I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
OK, Gallup boosters, prepare the billboards. I feel an all-out tourism campaign coming on.
Paul Theroux, the novelist and travel writer, thinks you ROCK!!!! I mean, he REALLY likes you. Or at least he’d like to visit again, which is more than can be said for the state’s biggest tourist draw, Santa Fe. Let’s just say, Mr. Theroux is not as enraptured by the City Different as its less-known, less prettified western neighbor.
Theroux’s new-found enthusiasm for Gallup, a city that straddles I-40 and the route of the fabled U.S. 66, can be found in this month’s issue of Smithsonian Magazine, specifically an article Theroux penned, er, tapped out on his keyboard, about driving cross country, a dream he has always had but never realized.
That is, until now.
Theroux drove 3,380 miles, starting in California and ending in Cape Cod. Along the way he stopped in a lot of places and made a list of places he’d like to revisit.
Travel usually implies seeing a place once and moving on; but this became a trip in which I made lists of places I’d return to — Prescott, and Sedona, and now Gallup, New Mexico, where I’d happily go mountain-biking or hiking in the high desert, or visiting the people who possessed the country before we claimed it as ours.
Compare that endorsement of Gallup to Theroux’s reaction to Santa Fe:
By late afternoon I was rounding Albuquerque and arrived in Santa Fe in the clear light of early evening.
Santa Fe, mild in May at 7,000 feet, was a monochromatic town of tastefully manufactured adobe. I felt no compulsion to return to Santa Fe.
Ouch! O.K., so it’s not a rude rejection of a place on the order of what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, Calif. (“Oakland? There’s no there, there”). But in travel writing circles if a place doesn’t gin up any curiosity, any mystery, if it doesn’t dampen that peripatetic urge that travel writers are so often giving in to, and the scribe bluntly reports this dearth of fascination with a place, well, it’s the equivalent of a smackdown.
So Gallup, enjoy your celebrity as well as that dose of schadenfreude that Theroux just handed you.
