March 8th, 2010
Homesick Spring
My homesickness always hits in the spring—which is strange because spring is actually New Mexico’s worst season. The only season, in fact, that pales in comparison to the mid-Atlantic’s. Spring in New Mexico brings winds that whip sand into your eyes and ears and hair. It is sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes wet with snow or rain, sometimes impossibly dry—all in the space of 24 hours. Spring may be known as an unpredictable season the world over, but in New Mexico, spring is beyond unpredictable. It is schizophrenic.
Yet without fail, since leaving New Mexico six-plus years ago, spring is when I begin to feel the dull ache deep in my chest, a longing for home so much it hurts. I suspect my friends are beginning to avoid me this time of year because they know where the conversation will inevitably turn. I’m convinced that if I explain it right—if I just tell one more story just so—they’ll understand why I will never feel at home here in suburban Washington. Home will always be 1,902 miles away in Chimayó, a remote village in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains with a population of 2,000, where Dave and I lived for five-and-a-half years.
Like other rural communities, springtime in Chimayó means the resurrection of everything dormant. It is when fields that have lain fallow during the winter are tilled; when apple blossoms begin to peak through their cocoons; when the thin reeds of grass paint the desert floor sage. But, more than all this, it is when the acequias are cleaned.
The acequias are an elaborate system of ditches that pull water off tributaries of the Rio Grande to irrigate the farmland. First dug by Spaniards who settled the area in the 1600s, the acequias make farming in an otherwise arid landscape possible. But in order for them to work effectively, the sediment and rocks and tree branches that gather in them over the winter must be cleared.
So each spring, every able-bodied man who lives on property with water rights is expected to take part in the ditch cleaning, or pay someone else to do it. It is a full day of back-breaking labor—literally digging ditches beginning at eight in the morning and ending no earlier than five. It’s a hell of a way to spend a Saturday. Sadly, employment opportunities in Chimayó are limited, so it’s easy enough to find someone to do the work for you…at a cost of just $30—less than $5 per hour. Every white person we knew in Chimayó paid someone to do it.
So imagine my surprise our first spring in Chimayó, when Dave told me he was going to do the ditch cleaning himself.
“Are you insane?” I asked.
I didn’t doubt Dave’s physical ability to dig ditches for eight to nine hours. He’s always been very athletic and strong and I knew his body could handle it. But I was less confident his body could handle the pummeling I felt certain he would get from his fellow ditch diggers. The fact is, Chimayó has a very rough element. It holds the title of the city (for lack of a better word) with the highest number of drug overdoses per capita in the nation. Not surprisingly, crime is a real issue. Murder is a too frequent headline in a newspaper that boasts a readership of just hundreds. I imagined Dave, in all his whiteness (and Dave is very white…white-blond hair, fair skin) showing up at the ditch digging with a bunch of ex-cons psyched for the opportunity to earn $30 to buy their next hit of heroin.
Now I realize I’m stereotyping. Many people who participate in the ditch cleaning are surely fine, upstanding citizens who are upholding a centuries-old family tradition of participating in the community event. But I knew plenty of the scarier part of the population would be there, too. At the very least, Dave would be an outsider, and I worried what that would mean for him.
The morning of the ditch cleaning, he readied himself. He put on his well-worn Carhart overalls and work boots, which, thank God, at least made clear that he was used to working outside. Then he filled his Camelbak (a backpack with a bladder in it and tube that runs over the shoulder) with water and ice cubes. Next came the sunscreen, which he applied like spackle. Finally, he found his Epi-Pen and inhaler (bad allergies) and put them in the pocket of his Gortex raincoat.
I watched this the way a wife watches her husband packing his rucksack before he ships off to war.
Dave smiled and said, “I’m sure every man in Chimayó is doing the exact same thing right now.”
***
We drove towards the place where the ditch cleaning would start. I say “towards the place” because we actually had no idea where it started. The only communication we’d seen was a hand-written flyer posted on the bulletin board of the post office that said (in Spanish): “Ditch cleaning. Rincon de los Trujillos” and the date. Dave asked our neighbor Seferino where he should go. He told Dave it started in Cordova—a village about five miles up the highway from Chimayó—but he couldn’t tell him where exactly. “Just drive up the road and you’ll find it,” he said.
So I drove Dave “up the road” that leads through Cordova. Sure enough, after a few miles, we saw two men and a boy whom I guessed was about nine years old walking with shovels in their hands.
We pulled over and asked if they were headed to the ditch cleaning. When they told us yes, we offered them a ride if they’d show us where it was.
“I won’t say no to that!” said the man I assumed was the grandfather.
They piled into the car and soon I heard the unmistakable hiss of a can popping open, followed by the smell of beer. It wasn’t even eight in the morning.
“Breakfast of champions, bro!” one of the men exclaimed as he knocked back a Budweiser in a matter of seconds. “Want one?” he asked Dave.
“No, that’s okay, I had oatmeal,” Dave said.
They all laughed.
These guys didn’t worry me. They seemed harmless. So, they were drinkers? Drinking was the past-time of choice in Chimayó and, although it was certainly the cause of a number of social ills, it didn’t bother me much. I guess when you live in a place where the community health center hosts a mobile needle exchange at the bottom of your street every week, a little drinking doesn’t seem so bad.
I drove them as far as I could, until the road started getting too narrow and too rough for our 1984 Nissan Sentra. I stopped and they disembarked. Dave closed the door and leaned in the window. “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you at some point, I guess.”
“Okay,” I said tentatively. “Don’t get killed.”
***
Dave survived. And he survived the following three years, as well. I have no doubt his willingness to participate in the ditch cleaning instead of paying someone with dark skin to do it earned him a respect in the community we otherwise never would have had.
But our final year in Chimayó, he didn’t go. Noah had just been born and we were too frazzled and sleep deprived to imagine it: I couldn’t imagine surviving a full nine hours alone with a baby, and Dave couldn’t imagine mustering enough energy to make it through a day of hard labor. So he paid someone $30 to do it for him. I’m not sure Dave has ever felt so ashamed to pay someone for a service in his life.
The ditch cleaning always ended right in front of our property. That afternoon, our last spring in New Mexico, we could hear the rhythmic ping of metal shovels hitting rocks drawing closer and closer. Eventually, we looked out the window and saw the group of more than 30 men standing waist-high in the ditch that bordered our property; their arms and shoulders rising and falling in time.
We didn’t know then that it was the last time we’d see it. We didn’t know that in a few days, Dave would get a call offering him a job in Washington, and that, in less than six months, we would be selling our house and property and moving to northern Virginia. We didn’t know that we would leave behind a rural life that bows to the will of the seasons for an urban life that, thanks to concrete and gutters and asphalt, gamely ignores them. Water now comes from a hose or faucet—not a ditch that has seen the turn of a thousand shovels. And whenever I think of that, I wonder why a life that has been made so much easier and more comfortable by modernization feels so much harder and more difficult?



