My father first visited Santa Fe, in 1945. He was 22, an Army Air Corp flight officer stationed at Kirtland AFB as the war wore down. He borrowed a car and drove north until the road dumped him into the Santa Fe plaza. I suspect there was more to Santa Fe than he remembered, but he found a parking place on the Plaza, which may be the last time any tourist did.

From our West Texas home, I spent plenty of time in New Mexico growing up, and then more time later. Along with the the fine roads into the Rockies, the architecture, the cool summer nights and pleasant days, the smell of piñon, the inhabited Pueblos and the uninhabited Anasazi ruins, the clear cold water, the high desert, it was, and is, beautiful.

I caught my first trout in New Mexico, and my second and my third. Kris and I honeymooned in Santa Fe, and it was the first time I’d been to Santa Fe in the winter. Later, one late night driving down a washboard road to Chaco Canyon, my rearview mirror fell into my lap. In the village of Cordova, in a modest home off the high road from Santa Fe to Taos, I bought an unpainted hand-carved Santo of St. Michael and the dragon. As I left, the señora–she seemed ancient–gave me a small home-grown apple almost as wizened as she was. I was driving and camping, de-toxing after the bar exam, and had been backpacking for a few days at Bandelier National Monument. I probably smelled a bit ripe. I think she suspected I was spending my last dollars on her family’s carvings, and like as not I was. I still have the St. Michael bulto. Even more, I still have that apple’s kind intent.

I joke that there are two kinds of Texans: Texans who love Santa Fe and Texans who love New Orleans. I’ve grown to like New Orleans well enough, but my heart is always with New Mexico. I have spent a lifetime pondering it, appreciating it, wishing I was there. I have never spent enough time there. I never will.

Beyond its physical beauty, there is no state where disparate cultures have coexisted for so long, or have been so studied, or have so preserved their own identity. There is a Navajo joke about the typical Navajo family consisting of a mom, a dad, four kids, and an anthropologist. Our country’s most irksome mystery, the 12th century disappearance of the complex pre-Pueblan cultures at and surrounding Chaco Canyon, reaches us after an earlier archeological progression of hunter-gatherers, basket-weavers, pottery makers, complex builders, farmers, hunters of mega-fauna . . . All traceable through a rich legacy of physical remains. People paint onto the abandonment of Chaco (or Mesa Verde, or Keet Seel, or any of the others) their own predispositions, whether they’re prone to the wacko or the scientific, whether they believe in alien invasions or ecological disasters; the mystery of the abandonment is large enough to accommodate and in their mind validate their notions, however peculiar.

I have a duffer’s understanding (maybe misunderstanding) of New Mexican Indian history. In the east the culture was Plains, Comanche and Kiowa I think, not so different from West Texas, and as far as I know none of that culture survives there except as artifacts. Along the Rio Grande and to the west there are 19 remaining Pueblos, dating from more than 1,000 years ago and reduced from the 100 or so inhabited Pueblos when the Spanish arrived. These are our country’s oldest continually settled communities. The remaining Pueblos are certainly (but somewhat mysteriously) connected to the abandoned pre-Pueblan sites, though they are divided among Keresan, Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni language groups.

The Navajo and Apache were relative latecomers, and speak a closely-related Athabaskan language. They arrived in what is now New Mexico and Arizona late, in the 1500s, and the Apache remained hunter-gatherers. The Navajo changed. They borrowed from everybody–they made pots, they built stone defensive structures, they farmed, and after the Spanish arrived they stole sheep and became nomadic shepherds. They even borrowed religious practices from the Hopi, the Hopi being top-notch at getting rid of witches. Among both the Pueblos and the Navajo witches are commonly believed to be a source of many of the world’s evils.

The Navajo seem to know how to absorb: not always, not too much, but plenty enough for us to recognize and identify with their relative plasticity. The Zuni, the most remote and traditional of the Pueblan cultures, will remain mysterious to almost everybody but the Zuni, precisely because of their adherence to tradition. Navajo culture on the other hand makes a lot of sense. After all, every Navajo family has its own anthropologist.

Through the 19th century, the Navajo fought with everybody–the Utes in Colorado and Utah, the Pueblo settlements, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and then the Americans. They didn’t completely appreciate the concept of property ownership, and all of those other folk were kinda like the supermarket. When in August 1846 during the Mexican-American War, General Kearney led American Troops to take Santa Fe from Mexico, the occupation was extremely unpopular, but at least at the time it was bloodless. Among other things, Kearney promised to end Navajo depredations. He didn’t. The Navajo pretty much did what they wanted until violent and destructive campaigns in the 1860s forced many of the Navajo to walk nearly 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner in Eastern New Mexico. The exile to Bosque Redondo, the Long Walk, was a brutal disaster, and is still a bitter memory among the Navajo. In 1868 the Navajo were allowed to return to their traditional lands.

The territories of the Utes and the Navajo were divided by Western New Mexico’s most certain source of water, the San Juan River, John the Baptist River, or in Navajo Są́ Bitooh, Old Man River. The San Juan feeds into the Colorado, and before it was dammed it was broad, slow, and muddy. It was a catfish river, and still is in its warmer parts. In its colder parts every fly fisher knows the San Juan. In Pennsylvania, sitting with a group of anglers at a picnic table at Fisherman’s Paradise, someone asked where we’d go next. I said I thought New Mexico. Two people immediately offered that they knew where we could fish in New Mexico, the San Juan. It’s now one of the Southwest’s glamour rivers, a clear, cold, nutrient-rich tailwater offering big trout for even the most incompetent. Being among the most incompetent, I’ve fished the San Juan a few times, and it deserves its reputation. We won’t go there.