Driving out of Santa Fe, my girlfriend Anjali and I made one final stop to see the New Mexico state capitol building. We stopped in the middle of the street – no traffic anywhere – and looked around expectantly.
“It’s supposed to be right here!” Anjali said.
Photo Credit: Corbis
The capitol, we concluded, must be the adobe to the right behind a row of suburban trees. That it was made of adobe was not the surprising thing. Everything in Santa Fe is made of adobe – houses, office buildings, freeway overpasses. The modest brown rectangles everywhere charm the eye and create a strange anachronism: I am driving a Hertz rental car through an 18th Century pueblo.
(Imagine the titanic battles over building materials that must have been waged on the city planning commission. “Adobe bus shelters for the people!” one cried. “Keep the fire hydrants red!” another yelled.)
No, the surprising thing about the state house is how easily I could mistake it for, say, a medical-supply company or a Presbyterian church. Even when we drove around and got a full-frontal, it lacked everything I expect from a seat of government. No marble, no Greek columns, no sky-piercing dome, just a two story building with a flat top. There wasn’t even the obligatory obelisk to remind the legislators to stick it to somebody today.
This made me so curious that I did a little research. Did you know that state legislators in New Mexico aren’t paid? In odd-numbered years they meet for 60 days a year, and on even-numbered years it’s only 30. This is shocking to a resident of California, where we recently had to pass laws to make the legislators not spend their entire careers in Sacramento. Oh, and our governor is a multimillionaire movie star who made his name by flexing the biggest muscles in the tiniest bikini.
The motto of New Mexico is “It Grows As It Goes,” which, like the statehouse, is curiously unstatesmanlike, so un-Manifest Destiny. It’s like designing a whole city to be the color of earth. They might as well have painted the phrase “Easy Does It” or “Hakuna Matata” on the signs at the Arizona border.
Interesting.