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For weeks now at five o’clock or so most days, my wife’s been saying, with an incredulous look on her face, “Man, I am so knocked out!” Lately it’s been catching and I feel it, too. At first I blamed my nap lust on the ragweed. I tend to leave it growing much too long because, well hey, we’re in a frickin desert and it’s green, you know. But that wasn’t it. I cut most of it down and nothing changed.

The wet summer in northern New Mexico has caused every bush, tree, shrub, flower, and weeds of every kind to flourish. The place is so green, it hurts. Everything is throwing out pollen. You can’t escape. That has to be the deal, right? But it isn’t where we landed.

A couple of nights ago, she said she felt not only tired but “funny.” Again, I knew the drill but had a sense it had something to do with our lives. Her life, my life, maybe everybody’s. Then tonight, more words: “I’m so exhausted,” she said, “like I’ve just been through something so enormous…”

“Yes! Me, too!” I said. “For me, I think it was my past. I lived it and it’s over, gone, behind me.”

“It’s like the end of an era,” she said.

“The end of empire,” I offered. “The American empire. How we live, the old ways breaking down.” Of which there are signs abounding, but it was more than that, much more. “The end of an era, absolutely.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant or what to pin it on, but that felt right, like something far away was over and the news had only just now washed up on the shore.

I used to want to sleep a lot because I was depressed. Now I want to sleep because I know I did a good thing (what?), but it wore me out. I used to be afraid of nightmares. Now I want to sleep to see what speaks to me in dreams.

We had an amazing visit at the Kit Carson Museum in Rayado, but I just had to see what was around the bend a few miles beyond on NM 21. As it turned out, this was: Miami Lake, a private reservoir just west of the unincorporated “town” of Miami itself. According to Wikipedia, Miami was named for Miami, Ohio—how exceedingly odd—and judging from the results of a Google image search, I did just fine turning around at the lake.

This is a very lightly settled area of New Mexico, which if you think about it is really saying something. I could have taken a nap in the road. The sight of so much water is disorienting, too—where am I, you know?

Perfect. Utterly classic. The Kit Carson Museum in Rayado, New Mexico is basically a restored working hacienda. All the rooms are set up like they would have been in the 1840s with period furniture, buffalo hide rugs, everything authentic. Not pristine at all, but dusty and dim, a little bit disordered. It looks like the residents just stepped out. I was so impressed.

Philmont Scout Ranch, just up the road, has owned the property since the 1950s. It’s a powerfully peaceful place. One reason is the staff, mainly scouts and local female hires in the summer, who wear period costumes and give private guided tours. These people know their history and speak in complete sentences. That threw me off a bit at first, but now I get it. They’re working in a replica hacienda, right? Well, it’s 1848 and no one has a phone! No one anywhere was scrolling through his messages or listening to music. These fine young men and women look you in the eye and pay attention. It was heavenly, I tell you. Kudos to Philmont and the people of New Mexico. One damn fine undertaking all around, and all completely free.

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That’s the way it looked on May 17, the last time we were out there. Better than the way it looked, to tell the truth, but close enough. The location is south of Cimarron, somewhere between the Philmont Scout Ranch headquarters and Rayado, on a stretch of NM 21 that follows the original Santa Fe Trail from St. Louis. Gives me goosebumps just to be there. It probably looked the same in the 1840s except for having a lot more grass.

We’re going back on Sunday. It’s my birthday and that’s what I picked. A fine lunch at the St. James Hotel in Cimarron is part of the deal, but first we have to get there. (See this post about another time we went.) The drive out from Taos is beautiful and just a little dangerous. You’re in the mountains the whole time. From where we live at 7,056 feet, it’s over Palo Flechado Pass at 9,109 feet (2,776 m), down switchbacks and hairpin turns to an immense mountain valley, a lake, a long wooded canyon with a river rushing through, and a slow descent to the edge of the plains. It takes about an hour and a half to get to Cimarron. There is no such thing as “traffic.”

The St. James Hotel itself is something of a hoot and will make you think you died and went to cowboy heaven. Jesse James used to stay there, and so did Wyatt Earp. Buffalo Bill Cody was a regular. The place is haunted by the ghosts of patrons gunned down in the bar. The salt and pepper shakers at the restaurant tables sit in holders made of welded spurs and horseshoes.

Weather and karma permitting, we’ll end up at the Kit Carson Museum in Rayado. (Check out this review.) The post office in Rayado closed in 1919, so the museum isn’t hard to find, if you catch my drift. Land baron Lucien Maxwell established the place in 1848 but found it hard to attract settlers due to Indian raids. The next year he lured Kit Carson out from Taos by giving him a ranch and things improved. Free land, my god! That might have worked for me, except for getting shot at.

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