Valles Caldera National Preserve

Jessie Fenton Fitzgerald

Ahead of my residency at Valles Caldera, I thought a lot about the fact that the reason I’m able to be here is that this land is now no longer privately owned. Like all of the properties under the aegis of the National Park Service, it is public land. We, the public, own the land in the sense that is it no longer in the hands of private individuals. But what does this kind of ownership mean? What is our relationship, as private individuals, to public lands?

It is astonishing to be here. Although I now live in Cambridge, England, I was born and raised 15 miles down the road in Los Alamos. Growing up, Valles Caldera, or The Valle as we called it, was always a place of seductive mystery. We loved it from afar, from the top of Pajarito Ski Hill, from the edges of New Mexico Highway 4, but never from inside its forbidden boundaries.

I’ve had the extended, focused time in the mountains I have missed and dreamed of for years. But the time has also shown me who I am away from the mountains. I am of the mountains but not always in them. Like obsidian from Cerro del Medio, I bear the fingerprint of the Jemez in all that I do. But, like the much of the obsidian, I, too, have travelled far from my point of origin.

On my first walk around Cerro La Jara, when rounding the north side of the dome, I see two coyotes hunting and loping along. Their tawny browns, blacks and grays blend in with the grasses. I hold my phone camera up, recording a video while tracking them with my bare eyes. Transfixed, I watch until they dissolve into the landscape. When I look at the video later, they aren’t there. Of course they aren’t.

My UK life is knocking at the door, emails are leaking in: dentist appointment reminders, tutoring to arrange for my daughter, my own teaching and mentoring jobs resurfacing. A small but perceptible shift in my heart, time to go home. Home to the life I’ve built and nourished in England over the past 18 years.

Every time I venture on a new trail, I scan the mountains, looking for burn scars, trying to gauge the extent of the Las Conchas (2011) and Thompson Ridge (2013) fires. It’s one thing to study a color-coded map that shows severity and extent of the burns, it’s another to stand on a hillside among acres and acres of downed trees, then see similar damage miles away caused by the same fire.

I have a not-so-secret agenda nestled in my stewardship of storytelling. I’d even call it a mission. My hope is that this work contributes to people articulating and nurturing their own personal versions of the land ethic. What is the land ethic?

Morning e-bike ride to Obsidian Valley. I had forgotten how thrilling it is to ride a bike in the mountains. Nothing compares with the pure joy of coasting through patches of sun and shade, the scents of ponderosas, warm dust, and mountain sage in the air.