Round and round the Roundhouse we go
A trip to Santa Fe and a circuit around the sun
…the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round.
-Black Elk
For opening day of the New Mexico Legislature in Santa Fe – a part-time, all volunteer lawmaking body that will meet for 60 days this year and no more unless there is a special or emergency session – I woke up before sunrise on an icy mountainside in Tijeras.
Friends harbored me at their quiet home near Sherwood Forest and San Miguel Acres for two days on a mission that would include reporting on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s State of the State address for the Las Cruces Bulletin and getting some photographs for next year’s legislative guide.
Parking around the Roundhouse was restricted or full, leaving me to park at a meter on Montezuma Avenue and walk a few blocks, with a camera and my famous “men casual multifunctional canvas messenger handbag outdoor shoulder sling bag travel bag” (i.e. purse) hanging from my body.
The press galleries sit above the House and Senate chambers, where print and television reporters peer down at lawmakers as they conduct business. This is why you will often see overhead photos of legislators in local news stories, unless the newsroom has a photographer on the floor. Seating is limited in the press gallery and when the governor addresses the joint session for her annual address, it gets crowded with people and TV gear and producers walking around barking instructions to their reporters. The high perch and limited space explain why all but one of my photos of the governor, who is under five feet tall, captured the top of her head bobbing in a sea of neckties.
My other photo assignment did not go so well, either.
The state Capitol is based in a round building inspired by the Zia sun symbol that appears on the state flag and innumerable business logos throughout the state. On the legislature’s opening day it was lively and packed with people navigating the curving hallways, lining up for seats in the public gallery, browsing display tables in the rotunda, congregating near entranceways and stairwells, shmoozing here and there. The Roundhouse is also home to an impressive public art collection that draws visitors.
Yet the place empties out with impressive speed. By the time I emerged from the Republicans’ press conference reacting to the governor’s speech, it was as empty as a mountain temple. I wanted people in my photos, but the following day, by the time I finished editing and proofing the paper in the morning by the heat of my hosts’ pellet stove, the chambers had both adjourned and the Roundhouse was quiet again.
The drive to Santa Fe from Tijeras is a lovely jaunt up a state highway through mountain ranges and Madrid, a tiny former coal town that now sports cafés and art galleries along a slender, winding roadway.
Blocks away from the Roundhouse, my camera packed up and my notebook put away, I visited the Brakeroom, a tiny pub sitting in an old brick flophouse for railroad brakemen. This is a place I stumbled on the first time I covered the Roundhouse a few years ago, when the Sun-News put me up at the Santa Fe Motel and Inn and for days I simply walked everywhere. Space is at a premium but there are comfy chairs and couches, good tables for laptops in back, and a no-nonsense atmosphere at the bar yet lively conversations throughout the house. Two painter friends conversed loudly about their work. A group of people at a table spoke about agricultural interests they had before the legislature. A scientist from the Environment Department and his gregarious dog chatted with me, as did a young woman who approached looking for an outlet to charge up her phone and was intrigued by me writing a letter by hand.
Dragging my feet about leaving, I stopped the next day in Albuquerque to explore some of the new-to-me pubs, cocktail bars and restaurants inhabiting old industrial spaces downtown with my friend and host.
But then it was time to head south again, by the other side of the mountains and criss-crossing the Rio Grande on a path to Las Cruces.
Turning through space and time
A week before returning to journalism as I started with it, as a full-time reporter with a wide-open coverage area (Go find stuff to write about!) , I also completed another circuit around the sun, spinning further away from my original vocation as a stage actor yet in a curve that feels orderly enough, as if perhaps I’ve been on a trajectory despite feeling unconvinced such a thing exists. We humans have a talent for back-filling chasms with meaning.
One line of dialogue from a rather silly movie, the 1989 chambara melodrama Zatoichi (the one directed by star Shintaro Katsu and featuring Ken Ogata as a rōnin with a drinking problem), has stuck with me as I go through one unexpected doorway after another: “The blowing leaf does not hate the wind.”
I am hopeful a new editor for the Bulletin will be named this week, while I try to tidy things up and leave matters in some intelligible order for them. And the week after that, I start writing for the Albuquerque Journal, and will show up for work much as I showed up on my first day at the Deming Headlight in 2017, wondering what on earth I’ve gotten myself into now.
Story tips across southern New Mexico are welcome…