New Mexico doesn't let go of you the way other places do.
The highway cut through 487 miles of the state — past Tucumcari and Santa Rosa, through Albuquerque and Gallup, climbing mesa country where the sky sits on the horizon like something painted there on purpose. The people who drove this stretch in the middle of the last century describe it the same way: alien and enormous and somehow familiar. The desert has a way of stripping things down to what's essential. The road through New Mexico did the same.
Out here, you find out what you're actually made of.
