In Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf,” a small, yellow-green leaf floats in front of a brown-red adobe wall, the colour of earth, colour of the hills and dirt of northern New Mexico. In other paintings, distant blue hills stretch across the top of canvas landscapes where light green and shades of brown below run horizontally across. I’ve seen these paintings and the real-life landscapes before, but now, looking again while reading Rebecca Solnit’s “blue of distance” essays in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, I see them differently. Solnit’s reflections on horizons, points in the distance shaded differently than things lit nearby. Layers of hills that turn to dusty blues and greys merge with deep blue sky, deep and serious and hopeful. My perception of colour and clarity changes depending on how the light hits. How pronounced it is in these wide-open western spaces, so many shaded and textured mountain tops.
Two years in a row, my spouse, our dog, and I visit “the ranch” in Gila, in southwest New Mexico, some 30 or so miles west of Silver City—this former working cattle ranch now divided into smaller parcels sold off over time. We stay in a rental cabin looking out toward a field edged with cottonwoods and the small Bear Creek just beyond with quick hills rising up beyond that. We’re in a small valley where everything heats up under the midday sun but because of the creek and a healthy supply of groundwater there are plenty of shade trees. We arrive when the cottonwoods and other trees along creeks and rivers are just beginning to bud, watch them turn from empty winter branches to pale white-green, to new spring leaves. Within just a few weeks, bright green darkens and settles in, ready for summer. The cottonwood ecosystems of pines, shrubs, birds, deer, javelina, and other animals, linear forests stretching for miles, sometimes the only green in a sea of dusty and cracked desert browns.
A break from the late-winter isolation in Michigan in that first year of Covid, we journeyed to the cabin on the ranch. Arriving again a year later, I’ve also come back to Solnit and the blues of distance, her reflections on longing, on what still always lies further and beyond, and on perception, how we look at a thing and then look again, see one thing and then see something else hitting deep. This is a different world from the world before 2020.
Considering how something can be viewed differently depending on the angle, how close or far away, I also think about the kind of distinction Annie Dillard describes in “Lenses” between looking through a microscope or through binoculars, examining microorganisms in droplets of water or swans flying and diving through the sky. Dillard pulls us into intimate moments within larger landscapes, contrasts how perception changes depending on the lens. She reflects on the feelings of control that a child might have while examining microscopic organisms, and how we falter and lose focus—like losing our footing while watching birds in the sky through binoculars—as adults. She offers us these seemingly disparate realities, holding them simultaneously within a few short paragraphs of a tiny essay. How easy it seems to embrace such contradictory experiences.
But in our social world, it feels nearly impossible: media-perpetuated narratives teach us that something can’t be both one thing and another. We can only choose. Wear a mask, or don’t. Get vaccinated, or don’t. Send your kids out into Covid unprotected, or don’t. Open everything for business as usual or shut it all down. Have total freedom, or none at all (unless you want the right to curtail my freedom).
How, in fact, so often a choice feels like no choice at all.
And yet, how we move between the near and the distant, these western hills, open landscape. And how we are so often caught in landscapes both spectacular and devastating.
O’Keefe’s flower petals sometimes look like they’re falling off the canvas, so that at first I don’t see a flower at all, and then looking close at what turns out to be the centre of it in detail: waves of colour, shades of light and dark, shadows, soft lines, the artist’s pencil capturing shapes and then changing and manipulating with colour. A flower like I haven’t seen before, always new, even though I’ve seen these paintings many times.
The smallest thing in its intensity, we might wonder what else would appear so very different if we saw it up close. If we looked from other angles. If we set it alongside something else, to juxtapose and cause us to see again. If looking differently can rupture narratives and preconceived notions, unsettle expectations. I ask myself if I have considered other vantage points and wonder if the thing that I am seeing is even that thing at all. Or might it be something else entirely?
*****
We’re gathered around the campfire ring to celebrate a birthday with the new and previous owners of this former cattle ranch and a few other neighbours. The old owners kept some of the land and live up on the hill overlooking the Bear Creek and Mogollon mountains. And they still own property adjacent to the cabins where they have a small stable and corrals with a few horses and cows.
At least 25 years ago, they bought hundreds of acres from the Hooker family, who, long before that, bought even hundreds more from the Lyons & Campbell company that controlled a huge portion of the ranch land in the west. The wife of the couple tells me they divided their land and sold parcels over the years where houses on top of nearby hills now sit perched with views for miles around. Some of the land near the creek was also sold to the state, now protected as a managed natural area.
She tells me how many cattle they had, a number I can’t recall, and that it was kind of a dude ranch: “tourists” stayed in the cabins and helped work the cattle for short periods of time. I picture the early 90s comedy City Slickers with Billy Crystal, a comedy that also gave a good glimpse into the hard work of cattle ranching. From their old Facebook page that’s still active, I scroll through photos of “Cowgirl Camp” events where women learned ranching skills from riding horses to roping cattle and more. An advanced Cowgirl Camp advertised learning to shoot while on horseback. Earlier photos show gender-mixed groups roping young cows and branding them with hot irons—a practice I think some have moved on from now or at least modified to be less stressful on the calves—and in 2010, a series of pictures of “roundup”: 15 or so vacation ranch hands on horseback following and guiding the cattle through the rocky hills, along trails edged by cottonwoods and other vegetation, near what looks to me like the Bear Creek we walk quietly next to most days we’re at the ranch.
She tells me her personal story: all those years ago, after her divorce and then marrying an airline pilot, they decided to buy land, move to New Mexico from California, and start ranching. She had little or no experience even riding horses, had to learn about the land alone for stretches at a time before her new husband retired from flying so they could do the work of cattle ranching together. It surprises me because they look like they’ve lived here forever: their wind and sun-worn skin, the look of rugged outdoor work. Her hair still blond and falling to her shoulders, he with his large cowboy hat and boots, Wrangler jeans, his quiet kind of brooding demeanor. She tells me one reason they decided to sell the cows and turn the cabins into more comfortable vacation rentals was that tourists’ interest in ranching waned, and more often they wanted to stay and relax, less often learn and practice the work.
I’m also drawn to the history before Hooker and Lyons & Campbell, before they claimed land as their own that didn’t belong to them, stories that are important to tell because the land wasn’t empty as often go narratives of westward expansion. Indigenous peoples have occupied the southwest for at least 10,000 years. From about 200 to the mid-1100s, the prehistoric Mimbres culture, who were part of the larger Mogollon culture known for its distinctive black and white pottery, was active and vibrant at many sites along the Mimbres River.
Touring the museum at Western New Mexico University, I learn that an invaluable treasure trove of Mimbres artifacts was recovered at the NAN Ranch just a bit southeast of Silver City, the “largest and most complete collection of Mimbres materials in existence from a single prehistoric Mimbres site,” the museum now housing the “most comprehensive permanent interpretative exhibition of Mimbres pottery and artifacts in the world.” Historians are still unsure why the Mimbres people abandoned a large pueblo at the NAN Ranch site in 1140, though there are theories about drought and disease, maybe overpopulation. They seem to have migrated away, their culture dispersed or joined with other groups in the wider areas.
I also learn from New Mexico Nomad that throughout the early 1800s there was conflict and sometimes peace between the Spanish and the Chihene Nda Apache—formerly known as the Mimbres, Gila, and Warm Springs Apache—and the Chiricahua Apache. As a goodwill gesture, the Spanish apparently built a huge hacienda, a “rancho del paz,” where some Apache families lived through the mid-1800s. In the 1840s, the US entered into war with Mexico for land along the Rio Grande, and in the 1860s gold was found in Pinos Altos, just east of Gila, and a fort was built nearby. Eventually, US “expansion” forced Geronimo, the famous leader of the Apache, to surrender, his people fighting colonisers for at least 200 years by that time. The “peace ranch” later became the Lyons & Campbell headquarters. And it’s still there in the middle of Gila—a tiny town with a post office and church, a few houses, a market that looks abandoned but has maybe only been closed since early Covid or just before.
The history feels complicated, as maybe it should, considering that Indigenous peoples lived and migrated for thousands of years before Europeans showed up, histories rarely taught in non-Native schools because narratives written by victors means that a lot of the details have been left out. Still today, there are thriving cultures and communities and Native-occupied lands throughout the southwest.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many Apache were removed from what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico and held at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Many of their descendants are today part of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe whose “territory includes trust lands in southwestern Oklahoma and southeastern Arizona,” the reservation at Akela, New Mexico “in the heart of its historic aboriginal territory,” and tribal headquarters near Apache, Oklahoma.
The Chihene Nda Apache were briefly part of the Chiricahua Apache Tribe, though today are fighting for federal recognition as a sovereign band. As their website explains:
The U.S. produced three treaties specific to our ancestors –1852, 1853, and 1855. The Chihene Nde Nation of New Mexico comprises the previously federally acknowledged tribe…and on the 1941 Smithsonian’s List of Indian Tribes…We are an independent nation of Apache survivors who have maintained tribal political influence and have substantially inhabited our homelands despite land dispossession [and] left without a permanent reservation.
And many of the Mescalero Apache Tribe’s more than 5000 members live on the 463,000-acre reservation, traditional homelands of Mescalero, Lipan, and Chiricahua Apache, to the east of Truth or Consequences, NM. One time, we drove through that land on our way to Ruidoso, the rolling mountains and green hills thick with ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, pinyon pine, and juniper, as we headed into high desert along the wide and twisting mountain roads. That the forests are so verdant is no accident. The tribe is invested in sustainable forest resources management, bringing together traditional practices, forestry science, business interests, and planning for the future of the tribe and its forests. Managing forests means sustainable seed planting and logging practices, dealing with invasive species, and wildfire prevention.
*****
Rivers create ecosystems of greens, shaded and textured forests with cottonwoods at their centre. Ageing majestic trees reaching high, their trunks knotted, branches growing up and out in mangled directions, leaves shimmering like quaking aspen in the breeze. In my mind, I can’t separate O’Keefe’s paintings of cottonwoods from the many living and breathing I’ve seen in person. Through her eyes, branches like limbs dance, circle, and twist, sometimes dramatically gnarled even while the leaves form a kind of symmetrical world in the sky like a bouquet.
From our tiny cabin on the far edge of the ranch, the big cottonwoods across the field along Bear Creek are the first thing I look for when I step out on the small porch in the mornings, the sunlight slow and pale highlighting the towering trees. In mid-morning, we walk closer, under the trees, along the creek, crossing to follow the trail through the linear forest before turning up the hill. Climbing and ascending up and away from the water, everything dries out and any wind blows dust along the road until we loop back down toward the trees.
*****
I’m not sure why I search these landscapes so hungrily, from the small details of each tree up close, to the far-off river forest running as far as I can see. I try to hold on to all of it, all at once, to take it in as if to imprint the image as some kind of action in my mind, as if this kind of meditation might be a small piece of creating a different kind of world.
The landscape, a kind of poetry. How a poem can sometimes be an agent of change. The smallest of details demanding attention, the potential to make some kind of impact on the world.
In A Field Guide, Solnit reflects on “getting lost” as literally and figuratively losing oneself in joy and mystery, of lingering in the intangible–such as in “a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away.” And somewhat in contrast to the voluptuous surrender that being lost in a moment or space can bring, the blue of distance has at its heart a kind of melancholy: “the world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.”
Looking outward can also be a reflection of what’s inside. Solnit likens desire to that distant blue and wonders if, instead of wanting to reach or acquire whatever is ahead and otherwise unattainable, we might embrace the longing. If one might “look across the distance without wanting to close it up,” she asks if it might be possible to “own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?” Desire functions as just that because the object of desire can never be attained, the “longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival.” The distant blue hills and horizon, like desire and longing, can only ever signal possibility. But is it that hope, that potential, that motivates our desires, our actions? Can we long for beauty as a kind of action?
Letting oneself be lost, or finding oneself in awe. To open to vulnerability, to emotions we might otherwise try hard to keep in check. A rapture and intensity of emotion like love walking hand in hand with sorrow, how mystery can excite or cause inexplicable sadness, or the heart-wrenching conflict of such beauty amid destruction.
*****
It was only recently that I learned we have cottonwood trees in Michigan, a surprise and not. Surrounded, sometimes claustrophobically, by hundreds of species of trees, they blend in. I think I’m drawn toward the cottonwoods out west because they stand out like green oases in the desert, and because they remind me of weeping willows, even though they don’t look much alike except for some similarity in their twisting limbs and rough bark. The resemblance for me is in the emotional connection I feel to both. Remembering the huge willow tree in the front of my grandmother’s yard growing along the ditch reminds me of the comfort and freedom of my childhood. Spending days and weeks at that house a little away from town and far away from the world I was allowed to roam the huge yard and the woods behind, learning to explore, question, and be creative.
The soft brushing of the long willow branches from my childhood, calming like meditation, a stopping of time, a warmth, a love. The cottonwoods remind me of that quiet brilliance, the sound of the breeze through leaves, cool green a break from a sea of summer heat, a time before this “adult” world of fear and division, before climate catastrophe became such a part of our everyday angst. The trees, the forests, a refuge, a resetting.
In Lansing, a local park known for its cottonwood trees is being renamed Azaadiikaa Park, which is Anishinaabemowin for “many cottonwoods,” azaadi referring “to the cottonwood tree as a living being whose essential nature is observable by the physical manifestation of movements in the world.” The resolution written for the name change says that “the City of East Lansing occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples’ land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw” and recognises “the importance of Native Peoples’ contributions to the past, present and future.” A small sanctuary in nature surrounded by city streets, an opportunity to listen to the trees and pay more attention to history along the path to the future.
O’Keefe’s cottonwoods embrace the seasons, like early spring leaves of light green floating over a red trunk and branches, some pale blue peeking from behind. Or glowing autumn yellows, limbs curving in half circles like scythes and highlighted by streaks of white, making the tree float on the page. In other paintings, fall colours take on darker reds and oranges. In winter, brown-grey limbs behind a light fog of cloud or snow, waiting quietly to begin again. A stillness. A kind of patience.
But like so many species of plants and animals, the cottonwoods are in danger, from generations of engineered management of rivers for agriculture or to eliminate flooding, to longer and more damaging droughts increasing with climate change. So many of the few sources of water in New Mexico, like in much of the southwest, have been diverted and manipulated for irrigation, ranching, and farming. The past and present already so changed in this place, the dry seasons becoming hotter and drier. Fire seasons now start earlier and the fires are often harder to manage and contain.
In Arizona, as Debra Utacia Krol writes, tribal communities like the O’odham and Pee Posh–who traditionally relied on water from the Gila River for agriculture–suffered starvation in the late 1800s and 1900s when settlers diverted most of the water supply, resulting in famine and the loss of livelihood for many. But in recent years, Gila River water rights have been given back to these communities, whose members now have more control over use and distribution as well as leasing rights. Other tribes have also gained greater rights to the Colorado River in Arizona, though more legislation is still necessary for greater sovereignty. Increased control has also given tribes the ability to work on water conservation, restoration of river habitats, and other resource management practices. “Before dams, diversion canals and the Law of the River throttled the Colorado River’s flow to a tiny trickle,” Krol explains, “the Colorado River Valley was a lush, green ribbon” where “honey mesquite, towering cottonwoods and willows anchored alluvial lands made fertile by muddy deposits left behind by the river,” and “sandbar willow, arrowweed, desert broom and cattails grew thick along the river banks.”
Some of the plants introduced and cultivated along the Rio Grande actually require more water than native plants and trees. With less rain and longer dry spells, and increased diversion of the water for multiple uses, the Rio Grande has been added to a growing list of endangered rivers. Running 2000 miles from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, the river doesn’t always flow to its destination. Between the Elephant Butte and Caballo reservoirs, along I-25 in New Mexico, it runs strong and fast through Truth or Consequences, but driving south through Las Cruces in April, I was confused to cross bridges spanned over dry riverbeds. In El Paso, the river forms a border between Texas and Mexico and one strains to see if there is any water at all in the narrow passageway. As the ecosystems become less diverse and native plants die out, and when the floods don’t come regularly enough to perpetuate the cycle and replenish the cottonwood bosque, the present and future become precarious.
In cottonwood forests, regular floods are necessary for clearing out the dead and spreading nutrients around the system of trees, shrubs, and other vegetation–like Gooding’s willow, peachleaf willow, New Mexico olive trees, false indigo bush and more–and the insects and animals reliant on that system. At least one bird species, the willow flycatcher, has become endangered because there are far fewer coyote willows growing under the cottonwoods where they have historically thrived. When invasive trees like salt cedar and Russian olives proliferate—imported for decoration or to help control flooding, and which then spread to wilderness areas—they disrupt the ecosystem making it harder for the cottonwoods and other species to survive.
*****
Around the ranch, everything is brown, though scrubby bushes among the hills slowly green and brighten as spring moves in, a few small wildflowers start to emerge along the road, and I imagine the brilliant array of colour that we are told will explode for a time during the summer monsoons, though we’ll be back in Michigan by then. Walking along the Hooker Loop above the ranch and away from the trees, I look out toward horizons lined with taller, blued mountains, not large and jagged like some of the fourteener peaks in Colorado, but soft and quiet, hillsides changing with the light at different times of day. The valley of farmland along a stretch of the Gila River far below, the river is home to another cottonwood forest running for miles in either direction, pale shades becoming thick and bright like a narrow stretch of carpet alongside the fields.
So fragile, these riparian forests, while outside their perimeter the land turning more fully into deserts of open space, bushes, grasses. Wildflowers hovering over the top of the ground.
*****
Sources
“About Us.” Chihene Nation of New Mexico. https://www.chihenendenationofnewmexico.org/about-us
Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1982).
Fort Sill Apache Tribe. https://fortsillapache-nsn.gov/.
Krol, Debra Utacia. “With water, tribes can reclaim their agricultural heritage and restore riverside landscapes.” AZCentral, Aug 8, 2022.
“Lyons and Campbell Ranch Headquarters.” New Mexico Nomad. https://newmexiconomad.com/lyons-campbell-ranch-headquarters/
Paskus, Laura. “Rio Grande 101.” New Mexico In Depth, Aug 9, 2016.
Solnit, Rebecca. “The Blue of Distance.” A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (New York, NY: Penguin, 2005).
Solnit, Rebecca, “Open Door.” A Field Guide to Getting Lost. (New York, NY: Penguin, 2005).
Western New Mexico University Museum, Silver City, NM.
https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/silver-city-mimbres-pottery-history/
