This Jagged Land: Growing up in the American Southwest

By David Pendery

Back then, in Albuquerque, I loved to walk or bicycle through the North Valley, along the

irrigation ditches and through the crackling sere fields in the fall. Though I had known it

before, those fields and ditches in the autumn were where I really learned to love solitude.

When we were kids, those irrigation ditches (any one simply "the ditch," to us) stitched

together the whole valley, and they were our shortcuts to anywhere. They all led to the Rio

Grande and once, when I was a little older, I rode with my friend Jeff’s wife, Kim, from their

trailer on Sandia View, along the ditches and through apple orchards and sparse corn fields,

across Rio Grande Boulevard, and to the river. Later we rode back through the warm dusk, the

sky purpling and sherbet-colored, and the Sandia Mountains before us on our eastward path.

Jeff drove up in his jeep some time after we had arrived back home, and we drank cold beer

and he told us about his adventures, his easy laughter punctuating his stories.

Growing up in the southwestern United States had a profound impact on my outlook. I

was possessed of a dreamy, introspective personality (“a weird and ridiculous boy…with

brooding and uncommon ideas,” as Ray Bradbury wrote in his story, “One Timeless Spring”),

and I loved the southwest’s many idiosyncrasies. I was fascinated by the deserts, with their

intriguing quality of appearing like lifeless moonscapes, while pulsing with life and vitality

beneath the surface. I admired the region’s jagged mountains that rose sharply from the

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landscape, their stony expanses lit blood-red at sunset. And I delighted in the parched but

determined flora—yucca plants with gleaming butcher-knife leaves, twisted cacti, sweetly

fragrant piñon trees, shabby cottonwood trees, and aspens in the fall with fluttering gold

foliage. Wallace Stegner wrote in his Wolf Willow that if you position yourself correctly in

such sweeping landscapes “…at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long.”

I was lucky to feel that kind of stature when I was young, and in an abstract way it infused me

with the confidence and perspective I needed as I developed in unconventional ways and

faced emotional turbulence during my teens. Every child should have that kind of stature.

People in New Mexico talk of the hurtling thunder storms, with death-black rain clouds,

gully-washers that kill, dance troupes of lightning, and thunder that frightens you to your

core. They talk of humility, humility like that found in a foxhole during an aerial

bombardment. We crouched in those foxholes, dodged lightning bolts, and were knocked

down by thunder's shockwaves when we were twelve, ten, and younger. With dazed and

stupid grins we emerged from our tents and holes and hiding places when the storms had

passed, and we knew we had learned self-sufficiency.

My parents were weekend travelers, and by the time I was in my mid teens, we had

visited the Sky City, Shiprock, Coronado Monument, Taos Pueblo, Mesa Verde, Chaco

Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and the Coronado Monument. In these places, I learned of the

surreal juxtaposition of achievement and decay; grandeur and tragedy. I remember one

pristine day after Christmas, we visited the Coronado Monument, a ruin of an ancient pueblo

along the Rio Grande west of Albuquerque. That morning we walked through the deserted

ruin, the eroded walls swathed in snow and ice. We saw the preserved Native American art,

faded paintings on stone and adobe. There is a path that leads down to the Rio Grande through

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the grey, dead cottonwoods. We walked down, the air was brittle cold, the sun shone thin and

yellow, and chunks of blue ice floated along the river. To the east, the Sandias—all iron, aqua,

and ice—reared brutishly. There was no sound save for the quacking of a few ducks that

skimmed along the river, and a black dog padding along behind us. All around us was peace

and death. That impacts a child.

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