Wine lies in the relief lines of every good road trip.
Someone once said they disliked humanity on the whole but
individuals were often delightful. Meeting those individuals is a benefit of
travelling. Though bad travel stories abound, serendipity surprises.
We walked toward roadside relief beyond the shiny sliding
doors of the TA travel center. A shiny black SUV pulled up beside me, rolling
down the passenger window. Reaching across the vehicle, he said, “My name is
Achmed. May I ask you for a favor?” As I shook his hand he recounted an
incredibly intricate story of how his wallet had been stolen at Walmart, and he
was driving through Santa Fe to California and did not have enough money for
gasoline. In the back seat, his pregnant wife nodded through each mounting
interval. By god’s grace, I really wanted to help him if he needed it. Yet
every intuitive alarm in my body was ringing “No!”. I glanced at my wife. And I
offered him five dollars. He left in a huff. Sometimes you open with a move to
discern whether to lean in or out.
You’ll meet quirky people. “And how do you spell that?”
asked the Barista. The tall Teutonic looking gentleman replied that it was
“Erich with an H,” and launched into a lengthy story of how his mother didn’t
want him confused with other Erics. We ordered after them and went to sit out
on the patio. The couple invited us to sit with them, “No need to sit in the sun!”
He was an engineer of sorts (shocking, right?) and his wife a nurse. Because we
were in Santa Fe, conversation turned to art. Erich said a friend of his is the
most left-brained engineer he knows, going on to tell us about how his friend designs
houses and sees possibilities in texture and color. They live in Poway, forty-one
miles south of Temecula Valley, which bills itself as “a wine-plus spirited
destination inspired by the vine.” We wrapped up our conversation in agreement;
Temecula Valley isn’t Napa and shouldn’t charge Napa prices.
“I’ll sit with these folks,” Mary the Administrator shouted
to her bureaucrat friends. Tall, sharply dressed and sharply featured, she
pulled up a chair. Though Mary is HR administrator for a school district, she is
also, seemingly, the unofficial PR spokesperson for New Mexico. She leans in. Begins
with an affirmation of what we’ve already encountered, New Mexicans are a warm
and welcoming people. The conversation bounced around like small talk does;
places to visit, places that no longer are. How the fires ravaged Ruidoso, draught
(light snow) in Taos and why the college makes Los Cruces hop. The talk flowed,
like the Rio Grande, shallow, in small ebbs and flows, to the Gorge an hour
north, home to one of New Mexico’s’ three wine regions.
