Summary
Displacement is one of the great themes of modern literature, but in his new book, The Walk (Trinity University Press, 2007), William deBuys explores life that is rooted in place. He surveys the inner terrain that opens up when he walks the land he has known and cultivated for nearly 30 years. He finds solace in nature's tiniest details. As he walks paths he believes he knows intimately, he discovers much that is new. He is prompted to ask what else he has missed. What doesn't he know about himself? The book gently prods us to ask the same question of ourselves. The Walk takes its title from the first of the book's three essays, each of which pays homage to a location near deBuys' home in El Valle, a village on the Rio de Las Trampas, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. The book opens with a homey, hand-drawn map of the area the author explores. "I begin essentially by walking in circles," deBuys said. "Circles I know very well - only to learn that there was so much more I hadn't yet seen." Pasatiempo met with deBuys in the Santa Fe apartment where he stays when he teaches documentary studies at the College of Santa Fe. He spends much of the rest of the year on his "ranchito" in El Valle, growing pasture grasses and hay. During the interview deBuys sat in a cozy chair just under a large sculpture shaped like a big yellow pencil. "A friend gave me that to remind me of what I'm supposed to be doing," he said. His wooden floors glowed in the late afternoon sun as he explained how he came to his particular callings - writing, environmental activism, and documenting New Mexico's people and landscape. DeBuys arrived in New Mexico in the early 1970s as a research assistant to Robert Coles, a medical doctor and child psychiatrist who was gathering material for Eskimos, Indians, Chicanos, part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book series The Children of Crisis. "To the extent that anybody has defined the field of documentary work, Robert Coles has done it," deBuys said. "Documentary work includes photography and writing. It's an attempt to come to grips with life as it really is. Coles inspired my own work." DeBuys is the former chairman of the board of trustees of the Valles Caldera Trust, which was created when President Bill Clinton signed the Valles Caldera Preservation Act in 2000. In essence, the U.S. government purchased an 89,000-acre ranch in New Mexico's Jemez Mountains on behalf of the American people. The act was the fulfillment of decades of attempts to preserve a prime location for viewing geological history. The caldera, or collapsed volcano, came into being after a volcanic explosion 1.2 million years ago. In 2006, deBuys co- authored Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico's National Preserve, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press. His co- author, photographer Don J. Usner, also contributed breathtaking pictures of the caldera and its environs. All of deBuys' works are concerned with the relationship between human beings and the natural world. They include: Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, and River of Traps: A Village Life, co- authored with Alex Harris. River of Traps was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is named for the Rio de Las Trampas. DeBuys' work recalls a tradition of nature writing that is commonly viewed as beginning with Henry David Thoreau. The Walk was written when deBuys was steeped in loss: his marriage had ended, and a close friend had died. "I was dealing with a profound grief and thought writing would help but couldn't find a place to begin," he said. Early one morning, while visiting friends in southwestern New Mexico, the first sentence of The Walk came to him as he sipped his breakfast coffee. "I ran for a pencil and paper and wrote it down. I realized it contained the structure of the next few pages and even the seed of the ending." Early in The Walk, as the author mourns the loss of his marriage, he wanders a forest in the aftermath of fire and sees a "landscape of ashes and stumps." Like Dante setting out in The Inferno, he is lost at midlife, and what should be a time of harvest turns into a raw new beginning. "The Walk is an account of allowing the land to teach lessons about hope, perseverance, and healing," he said. The author explores the idea that the familiar, when closely observed, can yield the unexpected. He writes, "In such a way, a homely well-worn path becomes a route into and through the self, leading to destinations unimagined." DeBuys notes that his first 20 years in New Mexico "coincided with one of the wettest periods in the reconstructed climate history of the Southwest." During that time, the ponderosa forest floor was so fertile that it filled with undergrowth. Drought came in 1995 and rainfall was scarce. The new growth died, dried out, and threatened to ignite in the powerful New Mexican heat. The author notes that the forest had suffered from a long policy of total fire suppression. He writes, "Banishing fire led to conditions in which fire must return as a destructive rather than renewing force. In a ponderosa pine forest, if fire is denied expression in relatively frequent, low intensity events, it will collect its due ultimately in massive, apocalyptic ones." Fire, like pain, should not always be suppressed, deBuys suggests. "The forest asks us to love what is marred," he writes. "It shows us the scarred face of beauty, the smile of broken teeth." ?
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