The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [109]
I headed south on US 285, which runs along the line of the continental divide. All around me was the most incredible natural beauty, but the landscape was constantly blemished by human intrusions – ugly trailer parks, untidy homesteads, even junk yards. Every town was mostly a collection of fast food places and gas stations, and all along the road for many miles stood signs the size of barns saying CAMPGROUND, MOTEL, RAFTING.
The further south I went the more barren the landscape grew, and after a while the signs disappeared. Beyond Saguache the wide plain between the mountains became a sweep of purple sage, interspersed with dead brown earth. Here and there a field of green had been snatched from the scrub with the aid of massive wheeled water-sprinklers. In the middle of these oases would stand a neat farmhouse. But otherwise the landscape between the distant mountain ranges was as featureless as a dried seabed. Between Saguache and Monte Vista lies one of the ten or twelve longest stretches of straight road in America: almost forty miles without a single bend or kink. That may not sound such a lot on paper, but it feels endless on the road. There is nothing like a highway stretching off to an ever-receding vanishing-point to make you feel as if you are going nowhere. At Monte Vista, the road takes a left turn – this makes you perk up and grip the wheel – and then there is another twenty-mile stretch as straight as a ruler’s edge. And so it goes. Two or three times in an hour you zip through a dusty little town – a gas station, three houses, one tree, a dog – or encounter a fractional bend in the road which requires you to move the steering wheel three centimetres to the right or left for two seconds, and that’s your excitement for the hour. The rest of the time you don’t move a muscle. Your buttocks grow numb and begin to feel as if they belong to another person.
In the early afternoon I crossed over into New Mexico – one of the high points of the day – and sighed at the discovery that it was just as unstimulating as Colorado had been. I switched on the radio. I was so far from anywhere that I could only pick up scattered stations, and those were all Spanish-speaking ones playing that kind of aye-yi-yi Mexican music that’s always sung by strolling musicians with droopy moustaches and big sombreros in the sort of restaurants where high school teachers take their wives for their thirtieth wedding anniversaries – the sort of places where they like to set your food alight to impress you. It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer. There would then be a break for an advertisement, read by a man who sounded even more urgent and excited – he clearly was having his nuts repeatedly slammed in a drawer – and then there would be another song. Or rather, it would be the same song again, as far as I could tell. That is the unfortunate thing about Mexican musicians. They only seem to know one tune. This may explain why they have difficulty finding work anywhere other than at second-rate restaurants.
At a hamlet called Tres Piedras – almost every place in New Mexico has a Spanish name – I took Highway 64 to Taos, and things began to improve. The hills grew darker and the sage became denser and lusher. Everyone always talks about the sky around Taos, and it is astonishing. I had never seen a sky so vivid and blue, so liquid. The air in this part of the desert is so clear that you can sometimes see for 180 miles, or so my guidebook said. In any case,