A Nomad’s Life

Position: 34°35’42.9″N 106°17’45.4″W

Nomads come in all shapes and sizes. Take us for instance. A mere foot of height between Carol and me makes the difference between seeing over the dodger or having to stand on Aleta’s cockpit seats. It also means Carol doesn’t bang her head inside the cabin. All nomads, by definition, have given up a permanent abode and travel from place to place. The word comes from the French nomade, one roaming in search of pasture. But saying that nomads have given up a permanent abode is a little misleading. Some nomads take their abodes with them. We sold our house when we bought Aleta. I think it’s fair to describe us as nomads. But you could call us peripatetic vagabonds and we wouldn’t take offense.

We had a visit from our fellow nomad (and fan of this blog), Carmelita last week. A land-based nomad, she has been traveling for the past four years. She arrived for a few days in her Toyota truck with Bambi in tow. Not Walt Disney’s doe, but Airstream’s dough maker. (To be clear: a Bambi is an Airstream travel trailer that you tow with a [Toyota] truck.) She had spent a few days traveling across Texas pausing to watch the solar eclipse. Given New Mexico had just had a complete solar eclipse last November in perfectly clear skies, another coming so soon with a mere 70% coverage was barely enough to make us reach for our sunglasses. We’re so spoiled!

Being relative newcomers to Albuquerque, we have only one sightseeing trick up our sleeve for out-of-towners: the Sandia Peak Tramway. As fun as that is, we needed another. In our research, we discovered several and settled on the Quarai Unit of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, about an hour southeast of the city.

God and Gold

A little revisionist history is, perhaps, in order. Salinas Pueblo is a Spanish name for settlements built from around the 1300s by the Pueblo and Anasazi peoples. In the early 17^th century Spanish missionaries arrived with the inquisition and their particular mix of state sponsored terrorism in the name of God and gold. The mission was doomed from the outset, but back then doom took a little longer to arrive than it does today.

In 1626 a merry band of nomadic and inquisitive Franciscan friars led by Fray Juan Gutierrez de la Chica bumped into the Quarai, a population of Southern Tiwa Pueblo people. They welcomed the foreigners into their large compound of interconnected apartments. The model of which looks for all the world like dwellings in Turkey and the Middle East circa 5,000BCE.

Friar John must have lived up to his name because according to the informational signs Tiwa women generously undertook most of the church’s construction. The site incorporates a kiva. A square pit used in Pueblo ceremonies. I suspect its inclusion was in part a mark of respect for their hosts, and in part a calculated strategy to make the convento the village’s only ceremonial gathering place. Once settled-in the Spaniards corralled horses, harvested salt from the nearby lakes and held courts of Inquisition. In case you are wondering, the Inquisition was a form of pre-Internet social engineering – with only slightly more fatal results for its participants.

cuatro jinetes

The Spanish crown ensured any profits from any of their mission enterprises was returned to the state and not reinvested in the communities. This kept indigenous people poor and frustrated. Besides, the Apocalypse’s four horsemen were never far away from the colonialists. By 1675 disease, crop failures and Apache raids drove people over the mountains, west to the Rio Grande valley. The site was abandoned after 300 peaceful years and 49 weird ones.

In the 1820s a couple of Spanish ranchers used the church ruins as a sheep pen, but they only lasted ten years before another Apache raiding party ran them off. A century later the European’s genocide was for all intents and purposes complete. The state of New Mexico acquired the ruins, cleaned them up and stabilized the structures. In the 1980s they were handed over to the National Park Service.

There are three sections to the Salinas Pueblo National Monument. We only visited one and that took a couple of hours. The other two units aren’t far from Quarai, but it becomes a full day out when you’re driving from Albuquerque. We had a date with the Sandia Peak Tram for a late lunch at the top of the mountain.

Photos

There was something about the light. The way the cirrostratus clouds whisped across the deep blue sky in soft contrast to the bared terracotta walls of the convento. Its stucco long since crumbled away. The scene reminded me of the cover of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, ivy notwithstanding. That put their song ‘Pride‘ in my head as I wandered over the nature trail taking pictures of the site.

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