Looking out, walking about

Petroglyphs of Northern New Mexico

Can you imagine living in New Mexico and not spending time outdoors? A lot of time? Almost 28 years ago, when I decided I could still make a living as a writer if I moved from Lower Manhattan to New Mexico, I wanted to settle in the middle of nowhere. I’d be a hermit, wandering daily in what passes for wilderness in a beautiful but often exploited region. Then I realized that I’d always needed and worked with community and that one day I’d get old. So when my mother died and I had some money for the first time in my life, I bought around 5 acres on the south edge of the tiny village of Galisteo, near the highway, but with unblocked views of rangeland and the Ortiz Mountains.

Each afternoon, after writing all morning, I would sit with my cat in the window seat of the little house — or “shack” according to some upscale neighbors — I’d built by the creek, where we would watch the cloud shows. I’d decide where to hike that day. I’m not sure what the cat was planning, but she survived owls, coyotes, dogs and bobcats for another decade. As a New Yorker, the “traffic” on NM 41 didn’t bother me; in early days, it was so rare that I woke up when a car passed in the night. Not so anymore, given the many oil and gravel trucks coming from Moriarty.

I explored the Galisteo Basin on foot, alone and with an artist pal who lives across the creek, later with my partner and his dog Rez, later still with companions, Chino and

Yazzie, and now only Yazzie. My primary goal was to know the land as only walkers can, to understand as well as an outsider could how previous inhabitants had conceived their cultural landscape. A major element in this search was the ubiquitous rock art, the petroglyphs and pictographs scattered throughout the region by the Tano (Southern Tewa) and Keres peoples who settled here in the 1200s. I was lucky to come to know and hike with some superb mentors — Polly Schaafsma, Jim Duffield and Katherine Wells. These were the old days, when you were not shot at or arrested when wandering ranch property, so long as you closed gates and your dogs didn’t chase the stock. Since then Santa Fe County’s demographics have reached a tipping point and made such trespassing impossible. Please don’t read this and try it yourself. Go to Petroglyph National Monument on Albuquerque’s western edge or take organized tours. And if you find an artifact, enjoy it and put it back where you found it, so that a Pueblo person or an archaeologist can learn from it.

The tribes dislike the term “rock art” because the images were functional and often sacred for their ancestors, but they are so beautiful that it’s hard, from a non-native perspective, not to think of them as art. Petroglyphs — scratched, incised or abraded — and the rarer painted pictographs hide in and subtly define the cultural landscape that once existed for miles around the Galisteo Basin’s eight huge ancient pueblos. Unlike the art world’s “earthworks” of the last five decades, the petroglyphs don’t demand attention or dominate the land. Rock art is often invisible until it is recognized. The time of day and the light — ah, the famous New Mexico light — conceal and reveal, so that many trips to the same area can offer surprises, and losses: “I know I saw it here just last week . . . ” These sights and sites focus the grand scale of our outdoors. Even when the rock art remains unseen, its presence is felt. And thanks to the land itself, a rock-artless hike is never a disappointment.

Thirty-five years ago, when I began to spend real time in the Mountain West, I sensed history coming up at me from under the ground as I walked. In Colorado, Wyoming or North Dakota, it might have been my own ancestral history, but not in New Mexico. Here I depend on other people’s memories.

Yet the losses and contradictions and multiple truths that define real, rather than just the conqueror’s, history are infinitely complex wherever you stand and walk. Nothing is definitive about oral histories. It took me years to learn why the Río Galisteo was down-cut so drastically in the 1920s that the acequias could no longer feed off it and the little farming village took a big hit. Railroads, overgrazing and deforestation were among the culprits.

Learning the land by being in it is a lot more fun than depending on books, however much they may complement each other. Outdoors, the elasticity of experience is your

EVEN DOOMSDAY APPREHENSION CAN’T SPOIL THE GRAY-BLUE MOUNTAINS, SHADOWED CANYONS, YELLOW OR SUDDENLY GREEN AND THEN YELLOW-BROWN RANGELAND, THE MIND-BLOWING CLOUD FORMS, SUNRISES AND SUNSETS.

teacher. The weather can affect the process, as can your mood, or the crackling of dry grass underfoot and the absence of wildflowers that were prolific the year before. A perceptual and often sensual experience involves an ear and an eye as well as a foot to the ground, catching the smells and sounds that evade those concentrating on speed, height and distance.

Descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans who settled here insist that none of their sites are “abandoned.” The spirits of every petroglyph, adobe wall and pottery sherd remain to represent their original makers. I’m aware as I walk, as I dream, of the role indigenous and colonial settlers’ lives, past and present, play in my pleasures. Then there’s the more painful role of fresh real estate signs and the dreaded green transformers sprouting in open land, announcing the presence of more ranchettes like my own. And luckily there’s also the comfort of protected land, such as county open space and the Galisteo Basin Preserve.

Of course, the volcanic hogbacks, deep arroyos, sandstone outcrops, intermittent streams and vast views of the elusive Galisteo Basin are only some of New Mexico’s many versions of the beckoning outdoors. From Chaco Canyon to Pedernal, from the eastern plains to White Sands, from the Organ Mountains to the Río Grande del Norte to the northern forests to Abiquiú’s stunning red rocks to the vast Gila and other wildernesses,

New Mexico’s offerings are infinite, just like the threats to their survival. The Río Galisteo is a major wildlife corridor, and bears, cougars, bobcats and the ubiquitous coyotes are sometimes seen and heard, or leave only their tracks. My dog loved the bosque, but as a former Española stray, he was wary. Being outdoors can offer challenges, from rattlers to flash floods, as well as pleasures, from sunrise to thunderstorms.

I wondered at one point what I was doing in a place with so many snakes, as I wasn’t fond of them. Then one day I was charging toward a petroglyph, brilliant on the basalt of the Galisteo Hogback, or the Northern Creston, when my companion yelled, “Stop!” A yellow-and-black diamondback was reared up against the black cliff. I stopped, and it was beautiful, and it belonged there, and I decided I wasn’t afraid anymore, though I know to keep my distance.

But we live in the 21st century, in the shadows of catastrophic climate change. You can’t “love nature” in this society without contemplating its past and its future. As much as I’d like to wander happily in the Galisteo Basin, immersed in its glorious scenery, and forget what’s going down in the world around us, the dark clouds that hover over the sunniest days inevitably come back to haunt me. Not every minute, of course. Even doomsday apprehension can’t spoil the gray-blue mountains, shadowed canyons, yellow or suddenly green and then yellow-brown rangeland, the mind-blowing cloud forms, sunrises and sunsets. But arriving back at my car or my house, tired and exhilarated, I try not to turn on the radio and reenter the century that demands so much of those of us mourning a respect for the land that seems to diminish with each generation.

The thousands, maybe millions, of words I have thrown out into the world in 60 years of writing cling to those on the current page. I have made my living writing about art and art’s relationship to everything else, such as place and history. But some 50 years ago I admitted in print that “nature” — whatever that is, and humans are inseparable from it — gave me more pleasure than art ever had. My artist friends may hate me for this. Decades ago, living for a year in the rural landscape of Devon, England, and influenced by the work of my then-partner, who made little clay landscapes and “pueblo” dwellings in the crumbling walls of New York’s Lower East Side, I imagined a woman so enamored of the land she walked that she was sensually consumed by it, disappeared into it — not a vision of death but of an integrated life.