Ramblin' in New Mexico: A Visual Journey

By: Erik Rittenberry

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”

—Joris-Karl Huysmans

I flew west into Albuquerque, grabbed my rental car, and pointed it north. Towards Taos. That mythical town that lies like a dream in a high desert valley at the edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

It’s springtime, and the “earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

I’m here for a few days, driftin’ and dreamin’, with a fierce hunger to taste part of the earth that I’m not too familiar with. Spring does that to you. It sparks a need to seek out strange lands, to voyage beyond the familiar.

Northern New Mexico spreads out wide and vast in every direction. I feel pleasantly lost as I roam among the ruins of what seems like some forgotten rock garden of the gods. Red canyons contrast with endless blue skies, dry riverbeds, black buttresses of volcanic rock, a harsh wind whispers in an ancient language through the junipers.

To the hyper-civilized eye, this place might appear barren, drab, a repulsive wasteland devoid of any scent of the lush greenery that sustains life. But our ancestors saw it differently. With its powerful grandeur of crimson colors and eroded shapes and the vast desolation, the indigenous people who once lived in this brutal region saw it as sacred, alive, animated by spirits, and central to ceremonial life.

When D.H. Lawrence came here in the 1920s, he became aware of “the terrifying underdepths” that lie beneath the civilized world. “Curious as it may sound,” he once wrote, “it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization.”

As for me, I have nothing but a camera slung over the passenger seat and my old ragged hiking boots thumping in the back. No plan, no company, no particular destination.

Just a hunger that gnawed from the inside, a hunger for a direct experience of the rawness of it all, the big sky, the dirt roads slicing through boulders, “the mysterious roar of silence itself.”

I wasn’t running from any particular thing. I was just slipping out the side door of civilization for a quick smoke. Stepping off the stage where they preach progress like a gospel and peddle theories and narratives like snake oil.

I’d had enough of it—the talk of growth, plans, and getting ahead in a world that feels more like a padded cell than a home.

For me, it was more of a return than an escape. A return to dirt and wind and the elemental things that lie beyond the cultural facade. I was heading into the wild, into a raw, rich, primitive land far from the stench of the residue of screens, deadlines, nine-to-five smiles, and dead language.

My soul had gone parched. My blood, sluggish. And I needed the kind of cleansing that only comes with silence and space and the holy ache of being alone in some faraway place.

Like Edward Abbey, "I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.”

This is the Land of Enchantment, a land of soul nourishment, a land of grit, a land with a brutal yet beautiful history baked into the red dirt. Here’s a visual journey through my lens. I hope you enjoy it.

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“The desert sweeps on and on and the silence of the desert erases our egos. We finally begin to exist as something beyond our everyday cares and worries. The border of our body vanishes and we become one with the land.”

— Charles Bowden

“This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigarette, and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.”

-- John Fante

"Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then you can detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made."

-Samuel Beckett

"Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert."

- Sir Roger Scruton

“I broke with the sun and stars.
I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.
I made the journey, bought the useless, found the indefinite,
And my heart is the same as it was: a sky and a desert.”

—Pessoa

"What good are words if the spirit behind them is absent?

All our words are dead. Magic is dead. God is dead. The dead are piling up around us. Soon they will choke the rivers, fill the seas, flood the valleys and the plains. Perhaps only in the desert will man be able to breathe without being asphyxiated by the stench of death."

-- Henry Miller

“I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.”

― J.A. Baker

“Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.”

—D. H. Lawrence

“Dreamers make the best drivers, always. They are not afraid of unknown routes, they do not complain about the bumps in the road, and they like the feel of the machine roaring down the dark highways. They seldom if ever get lost because wherever they find themselves is part of what they were seeking.”

— Charles Bowden

“When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's different. The sky is different, the wind is different. I shouldn't say too much about it because other people may be interested and I don't want them interested."

— Georgia O’Keeffe

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