On the Path to the Perfect Storm
OUTSIDE QUEMADO, N.M. — There were six of us on the porch, and except for the 400 lightning rods, not much else for miles.
The rain puddles were deep enough to drown June bugs; the nearest neighbor was seven miles off. Now and again thunder would rumble, and we'd grin dumbly, gaze toward the southern sky and hope for magic.
"This," whispered Mary Frances, glancing at the four strangers around us and the bare homesteader's cabin behind us, "is the wackiest vacation I've had in my life. Out in the middle of this with people you don't know
Mary Frances and I have been married 11 years, so I know she has spent at least one Christmas Day in Bahrain, an Easter week in Croatia and a summer spell on Bora-Bora, where she was invited to an autoharp recital. Around the globe, she has drunk deeply from the well of wackiness.
What brought us here was, in many ways, your basic four-day desert road trip, Albuquerque to Silver City and back, with a single added wild card: this conceptual-art lightning thing I heard about a year ago from a guy at a birthday party.
And then another storm came at us and brought me back to the moment. The sky flared, the rain fell just about sideways, and the sun dropped into a little slot between the lowest cloud and the distant horizon
Every year, come July and August, great stretches of the arid American West get briefly wet. In the skies above southwestern New Mexico, the cloudscapes swell to rival the landscapes as great billows of black and white hang above the red buttes, the cactus and the creosote clumps. When late afternoon rolls around, the booms and lightning bolts begin.
The New Mexicans call this their monsoon season, but you can consider it an invitation: In these weeks you see the desert at its most dynamic, the colors richer, the sky livelier, the Rio Grande swollen, the flora and fauna taking it all in.
Our visit was in late June, just as monsoon season was beginning. Flew to Albuquerque. Rented an SUV in case of dirt roads and deep mud. Turned our backs on the glossier New Mexico of Santa Fe and Taos. Headed south and west to the New Mexico of unaccredited museums and towns with goofy names.
We paused in Albuquerque's Old Town long enough to get soaked in a downpour and collect Certificates of Bravery (just for paying admission and looking) from the American International Rattlesnake Museum. Then we roared toward Socorro, Magdalena, Pie Town, Quemado and beyond.
