What I do not own

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1992 by Christpher Merrill

Indian summer. Coyotes start howling a little after daybreak, and all along the canyon--El Cajon Grande, four miles north of Santa Fe--dogs, goats, and burros respond in kind. By mid-morning my neighbor's macaw is squawking in its cage. Magpies glide through the apple orchard out front. The sky? Cerulean, as it is more than 300 days a year in New Mexico.

Beyond the gate behind our house is Santa Fe National Forest; up on the mesa, a five-minute walk away, cinnamon bears are once again foraging too close to civilization. Three years ago more than 30 bears were caught in these hills and transported north to the woods near Chama. One morning my neighbor woke up my wife and me to show us the large sow that Fish and Game officers had trapped in his backyard. The odds of a female surviving transplantation that late in the season were small, and he tried in vain to break the lock on the barrel-shaped cage.

"Another day in paradise!" cries Hans-Mukh, the Sikh day laborer who takes care of a neighboring orchard. A transplant himself (from Pittsburgh), he is walking up the driveway, hauling horse manure to spread around the aging trees, his white turban bunched up over his ears so that he can fit a Walkman headset around the back of his head.

The orchard belongs to Percival King, a spry man in his 80s who helped build the atomic bomb in nearby Los Alamos. He is the tnayordomo, or manager, of our acequia, our irrigation ditch, and I like to joke that ours is the bestregulated ditch in the state. Every spring Hans-Mukh and I spend an afternoon walking the acequia, clearing leaves and brush and broken branches, then ushering in the water diverted for the growing season from Tesuque Creek. Unlike other neighbors who sometimes join us for part of the journey downstream, Hans-Mukh and I do not belong to the landed gentry, and so we do not treat our labor as a pleasant distraction. It is part of our job.

As the caretaker of the estate surrounding me, I live in a small adobe cottage that once housed chickens. As a writer struggling to make ends meet, I am grateful for the gift of free rent. What is more, I enjoy the work integral to maintaining this place--pruning shrubs and trees; gardening in a variety of flower, wildflower, vegetable, and perennial beds; planting bulbs in the fall, raking leaves, and splitting wood for the winter; cleaning chimneys; walking the ditch. This work is, indeed, a vital counter to my literary activities, my inner life, what the poet William Matthews calls "this quarantine,/reading and pacing and feeding the fireplace."

But there are other reasons for living among orchards and horses, pinons and junipers, saltbrush and sage. "I learn from everything I do not own," John Hay writes, and I am heartened by his counsel. My wife and I own nothing here--not these three acres that real-estate agents covet, nor the water rights in continuous litigation, nor the house we guard, nor the artwork adoming the walls, nor the swimming pool we watch over as if it were a sick child. We work for our housing: a simple trade.

The question of ownership extends to the natural world. Certainly the Tesuque Indians living a few miles to the west have a different understanding of man's proper relation to nature than might exist among our neighbors. No one "owns" these cottonwoods turning gold and groaning in the earth, arcing over the acequia and our house. Nor the lawn I cut every five days until the first snow, grass native to worlds far from the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Nor the garter snake sunning on the flagstone path leading to the main house, a thick coil preparing to hibernate. Nothing is ours.

This is what my immersion here has taught me: Like the flash floods, which routinely carve the arroyo behind us and which once dumped more than a ton of mud in the swimming pool, everything flows away, even in the high desert. Our tenure anywhere is brief; as we attend to our surroundings, we must not fool ourselves into believing that we own anything beyond our capacity for love and awe.

What I treasure here in autumn are the magpies feeding in the orchard, the red-shafted flicker drumming on the viga above our door, the scat of the mountain lion I have yet to see, the bears that will escape this year's traps, the aspens blazing in the distance. At sunset on the mesa, when the coyotes howl again and the sky bleeds above the Jemez Mountains to the west and north, I can see the lights of Los Alamos as well as the first stars flickering overhead. A strange match. Yet this spectacle is what will send me to my study later in the evening, where I will write, praying for vision, compassion, and genuine acts of imagination, which belong to no one--and to us all.