“The Rio Grande is the only river I know that is in need of irrigating!"
WILL ROGERS
The 1,900 mile Rio Grande is known as the Río Bravo del Norte in Mexico and Tó Ba’áadi by the indigenous Navajo. It forms part of the border between the USA and Mexico and stretches from Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in the north, through New Mexico, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
Some of you may remember the 1973 film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It starredJames Coburn as the former and·Kris Kristofferson as the latter and how the Old West lawman killed him. Billy spent time in towns along the Rio Grande, such as Mesilla and Las Cruces, utilizing hideouts in the nearby Organ Mountains.
John Wayne movies were filmed in New Mexico and more recently, the Netflix series, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The Rio Grande, and its tributaries, flow though these films, as well as through Georgia O'Keeffe’s paintings and Cormac McCarthy’s novels.
More darkly, the state has been host to the US military-indutrial complex and, for decades, the state’s major employer has been the Department of Defence. At the northern end of the state, 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe, is Los Alamos, still the major US military nuclear research centre, that employs more than 16,000 people.
In 1945 the first atomic bomb test took place at the White Sands Missile Range, 25 miles north of Santa Fe. Later, H-bomb underground tests were conducted close to the Pecos River, a Rio Grande tributary, near Carlsbad, New Mexico.
John Wayne died of stomach cancer in 1979. An urban myth is that he may have contracted the disease from time spent filming on irradiated land. If true, it would not have been the first time a country has killed one of its most ardent supporters.
The river is the lifeblood of New Mexico, flowing from north to south through the state's dramatic rift valley. Running through desert, large stretches of its main channel often dry up completely during the summer. Due to heavy agricultural irrigation, climate change, and reduced snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains, its waters are over-used to irrigate chilli, onions, lettuce and cotton. 47,000 acres of desert are given over to pecan orchards, producing 90 million pounds of nuts annually.
It is possible to visit the three most important cities through, or near where, the river flows and remain unaware of its presence. In Taos it flows through the Rio Grande Gorge, ten miles northwest of the town. In Santa Fe it passes twenty miles northwest. In Albuquerque it splits the city in two, but runs dry in the summer months and does the same in Las Cruces.
My wife, Anne, was born in southern New Mexico. I was excited to visit her hometown of Las Cruces in 2000 where the white people lived in air-conditioned houses with watered lawns while the Latinos and indigenous citizens inhabited sadobe houses surrounded by native cactus that did not use up precious water.
We visited the Mesilla courthouse where, in 1881, Billy the Kid was sentenced to hang. It is now the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. On sale were T-shirts, posters, magnets and themed trinkets. There was a café selling coffee, waffles, ice cream, fudge and chilli candy.
While in Las Cruces, we decided to take the 250-mile road jouney north following the Rio Grande along Interstate-25 to Alburqueque, snd on to Santa Fe and Taos.
We visited Anne’s brother in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Alburquerque. It was a short visit. They do not get on which did not surprise me. A quarter of a century later he is among the dwindling Trump MAGA supporters. Surrounded by his military paraphernalia, he probably thinks he is taking a last stand at the OK Corral.
In Santa Fe I was impressed to hear the Tiwa language spoken in the street, the ancestral tongue of the Pueblo Indians. While there, Anne bought an Indian drum, which hangs near me as I write this. Itss rawhide drum skin features a charging buffalo.
Taos sits between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Rio Grande Gorge and while there we visited the gorge twenty-five miles west of Taos. The area is wild and beautiful and we stopped at a lay-by high above the river to watch a party of kayakers in the river far below. Above us were circling eagles. Anne started to beat her drum. The canoists waved. At a restaurant which had once been the Emudo Steam Gauging Station, a training centre for hydrographers, I ate trout. Anne still mocks me because I put down my knife and fork and said, ‘That was quite the nicest trout I’ve had in a long time, actually.’
Taos itself is well known as a centre for cultural nomads. We stayed at a small inn, the Laughing Horse, and our room had a TV and two VHS tapes, Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette, based on Marcel Pagnol’s novel and Nikita Mikhalkov’s film about Stalin, Burnt By the Sun. Both were as far away from Taos as it’s possible to get.
Perhaps not. My strongest memory of Taos has a Russian connection. We visited the Fechin House, today an art museum, but designed by Russian artist, Nicolai Fechin, who soon after arriving in the USA in 1923, moved into this adobe-style house. He reconfgured the interior, absorbing influences from his Russian heritage with Native American and Hispanic themes. He used sugar pine and poplar from the northwest forests which were knot-free, making it easier to carve and that allowed him to craft beautiful, undulating surfaces.
On our way back to Las Cruces we visited the Acoma Pueblo ("Sky City") Reservation. About an hour’s drive west of Albuquerque, this pueblo is built on a 365-feet sandstone bluff which has been inhabited by the Acoma people for more than 1,200 years. As peaceful farmers, they sought protection at night on the mesa from the raids of neighbouring Navajo and Apaches. The only access was by a 300-step stairway cut into the vertical rock. At the top a further 20 feet had to be climbed by hand and toe holds cut into the sandstone. There was a wall of stones at the top, which they could roll down without showing themselves.
At the end of the 16th century, the Acoma rose up against the invading Spanish and 800 of them were massacred. The survivors were enslaved and forced to build a mission church on the rock mesa. This involved carrying up 20,000 tonsof earth and stone, alongside massive wooden timber beams. The Spanish amputated the feet of those who refused to comply.
When we visited, we didn’t have to climb up the butte. There was a road constructed in the 1950s. Referred to as the ‘John Wayne Highway’, it allowed production vehicles and equipment to reach the top to film The Searchers.
Knowing this history, I was reluctant to enter the church until our Acoma guide told us that it might be called a missionary church, but we should take a good look at the interior. The walls are decorated with ancient Acoma symbols, including rainbows, stalks of corn and parrots. The altar is flanked by 60-foot pine pillars hand-carved with intertwined red and white braids which symbolize indigenous beliefs. It seemed to me that the Acoma were still there in both body and spirit.
Back in Las Cruces, I was reading the local paper, The Sun News. On the front page was an article which reported that a USAF bomber had crashed into the Rio Grande south of Alberquerqe. It was carrying a couple of unexploded H-bombs. When I told Anne’s mum what a scary thing to be living in such a dangerous place, she replied, ‘They need to keep us safe. I’m sure they knew what they were doing.’
We returned to London on a flight from from El Paso Airport in Texas. The river here forms the border with Mexico. I looked across at the Third World as we drove past green golf courses, their sprinklers using up the little water left in the river.
On the plane I told Anne that I now understood why she had taken up ballet and had headed out of town at the first opportunity. I said that, although I liked her mother and understood her enmity towards her brother, she was the only real American in her family. Her parents were both from Tennessee and her mother was part Cherokee, as had been her father, but she was the only member of her family proud of her Indian blood.
When we arrived in London, I looked fondly at her small blue torch cactus she’d purchased years ago on a trip to New Mexico which I had never liked. It needed a little water. I did this for the first time, careful not to touch it.
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