Tuesday, December 22, 2009 - Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu NM
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Crosshatch, Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu NM, December 22, 2009
"You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here and finally feeling in the right place again I feel like myself and I like it . . . Out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields-then the sage brush and beyond-a most perfect mountain-it makes me feel like flying-and I don't care what becomes of art." - Georgia O'Keeffe, in a letter to Henry McBride, 1929
Ghost Ranch is the most photogenic spot I've been in in a long while. I drove through Abiquiu on a road trip back on April 5, 2006 and I somehow forgot just how gorgeous the scenery is here. Driving US 84 through the valley is beautiful in itself but getting up close and personal with the multicolored rock formations here is something else entirely. It's no wonder Georgia O'Keeffe was so at home here. Kate spent the whole morning giving me a photo-op tour of a tiny portion of the 21,000 acre Ghost Ranch and the Conference Center. It's no wonder she and Terry are so in love with this place.
Night camp
Ghost Ranch Campground, Abiquiu NM
- This is a basic, small campground with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are not available here.
- Locate Ghost Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Waiting
I remember walking in art galleries, through the nineteenth century: the obsession they had then with harems. Dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans,turbans on their heads, or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunich in the background standing guard. Studies of sedentary flesh, painted by men who'd never been there. These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom.
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood