Day 34: Resistance and Accommodation

Day Thirty-Four: Resistance and Accommodation

7/13/11:

After a few minutes of lost wandering through the San Felipe Pueblo, I pulled our car over outside of a house with a hand-painted sign advertising water-for-sale. A little girl sat in the doorway surrounded by a veritable herd of floppy, big-pawed puppies. While Mom asked the young girl’s mother about the location of yet another adobe church, I dropped down to my knees and was quickly swallowed into a mob of tiny tongues, teeth, and fur. The girl poked at them indiscriminately from her perch, telling me their names, asking if I had a dog and would I like another one? I declined her gracious offer and thanked her, laughing as two surly little puppies fell over each other.

Back in the car, it was discovered that we were still a bit muddled on directions. The woman hadn’t been aware of any adobe churches of particular significance in the Pueblo. She claimed that the old church on a nearby mesa was in ruins and nearly impossible to reach, though we were more than welcome to look at the new church a few streets down. Driving the narrow streets, Dad laughed as our car rolled up before the “new” church. In the same colonial style as the others, this was the adobe church we had been looking for.

Like the church in the Santo Domingo Pueblo we’d detoured to earlier that morning, the San Felipe church sported a pair of elaborately rendered rearing horses around its large front doors. The horses represented visible signs of early tensions and fusions of two different cultures; the priests of both churches disliked the inclusion of animals, and soon after the construction of the churches, sought to remove them. However, their Native American congregations were having none of it, and every year the horses were (and still are) dutifully repainted—a reaffirmation of Native American traditions within their Christian faith.

The Santo Domingo Pueblo, or Khe-wa, which we had visited earlier, is considered one of the most traditional Pueblos in New Mexico, with “well over 80 percent of Santo Domingo’s children…speaking their native Keresan. Santo Domingo’s location along major historical and contemporary roads of commerce, like the Camino Real and the U.S. highway system, has placed the community in a prime location for inevitable contact, to which members have responded with both resistance and accommodation.”

Against the white adobe, the brightly colored horses sprang forth from the church: resistance and accommodation. I lamented the prohibition on taking pictures, even as I understood it. This “new” adobe church, like all those we had seen before, was still very much alive, a conflation of Native American and Christian traditions. Returning to the car, we all remarked with curiosity on what the “old” church, settled high on the San Felipe mesa, must be like.

Our intended destination was Albuquerque, and after these two detours, we continued on the scenic winding way. Albuquerque, apparently a desirous area from which to launch hot air balloons, did not disappoint, and making our way into the city, I watched a distant balloon bobbing back and forth in the yawning sky.

We next tumbled out of our car at el Paseo del Bosque (also Riverside) Trail. A sixteen mile stretch of smooth black asphalt, el Paseo del Bosque Trail ran parallel to the east side of the Rio Grand bosque and into downtown Albuquerque. We took to the blacktop in the sweltering early afternoon hours and pushed along under the faint shadows of the cottonwoods. Off in the distance, the Manzano Mountains were blunted by rolling clouds.

We biked a total of twenty-eight miles in around an hour and a half, Dad and I managing negative splits on the return trip. Neck to neck for the last few miles, Dad sprinted off on the last stretch of the trail, and I tucked in behind him, determined to pace him out. Flying over the last bridge, we both screeched to a halt, red-faced and gulping, at the parking lot. We’d cut five minutes off our time and inevitably burst a number of small, overtaxed blood vessels along the way (totally worth it). Mom followed at a more sane speed, and trundling our bikes back onto the car rack and our bodies into the air-conditioned interior, we set off for the Albuquerque Amtrak Station.

Neil—being awesome, as always—had given me a few days off work to poke around New Mexico with my folks, and now it was time to head back to Williams. Despite a population size of 3,500, Williams did boast an Amtrak Station, and waving goodbye to Mom and Dad from the second-storey train window, I settled in for the ride back to Arizona. Tuning out the inept attempts of the middle aged man in front of me to flirt with his much younger seatmate, I engaged in one of my all-time favorite activities: looking out windows. I watched the green landscape flush brown and then red, shielding my eyes as the light crescendo’d and then sank into dusk and night-dark.

Hours later, I disembarked at the Williams Amtrak “Station,” which revealed itself to be an ill-lit strip of concrete in the forest about ten miles outside of town. Standing in the dark with my suitcase, the train a series of blinking red lights in the distance, I waited for Joe and his truck at the end of the dirt road and felt, strangely enough, like I was coming home.

Photos: 1. El Paseo del Bosque Trail 2. Dad and Mom on the trail 3., 4. & 5. Amtrekkin' from New Mexico to Arizona 6. Williams Amtrak Station