The Last Road Trip (V)

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Lingered in the comforting womb of the Grants, NM Motel 6 this morning, and got a late start.

Even though Albuquerque is just a hop and a jump from Grants, it took a while to get there. I kept turning off at exits that had auxiliary signs indicating the intermittent presence of “Historic Route 66,” but some of them were dead ends or tiny bits of isolated pavement.

Finally, I picked up the stretch of the old road that, for several miles, and running past the rusting Rio Puerco bridge (a pork project if there ever was one), was a freeway frontage road. Eventually it crossed the interstate and entered the west side of Albuquerque.

When you follow old 66 into towns and cities you generally end up passing through the seediest, most marginal parts of town. You’ll see lots of transmission and brake job shops, used furniture stores, and motels that use plastic signs to broadcast their weekly and monthly rates. Then usually you end up downtown.

After the longest freeway-entering foreplay in all creation, I got on I-25 heading north to Santa Fe, but today bypassed that famous and somewhat overrated city, as my primary destination was close at hand.

A few miles up the road from Santa Fe, an obscure turnoff (which I missed a couple times), NM 503 East, takes us through the little pueblo of Nambe, then a few miles beyond to the famous sanctuary of Chimayo, the old Spanish mission known as "The Lourdes of America." I stopped there to eat a little of the dirt; pilgrims from all over travel to Chimayo to eat it from a hole in the floor behind the altar.

Did this reverence for the soil of Chimayo reflect an indigenous Indian belief the Spanish missionaries grafted on to the practice of Catholicism in this place? I’ve wondered for a long time, but have never found the answer, which is probably lost in the hazy intersection of myth and history and, of course, the passage of time.

But Chimayo was not my main objective, so I pushed on to highway NM 76, and through the long stretch of heavy construction presently snarling travel on that remote road, past the village of Cordova and through the strange, isolated mountain outpost of Truchas, finally arriving at the hamlet of Las Trampas, with its little church whose interior I had traveled 900 miles to photograph.

Nobody home. San Jose de Gracias was locked up tight, and the little curio shop across the dirt plaza seemed permanently closed. In fact, the whole village appeared nearly deserted.

There was nothing to do but push on to Taos, where I arrived exhausted about 4:00 in the afternoon. Checking into a seedy motel, I plugged in my computer and checked the National Monuments website.

The church in Las Trampas is only open to visitors on Fridays and Saturdays. Today is Wednesday.

Tomorrow I’ll rest here. Taos is a pretty place, the weather is great, and boy, I’m getting too old to bear up under all this driving. This is the last road trip for sure.