America's southwest has much to recommend it: green chili, adobe houses, new excuses to eat fried dough, cacti, campaign moustaches, the idea that you can simply remove yourself from the rat race to Santa Fe, grow a beard and compose ditties on the ukulele for eternity in a modest shack where high school peers will never find you. Below is a good representation of how I view the southwest in summary (photo contingent on securing a brief, pueblo-free-of-chubby-backpack-toting-frybread-eating-tourists moment - and they move in pairs usually, so this is hard).
Side note: I had visited Las Vegas, and, no doubt, Las Vegas airport, Dallas airport etc., and witnessed the southwest aesthetic (square, cheesy sweater designs printed on high skirting of buildings), before I ever visited New Mexico in the proper manner. (You will know you have admirably completed the commute to New Mexico if you pull up to a fake adobe motel with granola, corn chips and cheese crumbs littering your lap in the front seat of a Ford Focus after solid hours of driving through landmarks like "Wagon Mound" and "Camel Rock." Your legs should have seized up.) Anyhow, I never quite understood the whole aqua/terracotta color scheme in the airports, previously thinking all of Vegas must have been dressed by pastel-loving retirees running a side business consulting for mass-painted concrete swatches. Now I get it: Spanish-Puebloan charm. I await the Puebloan-themed Pier 1 catalogue that will one day arrive in my mailbox. It is important to note that the setting plays a big role in the sympathetic appeal of the adobe houses. Something about the Three Amigos backdrop endears them to me. If they were somewhere bitter like Russia or Lethbridge, Alberta, I should perhaps not love them so.
The salt-eked shrubland, boilerplate red soil, complete absence of water, vultures, and seemingly endless but fruitless expanses of pinon (I see the bushes, but must still spend $10 on a sample-size ziplock) are all well-known attractions of the southwest. I was surprised, then, at what I saw when we stopped into Great Sand Dunes National Park just a few wee hours from Taos on the way home. The sand dunes are impressive, mostly in that no one, including park literature, can explain terribly well how the dunes came to stack themselves 200 meters high in a corner of the San Luis Valley, a thousand miles from the coast. Dubious explanations implicate "Sand Creek," "M__ Creek" and the wind in moving the sand to its current position.
But neither the mild creeks nor gentle wind seemed to explain the expanse of *so much bloody sand* in the valley. In any case, the jam of cars trying to get through the ranger pay station did not betray a local fascination with geology. Rather, we found, the clamoring families in frilly togs and salmon, sleeveless shirts were there for the creeks themselves, deckchairs and pool donuts in hand. In the spring, the runoff floods the base of the dunes, and little eddying "rapids" provide visitors with the cheap thrill of a speedboat ride, without call for a two-stroke, boat license or ability to swim. Families set up camp on the flooded flats, adults ankle deep in sand and cool run-off. Kids ride the mini currents along the valley floor, or throw wet sand clods at one another. It is a marvelous sight.
But briefly back to the airports. I can almost understand the "welcome to [insert city]" mentality, but trying to disguise an entire transit operation, what with jumbo jets coming and going, by decoupaging the outside to look like the local "Happy Sleeps Motel" seems defeatist, and an expensive homage to my Great Aunt Muriel's famous crocheted toilet roll covers.
Side note: I had visited Las Vegas, and, no doubt, Las Vegas airport, Dallas airport etc., and witnessed the southwest aesthetic (square, cheesy sweater designs printed on high skirting of buildings), before I ever visited New Mexico in the proper manner. (You will know you have admirably completed the commute to New Mexico if you pull up to a fake adobe motel with granola, corn chips and cheese crumbs littering your lap in the front seat of a Ford Focus after solid hours of driving through landmarks like "Wagon Mound" and "Camel Rock." Your legs should have seized up.) Anyhow, I never quite understood the whole aqua/terracotta color scheme in the airports, previously thinking all of Vegas must have been dressed by pastel-loving retirees running a side business consulting for mass-painted concrete swatches. Now I get it: Spanish-Puebloan charm. I await the Puebloan-themed Pier 1 catalogue that will one day arrive in my mailbox. It is important to note that the setting plays a big role in the sympathetic appeal of the adobe houses. Something about the Three Amigos backdrop endears them to me. If they were somewhere bitter like Russia or Lethbridge, Alberta, I should perhaps not love them so.
The salt-eked shrubland, boilerplate red soil, complete absence of water, vultures, and seemingly endless but fruitless expanses of pinon (I see the bushes, but must still spend $10 on a sample-size ziplock) are all well-known attractions of the southwest. I was surprised, then, at what I saw when we stopped into Great Sand Dunes National Park just a few wee hours from Taos on the way home. The sand dunes are impressive, mostly in that no one, including park literature, can explain terribly well how the dunes came to stack themselves 200 meters high in a corner of the San Luis Valley, a thousand miles from the coast. Dubious explanations implicate "Sand Creek," "M__ Creek" and the wind in moving the sand to its current position.
But neither the mild creeks nor gentle wind seemed to explain the expanse of *so much bloody sand* in the valley. In any case, the jam of cars trying to get through the ranger pay station did not betray a local fascination with geology. Rather, we found, the clamoring families in frilly togs and salmon, sleeveless shirts were there for the creeks themselves, deckchairs and pool donuts in hand. In the spring, the runoff floods the base of the dunes, and little eddying "rapids" provide visitors with the cheap thrill of a speedboat ride, without call for a two-stroke, boat license or ability to swim. Families set up camp on the flooded flats, adults ankle deep in sand and cool run-off. Kids ride the mini currents along the valley floor, or throw wet sand clods at one another. It is a marvelous sight. 
But briefly back to the airports. I can almost understand the "welcome to [insert city]" mentality, but trying to disguise an entire transit operation, what with jumbo jets coming and going, by decoupaging the outside to look like the local "Happy Sleeps Motel" seems defeatist, and an expensive homage to my Great Aunt Muriel's famous crocheted toilet roll covers.
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