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MELANIE McGRATH
Motel Nirvana
Dreaming of the New Age in the American Desert
For Paul and my mother, Margaret
‘What do I know of life?
What of myself? I know not even my own work past or present; Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition Mocking, perplexing me.’
WALT WHITMAN,
‘On the Last Thoughts of Columbus’
Contents
There’s a Seeker Born Every Minute
White Light, Greenbacks and Redskins
‘Eat your way to consciousness’
Advert in Magical Blend magazine
DAY ONE
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? We’ll 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
