How Long Does It Take to Know a Place?
30 days walking Albuquerque's acequias was just a start
Let’s just get one thing out of the way: 30 days is not enough. At least not for the way I want to know a place.
I didn’t want to study this place I was staying, Albuquerque’s North Valley. I didn’t want to read books and articles about the ancient acequia systems used in arid regions across the world, nor about the way successive peoples—Pueblo Indians, Spaniards, Americans—adapted and developed the system along the Rio Grande River. There’s nothing wrong with that way of knowing a place, but it’s not what I was after.
No, I wanted to touch and feel the acequias, to be in and on them. I started at the first ditch I came to when I left our house: I’d walk north up the Duranes Lateral, then west along Montaño to the Bosque, and south along the river, then I’d head back home. It’s a five-mile loop, and we repeated it nearly every day. It made me want more.
What I really wanted was to experience how the acequias were used today. I went to the website for the Village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque and tracked down a guy named Dan Gay, who chairs the village’s Acequia/Ditch Committee. He sent me a couple maps (see below), but when I kept pestering him with questions about the mechanics of it all, he said, “Ah hell, why don’t you stop up and see me and I’ll show you around.” So I drove up to the nearest parking lot and walked down the ditch to his house.
You can get fooled by Los Ranchos if all you do is drive up Rio Grande Boulevard. it can seem like a pretty swanky place, with beautiful homes on either side of the road, a lavender farm/bed-and-breakfast with a high-end restaurant, vineyards, and all the trappings of fancy horse farms ... though not that many horses.
But the moment you step off the main drag and walk down the dirt paths that line the acequias, you step behind the curtain. I parked at the Shining River access point and walked east on the Albuquerque Main Canal and then south on the Pueblo Acequia. With every step I lost the sense that Los Ranchos was a posh, precious place.
It’s kind of hard to be precious in this climate: there’s too much bare dirt and sand, and it gets kicked up by the strong winds that blow through, mixed with tumbleweeds and branches and leaves from the dirty cottonwoods and elms that line the ditches.
There’s too much sun, sun that dries and cracks the fences that keep ditch walkers like me from looking right into your yard, sun that fades anything that’s left exposed, especially old cars that got parked out back and forgotten about.
The folks with money put their good face toward Rio Grande Blvd., but from the ditches you see the way people really live: the dogs running free, the peacocks calling from their pen of scrap lumber and chicken wire, the irrigation trenches hand dug to direct water to improvised gardens. It’s not that some people don’t have beautiful back yards. It’s just that from the ditch side, most people aren’t putting on a show, they’re just living their lives.
And all along these back yards are wide ditches with dirt paths down either side. Some of the ditches are shallow, just two or three feet deep, but others are so deep you can jump down in them and just barely look out (yeah, I tested it.) The ditches are crossed by gates, their size proportional to the ditch itself. And along the banks are these mechanisms called turnouts that allow the person with the right wheel or wrench to turn the long screw that opens the door to let the water flow out into their yard. You get the wheel when you pay for your water.
When I got to Dan’s house, I explained to him how I thought it all worked:
“From what I’ve read I understand there’s a mayordomo who is in charge of the distribution of water to the parciantes who have joined the acequia …”
I was showing off that I’d done my research and I knew the terminology, and that an acequia was both the ditch itself and the community of people who came together to use the ditch.
“… and so I’m wondering, how does the mayordomo communicate to the parciantes when and for how long they get water? Is there a website or a text-messaging system?”
Dan cocked his head and looked at me, and I thought at first that maybe I had screwed up the pronunciation of these terms I had picked up in the glossary I had found.
“I don’t know where you’re getting those terms,” he chuckled, “but let me tell you how it really works. Lawrence is our ditch rider—he’s the guy who walks up and down the ditches when the water is flowing, and he increases or decreases the flow using the gates. He lets us know how long we’ve got to flood our yards. I can text him and sometimes that works. But mostly he’s around enough that my neighbors and I can track him down to find out when we get our water.”
I ask Dan why someone doesn’t implement a more organized system; I was imagining a website and text alerts. But he pointed out that so many groups have claims on the water—the city, the county, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the state, the tribes, etc.—that it was hard to know who would deploy a new system. (That’s me talking, not Dan.) And this system’s been working just fine for a hundred years or more. Why change it?
So Lawrence increases the flow and the water rises in the ditch enough so that when Dan and his neighbors open their turnouts, there’s enough back pressure to flood their yards for eight to ten hours. They do this pretty much once a week, all through the irrigation season.
Now, you’re going to notice from my photos that there’s one really critical thing missing from this story: water.
I hit Albuquerque during the dry season, so the only water is in the river and the drains (or “clear ditches”) that run parallel to it. There’s not enough water for the ditches until May (and then it runs until the fall, September or October). So I got to see the ditches when they were filled with tumbleweeds and the sharp black shadows cast by the leafless trees. These dry ditches have got a beauty of their own, especially for a guy from the Pacific Northwest, but I long to see them filled with water.
I gave myself 30 days to know this place, just one small part of this place. I read some stuff. I saw a movie. I talked with Dan several times—hell, he took me to lunch at Mary & Tito’s.) But mostly I walked the ditches, 7-10 miles a day, every single day.
And you know what I realized? I don’t know shit! I went about one inch deep in a well that has no bottom. Walking around like I did, talking to Dan, I peeled back just one layer of the onion. But it’s a damned big onion, and there are so many more layers.
I got lucky to find one guy who used the acequias, who’s lived on the acequias all his life, and he invited me back to show me how it works when the waters are running. I’ll come back. I’ll peel back another layer. But the world’s too damn complex and way too beautiful to ever know fully.
I don’t know how to know the world, but I know this: you stay humble, feel your way, figure it out as you go, make your best guess based on the evidence you’ve got. And then you get up and try again.
Unless you’ve got a better plan?
A Few Resources:
Acequias: The Legacy Lives On (film), http://crsinfo.unm.edu/multi-media/acequias-film-project/index.html. Highly recommended if you can find it.
Acequias of Albuquerque (story map), https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=ad0a57bf59ed45558c29354b196fcce8.
Ryolithica, Acequias: How Water Creates Community (substack.com)
D’Nivra, The Ancient Water Tech They Didn’t Teach Us in School (substack.com)
Lamadrid, Enrique R., and José A. Rivera, Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2023.
Medrano, Lourdes, “Climate Change Puts New Mexico’s Ancient Acequias to the Test,” Audobon.
These travel logs are interesting in that you're able to observe and relate the kind of details that most of us would never know unless we lived in the place and even then, maybe we wouldn't see them. I'm curious how the people of Albuquerque have been shaped by the flow of water. The presence and absence of it. The crudely manual management of it.
There are cities that people have lived in their whole lives, and they still don't "know" it. They know their corner, perhaps. They know how to travel it (sometimes). In my city, if someone asked me how to get from Westfort to Current River by city bus, I could vaguely point them in the right direction, but that's about it.
Similarly, I'm sure there are many people in Albuquerque who now know less about the water system than you do.
I'm not saying this to be defeatist or pessimistic. I, like you, really enjoy going to a new city and learning about it. Sometimes I have an afternoon. Sometimes I have a week or more. You usually learn more in those longer stretches (unless, say, you're laid up in a hotel room recovering from malaria and don't get out much...)
I'm saying this because I'm pretty philosophical about it. We all learn things about our environments that interest us, whether that's an environment where we live or whether we're just passing through. We take what we need. We take what feeds us. I'm not sure if we're looking for ourselves reflected in the city or if we are looking for the city reflected in ourselves. But either way, we're looking for connection -- a mental and emotional souvenir of our time there.
(See? I told ya -- philosophical...!)
Anyway, glad you had your 30 days there. Maybe you can go out in the field again next winter and follow up. (Also another great thing about not learning everything all at once -- gives you a good reason to go back.)
Great post as always -- who knew irrigation ditches could stop and make you think!