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Towns
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Santa Fe, NM
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6 min
Adobe at first light
Mud walls, blue doors and the slow start of a long drive west.
Mile
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Santa Fe wakes up slowly. The walls are the colour of the ground they were dug from, and at six in the morning they hold the night's cold like a stone holds water.
We left from here because every long drive needs a quiet first mile. Coffee from a window, the truck loaded the night before, and a map with the route drawn in pencil so it could change.
Mud, straw and patience
Adobe is not a style so much as a recipe: earth, water, straw, sun. Walls get a fresh coat every few years, and the town looks a little softer each time. Nothing here is perfectly straight, and that is the point.
Build with what is under your feet, and the house will look like it grew there.
The first mile
By eight the light had turned from blue to gold and we were on the road west. Twelve hundred miles to go, and nowhere in particular to be.
Words and route by Wren Hollis
Joshua Tree, CA
8 min
The trees that keep time
Joshua trees grow about an inch a year. We sat with them until dark.
Amboy, CA
4 min
A sky with nothing in the way
No towns, no moon, and the Milky Way all the way down to the creosote.
Kingman, AZ
11 min
The last windmill on the ranch road
A fourth-generation rancher, a pump that still turns, and very little rain.
The Sunday Dispatch
Get the next stop on Sunday
One letter a week. Free, and easy to leave.