Santa Fe, a Town With Cachet

Gusty Winds May Exist

“You’ve always dreamed of living there – the great good place where everything is going to be different. You’re too late for Aspen, and Key West is too crowded. But don’t give up. We’ve asked around and checked the maps. There’s still a chance you can make it to Santa Fe.” 

 - From a 1981 story in Esquire Magazine

It was a little ironic, we always thought. As working journalists, my wife and I moved often over half a century, and we were fortunate enough to have lived in some truly razzle-dazzle places. Manhattan’s very happening Upper Westside. Bustling Hong Kong in a high-rise over the South China Sea. A century-old row house in Georgetown.

But despite all that, the place that really made jaws drop was our port of call after we stopped working and retired: Santa Fe, New Mexico. Admit it, your jaw dropped a bit just then, didn’t it?  

From the time Barbara and I hit our 60s, we had obsessively analyzed our retirement options. We were looking for East Coast, cobblestones, town squares and harbors festooned with sailboats. Yankee values. Boat shoes and fisherman sweaters. Now, that’s a retirement.

But when our son went to New York University, got a graduate degree in television writing, and scrambled aboard the next flight out to Los Angeles, we had to rethink our plans.

Our radar beam swiveled Westward, but it looked like the pickings there were pretty slim. Utah, no thank you. Nevada? Hell no. Those rectangular states? We’ll get back to you. There were some nice destinations in California, but we had spent our lives as journalists, not hedge fund managers, so those didn’t seem to be on option.

(Bandelier National Monument)

Then, one Sunday afternoon during our endless search, Barbara squinted at an online map and said, “Hey, you remember that vacation we took to Santa Fe that time? We loved it! Maybe we should have a look?”

Which is how, in October 2011, we booked ourselves into a room at a resort spa in Tesuque, just outside Santa Fe. We engaged a realtor and told him, honestly, that we wouldn’t be clients for four or five years, but we wanted to view some properties now just to see what we could expect.

After a morning of looking, we were convinced that there was something to this idea. That evening, we sat on the balcony of our hotel room and watched a hot-pink sunset under a canopy of brilliant stars. I had to ask. “You know, if we could retire here, why would we go anywhere else?”

“Do ya hear that whistle down the line?
I figure that it's engine number forty-nine
She's the only one that'll sound that way
On the Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe”

- Johnny Mercer

Just one month later, my job unexpectedly went away, changing our timetable pretty drastically. A mere nine months after our epiphany on that Tesuque balcony,  we were living in Santa Fe. An adobe home, 7,400 feet above sea level.

We were browsing the bookshelves at Collected Works, located on the site where Billy the Kid was jailed. We hiked rugged mountain trails that began right outside our front door. We owned hiking sticks and snowshoes. East Coast big-city life was only a dim memory.

The city’s history went back forever. Santa Fe was already the capital of the New Mexico Territory a decade before the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth Rock. Not long after we arrived, I was driving down Old Santa Fe Trail near downtown, and I noticed the cross street was Old Pecos Trail. I stopped to take a picture of those two street signs together and posted it on Facebook as the “coolest intersection in the galaxy.” Go ahead, prove me wrong.

“All this misery pays no salary, so
Let's open up a restaurant in Santa Fe
Sunny Santa Fe would be nice
Let's open up a restaurant in Santa Fe
And leave this to the roaches and mice”

- “Let’s Open Up a Restaurant in Santa Fe,” from “Rent”

There is no such thing as a newcomer pamphlet called “What to Expect if you’re Just Off the Bus.” I should point out that in Santa Fe, unlike any other U.S. city I know of, “just off the bus” applies to anyone who wasn’t born there.

There is some local resentment toward the legions of transplants, especially retirees, who choose to spend their golden years in Santa Fe. As a mayor back in the 1980s famously put it, “they come here with their big money and higher education…”

We learned what we needed to know by keen observation, and by sucking the local wisdom out of our experiences. We wanted to keep up, so we repeated our relevant stories to ourselves, like family folklore.

(Snowshoeing at Aspen Vista)

On our first Santa Fe Christmas, I was in a small shop buying some pottery as a gift, and the saleswoman pulled a ballpoint pen out of her beehive hairdo for me to sign the credit card slip. I saw several other pens peeking from the same hair tangle.

“That’s kind of eccentric,” I volunteered.

Her eyes narrowed. “Honey, this is Santa Fe. If you aren’t eccentric, they won’t let you in.”

While shopping for cumin seeds at Trader Joe’s, I overheard one employee who was stocking the shelves talking with another who was emptying waste bins in the same aisle.

“So, what did you do last night?”

“Oh, I finished rereading ‘The Man in the Iron Mask.’”

“Alexandre Dumas! That’s a great one. What next?”

“Think I’ll reread ‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’” he said, emptying another small plastic trash bag into a larger one.

I was paying for some dog kibble in our pet shop – with four animals, it was my home away from home. I noticed that the young cashier had a whole forearm arm filled, wrist to elbow, with colorful print. 

“What’s that tattoo on your arm?”

“It’s my favorite poem, ‘The Sick Rose,’ by William Blake.”

“The whole poem?”

“Sure. I just had it re-done.”

“Wow. That’s pretty impressive. Did you study Blake in college?”

Her eye-roll clearly told me she shouldn’t have to explain this to me. “No, see, how it works is, if I had gone to college, I wouldn’t have to work in a pet food store.”

Touché

Wow. These were some special people, these Santa Feans. Literate,  unassuming, and just a little off-center, in a very sweet way.

“The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is mildly Zen. There are public road signs that say, ‘Gusty Winds May Exist.’ This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.”

 - Chuck Klosterman

(Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks)

So, what is it like? That’s easy. It is exactly like nowhere else. How magically mystical is Santa Fe’s allure? Early in 2018 I was asked to answer questions for liveabilty.com about Santa Fe as a place to retire, and I ran with it. They asked me to end the article by telling what I liked most about the place:

People. Sunsets. The City Different kind of vibe. Lights on the Plaza at Christmas. The magical walk up iconic Canyon Road, on Christmas Eve. The fragrant smell of piñon logs burning in our fireplace. The aroma of fresh chiles being roasted outdoors.

Taking out-of-town visitors hiking at Kasha Katuwe and showing them Meow Wolf, blowing their minds at both places. Birdwatching at the Audubon Sanctuary. The very real sense of history. The fact that that two different downtown buildings have bronze plaques claiming to be the site of the jail where Billy the Kid was incarcerated.

And the fact that you would never, ever, ever mistake this dusty little cowboy town for anyplace else on earth. Those are the things I love the most.”

Not long after the piece ran, I got a Facebook friend request from a writer in California. I cautiously accepted it. She told me her husband had recently retired. They were carefully researching a number of possible new homes, including Santa Fe. She had spent one weekend there 25 years earlier, and he had never even been there.

They had loved the Livability piece, and they said that sounded like just the place for them. They bought a Santa Fe house, online – I’m not making this up – piled their animals in the car and drove to their new home. They were still living out of boxes when the woman contacted me and said we should get together for coffee.

Really? I had read about meetings like this, and they usually did not end well. I chose the most public outdoor coffee place in town, where maybe someone would stop her if she pulled out an ice pick or tried to lure me into a van.

It turned out, I need not have worried. We talked for 90 minutes, nonstop, Carlyn was a delightful force of nature, and to this day we remain dear friends. I helped edit her latest book, and she helps edit these stories you’re reading now.

There seemed something very poetic in attracting two new acolytes. Sort of like passing the torch, except we didn’t use real torches because, you know, the drought and the inevitable summer Santa Fe wildfires.

The list of likes I used in liveability.com wasn’t complete, especially as far as my own life went. Within 14 months of my arrival, I was writing a humor column for an alt-weekly newspaper and sitting on the board of the Santa Fe Animal Shelter. For my last couple of years there I was a docent at the historic home and studio of a famous Southwestern artist.

I had sought none of these things out. Indeed, believers in the preordained might think they had been waiting there patiently for me. To quote D.H. Lawrence:

New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever… The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul...

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