54
PARTISAN REVIEW
I said a book could very easily be published like that and still be full
of lies. I had seen the official Dies Committee report and it was pretty
tame.
Now he said this fellow not only listed men like Ickes and Jackson
but he said there were others too high to be named. Now if there were
others higher than Ickes and Jackson that certainly made you wonder,
didn't it.
I was holding the screen door open with one foot out. I said I thought
we all ought to be careful to be accurate in what we said about the Presi·
dent and the Cabinet. Maybe there was something in that book but it went
too far. I closed the screen door and we drove on.
It was about noon next day when we looked down into New Mexico.
The main road through Raton Pass was blocked off and we detoured on a
mountain road that wriggled upward all morning, slow going on a hard
grade. Our ears popped a great deal. On the last shoulder at about 8,000
feet we could see, I imagine, at least 150 miles to the southward. There
was something faintly submarine about land masses seen through such a
depth of atmosphere; and the masses themselves were weird, rising softly
sculptured and often level·topped from the desert, grey melting to violet.
Very distant to the west were stonier and more darkly wooded mountains
with pale snow on some of the crests.
Once down on the plain our road ribboned south through what we
now saw was not desert but grazing land, with here and there along the
road a "cattle guard" in place of a gate.
A-
cattle guard is a grill of iron
bars placed in the road where the road cuts through a fence. Cattle cannot
keep their footing on the grill. Informed by a big historical sign, we
looked more closely at the range to the right of the road and saw, sure
enough, overgrown but still deep and distinct, the ruts worn there by ox
carts sixty, seventy, eighty years ago when this was the Santa Fe Trail.
There must have been a dozen wheel tracks and they ran along beside us
for many
mil~s.
Once or twice they swung away from the motor road and
we could see the wide trail curving off around a swell of land.
At Las Vegas we told a fillin<:!; station hand that we understood Santa
Fe was higher than Las Vegas. "Same altitude," he said. "Higher living."
All right, you dead·pan artist.
The road went west and north into rounded mountains covered with
the shrub known as pinon. A crazily lettered sip.n directed us to stop at
the Oldest Well in the U.S. , then we passed a crude.JookinP.: stockade, then
another si!!"n cheerfully commanded Turn Back You Have Passed the
Oldest Well in the
U.
S. There
w~re
low adobe houses and Indians.
Gate~
appeared to El Rancho this and El Rancho that. At about 4:30 we came
over a rise and saw the Rio Grande Valley very broad and warm between
the mountains. The late sun streamed over it from a peaceful west. The
odor of cedar smoke, which was new to us and is very like incense, cam•
into the car occasionally in currents of the clear air.
