Santa Fe

17  March 2024

For Roswell to stake its claim to fame on the 1947 UFO incident is tenuous at best. It might be the nearest town to the alleged crash site but it’s still 108 miles away. I know this, as I plugged the coordinates into my GPS and followed the route for 98 miles, seeing only a handful of cars before the directions pointed me 10 miles up a gravel road. Being so totally isolated on a very heavy motorcycle and riding twenty miles on a narrow, loose surface that may have gotten worse was asking for trouble. So I pressed on, unconvinced there would be anything to see when I got there but it’s somewhere about fifteen miles beyond the farm in the photograph below.

I’d been keeping a close eye on the weather forecast but to no avail. Ten miles further on, the temperature plummeted from eleven degrees to freezing and with it, flurries of snow that within a couple of miles had covered the road. Thankfully, a car must have been a minute or two ahead of me and had carved two black stripes from the white. I rode precisely within this six-inch band at 40 MPH, until the road was completely covered again. Dropping to 20 MPH and relying only on the gravity and the gargantuan weight of a fully-loaded K1600 to keep upright, eventually another car passed. Mercifully, I had two grooves to follow again until I reached a major road. This led across Interstate 40, part of the historic Route 66. At the intersection was Clines Corners, a service area straight out of the Norman Rockwell era, for some much-needed coffee and a silent prayer of thanks.

Later, an Uber drops me off in the historic district of Santa Fe and it’s a nice place to be. Kind of kooky in an early 1970s way, independent jewelry and clothing stores are selling some truly beautiful pieces. They nestle with the usual suspects of Rolex, Cartier, et al, flogging the same stuff to wealthy visitors they can buy in their home cities.  The Spanish and Adobe architecture complement each other, the subtle hues of each creating a cool, tasteful vista.

The driver had recommended Box Car as the best place to try the local beers. I’m presented with a list, complete with fulsome descriptions of the ten available on draught. Sat to my left is… Well, I won’t name him for reasons that will become apparent, suggests the local Lacumbre ‘Elevated’ IPA after I dither, confronted by so much choice and it’s excellent.

Bearded, with ponytail and wearing salopettes, he’s been skiing but tomorrow is back to work for a couple of days to complete a home renovation. From Wednesday, he's doing a bit of a road trip himself with his brother. This is his life: work hard for a while to fund travel and experience. Rinse and repeat.

Previously, he made and sold drugs. But not any drugs mind, but ‘craft’ cannabis, ethically-produced, bio-dynamic, organically-farmed, and from a specific terroir, much like fine wine. He exited the business because of legalisation. The effect of government meddling was a race-to-the-bottom on price, leaving artisans such as he, trying to sell a premium product to a market not mature enough to understand the difference between cost and value.

Unlike wine, where 750ml of red liquid with a 13% alcohol content can sell for 1000x the price of another bottle, with the same basic characteristics produced a few miles away, the demand curve for weed has yet to establish a similar profile.

The other reason for getting the hell out was the other participants (the gangs…) who realised there was no money to be made in flogging something that you could get a version of at WalMart, legitimately, for less. So they did what any self-respecting capitalists would do and looked for a new product to sell.

That product happened to be Fentanyl and, according to X, the reason I’m so uncomfortable staying in what I thought would be decent and simple motels. He thought the same when he started his stop-start life of work-then-play-then-work but experienced the same unease when checking in and a sense that eyes were on him. He now boards at Airbnb venues with owners on-site when he travels. He’s around people - usually nice people - so there’s safety in numbers if needed, and that’s not been tested so far.

This hollowing out of the middle market by Airbnb has meant the hearty, check-shirted tradesman, the families on road trips, and the salesman with neat haircuts that were once the core market for motels (and who I had assumed would be my fellow guests) have simply fucked-off elsewhere, leaving this twilight world to darkness and to me. And increasingly, the hopeless cases that have nowhere else to go.

Fentanyl, according to my source whose credentials are impeccable, given his career history, is so powerfully addictive, it drives people into poverty followed quickly by homelessness. Most cities, reluctantly, have schemes to help the temporarily homeless so the state picks up the tab by putting them in motels for a couple of nights. OK, that explains why the cars are each worth less than the price of a room for the night. And why $30K of prestige German motorcycle always looks a tad incongruous.

This said, he doesn’t believe I’m in personal danger in these places. The effect of this drug renders people virtually useless and so are fixated on their next fix and nothing else. The comings and goings in the dead of night, I‘ve heard, is the noise of a 24x7 supply chain whirring away and the dealers are making too much money peddling the stuff to draw attention to themselves by robbing tourists. His advice is to take everything off the bike every night as I am susceptible to petty crime by someone looking to fund their next fix.

I can’t recall a more fascinating conversation with a complete stranger, so we swap numbers and wish each other well.

After some fabulous tacos at El Callejone Taqueria , I start looking at replacing the motel bookings for Airbnb’s or proper hotels when on the outskirts of cities as this is where the problem is at its worst. It’s at the point that the enjoyment of my odyssey is threatened by the constant source of unease from 15:00 one day to 09:00 the next. Decisive action is needed.