In 2005, I began a narrative guide to motorcycling in the American West.  The project, often referred to as simply The Bike Book, now has the title, The Lone Rider’s Guide to the American West.  I’ve presented papers at various conferences related to the work over the last four years, which will ultimately form part of the book.  Portions of the book are also now available at two websites: Reality X, where John Alphonse has been kind enough to keep up a sampling of the prose and poetry, and now also The Centrifugal Eye, where Eve Anthony Hanninen has just published her interview with me, and my brief essay on The Poet’s Image on a Ride.

Below you’ll find a portion of the book dedicated to The High Road to Taos, with photos. The Lone Rider’s Guide to the American West will weave together various aspects of the phenomenology of riding, how we interact with landscapes, with geography and geology, and the cultural transformation that have occurred in the American West over the last hundred years or more.

THE HIGH ROAD TO TAOS

Thanks  to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to  travel across the country from coast to coast without  seeing anything. From the Interstate, America is all  steel guardrails and plastic signs, and every place looks  and feels and sounds and smells like every other  place.

Charles Kuralt, On  the Road with Charles Kuralt

Only “middle Americans” (if such people actually exist) and primitives—peoples whose lives are “everyday” in the pejorative, grinding sense of the term—may feel fully a part of their own world.  Modern man has been condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for his authenticity, to see if he can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity or purity of others.

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

    In A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful, Edmund Burke warns us that  “It is, I own, not uncommon to be wrong in theory, and right in practice; and we are happy that it is so.”  Charles Kuralt seems to have caught that same sense of how theory can go wrong in his estimation of the U.S. interstate system.  It was good in theory, but in practice, the world from the interstate becomes one denuded of particulars and washed in non-descript colors of steel and concrete.  The old U.S. highways, on the other hand, might seem more of a practical experience of road building; and then country roads, and those byways maintained by the states, are even more particular in their constructions, and, like the High Road to Taos, tend to climb over and around natural features of the landscape rather than boring through them.  The interstate system was completed in the 1990s, but it restricts, as Kuralt suggests, the vision Americans have of their own landscape.  It may do more, however; it may create an impression of America which we have inculcated over the years, generation to generation, as each becomes more efficient in finding way to be somewhere else.  It is not simply nostalgia that has caused a few lone souls today to speak out against this homogeneous network of superhighways; it is an understanding of how the landscape actually comes to reflect the changing nature of American character itself.

    When you ride the back roads and byways, you see not only an older West, but also one transformed.  Many of the old highway routes have come and gone in prominence, and along some of the county roads populations boomed and died out over the last century as the superhighways re-routed cross-country traffic, often leaving good roads virtually unused across stretches of desert and high country.  But the High Road has never suffered from such a fate.  Parts of its route cover trails that have been in use since at least the 14th century.  It links a few of the oldest settlements in the northern region of the state, including the pueblos at Picuris and Nambé and the early fortified Spanish town of Truchas. If there’s an irony in it’s survival, it’s that today the increased popularity of the region due to tourism has created more of a problem of deteriorating road conditions than at any time in its lengthy past.

    Route 76 forms a good portion of the High Road, starting in Española.  An alternate route, is by Nambé Pueblo on N.M 503 just north of Tesuque on US highway 285.  These meet in Chimayó, and climb up out of the Santa Cruz Valley by the town of Codova toward the ridge town of Truchas and then north through the Carson Nation Forest to the town of Las Trampas.  Just beyond, Route 76 meets Route 75 near the entrance to the Picuris Pueblos, and the High Road runs east at this point through Vadito and Peñasco, where there’s a junction with N.M 518 headed north to Talpa and Ranchos de Taos back on US 285.

    For a rider, a good road must have certain salient features, not always interchangeable region to region, but generally speaking similar.  Curves that sweep gently into turns, banked to the inside just enough so that when you put the bike over the road itself becomes part of the turn.  Uniform surfaces, no matter of what material really, as long as they aren’t made up of patchwork repairs and deteriorated sections.  The High Road from Santa Fe, coming up out of either out of Pojoaque or Española, is good road, wide enough for graceful travel, and uncrowded but perhaps on the days of the Chimayó pilgrimage.  This is good because then the road allows you to think more about where you are than about who’s moving around you.  The biker is more aware of this than others, for she is more at risk from the mistakes of others, and more aware of how such mistakes can have serious consequences.

    That sense of danger from others and from the hard surfaces over which you travel, might be read in terms of the sublime.  Edmund Burke argues that the sublime provokes at first an overwhelming sense of the world, even an aspect of terror.  On a bike, that aspect of the landscape is increased by your vulnerability within it.  You take in the immensity of the world even as you move precariously through it. Burke says: “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime…. the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if they were really so” (22).  The rider’s eye perceives the world in a little different fashion from others on the road.  The road and the distances are often coequal in her perception, and the biker distinguishes less between immediate space and the landscape opening around her.  Because the world is more physically immediate, the sense of the landscape is more pronounced, your connection with it more direct.  In this there is also a familiar loss of self that accompanies an initial experience of the sublime.  “In the romantic sublime there is a sense of self as nothing before the landscape”, Ron Broglio suggests:

But there is a return for this loss.  First, it is this self reflecting on itself as nothing which yields the pleasure of the sublime.  Secondly, the sublime functions as a guarantee of common sense.  All faculties work together in a mutual identification of the object.  Recognition thus relies upon a principle of collaboration of the faculties.  There is a unity of all the faculties in the subject.  (web site)

This “collaboration of the faculties” could be equated with a certain intuitive sense of your place in the external world.  That intuition is what the rider realizes as a necessary condition of being aware on the road.  The immediacy of the world is the rider’s physical reality.

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig comments that people in cars see the world as if they were watching TV, without realizing their place in relation to what they see.  He writes:  

On a cycle the frame is gone.  You’re completely in contact with it all.  You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.  That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness. (4)

It is a matter of being in the moment and realizing the absolute nature of the material world that rushes by around you.  In short, you become part of the view.  The landscape at a distance is only an extension of the road beneath your wheels; your perceptions are most acute because you are never out of the picture.  This frameless world is what a Zen practitioner might call the true nature of reality.  It is the coextensive nature of all things living and inanimate, and something that gets hidden from us through our mental habits, through the ways in which we see ourselves as distinct entities a changeless world.  Pablo Picasso was aware of this, and Cubism is simply an attempt to break down the barriers between our habits of seeing and a more immediate reality.  Habits of sight create expectations of the world, separating it into its various distances, depths, textures, consistencies.  But to recognize reality at that moment Pirsig speaks of, is to see a little closer into the nature of the way we live not in but through the world. The rider is very much aware of this, for the motorcycle balances along an line of continual change and exchange.

The deceptive thing about this space is that it’s both physical and cultural.  It has long been thought that Native Americans have a unique sense of the land, and that their identity, both individually and collectively as tribes, depends on topographical associations and local features of their respective environments. Yet, it’s not hard to see that all human beings possess something this type of relationship.  We become attuned to our surroundings, familiar not only with the features of the landscape, but how certain details of that geography relate to us individually.  We also become attuned to the way in which others in the landscape react to our sense of ourselves within particular locales.  This exchange of presence with others, or the intersubjective aspect of the land and community, takes on different meanings with time and historical changes.

II

    On the High Road to Taos, there are various possibilities for this super-sensate space.  Like many western tribes, the Tewa of San Juan Pueblo define their world by four cardinal points in the surrounding geography; these four peaks have as their center the plaza in San Juan which houses the primary sipapu, or “place of origin” in the southern part of the pueblo itself (Ortiz 18).  This Tewa sense of space differs from others, and so helps constitute a awareness among the Tewa themselves of topographical points that are culturally defined. It is interesting, in this context, that the four cardinal points may have changed over the pueblo’s history.  The northern cardinal point, today Conjilon Peak, may once have been a mountain further north, San Antonio Peak on the Colorado border.  This according to early 20th-century ethnographers.  Alfonso Ortiz, in a more recent study, The Tewa World, suggests that the Tewa worldview itself may have changed over time. Although these four points define Tewa space, both ceremonially and as a community, the demands of defensible land and resources may have helped alter their perception of such space.

    My experience of the High Road into Chimayó, rising up above the Rio Grande Valley, is enhanced in a profound sense of open countryside.  And yet a little investigation into the conditions of such openness and my perspective changes considerably.  These lands themselves are defined by different boundary conditions, from the early pueblos to the 16th and 17th century Spanish Land Grants and later reservations set up by the U.S. government in the 19th century.  The openness, much like that of a National Park at times, is to some extent a constructed space, yet another designation of property within the greater grids of ownership and propriety in the United States.  From a plane at thirty thousand feet, it can come upon you rather suddenly, looking at the neatly demarcated rectangles and squares, the baled circular spots on the Western landscape.  All of America is owned.  The thought itself is enough to set off a chain of realizations about the nature of human interaction with the planet, and how previous to each of our appearance here the space with inhabit has been designated by the greater interaction of cultures.  These demarcations may be arbitrary, in a purely existential sense, but they are today the guiding principles of socially defined space.

    It is a longstanding truism that the idea of property and ownership of the land are Anglo-European concepts.   But it’s clear that some idea of property exists in all cultures, and has been the basis for conflicts since the first smog of recorded history.  Property rights may be something else.  John Locke postulated that the idea of property was a human universal, and predates most other conventions of society (Wiggins 2).  Although there are differences in how the land is conceived, whether politically, religiously, economically, there is increasing evidence that violent conflicts over land define North American space since the earliest populations.  And now even this designation of the earliest is under revision.  Recent archaeological evidence in Washington state (with the Kennewick Man), and on the Baja peninsula, and in Mexico and Brazil suggests that the earliest inhabitants of North and South American may not have been ancestors of the current Native groups, those descended from Mongoloid migrations across the Alaskan land bridge; but rather, that still earlier peoples from Africa by way of Australia, and possibly from northern Europe, settled parts of both continents.  Evidence in Brazil even suggests that these earlier inhabitants were displaced and even eliminated by later invasions. The pre-Clovis footprints and human remains in Mexico have helped challenge longstanding positions on the first inhabitants of the Americas in general.  What these finds make clear is an inherently aggressive aspect to human definitions of space; and moreover, the highly political and self-justifying nature of contemporary debates over originary ownership.  Such legal battles ring with a kind of irony when talk turns to property rights and ancient ownership. 

    It helps, of course, that such styles of architectures are now built into the bylaws of some of the towns and pueblos.  Santa Fe, for instance, has required new construction within the circular road of the Paseo de Peralta to conform to either Pueblo or Territorial styles since 1957 (Bunting 1).  The flat-roof and traditional adobe appearance are the prominent features throughout the area.  But the earliest pueblo constructions were, after the return of the Spanish to the area in 1692, combined with colonial influences to make the Territorial styles. “Spaniards wedded many elements to Pueblo style, such as portals (porches held up with posts, often running the length of a home) and enclosed patios, as well as the simple, dramatic sculptural shapes of Spanish mission arches and bell towers. They also brought elements from the Moorish architecture found in southern Spain: heavy wooden doors and elaborate corbel—carved wooden supports for the vertical posts” (Frommer’s online).  To some extent, this unwritten law of conformity extends miles north and south of the city, and has greatly influenced the overall appearance of new construction along the High Road, even since the 17th century.

    Our nostalgia for the sleepy plazas of the typical Colonial period New Mexican town are somewhat ironic in this context as well.  Certain insights are gained through Bainbridge Bunting’s study, Taos Adobes: Spanish Colonial and Territorial Architecture of the Taos Valley.  Bunting points out that the traditional plaza, whereas not specifically defensive in its early manifestations in Mexico, was definitely so by the time of the earlier colonial influences in New Mexico: “the term plaza connoted the idea of a fortified place rather than a central square.  By constructing contiguous houses about a central open area, windowless outside walls could serve as a defense barrier.  The center of the community could be approached only by means of a wide, double gate” (3).  Bunting points out that Taos, Ranchos de Taos, Trampas and Dixon (west of Picuris)  were early Spanish communities of this kind, and we see other early plaza constructions undoubtedly fashioned for defense in towns like Chimayó.  So the rider who feels her experience incomplete unless she rests an afternoon among the peaceful shade trees of the local plaza, would do well to perceive how the inner square was first used for defense.  It was not, however, against the local Pueblo Indian that such defenses were needed, and in fact many pueblos adopted similar defensible structures.  Rather, tribes more recent to the area, particularly the Navajo and Comanche, by the 18th century were making raids on both Spanish and Puebloan settlements.  Edward P. Dozier argues convincingly that the situation was such that if the Spanish colonial presence had not been in the area by the 17th century, the Puebloans would have been driven out of the Rio Grande Valley all together.  The Spanish presence then was their primary defense against marauding bands of Navajo raiders.  Although the rider may be lulled into thinking the High Road a quiet, forgotten trail between small pueblos, its more conflictual past is evident in its architecture.

    At Picuris Pueblo, the conditions were even more critical.  “After the revolt of 1696, most of the Picuris Indians fled northeastward and joined a band of Apaches in the neighborhood of Pueblo, Colorado,” Dozier explains.  “The Apaches enslaved the refugees and in desperation the latter asked the Spaniards to rescue them and return them to their pueblo.  Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez authorized a rescue party under the command of Sergeant Juan de Ulibarri, with a force composed mostly of Pueblo Indians.  The combined expedition successfully returned the refugees to Picuris during the summer of 1706” (64). Once the Spanish were finally in the area to stay, they became a vital part of the ongoing social milieu, and, after a fashion, they provided a much need political stability.  The influence was not simply an imposition of architectural standards either; the present day testifies to the adaptability of Tewa, Tiwa and Spanish cultures to integrated elements of the others.  In establishing ongoing communities, each sought defensive measures during a period of increased activity from nomadic tribes moving into the area.

    Don J. Usner, in his hard-to-find-but-worth-the-trouble memoir on Chimayo’s central plaza, Sabino’s Map, puts it this way:

When viewed in [an] historical context, the Plaza del Cerro is foremost a monument to the compelling need for defense in northern New Mexico in the eighteenth century. The Pueblo people had always recognized this need, and in many ways the plaza mimicked the consolidated villages of the neighboring pueblos.  However, the plaza structure also had old-world roots.  The military-minded Romans first devised the concept of the centralized towns as an efficient means of defending newly claimed territory during the colonization of Spain.  As Spain reclaimed the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in the centuries preceding Columbus’ voyages, the Spanish established grid-plan settlements similar to the Roman design to solidify control of regained lands. (60)

Those old Roman structures on the High Road to Taos may not be what the rider first thinks of when traveling between its communities, but the complexity of the cultural exigencies often belies the simple aesthetic reference so often found in the well-known Southwestern style.  When we incorporate earlier features, like the sipapu from the kivas, and recognize how it was later placed within the defensive walls of plaza sites like San Juan Pueblo, the contrasting interplay of religious and utilitarian influences becomes clear. 

    Usner points out that New Mexican neighborhoods around the plazas did not take on the grid-work structures of the Old World defenses, “primarily because there was very little military or religious presence and very few roads to speak of.  Like every other old-world convention,” he notes, “plazas here took on a simplified, highly utilitarian form” (60). The standard then was adobe homes joined together to form an open plaza in the middle, with no windows on the outer walls  of the houses.  The small windows elsewhere, another elements of the aesthetic that has captured painterly attention so often, were perhaps not so much for defense as for the lack of available glass.  Bunting suggests glass for windows may not have been obtainable in Santa Fe itself until carried over the Santa Fe trail sometime in the 1850s (5).  He even speculates that the familiar low doorways and raised thresholds are in part because it was desirable to have anyone entering your house to come in stooped over rather than in an upright, possibly fighting, stance (5). 

    If the rider starts to get the sides of the conflict clearly differentiated, it’s easy to disrupt the process.  The Navajo themselves were not free of attacks from other groups during the early centuries, and built what are called pueblitos in the northwestern part of the state; and both Pueblo and Navajo sought defensive housing structures to protect against Ute attacks around the time of the return of the Spanish in 1692 (Fosberg). After the abatement of nomadic Indian raids in the area, village structures changed.  Villages could be more dispersed according to the needs of the agriculture, and small clusters of houses, such as those at Peñasco and Talpa, further along the High Road, built sometimes on higher ground, could overlook the fields (Bunting 4). 

    It’s not hard to see, with all these fortifications, why the general movement in the region was up from the Rio Grande Valley into the adjoining foothills. From the higher altitudes, the low profile piñon and juniper afford a beautiful open view of the surrounding valley.  The road climbs arid ridges up into deeper canyons, barrancas, and then denser pine forests.  There was obviously, to start, a good deal of exposure in the river valley, and a bit more advantage on higher ground. This was certainly what the Spanish settlers from Chimayó and Quemado thought when they built Truchas, 37 miles east of Española. The town sits on the side of a deep canyon, and the original square was a fortified outpost, with a plaza built in the traditional fashion, and with only one entrance (High Road to Taos website).  A group of farmers from Chimayó and residents of Pueblo Quemado (today the town of Cordova) petitioned the Spanish king and the regional governor for permission to settle on the ridge top.  Their purpose was to defend themselves from frequent raids with the help of Pueblo scouts and weapons supplied by the governor.  The governor did not have military resources to help, but was glad to grant the land petition.  The grant itself gives evidence that today’s road north of Truchas very probably runs the same course of the road mentioned in the 1754 petition as a boundary, which states: “On the west, the public road that leads to Pequiries…” (Truchas History website). The settlers needed fortifications against nomadic Indian attacks, such as were already occurring in the Rio Grande Valley.  The governor specifically suggests the construction design of the plaza, after he received his report from the alcalde, the chief magistrate of the region: “sufficient land to build houses and which shall be united and adjoining,” he writes, “forming a square town site, closed and with only one entrance, only large enough for the passage of one carreta, in a manner that the inhabitants and families may be able to defend themselves from invasions and assaults of the barbarous enemies..." (Truchas History website).

    Around the town of Chimayó itself, similar changes, but on an ecological scale, can be seen, according to Usner.  In Sabino’s Map, he points out how our aesthetic appreciation of those lovely dry arroyos and sparse piñon dotted hillsides around this town does not really take into account what produced these particular features of the landscape:

Chimayó may appear to be a small town in the midst of undisturbed land, but people have altered the appearance of this valley and the hills since they first arrived long ago.  The Pueblo and later Hispanic settlers used the land in similar ways, clearing fields for farming and cutting trees for firewood and building materials.  On the highest hills around town—even on the summit of Tsi Mayoh and on the steepest ridges of the badlands—old stumps of piñon trees, cut by axes before saws were available, attest to the far-ranging wood harvesting that has taken place.  Hispanic people introduced livestock grazing, a more damaging land use that was to leave scars throughout the Southwest.  Goats were best suited to the rugged terrain near Chimayó and foraged extensively in the hills until the early 1960s.  Many of the gullies and ravines around Chimayó formed because of the terrain’s natural susceptibility to erosion, but the natural processes have at times been greatly accelerated by woodcutting and grazing. (24-5)

This transformation may not, at first, be evident to the rider.  But the effects along the barrancas and badlands, the boundary region between these high and low areas, are wide ranging, and Chimayó is only one of many towns which have exhausted the region’s natural resources.

  El Santuario de Esquípulas, Chimayó’s famous sanctuary, contributes its own diverse history to the tradition.  It’s main feature is the magic dirt that comes from a small hole or well in the side room of the main chapel.  Pilgrims have gathered the earth here for centuries, with the hopes of curing ills and sanctifying events in their personal lives.  But like other aspects of cultural terrain along this road, the tradition mixes history with myth, and has as much to do with imported rituals as with indigenous customs. Elizabeth Kay points out, “Geophagy,” or “earth-eating…was common in Central America and Mexico.  The Spanish observed early that the Aztecs ate thick layered cakes made of a slimy substance collected from the surface of Lake Texcoco, mixed with sand and earth, and dried in the sun” (30).  The conquistador Catholics were wise enough to see benefits in using pagan sacred sites to incorporate elements of the new faith, a practice called “baptizing the customs” (30).  A tactic, the rider might note, similar to St. Patrick’s fifth century’s ceremonies on Celtic holy grounds in Ireland.  The original Guatemalan site of Esquípulas was already famous among the Aztec for its healing hot springs and edible earth; the Catholics incorporated this feature into the new sanctuary and the statue of El Cristo Negro de Esquípulas, the Black Christ, was soon given miraculous powers as well.  How this Guatemalan site became transposed into the New Mexican countryside is a long and conjectural story, according to Elizabeth Kay.  But, one way or the other, the Santuario de Esquípulas in Chimayó inherited the sanctified dirt.  This tierra bendita or blessed earth is connected with one other chapel in the area, the Chapel of Our Lady of Talpa, which was used in the 19th century by the Penitente Brotherhood.  As Kay points out, the origins of this Brotherhood in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado have long been disputed.  But Bernardo Abeyta, who built the first small hermita which houses the sacred well, or El Posito, in a side room off the main chapel of the Santuario, is credited with transporting the tradition from Guatemala. It is Abeyta who is also perhaps responsible for introducing the Penitente order in the area, having heard of it or seen it himself in the “Sevillian-like penitential confraternities” of Guatemala (37). 

    But then there are other features of the High Road region that make this remote location an ideal home for Los Hermanos Penitentes in the early 1800s.  The fraternal order famous for its real-life reenactments of the crucifixion, found in the rural areas north of Santa Fe a haven far from the orthodox, and critical, eyes of the Church in Santa Fe (American Byways website).  Equated perhaps even then with a extreme form of devotion, a kind of Christian Reality TV, the Penitentes find worship in flagellation and self-mortification, with an annual crucifixion of one of their members.  But again, legend enhances the rider’s experience somewhat, for most of these ritual crucifixions were performed without nails.  The order, nonetheless, was compelled to hide its sacred moradas, or chapels, and even disguised them as common houses, in order to avoid the censure of the Catholic hierarchy, and the less literally-minded believers among the local public. That the Santuario de Esquípulas in Chimayó might be directly linked in its origins with the Penitente Brotherhood again shows the complexity of cross-cultural inheritances along the High Road, for today the two local traditions are rarely discussed in a common frame.  The tierra bendita and the Santuario remain well within the orthodox standards of the faith, while the Penitentes remain shrouded in masochistic imagery. 

III

    This draw and the mythic attractions of the High Road represent what Cecelia Tichi calls “the anthropomorphism of the American landscape” (Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places).  The rider sees this in terms of a mix of impressions, from the magical implications in traditions to the commodification of the same traditions into local attractions.  But the rider is not guiltless here either, forming a part of a growing body of temporarily displaced persons who travel the land in search of sometimes unspoken fulfillments they have not been able to discover in their own hometowns. Dean MacCannell, in a marvelously irreverent study, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, remarks: “It is the middle class that systematically scavenges the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic version of other peoples and other places.  This effort of the international middle class to coordinate the differentiations of the world into a single ideology is intimately linked to its capacity to subordinate other peoples to its values, industry and future designs” (13).  The motorcycle, like the horse before it, becomes a vehicle in the West for the illusion of exploration into “virgin” territories, while it performs the rite of passage for those seeking, as MacCannell hinted, to initiate the world into a single ideology of Romantic self-production. “I discovered that sightseeing is a ritual performed to the differentiations of society,” MacCannell writes, “Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, or incorporating its fragments into unified experience.  Of course, it is doomed to eventual failure: even as it tries to construct totalities, it celebrates differentiation” (13).  This is surely the case with the High Road, which both seduces the tourist and yet displays, for the careful eye, the remnants in art and architecture of a conflictual history.

Works Cites

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Broglio, Ron. “Wordsworth, Calculus, and Landscapes of Defiance.” American Conference on Romanticism, 1998. http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~broglio/cal&ww.html

Bunting, Bainbridge.  Taos Adobes: Spanish Colonial and Territorial Architecture of the Taos Valley.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin Of Our Ideas Of The Sublime And Beautiful With Several Other Additions. Online.

Dann, Graham M. S.. The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective.  Oxford: Cab International, 1996.

Dozier, Edward P.. The Pueblo Indians of North America.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970.

Ebright, Malcolm.  Review of Shiller, Mark. “The Truchas Grant, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y  Santiago Grant.” http://www.southwestbooks.org/truchas.htm#2

“First Americans were Australian.” BBC Sci/Tech. Thursday, August 26, 1999 Published at 15:39 GMT 16:39 UK.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/430944.stm

Fosberg, Stephen L.. “Navajo Pueblitos Of The Dinetah.”  New Mexico Bureau of Land Management State Archeologist. http://www.stonefoundation.org/stonexus/01_issue/10-pueblitos.pdf.

Frommers.com. New Mexico Architecture. http://www.frommers.com/destinations/newmexico/0234020062.html

Herold, Laurance C. and Luebben, Ralph A.. Taos Archaeology. Number 7.  Fort Burgwin: Fort Burgwin Research Center, 1968.

Kay, Elizabeth.  Chimayó Valley Traditions.  Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987.

La Hermandad de Nuestro Padre Jesus.  http://www.rmpbs.org/byways/lca_penitentes.html

Larkin, Dana.  Sample Student Property Outline http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:r7UDEnV-GTMJ:www.sandiego.edu/usdlaw/docs/academicsupport/Outline_Sample_Prop2.PDF+%22idea+of+property%22+%22native+American%22&hl=en&client=safari

MacCannell, Dean.  The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class.  New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

Ortiz, Alfonso.  The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Rodriguez, Sylvia. “The Taos Valley.” http://www.nmgs.org/bks-A20-23.htm

Truchas History.  http://www.ranchoarriba.com/truchas.htm

Usner, Don J.. Sabino’s Map. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Wittenberg, Hermann. “The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape.”  University of the Western Cape, 2004. http://www.uwc.ac.za/arts/english/Sublimelandscape.htm

The trip always starts with an espresso at the Silver Bean, in Cortez, Colorado, the gatekeeper to the great deserts of the Southwest...

... and with the open road.