Cowboys and Indians

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Traveling through the southwest is a race to the point at which you become really, inescapably, ineffably, at your personal breaking point for dealing with cowboys and Indians. If you see one more piece of Pueblo pottery, one more boot, or one more Tony Hillerman novel, you will tear into the Rattlesnake Museum and break all the glass cages and hope at least one of those soporific serpents is lively enough to spring forth and clear the streets just a little bit. As you walk through Old Town after Old Town you wonder about the moment each of these entrepreneurs turned to their significant other and said, "You know, this would be a perfect spot for a shop selling Indian goods." You know how just about every Ramones song sounds exactly the same, but there are experts out there who can somehow tell one from the other? It's the same with these cowboy and Indian shops. They all look the same to me, but presumably there are experts out there who can tell them apart. Not that I didn't enjoy a little of this. As a matter of fact, I really liked Santa Fe, which has great restaurants in addition to its cowboy and Indian shops. It also has the GOK museum, whence I pulled some interesting tidbits on modernism to add to the ever-present Caveman (part 5 of which, the crusher, is still in the hopper). Taos began to pale a little, as something of a Santa Fe Junior, and then by the time we took that left turn at Albuquerque, there was simply nothing an Old Town or a cowboy and Indian shop could offer. Of course, this was the home of the Rattlesnake Museum, and that was worth a trip. But at this point in the journey, we were ready to mix it up a little.

Getting into and out of these places was marked by three noteworth sites. First, there's Monument Valley. Now I know for a fact that when I say John Ford to you, you think that maybe he was Edsel's younger brother, but to me it's a motherlode of American mythology. Driving through Monument Valley, you relive every Pappy film you've ever seen, and you even begin to think that, yes, maybe, perhaps, all right fine, even "The Searchers" should go into the old Netflix queue once again (and if you call yourself a Star Wars fan, and haven't seen Searchers, than you aren't fit to trim an Ewok's toenails). Secondly, there's Chaco Canyon, the ruins of a long-gone civilization. It is to marvel, shall we say. Thirdly, there's Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the New World. High up on a mesa, the City in the Sky, you walk around in the wake of an Indian guide and fill in the complementary blank from the Chacos. We northeasterners don't think much about this part of our history. It's good to let some of it sink in.

I did, of course, succumb to a few items in the cowboy and Indian shops. In a way, it's like going to WDW. You enter normal, and before long you're covered in Mickey Mouse souvenirwear. Same thing here. I found a few things I simply had to have of the sand painting variety, plus the odd ceramic or two. So I wasn't totally immune as much as worn out, when all was said and done.

You will recognize me a Catnats by my spurs that jingle jingle jangle.