Home at Last

on the street where i live

Lives remembered, forgotten, and imagined tramp down the road along
Santa Fe’s “mother ditch.”

By Christine Mather

This article first appeared in Autumn 2003 Su Casa

I love our street. I love that it does not work well as a street. Unless you are a native you probably can’t even figure out how to pronounce its name—Acequia Madre—part Arabic, part Spanish, with the clunky English translation of “Mother Ditch.” I don’t live on a street, I live on a ditch.

No wonder the cars and trucks that attempt to maneuver its narrow confines and twisty route find themselves bumping up against the past as they rush to hook into real streets like Garcia or Paseo de Peralta. They fail to account for the fact that the speed limit on this street is predicated on reality rather than the usual caution and control. For this reason we often hear the sonorous tones of metal clanking as behemoth SUVs and oversize pickups gently whack their side mirrors together like mounted knights jousting out front.

Sometimes we find dotty oldsters, who can’t quite make the proper turn from the narrow street onto our equally narrow side lane, hanging with one tire in space over the miniature precipice that is the ditch itself. Most dramatic of all, one night when a once seedy, now upscale bar on Canyon Road disgorged its sloshed clientele at 2 a.m., we were roused by the harsh scream of a car slamming into two telephone poles as it ricocheted off the walls lining the street. The car had been channeled along like a projectile in some giant pinball machine, battering the inebriated occupant against the sides of its slots and loops. All of this is because my street is not a street at all, but rather a paved path lining an irrigation ditch—woe to the 21st-century mounted warrior who ignores the warp of the time travel that looms along its benign little meandering way.

The Little Mill, El Molinito, our little house, sits closest to the acequia giving us ringside seats for this clash between past and present. Our front windows are perched along the edge of the acequia so we hear and see the water rushing between the stone-lined banks—banks that seem to act as our personal moat reinforcing our sense of living with one foot in the medieval. A small footbridge across the acequia leads to our front door, seldom used as an entry since the car scene of the last 75 years has made foot traffic a quaint pastime at best and a perilous undertaking at worst.

Despite the jousting vehicles, serious walking occurs along the acequia all year round. Dogs do their doggy dumping on the grassy banks of the ditch, school kids delight in sloshing through the rushing spring waters, and pedestrians always favor this street since its charm as a footpath is hard to resist. With a coffee house at one end, we are entertained each Sunday with a steady stream of walkers headed for a newspaper, a scone, and a cup of coffee.

Best of all is when snows come in serious depths; then the meandering acequia path drifts into timelessness as does the entire center of Santa Fe. The quiet, the calm, the slow descend upon the town and blanket the silly little streets making them dignified and sensible again as trails and routes for walkers, burros, and wagons. In such a suspended state our tiny house with its odd location becomes transformed into an ancient peasant cottage in a remote corner of the old Spanish empire.

It is from this perspective that I often try to imagine those who have passed by my doorway over the centuries, walking the corridor down from the foothills into the town. I can imagine the Cinco Pintores—that deliriously happy artistic group who found themselves together as “discoverers” of Santa Fe in the teens and twenties of the last century—walking into town to buy supplies for their many home projects. Certainly Mary Austin must have walked this way from her home, Casa Querida, into town, her grumpy visage lost in thought about her next writing project. It seems that Richard Bradford’s high-school high jinx from the forties—our very own New Mexican coming-of-age novel, Red Sky at Morning—took much of its setting from our steps. He lived nearby in that odd expatriate society that once existed within the boundaries of the country. Perhaps the residents of Sunmount made pilgrimages this way trying out their lungs so recently recovered from their stay at the tuberculosis sanitarium not far away.

Certainly the leñadores—the firewood sellers—passed by here with their loaded burros headed from the foothills to their downtown haunt on Burro Alley. I know that many school children took this route on their way to the First Ward School on Canyon Road. Some have told me of their careful avoidance of our side of the street since it was common knowledge that our house was haunted by the miller’s wife.

All of these pedestrians followed in the footsteps of the early farmers who used the acequia to water crops grown in fields where houses now stand. Alfalfa still sprouts regularly along the acequia and old fruit trees attest to life when fields and orchards abounded. Yet even before the colonial farmers, the wood haulers, the young artists, and the school children, there were others who followed this route paralleling the small river which rushed from the mountains to the valley and the bigger river beyond. Such waterways were the ancient routes of people who lived their lives beyond memory. At certain moments, when the sun bakes the trees, filling the air with the scent of pine, or late at night when the coyotes howl near the center of town, time seems to fade and the venerable footpath fills with the movement of past lives walking quietly by my front door, tracking from mountain to river as always. Like the water in the acequia, the ancient, colonial, and present past flow by my door, and I listen to hear their passing.

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.