My Secret Place - March 2010
By Jenny Gabrielle, as told to Devon Jackson
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My secret place is in Santa Fe. It’s the part of the Santa Fe River near Guadalupe Street and across from Del Charro Saloon. It’s the riverbed, and the area under the bridges. It’s very beautiful and hidden, and right in the center of Santa Fe. It feels subterranean, and sometimes there are homeless people down there. Usually, they’re grateful to see you. They’re sort of protecting the place. But it can be dangerous.
I discovered it on my lunch break about five years ago. I really needed a place to be alone, and I was really craving water. I’m drawn to water, and I always missed that as a child. I missed out on lushness, and there’s a bit of it there. It’s a refuge. I usually go down there about once a month. It changes with each season.
In terms of taking other people down there, you don’t really know if they’ll get it. But I went down there with my husband once. We started chasing each other and behaving like kids. We ran into some teens who were smoking and hanging out. We kind of freaked them out.
I’m drawn to bridges. In Los Angeles, there’s something unique about bridges. You’ll find all this plant growth under the bridges. There’s a place near CBS Studios and the Los Angeles River that’s totally secluded, and it has this overgrown patch—way more overgrown than any part of the bridge over the Santa Fe River. It’s the weirdest place you can find.
I wouldn’t go down to the one in Santa Fe at night, but I don’t get nervous about going down there during the day. And it’s usually OK in daylight because there are other people around. Also, you have a couple tricks you develop, mainly making your presence known, but keeping your distance between you and the other people if you don’t know what their deal is. Once you have that down, you can explore. So you just have to be careful and be aware.
The other thing that’s cool is that the place can have that otherworldly, Gypsy vibe to it. You go in and lose sight of the city, and then you see a homeless person. It’s a weird, clandestine, Hunchback of Notre Dame kind of thing sometimes, like when he ends up in the thieves’ camp. And like that line from Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere.”
Actress Jenny Gabrielle divides her time between Santa Fe and Los Angeles and has appeared in Georgia O’Keeffe, In Plain Sight, and in the upcoming film The Dry Land.
