Photo by Jane Hammons
The sun risen but still low, light falling on the llano eery, cloud buffed, not bright but clear. I have my good camera with me for the annual procession to Santuario de Chimayó and am tempted to pull over to shoot the roadside altars refurbished for Easter, bright plastic flowers tinsel wreaths freshly printed photographs prayer cards. Litter seeds. Wind scatter.
Haze hovers, slips in layers down the blue face of the Sandias.
The day before my 71st birthday, I drive 70 miles north from Albuquerque to witness the procession along I-25, US 84/285, NM 503, County Road 98 to Santuario de Chimayó.
Electric warning yellow flash bulbs: Watch for Walkers. A Walking Dead fan I picture zombies seeking Good Friday flesh.
A dry arroyo holds eight burros ambling a straight line north along with the rest of us. Stringy manes dusty coats of brown splotched white. Black broom straw tails whisk sandstone gypsum aside.
Orange warns with cones closing one lane of I-25 for the Santuario Walkers. Signs painted with black arrows point to safer frontage roads, parallel streets, dirt trails. Porta-potties and water bottles stationed strategically. At the turn-off to La Puebla cars, strollers, wheelchairs, children riding high on shoulders, low-riders, bikers, black exhaust emitting trucks share the narrow two lane road.
I walk, but only the last 3 miles. I am not religious just fascinated by ritual. Fascination: enchantment, spell.
A lone palomino, old, flickers dull yellow, plods a field. Its mane threads a thick neck, wisp of tail swishes last year’s dried up harvest. Spring not yet arrived here a few daffodils in yards, roadside terrain dry scrub and stubble. Brown leaves catch sunlight, glisten off creek frothing from the Santa Cruz River.
At the road leading to the Santuario people sell earrings tamales burritos stuffed Easter eggs santos retablos bultos. The museum of low-rider art beckons, but like these other pilgrims on foot and behind the wheel, I have a destination. Those carrying wooden crosses lay them down in the parking lot, some cool feet in ditch water.
At a grotto lit by candles 5 reverent people so alike in shape and size they might have been sculpted a family at the bench rise and turn to leave revealing their motto on matching lime green Roswell alien t-shirts: We Have Never Been Alone.
Dead 2 years, my UFO-chasing mother has accompanied me.
Drums draw me to the Danza San Jose dancers shaking golden gourd rattles behind the leader who raises bow and arrow signaling a complicated routine, lines snaking in and out between each other.
30 miles from here Oppenheimer toyed up his Gadget then drove 223 miles south to explode it in a desert near my home. Considered vacant. Worthless. Unbeautiful unlike his beloved Los Alamos mountains. A sickly youth, sent there to recover, he was inspired to write poetry.
The dirt at Santuario de Chimayó is sacred. People fill baggies.
The only dirt I carry home is on the sole of my shoes.
All dirt is sacred.
I do believe in something.
Jane Hammons taught writing at UC Berkeley for many years before returning home to New Mexico. She has work forthcoming in Brilliant Flash Fiction and The East Over Anthology of Rural Writers. Her writing appears in numerous magazines and anthologies: Alaska Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine Southwestern American Literature, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Yellow Medicine Review, Hint Fiction (W.W.W. Norton), The Maternal is Political (Seal Press) and Selected Memories: Five Years of Hippocampus Magazine. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.