…the old woman shoved her around the shed with the gun barrel. When she reached the door Minoa balked, gun or no gun.
“Long as you’re here you might as well take the tour.” She reached out one hand in a worn work glove to the door latch, maintaining the pressure of the gun barrel on Minoa’s spine around the level of the heart.
The door swung open and the gun barrel thrust her into the shed so hard she stumbled and caught herself by grasping the wire mesh of the rattler cages, shaking the hand-hammered pine and wire structure. A bedlam of frenzied rattling broke out, her skin shriveled with horror. The door slammed shut followed by the sickening click of a stake shoved into the latch. She spun around and beat on the door with both fists.
“Let me out of here, you crazy old woman.”
The only answer was a raspy trill of demented laughter. She glanced around assessing the situation. The shed was nothing but plywood sheets nailed onto posts set in the ground, a door of reinforced plywood and a roof of corrugated tin sheets. She judged she could take the whole thing down in fifteen minutes. But could she do it without knocking over the rattler cages?
“What do you want of me? I said I’d go away and never bother you again.”
“Getting a teensy bit scared, are you?” The old lady laughed. This was probably the most fun she’d had in years. Living out here alone in the creosote-peppered hills with a bunch of rattlesnakes for pets would probably drive anyone out of the land of the normal. But the possibility of persuading her yet existed.
“Listen, I’d rather not knock down the whole shed to get out, but I will if I have to.”
The only response was a sing-song chant. She scanned the interior. A metal bucket sat on the ground near the door next to a long metal pole with mechanical tongs on one end. She picked up the pole and smacked the window glass but it held. A flicker of movement spied out of the corner of an eye caused her to turn her head. On the far end of the banks of cages a bottom cage door hung open and a Diamondback was gliding through. The head was too far out to slam the door shut with her foot.
“Let me out of here! There’s a loose rattler!”
New Mexico Curiosities
The current site of the city of Santa Fe was occupied for thousands of years by indigenous people. It was known by the Tewa inhabitants as ‘white shell water place’. The city was founded in 1610 as the capital of Nuevo México. The city’s full name as founded was La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís (‘The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi’). New Mexico became a territory of the United States in 1848 and a state in 1912, with Santa Fe as its capital. Discovered in the late twentieth century as the ‘City Different,’ Santa Fe today is a renowned center of the arts, and a wealth and retirement community, while beset by problems of poverty, crime, drought and environmental stress.Preserving the colonial appearance on East De Vargas Street in downtown Santa Fe.Claims to be the oldest trading post in the US.The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, chartered in 1859, bypassed Santa Fe until a spur was constructed from Lamy, New Mexico in 1881.Harvey Houses dotted the railway line. Fred Harvey founded the company in 1876 to provide meals for the growing flow of rail passengers.‘Harvey Girls’ waitresses were portrayed in the 1946 movie with Judy Garland.This statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, situated in front of the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, represents the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1531 to the Aztec peasant Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico. The church was likely built in the late 1700’s and contains an oil painting of the church’s patron saint signed by the artist, Jose de Alzibar, a renowned Mexican painter, in 1783. It was transported to Santa Fe in a cart along the Camino Real from Mexico City to Santa Fe. Also at the shrine is El Cerro de Tepeyac, a walking path featuring six tile mosaics illustrating the apparitions by the artist Arlene Cisneros Sena. The newest addition to the shrine is the statue depicted in this image.There are scores of unexcavated ruins in New Mexico from Ancestral Puebloan peoples as well as Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Tano, Zuni, Keres and others.Among the modern Hopi and most other Pueblo peoples, “kiva” means a large room that is circular, underground and used for spiritual ceremonies. During the late 8th century, Mesa Verdeans started building pit structures that archeologists call protokivas. By the mid-10th and early 11th centuries, these had evolved into circular structures called kivas. Mesa Verde-style kivas included a feature called a sipapu, a hole thought to represent the Ancestral Puebloans’ place of emergence from the underworld.New Mexico is home to seven varieties of rattlesnake. The Western Diamondback is ubiquitous and feared, but the Mojave, with venom which may combine neurotoxic and hemotoxic elements, is the most lethal.The architecture of New Mexican village churches is idiosyncratic, so that each church reflects the history and identity of the local culture it serves. Building materials include adobe, stone, vigas, and latillas. In general, the adobe churches are an adaptation of Pueblo Indian building methods to Spanish and Franciscan religious purposes. Countryside around the tiny village of Abiquiu, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keefe painted.
