The so-called wilderness was never wilderness to us, because we are part of that wilderness. -Vincent Lujan Sr., Taos Pueblo.

Matthew Traucht

“Aren’t you sick of camping in all this cow shit? New Mexico is just one big litterbox for heifers.” she said kicking a dusty frisbee of poop across a wheel-rut that here bisected the Continental Divide south of Pelona Mountain in the Plains of San Agustin. Lara Black and I were out on the rolling hills miles away from houses, paved roadways, and running water. Neither of us had showered in a number of days but at least had had enough water to brush our teeth that morning. Now it was approaching darkness and we had been squeaking along in our cactus-scratched and dust-covered truck for thirteen and a half hours looking for exactly this spot.

When Lara Black and I accepted a contractual job with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance collecting data on the current state of public lands here, neither of us had any idea what was truly in store for us. We had been advised that the days would be hot, long, and dusty and that the work could be tedious, boring, threatening, and frustrating. The trips into the “potential wilderness” might be taxing on our truck as we sometimes would drive on interstates for hours to access some isolated point in some far-reaching corner of the state. Or we might creep along from sunup to down never faster than eight miles an hour on endlessly meandering stretches of double ruts and boulders and cavities that scratched across the desert. Many times though, locked gates or washed out “roads” would impede our drive and we would hike for hours under the New Mexico sun etching dotted lines on photocopied 7.5 minute USGS quadmaps and scribbling notes and GPS positions and making snapshot after snapshot of...

The Wilderness Act (Public Law 88-577 [16 U.S. C. 1131-1136] 88th Congress, Second Session, September 3, 1964) defines a wilderness “in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape” and recognizes places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor and does not remain.” As a student of anthropology (the study of humankind) I am fascinated with both the presence and the absence of man on the face of this planet and since the focus of my job was to compare and contrast such places, to seek out those “untrammeled” areas, and to note where human impacts could be found, I truly felt that I had embarked on a sort of ethnographical fieldwork. I could engage in classic participant-observation in that I could take time to truly examine the world around me and hypothesize about why visitation occurs as it does, what appeals to us and what does not, what conditions are favorable and what developments have been made historically. What adaptations must we make for the present and the future? What role does nature play in the lives of those who play a role in it? What price does homo sapien pay to exist alongside nature though decidedly outside of it?

Along with studies about why particular areas are favorable or not for habitation and cultivation, and combined with research about who it is that uses “wilderness,” I could also analyze the experience of nature’s affect upon Lara Black and me. How is wilderness untrammeled by man if it is the imagination of man which identifies it as such? Without civilizations, absent of cities and industrial centers and communities and single homesteads and functional corrals and hollow tubes filled with “natural” gas and without a single human permanence, what is it about the vacancy of the place that so makes it? The notion of nature, the conception of wilderness, is a construction named and imagined by 20^th century men, women, and children- each of us informed by agencies, folktales, type of use, cultural and personal background, and the lure away from the civilization we have created.

The focus of the ethnography, I imagined, would be the people I encountered along the way from salt-of-the earth ranch-hands mending fences to Californian tourists soaking up the great outdoors. Lara Black and I would also become pieces in the puzzle to be examined, turned over, squeezed into the wrong place, and then thrown back into the heap. We discovered a plethora of “human impacts” in areas where it seemed that humans hadn’t been since the dawn of man in the New World. We also recorded images of devastation upon this earth borne out in the scars and melting remnants of mining equipment where the ground had leached a sickly yellow stain and where holes blasted into rock reek of sulfur. Places where gaslines and powerlines crisscrossed like a grid above and below and upon the dusty surface and wherever there are these such things there are bound to be access roads. Wherever there are roads there is bound to be trammel… and beer cans. The American west is a feeding lot for thousands of cattle and the lowering of the water table in order to keep these salivating behemoths from drying their mouths out on too much black grama grass and creosote is a drain on the floral and faunal species that exist here. The alterations of the landscape in order to redirect water and the “cow-bombed” fields look like a wasteland in huge diameters around tanks and saltlicks. Wildlife is poisoned, trapped, gunned down, stripped of life and dignity and too often hung lifeless from trees and fenceposts as either trophies or warnings. Lara Black and I encountered numerous instances of dismembered deer parts dangling from alligator juniper by rope and bloated coyotes with their tails tied to fences.

But there are vast and beautiful places too that are wonderfully complex and beyond description.

The assignment for the Wilderness Alliance involved a continuum of people from volunteers to high-paid lawyers and from lobbyists to cartographers all using data from USGS maps, aerial photographs, property ownership and management documents, previous fieldwork, and legal precedent to attain a goal of protection and preservation. Lara Black and I would be but two cogs in an entire of system of gears, pulleys, levers, and whirly-gigs that officially began with Aldo Leopold in 1924 and with its proposed end being a very far-distant future when our children’s children’s grandchildren might still be able to think of as well as stand among, hike through, fish in, sleep beneath, and explore some remnant of the wilderness of the American west.

We spent over sixteen months involved in the project working sometimes full-time and sometimes part-time. Full-time meant between eight and ten days at a time twice a month spent living out of our truck- and a rental car for one nine day period after our Isuzu was stolen- and sleeping on the ground and showering with water poured from a jug at the end of another hot and dusty day. Part-time might be only a couple of hours in some of the local regions near Albuquerque. We worked all year round, though we both also had other jobs in town and I attended classes at the University of New Mexico full-time; in snow sometimes and in 109 degree drought conditions in others. Our elevations changed from mountainous coniferous forest to low-land Sonoran desert and the public land we lived and worked on might be managed by the US Forest Service, the State of New Mexico, or the Bureau of Land Management.

Generally we carried our water on our backs, guided our way by use of an assortment of maps and computer equipment connected ostensibly to satellites in the ionosphere, while we hunted and gathered photographic proof and written descriptions of every human impact that we could find, or every one that had once been there when the maps were published in the 1960s that could no longer be found. A short list of some of the artifacts that we collected were roads, routes, pack and hiking trails, mines, prospects, homesteads, fencelines, powerlines, gaslines, ditches, ponds, over-grazed areas, quartered-off ungrazed zones, corrals, archaeological sites, cattle boneyards, ATV tracks, hunting stands, clear-cut areas of forest, chained prairies turned pastures, graves, USGS survey markers and signs, charred remains from recent and not-so recent forest fires, look-out towers, and abandoned windmills, wells, and tanks. All of this data would eventually be coordinated and compounded, entered into statistical formulas, coded and cartographed, and airmailed to Washington DC where laws are passed or not passed.

produced many cultural artifacts half covered with earth. In numerous

locations we uncovered potsherds of varying type from black on black

textures to black on white zig zags. We also developed an eye for flake tools that still remain almost razor sharp peaking though a thin layer of top soil. We encountered abandoned mines bored into the sides of hills and rusting away at Zuni Salt Lake. In the Gila, we found a sagging cabin down a long stretch of overgrown prospects like Eastern Mounds that we were sure must have belonged to Old Bear Moore over a hundred years ago.

The variation of culture that we met in our travels through the wider spaces of New Mexico is expansive and rich with diversity. We spoke to a third generation cattle rancher whose family had lost an allotment thirty years ago to the White Sands Missile Range and who was now worried about the rising permit costs for his 500 head on the Plains of San Agustin near the Very Large Array radio telescope. We spoke to a veteran of the US military who wore a white beard down to his chest and lived in a pickup with a camper-shell and seven dogs and a stack of books in a dry creek bed in the western Gila. He and his dogs were prospectors with a hammer and chisel and the old man let us pick amethyst that he had chipped away the day before and then showed us the ancient, rusty gold mining equipment that he had parked his home next to. Once, along a “Scenic BackCountry Byway,” we observed a shiny white luxury SUV squeal to a stop as a teenage girl with flowing blond hair and a flowery white dress hopped from its air conditioned interior long enough to focus a digital camera on some particularly majestic hillside and then just as quickly she was gone. While surveying a checkerboard of State, BLM, and Reservation land near Acoma, we were chased down by Pueblo police officers in a white and waxed pickup who hopped from the cab wearing black combat fatigues and mirror sunglasses and who were wielding semi-automatic rifles. These individuals had little interest in our maps and property schematics and they followed us all the way to the main dirt road that led back to the highway. In the lower western corner of the state we were flagged down by an environmental rancher who raised elk instead of cattle, was concerned about the ethics of his neighbors, harnessed his electricity from the sun, drank water from a pond, and wanted to revert his land back to its natural state of productivity. He warned us about one of the ranchers who lived nearby and about a bear who was temperamental and he wanted us to take one of his machetes or at least a shovel to protect ourselves from man and beast alike. In Catron County, we watched in disbelief as a ranch-hand on a camouflaged four-wheeler chased a bull-snake with a stick and then blast it to bits with a high-powered shotgun because he thought it might kill some of his calves. While in the malpais near the Valley of Fires we were startled by a local rancher who had been watching us through binoculars as we were wandering near his property. After talking to him about the beauty of the lavaflows though, he gave us a lift in the back of his rusty truck across his land and saved us three miles from our hike which was most appreciated in the blistering heat.

Lara Black and I each developed a vision and a respect and a fascination for the natural environment much because of the work that we did in the wilderness. We both came here from Ohio. The issues and impacts of land and water are important to the University of New Mexico’s Anthropology Department and The Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies and because of the education I have received here coupled with the experience that I have had on the ground and in the field, I am compelled to continue with my studies of the nature-man complex that has developed through our courses of history and prehistory. These same elements will continue to evolve alongside one another and even though man has moved out of the trees and into the concrete jungle, our relationship with wildness will continue to be one of adaptation, learning, and compromise. It must.