I first came to Ghost Ranch in 1963. I had finished my freshman year at Wagner College in New York City so I got on a Greyhound bus and spent two, maybe three, days travelling from the Port Authority bus terminal on 42nd Street to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Staff from the ranch picked me up in Santa Fe, fed me some green chili which was the hottest food I had ever eaten, and we drove up past Abiquiu to this new world.
The new world is still here...I continue to discover it each year. Yesterday morning the colors of the desert were vivid after some rain fell during the night. The small arroyos and larger canyons had a new layer of sandstone mud, red and dark brown; the few bushes seemed refreshed; the view across the Piedre Lumbre Llanos was clear to Pedernal, the huge caldera that forms the focal point of the valley.
That first summer Georgia O'Keefe still lived on the ranch and painted from her studio in a small adobe house. The house is still there, down the road from where I hiked in the morning, searching the arroyos for stones, artifacts, bones...the detritus that the rains might have uncovered. She also found beauty in the landscape. She claimed that God told her if she painted Pedernal (the high mountain across the valley) enough times God would give it to her. Maybe God did...but the mountain was still here in the morning as I search for my own kind of beauty.
