Sustainability

Sustainability is a word often bandied about by environmentalists, economists, and politicians trying to establish a platform. I don’t remember ever using the word myself when I decided to live in rural New Mexico for the rest of my life. Whatever we were after was more along proletarian lines, or the opposite of whatever we defined as bourgeois. There were plenty of other words to describe these goals: hippie, back to the land, alternative generation, or counter culture, but they all somehow missed the fundamental motive of wanting to discard any notion of being part of consumer culture while advocating for the overthrow of the government. How we could achieve the second goal in Placitas or El Valle, New Mexico, I don’t know, but we certainly could be nonconsummers when we couldn’t afford more than a weekly trip to town or anywhere you could spend money. Did that mean we were living a sustainable life? Not really, but it was probably as close as we could come to being self-sufficient without being labeled Luddites and maintaining some semblance of normalcy for our kids.

We weren’t prepared to live like our Hispano neighbors had only fifty years ago, when they grew all the food they consumed except for coffee and sugar. They grew all their vegetables and fruit and canned it for the winter. They raised sheep, pigs, cows, and goats and dried the meat for the winter. They grew and milled their own wheat for bread. They made most of their own clothes and musical instruments and actually spent time at each other’s houses talking, singing, dancing, and being neighborly. That’s the most important thing we learned in our El Valle lives: becoming buen vecinos.

I was surprised to learn recently that writer Jack London moved to a 1,400 acre ranch in northern California in 1905 where he could “leave the land the better for my having been.” He wrote in his journal, “My work on this land, and my message to America, go hand in hand.” He said he spent two hours a day writing, which is how he supported himself, and ten hours a day farming.

I thought if I worked on the land then I could have a message for America, that there was a better (whoops, not a poststructuralist word), more equitable way to live, if not sustainably, then at least consciously and lightly. Like building your own house, cutting firewood to heat your house, growing some of your own food, fixing, or at least maintaining, your cars, learning how to take care of yourself. If we could do everything the pioneers did, we could at least get a taste of a day in the life where everything was tended to: your body out in the garden, your mind at the computer, and hopefully your soul, the melding of the two. I try to never sit at the computer for more than a two-hour stretch (except when I had a deadline to finish the index for Malcolm Ebright’s book, Witches of Abiquiu, after which I gave up doing indexes) or I won’t have a body left to sustain a mind.

Perhaps the agenda calls for watering the vegetable garden or garlic field, which is really not that difficult as almost everything is on a drip irrigation system—I turn a few valves on and off and the plants are wet in a matter of hours. Of course, because everything is so sufficiently watered, things grow in abundance, and more and more of my time is devoted to dealing with the harvest. Some days I’m on my hands and knees thinning the carrots that have to be thinned in stages, rather than one fell swoop. Other days I’m stooped over searching for string beans hiding on dense vines only a foot high. At least the sugar snap peas grow six feet tall, although that means I’m constantly adding new string to the trellis to catch the incessant growth. Every day I search for the disgusting green tomato worms that if left unsquished would soon look like the caterpillars in Dune.

Irrigating the pasture is not so easy. One of my neighbors calls the corner of the field to which he can never get the water “Arizona.” We have a Sahara, a Gobi, and a Death Valley. No matter how many feeder ditches we dig off the main acequia, no matter how fast we get the water, or how much water we get, there are bare, brown spots that will never receive the sparkling waters of the Rio de Las Trampas. Too bad for them.
On the days when I do have to go to town, I always anticipate with great relief the final turn onto the dirt road that leads two miles to this village of twenty families. I find myself playing a game, pretending that this is the first time I have come here, that I have never before seen the lush, green valley or mountain peaks that are the setting for the village homes. I try to remember what I felt years ago when we first stumbled upon this place on one of our periodic, wistful trips to northern New Mexico when we still lived in Placitas, where we no longer wanted to live. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “You’ll never be able to live here,” as we made our way along the road of tin-roofed, handmade adobe houses painted lovely greens and pinks, sitting in fields of timothy grass, grazed by cows and horses, with at least one mandatory junked car on display. I thought at the time that it was probably the most beautiful landscape in New Mexico, if not the world, and I still do: the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop, the piñon-juniper hills rolling to sandstone cliffs the vista. Now, as I drive down the road, I never fail to marvel that I am able to live here, surrounded by all the things that are meaningful and comforting to me. I lead a privileged, if not sustainable, life.