Melanie McGrath - Motel Nirvana

Eat your way to consciousness

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One afternoon in late April last year, sitting on a bed in the second cheapest motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, staring at the TV and waiting for something important to happen. A welcome-pamphlet lies open on the floor, turned to the page on altitude sickness and a small gold box with its wrapper printed The Ark Bookstore, Romero St, squats by the remote control and digs into a toenail. Outside the high, empty air of a north New Mexico spring loiters in the parking lot and, beyond the lot, an idle slipstream of traffic waits for the lights on Cerillos Road before heading south into a thousand thousand square miles of New Mexico desert.

On one of the network channels Geraldo Rivera is quizzing a panel of prepubescent urban terrorists, closing for the commercial break with a hook: What kind of society are we living in today? Well be right back with the answer. A web of contradictory signals baffles the screen, then surrenders to a Lexus ad. In among the static lies the insubstantial reflection of a woman with hair cut short as Irish moss. The inconstant lines about the mouth and the restive expression of the lips are set in, but the eyes, same dirty blue as the screen, appear unsettled, no more than holes. Those eyes I followed in the rear-view mirror half the way across the state of Texas. They seemed to me more solid then. Perhaps it was just that the light was different.

The border between Texas and New Mexico happens to be where the American West truly begins. All but the southern tip of western Texas belongs to the great plain lands, in geography as well as in spirit. The region still seems raw and new, without past or future, defined only by its current usage. For hundreds of miles across the Texas Panhandle only the monstrous panorama of derricks pumping crude disturbs the tepid sky. Beneath them lies the rich green Texan turf, metaphor for Texan style brash, resilient, thrusting. In western Texas the air bears the odours of cattle shit and oil and the distant horizon appears as a glittering mineral line levitating just above the highway.

By contrast, all but the most northerly region of New Mexico is old and frail, a jumble of crepey rock and thinning, age-stained soil. Heading west, beyond Amarillo, TX, brittled turf gives out to bunch grass and yucca. The first blue mesas bubble the plain at Clovis, on the New Mexico border. All across eastern New Mexico the range stretches out vast and undulant to the curve of the earth, still open in places and the soil baked dun with red swatches between, like shortbread fingers laid out on a plate of ripened beef. This is where the magical palette of the south-west begins. Further west still the rivers dry up into arroyos, sagebrush replaces bunch grass and the tarry, fecund aroma of creosote bush competes with the smell of sage.

New Mexico towns are less ambitious than Texan towns; poorer too, by and large. Many consist in nothing more than a few mobile homes, a gas station and a single, neglected store selling liquor and animal feed. Maybe there will be a small polymall, laid out in horseshoe shape around a parking lot, with a Philips 76, a Bashas, a frozen yoghurt kiosk and a Radio Shack. Unlike the Panhandle, though, New Mexico is well-travelled. Along every main highway plantations of fast food joints and rest areas and cheap motels have sprung up. Every so often you drive by a WalMart or some other hyperstore strapped to the plain like a torah.

The southwest, and more specifically New Mexico state, is the place all America goes to find itself, just as it found itself in California thirty years before. Empty, yet historically rich, materially poor (forty-seventh poorest state in the Union) and thus apparently spiritually uncompromised, New Mexico has found itself become the baptismal font of secular and humanist America. Santa Fe, the City of the Holy Faith, is its focal point. Visitors and settlers congregate in Santa Fe to indulge in that peculiarly American pastime working on the self. The deeper Americas spiritual crisis gets, the more spiritual self-improvement is deemed necessary and the more money and visitors fetch up in Santa Fe.