A Journey to Rociada

My friend Kim and I got up early the other day and walked the dogs in the pitch black of a morning, a full moon resting above the lights of Truchas…

… and headed out on a journey just as the sun was rising…

… driving through ancient villages along the High Road to Taos, most settled in the 1700s…

… high up over a mountain pass, winding down, down, down…

… to the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains that I see from my house on the west side…

… into the little town of Mora which was founded in 1835 and sits at 7,100 feet above sea level. While I was looking for Mora’s statistics, I found that it’s mentioned in Willa Cather‘s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, and that one of author Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley, is based on Mora.

I headed out on this trip in the first place, to the other side of the mountain, to find a little village called Rociada. I went looking for it because I’ve just finished reading a lovely book titled Behind the Mountains, by Oliver La Farge which was originally published in 1956. It recounts stories of three women, primarily, who grew up there on the Baca Ranch in the 1920s.

All but three of the chapters were originally published in the New Yorker. It chronicles a way of life that simply doesn’t exist anymore and I wanted to go see the place I became so fond of while reading the book.

Directions in hand, I went seeking NM 94 out of Mora. I’ve included this photo, shot through my windshield, because I wanted you to see: THAT’S NM 94, the right turn where a white car has come to a stop. THAT’S my turn onto a state highway! All I can say is, only in New Mexico, and I mean that in the fondest possible way.

Turning onto 94 almost instantly took me into another world.

Little did I know what was going to unfold as I drove high up the mountainside again onto its east-facing shoulder and into another time.

A world where the 21st century almost doesn’t exist. We’ve all heard the phrase, “the land that time forgot.” Well, this is it. I climbed and climbed…

… past abandoned houses and barns.

And, although I didn’t end up with any photos to show you because I was quickly lost in an emotional response to the place, I finally crested that upward rising slope of the mountainside and, spread before me, was the valley that La Farge described in his book, falling away in every direction. It took my breath away. It’s vast and is its own Eden tucked up there on that side of the Sangre de Cristos. I didn’t expect anything like it.

Rociada is actually two villages, Lower Rociada, and Upper Rociada, and the Baca Ranch sat somewhere in between. I came first to the lower, which was partly abandoned…

… and partly lived in.

In most of these old villages, the churches are well kept.

And then I reached Upper Rociada, the village most written about in La Farge’s book.

I thought of the quiet but bustling town he’d described in the 1920s, a place he brought vividly to life with his pros…

… and standing in the middle of that silent street, in the midst of all those abandoned buildings–there was the mercantile and a few of the houses he’d written about–it was very quiet but not mute.

I could imagine Consuela Baca, age 10, riding her horse right past me, dust rising from the dirt road. It was as if I was perceiving the silent footprints of a world now gone forever.

She was a ghost, that girl I’d come to know.

And I was overcome with waves of feelings, my mind suspended. I really could hear the sounds of farm animals and the laughter of children playing, in the air all around me. Rociada’s streets left still to the eye, were not to the heart. The spirit of the place lives on still.

It occurred to me that, while I said this is a place that time forgot, we’ve forgotten something also. As a society. We’ve forgotten how to farm, how to raise most of what we need to survive.

We’ve, most of us long ago, abandoned quiet nights by the fire reading to one another, a whole family engrossed; forgotten entirely about bonding so acutely that it’s fair to say we needed each other, really needed our families and friends, for survival–at lambing time, or to bring in the crops, just to be there, solid. Knowing.

I think many of us in today’s culture have forgotten how to give of our time, in ways we don’t see on our device screens. Quietly, privately, intimately, importantly.

Understandably the young people left these villages and went off to cities where they could get jobs and earn money, which they had to do. Our culture was changing from an agricultural one into that of finance. The balance was tipping and we would soon need money more than we needed the goods we raised.

They left the old homes and their parents and grandparents, who stayed behind to work the land. And when the elders got too old to work and started to die out, these old villages started to die along with them.

And something was lost, I think. That quiet slow pace of considered living. Of admitting we needed each other. And depending on one another for a lifetime.

I stand on these streets, once dirt wagon trails, and I hear the phantoms. All of them and that life gone now. Though a few have stayed on.

I was struggling with this post because it felt almost too sad. It’s like something has become extinct and writing about it won’t bring it back, so why write it? But then I met Aggie at a party in Truchas. She and her husband are working to raise the funds to make necessary repairs to the old church in the village, built in 1754.

And she said we need to talk and write about what’s been lost so we can acknowledge it as a loss and properly grieve it. Yes.

So that’s why I’m writing this post, but also as a reminder to all of us to take more care, to understand what is precious and to know that our actions have consequences.

This old, adobe silo is the only thing remaining of the Baca Ranch. The rest burned down in the 1960s.

Gratefully, not in these villages but in others, new young farmers are planting small crops for their own families and to take to market.

I live up here in the mountains, in part, because the world has become too fast for me.

We used to look each other in the eye, not into the screens of our devices. I, personally, wish we could get more of that back and, maybe, one by one, we will.

Love to you all,

Jeane

 

 

 

 

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