Flâneur (n.) [flah-nœr] An idler, lounger, or saunterer; A deliberately aimless pedestrian.
April 2023
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Day One
Four stairs down in the red earth, the casita is cool and cozy. Its thick adobe walls, painted cornflower blue, shoulder exposed beams that have split with age. A basket of plastic fruit adorns a wicker dinette, over a floor of heavy maroon tiles, hexagonal and humped like a tortoise shell. I set my bags in the bedroom, while through a patio window, a cherry tree bursting with delicate pink blossoms plays muse for a buzzy chorus of bumblebees and house finches.
I ascend to the street and follow the sidewalk north, downtown. The rest of the homes are like my AirBnB—squarish and skewered with pine timbers like a rack of ribs on the grill. Mailboxes built right into the walls. I weave through the shade of weeping willows, admiring tulips and black-eyed susans alongside yuccas and prickly pears. Natives and transplants.
Quickly I come to a church. Built of adobe over rough stones, it has an airy bell tower topped by a white cross, which together overlook a courtyard. A sign says the San Miguel mission dates to 1610, making it the oldest church in the United States. From here, Franciscan friars fanned out across the upper Rio Grande in an attempt to convert the region’s native peoples to Christianity. Now, tourists filter in and out of the front door, snapping photos with their phones; a man sneezes; a girl tugs at her mother’s skirt, pleading for something.
Another few blocks and I come to a row of shops with merchandise spilling onto the sidewalk. The first has patterned rugs and shawls, wide-brim hats, cowboy boots and leather handbags—a costume for wealthy tourists. Then one selling earrings of silver and turquoise, another moccasins embroidered with glossy beads. There are wood carvings of eagles and coyotes, blown glass, photography, pottery, and paintings in every medium and size. There are some 250 galleries here, according to a brochure I thumbed.
I climb a few steps and slip inside the heavy wooden door to the New Mexico Museum of Art. My trail runners squeak in the air-conditioned corridors. The main hall houses an exhibit called “An American in Paris: Donald Beauregard”. Born in 1884 in Fillmore, Utah, Beauregard was the son of a Mormon rancher, reads an interpretive panel:
From an early age, Beauregard’s parents nurtured his aptitude for art. As a teenager he grew tired of Filmore and wandered for a while before deciding to enroll at Brigham Young University, from where went on to study at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris. Beauregard was influenced by European impressionists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and van Gogh, whose styles and techniques he blended into his own while wandering the French countryside. In 1908, he returned to Utah and continued to paint, including the farm and mountains near his childhood home.
The museum owns 180 of Beauregard’s paintings. The first on display is called Portrait of an Artist (1912). The subject, a young man (believed by some to be Beauregard himself), holds a coat, hat, and walking stick, the attire of a flâneur, the placard says, a gentleman stroller of city streets.
Flânerie first appeared on the streets of Paris in the nineteenth century, a product of industrialization and the growing affluence and diversity of the city, which offered one the ability to wander with no other purpose than to observe. A flâneur was a connoisseur of the street, “unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency”. The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote:
His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world… The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
This curious blend of intellect and ambivalence helped spur a movement of artists who increasingly began to turn an eye to urban life as the subject of aesthetic critique.
I emerge onto a sunny plaza. Squinting, I see an ice cream stand on the corner, more shops, a four-faced clock tower, and railroad tracks. A few young couples pushing strollers; children running and shouting; an elderly couple sitting on a bench. I walk under the balcony of a restaurant; across the street a busking saxophonist hoots over an electronic beat controlled by pedals. At the center of the plaza is a monument that commemorates Union Army soldiers and those who perished in “battles with savage Indians”. The upper portion of the monument, a stone obelisk, was toppled on Indigenous Peoples Day in 2020. To the base, now wrapped in a tarp and cordoned off with an orange construction fence, is stapled a laminated sign explaining that the city of Santa Fe, with the input of community leaders, is in the process of “reimagining” what the space might look like. Abutting the plaza to the north is the Palace of the Governors, a sprawling single-story building constructed by the Spanish as a headquarters for colonial administration. Now, from under its portico, Pueblo artisans sell handmade jewelry and other crafts.
The sun is going down. Music seeps from the back of barrooms and restaurants, and the smell of searing meat. I find a little taqueria and sit near an open window, watching the streetlights come up.
Day Two
The French writer Victor Fournel contrasted the flâneur with the figure of the badaud, the gawker or gaper. “The flâneur,” he wrote, “is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world... which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the badaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd.”
I find myself at Meow Wolf, an installation created by a local artists’ collective. In an old bowling alley, they’ve constructed a fully furnished colonial home replete with secret passageways that are portals to a phantasmagoric alternate reality. An upstairs closet leads to an ice cave guarded by a skeletal mastodon whose ribs can be played with felt mallets like a marimba; a bookshelf under the stairs swings open to reveal a mossy forest of pixies and glowing mushrooms; the refrigerator, an airlock that opens onto the deck of a spaceship, holographic co-pilot and all.
For the rest of the morning I navigate a dizzying hall of mirrors, a fluorescent undersea kelp forest, a harp made of lasers that you play by waving your fingers through the air. Swirling psychedelic patterns in black light; snippets of sound and disembodied voices. Like a dream.
**
In the afternoon I drive to the trailhead for Sun Mountain, on the edge of town. Forty-five minutes of hiking brings me to an open summit with a panoramic view. North, the snowy, manicured slopes of Taos, and the San Juan Range of Colorado. To the west, the city spills out across the valley like chocolate milk, toward the volcanic crater at Valles Caldera. Juniper spice on the breeze; the laughing chatter of pinyon jays; a crimson glow accentuating coarse-grained sandstone. Nowhere to be. I sit on a rock and think:
About the ancient inhabitants of this land, nomads who lived according to the seasons, the arrival of the rains, the migration of game;
About how city life has contributed to alienation from nature. Convenience is a trap that keeps us constrained, restless, and unsatisfied;
About the compromises I’ve made to travel lightly.
It occurs to me how much hiking has in common with the arts. Both are playgrounds for exploration and experiment. They can’t be forced. Success, when it occurs, comes from the serendipitous alignment of many factors, most of which are out of one’s control. Nudity is accepted, if tasteful. They are the domains of tortured souls, loners, misfits, and other castaways from the mainstream of society. They can be done in a group but are most incisive and insightful when done alone. For the committed, they are the only way to feel truly alive.
More than a decade ago, while in a dark place in my life, I landed an internship in the mountain backcountry of the Adirondacks, in northern New York. The job was simple: hike, and talk to visitors about camping regulations and trail conditions; man the backcountry outpost cabin and radio; assist with search and rescue operations. That summer, for the first time, I climbed alpine peaks in hurricane force winds, camped waterlogged and muddy under siege by black flies, sat by secluded waters whose stillness was broken only by the haunting tremolo of a loon. I read Thoreau, who espoused the virtues of self-reliance in nature as a path to freedom from the triviality and senseless worry of the purely human world. “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,” he wrote in Walking.
Of his tromps through the woods and fields of Concord, Thoreau wrote, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” He goes on:
[The] word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land… Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.
“If you are ready to leave father and mother,” Thoreau concludes, “and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” It was the answer to a question I had not even known how to ask. It changed my life.
Since then, hiking has lent me countless experiences in beautiful and unique places, moments of revelation and blissful spontaneity, and the company of the best people I have ever met. But mostly, the simple joy of walking. In the woods I found deep satisfaction moving under my own power, in tune with my body’s direct needs—when to rest, eat, drink. To just breathe… I learned the pleasure of paying attention, a delight in singular moments and fleeting encounters, ephemeral as a passing cloud. The way time becomes elastic, a wristwatch irrelevant. Now when I travel to new places, I want to experience them that same way. Forget the shuttle tour—I prefer to walk.
Day Three
The desk attendant at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum offers me a pair of headphones for a self-guided tour on my phone:
“Born in a Wisconsin farmhouse in 1887, O’Keeffe from an early age pursued an artist’s life. Beginning in 1905, she worked as a commercial illustrator to pay for her education at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Later, she developed her unique style using watercolors and charcoal, which led to abstractions, including close-ups of flowers, with which she would help define the American modernist movement…”
In the mid-1920s, while living with her husband in New York, O’Keeffe produced a series of romanticized paintings of the city’s skyscrapers, engineering marvels that had come to represent the ingenuity and mystique of America but that had yet to be successfully portrayed in art. "I know it's unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel, in the heart of a roaring city,” she remarked, “but I think that's just what the artist of today needs for stimulus.” Using bold lines and muted reflections, she depicted them from street-level, gazing upward.
Following the death of her husband, O’Keeffe eschewed the city altogether, preferring the serenity of her desert home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. The final room of the exhibit displays a collection of smaller landscapes that O’Keeffe painted during this portion of her life. One piece catches my eye. Titled The Black Place (1945), it depicts one of O’Keeffe’s favorite places, the placard says, the Bisti Badlands in northwestern New Mexico. The composition is simple—a fold of terraced hills, black on gray, with an irregular band of scarlet across their base—yet it resonates with foreboding depth, like the mouth of a cave.
**
“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. He meant that upon close inspection, existence itself is absurd. We are compelled to seek meaning but never find it. Instead, in its place, the “primitive hostility” of the world rears its head—hostile not because it is sinister, but because it is indifferent. This combination of beauty and terror, according to author Kim Stanley Robinson, defines an encounter with the sublime. It is to become, in his words, “transparent to the world, lofted into a higher realm.”
O’Keeffe’s work makes feeling plain. The way ordinary subjects such as flowers or the skull of a steer, when abstracted or enlarged beyond life size, take on hidden dimensions and properties: alluring, or grotesque, or beaming with significance. The sublime is, simultaneously, inexplicable grandeur coupled with powerlessness in its midst. The point at which all categories and mental conceptions break down, when we are faced with the incomparable vicissitude of raw experience. Step over that line and one risks becoming lost, absorbed in his senses, irretrievable. But keep your wits, and you might get close enough to peer over the edge, to reach out and bring back something useful.
**
That night, I head to a jazz club, where a server in a black tie leads me to a table for one. Sounds of clinking glasses and easy speech under the shuffling rapport of piano, horn, bass, and drums. I order stuffed grape leaves and a glass of pinot. The band’s pace is easygoing, passing solos like a spliff around a campfire. I strike up a chat with an older couple next to me. I’m in town for a few days, I tell them. Never been here before. The man, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and rimless glasses above a prickly white goatee, jumps in.
“We’ve been coming here for thirty years,” he says of Santa Fe. “It’s changed so much,” he adds, with a shake of the head.
O’Keeffe’s New York, too, was rapidly changing. Indeed, around the world, cities at the time were centers for daring innovations that were changing the way society looks and functions. Women, upon winning the right to vote, began to take on a larger public role. It was a time of economic growth, when the United States became the richest country in the world. It was also a time of great uncertainty. New technologies were disrupting business and politics. There was hand-wringing over new cultural norms of decency, and shifting gender roles. Fears of decay into immorality and vice, even of outright collapse. And prosperity was not shared. The decade marked a pronounced shift in wealth toward the very rich that would lead, by its end, to a devastating crash. All on the heels of a Great War that had shaken the very idea of progress.
Out of this was spawned an entire Lost Generation of disillusioned and cynical young people who sought to express their disapproval through art. Jazz was just one product. Take also the trove of American expats—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein among them—who moved to Paris, writing critically of the excesses of consumer capitalism. Or Felix the Cat, a popular cartoon character of the time whose trademark pace–strolling with hands behind his back, head down, somber, deep in thought—is considered by historians as emblematic of general unease.
My mind returns to the painting. The Black Place. Why there, I wonder?
Day Four
The next morning I decide to find out. I drive four hours west across a sea of dusty sagebrush hills to the Navajo Nation at Nageezi, population 300. Median household income: eleven thousand dollars. I turn off the highway and run a slalom of potholes that shudder the suspension of my car. I pass trailers and shuttered homes with barking dogs leashed to trees; children’s bicycles on the ground; horses flicking their tails in the air. Hiking is an activity accessible mainly to the middle and upper classes, I realize, who can pony up an initial investment in expensive equipment and who have a vehicle to get to remote places not served by public transit. How many people can afford to take time away from work, or their kids?
For example. In the back of my car: A brand new sixty-liter internal frame pack, an ultralight tent and mattress pad, a down sleeping bag, water filter, two Nalgenes and a collapsible reservoir, portable stove and cookware, headlamp, and trekking poles. On me: Altra Lone Peak trail runners, technical merino wool socks, a pair of zip-off, quick-dry pants, a canvas belt threaded with a holster for a spring-loaded, fifteen-action multi tool, a moisture-wicking, SPF-50 longsleeve shirt (light blue), polarized sunglasses, a GPS smartwatch, and a flat-brim sun hat. (I’m not immune to convenience.)
Still, spend any significant amount of time living out of a backpack and you end up realizing that you need less than you think. Life is simpler, slower. Efficient. Everything makes sense. Coming back, though, can be a shock. It was for me, at least, after that first summer in the Adirondacks. Why do we make life so difficult for ourselves? How did it get so complicated, so messy? Is it really worth it? So for a long time I’ve applied the mentality I learned in the woods to the rest of my life. Maintain distance, don’t get tied down, set down no roots. Emotionally self-sufficient. Perhaps this is a defense mechanism, a way of maintaining control. Perhaps if I keep my head down, blend in, I can retain the completeness I had out there. Maybe loneliness, I tell myself, is the price of freedom.
I think again of Thoreau, who never saw the West; whose walks through the pastoral countryside near Concord were hardly an encounter with hardship; whose notion of wilderness was naïve and starry-eyed, if ahead of its time. I wonder what became of his conviction, his commitment to solitude, if it ever wavered. Because his vision, I’ve learned with time, is not the whole story. It’s not as simple as casting off all attachments. We also need something to embrace. What if beauty can be found not only in the remote wild but also in the everyday, the here and now, the life I already have?
It’s another few miles of dirt roads before I come to the edge. Flayed open like a quarry, the scene before me is a maze of mesas, fans, and spires. Colors of cream, charcoal, sulfur, burgundy, and black. No sagebrush, hardly any plants at all. It’s afternoon. I throw on my pack and set out, salt crunching under my shoes. Up close, the hardpacked clay is a textured fabric of small lumps, like scales. No straight lines. The land behaves strangely. As I walk, landmarks are hidden and change position, disappearing into the background. I find myself turning my head frequently, making sure that I can retrace my steps. It would be easy to get lost out here. After a couple miles, I come across the trunk of a petrified tree—two feet across and fifteen long—emerging from the earth like a glassy rainbow. I round another corner and there, sticking out of a mound, yellowed by tens of millions of years in the dry sediment, is the femur of a hadrosaur.
I find a flat spot and set up my tent in an alcove of hoodoos, their cabernet caps perched atop dun stalks like a cluster of giant toadstools. The sun descends through curtains of mauve, rose, and indigo, its last rays piercing the air like amber daggers, casting shadows that fall across miles of open desert. A family of coyotes yip and yowl from somewhere unseen. Time moves casually, effortlessly, with grace.
That night I stand with my neck craned back under the most spectacular sky I have ever witnessed. A rolling ocean of stardust engulfing me like a cocoon. A moment comes when there is a stirring from beneath my feet. It rises through me, slowly at first then all at once, cresting and crashing like a wave. I am seen through. Weak in the knees, vulnerable, all my insides on the outside. I am towering and towered over. Imposing, crushing, all-encompassing. I can do nothing but gape and gawk.
What a relief.
What a gift to be anywhere at all.
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