May 2, 2002

Once we entered the canyon leading to Taos from Santa Fe, snow brightened the shade of the dark green pines on the hills and banked deeper on the mountain slopes. We tried to picnic at a park close to Embudo, but the strong New Mexico gales rushing down the canyon walls turned the styrofoam plates into disc-like kites.

The center of Taos is called "Rancho de Taos." The narrow streets and small land space keep traffic creeping in procession. "By 1615," the books say, "Taos was a thriving Spanish colony." But I don't think the Spanish intended to found such a traffic snarl. Also, horns on the oxen pulling carts defeated even trail tailgating. The moment we reached the motel parking space, walking the mile up to the workshop seemed safer than driving a lane and a half, two-way street, facing impatient motorists looking for a stretch for a break-away.

Natalie Goldberg reserves the Mabel Dodge Luhan house to hold her workshops. Her three books on writing draw an overflow of applicants. Early registrants stay in the multi-story house Mabel Dodge built for her fourth husband, the Indian named "Tony Luhan." The rest of us stayed in an adobe motel at the foot of the hill.

You may have read the Mabel Dodge story as she supported the New Mexico literati in the 1920s. She arranged for D.H. Lawrence to move to a small ranch close to Taos in 1923, for example. Mr. Lawrence left England for writing, or to write "Lady Chatterly's Lover," depending on whether or not you believe Her Majesty's government would expel a writer for composing a torrid series of sex scenes (I do). He wrote the book after leaving New Mexico, nevertheless, a Greek guy who owned La Fonda hotel on the square later on had a lot of fun tormenting the British Office of the Admiralty via post for censoring Mr. Lawrence. He owned four Lawrence watercolors. For pure deviltry, he offered to negotiate with the British museums to swap the Lawrence paintings for the large load of Greek artifacts the British had ransacked on military expeditions to Greece.

Mabel Dodge's husband located the home adjoining the Indian reservation as she wasn't permitted to live on tribal lands. "Home" is a poor choice of words. Better to say "sprawling adobe castle." Sixty of us ate in a long dining room and foyer off a kitchen 30 feet square. Low-cut doorways caused students five and half feet tall to stoop and put us six-footers into a crouch. Mr. Luhan must have had an open sky complex to offset his openings, as the white plastered ceilings must have been 16 feet tall, beamed with tan lacquered timbers off the nearby mountain slopes.

The only upstairs towered in pueblo size rooms for two flights above the ground floor. The room's windows opened into a gradual unfolding of gray-blue sagebrush to a mountain vista of peaked snow caps broken with green ribs of pine forest. The north windows looked on the sacred mountains of Luhan's people. Being married to a rich Anglo wasn't such a bad deal. If he became homesick, all he needed to do was climb the narrow stairway to look over his homeland.

One evening, walking back to the motel after class, I detoured over to the Kit Carson cemetery to look for Mabel Dodge's grave. Tribal law forbade burial on Indian lands next to her husband. Her gravesite was so far over in the southwest corner, she nearly missed being placed in the white eyes' cemetery. An 18 inch tall white marble slab marks the place.

I thought constitutional and international law enforced by ecclesiastical and common law required rich people to be buried in fine style. Be no problem to gain permission to mark herders' graves with a tin can lid nailed on a two by four. But somebody with as much dough as Mabel Dodge needs a marble crypt, if not a pyramid made from adobe bricks to remind poor folks to be respectful. Sure lowered my opinion of the citizens of Taos. They ought to be ashamed, marking a rich woman's grave with a slab too small for a footstone on the Kit Carson lot.

The writing classes started slow. Been a long time since my last classes. Miss Goldberg maintained an impersonal profile. After Mother kept saying I was an orphan, I became accustomed to being the teacher's pet. But Miss Goldberg didn't recognize abused or neglected childhood. I offered to tell her my life story, but failed to get a chance.

The days turned warm. We climbed the hill every morning invigorated by the high altitude and stimulated further by the exposure to books and words. I stopped raising my hand or looking up during the question period. I tried to remember how long it'd been since I was in school. Didn't really matter, as it was obvious Miss Goldberg didn't respect or offer tenure.

May 2, 2002

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