by Emily Withnall
It took ten minutes to walk from my house to the 2023 Going with the Flow: Art, Actions, and Western Waters exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. It was a chilly April evening. Inside the gallery, I lingered at the map of the river spread across one wall, sobered by its process of vanishing. I peered at small boats crafted from grasses, and photos of an ice book filled with seeds being released into the Santa Fe River. The exhibition felt like an elegy to this semi-arid high mountain desert.
Then, I turned the corner. Photographs of blackened forests lined the walls in front of me and photos of the wreckage created by post-fire flooding covered the walls behind me. But the land wasn’t any land. It wasn’t abstract or far away. I knew this land. What was it doing on a museum wall? I almost turned away. I had not been prepared for an exhibition documenting the charred remains of the places I love. My breath rattled in my throat and I felt the heat of it as I exhaled into my mask. I stared at the burned trees on the wall, my eyes stinging.
Sharon Stewart’s photographs were titled Firescape 2022 and they captured the aftermath of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire that licked at the edges of my hometown, Las Vegas, New Mexico, and that destroyed so many of my friends’ and community members’ homes from Mineral Hill to Guadalupita. At 341,725 acres burned, it remains the largest fire in New Mexico’s history.
I can’t explain the tears that brimmed in my eyes when I looked at Stewart’s photos. I had been inundated by images like these in newspapers and in videos for months last year as the fire was raging. I had been the interim director of University Relations at my alma mater, New Mexico Highlands University, when the fires began, and I was soon in charge of communications for the university’s Incident Command team. My body tensed in the gallery as I remembered the constant calls and flock of press releases I sent out daily. And how, even as the fires raged on, the university president asked me to send out daily poems to the campus community. He wanted them to offer solace in some way. As months dragged by and the fire raged on, I read poems between emergency meetings, revisiting favorites and realizing how melancholy they were and how difficult it was to find hope as my home burned.
There in SITE’s museum, reliving last year’s grief and exhaustion, I froze. I hadn’t expected to see the charred and flooded remains of the land I knew so intimately in this exhibition. In photo after photo, I saw the story of what had happened—a story still in progress as spring runoff and summer thunderstorms bring more flooding and more erosion. The photos revealed culverts twisted beyond recognition, tractors and backhoes stuck in flood zones, massive plumes of smoke rising over vibrant green land, and sunflowers growing along arroyos.
The photo that arrested my attention was called Firescape IX: Holman Hill Burn in First Snow. The photo appeared to be shot in black and white, the hillside dusted with snow and covered with trees as black and straight as spears. In the foreground, one tree bore limbs but it, too, was charcoal. Hints of green and brown peeked through the snow revealing that the photograph was, in fact, full color.
I know every curve of Holman Hill. I knew exactly where that photo was taken. I didn’t know who the photographer was, but I felt indignance brewing in me. How dare she photograph my burned home and call it art? I didn’t understand my reaction. Later, I wondered if it was a kind of survivor’s guilt. I had not been physically present in Las Vegas while the fires were happening.
I wondered too at my reaction to seeing these images on a museum wall, where, within the context of the larger exhibition, the photos felt like a requiem. I imagined other museum goers, unfamiliar with Las Vegas and Mora, shaking their heads. “It’s too bad,” they might have said. Or perhaps they admired the beauty of the burning and moved on, not thinking about this land at all.
One poem I sent out to the campus community that summer that the fires continued to burn was “An Old Story” by Tracy K. Smith. She begins: “We were made to understand it would be /Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, / Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. / Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful / Dream.” I was certain the university president was thinking more along the lines of “Hope is a thing with feathers” – not poems about epic winds like the one pushing Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire northward, or poems about the ravaged land. I sent it out anyway.
***
This year at SITE Santa Fe, an exhibition showcased the art of Teresita Fernandez. The show placed her work in conversation with the late land artist Robert Smithson, but it wasn’t his art I was interested in. I was drawn to Teresita’s work: the smoking archipelagos etched at shoulder height on all the walls in one room, the shimmering charcoal landscapes depicting crosscuts from aquifer to hillside to sparkling stars, and the metallic clouds gathering on two walls, flanking a heavy metallic waterfall that cascades toward the center of one room.
In all of them, I saw an apocalyptic landscape that is part present and part future. I saw the blackened trees in Montezuma, Rociada, Guadalupita, and Sapello. I saw the flooded rivers and acequias. Rain clouds that we all once embraced for the simple relief they offered from drought and heat, are now both blessing and curse. The land, without trees and plants to hold it, races down hills and mountainsides, walls of mud threatening houses and chemical-laden runoff poisoning waterways.
At a performance at SITE, Teresita Fernandez, Raven Chacon, Candice Hopkins, and Natalie Diaz weave an understanding of the mythology of landscape, the mythology of “America,” and the violence done to the land and its people. “We’re taught to see the land as fixed,” Teresita says, “but it’s always in the process of becoming.” Candice, referencing Teresita’s work, notes her use of charcoal in so many of the pieces. Charcoal is carbon, she says, both evidence of fire and the genesis of life.
I want to drink these words in and embody them. I want to look at Las Vegas from space, circle the stars and consider how small I am, how small we all are, the blip that is human history since the earth began. But there is a gap between my brain and heart. I am in the now, filling up giant water jugs at Walmart and driving them to my dad and oldest kid who live in Las Vegas. So many people in northern New Mexico are still fighting with FEMA, trying to hold on.
I circle back to Smith’s poem—specifically the ending, which was why I chose to send it out to begin with: “And then our singing / Brought on a different manner of weather. / Then animals long believed gone crept down / From trees. We took new stock of one another. / We wept to be reminded of such color.” When I was sending these poems out daily I wasn’t sure who was reading them. One faculty member asked me, forcefully, to stop sending them. A few others voiced appreciation for a small, bright spot in their otherwise stressful days trying to juggle teaching, evacuations, and smoke inhalation. Mostly, though, the poems were a way for me to anchor myself in the face of true disaster.
I wonder at my impulse to create meaning from the fires, to seek refuge in poetry and to write about the losses that still bring tears to my eyes. I reached out to the photographer, Sharon Stewart, a few months after I saw her photographs and shared with her my reaction to her work. She was not an interloper, as I’d imagined, but a person a lot like me. She had lived in Chacón for decades and had to evacuate when the fire grew dangerously close to her home. And like me, she uses her chosen art to try to document and reflect on her home within the changing landscape.
I so often despair of my writing; words can feel so trivial when the world is literally on fire. And yet, I return to the page, fighting against elegy, fighting for a way to become alongside the land that grew me.
Emily Withnall is a writer and magazine editor living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, High Country News, Orion Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and others. She is at work on a book about hydraulic fracturing and domestic violence.
View Sharon Stewart’s photographs at https://www.sharonstewartphotography.net/.
After the Art 