Edge of Taos Desert

An Escape to Reality

Mabel Dodge Luhan

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 1987
• ISBN:
  9780826325105
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving.

"I finished it in a state of amazed revelation... it is so beautifully compact and consistent.... It is going to help many another woman and man to 'take life with the talons' and carry it high."--Ansel Adams

Chapter One

The last evening I spent at 23 Fifth Avenue is still vivid in my memory. The large living room was softly lighted at each end, and dinner was served before the oakwood fire.

We left that room, with the fire glowing and the lights burning upon the patient household gods that had moved around with me, as though I were just going to pay a visit next door.

I went out of there intending to return. I was going to the Southwest, a little known neighborhood, for perhaps a fortnight, because I wanted to see what Maurice was doing, for his letters had intrigued me. I had always heard of people going to Florida or California, and more occasionally to the West, but no one ever went to the Southwest. Hardly anyone had ever even heard of Santa Fe.

I armed myself with letters of introduction to several individuals who stood out in that unknown and unexplored land. Among them, one was to Ford Harvey and another to Lorenzo Hubbell. These letters were both given me, after some effort to find people who had been to New Mexico, by a priest named Father Douglas who had lived near a tribe named Hopi. He was a friend of Sister Beatrix’s, and he had told me strange, wonderful stories about those people.

Ridgely Torrence, too. He and Olivia came to dinner one evening before I left. Leo Stein was also there, I believe. I think it was he who brought me a tome with many reproductions of Aztec and Mayan deities, and I pored over these. As people’s minds begin to churn and bring up bits of relevant oddities for the benefit of a friend traveling out of the familiar radius, so Ridgely, his eyes widened to their utmost, related tales of Indian magic told him by a friend who had “been there.”

One story was of a white man who had been taken into a tribe because the Indians liked him and to a certain extent trusted him. That is, they trusted him to the extent of allowing him to be present at some of their ceremonies blindfolded! Evidently they were right, for he told all he could tell. One of the things he told was that he knew the Indians had the power of levitation, but he didn’t know how they did it. People went on journeys in the air, he said, went on errands to a distant spot and returned in a short time. Once they took him down into a hole in the ground. It was a round, underground chamber with a roof made of seven portions, by tree trunks joined and fitted together, with heavy dirt on the top. In the center of this roof, a round opening to the sky, and below it, resting on the earth, lay a great round stone. There was a stout thong made of hide tied about the stone with its end lying on the ground. The Indians sat in a circle on their haunches, their backs against the earthen wall. But first they blindfolded the white man.

Then they began a low chanting over and over again like a mantra. The man said they kept this up for a while and presently he felt a change in the atmosphere, as though someone moved, or broke the circle, and after that a low humming was added to the chant, and at regular intervals a wind passed against his cheeks as though the air was heavily displaced before him. Round and round him something moved, each time faster while the humming sound grew higher pitched. Something rose on the solid body of the chant—rose in the room, fanning him briskly, higher and higher until he no longer felt the air moving on his face and it stirred his hair no more, but the great whine of an enormous rotary motor filled the hollow chamber of earth above him. For a few seconds only, and then, apparently, it passed out through the roof and soared away. The man heard it humming farther and farther off, then growing so dim that he couldn’t hear it any more. The Indians continued their chanting, and they sat there and sat there—he didn’t know how long. Finally he heard it coming back. He distinguished that low, far-away humming. It came nearer until it was a roaring overhead, and then it was inside the chamber with him. Once more he felt the air stir across his face as the thing passed and repassed him. It slowed down and its whine, too, sank to a low, deep sound. It came to rest in the center, and the men stopped chanting and began talking in Indian. One among them told a tale. He was narrating something. Others questioned him and he answered. When they ended, they unfolded the cloth from the white man’s eyes —and everything looked exactly as it had before. The light was faded a little from the room, that was all. Maybe two hours had passed. The circle of Indians was complete, as it had been, the stone was in the same place. . . .

Ridgely’s story touched the love of power that is latent in us all. We felt the secret tincture stir and mingle with our blood, and reborn again for the thousand thousandth time was the desire to know How.

“We have still to discover how the stones of the Pyramids were raised,” said Leo. “It is only conjecture that attributes it to slave labor. And I doubt very much whether the great stones of these Mayan temples were raised by hand,” he went on, turning over the leaves of his book. “Possibly they had hold of some law we have replaced by mechanical invention.”

I took up the Story of Atlantis by Ignatius Donnelly from the table: “They say the Atlanteans had a great many powers they lost because they abused them,” I murmured a little coldly, because I was afraid someone would jeer at me. One could speak of Atlantis all right to Ridgely, but not to Leo or Olivia.

Just as I feared, Leo looked smilingly contemptuous and replied, “Oh, I do not think it is necessary to go as far as the myths of Atlantis,” he said kindly; and his mouth turned down at the corners.

“How far people will or will not go determines their sense of superiority over others,” I thought, “and here I am going to the Southwest where none of them has gone! But I might be going to Atlantis, for all they know! For Leo, though, it would not be Atlantis, while for me it would. Leo would call it by a safer name and feel superior—just as I would call it by a far-away, magical name and feel superior myself!”

When I left, on the last night, I only took along a suitcase and a small trunk.

“Well, I want a vacation,” I said to myself. “I’ve had a horrid time lately. I feel like a Change.”

I got it. My life broke in two right then, and I entered into the second half, a new world that replaced all the ways I had known with others, more strange and terrible and sweet than any I had ever been able to imagine.

Whether it was to Atlantis I went or not I do not know, nor have I ever been interested in conjecturing about it. I suppose when one gets to heaven one does not speculate about it any more. And the same must be true of hell. Anyway, I was through with reading books about Atlantis, Rosicrucianism, the Seven Worlds of Theosophy, or about any other mythical things. I entered into a new life that they were concerned with and I was done with reading any books for a long time.

Chapter Two

The Train was crowded with Christmas holiday young people and the journey seemed interminable to me. I had telegraphed John, who was spending the winter with the Rumseys at Cody, to meet me in Santa Fe for his vacation. I hadn’t seen him for months, for he had gone out there after he left the Morristown School in the spring, and when Maurice appeared in their midst upon his solitary honeymoon, this had so horrified John that he had begged to stay through the winter.

Bob Rumsey, the hero of Rumsey’s Pond, the hero of so many young hearts, married now to a woman his mother’s age, had undertaken to console my son for a mother’s inconsiderateness. He was tutoring John himself—preparing him for Yale, which he had influenced the boy to choose. I myself would have preferred him to go to Harvard. Yale seemed to me smug and self-righteous and to my mind produced blue-eyed boys who were not on to themselves.

I had a mental picture of John and Maurice on the station platform at Lamy, where my train appeared, from the timetable, to let me out at some distance from Santa Fe. They would be standing there with eager faces and a large, closed car to drive me to the house Maurice had rented. This house, like houses in general, presented itself to me in a blur of warmth, light, and color—with cushions, flowers, white enamel, shining metal, and a table set ready for a delicious meal. That is what a house suggested of its own accord.

Not accustomed to traveling by myself, I got on all the wrong trains, and the final one was the kind that is full of children eating bananas and apples, and that stops at every station, and as the last afternoon dragged on, I could hardly endure it. My heart was pounding with impatience, for in spirit I had already arrived and only my body was left behind on the smelly train. Every time we stopped I went to the door and sniffed the clean air that was so good after New York.

Finally about five o’clock, we stopped at a little place for quite a while. From the window I saw two girls in big hats and riding clothes waiting on their horses beside the station platform. There were two or three old cars standing there too. The station-house was of ancient gray wood, and the open space behind it was worn and dusty, but there was the loveliest light all over everything and an empty road leading away, and beyond, just beyond, the bluest mountains I had ever seen. In an instant I rejected that train and ran out to where the automobiles stood. No drivers were about, so I blew a blast on one of the horns and this summoned a long, slow boy from somewhere.

“Listen! This train is supposed to reach Lamy by eleven o’clock. Can’t you motor me to Santa Fe quicker than that? Isn’t there a road?”

“Guess I can,” answered the boy, without much interest.

“Well, wait till I get my bag.” I was breathless and excited. Out in the still air everything sounded so strange. My own voice sounded out of key in my ears. “Why does it feel like church?” I wondered.

Against the windows of the train were glued the pale faces of passengers who were watching me with dreary attention (as they had been doing all day). The more they watched, the greater grew the distance between us, or so I had felt. What possible connection had I with them? (Dreary, drab people—I wish I could cut myself off from you forever, I thought to myself.)

I rushed into the train and secured my bag and my fur coat, and left behind on the seat The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Mercure de France. And I left behind the staleness and the dull, enduring humans all dressed in browns and blacks, with their grimy handkerchiefs in pockets gritty with the deposit of their dull lives!

I ran into the station and telegraphed Maurice:

AM MOTORING TO SANTA FE WILL MEET YOU AT YOUR HOUSE LOVE

MABEL

And then I hurled myself at the big boy who stood dazed beside the waiting automobiles.

“Now we must hurry!” I cried. “I want to beat that train.”

“This hyah is my car, lady,” said the boy, leading me to the end one. It was the most dilapidated vehicle I had ever seen. It had no top and its black, shiny leather seats were ripped and gray. Horsehair bulged through the rents. I didn’t care. I hastened into the back seat, my bag in front with the driver, and he started to crank the engine. Nothing happened, and after he yanked it round and round, he stood up and smiled with some embarrassment at the small crowd that now surrounded us. One of the girls on horse-back called out:

“Where you think you’re goin’ in that car, ’Lisha?”

He didn’t answer her or look at her, and finally the motor gave a start as though awaking from a trance, and began to throb violently. ’Lisha wiped his face with a red handkerchief and slowly lowered himself into the ancient seat. From where I sat, only his huge hat appeared before me, and in that bright winter evening light we started off down the alluring road towards the mountains. I heaved a great sigh of relief. How good it felt! How good this fresh air, this clear simplicity.

But all too soon I began to notice a painful jarring under me.

“Wait a moment. What is this bumping, anyway?” I tapped him on the shoulder. He turned his face towards me and called:

“Oh—them back springs is busted. I guess we’ll make it though. If these two cylinders hold out. . . .”

A horse poked his head through the wayside thicket and started to cross the road slowly. ’Lisha hastily leaned forward and squeezed a rubber bulb. No sound whatever.

“Horn’s gone,” he announced cheerfully.

“What kind of a car is this anyway?” I asked angrily.

“Dodge,” s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foreword: Beyond the Edge of Taos Desert
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Tweleve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-one
• Chapter Twenty-two
• Chapter Twenty-three
• Chapter Twenty-four
• Chapter Twenty-five
• Chapter Twenty-six
• Chapter Twenty-seven
• Chapter Twenty-eight
• Chapter Twenty-nine
• Chapter Thirty
• Chapter Thirty-one
• Chapter Thirty-two
• Chapter Thirty-three
• Index