Intimate Histories

It was mid-September and I was heading toward to the Cruces Basin Wilderness with one last chance to find and photograph my amigo Victor “Cuba” Hernandez at his high camp. Maybe ten miles west of US 285 on FR 87 just beyond San Antonio Mountain my journey was brought to a screeching halt by bridge construction just ahead, an event with two results. First, I have yet to visit Cuba at his mountain Shangri-La and it won't be this year. That sheep has left the barn. And second, it propelled me into the fallback subject revealed here.

With mission one aborted I turned back to a nameless wildlife sanctuary I'd spied on the way in, nameless not because it had no name but because I've already forgotten it. It was last month after all. I hopped the locked gate, always a plus, and walked a rutted path to a discarded homestead with two buildings and a concrete foundation with a rusted water tank. Set in a grassy valley running west toward Laguna Larga the ruins whispered intimate histories into my ears.