By Carmen Baca
On April 6, 2022, human error created the Hermits Peak Fire in northern New Mexico. The Calf Canyon Fire ignited on April 19 in the same way, for the same reason, and by the same people. On April 23, the infernos merged with 42,300 acres consumed. As I write this, it’s day 77, and the fire rages on with 72% containment and over 341K acres destroyed. Those of us caught within its perimeter call ourselves Norteños.
Our story is divided into Before and After. Before the Hermits Peak Calf Canyon fire, the largest in New Mexico history, and after, as we deal with the aftermath, which we’ve been told now includes monsoon floods. We shall see. Before, fire was always a concern, but no one expected our futures would include years of learning how to live with the after effects of the trauma from this inferno. What it did to us made our new everyday routines into exercises of controlled panic and increased anxiety resulting in nights of insomnia and nightmares of the terror-filled, consecutive weekends we endured in April and May.
Our connection to this region at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range lies in our families’ roots. We share origin stories with individual, yet common, details. Our forefathers came with expeditions from Spain and Mexico. Some, like my maternal grandfather, were Native Americans, so many of us are mestizos. In the 1850s, most of our antepasados acquired the tierra we own now from land grants; in my area, it was the Mora Land Grant.
The deep roots twine around our hearts and bind us to the place. Those in my valley, Cañoncito de las Manuelitas, call it “God’s Country.” But, I’ve heard primos in Gascon, Rociada, and Tierra Monte, and friends from San Ignacio and Las Tusas say their communities are God’s Country, too. We all feel blessed for the privilege of living here. Before, and most especially now, After.
Most of us in our sixties and older were told by our elders of our legacies. In my case, my father blurted it out of the blue one summer in the ’60s.
“Todo lo que ves será tuyo.”
He had waved his arm out, his hand palm up and open as if making a grand proclamation. And it was, too. ‘All this will be yours’ wasn’t something I expected to hear on one of our regular summer hikes to check on the cows. Not as a child, anyway.
He made his announcement with no fanfare. No further discussion either, I figured, when he took a step and kept going. Home was a mile downhill, so I didn’t follow right away. I stood there with my thoughts. This is one of those memories which has stayed with me my entire life: it made me aware of herencia. Like so many Norteños before and after me, I learned that day how important a role inheritance would play in my life.
I can still see the land as I saw it then. Majestic, healthy forests in front and to the right. To my left was the valle, a vibrant green meadow. Beyond that were trees as far as I could see. Every shade of green from the conifers and firs to the ponderosa pines and juniper, interspersed with the tall white gold aspen and the teal spruce. Moss-covered boulders, some as big as small cars, were scattered in a few locations like the giants of our legends had thrown rocks willy-nilly. Beneath trees also in certain areas grew short brown or white mushrooms and ferns. Wildflowers of different shapes and lengths in every color of the rainbow populated the land. Our small herd of Herefords dotted the meadow thick with timothy, grama, and wheatgrass. I took in the spectacular sight and let his statement wash over me with profound effect. These are the vistas I recall when I want to picture them Before.
Sadness hits first when this memory comes to me, the same as when I heard his words that day. For me to inherit all this, he would have to die. I didn’t want to think about that then. I don’t like remembering now. But this is the circle of life for us Norteños.
Through the decades, we have cared for our herencia; we have used our elders’ utensils, tools, machinery, and furniture. We are rich with archaic farm equipment, metal wheels and all, religious relics, historical documents—heirlooms priceless to each family. All are part of the inheritance, and we make use of the ones that work, displaying in our homes or on our properties with pride of ownership those antiques which don’t.
Descendants of our grandparents’ livestock populate our meadows, and we follow the methods of raising and caring for them from those who came before. Some of us plant the grasses which will feed them through the winters based on our weather predictions according to las Cabañuelas and confirmed by The Farmer’s Almanac. We prune the trees in the orchards our ancestors planted over a hundred years before, and they still provide fruit. We plant the seeds we save from previous harvests which provide the vegetables to fill our freezers and pantries for the coming year. Making use of the lands by planting in cycles and leaving certain fields fallow as needed, we know how valuable las tierras are in sustaining our livestock and ourselves. We deforest our woods and use the trees as fuel for heating and cooking and for building. Our herencia provides our families with sustenance to survive. For many of us, it’s a livelihood.
Some of our communities are hamlets, small towns, or villages, while others are merely a conglomeration of homes divided by fields and forests along country roads spanning ten miles or a bit more. I’ll bet every four out of five houses and properties along these roads belong to those of us who inherited our lands from our forefathers.
But if anything represents herencia at its best, it’s nuestras casas, those of us lucky to still live in them or to use them as outbuildings. The adobe houses hold deep meaning for us Norteños. Many stand today, as do the barns and the sheds. They have endured nature’s storms and erosion over time. They were built by the hands of the people from whose roots we grew. The land provided the materials. The cozy cocinas where our gramitas made their tortillas, their frijoles con chile, red or green didn’t matter. They preserved and canned their harvests there in the fall and sat by the wood stove to sew or crochet in winters. Those formal parlors for guests with the sepia portraits of ancestors on the walls and crocheted doilies covering the furniture. Those are the casitas many Norteños still live in, adding rooms as members to the families increase. That last detail isn’t true anymore. After the fire, 400 or more homeowners now sift through the debris in hopes of finding something to cherish from Before.
Those of us who didn’t lose our homes or structures lost part, much, or all of our lands. The property on and around the house is a part of us as much as any family member. When it hurts, so do we. Severe droughts parch the earth, and when every footstep raises dust, we shake our heads. Places previously underwater, like riverbeds, crack as Mother Nature leaves puzzle pieces in the landscape. We pray for rain. When the pine needles crackle underfoot and the smell of trementina, turpentine, wafts in the breeze, we cringe. The heat, the winds, the dry vegetation, and the starving earth strike fear in our consciousness. We know very well what that combination of materials can mean.
Water is scarce, but we prepare our homes for the possibility of wildfires. We save the rains and take containers of water everywhere because we never know when a spark from anything, even a horseshoe, can ignite a flame. A small fire can turn large on a windy day. We know this, and we are careful. We value the land; we value our herencia. We accept that we have been designated caretakers of our little slices of New Mexican soil as have our vecinos on either side, over the mountains por todo los lados, and across the fields and the rivers everywhere to the other communities in the four directions. None of us would put an inch of our herencia in jeopardy.
This land will belong to our children. And their children. And long after we are gone, they will care for la tierra as we did when our lifespan allowed us the honor. Our family tree will keep growing branches to ensure the land thrives to sustain the generations. That was the plan, anyway. For most of us, it’s still the plan; but many of us won’t see the forest look anything like its former lush glory since it’s going to take 120 years. For many Norteños, especially the elders, their source of income is gone. Wood for building and heating is gone. So are the summer pastures for the livestock. The water will soon be contaminated with burn scar debris.
And now we wait for the monsoons.
Before the fire, we Norteños thought we might have a good summer until we felt the April winds grow increasingly erratic. And then an ill-advised act by la Floresta, the Forestry Service, ignited a spark which grew into a fire and spread over all of us. As the inferno passed from one location to the next, we did our daily chores with one eye in the direction of the closest plumes.
Having kept track of the widening burn area since its start on April 6, 2022, we all kept our eyes on the TV news and the reports from the Floresta which started the damn thing in the first place. Another prescribed burn gone bad. The Forestry Service has long been the thorn in our sides. Their actions in the national forests nearby affect us in different ways, the worst, of course, by fires. Our alarm as Norteños, thousands of us natives in countless communities, was warranted. The winds rose to 70 miles per hour on some of the days which followed. Day after day of blowing wind and billowing smoke made us all start wearing our COVID masks again. Asthmatic people and those with other breathing issues left their locations if they could. The “Ready, Set, Go” evacuation system by the sheriff’s department made our stomachs drop. It had gotten more real than we expected. Many of our ranchitos have had fires close by, but most of us survived without being touched. We felt sure this one was going to be the closest yet, but none of us thought it was going to consume us all.
On April 19 when the Calf Canyon fire ignited after lying dormant since January, the high unforgiving winds blew embers and sparked new fires; the horizon now had multiple plumes to watch. We learned how to navigate a variety of fire maps, infrared ones, and others which showed in gruesome detail the locations already burned. We followed their borders on the sites as if they were accurate and screamed internally when each day brought them closer to our area. We saw Facebook pages pop up with updates from the Forestry, evacuations on the Sheriff’s page, and requests for help from one person or another in one way or another. Evacuation centers formed, first one and then several at a time as thousands had to flee their homes. The Red Cross arrived, followed by FEMA. Motels and hotels were already full with firefighters, one Incident Team, then three toward the end. People went as far as Albuquerque, over 200 miles for some. Many hotels and motels offered discounts to evacuees, and the state fairground opened to RVs. New Mexicans across the state rallied to help however they could, but some faced evacuations of their own after days or weeks passed. Las Vegas and Mora, surrounding communities between and around, came together as one. All of us with a common goal. Community pages with volunteers for this or that, free food for evacuees, then services for HELP NM money, Red Cross delivery schedules, and so much more filled all our Facebook timelines.
We tuned to the Forestry Facebook page every morning at nine and every evening at six for video updates on every fire detail, sheriff evacuation updates, the weather, and containment, an overload of facts which weighed us down with worry and dread. We watched the number of personnel grow from the hundreds to over three thousand. It was clear this fire wouldn’t be like the others when Southwest Incident Management operations section chief Jayson Coil used the word “catastrophic” for the fire conditions. The word applied most to the last two weekends of April.
The day before the fires combined, the winds blew in all directions between 40-70 miles per hour. I can’t remember a windier April ever, and I’ve lived on our land permanently since 1987. Communities went from “Ready” to “Set” in a matter of days. “Go” came without warning. An alert on our phones listing the residents who had to get out NOW struck with loud and alarming beeps. Our hearts fell with each announcement.
Then reports of one family home or an entire community burning began. The shocking and traumatic experiences shared on social media, texts, and DMs will leave our timeline memories permanently scarred with this event we would love to go back and make only a nightmare. Like losing a loved one who comes back once a year when we post the death, and the ghost of the post, the tweet, or the blog reminds us. We sat by our windows or stood outside when the smoke wasn’t so bad and watched. Every one of us Norteños feared this fire, growing in acreage and personnel but not in containment. It was a monster, consuming our lands by the minute, and more of us went into “Ready” while a few more communities close by went into “Set.” And that damn alert caught us off guard again when even more went into “Go.” The beast approached. We watched the skies, reported and updated daily with photo evidence sent to land owners living in other states, we watched the maps, and our anxiety ate at our stomachs. I remember how the fear clung to me some days in chills and on others with the urge to flee. A panic settled over me. I felt like an animal sensing approaching danger and my back tensed, my senses alert. I waited and hoped the inferno went northwest, away, even though I knew that would put other ranchitos in danger. But please, Lord, not my house. Not our valley, please.
We kept our watch, sleeping in fits and spurts through the nights. I saw the flames crest over the ridge to my southwest. It looked like the fire was only one mountain away from our house. I felt for the first time in my life that feeling when people say, “My blood ran cold.” I can’t describe it any other way. I felt it deep inside, a hysteria pulsing in waves outward to my skin. We’d had a fire that close in 2001 on the other side of the house. I hadn’t seen the flames with that one though.
We were informed of our “Set” status by sheriff’s deputies and state police on Monday, April 11. But the peril became more pronounced on April 20, and the internal desire to flee or scream, because I knew my husband would stay, ate at my gut. But I packed anyway, gathering items the sheriff’s Facebook page told us to pack. We didn’t load anything, just watched to the west and then to the north when the fire shifted as though it wanted to come around us and envelop us from the back. We watched as ranchers with livestock passed with loaded trailers, then fire trucks, Forestry, and law enforcement, back and forth throughout the next two days. Then overhead came the air support before the winds grounded them: scoopers, chinooks, and choppers with those red water bags dangling from cables. Disappearing behind the mountains and coming back not long after.
That afternoon the plumes in our area increased our alarm. The community about ten miles to our west went to “Go.” We watched the skies, we felt the hot wind blowing through our canyon, and our unease grew. Still, we stayed, along with several of our vecinos, watching the news as residents were videoed loading belongings into vehicles between comments and hunting for pets as the camera panned out. Those ranchers who didn’t haul their animals out opened gates to meadows and roads and let the livestock flee. When other locations came into the line of the fire, sometimes both people and animals, livestock and all, had to evacuate for the second time. The anxiety for the animals left behind created an agony of the heart and the mind, settling into the pit of our stomachs. The alerts for five to eight communities to evacuate at once increased in speed. The anxiety we faced consumed us as the conflagration ate our lands, a portion at a time. The maps grew, their north and southern boundaries falling off the site pages. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, we and our lands suffered the worst in those hellish weeks.
Early on April 22, the second round of state police and sheriff’s vehicles came in a black line down our dirt road. It was like a funeral procession. I watched several cruisers breaking off the line and officers in black opening gates to houses beyond the meadows and the creek or on the same side as our house. I wanted to hide, but three cars pulled up in our driveway one after the other. “Go” didn’t leave any room for argument. But still we thought we would be okay if we stayed, never mind the smoke blanketing us all out there in the wind. At 10 a.m. our electricity turned off, and we knew the co-op had done their part to prepare our beautiful, verdant valley for the coming disaster.
We watched the billowing smoke rise, in some areas white, or black when the insatiable inferno consumed something in its path. Plumes of orange in some places, red in others, as it approached all that day. I confess we should’ve been doing more than loading up our trucks, but we were still convinced we would be fine, we would hunker down, and the fire would pass close as it had previously. By late afternoon, the flames were behind our house and we knew the forests were burning. The air was suffocating, the heat intense. When we looked out the window to the west and saw the dark brown smoke coming down our valley between the mountains on either side, enormous in size and moving fast, we knew again this fire wasn’t like the others.
The panic held in check came out in hysteria. We fled for our lives. The brown smoke deepened in color, shut out the setting sun, turned black and obscured everything around our trucks as we drove down our drive and hit the dirt road. My husband was behind me, but I lost sight of him almost immediately. Those two miles to the highway were the longest since we could see no familiar landmarks, only the roiling black smoke, seeping into the vehicle and making my breathing labored. I remember in the panicked flight being mesmerized by the flaming red embers falling from the pines nearest the road, and I wondered if my tires would melt before I could get out. Looking ahead, I saw the red crowns of the burning trees in front of me and wondered if our way out of the canyon was blocked by fire. There was no turning back. The other exit had been burning since the day before. I passed my cousin’s house where something had burned; all I could see was a line of flames approaching the road.
I reached the highway. I wanted to wait for my husband, still back there somewhere, but the heat was too intense, and again I thought about my tires. Surely, he’d be fine. I moved forward into the blackness.I reached the Y of two communities to our south where somewhere between 30 to 40 vehicles were at the stop sign, one-by-one merging with others ahead of me. I joined the procession. About a half an hour later, my husband finally appeared between the dozens of police and emergency vehicles at the country store where we agreed to meet. From there, we drove single file with at least a hundred other vehicles the 20 miles into Las Vegas, the nearest town. The other town, Mora, 20 miles to our north, had been evacuated, too. About a thousand of us reached safety that night. The next day, the two fires combined. Over the next month, somewhere between six to seven thousand more evacuees joined us.
On the weekend of May 29th, also deemed “catastrophic” due to the constant winds, many spot fires from flying embers sprang up everywhere. They traveled to the north, south, and east, bringing one close to Las Vegas. Several of the streets and neighborhoods on the west side were evacuated without much advance warning. Many residents already in “Set” status left as well. The northern division threatened our valley once again. People who had returned to their homes in communities close to our place evacuated for the second time.
These past two and a half months are burned into our memories as deeply as the catastrophe etched our landscape and left it a wasteland. Northern New Mexico looks other- worldly, apocalyptic. Populated by blackened trees standing limbless, most ramrod straight arrows pointed at the sky in an army of millions, our forests are forever changed. The towering pines, the conifers, the firs, the ponderosa pine, and the blue spruce will not come back to their former beauty in my lifetime.
Those who lost their homes, the houses their antepasados built with their calloused hands, the antiques—utensils and equipment—they used in the kitchen, the barn, and the tool shed their great-grandparents left them are detritus covered in ashes now. The historical documents are a memory someone should put on paper soon before they’re gone. The precious mementos of those families’ pasts are reduced to residue melding into the earth.
We cry over these material objects not because they were worth money but because they were a part of our herencia. We cry for the trees which stood for over a hundred years and still stand, though they’re dead and will eventually topple to the ground. We cry for the wildlife which didn’t survive, and we cry for the domestic animals left behind in the panicked rush to escape when the fire front came upon us so fast. There were days when thousands of acres burned with 80 mile an hour winds propelling the flames.
Our forests contributed to our love of the land, and like our fellow Norteños, we spent hours there. Now, we cry when we walk through the mountain paths the creatures made or the wider one made by wagon wheels. We were supposed to take care of this all for those who left it in our care. We failed. Therein lies the rub, though. The source of our anger, frustration, and helplessness: the wardens of the woods caused this disaster. We had no say in the matter, but we surely suffered the consequences. Many, many hamlets, communities, villages, and small towns lost part of our herencia. No amount of money can make up for our losses. There will be no retribution or reimbursement enough to cover what the fire destroyed. Herencia has no price.
Our inheritance makes us unite as Norteños for one purpose: to revive what we can, to nurture and sustain what’s left, and to preserve a way of life so old most of us don’t even know the origins. We square our shoulders, take deep cleansing breaths of the breeze that still smells of smoke and burning timber. We know the landscape we cherished only a few weeks before is forever changed. We receive comfort from seeing how it was in our memories, in photos, and videos, bringing back the scents and sensations according to the season when they were taken. We continue to nurture the land which has been spared, our thoughts on the blackened forests and how we could possibly clear them all out—miles of dead trees. And we pray the floods don’t come with the monsoons. At least with fire, most of us had fair warning to get out. Floods strike faster, move faster downhill where many of the communities hit first by fire lie alert to this second threat.
The road ahead doesn’t overwhelm us though. “Una migaja a la vez se comió la hormiga su cena.” My dad used to say that. One crumb at a time the ant eats its supper. I have a feeling he learned it from his father. I think of my parents, my grandparents, and the other ancianos who populated this valley so long ago as the rains fall today from the monsoon, gentle but steady. Our ancestors’ tears falling soft upon the burn scars and the parched earth, their sorrow tempered by their knowledge of what torrential floods would add to our already heavy hearts. The welcome water on the parched earth feeds our motivation, our desire to replant, to rebuild, to reassemble as much of what we had and blend it with the new we’re determined to adapt. We Norteños go on. Herencia demands it.
Carmen Baca taught high school and college English for 36 years before retiring in 2014. Her debut novel El Hermano published in 2017 and became a finalist in the NM-AZ Book Awards program in 2018. Her third book, Cuentos del Cañón, received first place for short story fiction anthology in 2020 from the same program. She has published 5 books and over 50 short works in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. She and her husband live a quiet life in the country caring for their animals.