Poems by David M. Hoza

Close to Home

by David M. Hoza

From Canary Summer 2019

David got to know Bachechi Open Space in Los Ranchos, New Mexico, the winter he sold his home of 20 years. He travels year around and enjoys a visit to Bachechi whenever he’s close.

There’s this guy over off Alameda on the north side of Bachechi that sells little Bonsai trees out of his van. I see him there every day, sorting out his creations on the makeshift shelves he’s brought with him, in a vacant lot by the side of the busy road. He’s always sitting with a shelf in front of him, as the wind from the traffic—or the more malevolent winds of spring—threaten to blow him and everything he’s dragged outside away. Who knows how many times I rode right past without even seeing him. For months I biked past wondering what the hell brought him to this point in his life; this place. I’ve hardly ever seen anyone stop to buy anything. Once in a great while, maybe. Yet day after day, month after month he’s in the same place doing the same damn thing time after time.

Across the street from where he sits is the north side of Bachechi Open Space. Forever I’ve wondered what the difference was between an open space and a park. They both have trees. They both have ponds. They both have trails and benches and pathways. I got so curious one day I decided to have a look. All through the open space there are these interpretive plaques that describe the natural history of the place. The different plants and trees, the hummingbirds and squirrels; especially the waterfowl that overwinter there. It turns out that the central Rio Grande Bosque, as it’s called—the great riparian area on the west side of Albuquerque through which the Rio Grande flows on its way down from the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado—is a central flyway for all sorts of birds on their way to and from Canada year after year. The river passes between Texas and Mexico on its way to the Gulf.

When I think of a park I always think of the Frederick Law Olmsted tradition, with great attention to planning, detail and selection of plants based primarily on their beauty and popularity, rather than their native stature. Olmsted designed his parks for the enjoyment of the people, while the open space is—as multiple displays in the education center point out—a sort of hybridized attempt to return fragments of the landscape to something somewhat like what existed before the first round of modern development usurped the grounds for commercial production. Pampas grass, reeds; honey locust trees, screwbean mesquite and Rio Grande Cottonwoods pepper the open space, suggestive of what might have been.

The Bachechi story goes deeper than that. For years since the early 1900s, an Italian family by the name of Bachechi farmed there. Water was plentiful owing to diversion canals from the free- flowing Rio, and Bachechi knew enough about exotics to plant a successful grove of pecan trees. The old grove still bears bushels of nuts that the birds pick through in fall. Like most modern, mechanized, commercial operations, the farm left its share of toxic waste. Underground tanks leached out into the soil. Oil, diesel and grease—from tractors, trucks and other farm equipment, cleaned and serviced on the property—contaminated the soil before pollution of that kind became alarming. After old man Bachechi died, the farm defaulted to just another piece of real estate, held and traded like a card in a poker game.

Having all that history under my belt while walking the shaded paths through the trees may not change anything, but I like the perspective it’s given me, and I like going there all the more. I like being able to name the trees and plants and things as I see them. It’s become like a second home to me.

Meanwhile I kept wondering about the Bonsai guy. Whatever brought him to this particular place, and what’s kept him here? As it sometimes does, my curiosity got the better of me, and one day I pulled over to the side of the road and said hello. Things were kind of awkward at first. I knew what I wanted to ask him, but suddenly it didn’t feel right just blurting it out, grilling him for answers. We talked a bit. He was far more attentive to the day than I am. He noticed all the subtle peculiarities of the season and proceeded to share with me the seasonal goings on in the open space. There was so much that I hadn’t noticed, though when he mentioned the different things there were to see and hear I began to realize all the things I’d been missing. He put it together for me in an ever-evolving mural, a mosaic, changing practically day by day. It’s fascinating when you really get the chance to know the neighborhood.

He told me to come back at dusk and he’d show me something else. A full moon rose above the peaks just before dark, and the kinds of light transitioned from the hard brightness of day with its long shadows leaning east to the soft creamy light between long shadows leaning west. As we toured the perimeter and then entered into the heart of the open space, he imagined for me in great detail the lay of the land back when it had been a productive farm: the way each farm building sat, how it looked, down to the details of what sat on the porch, the out buildings, the pig pens, the chicken coops. He pointed out where a tire swing once hung in the yard next to the foreman’s house from a big branch of an old cottonwood tree, now long gone. He talked so intimately of things, I said it was like he lived here, and his eyes grew large and bright and he broke into a smile.

In fact, he’d grown up there. He was indeed the foreman’s son. His dad had raised him to believe he too would one day become the caretaker of all this, but then old man Bachechi had died and his offspring divided the spoils like a jar of wheat pennies, dismantling the great organic thing it once was, lying in wait for the encroachment of the city and skyrocketing land prices. His dad didn’t know anything else, and there was still plenty of farm work around if you really knew what you were doing, though it didn’t pay much.

The Bonsai guy felt much like his dad. Though they’d never owned the place, it was all he and his dad had ever known as home. His mom had died in childbirth. The Bonsai guy took a job when he was a teenager in a pizza place nearby and eventually managed the place, then bought it and ran it himself. His dad was fast closing in on a hundred years old. He lost the pizza place when the neighborhood finally built out and the new generation of locals abandoned tried and true pizza for another new microbrewery. He, for all he’d been through, was still living as best he could in the place he’d been raised.

I stop in on him now and again, especially when I need a little jog in my perspective, to see what’s what. It turns out the little trees he bonsais are actually native sage. He pays a kid he knows to bring them down off the West Mesa. We especially like to meet up on moonlit nights and stroll beneath the honey locusts and the cottonwoods and the mesquites, after they’ve unfurled their dense canopies of leaves. Discussing things like a pair of old-school naturalists or philosophers. He’s read nearly every issue of National Geographic I have. It makes me think we’re two of the worldliest people I know, though I haven’t set foot outside the neighborhood in I don’t know when, and he, as it turns out, never left.