Santa Fe

By Alison Arnett, Globe Staff, 06/07/98

SANTA FE -- This city, once the epitome of rustic charm, has become another mecca for celebrity-spotting, for mixing shopping for priceless silver jewelry with picking up a Gap T-shirt near the Plaza. The pleasures of brilliant sun against red abobe and the city's artwork are still there, but finding the quiet and quirky spirit of New Mexico means venturing beyond the city limits.

This is a triptych of places that convey the enchantment of the land and its people, all within an easy drive of Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The Jimez State Monument along the Jimez Mountain Trail tells in stone the entertwined heritage of the Indians and Spanish settlers. The stark lines of Georgia O'Keeffe's home in Abuquiu lets the imagination run free. The simplicity of Santuario de Chimayo makes miracles seem tangible.

The approach to Jimez State Monument from Albuquerque in Northeast New Mexico is a winding, ever-ascending road. Signs advertising artisanal pottery and the tribal council offices at Jimez Pueblo mix with many notices marking fishing access and hiking trails in the forest land along the trail. On a blustery March day, with rain clouds playing tag with the sun, those pleasures seem a few months off.

Today, though, I'm headed for a more elusive piece of history. Jimez State Monument is centered around the ruins of a Spanish mission church, built in 1621. The stone and adobe church once rose over the mountains with a belltower that commanded a view of the valley. For the Spaniard missionaries anxious to establish a material and spiritual bulkhead in this rugged new land, the church was considered ``the best in the Indies,'' as one Franciscan chronicler put it. From here, they attempted to convert the H'mez Indians at the Giusewa Pueblo, named for the hot springs in the area.

But what is immortalized here, a visitor slowly realizes as state monument ranger Javier Guzman explains the site, is not the Spanish accomplishment in building San Jose de los Jemez but the Europeans' failure. Guzman, who points out that the monument exhibits try to tell the unvarnished truth about the past, tells me that the church, built on top of the old pueblo, was used for only about nine years. Then the Pueblo people rebelled against the Spanish insistence on taxes and on virtually enslaving the Indians. The church was burned, and the priest in charge killed, part of sweeping insurgency in the New Mexican territories against the Spanish.

Guzman gestures to the round remains of a kiva, an Indian place of worship, that had been destroyed by the Spanish when they arrived, and a plaque quotes a friar as describing the land's inhabitants as ``subject to the Demon.'' The Spanish retreated only for a time, coming back into the territories with stronger forces to subjugate the Indians again, and finally a religious truce was forged. Ninety-eight percent of the Jimez Pueblo, where the Spanish moved the mission in the late 1600s, are Catholic, Guzman says. ``They made peace,'' he says.

The ruined walls of the church, which has been restored over many decades, show traces of the frescoes that once adorned them. The flat roof with its wooden beams (vigas) is long gone, and wildflowers peek through the adobe stones on the floor. Plaques explain the history and folklore of the missionaries and the Giusawa Pueblo people. A sign instructs visitors to stay on the paths to ``respect the rattlesnakes' right to privacy.'' Inside a small building are examples of turkey quill blankets, ``as warm as down coats,'' as the placard reads, and basketry and pottery.

But the beauty of the place isn't really in the historical facts but in what is left unsaid. When asked why the Indians didn't pull down the ruins over the centuries and use the land for something else, Guzman replies that ``bad memories'' kept them away. Now the sun burnishes equally the red adobe of both the rim of the kiva and the half-standing walls of the ancient church, the spirit of the past gracing both.

Georgia O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu holds none of her famous paintings. In fact, only a few simple pieces such as elongated brass cones in the patio bear witness to her artwork. The simple one-story house behind a high adobe wall is open by appointment only three days a week from April to November. Twelve people, who must gather at the Abiquiu Inn down on US 84 to be driven to the house in a van, are allowed through at a time for a one-hour tour.

With these limits and limitations, plus about a 50-mile-drive north from Santa Fe, one might wonder about the tour's popularity. But Judy Lopez, assistant director of the foundation that manages the house as well as a O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, says it's advisable to make tour reservations four months in advance.

This is only puzzling, though, until one steps into the big open room O'Keeffe used as a studio, and Lopez opens the sliding white curtains. The almost ceiling-to-floor windows go right around the corner of the room, and from them, the panorama of the pink and ocher-tinged mountains, the fuzzy-edged cottonwoods along the Chama River, the deep blue sky banked with clouds takes one's breath away. Unlike some museums or homes that display information and objects relative to a famous person, the O'Keeffe House lets one see what the artist saw.

The cottonwoods, Lopez said, were painted by O'Keeffe about the same hazy time of early spring that I saw them. The black door O'Keeffe often used in her patio paintings is still there; the herbs in big gallon jars are still on kitchen shelves along with '50s-era appliances and a funky laundry press. O'Keeffe grew all the herbs, vegetables, and fruit she used in two tidy rectangular gardens in the back of the house. In summer, hollyhocks, roses, poppies, and irises grace the beds, Lopez said, adding that the artist was a member of the local ditch association, which provided water for her crops in the arid Southwest. The artist's collection of stones and rocks from the New Mexican landscape is strewn across a cabinet in the living room.

O'Keeffe bought the house in 1945, which has some rooms from the 1800s, and moved into it 1949, when she moved permanently to New Mexico. About 5,000 visitors a year tour the house, Lopez said, a number partly kept in line because concerns about crowds by the tiny town of Abiquiu and partly to preserve the house. Going here is definitely not Disneylike -- one must use imagination to find O'Keeffe's spirit in the spare rooms. Yet, the rooms remind one of the artist's work -- nothing extra, nothing ornate, but bold and assertive in line and space. It's a fitting tribute, after all.

Several potent legends swirl around Santuario de Chimayo in little Chimayo off the main highway from Santa Fe to Taos. Before the Spanish came to establish missions in the area (as ranger Guzman at the Jimez State Monument told me, when the conquistadors couldn't find gold, they had to invent some other reason for being in the territories), a pueblo occupied the valley and the Indians believed a spring at the site had healing properties. Later, in 1810, a Chimayo settler, Bernardo Abeyta, was performing penance on Good Friday when he supposedly saw a bright light shining from a hole in the ground. In the hole, he found a black crucifix that resembled one in Guatemala believed to have miraculous powers to heal the sick.

The crucifix was taken to a church in a nearby town but kept returning of its own volition to the site until finally Abeyta built a chapel there. Every year during Easter Week, believers from Santa Fe and other towns walk to the chapel to pray and seek healing from the ``holy dirt.''

The legends are well-known, and parking lots and signs on nearby businesses attest to the shrine's popularity. The surprising aspect is the shrine's humbleness. The adobe church, with its rounded lines and two little square belltowers, has a corrugated tin roof and a gateless entrance. When I ran in breathlessly, 45 minutes after the sign said winter hours were over, a priest in a brown cassock muttered in Spanish to hurry, so that he could lock up, but didn't order me out.

Inside, pale sunlight filtered through high windows, and the simplicity of the chapel was endearing. A beautiful wooden altarpiece and frames around statues were painted with religious scenes in soft colors. Tiny hand-written cardboard signs explained the scenes and identified the artists. A bank of votive candles sputtered around a font with holy water.

Behind the church was a little terrace where believers had woven wooden crosses into a chain link fence and photographs of loved ones were attached to trees. A man and woman prayed quietly at a table. No matter what one thinks about the legends, on a quiet off-season evening, the spirituality of Santuario de Chimayo is palpable.

- The Georgia O'Keeffe House is in Abiquiu on Route 84 north from Santa Fe. All tours must be reserved (no exceptions are made) through the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. The tours are conducted Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from April through November. To reserve and for information, call the foundation at 505-685-4539.

- Santuario de Chimayo is in Chimayo on Route 76, also called the High Road from Taos to Santa Fe. Once in Chimayo, look for Country Road 98. For hours and information, the phone number is 505-351-4889.