mountain walk

That is me in the middle. Donnie, a cousin, is on the left and Kenny, my brother, is on the right. Tippy, the dog seems to be wondering why my shoelace is untied.

I was born in Colorado but I grew up in Northern New Mexico.  My brother and I would often return to Colorado for a part of summer to work on an uncle’s farm when his  labor was scarce.  I liked to stack hay the best because of how it smelled and because they would let me drive the tractor; but threshing time with all the neighbors and mountains of fried chicken and corn on the cob was great also.  We spent a lot of time in Colorado—but I was raised in Northern New Mexico.

That distinction is important because it means that what I know of this place was gained by osmosis, by daily encounters with the people of San Juan, Abiquiu, Chamita, San Ildefonso and Santa Clara; with the nuns who ran the rural public schools and the Presbyterians who ran the hospitals and clinics; with neighbors whose horses we would catch at the end of the day so that we could ride them home bareback rather than take the bouncy and sputtering school bus.

If the horses were not there and we had to walk home from school we would go to the river, throw a tin can or a bottle as far upstream as we could and then see who could hit it from the bridge with a rock as it floated by. On one of those walks home, a car with a strange license plate stopped and the driver asked directions. We acted like we knew, though we didn’t, and we sent him off to somewhere truly believing that anywhere in New Mexico was better than where he had come from.

We learned to swim in the acequias and under the old bridge at Oñate’s San Gabriel. And sometimes we would sneak into the kivas and marvel at what we saw, all the while feeling the excitement that kids feel when their curiosity prevails over the thoughts of punishment they know will come.

We did the chores of every child: we fetched water from a shared two-bucket well where, if we happened to pull in a frog or a dead bat or an unfortunate lizard, our mother would make us return for another ‘cleaner’ bucket. We cut wood for the kitchen stove and lived with the fact that the open door of our outhouse faced that of our neighbor.

We played chicken in the arroyos after a summer rain. Standing in water that reached our ankles we would wait for the four foot walls of flood that we could hear roaring down upon us and then quickly climb to safety and watch the debris of a time before landfills rush off to the river.

The boulders along the Rio Grande were our playgrounds and, with our fingers, we traced the lines of the petroglyphs chipped into the black basalt by the ancient ones and looked around to see if they were watching.

Our dad would take us along to his job and while he bulldozed pumice into piles that would then be hauled off to Santa Fe and molded into building blocks, we collected shiny black obsidian, explored the hundreds of ruins scattered along the Pajarito Plateau, and tracked deer through an early snow.

On weekends the entire family, kids in back, parents in front, climbed into the pickup to ‘go for a ride’ to the villages of the Sangres and try to get our tongues around their names: Peñasco, Cundio, Terrero, Picuris, Tecalote, Chamizal, Costilla. . . Sometimes we would stop by the trading post at Bobcat Crossing and get a popsicle or enjoy a cheese enchilada at a small restaurant in Galisteo known only by the name hand painted on a sign fixed to a broken gate: it said, ‘Restaurant.’

Occasionally we would go even further afield to watch the pronghorns along highway 285 and our dad would tell us old jokes about how much the wind blew at Cline’s Corners.  “There is nothing between Cline’s Corners and the South Pole but a barbed wire fence,” he said. “And it has blown down.”

As we got older and more mobile, we camped in the sandy hills along the Camino Real and told ghost stories. We fished the streams far up into the Jemez and watched the Basque sheepherders dock the newborn along the Rio Los Pinos. We trapped minnows from the waters of Valle Grande and sold them for bait to the families that fished the reservoir at Santa Cruz.

Long before the Taos Valley became a national treasure for skiers, we summited Wheeler Peak on long wooden snowshoes borrowed from the Forest Service at Twining and in the summer we climbed the Truchas and called out the names of all the peaks and streams and villages we could see laid out before us.

We could not wait for the taste of ripening apples, the sight of yellowing cottonwoods and the aroma of roasting chiles in the Fall. Nor could we wait for the snow squalls that danced along the face of the mountains—an announcement to the villages that it was time to hunker down for the Winter. Neither, for that matter, could we patiently wait for Spring and the blossoming of columbine and wild iris and the chance to be the first to move back into the mountains. And, Summer, with its special kinds of enchantments—long hikes, long swims, picnics with friends, and the sweat of physical labor—could not come too soon.

There was no favorite time of year for us, just as there wasn’t a fence we couldn’t cross or a gate we couldn’t pass through. Growing up in Northern New Mexico was nurturing of body, mind and spirit. It gifted us with curiosity and energy. It was beautiful and it was home.