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My daughter shouts with delight as soon as the water towers in Reserve come into view: “Grandma’s house!” She is more at home in this valley than I have ever been. After long visits with my mother along the San Francisco River over the past few years, she has become my tour guide through a place I thought I knew by heart. Over the weekend I was shown my old stomping grounds through the eyes of a child.
Being a momma is magical in so many ways, and appreciating a new perspective on old sights is just one of the many gifts my baby gives me every single day. With her as my co-pilot, the long drive I’ve been making for 38 years is no longer a cumbersome means to an end, but a grand adventure.
We pull off at Sevilleta and Joan, the ever present and friendly face at the welcome center, tours her through the exhibit where she learns about the many stuffed wild animals on display. She tells me proudly that the wolf was her favorite of the animals because he reminds her of Baby Monster, her goofy and deaf husky mix puppy.
We drive on, past the town where “momma works”, and onto Route 60, the two lane highway that takes us past “witchy mountains” and drops us into Magdalena where they have her favorite candy at the gas station. She doesn’t know the name of the town but she knows it’s where the candy is. She knows it’s where she met my boss’s donkey (Mugshot), and where there is sometimes frybread for sale by the road.
With a chocolate mustache, she guides me west — "that's the way to grandma’s house” — to the VLA, and here I tell her the story of how the first time I brought her brother and sister here they were just a few years older than she is now.
“You see those big white disks?” I ask her. “When Arrow and Grace were little and Oscar and Chester were still here (our old dogs), your dad and I told them we were taking them to go to a planet called Caninia where dogs come from.”
“For real life, momma? Can we go to that planet?”
I laugh and explain that it was all a joke but that I hyped it up with such confidence that by the time we got in sight on the satellites they were convinced they were being sent to outer space with a schnauzer and a chihuahua as their only chaperones. She laughs and laughs as we stop to take the requisite photos. I have told her this story before but at 5, she can finally appreciate the gag.
In Datil we stop at Guest Eagle Ranch, the gas station and restaurant that has been around since the 1920s. As we wait for the best burgers on earth, she asks to go get a candy. Since we are on a vacation of sorts I tell her it’s fine, but she has to buy it herself. Motivated by sugar she takes my card and makes her first ever solo purchase, returning to our table with a look somewhere between pride and slyness.
“I did it momma! All by myself!”
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After filling our bellies and her admiring all the trinkets and decor, we are on the road again, taking the left lane at the Y to Reserve.
We play her favorite tunes, a mash up of Lady Gaga, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and Bad Bunny, singing, wiggling and holding hands. I take note of the weather and how the light creates deep shadows on the hills of St. Augustine plains and makes the gramma grass glow. She tells me every color of the sky as the sun gets lower and lower and points out the “reindeer” (antelope) along the road. We stop and take photos of a herd of young elk crossing the road, and I marvel at the way their dust mingles with the golden hour light, creating halos around them.
In Horse Springs we pull off to look at the old gas station and I tell her how I wish we could buy it for an art studio. I ask her opinion on the matter.
“Oh yes,” she says. “It’s really nice!”
We discuss the different things we would do with the building. She votes for ice cream, toys, horses and goats. I tell her about the walls I would cover with art and how I’d get the neon sign back glowing in the night, a little blip amongst the billions of stars you can see there. We admire the moon that is beginning to show and she tells me, “look, it’s our favorite moon!” A silver thumbnail on the horizon.
In between songs and snacks, she points out cows and reminds me that papa has cows, too, and how she's going to help him take care of them when she’s a big kid. As we descend into the canyon I tell her how when I was a kid someone stuck a pig’s head on a pole “right there” and we all thought the place was probably haunted. We quiet momentarily in the mystery and morbidity of this lore.
Past Uncle Bill’s Bar, where so much Daniel and Davila history was made over the past 60 years, where I had my first Shirley Timple, past Jake’s Grocery Store, where my cousins and I would pool our money together and walk “uptown” for a coke and candy bar, past the colorful houses of colorful people long gone whose names I can’t recall, along Main Street where one time Chubbs, my grandma’s dog Blue Girl’s puppy, followed my cousins and I one summer and my oldest cousin Aaron took it upon himself to carry the little stinker when his legs got worn out, past the cut in the side of the hill where as a teenager my best friend Jillian and I would walk up to get into mischief on the mesa with Rael kids and loiter in the park, we turn on the road that takes us home to my grandma’s trailer where my mom has now made a cozy little home, where so much love has been shared at the kitchen table, and so many tears have been shed at our family cemetery, where so much food has been grown and cooked, and so many generations have blessed the water with their joy.
We bump along the dirt road and lunge into the little river, she points out the bank where her and grandma saw baby elk and how they had spots on their butts.
As we wind up the bank, past the willow groves where Zino’s cows always escape to, we are greeted with the welcoming bark of Junior, mom’s big black dog. And we park in the spot where we always park and wait for my mother to rush out to hold us in this enchanted place where my daughter feels at home.
