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| Depot, Santa Fe |
The Desert Has Come to Define Me
I am writing this in
what I consider New Mexico’s fifth season--wind. Not the easiest time (the
winds have been clocked at more than 50 miles per hour!), but the period of
each year in which we learn to cling to the ground--and the time to desire spring,
which emerges, teasingly, through the density of air.
I was born in New
York, and spent a couple of decades along the East Coast before moving to San
Francisco in search of warmer weather and less slush, but also something I
couldn’t have identified. I was excited by the possibilities there. In the end,
though, I only stayed a few years.
In a typical
getting-to-New Mexico story, we (me and my husband-to-be) drove the main
(two-lane) street into Santa Fe, and decided to stay. We bought our house nine
days later, the first and only house we’ve ever owned. For those interim days,
we camped in the forest. It was summer, and we spent each afternoon entranced
by thunderstorms. Rain poured down in a flash of light and sound. I was amazed
that the ground ignored that moisture coming down, that it remained dry.
I learned a lot those
first few years, acclimating to being in the basin of higher mountains, to
being at 7,000 feet. I hadn’t expected snow – or cold weather. Or less than 7
inches of precipitation all year. The sun shone nearly constantly. When it
finally set, temperatures dropped 40 degrees and a long chill fell across the
quiet land.
That house purchase
was 17 years ago, and we’re still in the same sweet home in a rural, farming
village just outside of Santa Fe. I have watched flash floods and helped to
build drainage ditches to accommodate. I have seen our arroyo run dry. I have
climbed nearby mountains, thinking the edge was close, that the sky was tangled
in tree branches just past the crest. Anywhere I journey around the state, the
dignified blue sky is always in full focus. The land is never barren, but
rarely showy. And every night, stars are planted in the rich dark sky. It is as
if the universe is all visible then, a masterpiece of small lights.
Though I was once
accustomed to urban sounds, I’ve developed a familiarity and a comfort with
more personal noises: the doleful cries of mourning doves in first light, a
family of quail bobbing in a straight line past the junipers, coyote howls
serrating the air at dusk, the dry silence of rattlesnakes and jackrabbits.
Living here is like living in a beautiful box of time that opens out hundreds
of years, and exists, somehow simultaneously, in an enclosed moment around me.
The desert has come
to define me - its long shadows, the heady fragrance left after rain, the wily
stalks that grow without nutrients. Everything here is unmasked, on the
surface, impossible, but even so, the terrain and culture continue to expand,
to offer, to glow. I live with the principles of dirt intermixed with the
sparks and whispers of history.
It is for these many
mysteries that I remain. Somehow, in my poems, I think I can grab onto and
contain these things, then find they blow away. Each time--stubborn and
determined, or comfortably naïve--I am willing to chase after them again.
--Lauren Camp, Santa
Fe, March 2012
Lauren Camp is the author of the
poetry collection This Business of Wisdom (West End Press), and she is the
host/producer of “Audio Saucepan,” a weekly music/poetry show on
KSFR-FM. She is also a visual artist. Lauren blogs about poetry and its
intersections with art and music at Which Silk Shirt. She lives in a
rural farming village near Santa Fe. www.laurencamp.com
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