A Land Fallen In On Itself

Preface

This essay was written during an earlier chapter of Valles Caldera, when the former Baca Ranch had recently entered public ownership and was being managed through the Valles Caldera Trust. Since then, the preserve has changed significantly. It is now Valles Caldera National Preserve, managed by the National Park Service, with a new long-term planning process shaping how access, restoration, cultural resources, grazing, science, and public experience will be carried forward.

Because of that, the piece below is not a current description of management. It is a historical and personal account from a threshold moment, when the valley was moving from private land into a new form of public stewardship.

It also remembers something that feels increasingly rare in the Jemez: a relational system of place. The Trust era was imperfect, experimental, and sometimes conflicted, but it held a kind of immediacy between land, worker, story, repair, access, and responsibility. People knew one another through the road, the cabin, the rut, the fishing beat, the sleigh ride, the broken window, the water, the work.

As public systems become more formal, and as the language of stewardship becomes more bureaucratic, local stories can fall out of view. What is protected on paper may still lose the relationships that once helped people understand why protection mattered. Across the Jemez, many places are being strained, simplified, loved too hard, managed from a distance, or degraded by the loss of direct local memory.

Online Bloom is interested in that memory.

We welcome historical perspectives, family stories, field notes, photographs, oral histories, and reflections that help tell the deeper story of the Jemez Mountains and surrounding communities. Official histories matter. But so do the remembered ones: the view from the highway, the work truck, the cabin, the stream, the fence line, the fire scar, the road that appeared overnight, the place that opened after years of being closed.

This is one such story.

My valley was the depth of seeing, as its openness to high mountain air defined clarity. My valley was also desire, because until recently, it was forbidden private property. In the seventies, it was an awakening to others’ interpretation of place, as within a season I watched a lumber road spiral up one of the valley’s surrounding domes. My valley was an approaching point to my father’s cabin. It is now a place where my father works and plays.

My valley is saving my father’s life.

Valles Caldera is no longer privately owned. It has finally been recognized as a site of convergent visions, or arrivals. Its management is innovatively reflected by the Valles Caldera Preservation Act of 2000, by which 89,000 acres are held in stewardship by a board of trustees.

The principles of management are distilled from a long history of interaction with this place and are in recognition of its ecological and cultural significance. Among the goals are maintaining the caldera as a working ranch, protection and preservation, controlled public accessibility, science-based adaptive management, and financial independence. Yes, conflicting mandates by appearance, yet I know from growing up in this state, which values independence and co-dependence equally, that such a balance is possible and visionary.

I’m not surprised my father finds himself in the midst of such an experiment.

My father volunteered until he became indispensable. Then he was hired as a recreation specialist, or he was hired so his supervisors would have some influence over what my father chooses to do. He’s called “Allegi” by two on staff who are from Jemez Pueblo. It signifies a spike bull elk, a yearling perpetually rebellious, playfully impetuous. He has since been told that the word may actually refer, more bluntly, to a bull’s dick.

As he and I drive up to the receiving station in his old Ford truck, I notice neatly heaped rocks contouring the dirt roads and recognize his handiwork immediately. The functionality, in relation to the time and effort he put into those heaps, would put them low on any priority list, I imagine, but he would do it anyway. It’s a private aesthetic.

He is a rock gatherer and has built a wall of them around the base of his cabin. It is a beautiful wall, and the closer one draws, the more details emerge: arrowheads and pottery shards embedded in the mortar between considerately placed boulders. The time it took to gather and stack those stones was the time between my visits.

It has taken me nearly half my life to arrive at a level of acceptance that puts a smile on my face as we pull up and stop.

I am introduced to some of the other guides, or rather historical and ecological interpreters, as they prefer being called. I won’t remember them, except that they are familiar like family.

There is a New Mexico man, whether Hispanic, Native, or Anglo. He is in the way he stands, weight centered in the hips, action poised in the hands. Centered thus, there is a relaxed flexibility in how words are cast, how glances are met. Space is allowed for sizing up, negotiation, translation, clear-sightedness, jokes, and opinions.

I like watching my father talk to people. He listens, but with a playful, reserved half-smile that says, I have history. I have a story you haven’t heard yet.

We are here so he can show me up close what I’ve only been allowed to see from the highway. The Valle Grande only gets larger from inside, and it gives way through its ponderosa pine rim to other valleys, other vistas. Back inside his truck, I feel like I did as a kid on some other adventure in some other fifties-vintage truck smelling of old vinyl and gear oil, like we are getting away with something, allowed to play freely for this moment only.

And we are.

Activities in Valles Caldera are highly restricted as part of a management intent to value quality of experience over quantity. By right, in my own valley, it is appropriate that I have a private guide beside me. Yet to hear my father talk, we are retrieving trash from the bunkhouse and checking a broken window in one of the homestead cabins.

As we negotiate ruts in the road, my father lists things he does. He fixes equipment, maintains vehicles, repairs washed-out roads, burns slash, and builds an outhouse. In summer, he shows fishermen the fishing beat, the mile of creek that is theirs for a day to release up to ten brown trout they catch. In winter, he helps with sleigh rides, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing.

My father is sixty-six (at the time of this publication , he is 87). He’s not a big man, but he’s strong. I recognize his capacity by my own because we are so much alike: first, determination to do what is before us, followed by a discovery of strength and ability, enough as usual, even if there are periods of dormancy, no specific health regimen. Neither of us has to watch what we eat, either in terms of food intake, which is also cyclic by desire and plenitude.

He has compared himself to a coyote, especially after stuffing himself for want of wasting food, just like a coyote drunk on last season’s apples in a spring thaw. And yet, when inconvenient, we go without, and our bodies respond, balancing according to conditions. The one corporeal demand neither of us can cheat is sleep.

Before this job, my father was on the road a lot, visiting a girlfriend, his independent ninety-four-year-old mother, one of his children, his properties, his friends. He has mistakenly identified himself as a recluse. Thus, the cabin in the woods. He can’t stand to be alone. He needs people. He just doesn’t trust them.

My father is a coyote.

He was beginning to fall asleep at the wheel sometimes. He would have died in his car.

A while back, my father sent me a picture of himself outfitted for the turn of the century, his winter wear on the Valles Caldera. He wears an original bearskin coat he found in an antique store in Colorado, called a plains coat, designed for wind. Everything at that time was made to last a lifetime, and this coat has the memory of a body not unlike my father’s. He wears Angora goat shotgun chaps he found in Arizona. His hat was custom-made in Oklahoma City by wholesale hatters: late-1890s, flat-brimmed, round-crowned.

The look is intentional. Charlie Russell painted a man in this outfit.

His snowshoes are Alaskan-style, forties-vintage, from Minnesota, made of hickory, four feet long, ten inches wide. The disadvantage is that mice favor the rawhide lacing.

“They are works of art,” he tells me, “but I use them anyway. I have three pairs.”

My father has at least three pairs of everything, including Hoover vacuum cleaners.

My father studies old paintings and artifacts to see how they are made. Since childhood, he has sought out lost skills by talking to people, by slowly piecing together the experience of others into a practicable whole. He is not only a collector, but an artisan.

He knows how to tan a hide using wood ash and animal brains. When he describes the process to me, his language is precise. I see his hands meticulously working the slurry of brain into the hide, squeezing it in by alternately soaking and wringing with a wooden pallet over and over until the hide glows ivory white.

He tells me, as if speaking of his life, “You can’t get too much in, but you can get too little.”

I see him smoking the hide with juniper, apple, or spruce, just a bit rotten, for colors golden-warm to red. He makes clothing and pouches for his muzzleloaders. He makes reproduction quivers for arrows, also self-crafted, fletched with raven, turkey, or flicker feathers.

He’s a flintknapper. His arrowheads are museum-quality. He tells me that in his life he decided to practice craft, perfected to art, so no one could catch him. It’s true. His work carries a seriousness that stands beside living Pueblo and Plains lineages without pretending to replace them. It is a lost art, perhaps coming back, and he has given himself to it almost completely.

We have arrived in Obsidian Valley. The dirt road glitters with black glass. Shiny black fragments are scattered everywhere, on top of boulders, as if remnants from a raucous party of goblet-smashing giants.

This place has been mined for the past eight thousand years. I am struck by the inexhaustible supply of material. My father explains how Native Americans probably reduced large pieces into workable and transportable fragments, maybe shaping points on the spot for trade. Obsidian was a commodity everyone would have wanted, whether Navajo, Apache, Plains, or Pueblo.

I’m impressed by the smoky black stuff, but my father tells me there’s a lot of pumice in it, though some is good grade, weapons grade. A broken edge is sharper than surgical steel, cutting one or two cells wide compared to steel’s ten-cell margin.

He began experimenting with flintknapping in Boy Scouts, but quit when a sliver pierced his eye. He finally found someone in Taos to teach him who had been doing it for thirty years: Bud Quimby, a master knapper. I’ve held one of Bud’s points, two palms long, a finger thick in its center, narrowing to a darkly transparent paper edge. Its lethal symmetry is shaped by percussive grooves, like heartbeats, like ripples on water.

It’s beautiful.

My father demonstrates his art for visitors, careful to roll out a drop cloth to keep dust and fragments from mixing with this casual inventory of native glass. I’m tempted to pocket a rough marble, but preservation is sacred. This place has been longed for by others than me, and is closely guarded.

Next, we head to the San Antonio cabin, built in 1947 for sheepherders and foremen, now used by hunters. It is simply two rooms, a kitchen, and a porch, which looks out on its own suite of grassland. A stream runs nearby, with a pipe diverting water for closer access. A trail leads off to a bathhouse, where the lock on the door has recently been shot out.

Inside, the deep pool steams, a hot spring.

This caldera is active, one of three in the United States. Calderas are formed as magma explodes from weak areas around a chamber dome, so much so that the dome collapses, leaving a basin to catch water and sediment, eventually presenting as valleys, bold and green.

In the seventies, there was a serious investigation into the geothermal potential of this area, with plans to build a sizeable federally funded power plant. Surprisingly, this plan failed due in part to its infringement on public rights and its impact on the environment. Drilling continues by Los Alamos National Laboratory, geologists working toward understanding magma systems. In 1988, they drilled the deepest, hottest hole in the world at 6,000 feet and temperatures of 300 degrees.

My father is fumbling with the shattered door, shaking his head. His jaws are clenched in a familiar way, but he lets it go faster than he would have years ago. I understand, by his blood in me, the building pressure of hot water, the hidden systems of magma. I also understand how we have both had to fall in on ourselves to make way for softer aspects.

We head back.

My father is already nostalgic about the day. It’s a quality in him I don’t tolerate very well. I don’t have the same reductive memory that he has. There is no corresponding sediment in how he talks about a common past to match the snapshots I still carry, many arrestingly stark, not at all pastoral.

My growing up had been Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School to his Larry McMurtry, Cadillac Jack; his self-saved, self-made man to my endless deconstruction. What is common to these storytellers is displacement, the loss of an illusory nature of home, and it is as if my father and I were born too late or too soon. Our interface with the world is slightly off, like badly aligned color plates trying to print an image, trying to make it look real.

I recognized some time ago that my father should never have married, never had kids. He would have fared better to have honored his roaming heart with girlfriends scattered like dandelions: nurse’s aides, waitresses, hungry divorcees, doctors’ wives, land baronesses, the stuff of fantasy.

I also knew some time ago I am not my father’s type.

I am, however, a lot like him.

We pass what looks like an abandoned town, false fronts intact, swaybacked bodies of buildings, planks fallen in: the movie set for Buffalo Girls, starring Anjelica Huston and Melanie Griffith. There have been several movies made here, including, most recently, Ron Howard’s The Missing. It’s a perfect place for sweeping backdrops, no power lines or paved roads to edit out later.

As I turn my head toward the window, away from my father’s words, I too easily fall into a practiced puppetry of thought and response. A catalog of my father’s faults is easily accessible in this mood: his many false fronts, his bold and failing attempts at social conformity. Money-making schemes have been a cyclic theme in his life, most recently resulting in significant loss through stock-market trading. There is a compulsion that grips him, obvious to all but him. He shoots sparks and pieces of metal like a gear breaking down, even in the midst of turning.

The positive result of his last attempt toward financial independence is a necessity to work again, to once more face the challenges of human contact.

He recites his favorite poem to me:

“Sweet clean air from east to west,
and room to go and come.
I love my fellow man the best
when he is scattered some.”

I believe he has the opportunity now to be among people on his own terms. The opening of the Valles Caldera is like a beneficial protection and preservation of what is best in my father.

I decide I want to learn something new. I ask my father about the time before his hated job with Los Alamos National Laboratory. That job cemented his role for a while as provider, father, and husband. I see him as a handsome young man in graduate school, studying ecology. He is driving all over the state in a 1948 Dodge for the Civil Engineering Department of New Mexico State. They are trying to establish the first U.S. Geological Survey for interstate streams.

In the thirties, we sold our water to Texas without knowing how much we had or what the quality of it was. He used to take composite surveys of the length of each stream, border to border. He camps and collects water every eight hours. When he needs help getting down a river, he asks someone to boat him there. He talks to fishermen, farmers, miners, and land developers who want to know what he’s doing on their river.

He learns how to talk to people, how to listen. Like the veins in the back of his hand, he learns New Mexico intimately through its waters.

On the way out of the preserve, we pull to the side to allow another truck to squeeze by on its way in. There is a slow anticipation as both driver windows are lowered at the pace of stopping. There is a young, good-looking cowboy at the wheel. He is probably chewing on something like a toothpick. He shifts it to the other side of his mouth as he speaks. There are silences as we all peer toward opposing horizons, yet lean slightly toward the open windows.

He’s nodding first, as if it helps make way for words that are slower. There is some condition for apology being mapped, some past inequity negotiated. Then it’s practical talk of what’s needed: a rut filled before winter. He had been thrown from the sleigh last winter, caught in it, and had broken his collarbone.

It’s apparent these men mean. It’s apparent these men own. Their personal efforts here hold each other accountable.

There is no top-heavy management holding workers to unreal profit margins, keeping human time to the voracious appetite of markets. This management is a shared vision, or more, a fluid cohesion of diverse visions negotiated in real time, in real place, by people with histories and longings.

We are at the highway, the valley again apparent from such a familiar angle of view, and yet transformed. What was yearned for, idealized, becomes internalized, embodied by having been touched, seen, smelled.

With freer access comes a renewed sense of responsibility. I am concerned for the success of this new stewardship. I care about this place.

In my youth, when the logging roads appeared as if overnight, I remember closing off that entire area as if I were closing off a room inside myself. That closing, along with other closings as experience dictates, allowed me to be more reckless in my life, allowed me to rip and tear into what was sacred or untouched.

For me, deconstruction proved necessary. I don’t regret the death of the ideal, because it has led me to an understanding of action, of choice, of agency, and of the embrace of a new ideal.

The world only seems worse for our involvement in it because we are so young in understanding our inherent creative power. What we do, feel, think, and see is impressed in the physical world, dictating further action or reaction. Miraculously, by this creative, destructive, or maintaining interaction, what is reflected in the physical world is a map of our own stories to be interpreted toward a greater understanding of ourselves and others.

And we do the work to understand our unique stories always.

So there is hope.

My father is smiling, recounting the day, happy to have shared his valley with me. With access, I understand enough. Finally, I have seen enough of his valleys and systems to allow for doors to stand open, lights on in long-closed rooms.