White Sands

It's around a four hour drive from Santa Fe down to the town of Alamogordo. If you read the Frommers guide, you might wonder why I bothered:

While traveling in this area, I came to jokingly call it "Alamageddin," mostly because the town itself is fairly desolate, without many amenities.

Luckily, I'm not here to avail myself of any amenities, just to visit White Sands National Monument a few miles west of town. 275 square miles of gypsum dunes; the largest anywhere on earth. You seldom see gypsum as sand, because it is soluble. But here in the Tularosa Basin where there's next to no rain, the sun evaporates the water leaving the crystallised mineral at the mercy of strong south-westerly winds.

As the grains of gypsum are blown, they rub together until they shine brilliant white, and bank in dunes just like any other sand. Their colour means they reflect more heat than quartz sand, so you can walk across them without burning yourself.

The dunes have an unusual attraction. It's a subtle difference really, but their ethereal whiteness imparts a strange virtue. It is a bridal white that hints at purity and holiness, and it lends an almost supernatural elegance that makes it seem other-worldly. You just won't see or feel something like this anywhere else on Earth.

As usual, I wander off for a little solitude, in preparation for sunset. There are some good clouds about and I don't have long to wait. Unfortunately, some of those clouds park themselves resolutely in front of the sun. I trek for half an hour or so, to get closer to the horizon and further from anyone else. It's funny how we are drawn, almost magnetically, towards a sunset. I eventually climb a dune and sit in the sand to wait.

It's pretty dark, and the gypsum fades to a dull grey without the sun to help it fluoresce. I'm looking down, playing with the sand when the sun drops below the cloud line and lights me up. The grains run through my fingers as I am bathed in the purest light.

Suddenly the whole landscape is transformed. The clouds and dunes come to life, and play off of one another. It is a marvellous, peaceful privilege to experience. It doesn't last too long, and as the sun dips out of sight behind the San Andres mountains, the park descends into greyness again, just as its inhabitants begin to burrow out of their tiny holes and get ready for their sunless day to begin.

This isn't quite the end of the story though; another side to this place's history gives me pause for thought. Because the White Sands National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the White Sands Missile Range. And in a northern corner of the range is the Trinity Test Site where, on July 16th 1945, the first ever atomic bomb was detonated. That a land of such natural virtue was chosen for this is a cruel irony, and it will remain forever tainted as a result.

The transformation wasn't lost on those present that day. Once the day had gone "from darkness to brilliant sunshine in an instant", hands were shaken and backs slapped. A bottle of whiskey was passed around. The war was over. When they'd got their vision back, had picked themselves up from the ground where they'd been thrown, and had a moment to reflect, a more sombre mood descended.

Robert Oppenheimer, the bomb's architect, famously reflected;

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the test director, expressed the same sentiment more succinctly. Seconds after what he called the "foul and awesome display" he turned to Oppenheimer and remarked:

Now we are all sons of bitches.

Stairway to Heaven

Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the oldest cities in the United States. A rather pretty little place, its traditional adobe houses, galleries, churches, artists and museums lure the tourists in their droves. There is a singular air about the place; it is distinctly New Mexican. Red chiles hang from every doorway.

Hot chile peppers in the blistering sun

Perhaps the most intriguing attraction is the Loretta Chapel. The story goes something like this: the chapel was built with no means of getting up to the choir loft. The Sisters of Loretta didn't want to haul their habits up some rickety old ladder, so they prayed to St Joseph, patron saint of carpenters, for a solution. Lo and behold, on the final day of their Novena, a mysterious man appeared at the chapel door offering his services. A few months later, he disappeared without a trace, but not before he'd knocked up a neat spiral staircase that turns through 720º without any obvious means of support. It was proclaimed a miracle (though not an official one).

Can you feel it?

I'm not an overly religious person, but I like places of worship and the thoughtful reflection they quietly imbue. So I was rather looking forward to a few peaceful moments looking at this wondrous bit of carpentry and pondering the message behind its mysterious creation. Never mind. The voice booming out of the speakers repeated the story every five minutes over a backtrack of moving choral singing. The only place it moved me was the exit, which is reached via a gift shop selling all manner of borderline blasphemous tat. Luckily the beautiful St Francis Cathedral Basilica a few blocks away offered some respite, with only a modest souvenir shop wedged in the vestibule.

The clear implication is that the mysterious old man was in fact some incarnation of Joseph himself (not me, I'm hopeless with a jigsaw). Because the staircase has no central support, it was considered to be held up by some divine force. This too is nonsense - the innermost piece of wood is coiled so tight that it acts as a support. It's an extremely accomplished piece of carpentry, achieved with very basic tools, and by soaking the wood in tubs of hot water. All that glitters is not gold.

But the staircase has 33 steps! They cry. Jesus's age when he died. Oh come on! The staircase has 33 steps - exactly equal to the number of apostles (not including Judas) multiplied by the number of people in the Holy Trinity? Or the very same 33 that you get if you subtract the number of days God took to create the world (including Sunday, even though he had his feet up) from the number of days Jesus spent in the wilderness? Hmmm.

I am exacerbating my cynicism, not just for comic effect, but because the packaging of this beautiful chapel invites little else. Of course all these tales are complete bunk, but at least let them speak for themselves and don't turn them into a shameless money spinner.

The rest of Santa Fe is nice, but I can't help but thinking it doesn't suffer from a similar malaise. It is a beautiful place to wander about, but bloody expensive. There are galleries everywhere. Some are good, others less so. Some, it seems, assume that just being in Santa Fe validates their art and justifies the lofty price tags.

Restaurants too. Hype and style over substance, in the two I put to the test. And punitively expensive. It seems a shame that in a place special enough to not really need any selling, everyone seems determined to do just that.

Moving Home

Some time in the 6th century AD, Native American Indians came to live on Mesa Verde in the south west corner of Colorado. They farmed and hunted on the mesa top, where the land was fertile enough, but prone to long periods of drought. They built homes, initially simple pit houses, but later sophisticated stone masonry villages. Then, around 1200 AD, they began to build homes on ridges and alcoves in the cliff faces below the mesa top. The greatest examples, like Cliff Palace have survived to this day.

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

There are some 600 cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde National Park. Cliff Palace is the largest of them with 150 rooms, and was probably a kind of community centre. With the harsh conditions, the Ancestral Puebloans had to pool their resources to survive. Of the 150 rooms at Cliff Palace, many were for storing crops and meat. 23 of them were Kivas, round, sunken rooms used for ceremonial purposes.

Kivas in Cliff Palace

Around 100 years later, the people that built these communities upped and left, never to return. Although there were severe droughts around this time, they'd survived plenty worse. It may have been that after some 700 years of tilling the same land, it could no longer support their burgeoning population. They spread south into Arizona and New Mexico and settled among their kin. No matter how sophisticated a race or people, once the natural resources of its land are exhausted, the options are either to move on, as the Puebloans did, or die out.

A hundred and fifty odd miles away, to the south and east, near the town of Taos, New Mexico, another group of people have assimilated their homes into the landscape: Hippies. And they call their homes Earthships. (Cue anti-hippy shudder and contempt. But I decide to check it out anyway).

An Earthship is a sustainable home made entirely of recycled materials that generates its own power and recycles its own waste. It is half buried in the ground to conserve heat, and has solar panels and wind turbines on the roof. Rainwater is harvested and treated then fed into a traditional plumbing system. Grey waste is used to water plants, then to flush toilets. Black waste goes into your standard septic tank. The walls are made of used car tires, packed with earth and filled out with old drink cans and bottles.

Another Brick in The Wall

Now the people who build and live in these things in hippy communes in the middle of a large field in New Mexico might strike you as being a little strange. They are. But at the same time, they would appear to be onto something. Is it so absurd to think that if you are building a new home, you should harness as much of the energy it will need from the wind and the sun? Or that using as many recycled materials as possible will reduce its impact upon the environment and cost you less money?

Not sure of the name of this one. Er, Tire Palace?

I'm not completely buying into all of this of course. I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to live in a house that looks like something out of Mad Max 2, or call my children things like "Rainbow" or "Snowflake". Hell, I'm a pure bred capitalist ex-bookie for God's sake. But the principles that underly what they're doing here must eventually be assimilated into mainstream society. The smartest architects are already designing and building homes that work in harmony with their immediate environment, not against it.

Ask the Ancestral Puebloans. A hundred years after building the most incredible homes and communities, they were gone. There's a limit to what the land can give us, and unless we're quick enough to devise new ways to enhance our return from what we've already taken, we'll be faced with the same two options as them. But there are 6.7 billion of us and counting, so repatriation could prove a bit more complicated...