By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
So there I am in the Wal-Mart parking lot, wondering what D.H. Lawrence or Jack McKee would have done with the announcement that National Geographic Adventure magazine had chosen Albuquerque as one of the country's "50 Best Adventure Towns."
Wal-Mart has never been high on my Top 50 list of D.H. Lawrence sites, but about 25 feet from the entrance of this Wal-Mart, a load of roasting green chile tumbled in a hot metal barrel.
It sent up clouds of incense that hinted of September ristras. Not even Wal-Mart can undersell that.
And I'd been re-reading the best little (105 pages) reference book ever printed about New Mexico— "The Spell of New Mexico."
So D.H. Lawrence and Jack McKee came to mind.
I know the day should be taken up with the godawful outrages of life in 2007, but I'd been in a chile incense frame of mind ever since we went up to Santa Fe recently.
We came home with the light fading but still bright enough to turn clouds into inexplicable colors that always look more real to me in a lithograph than in the sky.
"You gotta get this," a friend had e-mailed with the link to National Geographic Adventure. I went to the Internet link and then I walked across the street to look at the magazine in a Flying Star.
Albuquerque's latest brief moment in the national sun begins with an odd typo, a dollar sign in front of the population statistic:
"Population: $507,785."
What could that Freudian slip be about?
The total red-light camera fines so far this fiscal year?
Next year's APS public relations budget?
Marty's gubernatorial exploratory committee luncheon?
National Geographic Adventure likes Albuquerque's bosque bike trails (and why not?): "This biking mecca has cycling paths along the Rio Grande through town and the 52-mile, high desert Turquoise Trail for bigger thrills outside city limits. Jobs revolve around the University of New Mexico and Los Alamos National Laboratory."
I'm not sure about those revolving jobs (I do love 13-word economic summations); but given our penchant for wrong lists, it's good that America now will see we're an adventurous lot, at least on our bicycles.
I still wonder what John DeWitt McKee might have done with it. I was lucky enough to know him a little before he died. He's one of the essayists in "The Spell of New Mexico."
Last week, when we came down La Bajada, two separate storms swept across the Jemez. On the other side of I-25, a single curtain of rain descended on the Ortiz Mountains.
"The land's alive," Jack McKee wrote. "It has a tensile strength unknown in the matronly luxuriance of greener places. It has a thrusting power not found in the contented pregnancy of midland fields ... The land itself by slow degrees takes those who come to it and shapes them till they fit, till they take the color of the desert, till they can look almost unwaveringly at the sky."
That's always been in my Top 50.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
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