Harry is always bemused by the border crossing. The moment the car jolts across the cattle guard and the WELCOME TO THE LAND OF ENCHANTMENT sign appears by the roadside everything seems suddenly altered: the highway’s shoulder vanishes and the striping invariably fades; potholes pop open like craters and ancient pickups sit stalled at blind curves; in winter, if the road has been scraped down to a thin and thawing sheet of snow on the Colorado side of the cattle guard, you can count on six inches of slush in New Mexico.

As far as Harry is concerned, New Mexico remains the best of the Four Corners states. Much of Colorado once was a knotty-pine kind of place—“cowboy Bavarian” is the way he likes to describe it—but by now the scourge known as “resortism” has taken its dreary toll and holiday homes—so often strangely referred to as “ranches”—have brought their own sort of blight. Utah encompasses perhaps the single most astonishing chunk of geography on the planet, and its towns are tidy, but they are bland as a butter sandwich—a little like those in Iowa but absent all the excitement. Arizona has become little more than a place where people put themselves out to pasture—plump women in jogging suits, baldheaded men in bolo ties. But New Mexico. New Mexico is the Third World, and Harry relishes its rat-ass complacency. As a matter of fact, except for the capriciousness of the lines of latitude, Cortez rightfully would be part of the state to the south. It looks like a New Mexican town, feels like one, and the border is only forty miles away by the highway that cuts straight to Shiprock. As a native Coloradan, one possessed of its peculiar kind of chauvinism, Harry is rather proud that his home state also contains a strain of that wonderfully weird and disheveled town-building you only find in the true Southwest.

But the problem with New Mexico these days is that Santa Fe chic is threatening to devour the place, to turn it into an awful kind of caricature of itself. Crossing the border at Chromo, and driving south through Chama and Tierra Amarilla, Harry remarks to me that at least the lovely, impoverished mountain country still seems spared the onslaught of rapt attention. Abiquiu does show signs of becoming the principal stop on the Georgia O’Keeffe Memorial Tour, but the little city of Española remains wonderfully out of sync with the close of the twentieth century—pawn brokers and burger stands, body shops and roadside chile vendors, adobe and decades-old neon all in casual and comfortable disarray. It isn’t until the hillsides grow thick with trophy homes and the highway begins to get crowded that Harry begins to bemoan the changes.

“Remember when we really used to love this place?” He sounds surprisingly nostalgic.

“The years I lived in Albuquerque, I thought having a practice here would be perfect. ”

“I’d never even been here till you brought me that first time. After the drive down from Denver, seeing this funky, quiet, brown little town that smelled like piñon smoke, I thought, if this woman can take me to these kinds of places . . .”

“You were wonderfully behaved, my dear. You did everything just right. Even meeting my mom that trip, you couldn ’t have been sweeter.”

“I thought her boyfriend was a twit.”

“Yes, but you’re good with twits.” I smile, reaching over to touch the denim stretched across his thigh. “No telling what this dentist of hers will be like.”

“He’ll be very . . . intense. And he’ll want to talk shop with you, to prove that just because he’s a DDS doesn’t mean he’s a dipshit.”

“Stop. I don’t want to think about it. I just want to be in a good mood and make this nice and simple. Nothing’s going to phase me.”

“You’re right. I’ll keep quiet about how all the Dallas matrons in pleated skirts and squash-blossom necklaces have utterly fucking ruined this place!” His quick tantrum over, Harry heaves a deep breath.

“Don’t worry. Cortez will never be trendy.”
“ I wish you could promise me that. I love it that you can drink good coffee there nowadays, but it’s also a very bad sign.”

“Your problem is that these backwaters you love so dearly are also poor as hell and they are dead-ends for most of the people who live in them, Cortez included.”

“If you can convince me that skyrocketing land prices and jobs as maids and kitchen help are a good solution, I’ll promise to pray for prosperity.”

“I know.”

“Maybe we should move to . . . San Francisco,” Harry says, full of sudden enthusiasm, as if we maybe we should move there tomorrow. “Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to worry about everything surrounding you getting ruined by assholes?”

“People in cities have the same worries. They’re different issues, but . . .”

“How do people have children in the face of all the world going to total hell?”

“Promise me, Henry, that we’re not going to get into children this trip.” I try to shape a steely smile, one meant to prove that I will broach no compromise. “That subject remains a distinct disaster with her.”

“Maybe I’d better just drop you off.” He sounds hopeful that I’ll take him up on the suggestion.

“Maybe you should just show them your pretty teeth for two days,” I offer instead.

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Excerpted from The Sorrow of Archaeology by Russell Martin, Copyright© 2005 by Russell Martin. Excerpted by permission of the University of New Mexico Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.