AFTERWORD: WHY LOS RANCHOS?

TONY HILLERMAN

SINCE WRITERS OF fiction are free as the proverbial birds, they can live anywhere they wish. Right? So why do I live in little Los Ranchos, New Mexico, when everyone, including my mailman, seems to think I actually live in much larger Albuquerque? Or, for that matter, why not move to Hawaii, or that little place with the great beach where Ernest Hemingway hung his hat when he stopped roaming?

The answer: Albuquerque is too big for a bona fide country boy, and neither Hawaii nor Hemingway’s little island offers the odd mixture of social, geographic, ecological, and historical delights I enjoy here. And all in a high and dry climate, forested mountains in every direction, and plenty of open spaces when you need a lonely moment. Our high, dry climate, combined with our mountains and the good luck of being first settled by agriculturally minded Pueblo Indians, soon joined by Hispanic explorer-soldiers-farmers, gave us irrigation ditches.

My door is maybe 200 yards from the Griego y Gallegos lateral, which is my favorite ditch. When the need to flee from my desk and its clutter of unanswered mail and undone work hits me, that ditch offers a smooth path, lots of shade, endless rows of backyards to look down into if the yard dogs aren’t barking at you. If I skip over to the Rio Grande bosque, the natural forest shading it, I find my fallen cottonwood log, which I have rested upon enough now to have worn the bark comfortably smooth. There you watch the Rio Grande roll past en route to the Gulf of Mexico, enjoy the silence, and think yourself though that problem you have managed to tangle your characters into in chapter 13.

The ditches also offer bonuses. When the autumn comes I sometimes head northward on my G y G lateral. Earlier generations of ditch walkers seem to have brought along apples and then dropped the cores into the ditch. There the seeds eventually sprouted. About a dozen steps north of my bridge a scrawny apple tree has survived amid the ditch-side competition. The apples it produces in July are small, bright red, and downright delicious, but they don’t last long. That’s partly because when summer vacation time arrives the young ladies whose parents live out here bring their daughters home for that vacation period. Then the ditches become ideal routes for leisurely horseback rides for these folks and the friends they bring along. The girls like the apples, too, and so do their horses.

The Rio Grande Bosque near Los Ranchos, New Mexico

When the apples are gone, I sometimes amble south down the G y G lateral. About 200 yards down you reach a “T” where the ditch splits. About half is diverted eastward and what’s left pours westward over a neat little waterfall. This ditch waters the gardens of neighbors who live behind my house, divides again to provide water for another housing addition next to the Rio Grande and, finally, dumps what’s left into the river. In this terminal lap, it has watered a little collection of blackberry bushes and some asparagus roots. And no asparagus is tastier than the wild stuff.

Getting your share of ripe blackberries is chancy, because the robins and other birds have found them and stick around waiting for the berries to get big, fat, black, and sweet. Last summer the birds left me only fourteen eatable berries, and some other walker harvested my asparagus before I got there. However, a bit later in the summer, I turned northward at the G y G junction, jaywalked across Rio Grande Boulevard where the ditch is tunneled under the pavement, and followed it into the open fields. There one finds an old vineyard with not many plants left except those of a species that produces small bunches and small fruit. Early comers may have harvested the best of them but you want to get there anyway for the open view.

Just to the east, Sandia Mountain dominates the horizon. If you see it in the autumn sunset light you understand why the Hispanic settlers named it for their juicy red watermelon. That slanting sunlight turns its granite slopes red. Just south of the Sandias is the less impressive Manzano range, the locale of a nuclear weapons laboratory. If you find a good view to the north you’ll see the Jemez Mountains, home of the Jemez tribe and site of Los Alamos National Laboratory where we built atomic bombs. It’s also some of our most beautiful landscape.

However, to impress visitors I take them up Tramway Avenue to the base of the Albuquerque ski operation. There you board America’s longest lift, which takes you from about a mile and a quarter above sea level to unload at about two and a quarter miles above sea level. Now you have easy access to my favorite view. At the rim, you look down at the city of Albuquerque spread below your feet. To the west along the green line of the Rio Grande bosque, you can see the roof of my house in Los Ranchos, and across the river, the burgeoning city of Rio Rancho. Beyond Los Ranchos, the peak of what our maps call Mount Taylor juts into the sky.

The Navajo account of their arrival here explains that First Man, after helping the tribe escape the flooding underworld into our Earth Surface World, built that mountain to mark the southern boundary of Navajo territory. He decorated it with blue turquoise beads, pinned it to the earth with a stone knife, and assigned two other Holy People (Yellow Corn Girl and Turquoise Boy) to live there as its protectors. I dearly love that legend.

From the rim of Sandia Mountain, I see dozens of other places—mountain ranges, cliffs, buttes, canyons, ruins, and so forth—where important religious figures did interesting deeds, affecting what has happened there. Many of these landscapes are enriched by explanations of their holiness. The landscapes and the stories behind them provide an endless list of pleasant subjects to ponder while doing your ditch walking. And, come to think of it, the people who tell me these Native American accounts of creation are the major part of the reason why I live where I do—in the Los Ranchos segment of the Duke City [a nickname for Albuquerque] part of the American West.

Editor’s note: Tony Hillerman wrote this piece at the request of Harper Collins in 2006 to be included in an anthology about why authors live where they do. The book was never published.

Dad’s favorite bench with a view of the slow-moving Rio Grande near the Rio Grande Nature Center, Albuquerque