building. It had probably been two centuries since there was any loose dirt in the city, aside from the parks, whose footpaths were paved, too. The exact opposite of where she now found herself, she thought. Funny, but she didn’t miss the city one bit. She had always assumed it was woven into her identity, inseparable from who she was. But here in the desert, it seemed like a mirage that she had suddenly stepped out of. She parked not far from the base of the biggest volcano of them all, facing east toward the Sandia Mountains that rose up like a natural barrier between her and her past, and collected her backpack from the floor of the car. It contained a bound sketchbook, a bottle of black India ink, a Rapidograph pen, and two bottles of spring water. As she climbed out of the car, Magpie scrambled into the front seat and jumped out the driver’s door a second after Margaret. There was a large sign listing all the rules but they ignored it, particularly the leash law which seemed absurd, given all the empty space.
They had never climbed a dormant volcano before—naturally—and Margaret found it difficult to keep her footing. Broken bits of lava, centuries old, shifted, her feet slipped, and before too long she was ascending the steeper parts with one hand and sometimes two on the ground before her for balance. Meanwhile, Magpie, a city dog after all, stuck her nose under every rock, which evoked images of sand-colored scorpions and angry tarantulas on tall hairy legs, ready to strike, and Margaret had to turn her face away so as not to be neurotically overprotective. Somehow, huffing and puffing, they made their way to the top, which actually wasn’t very far, though once they got there it seemed that the West Mesa, which stretched in all directions before it met the walls of the city to the north and east, was part of another, lesser world. She found a rock with a good backrest, facing east, and settled down to do some serious looking. One thing Margaret knew about herself was that her eyes went everywhere. Where other people saw a simple edge, she saw a series of shadows laid out, one more intense than the other, and a drop-off that typically pitted two radically different colors against each other. Where other people saw a tree, bare in winter, and dismissed it as such, she saw a riot of color—purples, greys, blacks, dark blues—shimmering against a sky that looked as if it had been carved in bas-relief out of library paste; where others saw the Hudson River and perhaps categorized it as a grey stripe separating Manhattan from New Jersey, she saw a shifting orgy of iridescence which could only be captured one nanosecond at a time and never fully. Her natural impulse was to hold her breath in an effort to stop everything so she could look longer and see more. “Take a breath, me darlin’,” Donny had insisted over and over again when she was a small child. “You’ll pass out of the picture if you don’t.” But Margaret held out. She tried to make time stop. But it never did. By the time she was a teenager, she gave up trying.
She started with a slow 180-degree scan, north to south and back again, just to allow the landscape to imprint itself in broad strokes of color first: the light beige sands of the mesa; the darker tan of the city of Albuquerque, low to the ground and so infused with the palette of the desert that it almost disappeared; the greenbelt along the river; the rising mountains, slate-colored in this moment; the sky, a psychedelic shade of sea-blue. Above, a few hawks rode air currents across her visual field, and a few black crows squawked from the top of weathered fence posts; while a cow, here and there, munched anemic desert grasses.
Where was she? She closed her eyes and watched the complementary colors of all she’d seen appear on the screens inside her eyelids. It was a phenomenon that could keep her occupied for hours: open her eyes, see the green stripe of the river; close them, it
They had never climbed a dormant volcano before—naturally—and Margaret found it difficult to keep her footing. Broken bits of lava, centuries old, shifted, her feet slipped, and before too long she was ascending the steeper parts with one hand and sometimes two on the ground before her for balance. Meanwhile, Magpie, a city dog after all, stuck her nose under every rock, which evoked images of sand-colored scorpions and angry tarantulas on tall hairy legs, ready to strike, and Margaret had to turn her face away so as not to be neurotically overprotective. Somehow, huffing and puffing, they made their way to the top, which actually wasn’t very far, though once they got there it seemed that the West Mesa, which stretched in all directions before it met the walls of the city to the north and east, was part of another, lesser world. She found a rock with a good backrest, facing east, and settled down to do some serious looking. One thing Margaret knew about herself was that her eyes went everywhere. Where other people saw a simple edge, she saw a series of shadows laid out, one more intense than the other, and a drop-off that typically pitted two radically different colors against each other. Where other people saw a tree, bare in winter, and dismissed it as such, she saw a riot of color—purples, greys, blacks, dark blues—shimmering against a sky that looked as if it had been carved in bas-relief out of library paste; where others saw the Hudson River and perhaps categorized it as a grey stripe separating Manhattan from New Jersey, she saw a shifting orgy of iridescence which could only be captured one nanosecond at a time and never fully. Her natural impulse was to hold her breath in an effort to stop everything so she could look longer and see more. “Take a breath, me darlin’,” Donny had insisted over and over again when she was a small child. “You’ll pass out of the picture if you don’t.” But Margaret held out. She tried to make time stop. But it never did. By the time she was a teenager, she gave up trying.
She started with a slow 180-degree scan, north to south and back again, just to allow the landscape to imprint itself in broad strokes of color first: the light beige sands of the mesa; the darker tan of the city of Albuquerque, low to the ground and so infused with the palette of the desert that it almost disappeared; the greenbelt along the river; the rising mountains, slate-colored in this moment; the sky, a psychedelic shade of sea-blue. Above, a few hawks rode air currents across her visual field, and a few black crows squawked from the top of weathered fence posts; while a cow, here and there, munched anemic desert grasses.
Where was she? She closed her eyes and watched the complementary colors of all she’d seen appear on the screens inside her eyelids. It was a phenomenon that could keep her occupied for hours: open her eyes, see the green stripe of the river; close them, it
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