The wind roars across the high desert the same as it's done for a thousand years. Blasting off mesas and sandstone cliffs, it blots chaparral and highways with brown, dirt laden gusts. Sandstorms spring up anywhere the land is open -- pretty much everywhere outside the urban centers. I've been driving through these desert darknesses for hours in search of the types of opportunity a person needs when life has thrown a curveball.
Feeling none too cheery, there I sit at a red light. The road name hanging from the pole above the light is Gun Club. How many people have disappeared into the desert at the end of Gun Club, I muse, waiting. My eyes catch sight of a dog eared city map hanging askew from the flap above. It immediately puts me in mind of the fact that at the terminus of this road, indicated on the map by a pale broken line like a twisted bit of yarn, one will approach a wide area called Donkey Canyon. I have never seen it. A quick turn and I'm bouncing along the washboard gravel towards a line of ancient, quiescent volcanoes to the west.
As I follow first one dirt track, then another in an effort to find my way west without ending up in a ditch, I speculate on how Donkey Canyon came by its name. Stories had it that it was once the place where discarded burros. pickup trucks of 100 years and less ago, banded together when no longer fed or cared for by their familiar humans.
My tape player sings, "Hey, Mr. Vaquero, put a handle on my pony for me/Teach me the mystery./Did they sing all day?/ Did they dance all night?/Did they ride their spade bit ponies through the golden light?/Did they find true love? /Was it all a pack of lies?/Quien sabe, maybe it was paradise." *
Out here on the twisted, bumpy tracks through scruffy desert plants the light is more brown than golden, filled with sand as it is. The wind hurls itself through rabbitbrush, through bones of ancient sofas discarded willy-nilly, through feathers of a dying dove in the middle of the road. A stench poisons the air around an isolated dairy farm where cows crowded in pens have pounded all growing things to dark muck. The odor comes from two scummy settling ponds.
But where is Donkey Canyon? Must look up a ways, where I can just make out the stark shape of a dump truck against the cloudy sky. Bumping across a couple of washes, along more trash-catching tracks that no doubt would take me to somebody's isolated trailer in another ten miles if I cared to follow, I finally crest the volcano where the truck sits. A sign points south to the county landfill. In the truck I just make out the form of a city worker, seeming sound asleep. His vehicle fills the turnout. I can imagine that the view of Donkey Canyon to the north is spectacular -- if you like miles of brightly lighted chaparral with dark, cloud covered mountains in the background. Black lava rocks protrude from the soft green of the saltbush community.
The landfill contents has skittered out of its appointed graveyard as I bump along in search of another vantage point. Trash bags, bottles, bygone teddies, dolls and beer cans shake, rattle and roll between the soaptree yuccas.
"Magpie," sings the guy on my tape, "You know the West ain't never gonna die, just as long as you can fly... Ah, Magpie, you're a pretty bird./You just wanna be free./I am you, you are me."
No magpies here, over Donkey Canyon. It is clear that the West may not be dead, but it sure is in trouble. If 50 years ago discarded donkeys wandered through this harsh land of scouring winds and little grass or water, the last five decades have certainly not improved the place any. North along the rolling volcanic slopes lies the advance of the city of Albuquerque -- which is, by the way, planning to annex this emptiness any year now. To make way for more... what? Progress? Right now progress is indicated by a few stick corrals, none occupied, various trailer homes in the throes of decay, derelict vehicles that haven't seen a tire in 30 years. A flock of crows bobs up and down, playing with the wind currents, settling to the ground around a dead thing, swooping and soaring again. Forever restless. The odd raven croaks and barges through the crow flock, wedge-shaped tail clear among so many plain curved ones.
At the bottom of a gravelly wash I venture into the fierce wind for a few minutes to imagine what it was like to be a donkey making a living in this place. My hair may be as grey as the donkeys', but my view of life is not so patient as theirs. Out of respect to their memory, I want to sweep away the miles of trash scarring the donkeys' tawny resting place. I listen for the sound of their raucous braying echoing mournfully down the years. "Hee Haw!" I shout against the wind. The only return above that roar is the motor of a dirt bike.
In my mind's eye, I see a line of donkeys coming over a hill. Ears wave, heads high, little ones tucked close by their mothers. As the dusty wind whirls grey shapes through the air, the donkeys come by me, then vanish in a trick of whirling dirt.
Up on the crest, the city worker has wakened from his nap. He must have eaten something, because from the truck window flies a paper cup.
So, the donkeys came and went through this canyon here, just as we people come and go through one another's lives. Seldom any reason given, rarely any opportunity to stop and say "It is good that you were here" when the chance is before us. So it is with this land that some people call barren desert. We treat it like something we don't really want, and pretty soon it has gone on to become something else.
"Jacquima to Freno/He's an old Amansador/Still hangin'on, just about gone/Like the California Condor/He's been down to the rodeo ground/Seen him on the movie screen/Sometimes I think he's like America/Only see him in your dreams."
* Ian Tyson, folk singer, barrel racer, cattle rancher in Alberta, Canada.
