Ode to Santa Fe:

As you enter the state of New Mexico on Interstate 40, you are atop a ridge thousands of feet above a huge valley that expands before you. This is a giant arroyo that spreads from north to south with a snow capped mountain range in the distance west. You have entered a land of enchantment, a land where magic abounds. A land where you can travel fast: The speed limit's seventy five but most cruise at ninety.

Arriving in Albuquerque, you branch onto Highway 25 and head north. The light from the sun is a different color from what we see in the eastern United States. It's less yellow and the shadows it casts are smaller. The sky is a cobalt blue, like the skies you get with a polarizing filter. The sky is occasional blocked by thin filmy clouds, or huge thunderheads that seem to go miles high in the bright sky.

You start the climb both up and north into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. If you want, you can get off onto the Turquoise Trail, which winds through the ghost town of Golden and into the tourist trap that is Madrid. Otherwise, you stay on the highway and the altitude climbs steadily to seven thousand feet above sea level.

Now you are speeding across the highest of deserts, no cactus or sandy desolation. The mountains have some green where the snow had melted and the lowlands are bearded with wind hearty, drought tolerant pinon trees, both ancient and ragged and low to the ground – Darwinian victors – and there is the occasional vertical statement of bare-branch aspens. Millions of trees, tipped with white. This mix of trees creates an illusion of distance and size if you are used to the trees we have in the east. Pinons look like large pine trees, hills look like mountains, juniper abound. It is an alien landscape to those of us that make the east coast our home.

You exit on to Cerrilos Road from I25 and continue through the southern part of Santa Fe, which seems not much different from any other small city, with shopping centers, and auto dealers and gas stations and the type of businesses that hug highways. You follow the signs north to City Center and the Plaza and you are suddenly in a different world. Narrow, winding streets, some of them cobbled, that force you to reduce your speed as you roll by one-story adobe and Spanish Colonial building plastered in sienna, peach, dun and gold; twenty nine different shades of mud. All of them accented with the ubiquitous turquoise trim. Trees line the streets in the old town. This is a city as old as Boston but from a different country and a different time. This area was inhabited by natives before any western European’s touched the shores in the east.

On the north side of the plaza, art galleries, sculpture and glass studios, gourmet cookware emporia, purveyors of fine foods, high fashion clothing and hand-hewn furniture, custom picture framers. Cafés and restaurants never tainted by corporate logos abound, promising everything from southwester to sushi. SUVs are the steed of choice, and sinuous, happy people in jeans and suede and boots that had never known the kiss of manure, crowd the sidewalks.

The central plaza, a square of tree shaded green, set up with a bandstand is surrounded by low-rise shops. You drive past a covered breesway, where a couple of dozen down-parkaed Indans sit behind blankets of silver jewelry in front of the Palace of the Governors. Across the square is a massive blocky structure of fieldstone that seems more European and American. More restaurants and galleries, a couple of luxury hotels and suddenly you are out of the center of town and back to the broad streets and shopping plazas.

Santa Fe is both ancient and modern. It is a place out of time.

Each night that I am there, I gaze out of my bedroom window, down onto the city. I live in the mountains to the south of the city where turquoise, gold and silver were mined. Vista del Oro, view of gold, a dirt road in the hills outside of Santa Fe. This is my winter home, a place I go to, to recharge my soul. Although I am a Mainer, who loves water and surrounds himself with it, my winters are in the dry, arid climate that is Santa Fe. The land of the coyote, the land of mystery, the land where magic is still alive.