DUE EAST

Thirteen years ago I packed up my truck, merged onto I-40 and headed east to Nashville. To East Nashville, in fact. I was going to live the life of a starving artist. Original, right? I know. But if I couldn't get out of New Mexico, I didn't know what I was going to do. No future, no formal education, I really didn't have much going for me. Nothing to lose. Music was my chance and I took it.

Served me well for a while, too. Then the music died and something else took its place. The next obsession.

Silversmithing. In Tennessee, of all places.

I thought I was done with New Mexico. I'd moved on, gotten out, escaped the Land of Entrapment. I was wrong.

Turns out I needed the distance. Tennessee is what let me see New Mexico. Where there was no grass to be greener, there was only dirt, and the dirt was alive now.

The railroads. The landscape. The history. The jewelry.

The Jewelry.

The turquoise in every gas station between Gallup and Albuquerque — I never gave it a second thought. Nobody who grew up there did. That's just what tourists buy.

Well. I became a tourist.

So I moved back. Every case and book I could look through, I looked through, studying the artists through their work. I was reading the story written on the surface of each piece. How it was built, every little decision, why whoever made it left something in and took something else out. The symbols. The file marks. The patina. It was as if I was sitting next to them at the bench.

Then I went further back. The history of the West, the turquoise, the mines. My own family. It was all woven together and it blew me away. My family had a hand in the story that made New Mexico what it is.

Somewhere in there I stopped being a tourist. What I came back for wasn't sitting in a case or a book anymore. It was in my hands. That comes with you.

Last year, I packed up my car with my family, merged onto I-40 again, this time with a few things I didn't have before.

— Words by Chad Barela, silversmith