{"id":71291,"date":"2017-04-26T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mellzah.com\/?p=71291"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:12:20","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:12:20","slug":"the-turquoise-trail-to-tinkertown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mellzah.com\/index.php\/the-turquoise-trail-to-tinkertown\/","title":{"rendered":"The Turquoise Trail to Tinkertown"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think I’ve ever been cagey about how badly the winters in Seattle affect me: the days themselves are surpassingly short and spots of sunlight among the nigh-constant cloud cover are fleeting at best. From the moment the holiday lights snap off in January, I feel dragged down emotionally and physically. Light therapy doesn’t help, exercise doesn’t help, a healthy diet doesn’t help, a junk food diet doesn’t help. I don’t want to write, I don’t want to make art, I don’t want to go outside. All I want to do is sleep, like a form of hibernation for the modern useless person. And this winter has been particularly difficult, as it’s been hard to feel hopeful about, well, anything<\/em> since late January.\u00a0 So this year for my birthday, instead of throwing a massive party like last year<\/a>, I wanted to get out of town for a while, feel the sun on my face, experience an emotion other than anxiety and despair. I decided that the timing would be ideal to head back to New Mexico to do all of the things we ran out of time for on the Harpies road trip last summer<\/a>, plus a plethora of other things across a larger swath of the state that were entirely out of reach previously.<\/p>\n

My first stop was Tinkertown, via the “singing road” on eastbound Route 66 outside of Tijeras. I’d read that as you drive over it, you hear the strains of “America the Beautiful”, but only if you’re driving the speed limit of 45mph. Neither Jason nor I believed it would be all that impressive, potentially just a series of rumble strips that you could convince yourself was “America the Beautiful” if you were singing it in your head at the same time, the same way you could click a pen in time to Katy Perry’s “Firework” and hear different tones out of that pen click, that it was all about the power of suggestion. Nope.<\/p>\n