Sacred Land
From the Backcountry Squatters Story Night:
by Eliza Donahue
Where are you from? It may seem like a simple question, but
it rarely has a simple answer. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts to attend
college, I would tell people that I was from Santa Fe, New Mexico. What I
didn’t tell them was that when I was a young child we lived in a pink adobe
house with blue trim, a vegetable garden out back and a single aspen tree out
front, surrounded by dead and dying grass and weeds. The railroad tracks ran
past our neighborhood, and at night the train would shake the walls gently. Sometimes
we would walk through the alley and out to those tracks where fine dust swirled
in lazy circles at our feet. Tall trees stood guard over that alley; in the
fall their leaves softened our steps and I imagined myself in a secret
passageway.
Later, we moved to a different house near those same tracks.
Out front there is a stunted peach tree, a remnant of a peach on a distant day
just after we’d moved in. I was five; I held the pit in my hand, its juice
oozing over my fingers. I bent down and, cupping a handful of dirt away, sunk
the pit into the dry ground outside the front door. “That will never grow,”
said a family friend. But it did. Hence, the tree. Sometimes, we would go for
walks in the arroyo near our house, and later, runs. In the winter, my Dad
works at Taos Ski Valley, and we would drive up to see him and ski on weekends.
I know that drive by heart. Past the shuttered storefronts of Espanola the
two-lane highway follows the Rio Grande as it snakes through Orchards and
spring blooms in Velarde; wrinkled cottonwoods and junkyards; a vineyard and
mobile homes and the New Wave boathouse in Rinconada, once surrounded by
sunflower stalks the size of me; vintage red gas pumps in Embudo; the small
river communities of Rio Arriba County. Further north, past Pilar, the river
becomes a deep fissure in the land, a 600 foot deep cut that dramatically bisects
the Taos Mesa beneath the mountains. There’s a skull on Taos Mountain; a bald
patch etched into the mountainside. The skull looks out on it all and gapes a
toothy, knowing smile.
What I couldn’t explain that year in Amherst was that there
is something fundamentally different about the land out west, land which I
ached for. It was more expansive. There was more room to think. In rural
western Massachusetts I felt crowded by the dense forests and sprawling New
England towns that punctuated well-worn hills. The landscapes of Northern New
Mexico have taken root in my psyche and spiritual beliefs, and tie into the
larger discourse on ‘The West,’ seated squarely within romantic ideals of the
open road and the wild freedom and intrigue of the Southwest. Only as I’ve
gotten older have I begun to realize how problematic colonial narratives of the
West truly are and how much they have shaped my life; I saw that I grew up on
sacred land. I’ve realized how outdoor recreational activities like skiing
arise from a White European ideal and view of wilderness. And I’ve realized
that the separation of ‘nature’ and ‘civilization’ is a construct borne of
Western European ideals; rather, the landscapes I experience are complex and
socially influenced.
The more I learn about the places that make me who I am, the
more I see the urgency behind asking tough questions. Why did we grow up where
we did? What is the history of that land and the people who lived there before
us? What does it really mean to own land? When people do not connect to place,
what happens to our planet? As species continue to die out, winters shorten, forests
burn, reservoirs dry up, and ocean levels rise, we lose irreplaceable pieces of
the natural world. But we also lose our histories; we lose our homes; we lose
ourselves.
Many of us are already seeing these changes. I grew up in
drought and I can’t remember the last time we had several consistent snow years
back-to-back. I wonder if things continue the way they are going, whether I
will be able to continue to connect with the land the way I do now. Most of all
I think of the summit of Kachina Peak, a place that has given me solace for
years, a place where I did my first big mountain skiing competition, and later,
where I numbly scattered the ashes of my teammate. We had shared in the
mountain’s sunlight and chased each other down her gullies; now, a piece of him
is there forever. Kachina, a part of the human-designated Taos Ski Valley, but
also a small piece of "wildness," situated just a few miles from Taos Pueblo’s
sacred Blue Lake. Bighorn sheep look on
curiously at tourists in ill-fitting ski boots and now, a brand-new triple lift.
Prayer flags grace the mountain’s highest point, standing guard over the living
and the dead.
Even if I cannot begin to unpack what these places mean,
what I do know is that Place matters. Place is who we are and where we’ve been
and what we want to be. And we cannot forget these places. After all, we’ve shaped them as much as
they’ve shaped us. When I returned home after a difficult year in Massachusetts,
I looked out my family’s kitchen window at the pine and Juniper on Atalaya
mountain, and I remembered that this place had always been with me.
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