Growing Up, The Sequel
More, April 2007

The pretty, young rent-a-car clerk at the Albuquerque airport shuffles through my paperwork and frowns. "You’re going to Taos. That’s mountain country," she says. "You really should have an SUV."

She looks up, scrutinizes me. Her smooth face crinkles into a perky grin. "If you happen to be an AARP member," she says. "I can upgrade you for free."

I attempt a smile. "I’ll be fine with the mid-size. I’ve been driving those roads–" am I really going to say this? –"since before you were born."

The first time I arrived here was in the summer of ‘68, big year for the world, big year for me. I was a 17-year-old runaway, the usual story: I didn’t dig my parents, they didn’t dig me. Since I’d left home a year earlier, I’d been sharing a fourth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up with my boyfriend, Paul. Then our open relationship got a little too open and Paul split for Taos, where he settled in to wait for my love to become a bit less free.

Paul wooed me with love letters sprinkled with bits of Taos: spicy shreds of sagebrush, tiny tinfoil packets of chile colorado, crumbled morsels of milk chocolate earth. So even before I’d inhaled my first lungful of piñon smoke, Taos started working its magic on me. I wanted to squeeze that dirt between my toes. I wanted everything I ate to taste like that chile. I wanted my sweat to smell like sage. I packed my life into a duffel bag, bought a student-fare standby ticket, and showed up at the Albuquerque airport, I Ching in hand.

Paul led me to the parking lot, threw my bag into the back of a putrid-green ’57 Chevy panel truck. "I bought it off a guy an hour ago," he said, wrestling the keys out of the pocket of his skin-tight 501’s. "Taos is three hours north," he said. "The road’s pretty twisty. You wanna drive, or should I?"

I stared at him, horrified. Before we’d dropped out of the Bronx High School of Science together, Paul had managed to flunk Driver’s Ed. My driving experience was limited to a few nerve-wracking lessons in my parents’ Dodge Dart on cacophonous Manhattan streets. Whose shaking hands should we put our lives into, Paul’s or mine? We knelt on the searing asphalt of the airport parking lot and consulted the I Ching. Hexagram Seven: "With firmness and correctness, and a leader of age and experience, there will be good fortune and no error." I was three weeks older than Paul. He handed the keys to me.

The Road to Taos

Thirty-eight years later the highway still hugs the shapely hips of the Rio Grand. Dusty sagebrush still stretches to the horizon; the sky still broadcasts 10 different weather reports at once. But humans have altered the landscape even more than time has changed me. Just as gravity has had its way with my body, the tiny towns on the Turquoise Trail have been stretched so far on both ends that they now meet where only achingly empty desert used to be.

My heart quickens as I drive into Taos, as if anticipating a rendezvous with a long-abandoned, romanticized lover: exactly what this town is to me. Through all my reinventions and relocations Taos has remained my own true north, the only place that’s felt like home, the only place I’d rather be. I’ve thought of myself as being on my way back to Taos since the day in the early seventies when I said goodbye to the goats, the mesa, my friends and Paul, hitchhiked to the Albuquerque airport and flew away.

Why won’t that fantasy fade, I’ve asked myself again and again. Is it really Taos that haunts me, Taos I yearn for, Taos that won’t let me go? Or is Taos just a word for what I’ve never gotten over, what I wish I could have again: the glory days of the sixties; peace, love, and endless idealism, my smooth-skinned, slim-bodied, seemingly everlasting youth?

It’s the eve of my fifty-fifth birthday. It’s time to find out.

Just south of the Plaza is–was–the Greyhound bus station, where Paul left me to take his physical in Albuquerque when his draft number came up, and where I left him briefly for a New York fling. Across the street is the old General Store, where all the hippie chicks bought 50-pound sacks of wheat berries to grind by hand at home. The bus station is a Thai restaurant now, and the General Store is a Wendy’s. The Chevron station where we paid 28 cents a gallon is selling gas for exactly ten times that price.

Circling the plaza, I fall behind a slow-moving convoy of rental SUVs. Where are the brown-skinned women buying masa and pinto beans, the sun-creased cowboys buying Bugle tobacco, the hippies buying moccasins, the Pueblo Indians wrapped in striped cotton blankets? Gone to slim blondes toting rolled-up yoga mats, every one.

There’s nothing for me here, but no matter; I push north. I’ve timed my visit to coincide with another birthday. The New Buffalo commune, where Paul and I brought our goats to be mated, is celebrating its fortieth anniversary with a tribal reunion–on the summer solstice, of course. What better place to face my relentless nostalgia?

The Commune

In 1968, New Buffalo was the landing pad for the refugees who straggled in from both coasts sun-stunned, culture-shocked and stoned. Built of mud, straw and hallucinations by barefoot, trust-funded, wild-eyed kids, New Buffalo was where we went to pass the pipe, beat the drums, close the wagons around the circle. Late in the eighties, when the last hippies staggered back to medical school, to their parents, to Albuquerque and Minneapolis and L.A., New Buffalo became a sixties-themed B&B.

"The rooms aren’t habitable anymore," the new owner told me when I called last [month TK] from California. He told me he was "honoring the original vision," rebuilding the big round ritual room, replacing the rotting beams, turning New Buffalo into a center for agriculture and ecology "to help our community survive the devastation of the world. But we’ll have plenty of teepees set up for the reunion," he said. "Just come."

I don’t need a map to find New Buffalo. Turn left off the highway at Herb’s Lounge (still there!), cross the thunk-thunking wooden bridge, yield to a herd of lollygagging sheep. There’s a hand-made sign on the New Buffalo gate. "Welcome Home," it says, with a peace sign drawn inside one "o," a buffalo head in the other. I get out of the car, take some pictures. The lens is blurry. Oh: I’ve started to cry.

Cars are parked all over, a bumper crop indeed. The scent of sage, crushed beneath tires, perfumes the air. Dozens of people stream toward the courtyard: gray-haired 60-somethings in crocheted berets and flowing Indian print skirts, their 30-something kids in Dockers with Nikon cameras around their necks, their grandkids wearing only their innocence.

We are called to the circle. A hundred of us join hands, encompassed by the crumbling mud structures, the dream we built when we were young. Blessings are made, thanks are offered "for the vision we had, the land we loved so much, the life we had here, the living we made here, the children who were born here." We’re asked to call out the names of loved ones who aren’t with us anymore. I learn in this way that several of my old friends have died.

We line up at the potluck groaning board. Over steaming pots of beans and platters of grilled zucchini, we peer into each other’s faces, looking for the people we once were. "You’re Suzy Creamcheese!" "You’re Magpie!" "You’re Pilar!" Memories explode like little firecrackers. "My son was born in this room." "Remember how we used to shovel snow off the roof so the ceiling wouldn’t fall in?" "I never thought I’d live past 40, and look at us–we’re alive!" "The sixties aren’t dead till we are." "Maybe not even then." "This was the most important time of my life."

So I’m not the only one who’s hanging onto Taos, not the only one who gathered up the bounty of that time, this place, and is still carrying it around.

The Village

I drive north to the village where Paul and I built one house and our friends built another, on 40 acres "loaned" to us by a kindly old couple named Craig and Jenny. Craig died years ago, smoking unfiltered Camels to the stub. Jenny, incredibly, is 93. As the crunch of gravel announces my arrival, I realize that when I met that "old couple," they were just about the age I am now.

The screen door slams behind me. Jenny’s hug is as fierce as it ever was. "This is Meredith," she tells her great-grandson. "She and Paul built a house and wrote books here when they were 15."

"Seventeen," I correct her. And then I think: I built a house and wrote books when I was 17?

We visit awhile. Then Jenny ducks her head at the big blue mountain that fills her kitchen window. "Go on up and see your place," she says.

"My place?" I repeat. The A-frame Paul and I built burned down in the eighties–renters, Jenny tells me, city people who left the potbelly burning and drove into town. A few years ago, Jenny’s son built a new house on the same spot.

"Better get up there," Jenny urges me, "before it gets too dark to see."

At the top of the mountain I park the car, get out, and take in the view. My heart clutches, my knees go weak. There’s my mesa, 300 miles of shifting purple shadows. There are my mountains, still keeping watch. And down there–there’s my valley, where I grew up at 17. Where I built an A-frame house with my New York boyfriend from a how-to book. Raised goats and milked them. Grew food in summer, ate it from Mason jars in winter. Chopped wood and burned it, huddled with my feet propped up on the potbelly when the blizzards blew in from Colorado, when Paul and I broke up and he moved to Santa Fe, when the thermometer on the outhouse got stuck at 20 below.

I walk down to where our house once stood–the road seems too steep, too rutted to drive. But wait. When I lived here alone at 19, that road was my route to life’s necessities: mail, wheat berries, sex, pot. I drove it every day in mud, in ice, in snow. Was I being reckless then, or am I being ridiculously cautious now?

When I got to Taos I didn’t know how to do anything, and I did it all, anyway. Learned to drive by driving. Learned to saddle a horse, shoot a deer, cook for 20, be in a couple, fill a perfectly empty day. Everything I do now is planned, thought-through, carefully considered. Everything I can’t do–or think I can’t–is contracted out. Is this what Dylan meant when he sang, I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now?

But wait: because of Taos, there is a moment, just before I call in the experts–click onto Craigslist, check the references, hire the carpenter, the editor, the shrink–when I pause and think: I bet I could fix it myself. Because of Taos I grow my own lettuce, own a no-electricity cabin in the woods, insist on doing work I love, have two kids who insist on the same thing, and still cook for 20, even when the table is set for two. More than anything, Taos is what turned me into a person I’m glad, most days, to be.

The goat pen and the outhouse, I see, have melted back into the ground. But there’s the house that Jenny’s son built, complete with Dish TV. And there’s what the fire and the years have left of the A-frame: crumbled concrete foundation, rusted water pipes, twisted strands of barbed wire. I see myself half-naked in my 501s with my teenaged breasts bobbling, digging holes to sink that foundation, learning first-hand how the Rocky Mountains got their name. I see Paul, three months later, laying the level on the finished floor, showing me the bubble floating dead- center in its little yellow pool, smiling his crooked grin at me. I see us moving out of our tarpaper shack and into our insulated house that day. I see us standing together at the window that night, watching white falling silently in blackness as it begins to snow.

I step inside the foundation’s perimeter, recalling the nights I tossed and turned in that shack, wondering if we’d finish our house before the high desert winter threw its gauntlet down. What else did I worry about back then? Sexual dramas. Friendship dramas. Parent dramas. Wanting to have kids. How to survive until the next book deal came through. The house falling down.

Thanks to menopause, the wisdom of aging, and the love of a good woman, the sexual dramas have cooled. And I’m waiting for grandkids, not kids. Otherwise, my worries are pretty much the same.

The Boyfriend

Paul greets me outside the house he built in Santa Fe after he left me, unfiltered Camel dangling from his lip, the latest in a lifelong series of tail-wagging, half-wild dogs snuffling at his side.

I compliment his renovations: new patio, bigger bathroom, added-on studio. Paul started painting at 45, then stopped doing carpentry for a living when his paintings started selling at a gallery on Canyon Road. Only the kitchen remains as it was, appliances manufactured in Midwestern towns before we were born. "Remnant of my hippie phase," Paul says dismissively, flipping quesadillas on the griddle of his Wedgwood stove.

The four of us sit down to eat our quesadillas: Paul and Meredith now, Paul and Meredith then. I take a too-big bite and make choking sounds. Paul hands me a glass of water, smiling at me the way he used to do. My heart blossoms in my chest. For just an instant I don’t see Paul’s gray hair, well-worn skin, bespectacled eyes. I see the boy who snatched me out of my Upper East Side high-rise life and brought me to Taos. I see the boy who rescued me.

"You should have come to the New Buffalo reunion," I say, eager to make a Paul-and-Meredith-now out of Paul-and-Meredith-then. Paul’s eyes cloud over. I realize that I’ve just blown it again.

"Been there. Done that. Moved on," he drawls. "A bunch of old hippies, reminiscing about the past? Frankly, I’d rather watch a faucet drip." I see that my exuberance is wearying Paul. Same as always, we are as temperamentally different as any two people can be. I glance at the clock on Paul’s adobe wall. My flight leaves the Albuquerque airport in two hours. Same as always, I hug him too hard.

Albuquerque airport

"Did you have a good visit to Taos?" the rent-a-car clerk asks.

"I had an amazing visit to Taos," I say.

"I grew up there," she says dreamily. "It’s such a special place. I’ve missed it ever since I left."

"Me, too," I say.

She looks up, surprised. Then awareness breaks over her face.

"Oh," she says. "Were you there during the hippie time? I wasn’t born yet when all that stuff happened. What was it like?"

"It was more wonderful than you can imagine," I say. I ponder this for a moment. "It was the most important time in my life. In a lot of peoples’ lives."

I’m a child of the sixties. Even when I’m in my sixties, I always will be. But if there’s a moment in each life when the line is crossed between young and old, this is that moment for me. When I got to Taos in 1968, my job as a writer was to tell it like it is. Now my job is to tell it like it was, to make a record–while living it like it is.