Santa Fe is calling – a guest post by Helen Currie Foster

A guest post by Helen Currie Foster

Driving into New Mexico with my husband (favorite long-time travel companion) I peer anxiously out the car window––I won’t be happy until I spot the first antelope, tiny, almost invisible, bounding across vast pale green ranch pastures below a string of distant mesas. Then, where I-25 crosses the south-running Pecos River, we see towering above us the sinuous length of Rowe Mesa, all red rock and green conifers. We exit south on State Road 3, then climb an impressively steep gravel road to the adobe house of my cherished friend, a college classmate. Her house sits in the lap of Rowe Mesa, looking across the broad valley at Bernal Mesa. The old house is formal, plastered white inside, with a beautiful ceiling of beams (vigas) supporting the roof. Sticks, or latillas, lie in a formal herringbone pattern between the vigas. 

Walking across the property we spot chips from arrowhead manufacture. Our friend says she’s found a spot above us on the edge of the mesa littered with many such chips, where centuries ago an expert sat under a tree long ago “knapping” (flaking) stones to make arrowheads and points. We saunter along, picking up turquoise-colored pebbles from the played-out turquoise mine. We hear nothing but the wind in the junipers and piñons and the occasional faraway buzz of a small plane.

My friend has taken us down along the Pecos to see the extensive ruins of the adobe customs offices that once controlled the river crossing into Spanish New Mexico. Further down the river we see the irrigation ditches or acequias feeding water into Pecos farm plots, before the Pecos narrows into a canyon. All ages old…

We love this place. But Santa Fe is calling. 

To celebrate the completion of Ghost Daughter, we’re on Otero Street in Santa Fe, with beauty everywhere. Carved wooden beams over doorways. Intensely colored flower gardens in yards. Curved human-scale adobe houses. Blue sky above adobe walls. 

Downtown, Santa Fe offers layers of history––Pueblo architecture, Territorial architecture. Along Palace Avenue by the New Mexico Museum of Art, heavy bronze sidewalk plaques celebrate Santa Fe artists. Each plaque features a helmeted conquistador…which seems incongruous for celebrating, say, Georgia O’Keefe or my hero, Gustave Baumann, the German immigrant whose vivid woodcuts tantalize my protagonist Alice in Ghost Daughter. But maybe it’s not incongruous. Baumann says he was drawn by the powerful presence of intermixed layers of history when he jumped off the train in New Mexico in 1918. And the sheer beauty! Mountains and streams! Pueblos! Golden cottonwoods in fall! 

In Ghost Daughter, Alice’s trips to Santa Fe were too fraught. Although she enjoyed El Rey Court, she missed so much, including the room of Baumann prints in the Owings Gallery. So we go in her stead, riveted by Baumann’s precision and freedom, his intense colors so delicately layered. I want to see his old German printing press…but rats! It’s locked up and unavailable at the history museum. We console ourselves with ice cream, sitting in a shady corner by La Lecheria. 

Santa Fe calls itself the “City Different.” I feel different here too. Somehow an invisible bubble over the city blocks my usual worries…children, work, the state of the world. At home, awakened by “the usual worries” in the middle of the night, I often take refuge in half-awake creativity, envisioning plot possibilities, imagining scenes, hearing characters say surprising things. I’m grateful for a midnight refuge which triggers ideas for the next day’s writing and distracts me from worry. But after days in Santa Fe, a place so vividly creative, so confident in mixing the very old and very new, the traditional and startling, I’m ignoring those worries. I feel emboldened. 

Thanks, Santa Fe! I’ll be back.

Learn more about Helen Currie Foster and Ghost Daughter at www.helencurriefoster.com. Did you like this interview? If so, click here to read more Behind the Story interviews from your favorite authors.