I told you how I met Quincy Tahoma’s artist friend, Ramos Sanchez through Rex Arrowsmith, an Indian arts dealer and expert. This is about my attempt to find Ramos. When I knew that I was going to be in Santa Fe, I called Ramos and asked if I could come and see him. Sure, he said, any time. We settled on a date and time and his wife Gerdy gave me directions to his house, which is outside the San Ildenfonso Pueblo, but within the Pueblo’s reservation lines.
I love the country north of Santa Fe. The land here is punctuated by unexpected mesas and vistas of green-clad mountains in the background. In between wide sweeps of flat dusty land provide scarce vegetation for wandering cows and horses.
It is easy to see why the pueblo people have settled there for hundreds, if not a thousand years. When the Spanish conquistadors came through the Puebloans were here, and they are still here. Most of their legends say they came down from the area of Mesa Verde in Colorado and split into the many villages that exist today, most along the Rio Grand River that runs south from the mountains in northern New Mexico, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque on its way to Texas.
The directions that Gerdy gave me went something like this. Take the highway north from Santa Fe and follow the branch toward Alamos. Go across the river and when you see the black mesa, look for a trailer house and then we are the next road. It sounded pretty clear until I got there. But then, I wasn’t very clear on a lot of things. I thought Gerdy’s name was Gertie (like my husband’s aunt Gertrude) until I had visited with Gerdy a couple of times, and saw her name in print.
I missed the turn-off to Alamos which is pretty simple to see when you are familiar with it–and pulled into an orchard where a guy loading crates of fruit explained to me how to get to San Ildefonse.
I saw an entrance to San Ildefonse, but I had not yet crossed a river. Soon I saw another sign for San Ildefonse, and I got worried because I assumed I need to go into the village. I pulled off the road, and called Gerdy on my cell phone. No, she explained, I did NOT need to go into San Ildefonse. I went on a ways and the road dipped and curved over a bridge across the Rio Grande River. (Duh, I said to myself–”the river” is the Rio Grande.)
Ahead was a large black mesa on the right hand side of the road. Of course there were mesas of varying degrees of darkness all over the place, but this one seemed more dramatic than the rest, and likely to be the landmark. Good. The bad news, however, lay ahead–a ribbon of road bordered by barbed wire fence, and here and there a cluster of houses or trailers off to the right beneath trees.
Thoroughly confused, I called Gerdy once again. By now I’m sure she had me pegged as an idiot and was wondering why she and Ramos were wasting their time on me. “Do you see a man painting by the road?” She asked. YES! There he was, easel set up for painting the Black Mesa. That was a landmark that got me in to their house. Heaven knows how I would have found it if he had packed up his paints before I got there.
This expedition was just another example of communications between the native dwellers of the Southwest who know every natural landmark and notice every change made by man–and the urbanized (even from small towns) non-Indians who rely on roads, named geological features, numbers on houses and signs to get around.
