Santa Fe, New Mexico

With the extended mud season this year, we decided to head south.  Moab was a mob scene and Colorado was a relief from Utah, but too groovy.  The roads got rough when we crossed into New Mexico and the Green Chilly in Chama got hotter, but our dog was allowed in the bars where they rewarded us with a healthy, unmetered pour.  Abiquiu was too O'Keeffe artsy and authentic and Ansel Adams's Hernandez was long gone to strip malls, so we wound up in one of our favorite towns - Santa Fe. 

The New Mexico capital city at 7000 feet and 35 degrees latitude at the eastern edge of the Mountain Time Zone, for those who like morning light and less of that midnight sun stuff.    With only 50,000 residents in town, 100,000 including the suburbs it is human size city like Helena or Boise.  Founded in 1610, ten years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, this place is old and has some history. 

Today Spanish, Mexican, Native and White Legacy Americans round out a diverse population that is unpretentious and somewhat inclusive.  The diverse but blue legislature is mostly women and so is the governor.  NM is a little bit like Old Mexico but somewhat cleaner, ostensibly safer, and not as cheap.  The bad thing about NM is that it is part of the USA but the good thing about NM is that it is part of the USA.  You can go out to eat for $20, gas is less than $4 and you can buy a nice house for less than half a million dollars. 

There are empty hiking/biking trails right from town and up on the surrounding forest and leash free dogs are welcome.  The mountains out of town rise up to 12,000 feet and there is a clean little ma and pa resort 15 miles up there for some fine skiing and touring.  Santa Fe has four seasons but winter is mild in the valley, being this high and this far south.  Snow comes and goes quickly with all this enchanted sunlight.  I’d say the climate is a cross between Park City, Salt Lake and Tucson.  Just right.

Spring had sprung in early May with the trees leafing out and spreading seed.  The Ravens seemed to be pairing up loudly in the mornings for mating season, but the town was empty of tourists and tramps.  It’s chill.  The temp was in the 40-70s but the Relative Humidity was 2-5% and the Dew Point was -25 F!  And we thought Utah was dry where it is 5 – 10 times as moist this time of year.  With the winds gusting to 60 it is no wonder that half of this state is on fire!

New Mexico seems to be off the radar, like Utah used to be, and Santa Fe seems to be the city-that-time-forgot, like Salt Lake used to be.  In these days of reservations at National Parks and Paid Parking at trailheads and ski resorts, there are too many people – everywhere.  Where did all these people come from?  I realize that there were 3 billion people on this planet when I was born and there will be 10 billion when I die, but this is getting ridiculous.  Is it that so many Boomers or Millennials are looking for that post-Covid quality of life thing?  Whatever it is, we have been out to beat it, camping down old Forest Service Roads, eating at Taco Trucks or just zigging when they are zagging.  We are on a mission to get away.  We are searching for the next great undiscovered American city, like BozeAngeles or ToHellYouRide, were at one time.  I think we may have found it.

Socks and Civility Theorem - Funny seeing you here...

Have you ever noticed, anecdotally, that when you do a load of laundry, pull it out of the dryer and put it in the laundry basket for placement in your drawers, certain elements are often, if not usually, contingent if not close to each other.  Matching socks will be as close as brothers, similar underwear will be entwined like young lovers and t-shirts will be hiding together in the corner.  This seems to be more than coincidental so from my pseudo-scientific observations I postulate that: similar, identical or like bodies of laundry, subject to the same forces of fluid, forced air, friction, spin and rotation turbulence as well as electrostatic attraction centripetal and centrifugal force and Coriolis motion, will wind up in the same general area? (Pardon the exhaustive lists of variables but they all matter.)

Then I noticed that people of the same ilk or persuasion will wind up in the same place, more often than not or more often than the randomness of the universe should dictate, and say “funny meeting you here”. How many times have you run into a friend or compatriot at a store, isle, restaurant, trail head, lift, run, chute or cornice? 

There is primarily a similarity to the supply of people concerning; age, lifestyle, health, time, economy, experience, decision matrix and desires.  There is also a similarity of the attraction that brings us together; stores, products, prices, a sale, passes, powder, snow, sun, shade, season, schedule, weather, climate, heat, mud, moguls, crud, corn, corduroy, angle, aspect, fall line, food source, bathroom, water or beer.  This is not an accident or pure coincident either.  If we are similar humans subject to similar forces and attractions, we will wind up close to the same place.

So here we are living in Park City, for the last five or fifty years, similar, active, athletic skiing-biking people with a recreational bent in search of that ‘quality of life’ thing, keeping score by the number of days spent out and about, not the number of dollars in our pockets and bank accounts.  We have not been randomly lumped in this place but have been drawn here by who we are and what we want and attracted by what this place has to offer

So it is not a coincidence that we are all kindred spirits in our selected nirvana.  We are not forced to be here by family ties, job necessity or spousal demands for hometown martial bliss.  As Stegnar might have said, it is the geography of choice.  We mostly choose to be here.  So as distinct as we are, as different as socks and shirts, we share a commonality of choice and a convergence of coincidence.  We are therefore related, a tribe, a family, tied by our sense of place, this place.  That is why we say ‘hey’ to people we don’t recognize and lend a helping hand to people we don’t know. We are all connected by fate and physics.

That’s what makes this hometown special where we can forget our differences and coalesce our compatibility for the basic things we want; an inclusive, simple, small town, a recreational, family friendly resort with good schools and transportation with a sustainable ski industry, resilient support economy that is attractive and approachable to locals and visitors alike.  Give or take.  The only difference is how do we get there.  Let’s celebrate with civility our similarities in this time of fractured polarities and schisms.  We have more in common than you think.  Like Forest Gump and Jenny, peas and carrots, socks and shirts, we should stick together.

 Inspired by Richard Feynman