Unlikely pilgrims, my daughter and I have come here from New Orleans without reverence or belief, because of a song called "Chimayo."  We linger in the Santuario’s dusk, where the faithful kneel and petition and pray, in a side chapel scoop up holy dirt to carry home from this sacred place.  From the walls gaze down the faces of children:  the unlucky, the afflicted and, sadly, the dead.  Yet the faces smile, unaware of their fate, the Hispanic boy in a football jersey, the teenage queen, the newborn, the forlorn, the fated, the jinxed.  I can hardly breathe here as banks of candles consume my air.  I pass a retablo and do the math, the ratio of miracle to lost cause, and marvel at the sheer tenacity of faith, the way it clings, a barnacle stuck to a sunken ship.

    At Easter the pilgrims come by foot, walking twenty-seven miles north from Santa Fe, often crawling the last few yards to this chapel known for healing powers.  We have come west by car, along interstate 10, then north from Carlsbad on 285, with our health intact, to Santa Fe.  We’ve seen the Georgia O’Keeffe museum—red bones framing yellow sky, white camellias supersized, landscape whittled down to line—all as prelude to the journey here, the home of Lolo and Joann and Charles, and for awhile Myshkin, who wrote it all down, and sings about it when we make the request at the Neutral Ground coffee house in New Orleans.  It’s not her best song, but it’s captured us both, Kate, at fourteen, drawn, I suppose, to its glimpse of twenty-something life:  wandering by the riverside; hitchhiking to work; all day "painting stucco some sick shade of brown/Trying to make it look like it was built out of the ground"; on the weekend being "so full of silence.… wound up so tight…I’ll stay in town and I’ll stay up all night";  and always replacing family with friends, who come in for a smoke, or to share some free time, who "talk about nothing/Talk about it slow/That’s what we do in Chimayo."

    That refrain’s been playing in my head for days.  I hear it now as I leave this church’s crushing gloom for the light and air of the world outside.  Looking up at the sky, I remember O’Keeffe, peering through a pelvic bone at that same blue and claiming this landscape as her own.  I wonder if men feel the same hard pull to sky and rock that brought me here, and made O’Keeffe paint, and inspired Myshkin to put down in song the big, bold beauty of this western place:  "There’s nothing holding that damn sky in/And there’s no borders and no such thing as sin."  Landscape is body, the undulating lines of O’Keeffe’s bones and hills and flowers and face.  Landscape is mind, the West’s bare stone and endless sky a testament to all this church denies:  that man invented sin and godhead and his own dominion, that we come unbidden and go unmourned.  I see again the folded slips of paper in the church’s glass bowl, all those pleas for intervention, bent like wings.

    We walk across the street to the store, pausing at the tables set up outside. I comment on the apricots, and the youngish merchant gives me three.  Now he knows I’ll have to buy.  I scan his offerings—bright green chiles, pistachios, onions, Mexican spice.  He cracks open pistachios and puts them in our hands, then sprinkles on top a pinch from a spice bag—crushed red peppers—the orange surrounding the pistachio’s green.  "Like this," he says, throwing his head back, jello-shot style.  Kate hesitates, but I follow suit, the nuts tasting dusty and hot in my mouth.  "How much?" I ask, "for a bag of the spices?"  "Five dollars," he answers, a seasoned pro, a kind of cattle egret on the church’s back, his future as solid as the fact of woe.  I hand him a five, and it’s our turn to barter.  "Do you remember a woman named Linda?" (Myshkin a stage name).  "Leenda, Leenda, Leenda," he muses.  "She’s a singer in New Orleans.  We like her songs."  That triggers his memory.  "Leenda.  She rented from me.  She liked to sing."  And then Kate dares to ask his name.  "Lolo."  I tell him his name is the first word of "Chimayo," and Kate sings him the opening bars:  "Lolo’s painting up that caddy again/He’s covering purple pinstripes with a deep blood red/And then Joann walks out the house in her long bronze legs/Laughs as she leans over the cadillac’s hood."  "You’re a singer too?" he states more than asks. And suddenly I see it, the way New Orleans circumscribes her being, so that out of context it marks her still, its air and rhythms, its languid pace, the music playing in its shabby rooms.  I see her at ten on a yard-sale couch in the Neutral Ground, while Myshkin sings some long, rambling narrative buttressed by her husband’s banjo chords.  It’s midnight and the room has emptied out so that only we witness the magic that happens:  the driving banjo, Myshkin’s voice, and Mike’s singing behind it the haunting words:  "You, the moon in my throat/And I, the sea in your ears." The counter worker has stopped clinking dishes to listen, and I feel we’ve intruded on a private scene.  Years later, we’ll recall that night through its meme remaining, the lingering line, Myshkin singing to Mike in the dusky room,  "you, the moon in my throat."  Now I’ve brought Kate to Chimayo on the wave of another song we both know.   But we hear it differently, I, fixed on the words that conjure up a landscape left behind; she, maybe not hearing words at all, but pitch and intonation, phrasing and timbre, the music that’s in her blood.  Landscape is silence, cityscape sound.

    In this flash, Lolo’s eyes have taken on a hungry look, the balance of trade about to shift, but he fields one more question, "Who’s Joann?"  "My wife," he answers, gesturing with his chin toward a Mexican woman who is cooking inside.   Then he scoops up a spice bag, drops it in a paper bag, scribbles his address on top, and hands it to me.  "A present for Leenda," he says.   "Tell her to send me a tape of that song."  I promise to put the bag in her tip jar and deliver his message, to Myshkin from Lolo, the consummate master of quid pro quo.  Then we’re off, smiling, saying goodbye, amazed at the outcome of our journey.  "I can’t believe we met Lolo," I tell Kate.  "Myshkin," she replies, "is going to think we have no life."

    But life is what we’re having here, turning back onto the high road and climbing toward Taos, life with its interplay of landscape and mindscape, its unflagging bass line of story and song.  We’ve left Chimayo, but we’re carrying it with us, ziplocked and stashed away, a pungent companion on the road ahead.  We pull into Taos at 5 o’clock, too late for the Pueblo, but we see the elbow of the church O’Keeffe painted, St. Francis of Assisi, and feel our knees wobble standing over the Taos Gorge.  The next day we head west through Gallup, through what feels like wasteland, until just off route 40 the desert opens in a bloom of colors that have no names.  We stop at every turn-out, winding through the Painted Desert, at each new angle just stand and look.  I remember those three-tiered crayola boxes I lusted after as a child and O’Keeffe’s pastel set on display in Santa Fe, wonder whether even she could come close to capturing this.

    When we pull into Flagstaff, it’s the end of the road, this high town, part Indian, part lumberjack, part Harley driver and New Age flake.  Off the road to the canyon, seven miles beyond town, we turn left onto Bader and left onto Suzette Lane, until the mailbox and cinder driveway appear, with the house standing lonely a quarter mile in.  It’s here that the pain begins, that life and the stories behind it merge, as if a bass player had turned up his amp, touching off a vibration inside my chest.  I am Woolf’s Lily Briscoe come back to the house after ten years and Mrs. Ramsay’s death.  Here all remains as they left it, my mother seven, my father one year dead:  clothes in closets, dishes in cupboards, salt shakers on tables, and my children’s art work under magnets on the icebox door.  Upstairs stands the bedroom set they used throughout their married life, with that picture of my teenaged self, hair fanned out as the camera catches me mid-whirl.  It’s as if my mother might any moment come through the door, or my father emerge from burning garbage in the ditch.  From the deck I gaze out at our view of Mt. Humphrey, that big wedge of stillness my parents caught by tilting the house toward its southern face.  At night we pull  mattresses out on the roof, sleeping under the stars, the night twice broken by coyote calls.  We ride the ski lift to the top of the mountain and through binoculars find our house, then the glow of the Grand Canyon seventy miles away.  And through it all I hear Myshkin’s voice, mid-way through "Chimayo":  "Oh the West has got a way of working into your blood/It’ll bake something solid out of grass and mud," as it’s made me, past fifty, adobe-like, desiccated, hard and spare.  Landscape is destiny, our minds and bodies cast in childhood, molded out of local clay.

    It’s hard to leave here, 2000 miles ahead, and all that beauty at our backs.  But Kate is growing restless.  There’s too little music here, and the last performer, in Santa Fe, wore a phony eye-patch and mumbled his words.  She needs to go home.  We get up early, our goal Amarillo, some ten hours away.  I steel myself for a grueling drive, but to my surprise the stretch of I-40 beyond Albuquerque cuts through red-rock formations under glittering sky, a kaleidoscopic curtain call to this long trip.  Kate is reading in the front seat.  It’s all I can do to hold my tongue, to not tell her, "Close the book"; "Look up"; "Drink it all in."  Instead, I watch the landscape move past my windows, outside and inside, memory and moment now converged in this frozen template, the quintessential West:  desert pavement, cactus needles, sandstone and tumbleweed and slick mirages on the road ahead.  For a moment I feel certain Myshkin had in mind this very stretch, this first leg East from Chimayo, back to New Orleans, when she wrote of the West:  "It’s a big blazing icon of the last free space./Sometimes it lives up to its myth that way."  If I just look hard enough, I can hold it all inviolate, in some airless recess within my mind, hold it all through the seasons, hurricane and holiday, Mardi Gras and Easter.  When it starts to fade, I can climb to the art museum’s second floor and stand before the tiny landscape O’Keeffe titled "My Backyard." Or punch in the CD and sing along to "Chimayo."

    Story and song.  As I drive on I think of the spice bag behind me, the gift I’ve conveyed now from high road through high town and on into Texas, like Garcia-Marquez’s Senator Sanchez—six months, eleven days before his own death—carrying  through the desert a single rose, keeping it alive, as if in the process he could thwart his own fate.  We are magical thinkers, who transfer our longings onto symbols of self, who touch wood and sacred ground, who cast our wishes into fountains and wells—or fragile bowls on altar tops.  I see now my own trip has been like theirs, those pilgrims bound for Chimayo, has had at its faithless core the grammar of faith:  pilgrimage, offering, and sacred place, and its own high priestesses of lyric and paint.  Like theirs it has been propelled by death, that end of all roads, whose imminence my mother faced with words as hard as granite—"You take what you get dealt"—mind and landscape synchronized.

    Kate is looking up now, the scene spread out before her.  I will it to work its way into her blood, to pulsate over miles and years and pull her back, when she least expects  it, to that road or mountain or rooftop bed, where we slept amid coyote cries, the moon in our throats.  I think of what we carry—gifts and talismans, words and melodies, stories and wide tableaus—how we venture out, how they bring us back.  I think of Myshkin’s voice, and the offering I’ll make, for gifts received, when the tip basket makes it way to me; how I’ll place, atop the dollar bills, Lolo’s spice bag--orange on green--and see again red peppers and pistachios in my palm.  When I send the basket back to her, she’ll slide down that scent into a world of private memories, of slow talk and riversides, of mud and paint, of earth and sky and lives intersecting in a place called Chimayo.