My Secret Place - February 2010

By Jimmy Santiago Baca, as told to Devon Jackson

The place I like is where I love. So I’d rather not give it a name. It’s way back in a canyon in a cul-de-sac of cliffs that loom straight up. It has a year-round waterfall. It has kivas on the cliff. And there’s a year-round creek running off the waterfall.

You don’t realize how absolutely off the beaten path it is until you’re interrupted by a coyote in the road gutting a turkey. This happened the last time I was up there. I got out of my jeep and put the turkey aside for later. Then I came across this huge bull elk. I got right up to his backside before he saw me and darted off. Then I saw a fox flash across the road.

Then a family of raccoons. That’s when I finally hit the main road. My first time up there was about 16 years ago. This friend of mine had told me about it. I was blown away by its isolation and the unique quality of the place. There’s a small village up there. But it’s not inundated by anybody. It has a small church, and about 10 people live there year-round. Everything’s pretty much intact, historically and culturally.

I’ve taken lots of people up there—for fishing, bowhunting. But when I was building my cabin up there it was hard to bring people up there and get them to stay for too long. So many of them freaked out at how isolated it is. They were a bit too urban. (They had to get their own water from the creek.) It’s so isolated, most people don’t want to go that deep into their own nature. They’d ask me, “Why do you want to be up here, anyway, Jimmy?” Which is why I like it so much. It’s so far away from everything. It’s the perfect place for me to go read and write. But most other people, they’re so accustomed to all the things they have in the city. This place is unique in that it really hasn’t been touched by all these other things: no TVs, no cell phones, no Internet. My neighbors don’t even come around. And in the winters, a lot of them are usually down in Mexico.

As a child, my heart of hearts was that open area out by N.M. 14, [and] the prairie out there near Tajique and Willard [southeast of Albuquerque]. I love going through the back part of the mountains, [as well as] through Madrid and Golden. That’s really beautiful. But it doesn’t compare to this. This is idyllic. Plus, my kids love it. And most of my friends have expressed a spiritual sensibility after going up there. A lot of others have been like, “I sat on the porch and just started crying.” They experienced this feeling of compassion for themselves and what’s around them.

It’s the kind of environment I like to be in, to surround myself in. The best of all worlds is to go up there and do my work and then go back to the city—where I can hit the clubs and dance.

Jimmy Santiago Baca recently published his first novel, A Glass of Water, and a new book of poetry, Selected Poems of Jimmy Santiago Baca/Poemas Selectos de Jimmy Santiago Baca. His primary residence is in Albuquerque.