A State of Enchantment

Counter-Currents

Jemez Mountains, NM. (Photo by the author)

1,161 words

It was said of Jim Bridger, that pioneering explorer of the Old West, that he liked places better than he liked people.

This Jim can relate. I love to travel far more than I like to socialize.

But places, just like people, are not all equal. Most are bland and forgettable. Some you’d want to avoid altogether. But a magical few will mesmerize and bewitch you the moment you lay your eyes on them. You can never quite get them out of your mind.

In the summer of 1971, my parents took me on a three-and-a-half-week road trip from our suburban Philly row home out to Phoenix, AZ and back. Our former next-door neighbors had relocated out West because the family patriarch had developed a debilitating case of arthritis. Whereas Philadelphia is muggy in the summer and damp in the winter, Phoenix is in the Sonoran Desert. Although Phoenix broils under the naked sun like a giant parking lot in hell, it’s what they call a “dry heat.”

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Dad drove, mom rode shotgun, and I sat in the back, poring over baseball box scores and calculating batting averages in my head. Our route to Phoenix took us from Pennsylvania down through the spectacularly unspectacular Midwest, then into Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. The most I remember about the latter two states were tumbleweeds, oil rigs, and flat, dusty plains. Nothing I’d call “breathtaking.”

But about an hour after we’d crossed over into New Mexico—the “Land of Enchantment”—I looked up from the newspaper sports page to behold eye-popping scenery that reminded me of what I’d seen on the Road Runner Show. That was a popular 1960s animated cartoon in which the mischievous protagonist led the hapless Wile E. Coyote on endless danger-laden chases through the desert Southwest’s psychedelically colorful mesas, buttes, canyons, hoodoos, and gulches.

I was enchanted. It felt like being on another planet. It would be my first real-life exposure to the magisterial desert.

Our trip took us further westward into Arizona and to the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and the Painted Desert. Later forays out West took me to Death Valley, Monument Valley, the Valley of Fire, Canyon de Chelly, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park. It all staggered me. Nothing back East or in the Midwest could hope to compare to the desert Southwest’s soaring grandeur.

As I told you last week, my wife and I have wanted to leave Georgia for years. We briefly considered Sarasota, FL, but it’s even rainier than Georgia. Plus, it’s Florida. The meme “Florida Man” refers to the fact that if you hear a news story about a naked gent with a bone through his nose who, while high on paint thinner, microwaved a baby at a local convenience store and ate it, odds are that it happened in Florida.

We also pondered relocating to the charming little mountain town of Chattanooga, TN. It’s better than the ATL, but Chattanooga raises similar climatic and demographic concerns—it gets more rain than Atlanta and almost a third of its residents are Chattan**gas.

Regarding rain, Hurricane Helene recently dumped more inches on Atlanta over 48 hours than Albuquerque averages in a year.

So where does an American man of meager means take his wife if he’s tired of both coasts and has never been impressed with the Midwest?

In my experience, the Mountain Time Zone is by far America’s most scenic. Statistically, it’s the country’s most sparsely populated temporal quadrant. For someone who likes places better than I like people, that sounds heavenly. Utah is the only state—and this happened twice twenty years apart—where the landscape was magnificent on such a surreal level that I spontaneously burst out laughing. But Utah is too cold for me, and the Mormon vibe is too palpably cultlike for my tastes. Idaho, likewise, is too frigid. Don’t even get me started on Montana. Or Wyoming. Though Colorado has its charms, its residents always rubbed me the wrong way. It’s hard to explain, but it’s been a constant ever since I visited my brother out there in the 1970s.

To me, no other place felt as serenely hypnotic as New Mexico.

Although the Land of Enchantment is America’s fifth biggest state—only Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana take up more space—its total population of 2.1 million is one-third of the Atlanta metropolitan area’s. Only Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas have fewer people per square mile than New Mexico does.

There are roughly as many black people in the Atlanta metro area alone as there are people of all colors in the entire state of New Mexico. If 2020 Census stats are accurate, New Mexico is only 2.1% black.

When my wife and I visited New Mexico last October and this past April scoping out whether it was a viable place to live, we played a game of “count the blacks.” Over the course of about nine days, we tallied fewer than one sub-Saharan per diem.

I took her soaking at natural mineral springs down south in the shady little spa town of Truth or Consequences and up north in the majestic Jemez Mountains and Santa Fe. She said she found both the scenery and the hot springs very “soothing.” During our second trip as we barreled down I-25 ogling vast red mountain vistas, she said, “I could see living here.” She liked the sunshine. And the food. And the wide-open spaces. Given that she’s spent her whole life in New Orleans and Atlanta, she said it was refreshing to find a place so atypically schvartze-free.

Despite its paucity of ex-Africans, people have warned me that New Mexico is a beaten-down, impoverished, perilous shithole. According to a 2024 analysis, it’s America’s second-most dangerous state—behind only Alaska. But Alaska and New Mexico rank first and third in their quotient of what are known as “Native Americans.” They also rank first and fifth in total size. When you factor in the population per square mile and the abundance of Injuns, does this skew the crime stats?

Yes, New Mexico is pockmarked with desperately dissolute patches of crime and dysfunction. But I’ve been to the Land of Enchantment at least twenty times and have probably spent an aggregate total of two months there, and the only places where I wouldn’t want to sleep at night are the dilapidated reservations set aside for the haggard and weatherbeaten Injuns.

I’ve never felt the sort of stark-feared, hairs-standing-on-the-back-of-my-neck sense of menace and danger in New Mexico that I have in places such as East St. Louis, Camden, Gary, or Atlanta’s near west side. On a recent overview of America’s 25 Most Dangerous Cities, Portland makes the list, but Albuquerque doesn’t. Until I’m given reason to feel otherwise, I’m going to stick with my hunch that New Mexico is “dangerous” because of the Injuns out on the rez, and they’re mainly a danger to themselves.

Unless something happens to break my spell, I’ll remain enchanted.