"Easter Eve in the Sangre de Cristos" by Richard Holinger

Saturday, April 21, 6:30 a.m. Bishop’s Lodge

Easter weekend in Sangre de Cristos Mountains: “Blood of Christ.”

It is the mid-1980s. My wife and I are on spring vacation from our careers as parochial high school teachers; even though we are both agnostic, we lead our students to Mass once a month in a gymnasium or abbey church, respectively, and fake our prayers and responses. That does not mean, however, we are not spiritual.

            This essay was written soon after our trip, culled from journal entries written at the time. Reading what I wrote nearly forty years ago, I discover a theme: the vast gulf between the grandeur, community, and richness of Bishop’s Lodge, the mountains, and the dude ranch, contrasted with the poverty, anger, and isolation of the drunk whose portrait appears in the essay’s last paragraph.

            Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I drove through a shallow green stream emptying into a manmade pond, then passed an outdoor pool and tennis courts. In the office, from the super-realism school of art, a blue-jeaned American Indian sat still as stone—because it was. Bishop’s Lodge, a year-round family resort for campy families, sits in the hills ten minutes north of Santa Fe.

We were led to our room in one of the two-story buildings by a man wearing the requisite Western checked wool shirt. When we walked in, our nostrils filled with a pine forest imported by wall and ceiling paneling, although the long, overhead beams looked faux. From the window, we saw a forest of long-needled white pine climbing up and over a hill.

We went to the dining room for the buffet meal (included), and on our return found a fruit basket on the dresser along with multiple pamphlets printed in walnut-colored ink on heavy, burlywood paper:

            lodge and trail maps

guest information

            a directory of services

Santa Fe—an ancient meeting ground

birds—a field check list

            I’m recording these events in my journal while sitting in the “Library,” as I don’t want to wake Tia, still sleeping. The room’s moniker must derive from its two shelves of musty mysteries. When a security guard opens the lodge’s front door, I watch as he walks over to the front desk and leans on it.

            “I’m gettin’ tired uh this cold,” he says to the clerk. Because I stepped outside for a few minutes, I guess it to be about 32 degrees. “I live here. I have to go around every forty-five minutes to an hour and check everything. You get tired of the cold.”

            A man maybe in his sixties strides in dressed in denim from neck to boot and hacks out an insistent smoker’s cough. A girl, maybe seventeen, wrapped in down, spills her coffee trying to manipulate a brass pitcher twice the size of the dented, fire-blackened cliché that cowboys pour black water from after taking it off a dawn’s campfire.

Seventeen: “I didn’t know how fast it was going to come out. Poured it all over my hand.”

Smoker (in a smoker’s chalky drawl): “You’re not supposed to do that. Where you from?”

Seventeen: “Dallas.”

Smoker: “We’re from Corpus Christi.”

Seventeen: “We ate at the Santa Anna Café last night. Really good.”

Smoker: “What you get in Santa Fe’s not New Mexican food. Here they glop everything

together. In Texas, they separate things.”

Seventeen: “If I’m gonna get fat, it’s gonna be on good food.”

Smoker (chuckling): “In another coupla weeks, all the trees’ll be bloomed out. Spring’s a little late this year.”

Seventeen: “These occasional snowfalls impede the progress.”

Smoker: “I heard they had snow Memorial Day here one year.”

            A woman enters wearing a turquoise and tan shirt, turquoise pants, and tan canvas shoes. She speaks to the desk clerk about the spelling of “Sarah,” something about the “h.” The Texan in blue jeans clomps around the lobby. When a housemaid walks through, he thanks her for making up his room the way he likes it.

            “I knew you were coming,” she answers.

            A short man in khakis comes in and tries pouring coffee.

            “She scalded her hand yesterday,” Seventeen says about Turquoise/Tan.

            “Oh, yes,” the short man says with a French accent. “That eez very painfool.”

            The voices blend together.

            “It’s like falling off a horse. You have to get back on.”

            “That’s a heck of a way to start the day.”

            “The good news was there’s snow.”

            “Oh, yes, that eez better than butter, better than grease. I am glad you didn’t blister.”

            “Yesterday a man with a stick came around and knocked the snow off the flowers in the window boxes.”

            “A morning like this makes you want to ride out and see what’s over the next hill.”

            The Texan’s wife has called the desk, and the clerk delivers the message that she wants him to bring her coffee.

            “She wants room service,” Smoker laughs and coughs, then nearly burns himself pouring coffee. “This pitcher’s twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Always had that problem.”

            Later that morning, it takes an hour to drive seventeen miles if the miles are up muddy mountain roads. A friend who lives out here once told us people describe distance by time, not mileage, which now makes sense. When we called the Ski Basin, they told us they were fewer than twenty miles from Bishop’s Lodge, that tickets and rentals were half-price, and that they had eight inches of new powder yesterday. “Let’s do it,” I said. “It’s only twenty minutes away.” We didn’t know we needed a translation from Illinois miles, where the loftiest peak might be a bridge over an expressway, or where the curviest section of a road demands only a slight raising or lowering of your thumb on the steering wheel.

            The roads here demand two hands on the wheel, gear shift in D-2. We leave with a rented gray Chrysler Aries K and arrive with one caked in sepia. All the way up, the car pants; it’s out of shape, never trained on hills, much less mountains. Tia and I feel cruel riding it, whipping it along at ten miles an hour. I sense any minute the car will drop out from under us, surrender to gravity, foam at the grill.

            An ancient Volkswagen Beetle passes us.

            The skiing turns out to be worth the car’s exhaustion. Thick evergreen forests carpet the mountains except where ski trails leave jagged, white rips. Because so few people have turned out today, only one of about ten chair lifts is running. A young, blond Apollo helps us with boot sizes and pole lengths as if he woke up this morning only to serve us. We hear other assisting youths speaking Swedish, German, and French.

            Riding the lift, we notice each needle on Douglas firs and spruce trees is blanched with snow. From the mountain’s top, the lower range looks like white chins with three-day-old emerald beards. Snowcats clank right of way. Tall, slender skiers who grew up in buckled boots swish by. After passing a few hundred trees, I need to rest, thigh muscles rebelling against an activity I haven’t practiced for more than a decade.

On short skis, with few skills and little talent I can pretend to be an accomplished skier. After a few intermediate runs, we look down an expert slope, a snow-covered sea filled with rounded-off icebergs. We turn back to a more familiar slope and take a last run.

That afternoon, back at Bishop’s Lodge, we walk into their corral wearing tennis shoes, corduroys, and windbreakers, dressed for a cruise on a billionaire’s yacht. When a family in blue jeans, pointed cowboy boots, and curled cowboy hats passes us sitting on a log bench, I ask, stupidly, “You here to ride?”

I can imagine the parents asking themselves, “We have to be on a trail for two and a half hours with this nitwit who might ask tourists on Liberty Island if they’re here to see the statue?”

Turns out they live in Texas, but not from there originally. I’m slowly learning that Texans go to New Mexico for the same reason Illinoisans vacation in Wisconsin.

“You like Texas?” I try again.

“It took adjustment,” the mother begins. “You know I can go to the supermarket at 6:30 in the morning and every woman will have makeup on! And no one’s wearing blue jeans. I lived in New York City before that.”

Two cowgirls (cow women?) in their early thirties buckle on saddles, help us onto our horses, and fit our toes into stirrups. For me, the aroma of horses and saddles and stables measures up to any other reason for riding. Sure, we see beautiful country as we lope along a foot-wide trail halfway up one side of a valley: trees grow pine needles longer than yellow Ticonderoga pencils; the wind whirling through tree limbs sounds sweeter than a children’s choir; the stream below us chuckles at a running joke. Tia holds onto the saddle’s horn, more secure, at least in her mind, than the reins; later she’ll tell me she hadn’t expected a trail mere inches from a cliff face, expecting dude ranch hands would choose flat, perhaps macadam, roads—clean, shitless surfaces. Each time I call out for Tia to turn around so I can take her photograph, having taken one hand from a fistful of mane, she smiles through her terror. Her horse, Traveler, the deadest of the lot, lags behind, only to have his guilt overcome inertia when he surges ahead at a gallop to catch up with us, Tia spread out over the bolting equine like a saddle blanket.

Meanwhile, my horse, Sundance, hates his career, especially when working with tourists like me. When I get on, he shakes his head, coughs like the Texas smoker, and then, without my urging, asking, or wanting him to, clops over to the water trough.

“Let’s clear up one detail before we leave,” he seems to say. “You are not in charge.”

            “Is it okay if Sundance has some water?” I call to a cowgirl as if I can do something about it.

            “Sure,” she says, “long as he doesn’t get his head caught in the fence rails.”

            The ride turns out to be peaceful, generally, although Sunset confirms the pecking order when leaving the corral, brushing my leg against a gatepost he could easily have avoided.

            “You think that hurts,” he surely thinks, “wait until we’re on that narrow path up in the woods and I run your knee into three tree trunks and four protruding boulders!”

            After the ride, we drive into Santa Fe to see a movie at the El Paseo Theater. Arriving five minutes before the movie starts, we find the theater three-quarters full, but the first four rows offer heavy, plush, velour sofas; we sit on the only one vacant, first-row center. Black choir spirituals spill out the theater’s speakers followed by cowboys yodeling. Babies behind us cry. Thrown candy clicks off metal chair backs.

The lights go down. With our legs outstretched and our heads at an eighty-degree angle upward, we’re transported to the Florida swamp country of Marjorie Rawlings’ Cross Creek.

            After the movie, walking out into the cool night, we spot an ice cream parlor across the street. We’re starting diets when we get home, not now, so we launch into homemade butter pecan ice cream and a flavor called Blackout Cake with the chocolate density of a golf ball.

            “This is a funny town,” Tia says between mouthfuls. “In some ways, yes, it’s real cultural. There’s a chorus or something here, right? But in other ways, it’s real…”

            “Primitive?” I suggest.

            “Something like that.”

            Before the movie, we walked around town looking for somewhere to mail the postcards we wrote. A man, seemingly very drunk, leaned into the road and waved at a police car. “C’mon over here,” he yelled again and again. “Come and talk to me.” We turned a corner and a block away found a mailbox. When we returned, the man and the police car had disappeared, the street again quiet as a tomb.

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared in Iowa Review, Hobart, Chautauqua, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best of the Net nominee; this year’s work has been nominated twice for Best Microfiction 2025. Best American Essays 2018 recognized his Thread essay as “Notable.” Books include North of Crivitz (poetry) and Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (essays).