Faith healing by mud in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A church full of discarded crutches and sunnies. You too could walk again, see again, by going to this church only once.
Not far from Santa Fe you’ll find the Santuario de Chimayo, a charming Catholic church, built in the nineteenth century in adobe brick, the poor man’s breezeblock. The altar and other devotional paintings are in the Mexican naive tradition, but what makes this little church such a draw card is the well in a room next to the church proper.
The dirt from this well provides a cure for all ailments and disabilities. Provided you are a devout Catholic, of course. If it doesn’t work, you obviously are not devout enough or not a Catholic at all.
Needless to say, ‘disabled’ parking spots vastly outnumber other parking spots at the Santuario. We parked the Egg in a disabled spot, not being able to find another spot.
As proof of the effectiveness of this mud, the little room-with-the-well carries a hilarious display of crutches no longer needed by people who applied the mud. Just applied a little mud, and threw their crutches away, cured! A quick, surreptitious count indicated well over a hundred crutches.
Mrs Henry wanted to do the inevitable gift shop. She came back with a tiny, decorated steel box with a hinged cover filled with, you guessed it, holy mud. “Well, you never know”, protested Mrs Henry, “and I can always give it to someone who believes in it.”
As readers will have guessed, Mrs Henry and myself have done a dash south, after some light snowfall gave Mrs Henry an anxiety attack. Mrs Henry will jauntily pay for a fairground ride in a machine that shakes your vitals about like castanets and throws you up and sideways at enormous speeds and enormous heights, but a couple of snowflakes or the hint of a ravine spotted from the Egg at a distance of 50 metres will send her into a panic.
How we made it over Independence Pass I will never know.
But the summit was great, covered in about half a foot of snow, bright sunny weather with the odd cloud. Mrs Henry said later that you felt as though you were on top of the world, a sentiment with which I agree. If there was a god, you would have been able to see him from there.
This post, dear readers, reaches you from Las Vegas, New Mexico, where Mrs Henry and myself are once again encamped, having given motels the boot. A section of the old Route 66 runs at about twenty metres from our encampment. We have had our dinner (southern-style cabbage, mashed potatoes and pork sausages) and had our first intensive brush with American wildlife shortly after, when we took our dishes over for a wash-up at the ‘camp kitchen’.
In the dusk, we spotted an animal shape, which I thought belonged to a bear, so I ran and threw myself headlong into the Egg, leaving a struggling Mrs Henry behind. Unfortunately, my legs were still sticking out, so I couldn’t close the door. Meanwhile the animal shape paused at the edge of the old Route 66, looking at us. On closer inspection I decided that it could not be a bear. Too small. A large coyote, thought Mrs Henry. “Do they bite?”, I asked. “Nah”, said Mrs Henry. So, we clambered out of the Egg, collected such dirty dishes and utensils as we could find in the gathering darkness and made our way back to the ‘camp kitchen’.
When we returned the coyote was nowhere to be seen but had pulled a box with provisions from the picknick bench outside of the Egg on which we had put it. Tomatoes lay scattered, cans of beans had rolled, an onion had come to rest under the Egg and Mrs Henry discovered that her loaf of sour dough bread was missing.
The next morning, Gene, a handyman at the Las Vegas “ahrr-vee parrrk” clued us in. The coyote was in fact an old dog belonging to somebody in the hills behind the “ahrr-vee parrrk”. Gene shook his head. “I gotta clean up de trash he goes troo ev’ry mornin”.
