What you find in Santa Fe

Jan 08, 2008 - 22:49 PM PST

Two years ago, I had the amazing opportunity of being able to visit Santa Fe, New Mexico. I didn’t know much about the city before going there, but I was more than pleasantly surprised by it. In fact, I fell in love.

I have some pictures that I took from the airplane, both there and back, but I have none of Santa Fe. Santa Fe is not a place where you can go in and capture meaning in a snapshot.

On the morning that I left, I had to catch an 8am flight out of Albequerque, so I left Santa Fe at about a quarter to six in the morning. We were driving south down the highway, the sky was crisp and clear, and for miles all you could you see were stars framed by the soft rolling edges of the mountains. In Santa Fe you don’t have to look up to see the sky.

We just drove in silence and I stared out the window. Looking East, I searched the sky for the few constellations that I knew how to find. I spotted Orion almost instantly; the moon was in front of him, to the South. And then a strange thing happened. Riding in silence out in the desert I could see Sirius, his dog, chasing the moon and following Orion at his heels. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I had known that Orion had a dog, but this was the first time I had actually witnessed him and he appeared clearly to me. This amused me at first and I watched him running after the moon as we rode further down the highway. Soon the scene shifted as all things do. The moon was still up, but along the edges of the mountains the light of the sun had begun to creep up, and I saw that not only were Orion and Sirius chasing the moon, the great hunter and his dog were running from the sun. At once their pursuit seemed to take on a sense of urgency as their faintest stars began to fade. I guess even the mightiest of hunters are not infallible.

This was one of those rare moments in life when the World speaks to you as clearly as it can and you understand something immense. These are the kinds of things you find in Santa Fe. You don’t need cameras to capture them. They stay with you for a lifetime and you always remember them.