Southward Seeking

Beth Clements Mosley

It’s hot here.

Here, at this moment, is Truth or Consequences, New Mexico at the end of September. If this is the beginning of autumn, I can only imagine what high summer must feel like. Only mad dogs and Englishmen, it was said in India, go out in the noonday sun; I assume the same to be true here.

My traveling companion and I are neither of these, but we have walked the few blocks that appear to be the center of town, searching for coffee, food, a treasure. Jenny has already found first editions of On the Road and The Color Purple in an overstuffed and labyrinthine bookstore on the main drag. Every other store front is an antique shop or art gallery, but none of them are open. All the restaurants seem to have sporadic, truncated hours; you can have something to eat if you can catch them. I’ve been imagining frybread and the kind of green chili that simply can’t be replicated outside the Southwest. Instead, when one of the restaurants does open, I discover avocado toast and tabouleh salad. Another offers pastries, lattes, quiche. Later, I meet an exquisite little coyote-wolf-dog who, her person tells me proudly, has appeared in a sci-fi film shot here.

This place is the kind of remote, somnolent town teenagers can’t wait to escape; a Western movie set; a raucously colorful artists’ commune. I wonder aloud whether Billy the Kid ever slept here. I imagine enduring life here in petticoats, no air conditioning, curing under this relentless blaze like a buffalo hide – dragged here, perhaps, by an inconveniently adventurous husband, an agent of Manifest Destiny unconcerned with what I thought about making the trip. “Oh, my God,” I croak to my friend through parched, peeling lips, “why did we colonize such uncomfortable places?”

Ravenous Westward Expansion, devouring mountains, rivers, plains, pushing, always pushing the people of the First Nations before us, plowing them under. The Geronimo Springs Museum and Las Palomas Plaza mark the spot where Captain Pfeiffer, commander of Fort McRae, along with his wife, two young women in their employ, and a military escort, encountered a band of Apache warriors as the Captain bathed, soothing wounds he had sustained in an earlier conflict with members of the same tribe. This group apparently abducted the Captain’s wife and one of the women, leaving him, if accounts (including his own) are to be believed, to leap naked upon his horse and give chase, faltering only when pierced through with arrows. An army patrol eventually caught up with them, at which point they killed the two women and evaded capture. Pfeiffer sought his revenge by becoming a celebrated ‘Indian fighter’, joining Kit Carson in his scorched-earth campaign to crush the Diné (Navajo) people.

Though the Athapascan people, in this particular region the Warm Springs Apache, had inhabited this land since the 1500s, the first permanent structure, a bathhouse for cowboys on the John Cross ranch, wouldn’t appear here for another three hundred years, in 1882. Once work on the Elephant Butte Dam began and white Americans decided they liked the hot springs, though, a town sprang up and the native people began to lose access to the bathing sites that were sacred to them, which were eventually monetized and reserved for tourists. Interestingly, before the town was incorporated in 1916, residents who had built homes and businesses here had technically been squatting on public land for the previous thirty years. Once they applied, they were awarded their allotment; remaining parcels were auctioned. On the other hand, the people who had made their home here for centuries before were relocated, first to Arizona in 1877, then Florida in 1886, then Alabama, then Oklahoma in 1894. By 1913, they were given a choice: they could remain in Oklahoma or return to New Mexico to join the Mescalero Apaches on their reservation.

I have another friend who lives here, one I roomed with briefly in Brooklyn a million years ago, when everyone was young and no one had ever died. She’s ventured out into the beating heat to join us for lunch. It feels strange to come so far from home and find a familiar face.

My friend is sad. She’s wickedly hilarious, and whenever we’re together we never stop laughing, but each time I leave her I worry that the darkness might overtake her as it has so many of the bright, complicated souls I’ve known. She’s bought a house here in this sun-battered, arid outpost, a stopping-point in a journey that’s taken her many places in her soul’s quest for a home. It seems like she may have found something here that she’s been seeking for a long time.

Oddly, that’s why I’m here, too. I’ve come five hundred miles across the desert to see if I can find the writer’s voice that I’ve worried might have been killed by chemo, cut out of me along with the grapefruit-sized tumor it took two surgeons to slice away from my spine and detach from my lung and aorta. I’ve never had more material just waiting to be used, but each time I open my laptop and try to imagine where to begin, it feels like whatever I lost during that first grueling year of surgery and poison and tests and procedures might have taken my talent with it. I’ve become old overnight; words elude me now, hiding themselves amongst the clutter of Chemo Brain.

I wonder sometimes what the point is in trying to retrieve it. I feel temporary, as if the entire world is rented and I have to return it soon. But then I think: all I’ve really lost is the illusion that it was ever any other way. Cancer is a perfect metaphor for existence, the tension between the need for forward momentum and mindfulness of an end that could arrive at any time.

I’m here. There is this moment. I can still become.

When I saw the event posting for the writer’s camp here, I almost scrolled right past it. I hadn’t traveled in years, save for the chemical-seared wasteland between my old life and this one.

My only time away from home had been the days in hospital after the surgery and the three weeks in the stem cell transplant ward. Some part of me – perhaps the same one that managed in the moment to recognize the deep strangeness of first discovering your cancer while watching an ancient episode of Big Valley on an emergency room television (Oh fuck I’m dying I’m going to die oh my God look at Barbara Stanwyck’s cheekbones) – suddenly realized that if I wanted to, I could just… do it. I could go. I could head south under the pink-streaked turquoise sky, looking for something I’ve lost that I might actually be able to get back.

Beth Clements Mosley has been fortunate enough to spend most of her life doing exactly as she pleases, all the while failing to generate income of any significance. Mostly this involves theatre, words, and dogs. Lots of dogs. She is currently working on a memoir. This is always the case.