Is It Sunset Time for Apache Mesa Ranch?

I haven’t written about my ranch in south-eastern New Mexico, near the old town of Las Vegas, for some time. In the interval, a lot has changed. First came the disastrous 360 thousand-acre Hermits Peak fire that burned for three months and was only described as being put out a week ago. Although the fire was ten miles north and east of my ranch, and not a direct threat—the houses, ranches, farm animals and woods it destroyed are largely north of Las Vegas—the thick clouds of smoke, day after day, made it essential to evacuate and the three horses and their owner left for Santa Fe months ago and have not been back.

It’s a lonely and isolated 1300-plus acres on top of a dry mesa with only pinion, juniper and weeds able to grow, not a place for cattle although possibly sheep or goats—but someone has to live there to care for them. And finding such a person, willing to endure not only prolonged solitude but violent weather—fierce sun, windstorms of incredible violence—has proved impossible. If I am to continue to own this blessed piece of land, I will have to live there, along with a flock of wild turkeys and one or two brown bears.

This seems untenable. But yesterday, as I thought over the difficult situation, I came across one of those endless post-its that dot my writing life. It contains the title of a book, an idea probably from several years ago. The title is, Apache Mesa Ranch: The Story of a High Mesa in New Mexico.

What do you think? Would anyone be interested in reading such a book, embellished with my photographs?

Mainly it would be about the wildlife. How a mother wild turkey hunched and hovered over her nestlings, then scuttled away with loud cries to drive us off. How my beloved Pip decided to confront a bear cub in the spring fed pool (since dried up) not once but twice. How to deal with a gigantic cottonwood, felled in a recent storm, that is blocking the dirt and rock track to that spring…

History is in the ranch, not the dramatic visible history of towns and cities but the scraps left from lives long gone: a bit of black-and-white pueblo pottery or the rim of a rose-painted china teacup. There are a few neighbors who remember when the mesa was home to a group of immigrants fleeing the Dust Bowl, when the stone schoolhouse was built. I’ve never enjoyed interviewing people, relying instead on my imagination, but I may need to learn.

There are no human-caused dangers lurking on the mesa. There are only the manageable dangers of a dirt road that’s impassable after rain, or the more subtle dangers that haunt the edges of isolation.

But life here in Santa Fe has changed drastically in the thirty years I’ve lived here. The city has doubled in size, from thirty thousand people to sixty thousand. The good news is that I now see a few young people in my neighborhood and several African Americans in the park. The bad news is that a supine mayor and City Council have collapsed in the face of the demands of developers and the obscenely rich refugees from Texas and both coasts who seem to know and care nothing about our history as a minority-majority state. They insist on living in enormous new houses or tearing old adobes to pieces to add closets and bathrooms, oblivious of the fact that we are on the edge of losing our groundwater.

And then there is the ever-looming threat of the pit production at Los Alamos, scaled up to produce twice as many of these nuclear triggers in the next thirty years…

I’m a second-time empty nester now that my two granddaughters who grew up here have left for college, law school and their adult lives and careers, and their father, my oldest son, has followed them back to New York. I realized with a start that their mother and I will be the only family left in Santa Fe this coming Thanksgiving.

My life is my writing, sorely disrupted by the inevitable demands: telephone calls, emails, urgent demands for political action, donations, devoted friends…

What do you think?

In New Mexico Apache Mesa