Land
IN THE MORNING we saw the view we had of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, the range jagged like shark’s teeth. And close behind us, we saw the green tops of the Jemez Mountains. The land was built up from eruptions and worn down by erosions. The Jemez volcano made a vast, flat meadow surrounded by rocky cliffs and in most seasons, when the wind brushed over the meadow, it became a rolling wave of grasses.
WE CALLED WHAT we lived on—on the other side of the Jemez rim—a mesa, because we recognized the image from our college textbooks, or we called it a mesa because someone told us that was what it was. But it was not a mesa, exactly; it was a potrero, a dry tongue of land. The shaggy forest gave way to sudden cliffs and we could see we were isolated on three sides, like a high fortress with a deep moat. To mostly everything out there, we did not exist. The light shimmered and stretched our own views. And in the eastern side of the sky we saw the alpenglow, a bright red band on the horizon, as if the sun were setting in both the west and the east, and we did not think about the optics; we just thought it was beautiful.
THE SPARSE LANDSCAPE felt isolating and disturbing. Or to see so much with so little in it was relaxing, and we admired the quiet. Some of us could understand why, before us, people from big cities visited here to regain their strength in the fresh dry air.
WE SQUINTED AND wrapped a scarf over our foreheads. Some of us did not burn easily but many of us did. We came from sunny places and we thought the light was bright and cheerful or we came from overcast places and saw the light as harsh and comfortless.
OUR HOUSES, CARS, and skin appeared covered by another skin, a skin not our own but the sandy, warm-toned skin of the desert. The spring rain created a carpet of yellow and purple wildflowers we could see in the distant desert meadow. And after the rain, the sagebrush filled the air with a smell like camphor—sweet, but medicinal. Rainstorms soaked our chimneys, put out our water heaters, and turned the clay of the volcanic soil into a slick adhesive our children’s shoes got stuck in. Our husbands made a boardwalk of pine trees so we could get from the car to the front door.
SOON THE FLOWERS were withering in the hottest, driest days of summer, and we were hot inside our houses and we were hot outside and we were sweaty and the soil clung to our wet arms, to our lips. We tried to read books in the yard or we began a victory garden, planting tomatoes, spinach, green beans, watermelon, and basil to make our rations go further. Though it rained, rapidly, in the midafternoon, we were not accustomed to gardening in a desert climate and we watched as nothing sprouted; we watched as our victory garden did not grow.
THERE WERE BUILDING crews, bulldozers, cranes, the sounds of trucks, the clouds of dust, the roar of diesel, the chaos that comes with construction. The few dignified, original stone and ponderosa pine buildings—the lodge and a dozen homes—were, within weeks, surrounded by barracks, apartments, Quonset huts, trailers, and prefabricated houses.
AT THE HOUSING Office in a piñon-shingled garage next to the water tower on wooden stilts, we argued with Vera, a Women’s Army Corps member, who did not want to grant us a bathtub. As politely as we could muster we thanked her for nothing and walked back to what she said was ours—a thin-walled little house. Our loveseats and wingback chairs and record players and books were still all piled in the middle of the living room—we had stalled unpacking in hopes we could persuade the Housing Office we needed one of those stone houses with a bathtub. We plugged in the radio for comfort and heard, for the first time, or the first time in a long time, cowboy music. The jealousy of lost love, the sorrow of being a poor man, men telling women, through jolly beats, to put down their pistols—all of this was interrupted by the news that Mussolini had been arrested. And as we looked around at the only things we had to set up—our dining table, our sickly cactus centerpiece, our dishtowel napkins—we hoped this meant we would not have to stay in New Mexico for very much longer. Five days later Italy did surrender, but several cactus centerpieces would die before we had hope that Germany and Japan might give up.
THE SANDY SOIL came through cracks in the windows and doorframes, and gathered on the furniture, the floor, and our Army-issued cots, which were stamped used. Gusts of sand made outlines of our bodies on the sheets. We stared at the used stamp at the foot of our beds. Eventually we learned that used did not mean it was recycled, but stood for the United States Engineering Division. But they were used: our beds still bore the names and ranks of boys who had slept on these mattresses before us, who had carved their names into the frame. What had these beds and these men seen? Where had they traveled?
THE SMALL WOODEN buildings were all painted the same olive color, which matched the dusty pines and in some seasons blended in with the background of the mountains. Green walls, green chimneys, green tin. One of us set a pot of red geraniums in front of the door so our children, our husbands, and ourselves could recognize our home. One of us put a black bowl of pinecones on the porch. Because the streets were not named and the houses were identical, when we met someone at the commissary and invited them over for tea, or for coffee, the only way we could describe our home was in relation to the water tower, the highest thing in town: West of the water tower, third house on the right. East of the water tower, the last house on the left before the road ends. It was a landmark that mocked us—a water tower that only sometimes held enough water for us to bathe or flush our toilets.
OUR HUSBANDS WERE unshaven and within a few days became bristly; for the first time we could not see their strong jawlines, and their faces moving in close, for a kiss, caused our own to sting.
IN THAT FIRST week we were invited to learn how to run our clothes through the hand-cranked mangle at the community laundry. Before this, we had other people do our laundry, or we had electric wringers, and for many of us our memories of those hand-powered water extractors were of the heavy crank and our mother’s warnings not to get our hair caught in it. We were still wearing high heels and they stuck in the mud and we pretended that we learned what we were taught about the mangle but instead gathered our husband’s shirts in a wet bundle and carried them home, smiling sourly. We hung the clothes on the line and ironed the cotton shirts on our kitchen table. Because our clothesline was erected in one of the only spots on the mesa that was not in direct sunlight, in the morning we brought our children’s cloth diapers and our husband’s boxer shorts in as square little ice boards.
IT WAS OUR first day, our second day, our hundredth day, and bells sounded. Bells sounded in the morning to tell our husbands it was time to go to the Tech Area, bells sounded in the evenings to tell our husbands it was time to get back to the Tech Area after dinner, bells sounded if there was a fire, bells sounded if we were out of water, bells sounded, bells sounded.
In the Day, in the Night
LOUISE PLAYED POWER forward for the University of Nevada’s basketball team and helped win the state championship. She is a great shooter, her husband bragged. We weren’t surprised—she was a tall, strong woman who seemed to find a solution to everything, as if the belief that she could made it so. And though the weekly dust storms got the best of several of us, when it covered her house Louise just hauled her sofa out into the front yard, pounded the couch cushions clean again, and lugged it back inside without complaint. Others of us said, What’s the use? and only cleaned the sofa when it was our turn to host a party.