Saturday – A Trip To Town – Wine, Art, Architecture

Bosque art afficionados celebrate galleries, sculpture, one another in harvest season

Clifton – Mayor Fred Volcansek tried his best to explain to the three stone-faced political appointees on the Public Utilities Commission last week.

“We've got a half million dollars of promotion on the line,” he said.

People are welcome; here is a destination worthy of a weekend jaunt. "You're trying to turn us into an industrial area," he said.

There is something new and different in a Victorian-era ranching town on the river – in the woods – el Bosque. It's not the buildings, the people or the art. It's the attitude.

Art galleries in restored native stone buildings, people coming to town to the picture show, sitting watching each other promenade in a leisurely passagiata with wine glasses in their hands praising and appraising works of art, artfully restored buildings, an ambience worthy of the $25 entry fee that buys a bottomless glass of local wine, finger food, conversation.

On a Saturday night in the 80's – the eighties of the nineteenth century – one would have seen a similar sight, throngs come to town, strolling the sidewalks, meeting, greeting one another, window shopping.


The greatest victory, Save Our Spaces organizer Walt Human told his dejected troops following the undesirable decision about routing a transmission line through highly prized scenic territory instead of down the path of an existing high wire array, is that the people came out of their houses and perceived themselves as members of a group of neighborhoods strewn across a fabulous landscape in the valley of the woods, the Bosque.

That was on Wednesday. On Saturday, they held a little reunion on Clifton's Avenue D and meandered in and out of art galleries and the store fronts of local wineries and restaurants.