Now pull up a seat, because there is a small white building up on the mountain behind you with an English novelist in it, and how he got there is one of the stranger journeys I know of.
David Herbert Lawrence was a coal miner's son from the English midlands who became one of the most famous and most scandalous writers of his century. Books banned. Obscenity trials. A man who spent his life being attacked for what he wrote about bodies and desire, and who spent most of that life wandering — Italy, Australia, Ceylon, Mexico — sick with tuberculosis and looking for somewhere that would let him breathe.
And in the nineteen twenties he came here, to a small ranch on the slope of that mountain, and something about this country got into him. He wrote afterward that New Mexico was the greatest experience he ever had from the outside world — that it changed him forever. Coming from a man who had seen most of the world, that is quite a thing to say about a hillside in New Mexico.
He died in France in nineteen thirty, at forty-four, and was buried there.
And that should have been the end of it. But his widow Frieda wanted him HERE, on this mountain, at the ranch. So years later she had him exhumed and cremated, and the ashes were shipped across the Atlantic and hauled up here to be put in a little shrine she built.
Now here is where it gets properly strange, and I will be straight with you that the accounts do not agree.
There are stories that the ashes went astray in transit. That they were left behind at a railway station. That there was a quarrel over who should have them, and that to end the argument once and for all, Frieda had the ashes tipped into wet concrete and made part of the altar itself — so that nobody could ever move him again.
Is that true? People up here have argued about it for the better part of a century, and there is no way now to settle it.
But I will say this much. A miner's son from Nottingham, who was hounded and censored and never really at home anywhere, ended up mixed into the fabric of a small white chapel on a mountain in New Mexico — in the one place he said made him feel most alive. Whether he is in an urn or in the concrete, he is not going anywhere.
Of all the places that man could have finished up, he finished up here. Look up the hill as we pass.
Photo: Vivaverdi · CC0