Photography As Memory 2

And then, when it got too cold to live in the trailer on the mesa overlooking Taos, I packed everything into the truck and trailer, got it down the hill, with a lot of help, and put it into a storage unit in Taos. Then I flew back to the Midwest for a month's visit over the Xmas holidays.

I came back to Taos, loaded everything up, and started out on the journey to California. I was going to visit Los Angeles first, then drive on up to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I ahd been offered another place to live for awhile.

I got several miles down the Rio Grande river valley, where the gorge becomes an inhabited cabin, almost to Dixon, when the trailer broke loose from the truck, broke it's safety chains, rammed the back of the truck, then flew over the cliff into the bosque by the side of the road, coming to rest against a boulder halfway down the cliff.



Managed to get a tow truck out, after dark, to pull the damaged trailer up the cliff, and onto the land of a fire ranger who helped me out that night, and the next few days, about a hundred yards further down the highway. In the light of day, next morning, I saw that the trailer was basically crushed, the eggshell of its fiberglass shell cracked or shattered in several places, the flooring buckled, the braces and wheels bent and unfixable. The weight of the air conditioner unit in the roof had caused the ceiling to partly cave in, from when the trailer hit the boulder and bounced.



So I packed up what I could, shipped off several boxes from Santa Fe to SF, packed up more, then drove on the Los Angeles. That drive was made severely more difficult by the truck being overloaded, and the trauma of the past few days. I found myself terrified of anything more happening, as I drove through Albuquerque, and west towards Flagstaff. I spent the night in a small desert motel in Grants, NM, having driven only that far, and chanting to myself, continuously, all day long, I forgive and bless every inch of this road.



And that was the end of that chapter of life.

On the way to California, however, I did manage to stop for a day at the Grand Canyon, my first ever visit there. I've been there a couple of times since, and will go back again and again, whenever I can be in that part of the desert Southwest. It truly is the one natural wonder of the world that lives up to all the hype.