Geoff Dyer: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

‘ We both got fierce headaches from the relentless wind ,’ wrote Laura, ‘ but the Painted Desert was one of the highlights of our frenzied trip .’

We spent the night in Gallup, a strip of motel signs telephoto’d alongside the railroad tracks. Laura was happy to be in New Mexico (‘ The licence plates here are much nicer than the ones in Arizona .’) and even happier to be on Route 66 — if we were on it. Difficult to say for sure, difficult to know what, if anything, remained of that stretch of post-fabricated, vinyl-macadamed mythology. ‘ There were dozens of motels with lovely names like Cactus Motel or Desert Sands or Desert Skies but we ended up checking into one with a very ordinary name: the Days Inn .’ It was a Sunday night and, as far as we could make out, there was only one restaurant open. ‘ G. had a breakdown because he couldn’t find anything that suited him on the menu. He asked the waitress to point out the vegetarian dishes about ten times, each time deciding that it was all too disgusting, and finally lost it. What an idiot! ’

After that we needed a drink but, according to New Mexico law, all bars are closed on Sundays. We couldn’t even buy beer to drink in our room at the motel where the vertical hold on the TV left much to be desired. The only thing to do was have sex but Laura didn’t want to. I didn’t want to either: it was only the fact that Laura didn’t want to that made me want to. In the end we just lay on the bed, watching the TV flip round like fruit on a slot machine, listening to the shunting, the iron-rumble of the Santa Fe freights.

The next morning I once again ‘ fell prey to a terrible attack after a fearful blueberry pancake covered in sour cream that had gone sour. Off we stormed! ’ Ah, we may have stormed, Laura, but at least, by now, we were storming in the right direction. After a meandering start, Laura had got into navigating in a big way. We exited Gallup without a single U-turn and headed, like an arrow, towards Santa Fe. As we drove we supplemented our normal competition — who would be first to identify the band, track and the album from which it was taken, on the classic rock station we were tuned to? — with another: who could name the most Indian tribes?

‘I’ll go first,’ said Laura, shouting to make herself heard above Tonto’s Expanding Headband. ‘Sioux.’

‘Navajo.’

‘Apache.’

‘Comanche.’

‘Mohican.’

After that it became difficult. ‘Pawnee,’ I said, after a pause.

‘Shoshone.’

‘Cherokee.’

‘Comanche,’ said Laura,

‘I’ve already said “Comanche”,’ I said, but before I could gloat over my victory we saw a body hanging from a ranch entrance sign, swaying in the wind. We backed up and saw that it was actually a guy, stuffed and dressed in hat, shirt, jeans and boots. Even close-up, silhouetted by the sun, it seemed like a real body hanging by the neck. Written on the gallows ranch-sign were the words ‘We Do Things The Old Way: Keep Out’. It was the lack of spelling mistakes that convinced us that the warning was a joke: in this part of the world a message of genuinely ill intent, however simple, would always be enhanced by a missed ‘h’ or a dropped vowel.

In Santa Fe the word ‘adobe’ was on our lips and in our eyes constantly. We couldn’t move for adobe buildings selling adobe pots in which to eat adobe-coloured burritos. We walked around for an hour, looking at the Navajo rugs and turquoise jewellery but by now I was in a frenzy of impatience to get to Taos. Besides, Santa Fe didn’t quite live up to the immense romance of the name we had seen on the sides of the freights at Gallup. It had a peculiarly indoors quality: beige buildings, magnolia sky. Even the thermometer on the street showed 68 degrees: room temperature. Laura was keen on looking for turquoise earrings and Navajo rugs but I insisted on the importance of getting to Taos ‘in good time’ even though there was nothing to hurry to Taos for.

Once we got in the car, though, I hurried to Taos as if there were no today let alone tomorrow. Laura, who had now assumed overall responsibility for all matters pertaining to route and maps, insisted on our taking scenic Highway 63, the so-called ‘turquoise trail’, but we didn’t get much opportunity to admire the scenery. Having lost control of our route I concentrated on determining our pace. I floored the accelerator whenever the road was clear, passed every car in sight, took curves at speeds that reminded us of the crash at Alonissos. It was the fault, primarily, of the classic rock station which kept drumming up support for the pleasures of flat-out rhythmic velocity.

It was late afternoon by the time we checked into La Fonda, the hotel where Lawrence’s paintings are kept. There was no sign of the owner, Saki Karavas, but Johnny, the receptionist, was there to welcome us. He smoked with one hand while, with the other, he fixed some kind of clear tube into his nose. He had the driest skin ever seen on a human being. Magnified a few million times it could have passed for a close-up of a log in the Petrified Forest. We were booked into the Tyrone Power and Somebody Else Honeymoon suite, he said. I asked after Saki who, according to Johnny, was around some place but was not feeling himself today. I took this to mean — as I had ever since the debacle in Denmark when I had excused myself in identical terms — that Saki was utterly himself today: there comes a point in our lives when we are most often and most emphatically ourselves on those days when we like to think we are not ourselves.

Perched on the dresser in our room, black and guilty, omens — for all I knew — of theft, illness or death, were two birds. They lunged over the bed as we entered, flung themselves out of the window, leaving a flurry of wings in their wake. They scared us. From the window we watched them fly low over the adobe plaza and take their place on a telegraph pole. They could easily have been a thousand years old or more, those birds. Like us they watched the humans coming in and out of gift shops, parking their pick-ups at meters. An Indian in a cowboy hat walked by. The birds flew off.

I wanted to head out to the Lawrence ranch but Laura said we should save that for the next day as it would soon be dark. Instead we drove up to the pueblo where two hundred Indians still live without water or electricity. A police car was waiting in the middle of the road, facing us. I pulled up alongside and wound down the window. The policeman, an Indian, said that the pueblo was closed for religious ceremonies and would not be open to the public again until Monday. We couldn’t hang around till Monday. Therefore we would not see the pueblo: a blow that was also a relief. If the pueblo had been open I would have visited it and set down my impressions, would have tried to sense if the ‘old nodality’ Lawrence spoke of still held good. As it was, there was nothing we could do. It was not our fault that the pueblo was closed — as it often was, apparently. Keeping visitors out was a way of retaining that old nodality and we had played our part in perpetuating it.

Laura was keen to see a ghost town mentioned in one of the guide books and so we headed out past Eagle Nest in search of Elizabethtown. We drove as far as Red River, a town that had the look of a ghost town in the process of formation. By that time we were miles beyond the expected location of Elizabethtown. We had missed it completely: it had become the ghost of a ghost town, had lost even the phantom of nodality. Anywhere we went that afternoon, it seemed, was going to be either closed or non-existent. We decided to return to Taos and kick back for the rest of the day.

Both the Moby Dickens Bookstore and the Taos Bookstore had selections of out-of-print, Lawrence-related titles but there was no sign of Phoenix . Laura was browsing through the shops selling Navajo jewellery and rugs. I was already sick of the sight of gift shops selling Navajo jewellery and rugs and so I bought her a turquoise necklace. That seemed to do the trick but, in addition to the gift shops, there were the galleries to contend with. They were also gift shops really. I had thought there were a lot of bad artists in Santa Fe but it could not begin to compete with Taos in that respect. Taos had an unrivalled concentration of terrible artists. There were more terrible artists living in Taos than anywhere else on earth. That was where its nodality lay.