The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [111]
I don’t know how many beers I had, but – I will be frank here – it was too many. I had not allowed for the fact that in the thin mountain air of Santa Fe you get drunk much faster. In any case, I was surprised to discover as I stood up a couple of hours after entering that the relationship between my mind and legs, which was normally quite a good one, had broken down. More than that, my legs now didn’t seem to be getting on at all well with each other. One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, decided to make for the rest-room. The result was that I lurched through the bar like a man on stilts, grinning inanely as if to say, ‘Yes, I know I look like an asshole. Isn’t this amusing?’
En route, I bumped into the table of a party of middle-aged rich people, slopping their drinks, and could only broaden my brainless smile and burble that I was ever so sorry. I patted one of the ladies affectionately on the shoulder with that easy familiarity that overcomes me when I am drunk and used her as a kind of springboard to propel myself towards the stairs, where I smiled a farewell to the room – everyone was by now watching me with interest – and descended the stairs in one fluid motion. I didn’t exactly fall, but then again I didn’t exactly walk down. It was more like surfing on the soles of my shoes, and was, I believe, not unimpressive. But then I often perform my best stunts while intoxicated. Once, many years ago during a party at John Horner’s house, I fell backwards out of an upstairs window and bounced to my feet with an élan that is still widely talked about south of Grand Avenue.
In the morning, chastened with a hangover, I drove back to the campus of St John’s, found my niece and embarrassed her – possibly even grossed her out – with a hug. We went to breakfast in a fancy restaurant downtown and she told me all about St John’s and Santa Fe and afterwards showed me the sights of the town: St Francis’s Cathedral (very beautiful), the Palace of the Governors (very boring, full of documents about territorial governors) and the famous staircase at the Loretto Chapel. This is a wooden staircase that rises twenty-one and a half feet in a double spiral up to a choir loft. The remarkable thing about it is that it is not supported by anything except its own weight. It looks as if it ought to fall down. The story is that the nuns of the chapel prayed for someone to build them a staircase and an anonymous carpenter turned up, worked on the staircase for six months and then disappeared without payment as mysteriously as he had arrived. For a hundred years the nuns milked this story for all it was worth, and then one day a few years ago they abruptly sold the chapel to a private company, which now runs it for a profit and charges you 50 to get in. This kind of soured me on the place, and it didn’t do a whole lot for my respect for nuns.
Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences. Preserving the past for its own sake doesn’t come into it much. There is little room for sentiment. When somebody comes along and offers a group of nuns good money for their staircase, they don’t say, ‘Certainly not, it is a hallowed shrine, built for us by a mysterious and rather hunky-looking courier of Jesus.’ They say, ‘How much?’ And if the offer is good enough they sell it and use the money to build a new convent on a bigger site, with airconditioning, lots of parking space and a games room. I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that nuns are worse than other Americans in this regard. They are simply behaving in the customary American way. I find that very sad. It is no wonder that so few things last for more than