Where should we meet?

Finding friends across New Mexico, desert landscapes, and missing people you love

Perhaps I shouldn’t write about this all so soon. I have a habit of handling my thoughts before they’ve cooled, which has, in the past, led me to do and say things that I regret or feel embarrassed about (are those the same?). Though I do feel a sort of sick satisfaction in stretching them out when they’re still doughy and tactile, holding the translucent webbing up to the light even as it burns my fingertips. I sift through hundreds of images and discern what is a good photograph and what is a good memory, and how to keep their weight balanced on the scale of what is valuable, and I try my best to decouple it all from my worth.

Last week I took a trip to New Mexico. The genesis for this adventure was Amy Denet Deal of 4KINSHIP and the Diné Skate Garden Project inviting me to a ‘Protect The Land Earth Day’ event at the Two Grey Hills Skatepark, which was led by the Diné Skate Garden Project and 4KINSHIP in collaboration with Nations Skate Youth, Salad Days of Skateboarding, the Diné Native Plants Program and Navajo Parks and Recreation.

Specifically, Amy had said, If you find yourself in New Mexico. And I thought, could I find myself in New Mexico?

After a careful review of (limited) train and bus schedules and a generous offer to loan a car from a friend, I decided to drive out and spend a few extra days in Santa Fe as an attempt to make the trip more sensible. By kismet, I would also get to see some close friends from grad school up in Taos. And I would spend nearly 36 hours over 5 days alone in the car.

Every minute of the drive was worth it for the opportunity to stand on one of only two skateparks on a reservation in New Mexico, handing out boards to kids whose faces glowed at the realization that they were theirs to keep. I have Nestor from Salad Days of Skateboarding to thank for letting me help with that, and for a revitalizing conversation about creating new kinds of skateable spaces in the public realm.

I also got to hang out with my dear friend Norma and the crew she was traveling with from Nations Skate Youth led by Rosie and Tristan, and meet many brilliant new people who were drawn together by the desire to create opportunities for overlooked communities to spend meaningful time outside.

While in Santa Fe I saw my friend Kyle, who is also the author of one of my very favorite books about skateboarding and being human. We had planned to skate but there was wind blowing (aggressively) and contemporary Christian rock music playing from a JBL speaker (also aggressively). So we did not skate, but we did save a life — a field mouse had gotten itself stuck in the deep end of the bowl, and through our combined ingenuity, a skateboard, and a reusable bag, we were able to transfer it out and into the brush. We remarked on how many possibilities there are for a small creature’s death across this landscape (hawks? snakes?) and I hoped we had really saved it, and not just ushered it into an alternate ending. I wanted to cover it with my board while it crossed the sand to find its family, like those videos on the internet of people helping baby turtles make it to the sea.

We went and got coffees and sat outside as the wind and sunshine battled for weather dominance. We talked about photography and writing and the exhaustion of cobbling together a living out of the thing you love, of the pursuit of craft in the face of an industry machine, and I remember the sense that this is sort of the whole point, yeah? The talking and the coffee and the friendship and the support and the unlikeliness of it all in the first place, the two of us sitting here in New Mexico because I had decided to go to some skate thing in Arizona and then pick up a book. The blessings of the smallest choices.

We parted, and he told me I should take the High Road to Taos tomorrow when I would go meet my friends from grad school. I had spent every drive hoping to see a horse and had been unlucky. And then, what do you know —

absolutely loved chin scratches

guardian of the souls

It was pure chance that I and my friends from Denver would all pick a trip to the same state on the same weekend. The blessings of the smallest choices.

We hiked to an alpine lake that sits at an altitude of 11,036 feet, nearly bailing halfway because some of us were wearing socks with Tevas and some of us were wearing Asics and live at basically sea level. But we continued on and were rewarded with these stunning snowy peaks and massive rocks covered in lichen and a freezing lake that, yes, should have been more frozen and more full, but we were filled with sandwiches and sour straws and the sun was stronger than the chill and I was with my friends.

Afterwards, we went to a hot spring and soaked in the squishy-bottomed pools and slipped around on the algae covered rocks to make room for all eight of us. We met two guys who were camping nearby, and one told us, ‘I miss my mom.’ We had the kind of conversation you can only have as strangers in a warm body of communal water, and he was so earnest and open with us and in a weird way we all sort of loved him.

My friends called the restaurant where they had a reservation and asked to add one more. We ate at a family-style kitchen table with artfully mismatched dishware, and it so happened that it was perfectly sized for eight.

There is the ending, but first there is the beginning of the end. It arrives at the house where you are not staying but everybody else is, and they are building a fire in the fireplace and you are facing down an hour and a half drive in the dark to stay the night alone in a Motel 6. You have stretched it out all you can, this moment; you traded beauty for a little agony, more time together for less time asleep.

So it starts to set in, then. The big bad sad.

You love these people, and you miss these people, and there is a world where you decided not to take this trip and it would have been some indeterminate amount of many months before you saw these people again. This was a reunion by chance during a trip that you were not invited on. Because you moved to Los Angeles. In the three years since you’ve moved to Los Angeles, every time you see your friends during a trip back you think, What have I done? What have I given up? Why can I not chose to (submit to) the path that would allow me this life? Or, what is wrong with me?

You feel like this day was so perfectly light, so fucking easy, just the easiest — the laughter! You laugh like this with near no one else, and you left? Wine and card games and getting ready together in the bathroom, one perfect hit of a joint before dinner, and you laugh and laugh and laugh, and for the first time in a while there is no paranoia at the edges of the high.

You also know that what you feel is the lightness of being a visitor in a timeline that is not yours.

Because they stayed, and you left, and they are home and it is time for you to leave.

You fill the full day of driving with adventure, stopping at the Petrified Forest National Park because you remember it from a trip in 2018. The wind is plotting to whip you off the edge of the cliff and your Fuji is dead and you’re almost at the end of your last roll (and your camera has a massive light leak, but you won’t learn that until later). You are the only person you see who is there alone.

You save the last two shots on your last roll of film for a sunset that never comes. Sometimes it just gets dark, slowly, and then all at once. It starts to rain, because of course. Light and then heavy, and you’re so hungry and the Cracker Barrel is still so far away, and you want to go faster to get it all over with— you remember something about highways being slickest right when it starts to rain, how they shimmer iridescent with the oil from the cars— and you feel so sad but you don’t want to die; you’re grateful that the part of you that wants to die (there is a small part) is not the one driving tonight. And besides, even if you did want to die, this isn’t your car.

So it’s slow and steady and whatever comes on shuffle through the speakers. Weirdly, the wipers start to work better as it rains harder. The car gets cleaned of the desert dust, and you can see the cloud break there in the distance, and the funny bit about this darkness is that it is actually still light out under all these clouds, and the sun hasn’t even set yet, not really.

You make it to Cracker Barrel. They call you, Sir. Sit wherever you’d like, sir.

And then you make it home. You drop off the car, and you are so absolutely convinced that you left it unlocked that it is all you dream about. You dream that you go to check on the car and that someone stole all the doors and the frame and all that is left is its metal guts. You think that just because you are capable of doing things doesn’t mean it is healthy to do them.

The Day After

While I was away, the tree outside my apartment has gone purple. I brought the wind home with me, these thick heavy gusts, but it makes everything cool and I can put on a sweater. The rain has cleared away the smog that perpetually muddies the mountains, and the jasmine is growing in massive walls. It’s my third spring here and I had forgotten that the jasmine will come, and that it will make everything in the air smell so sweet.

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“It wasn’t a life in the shadows any more — instead exhilaration, free-running cheer that had no basis of anxiety. Hope, I suppose it was.” - Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt

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