FIRST PLACE
Six strange hours, three encounters with death (or why I moved to Santa Fe)
Lisa Davenport, Santa Fe
Depending on the weight of your foot and the size of your bladder, it’s about a six-hour drive from Santa Fe to Denver. I have done it (as well as the same route in reverse) dozens of times, ever since I met my husband, Rob, in 1991.
Back then, I was the Denver City Girl, he the Lamy Yurt Man. Rob lived off the grid in a beautiful wooden yurt he had built outside Lamy, 18 miles from Santa Fe. I had been smitten by this sensitive artist since the night we met, when he serenaded me with a song he’d written called “Road Kill on the Highway of Love.”
Soon, the 360-mile trek between my apartment and his yurt had become a fixture of our long-distance romance, in which every rendezvous was filled with Santa Fe magic, from moonlit walks along Acequia Madre to evenings sipping sangria at Tomasita’s bustling bar.
After Rob moved to Denver and we got married, that familiar route became a favorite road trip, returning us to where our love story started.
When some good friends moved from Denver to a community north of Santa Fe with long views of juniper-studded hills and spectacular sunsets, we found yet another reason to visit. In the spring of 2019, I made the drive to Santa Fe by myself, excited to spend a few days catsitting for those friends.
As I wandered the city that brought back so many sweet memories, I was struck again by the unparalleled beauty of New Mexico’s landscape, architecture, and sky. And I was struck anew by the realization that Santa Fe felt like a refuge from the enormous, crowded city that Denver had become.
Each day, I was reminded of how long, and how much, I had loved this place.
But my friends returned from their vacation, and it was time for me to head home. I got an early start on the morning of my departure and was driving north on I-25, singing happily despite feeling a bit blue to be leaving.
I had been on the near-empty highway for 25 minutes when I noticed something up ahead on the shoulder. Judging by its size and shape, I assumed it was a tossed-out bag of trash. But just before I passed it, I realized it was a man lying on the side of the road, motionless and alone. There were no cars nearby. No homes in sight. He could easily have been mistaken for a dirty, discarded tarp. But there was no mistake: It was a man. And it looked to me like a dead man.
Within seconds, I was too far beyond him to stop and walk back, and the next opportunity to exit the divided highway was miles away (although I’ll admit, I was also rattled by the thought of what I might find if I turned around). So I noted the roadside mile marker and pulled over to call 911. After providing the man’s location and being assured that they would investigate, I continued my journey — saddened, subdued, and no longer singing.
By the time I reached the long, lonely stretch between Wagon Mound and Raton, I was feeling a little lighter. At one point, the vast emptiness was enlivened by several small birds that appeared out of nowhere and swooped, carefree, in front of my car, but otherwise, the drive was uneventful.
Happy to be halfway home, I pulled into a gas station in Raton and sat for a moment texting Rob with a progress report. When I looked up, a young couple was standing in front of my Mini, staring at it with looks of mutual disgust. Odd, I thought, as I got out and went behind my car to fill the tank. While I was waiting, a young boy and his father walked past my car, pointed at it, and moved hurriedly on.
With a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, I hung up the hose and went to see what was causing the peculiar reactions. There, plastered to one of my headlights in a smear of blood and feathers, was what remained of a small bird, a member of the happy-go- lucky little flock that had crossed paths with my car earlier in the day.
Horrified by the bird’s violent end and seized by guilt and queasiness, I grabbed some paper towels and scraped away the mess. Returning to the safety of my driver’s seat, I got back on the highway as quickly as I could, my heart beating fast and tears in my eyes. I spent the next hundred miles trying to brush away thoughts of the two unsettling scenes I had witnessed.
When I finally made it past the incessant road construction near Monument, I silently congratulated myself for being almost home.
A few miles south of the C-470 interchange on the outskirts of Denver, I took a leisurely look in my rearview mirror, only to notice a police car coming up fast — scarily fast — behind me, lights flashing and siren howling.
I veered into the next lane just in time for it to pass me like I was standing still, although my cruise control was set at 81. My relief over not getting stopped for speeding didn’t last long, however, because within moments, three more police cars hurtled by. Then another three, hot on their tail.
I watched anxiously as they all barreled down the exit to C-470.
As I continued uneasily on my way, one eye scanning behind me and the other glued to the highway in front of me, my heart sank. Up ahead, another string of speeding, flashing police cars was blazing south on I-25 and peeling off onto C-470 heading west. I counted as they swept down the ramp and disappeared: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, now merging with the original group.
Thirteen police cars, all racing at top speed in one long, urgent, lit-up line.
I felt sick. Whatever was going on, it had to be very, very bad.
The final 30 minutes to my house were filled with foreboding. I couldn’t wait to walk in my front door and have this stressful, surreal road trip come to an end.
After hugging Rob and petting our dogs, I said, “Something terrible is happening.” I opened my laptop, wanting to know and at the same time dreading the answer.
And there it was: A mass shooting at a STEM school in a suburb south of Denver. Police and SWAT teams were on the scene, but details weren’t available.
I stared at the screen, numb. A dead man. A dead bird. Dead children. The road I had traveled over the past six hours seemed strewn with dark portents. But suddenly, the path forward was startlingly clear.
I walked out to where my husband was sitting at our dining room table in our beautiful home, in our beautiful neighborhood, in the beautiful city that I once swore I would never leave.
“I want to move to Santa Fe,” I said.
Rob never hesitated. He simply replied, “Let’s go.”
Lisa Davenport is happy and grateful to be living in Santa Fe with her husband, Rob, and their two dogs, Bugsy and Skippy. She is a recovering copywriter and a mosaic artist who enjoys breaking dishes and transforming them into beautiful things. Lisa still loves to sing in the car and around the house and is currently taking voice lessons in an effort to remain married to Rob.
SECOND PLACE
Me Too at 97
Kevin McCullough, Santa Fe
“Good morning to you, good morning to you, good morning dear Kevin, good morning to you.” Sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday”: My mother would often greet me each morning with this little song.
A saint, she was to me. Always the eternal optimist, she rarely complained.
She belonged to the “Greatest Generation,” that group of Americans who grew up during the Depression in the 1930s and later led us to victory in World War II. Their strength, resiliency, and perseverance is legendary.
Enduring hardship was something she knew well. She raised five kids, suffered from migraine headaches, and near the end of her life, her body was contorted and twisted with severe arthritis. Life’s shrapnel almost never seemed to affect her, or at least it never really seemed to penetrate very deeply.
That is, until just four days before her death at the age of 97, when some of that shrapnel came to the surface. It’s when my mother became a member of the current “Me Too” movement. She revealed a 78-year-old secret that she may have never told anyone.
Much more than a catch phrase, the term “Me Too” was coined by Tarana Burke in 2006, but it took until 2017 for the public to take notice, when more and more women, especially celebrities such as Alyssa Milano came forward. She tweeted, “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘Me Too,’ as a reply to this tweet.”
My mother never sent a tweet in her whole life, but near the end, in the hospital emergency room, when talking was a real effort for her, she told the us that two men raped her in the basement of her family home in Pennsylvania when she was only 19 years old. “They did terrible things to me,” she said.
Other than the nurses, my niece and I were the only witnesses to this “Me Too” moment. She was 90 pounds at most, a stark contrast to the mother I knew. Her panic-stricken eyes were glassy, hollow, and recessed deeply in the sockets. The skin on her arms hung loosely over the bones that were rail-thin at that point. She hadn’t been able to keep much food down for several months.
As I stood in the emergency room, she seemed to be in a state of shock. “Bad men,” she said, “they did terrible things to me.” She was reaching out, trying to draw me closer, almost grabbing my collar in order to pull me in. “Bad men, very bad men,” she said again, but this time desperate, trying to make me understand something which I had no idea what she was talking about.
More than once my niece and I asked, “Who? Who are you talking about?”
But she wouldn’t offer much more except ...
“They hurt me.”
I was confused, holding back buckets of tears, and suddenly wanted out of there. I quickly left with some excuse about getting lunch. I returned about 15 minutes later and there at my mother’s bedside, two or three nurses stood solemnly along with my niece. The moment had finally arrived ... my mother was filling in the blanks and giving them details.
Now there was no doubt about what had happened.
My mother had revealed what she had been keeping a secret all those years.
She told this small group of people about being raped in 1940 in the basement of her home on Maple Street. She said these men probably followed her home from work as a receptionist/bookkeeper at the family business.
She revealed how they were fighting about who would go first, and how she was crying throughout the ordeal while they were laughing.
Beyond that, no names, no clues, about who these men were.
It’s very hard, as a man, as a son, as a human being, to imagine being violated like that. Why didn’t she tell anyone? Or did she? Maybe no one believed her.
Here in Santa Fe, on the wall of our plant room, is an iconic black & white photo of her from the 1940s. She is sitting casually on the bleachers in a small baseball field while sipping soda from a bottle. She looks like a beautiful Hollywood starlet of the time, maybe Lana Turner or Betty Grable.
It’s hard to imagine this was taken only three years after the assault.
On the back of the photo, in my mother’s handwriting, it says, “July, 1943, Eurana Park, Weatherly, PA. Camera Club award, 4th, ‘Contented Spectator.’”
The image is really a work of art. On the opposite wall in the same room is a framed photo of her and “Pop” on their wedding night in 1943. She’s almost sitting on his lap and seems to be laughing hysterically as he’s whispering in her ear. Maybe they even had a little too much to drink. I love this photo because my parents look like two kids in love.
I don’t think the trauma of being raped defined her life or legacy. She believed in moving on, healing, and staying positive to a fault, no matter what happened. It didn’t stop her from spreading love and joy throughout her long life of 97 years.
My mother returned to the nursing home in an ambulance after being discharged from the hospital, and my siblings and I took six-hour shifts around the clock to watch over her. She died during one of my shifts, around lunchtime on a Wednesday.
For a while we didn’t tell anyone about what she revealed to us. It seemed like too much in addition to her death and all the grief and sadness that came with that. Later, we told all our family members. Some cried, some were shocked, but my brother Brian added something poignant. He remembered watching The View or Oprah with her one morning when the “Me Too” movement was the topic of the day. They watched, they talked a little, and my brother remembered some subtle yet unspoken acknowledgement from her.
Finally, not right then, she gave herself permission. She released it, she revealed it, it screamed right up out of her soul later on that hospital bed. Now, others who hear her story also have permission. Me too at 97.
Kevin McCullough: I am a retired Santa Fe Public Schools teacher (fourth, fifth, and sixth grade) who loves working part-time at the Santa Fe Public Library, writing stories, reading, and spending time with my wife, her mother, our son, and a cat named Buddha.
THIRD PLACE
Nancy
Charles Smith, Santa Fe
Five patients are sitting in their wheelchairs, grouped around a table. The big man with his back to me has his right arm raised in the air as if he were leading the conversation. Two women lean forward and seem to be listening closely.
My mother, Nancy, is also talking. Without looking down, she wipes the surface of the table with her right hand, a gesture I have seen her make thousands of times. The second man is sideways to me. His head is moving; he must be nodding in agreement.
It looks like five friends just chatting about the morning news.
As I approach, however, I realize that the two women are asleep. The man with his back to me also has his eyes closed. His raised right arm is rigid, except for the fist, which is clenching and unclenching. The other man is muttering, “Engineer. Bridges,” over and over again. From previous visits, I know that he was once a prominent engineer and built bridges.
Nancy with her little smile is the only one who is actually having a conversation, but she is just making sounds, not words.
When Nancy first began losing her memory, we talked to her doctors in Florida where she lived. “Just getting old,” they said. The word “Alzheimer’s” never came up. We didn’t know what it was until that summer when she was visiting Colorado where she had lived many years earlier. She loved the music and was a lifetime Trustee of the Music Associates of Aspen.
One day a woman who worked in the Aspen Post Office called me. She said that Nancy had been calling her four or five times a day to complain about her mail delivery. I was puzzled because I knew that her mail had been arriving regularly.
Finally, this complete stranger said in a gentle voice, “I don’t know you personally, so I hesitate to intrude, but my mother had Alzheimer’s and she acted just as your mother is.”
This is the way it is with Alzheimer’s. Generally, you learn about it from other people who have experienced it with family or friends, not from medical personnel.
We then persuaded Nancy to come to Denver, where we lived. “A short visit,” we told her. We found her an attractive small apartment in an assisted living facility.
“This is a strange hotel,” she would say. “All the people are old.”
Soon she began making repeated trips to the supermarket next door, loading her cart with all sorts of treats and then wandering into the parking lot with the cart full of food. A manager would come out, collect payment, and steer her to the assisted living facility. She would then stack the food on a table with the food she had bought the day before and the day before that and it would soon all spoil.
Finally we obtained a court order appointing us co-conservators and arranged to place her in an Alzheimer’s nursing home in Aurora, Colorado.
The head nurse was a tall, soft-spoken woman from Ghana. Most of the nurses were Nigerian. They were the kindest women imaginable, caring for people who could never thank them, who would only go downhill.
Alzheimer’s is said to be the cruelest of diseases. I’m not so sure, however. My mother never suffered the physical pain of cancer or so many other end-of-life illnesses. In fact, Alzheimer’s seem to shut down much of her sensitivity to pain. One day, for example, another patient closed a door on her fingers, almost severing the tip of one. Initially she cried out but never thereafter showed any signs of pain.
In addition, she had no awareness of how this disease had robbed her of the beauty, grace, humor, and athleticism that had marked most of her life.
The cruelty is the impact of Alzheimer’s on family members and friends. It’s as if the person you loved has fled, leaving only a husk of a body. So it’s tempting to believe that your relative is no longer a real person, just a memory. That is a terrible mistake.
Over the course of years of visits, I saw the residents of my mother’s ward emerge with distinct and compelling personalities. There was Leo, who grabbed my arm during that first visit. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
I quickly recognized him. He had been a Deputy District Attorney in Adams County, Colorado, when I was a Public Defender, and we had tried many cases against each other. His grip was just as fierce and unyielding that morning as it had been when he would grip my arm outside the courtroom and tell me that my client had better plead guilty.
There was Lorraine with her jokes and her thin, white hair tied in a tight bun at the back of her head. I doubt if she had ever been what you would call good looking, but she had an extraordinary sense of humor that must have given her a very special life.
There was the woman always cradling a doll named Buster; Nadine with her smile; the polite, gracious former airline executive; the tall, wiry man who kept clapping his hands; the engineer trying to recall those many bridges he had built; the German woman who would pet the little white dog I always brought on my visits.
The women outnumbered the men two to one, a fact that made me aware of my own mortality.
As I stood in the doorway that morning, watching Nancy and the other four patients, I realized that, despite their various afflictions, they had their own way of communicating. Maybe it was nothing more than the warmth of being in the company of other humans. Now Nancy is gone. Now I realize how much I’ll miss those visits, wandering down the hallways to her ward with my dog, just sitting in the dining area, watching and listening.