"We dodged a (small “d” this time) bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn that got away in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.”
On Friday, September 8, 2023 it was us, although everyone was saying we again “dodged a bullet” because our houses didn’t burn, just the surrounding forest. In an ironic twist of fate someone set ablaze the large thinning project above El Valle on the ridge that separates us from Las Trampas. The slash piles were still on the ground. After the smoke cleared and I could see the thinned acres up on the ridge it looked like it had snowed: the piles were white ash. The next day, when the rains came, the piles were black.
It was a crazy three days. First, the fire erupted midday on Friday with huge billows of black smoke scaring the shit out of everyone. I was in Taos when my neighbor Marty called telling me El Valle was on fire. She was on her way home from Española. Whoever got there first would get Paco, my dog. Forty-five minutes later, in Peñasco, the state cops at the road block told me no one was allowed on SH 76, the highway you have to travel to access the forest road into El Valle. I yelled and argued that I had to get my dog. I called 911: “Obey the cops.”
Along with other locked out El Valle neighbors, also using Sugar Nymphs Wi-Fi, we were constantly on our phones, talking to other neighbors, finding out who was in and who was out, telling our families that El Valle was burning, and fielding calls from other friends offering houses and help. I slept at the Sugar Nymphs house where Kai offered me some pot to try to sleep (no Xanax in my purse, my only possession). Instead of sleep I hallucinated for two hours on only two tokes. Marijuana has never been my drug of choice.
Early Saturday morning I got two texts: “We got into El Valle.” I threw on my clothes, left a note for Kai and Ki, and raced home. No one was manning the Road Closed signs. The helicopters and slurry planes were in full force: hundreds of water drops over burning trees with slurry laid across wide swaths of smoke. Those of us who made it back in packed up all the stuff we weren’t able to pack on Friday and waited to see if they (the county sheriff or state police) were going to try to throw us out. Once again they closed the El Valle Road but they didn't make us leave.
It’s now a week later. The crews are still here, remediating the bulldozer lines that had to be laid at each end of the village, chipping all the trees they cut to create the fuel breaks, fixing fences, once more passing through the burned acres, just in case. We finally got our mail, a week after the road closure sign went up; we have to have a talk with the mailman, who unlike the UPS and Express drivers who barreled through, obeyed the admonition. I’m walking through all the detritus of the fire, measuring where it burned hottest, where it skipped over, where it validated other thinned acres accomplished by home owners with agency help. Once the survivor euphoria wears off there will no doubt be lambasting from thinning deniers—"let nature take its course”—or the village crank whose private lands across the river burned. Compared with what happened a year ago not so far away, I say, let’s rejoice and give everyone a pat on the back before we descend into dissecting what happened and why.
