This Land: Taking Books Far and Wide, on the Road Less Tra..

This Land: Taking Books Far and Wide, on the Road Less Traveled By

February 4, 2007, Sunday
By DAN BARRY (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 18, Column 1, 917 words
CIMARRON, N.M.

It takes its time in rousing, in shaking the winter morning chill from
its streamlined hull. Soon, though, mechanical hums and harrumphs are
disturbing the off-season silence in this Old West town, as the rural
bookmobile announces its readiness to roll.

Loaded down with a kind of lightness, a cargo of imagery and simile,
the bus of books grunts forward and turns west onto Highway 68. It
passes the turnoff for the St. James Hotel, where the gunfighter Clay
Allison was known for never killing a man unless he needed killing,
and eases into the serene remoteness of the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains.

Tucked amid the pinyon trees, close to the Rio Grande, live people in
out-of-the-way places who want to read what new intrigue John le Carré
has conjured. They want to read why Ann Coulter seems to reside in a
state of perpetual pique, or how best to care for their African gray
parrots, or what life's lesson Oliver Pig is learning this time.

These are the goods that Betty Palmer, librarian and grandmother,
trucks through the mountains, with a dedication as firm as her grip on
the oversize wheel. Gone are the nightmares she used to have about
driving a 13-ton bus through challenging terrain. She guns the motor
with a foot ensconced in a Skechers sneaker and says, "Books just
energize me."

In ascent, the bus pants a trail of diesel exhaust. In descent, its
pencil drawer slams against the back of the driver's seat. Up or down,
the fly swatter dangling from a hook swings like a metronome. But the
3,500 books, arranged on slanted shelves, never shift.

Ms. Palmer operates the bookmobile with two colleagues. Three Tuesdays
a month, one minds the Cimarron library while the other two set out
for parts of northeastern New Mexico far enough to require overnight
bags. On this trip, as is their custom, Ms. Palmer and another
librarian, Leroy Chavez, have rooms booked for two nights at a Super 8
motel in Taos.

She is 58, with blondish hair, eyeglasses and a compulsion to wipe the
book jackets with Windex. He is 54, with a wiry frame, a teaching
career ended by heart attack, and a fondness for eating M&M's on the
road. No, they both say, they never tire of the job, the travel or the
scenery.

Today's first of five stops is in a blink of a place called Rinconada.
Ms. Palmer steers the bookmobile into the parking lot of a health
clinic. A white-haired woman sits in a Honda Accord, waiting. "That's
Charlotte," the librarian says.

Ms. Palmer flicks three switches to start the generator, activate the
overhead lights and unfold steps to the ground. Then she opens the
door.

Instantly, rumbling bus becomes quiet library. People cock their heads
in that unnatural way seen only around book stacks, and Mr. Chavez
seals the contract between state and reader with stamps on the
checkout cards of books: MAR 06 2007.

Charlotte Champerlin, the patron who had been waiting patiently,
returns four novels that she has carried in a canvas bag. She is a
retired midwife who delivered a lot of babies and has had, she says,
"a good life." She chats with Ms. Palmer about an ailing mutual
friend, checks out several books and pauses a moment to explain the
importance of the bookmobile.

"I read a lot and I'm alone," Ms. Champerlin says, her bag filled with
fresh books. "When you're alone, you read a lot."

The bookmobile lumbers back onto Highway 68, its engine's roar so loud
that Ms. Palmer must breach librarian etiquette and raise her voice to
be heard. A 1998 Blue Bird, one of four the New Mexico State Library
has on the road, this bus has traveled nearly 165,000 miles but is now
on its final voyage in the name of literature.

The next week Ms. Palmer will receive a new, much quieter bus, one
with a bathroom and space for a microwave oven. She cannot wait, of
course, but with maternal affection she looks down at the wheel of
this old workhorse to share the assurance that "it's been a very good
vehicle."

The bookmobile makes its rounds - a Head Start school in Velarde, a
post office in Alcalde, another one in Dixon - all the while rolling
past a landscape almost beyond any book's words. Mesas that resemble
massive, futuristic tables. Bare apple trees with branches extended in
hallelujah praise. The Rio Grande, now calm, now churning.

Late on this day, a day on which 30 patrons will have entered and 173
books will have left, the bus comes to its last stop: the desolate
parking lot of St. Anthony Catholic Church in Peñasco, where an
American flag flaps not far from a compact cemetery. Soon cars pull up
to the large vehicle, looking like curious fish beside a whale.

In comes Sean Kelly, a United States Forest Service employee, who
needs a book about puppy care because his dog is about to have a
litter. In comes Helen Graves, who always brings a snack for the
librarians; this time it's two bananas and two cans of Dr Pepper. In
comes Theresa Velarde, who rejoices in the mobile library because its
contents "keep us busy on those long winter nights."

Suddenly, things are crowded in the bookmobile, now aglow in the
descending dusk. The patrons tilt heads and the librarians stamp
cards, all inside this bus humming like a living, breathing thing.

---
[Betty Palmer is the wife of Doug Palmer, Assistant Director of
Program at Philmont]