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I have to admit to falling in love a bit with New Mexico. I’ve only been here with Maria for a couple of days (we come home next Wednesday),  but this place is already in my head. NM is not one thing but many different things, all jumbled up together in a feast of the eye and the mind.

There is the most astonishing natural beauty I have ever seen. Apart from its stunning landscapes (which change completely every few miles), I am reminded of a number of different places I have loved – New York City, the old West and East Villages, the old Bowery, Provincetown, Savannah, the Old West (cowboys and cattle ranches the size of Rhode Island),  the Florida Keys, parts of LA., the broken town towns of Route 66 (which runs through New Mexico.

The beauty and the ramshackle live side by side in New Mexico, it is, so far, the most egalitarian place I have ever seen. Almost every property has a different kind of fence, many ramshackle and falling apart. Why? “It’s a New Mexico thing?”

There are artists everywhere, and a rich legacy of American culture. Oddballs live next to rich second homers and ski lodges, stunning mountains loom up behind shacks with goats and chickens (and fences), it is a hip place and a poor place, often right in the same place.

And the towns all have the greatest names.

Today we took a drive up to Abiquiu, the last home of Georgia O’Keefe, and we were both speechles at the richness and beauty of the landscape. On the ride up, miles and miles of adobe shacks and shanties, dead restaurants, abandoned trailer parks, Native-American reservations with casinos and bowling alleys,  artist studios,  decaying gas stations, and hundreds of trailer parks with who have seen better days.

They don’t seem to obliterate their past in New Mexico, as they do in the East, they just ignore it and move ahead. The past, present and future share the same space.  I haven’t Taos (tomorrow) or Santa Fe yet, we go to Taos tomorrow, but O’Keefe’s home and studio were very powerful and magical.

The trailer parks and shanties look natural here, not out of place at all, like they grew organically out of the ground. I’m sure there are tons of rich people too, haven’t run across them yet, but I know they are there.

I have a new favorite tree, the Cottonwoods, now changing color, they transcend even the eastern oak for their beauty and structure. I’ll put up a photo or two. When I visit New York I wonder where all the characters and artists and oddballs and free spirits have gone. They are here, and it is a great joy to see them.

In much of America, individualism has been pushed aside by corporatism. It very much lives here.

This place is a literal riot, the most beautiful and friendliest mish-mash of geography and culture I have ever seen. I do love it. More to come.