Waking Up Santa Fe

Now you can try the plaza in the midday heat, you and swarms of other tourists, or you can sneak out of your bed at sunrise and catch Santa Fe before she’s quite ready for you.

The slope of Canyon road, the air fresh and light like kisses. Morning yellow bees humming around the purple sage spires, the curved folds of adobe draped across the top of stone walls and everywhere fleeting moments captured in wood, metal and stone.

A bronze horse seems to pause for a moment as you pass by. Wisps of human forms seem momentarily frozen, arms high and wide to the blue of the sky.

The art galleries that line this street look different in the early morning, more contemplative, somehow stripped of their normal self conscious sophistication, reduced, perhaps expanded, to the naked art without the artifice.

Curve all the way down Canyon following the sound of the church bells. Take a right on Paseo De Peralta and then left onto Alameida. Follow the ghost of the Santa Fe River tiptoeing past the quirky wooden angels all the way into downtown. Turn right at Galisteo with the cafe on the corner blasting throaty Sara Bareilles into the still sleepy air. Inside the shadowy staff sway and scrub counters, prepping onions, peppers and mushrooms for the daily omelette special.

Continue on past an Aladdin’s cave bursting with thousands of magical flying carpets. Pause at the doorway of a small, dark restaurant, silent and closed for business even as the morning sun dances on the yellow painted front door. Make a mental note to call later, make reservations.

Turn left on Water, away from the plaza. Right on Sandoval and duck into Burro Alley where there are some signs of movement. Step invisibly round the sleepy staff setting out umbrellas and wiping down bright colored plastic tablecloths. This is the Café Paris where, later in the day, you’ll enjoy the fluffiest French omelette in recent memory and a man in a straw hat and a striped shirt with a large French nose and an accordion will whisper to you that he’s actually from Ohio and you’ll barely believe him. At least he must be Quebecois, surely?

Now turn right past more silent, slumbering stores towards the plaza and the Palace of the Governors, still, as perhaps it was on a morning four hundred years ago.

Along the white Palace wall you notice subdued movement. An orderly line of several people come into focus. Everyone holds a folded cloth or rug waiting as they have been waiting hundreds of years for that same signal to spread their wares and begin the day's trading.

You leave the square and walk up through the dappled shade of the elongated garden next to the St Francis Basilica. Ahead of you, on the grass next to a wooden bench, lies a small splash of color. There, laid out as if on a bed in a morning bedroom is a complete outfit; thin cotton striped shirt; faded blue denims, a pair of shoes where the feet would be. On the bench two balled up socks next to each other.

A middle-aged couple scamper in through the backdoor of the church. On a whim you follow. Inside is Spain. Well, at least, there is Spanish. Everything said, everything sung, a whole community awake and singing. You are in a foreign land. Sit awhile trying to imagine what is being said, or rather intoned. It sounds so rich and full when the content is left to the imagination.

Ten minutes later use the full weight of your body to push the heavy front door open, just enough to squeeze through. Down the steps you go and round towards where you’ve come from. Follow your nose, walking uphill back past the sleeping adobe homes, the rolling foothills in the blue distance.

Walking up Canyon road the galleries still look less sophisticated and more themselves, like someone just woken up before they’ve had time to put on makeup.

Back in the dim interior of the low, sprawling adobe house everyone is still sleeping. Still sleeping! And a whole world has passed by.

Here is more of what you see when you wake up Santa fe.