`Aren't you Someone's husband?" The question came as I queued for lunch on the film set, out on the prairies at the back of beyond. The question wasn't academic, for I was an extra, the lowest form of movie life, and extras have to wait until everyone else, down to the dogs in the street, gets fed. Seeing as it was a long time since breakfast - we'd been up at 5 a.m. that morning - I was very glad that I was Someone's husband and, indeed, knew the director, so that I could get at the very good food they have on films before the best of it was all scooped up.
Being a husband had, in fact, brought me to extradom and, indeed, to New Mexico, where Someone was acting in a western called The Hi-Lo Country set in the 1940s. If I'd thought of New Mexico at all before I went there, it was as a place of heat, deserts and cowboys. In fact, only the last named were to be discovered in that part of the state where we were located.
Santa Fe, the capital, is 8,000 feet up and in November, though we had some gloriously sunny days, there were flurries of snow and chilly nights. The air is thin there and dry, so that people can get tired, disorientated and dehydrated until they acclimatise, but fortunately I was one of the lucky ones who didn't suffer at all.
Maybe that was because I was on a permanent high, having found it one of the most exciting places it has been my good fortune to visit. The landscape - and I only saw a small part of it, for New Mexico is about four times the size of Ireland - is overwhelmingly beautiful. Great plains stretch off into the distance, cut by huge canyons, while snow-covered peaks rise on the horizons - this is where the Rocky Mountains, reaching all the way to Canada, begin under the name of the Sangre de Cristo range.
"The big sky" is an expression which anyone who has seen westerns will know. The reality is staggeringly beautiful, particularly at sunset when the mountains turn first dark red, then a rich almost royal blue, then black, lit from behind with a range of colours from vermilion to orange, with each individual cloud seeming to have its own internal light display. The great prairies sweep on and on, empty for mile after mile but for a few clumps of trees, which when you get nearer reveal themselves as surrounding a ranch. Fertile valleys, cut into the hills, are lush green and, in the autumn, orange, red and russet from the trees which line their rivers.
Along the main roads, it is true, there is the familiar sprawl of gas stations, fast food joints, motels and souvenir shops that proclaim a tourist area, and a large proportion of the population seems to live in mobile homes, but the state population is only 1.6 million, and the landscape is so huge that they intrude less than they would in a smaller place.
New Mexico is quite unlike anywhere else I had been in the United States. To begin with, in a country where any building more than 60 years old is apt to be labelled "historic", the signs of human habitation here are genuinely ancient. The Spaniards first came here in the 16th century, in search of mythical cities of gold, and Santa Fe boasts the oldest public building (The Palace of the Governors, 1610) and the oldest church (1625) in the United States.
But the Native American population, of course, far predates that and one can see buildings in the Indian pueblos that date back more than 1,000 years. Even that, in turn, is relatively new, for considerable prehistoric remains have been excavated that go back 11,000 years.
This is the land of adobe, the beige baked mud bricks traditionally used for house building, and Santa Fe is almost completely built in this style, though much of it is fake, wood or other materials being painted to look like the real thing. By American standards a small town, with a population of 60,000 or so, it has become in recent years one of the prime tourist destinations in the United States. In the summer, when the heat is intense and, by all accounts, its streets are jammed, it's somewhere I would want to miss, but between then and the start of the ski season (for the mountains around attract many winter sports enthusiasts) it was a pleasant place.
Its main attraction is its galleries, of which there are said to be more than 150 - Santa Fe ranks third in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles, as an art market. New Mexico's wonderful light first started to attract artists at the start of the century and, since the 1920s, the trickle has become a rush. One area alone, Canyon Road, has more than 100 commercial galleries and, though much of what is on view is inevitably terrible, we saw some wonderful things, albeit at astronomical prices. Best of all, perhaps, are the Indian pottery and textiles, some of them of stunning beauty. The public museums, too, are well worth a visit, showing the best of these and of the many artists from all over America who settled in the state over the years. The Museum of International Folk Art contains the largest collection of folk art in the world and there are two other galleries, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, devoted solely to native American work, while a new museum is given over entirely to the works of Georgia O'Keefe, the artist most associated with New Mexico.
Seventy or so miles up the - wonderful - road is Taos, also known as an artist's retreat. Walking round this pretty, rather gentrified small town it's hard to remember that this was once a pretty hairy place. To remind you, you can visit the home of Kit Carson, the legendary scout, and that of a governor who had his scalp carried round the town plaza by his killers during an Indian revolt.
Just outside the town is Taos Pueblo, an Indian village that must surely be one of the most beautiful places in America. Inhabited for 12 hundred years (though the lack of modern heating or lighting have driven many inhabitants to more modern homes nearby) it is dominated by a huge mountain that, on the day I visited, was covered in snow. Children played on a dusty square, down the middle of which a small clear stream flowed, the air was crisp and sunny and altogether the mood was idyllic.
Other excursions took me to Las Vegas - no, not that one, but a small place once known as "the wildest town in the wild west" and the haunt of Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Scarface Charlie, Stuttering Tom and other nefarious characters. There we stayed in the Plaza, a 19th century hotel that could have been in any Irish small town, except that the resident band in the bar played Mexican music and the drinkers wore stetsons and high-heeled boots.
I drove, too (hiring a car is essential in a state where public transport is minimal) through little Spanish villages where one half expected to see John Wayne step out of one of the houses. In one, I was approached by a villainously moustachioed character who looked like one of the Mexican bandits from The Magnificent Seven. Unsurprisingly he turned out to be as friendly as people everywhere in New Mexico seemed to be. When I told someone else, though, that I had been driving up dirt tracks and wandering in the hills, I was told to be careful, as people there are apt to shoot first and ask questions later of any stranger they see on their property.
And my film career? What larks to be out on the range for two days with real cowboys, who turned out to be great fun and great company! Watch out for me, but if you drop your sweets don't bend down to pick them up, or you might miss me.