HERE IS MY FULL DISCLOSURE – I am in love with Maggie Fine. I’ve been so from the moment I saw her. You would be correct to think I am biased.
Ten years ago, she drove up the long driveway of my property at Shakespeare on the Hudson. She came there to scout a location for her film project. What she saw when she emerged from the clearing was a wide rolling lawn leading to the Hudson River, a wooden amphitheater, a rambling stone house, a very busy pool, a party of unruly actors dressed as pirates. And me, in a once-white shirt and pants, with a pink tie wrapped around my head.
The first thing she said to me was Who do you think you are, The Great Gatsby?
She never left. We were married six months later. When she got pregnant, she announced that our child needed to be born on the ley line of Santa Fe. It seemed prudent not to argue with her, so, on the day Trump got elected, we set off with Jake our golden retriever and whatever else we could fit in the truck.
Though I never quite understood what a ley line is, I did understand she felt compelled to return to her hometown 20 years after she left it. I reminded her that it also took Odysseus 20 years to return to solid ground. Without her influence, this magazine, grounded in this community, this land, this light, would not have happened.
My wife has many gifts. One of them is to ask the perfect question, a question that’s so patently obvious that most people assume it has already been asked. Settled. Over. That’s why you never hear that question, right?
To wit: she came into possession of a trove of government files that cast a new light on Watergate. After a furtive effort to unscramble this gift, she was even more perplexed. What were the burglars looking for anyway?
To find an answer, Maggie had to become a sleuth reporter, a library researcher, a crony of superannuated cops, a confidente of everyone, a chameleon actor and the relentless case closer for the skeptical, including an Emmy-award-winning writer who became her partner. She knew how to ask the great question, and the story that emerged turned out to be a drop-dead thriller. Warner Brothers agreed and they are creating a scripted TV series with her as the creator and Executive Producer.
As Roving Editor for this magazine, over a drink at the bar at El Farol, Maggie once made a new friend. I was sitting on the far side of them, straining to hear their conversation, when I heard her ask why can’t there be a Summer Walk on Canyon Road like the Farolito Walk?
There was no good answer, so Maggie sounded a clarion call, finding like-minded partners in a bevy of multi-talented moms and friends, wielding their charm, diverse skill base, domain knowledge, improvisation, and moxie to convince everyone who needed to be convinced to make this happen. They set land-speed records for how quickly a group, with no initial capital, can make something happen in this city. That’s the story you will read here.
That’s my wife. She asked a question, and we ended up with an immersive movable feast on Canyon Road starring a host of musicians, special food and conversations, and a wide welcome from stores and galleries: a whole community of old friends and new friends, dogs and children, encounters and overdue reunions, walking and art. An event that feels like it has been here forever.
Maggie, Mika, Emily and their friends conspired to make it happen. Their co-conspirator was the city of Santa Fe, this place of thin magic light that has earned it frequent visitations since creation. At different moments in the life of this city, this light has been the natural beacon, the constant, alongside the colliding forces of art, culture and diversity. This light, its relevance, and currency to the road itself, has wavered and at times been almost forgotten. But in asking the right question and getting the response from her friends, Maggie has helped this city remember what it always had, remember just how good, how true, the ongoing story is. It is at heart a simple idea. They made this happen first Wednesdays this summer, and it resonated everywhere.
In helping to bring Canyon Road back to its roots, with her feet now solidly grounded on dry land, a daughter of this city has come home. —OL
Tell us the origin story of the Canyon Road Summer Walk.
I had been spending some time doing interviews for Santa Fe Magazine’s special Canyon Road issue. It was on a cold February night; I was with Owen and he had left his camera at El Farol. We came back and decided to have a margarita – this was my great margarita idea! We were sitting at the barstool and I was talking to one of the servers about why it was so empty on a Saturday night, and how dead the road felt.
Then the guy on the stool next to me declared that there should be no cars on Canyon Road! I thought, who does this guy think he is? It turned out to be our future Senior Editor, Spencer Windes. He started talking about how so many great cities, of which Santa Fe is one, have these pedestrian spaces, whether permanent ones or areas that are closed at certain times.
My wheels started spinning and I thought, whoa, this is interesting, because we already have this precedent on Canyon Road once a year, called the Farolito Walk – as a community, we have a lifelong tradition of going to the road on Christmas Eve to walk. I had a light-bulb moment of why don’t we walk like this in the summertime? Why don’t we come to this beautiful road and walk?
As a local who was born and raised here, I know how Santa Fe feels about our traditions. I felt like this idea would strike a chord, in a very deep way, with everyone in our community. Because I was also part of the generation that grew up here in the ‘80s and ‘90s that was really pushed off Canyon Road.
How so?
There was a policy when I was a teenager that teens should not hang out on the Plaza or on Canyon, because big money had come into Santa Fe, and it had become an international mecca of tourism. We local kids were not to be seen or heard on this iconic road.
I had this sinking feeling that night at El Farol sitting on that barstool, and my sadness was, Where is everybody? Why is the most beautiful part of our town, that we all pay taxes for, why is nobody here? We should all be here!
It shouldn’t be dead. It felt like it was time for us to come home.
What were the first steps in pulling this off?
It started with a network of women. Last year, I’d been having dinner with an old friend, Brienne Rose. She had been working in, I think, Sweden. She was talking about how incredible their Christmas festivals were and asking why in Santa Fe, where we have this amazing town, why didn’t we get to celebrate Christmas the way they did in Sweden?
We came up with this idea of Winter Village at the Railyard, of bringing Santa Claus to the train. We wanted to be able to sell Christmas trees there, and we wanted to have a place where all the small businesses and vendors and children could all come together to feel Christmas-y without going to the mall. Then Brienne said, Okay, I’m doing this.
She wrangled this group of women who have incredible abilities. It was amazing to see how fast we put that market together last year with these women. So, when we decided to do Summer Walk, right after we secured the permits we did an email out to the Winter Village group where we said, calling all foxes, and galvanized this group of volunteers.
Who are they?
We are all moms – we’d meet each other at drop-off or pick-up from our various schools. In addition to Brienne, there’s Emily Leveille, who was my first partner. Emily is this dynamite international portfolio manager who works for Thornburg and has a passionate bend towards sustainability. She has lived all over the world and has brought her expertise and knowledge back here to Santa Fe. For instance, if you noticed all the sorting stations and glass stations and multiple volunteers to help us be aware of how we should throw away our trash, that’s Emily.
There’s Mika Van Winkle, who is actually now Santa Fe Magazine’s new Associate Publisher! When I met Mika I had no idea I was working with an international model with an amazing career in Tokyo, Paris, and New York, and who brought her knowledge of how to throw an incredible party to the floor. Mika was the first to come forward and right off the bat said, let me help you with Canyon Road relations.
There are really too many amazing women to mention who came together for this. We’re all bonded by our boundaries, by being moms with the desire to create a safe, beautiful neighborhood for our kids.
How did you get the city on board?
It was Emily who said, Okay, I got us a meeting with this woman Barbara Lopez at the city, we’ve got to go meet her. Barbara Lopez runs traffic and transportation for special events. Santa Fe is made up of special events. If you want to get anything done, you’ve gotta go through Barbara.
I think this is all in the timing; with my history here of coming home after being gone for 20 years, and seeing the city change since I was a kid. That gave me the insight, when we sat down with Barbara, to say, Canyon Road has been our main street for centuries. It was the main road to the river valley for the indigenous tribes. It was where a lot of families, 400 years ago, came to settle. It was modeled after Spain, and it was a rambla, a place of family gathering and connection and food. When El Farol opened in the 1880s, it was where the cowboys first came off the old Santa Fe Trail. It was where the art colony began in the ‘20s. It’s our story and it’s our history and now we are outsiders in our own town.
Barbara set up a Zoom with about 50 people. There was the fire department, police department, waste department, and food trucks. I remember there was a long silence because I said, We’re all outsiders now and we have the right, we are living in our own city, to go to our own road and walk up it without cars in the summer once a month. We have the right. There was a silence, and then it was Amanda from the police department who first said, I like it. I like this. And Barbara said, Okay.
It struck a chord. Soon after, both the Office of Economic Development and the Office of Arts and Culture stepped up to help with the funding.
I am aware that tourism is the economy of Santa Fe. I’m not trying to say this isn’t about tourism, but, no, this is about us. It’s about our community, as people who live here, having the right to go to our most beautiful road in our city, and some would say the world, and walk.
One thing that was magical about this is the reception we received when we went to meet with the businesses on the road, especially with Pilar Law, whom I call Mama Canyon. She helped us to gather many of the stakeholders of Canyon Road, just to pitch the idea to see if it was even possible. It was Tonya Carroll who said let’s do Wednesdays because it won’t interfere with first Friday, and you won’t piss off so many people! Then we were off to the races. The relationship started with about 30 different businesses and now we’re up to almost 80.
Was there an idea of what the event would look and feel like?
As an actor, I was in a show, Sleep No More, in New York, which was inspired by MacBeth. It was set in a city block where you walk through worlds; that’s what we’re doing with the Summer Walk, bringing that immersive experiential influence to Santa Fe to show us that we can live in the past in the present.
As I was figuring out the programming, what the experience of this walk would be, I was able to gather the people that I’d met through my work for Santa Fe Magazine. It was the magazine that had initially pulled together this incredible pool of talent and collaborations.
The concept was live music, food, and storytelling. We’ve been hosting everything from conversations with Ray Sandoval about the 100th anniversary of Zozobra, to our Secretary of State talking with the city’s former poet laureate, to St. John’s College deconstructing a John Donne poem for their freshman class at the Olive Rush Garden.
It’s not just about performing though, it’s about living. I’ve invited art classes to the road so that they would paint on canvases to bring back to life the idea that this is a place of creation, not just buying art. It is a place for buying art, but it’s also a place where people have created art. I want to bring the chess club out next year, I want people to play chess on the road. It’s all about bringing it to life.
For the look of the event I wrangled my friend the artist Nikki McCauley. I waitressed with her in LA 20 years ago, and I gave her the magnetic pull to come out here, so she showed up in June and made all the signs, the hand-made objects with this incredible home-spun New Mexico-influenced artwork. We’ve made this an anti-corporate homage to the 1970s.
How has it worked out?
Beautifully.
It’s been remarkable to see how many people have come – roughly 3000 to 5000 came in June, 2500 in July and August, and then this last one was about 4500.
As we all walked together without cars, the dynamic did change this summer. I heard stories from people saying, Oh, I found the guy who had dad’s tackle box and I ran into my college buddy from New York and we’re best friends again. Family members who hadn’t spoken in 20 years were reuniting and talking to each other again. I even ran into my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Sanchez!
I said to someone that the feeling of Summer Walk is like what it must be like to die. There’s this light where everything feels almost mystical, and everything is glowing and everyone you’ve ever loved or known is there. My child is running past me in the light, and my husband is giving a talk on farming.
My mother – I should say it’s her stories of Canyon Road that inspired me, of when she came here in 1974 – talking about a hitching post being in front of El Farol and talking about this place called Claude’s Bar. Then there was the Santa Fe Magazine story on painter Eli Levin and the Canyon Road bohemia that brought it all home. That is what opened the floodgates.
The generation here that are now in their 70s, they moved here in the ‘70s. They were part of an art colony. They remember Canyon Road before all of us kids from the ‘80s and ‘90s remember it. It was the place where you found the cowboys, and the Natives, and the East Coast girls, and Bob Dylan. This was the place where the world collided, the place where all the tribes met.
I’ve always had a romantic fascination with Canyon Road, and even as a little kid I knew I wanted to work there. At 15 I went in and got my first job there, as a busser at Geronimo.
Canyon Road might be the oldest main street in North America. I think main streets are main because they are where the people gather, where the people come together. In the last 40 years people have become more siloed by their cars and their screens. There is a silo that has occurred that has left us empty. We’re all longing a little bit. One of my favorite quotes from the summer was by a woman named Gay Dillingham, who said, You have filled an artery. This is filling an artery of Santa Fe. And that’s what Canyon Road is, it’s an artery.
I think, if a lot of communities remembered their main street, and came home to their main street, and celebrated each other, and walked together, that it could affect a lot. Our community has history on this road. That’s why Canyon Road works for us. People’s families are still on Canyon Road. It’s our histories for those of us who have been here long enough, or our parents, or generations and generations – all have history on Canyon Road. It is a road that’s meant for all of us to gather.
It’s also about the act of walking. Taking on this project made me question the word walk. What is a walk? Oh, a walk is a pilgrimage. What is a pilgrimage? A pilgrimage means to walk in reverence. I recall something that N. Scott Momaday said in Santa Fe Magazine about how we must revere our land. We mustn’t walk in shame over what we’ve done to it. It doesn’t want that, it wants to be revered. It wants us to walk in beauty.
When we interviewed Charlie Dorame, the former Governor of the Tesuque Pueblo, he said that Canyon Road was where you would go to pilgrimage. Again, what is a pilgrimage? This was the Acequia Madre, where the water flows. It’s the heart of this city of gold, a term that refers to this thin magic light. The photographer Kurt Markus said that he had photographed all over the world, in the most beautiful cities in the world, the most beautiful people in the world. He said that Santa Fe is the only place where he doesn’t mess with the light in the dark room.
Painters have come here for centuries, and they don’t mess with the light. We who come here, whether it was 400 years ago, 1000 years ago, or last year, we come for the light, too. The light is why we’re here, all of us. There’s something about walking together in this magic hour that occurs in the summertime in Santa Fe.
On Canyon Road specifically?
On Canyon Road. She’s the great performer. She’s the star, Canyon Road. She speaks for herself.
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