What Horses Teach Us About Freedom: The Valle Vidal
Just as the ranger from the Questa District promised me over the phone earlier this week, the envelope she’s mailed contains neatly folded maps of the Valle Vidal.
I spread them out on the dining room table. Smooth the creases in the paper. Imagine the map to be a sprawling plain alive with herds of American Buffalo and elk. Wild turkey dot the grasslands and roost in the low branches of the pines. A mule deer drinks from one of the clear, cold creeks marked by a squiggly line that bleeds off into a smudge mark at the bottom of the page where I've spilled my tea, her ears twitching as she lifts her head. At any moment a bear or a mountain lion might roam by.
Valle Vidal means The Valley of Life. The 100,000 acres in the northeastern corner of New Mexico is virtually unspoiled. Although I haven't seen it yet, this clearly delineated piece of geography beneath my index finger on the map is reputed to look like the west did 100, 200 or even 1,000 years ago.
I've read somewhere that signs at both of the Valle Vidal campgrounds warn, "Buffalo Are Wildlife." I wonder how my young Percheron horse Toby, who seems about as big as a buffalo to me, would react to seeing one of those massive hairy beasts. Would he freeze in place like a statue on four pillar-like legs, snorting and blowing through his nostrils, shuddering beneath me in excitement? Or would he merely glance at the bearded giants as we passed by, too eager to explore all of that wide-open space?
You’re supposed to need some orientation skills if you intend to roam this expanse of wilderness. It says so in the literature the ranger sent along with the maps.
There’s a glaring absence of any hiking trail legends. That’s because there’s not any. If I go to the Valle on my own, I might get lost. I’m no backwoods woman by any stretch of the imagination, and I would possibly wind up being one of those fantastical news stories on CNN. You know, the one about some poor fool who’s been lost in the wilderness for days after what was supposed to be a two-hour trek into the woods? Usually she’s found after several days of on-the-edge anticipation and increasingly shrill testimony from family about how God works all things for the good, even if they find her crumpled in a heap at the bottom of a canyon. In all of my years in Northern New Mexico, stories like this come too close for comfort.
The father of a brother-in-law is lost in the desert for days while antelope hunting until a local sheep rancher finds him, very alive but very thirsty.
An old family friend crashes his small airplane into the peaks during a snowstorm. His Labrador Retriever is the only survivor. Rescuers find the puppy whimpering beside the wreckage.
An elderly acquaintance, a newly widowed woman who has just spent a small fortune remodeling a beautiful historic adobe because she’s at a loss without her husband, disappears during an afternoon hike in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with her three adopted mutts. They find her body over three weeks later. I still think of the woman sometimes, although I barely knew her. Images flood the memory gates against every shred of my will—I see her cold and disoriented from hypothermia, curling up in the pine needles and the aspen leaves, hunkering down for the rescue party, too exhausted to go on, finally falling asleep as the mutts snuggle closer to her shivering body which eventually doesn’t shiver any more.
I think of the bleached white bones of a deer beside the high and winding trail we rode up to Lake Johnson last summer.
I think too much sometimes.
I’m pretty sure I hear truck tires on the gravel driveway outside, thinking that Dennis might be home early, but my heeler dogs aren’t barking so it must be my imagination on overtime. My husband is the kind of man you’d be fortunate to get stranded with on a deserted island or a treacherous high mountain pass where the wind howls and moans, if that type of thing has to happen to you. The man knows his way around the wild places and has the skills and the moxy to get everyone home safe and sound. Because of him, and not because of any particular skills that I have, except for my ability to ride a horse and make a pretty tasty sack lunch, I can begin to make plans during the late winter season for a summer horse camping trip to the untamed Valle.
A red heeler dog is wriggling beneath my knees, whining, eager to go outside and torment exercise a horse or two before it gets dark. Her sister places her freckled paws on my knees and stares into my eyes, silently pleading. I’ve been too long with my papers apparently. I rub her head and put the maps aside for when Dennis does get home from work.
And then I find myself sitting down at my computer, searching the internet to see if the local community college is offering an orienteering class this Spring. The heeler dogs lay down at my feet, sighing pointed, heavy sighs tinged with disappointment and then resignation until finally they fall asleep and dream of chasing whatever wild things haunt their canine imaginations.
Perhaps they are poised within the ample shadow of my Percheron horse Toby, staring with him in wonder at the buffalo.
Related Links: www.vallevidal.org
