My Secret Place - September 2010

By V.B. Price, as told to Devon Jackson

My secret place would be the Duranes Lateral, in Albuquerque’s North Valley. I first went down there in 1965. By accident. I was looking for empty roads to run on, and a quiet place, for some solace and solitude. The Lateral is part of the Middle Río Grande Conservancy District ditch system. It’s surrounded by old farmland, valley houses, willows, and cottonwoods. It’s an oasis of cultivated wildness in the middle of the city. And, as far as I can tell, it’s only used by people who love it, and by conservancy workers.

I’ve run and walked many hundreds of miles on that ditch, in all kinds of weather. No one can find me. My life as an editor, journalist, and teacher is a very crowded one. But I’m always unavailable for a while when I’m walking on those rural pathways, by the water, in the shade of the cottonwoods.

I realized that I was in a completely rural or even semiwild environment not two blocks from Río Grande Boulevard. It was the first time in my life that I could engage personally with a riparian environment, and it was almost outside my back door. I saw a muskrat the first time, smelled the Russian olive blossoms. The water itself was magical. When I was on certain parts of the ditch, I really couldn’t see the city at all, only remnants of the cottonwood bosque, the volcanoes to the west, and the Sandías to the east. I’d been making my living by then writing about urban issues, and the ditch system in the city seemed utterly unique to me.

I’d been living in town since 1958, when I first came to school at UNM to study anthropology and try my hand at running college track (a losing hand). I’d been raised in Los Angeles, and the agricultural life of the valley, combined with the oceanic desert, seemed like the perfect antidote.

My wife, the artist Rini Price, and I walk there several times a week. It’s the most peaceful workout we know of, almost as good as working in the garden. And it’s changed very, very little over the years. It’s so isolated that, on snowy winter nights when the weeds and elms and willows haven’t been mowed and are a yard or two tall, the ditch path can become a tunnel of snow in the moonlight. It’s a cross between Eden and an Anasazi paradise.

Scholar, editor, poet, and teacher (now in his 25th year at UNM) V. B. Price recently finished The Orphaned Land: Notes for an Environmental Accounting of New Mexico Since the Manhattan Project, forthcoming from UNM Press.