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Excerpts from
Beside the Rio Hondo
By
Phaedra Greenwood
Published by Sunstone Press 2007

I was the only woman to work on the Atalaya back in the 70s when the crew was traditionally made up of middle-aged Hispano men. The women stayed home and cooked big suppers for the men. Wielding a carving knife with a serrated edge, I jumped in beside Aaron and hacked at willows until the blade snapped. Over the years a few more women came on board. The men accepted us when they saw we could work just as long and hard as they could without fainting. . .          Ditch cleaning day dawned warm and clear. I slid into my grungy jeans and searched through the cupboard for my gardening gloves. I loaded my shovel in the back of the car and drove up to the highway. Battered pickups were parked nose-to-nose beside the road. The men sat on the hoods of their trucks or gathered in small groups, talking quietly, their eyes lit as if they had come to party. New arrivals were greeted with handshakes, back slaps and friendly grins. "¿Cómo estás, mi amigo?" The answer was usually, “Bien. ¿Y tú?”

I was assigned to a work crew and we set out for the west end of the ditch. I threw myself into it like I do, widening the ditch, shoveling out stones and clumps of clay . . . We quit for lunch and came back at one. Our backs and arms were sore from wielding shovels and tossing stones. As the afternoon dragged on, sweat poured down our cheeks and we paused more often to gulp the lukewarm water from our canteens.

The last hour was the worst. Dust dried our throats; weeds itched under our collars and down our shirts. With one eye on our watches, we stumbled and faltered. We had forgotten the why of it.          “It’s like purgatory,” Freddie said.          “You mean hell?” Emilio laughed. “Yeah, I can agree with that.”          “No, purgatory. It’s never gonna end.”          I offered my young friend Karen six bucks an hour to clean the ditch with me on Sunday. She hitchhiked to work every day and I picked her up whenever I saw her. She was tall and lanky and looked as strong as some of the men. I thought she might enjoy the novelty of working in community. She came by the house wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, but no hat, though I offered her one of mine. I was better prepared than I had been on Saturday. I carried a bottle of water, changed my billed cap to a straw hat and traded my shovel for a rake and clippers. We started at the top of the ditch and worked our way down to the highway. It felt good to have help as we shoveled and cleaned the section that crossed our land. I showed them the muskrat holes and they stuffed them with sandbags. Together we pitched into the beaver dam that blocked the ditch and cleared it in five minutes. Again, Armando warned me to keep the beavers out.          “These damn willows,” Armando said. “We’ll never get rid of them. We’re supposed to be able to walk the top of the ditch.”          “It never used to be this way,” Emilio said. “People let their goats eat the willows down. But nobody keeps goats anymore.”          It was a perfect day for photos--the fields greening up, a pure azure sky behind snowy peaks. I tucked my camera in my fanny pack and shot two rolls over the course of the day, from early morning when we were still going strong, until late afternoon when we were beaten to our knees, dazed by heat and fatigue. I tried to capture the wrinkled brown faces of the old men, the shy young boys working steadily, whispering to each other, the patient, determined women. But there was no way to capture the musical Spanish phrases that flowed between the men as they chatted and teased. “Mucho calor,” very hot, Esteven said, wiping his dripping forehead.          “Cansado,” I’m tired, Ramon said, plopping his butt on the bank. He was tall with shoulder-length black hair. He offered his canteen. “Aquí--agua.”          Estevan took a swig. “How come you’re here? You don’t own land.”          “I’m a peón,” Ramon said. “I’m working for the Zamoras. Mucho trabajo, poco dinero. ” Much work, little money. They both chuckled.          Estevan turned his sharp, brown face to me. “I remember when you first started working with the crew. You had a big knife. The guys said, ` That woman is crazy. Stay away from her.’”          I slapped my gloves against my knee. “¡Cuidado!” Watch out.

At noon Karen and I trudged back to the house. I took a shower and changed my underwear. Karen and I ate salad at the outside table. Her face was bright red. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” she said. “That’s it for me. I think I have heat stroke.”          “You’d better go in and lie down.” I hefted the shovel and went back to work.

In the afternoon Anna and I worked in tandem, one raking the willows and dead leaves into piles, the other picking up the piles and tossing them onto the bank. We were schlepping a lot of debris--not just willows and leaves but dried green slime that looked like elephant snot. Anna was lean and brown with long black hair tied at the neck. Her hands were callused with digging in her garden, messing with horses, building fences. She clued me in on how to survive in Taos without a lot of money: "Plant a big garden and don’t go anywhere." But at her end of the valley she had soil, not just rocks, sand, clay and caliche.          Contenta, our crew chief, whipped us along all day. In the old tradition she marked out with an adz twelve-foot sections, las tareras, for each of us to work individually. No one paid much attention to that--it was more productive to work side-by-side--but we needed more clippers and rakes. At one point she handed me the clunky adz to carry, like the burden of authority. I tried to trade it off, but no one else wanted it.          Now and then I’d climb to the top of the ditch to see where we were. “My God, this ditch is long!” It wandered back and forth following the contours of the hillside and seemed to run uphill before it crossed the highway.          As the sun fried our faces and necks, we took more frequent breaks, cowering in the shade of the bank. The men perched on the blades of their shovels. “It’s not good to get stiff and damp from sitting on the ground,” Ramon said. He took a swig of his water and offered me some. “What happened to Karen?”          I shrugged. “She thought she was going to faint.” He laughed. I wiped my forehead. “You know how these Anglos are--they want to do this communal, close-to-the-earth stuff. They think it’s romantic. And it is--for the first two hours.” Another burst of laughter.          Freddie scratched his neck. “After that it’s just outright abuse.”          Twenty minutes later a photographer from The Taos News popped up to take pictures us. Communal tradition. Even National Geographic got in on it a few years back.          As the sun sank toward Tres Piedras, Anna and I dragged our rakes down the last eighth of a mile of the ditch. I paused to look up at Contenta who stood astride on the bank, hands on her hips. I gestured up and down the acequia. “Has our ditch ever been cleaned so thoroughly in the past ten years?”          She gave me a wilted smile. “No.”          “Here they come,” Freddie said.          Eloy and Marty were walking backward as fast as they could, tossing out tangled branches and debris with their shovels, barely keeping ahead of the churning tongue of water. The crew scrambled up the steep bank as the muddy current flooded the culvert and gurgled out the other side, washing away everything foul and unwholesome.

Nobody spoke, but the same exultant smile lit each face as the living water glided by us, a mirror to the sky, swelling every crevice with moisture and possibility. Eloy nudged my arm and winked, “No agua, no vida.” No water, no life.          I grinned and nudged him back. “¡Verdad!” True.

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