We Are Responsible for the Clouds, Reprise

(image of Los Conchas Fire, by Sheron Smith-Savage, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2011)

“Nearly 13,000 acres of land in the Santa Clara Canyon was blackened by the Las Conchas fire by Friday evening.

That land accounts for nearly a quarter of the Santa Clara Reservation—land considered sacred.

Pueblo Governor Walter Dasheno said Friday, "Yes, it is our home, but it's also our church and it's also our traditional lands."

Thirteen-year-old Mirdacia Padilla lives on the pueblo. She says they won't be able to do traditional dances without the deer and elk that live in that canyon.

‘I'm happy I got to at least see the canyon before it all burned, but I'm sad because my brother, and all these younger kids won't be able to see the canyon or remember what it looked like,’ Padilla said.

Governor Dasheno says the canyon has been scorched by flames before, and there's always hope.

‘We can re-plant the trees, the plants will grow back up, the water will be cleaned out, the fish will come back and the birds will fly,’ Dasheno said."

(from KOB.com, NBC Albuquerque, New Mexico, report for July 1, 2011)

As we approach the 235th anniversary of the official beginning of the independence of our homeland, who in America can be unaware of the events that have unfolded in northern New Mexico over the last week. This year alone in the U. S., we have seen more disaster than we want to see. Some of us witness it from afar, while others find themselves—wondering wounded, conflicted, mournful and sad, amazingly hopeful—in the midst of the wildfire, the raging and flooding river, and the breathtaking tornado. In northern New Mexico, fire has once again come to Los Alamos County, and well over 100,000 acres of land has been scorched—so far. Again, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world, has been spared. And today, the nearby-Santa Clara Pueblo has been changed forever and for a long, long time by this wildfire—the largest in New Mexico history.

Yesterday I carried my friend Judy to the mesa in the Carson National Forest where she and her mother have had a summer home for more than 30 years. Their small, real adobe—built by their own hands with the help of other family members and friends—sits in the middle of a scrubby expanse that allows them unobstructed views of Taos Mountain and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From their place, you can see across the Rio Grande Gorge to Taos. But sometimes these days, today an illustration, the view is obstructed by smoke from the Los Conchas fire. Right now, Judy is on the mesa finishing up closing down the house for another year. I helped with some of this process. In mid afternoon I headed back to Albuquerque, my car filled with her mother Joy’s clothes, sewing machine, remnants of old Navajo weavings that Joy had intended to start repurposing into totes, books to read, a blank canvas waiting for the brush, and more. Meanwhile, Joy waits at the Best Western near the Albuquerque airport for Judy to return and for the two of them to begin their journey back home—Joy to Tulsa, Judy to Ft. Worth. Their annual respite in northern New Mexico—this year only 8 days—came to a early end.

As I returned to Albuquerque in the afternoon, the haze from the fire was in the air, everywhere, even though the winds had not shifted, as they usually do in the afternoon. I made my way through Ojo Caliente and Espanola, where earlier in the day I had noticed at a convenience store an older fire truck, the man who was riding shotgun standing at the passenger door, his left leg on the running board, and his yellow t-shirt blackened with soot. They’ve just come out of the fire, I commented to Judy. On the return, for me, at the Los Alamos exit off of U.S. 285/84, I thought of a holiday weekend journey my friend Steve and I made to the Santa Clara Pueblo in 2009. It was Memorial Day, a day of remembrance that, according to history, was first celebrated in 1865, by Freedman (freed enslaved Blacks) to remember fallen Union Soldiers (Wikipedia). Most of us likely don’t know that. I didn’t know that. That Memorial Day weekend in 2009, Steve and I spent part of a Saturday afternoon on Puye Cliffs at the Santa Clara Pueblo, north of Santa Fe and near Los Alamos.

After that visit two years ago, I was urged to say: “Steve and I stood on a mesa in the Jemez Mountains overlooking a vast valley, where pinyon pine is repopulating itself. A planned burn grew out of control nine years ago. It made the national news for days. A young man of Santa Clara heritage, mingled with German from his maternal grandfather, was our guide through the remnants of dwellings dating to the 12th -16th century. He spoke eloquently of the history of the pueblo people, occasionally calling on his ancestral native Tewa language. His view of his world, our world, was as expansive and real and solid as the 360 degrees where we stood. ‘We are responsible for the clouds,’ he said. Drought had driven his people to the valley below four centuries past—by their belief because of improper behavior on their part."

Soon, the land will begin to heal. The pinyon pine will begin to repopulate itself. The wildlife lost to this fire will fulfill its nature. Everyone, including the people of Santa Clara, will heal, rebuild, and remember. But life has changed for everyone for today and forever. Ten years down the road someone will stand on Puye Cliffs, just as Steve and I did on that Saturday in 2009, and a guide will talk about the land, recounting the Los Conchas fire of 2011 and the Cerro Grande fire of 2000.

Each day we are offered the chance to be reborn, to be recast, to remember and move on, the better, although for the time, perhaps wearier. No one escapes the wildfire, regardless of how it looks. We are born of fire, like the Phoenix of Greek myth rising from the ashes. “We are each responsible for our life and how we create our reality, what we think, where we put our attention, our feelings,” Gayle reminded me two years ago. God, spare me from failing to remember and from starving in the midst of plenty.

“I release this prayer into the Divine Law knowing it is already so. I let go of all human attachment of what it should look like. I surrender, I allow and I let God. And so it is. Namaste.”

We Are Responsible for the Clouds, Reprise—Albuquerque, New Mexico (July 3, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis