Embudito Canyon
The first time we hike the full trail, Alyssa is sixteen, old enough to drive us, and Gabriella, eight, is old enough to remember it. We have our system: Alyssa leads, Gabriella takes the middle, and I’m in the back, where I can watch the picture of the two of them: how Alyssa laughs with her whole body when we accuse her of getting us lost. How Gabriella scales boulders twice her height, stops for every lizard.
It’s spring. The trail starts in desert grassland, where blue grama and Spanish broom nestle against cholla. It veers left, but we go right, following a non-trail, soft sands that open into the canyon.
The walls dense with piñon, juniper, and oak rise around us. Planes of granite slickrock, trickles of snowmelt. We chimney between rock faces, ford little streams. At some point, Alyssa scrambles up an incline dense with prickly pear to find the trail again. The canyon we came from yawns open below us. Behind us, the city opens west. Before us, a real path.
My dad and his mother had a recurring argument. He insisted that, as a boy in Havana, he used to ride his bike for hours alone, away from the house, through the city. Abuelita insisted that he never did, that she’d stand at the window, and he was only allowed to go as far as she could see. The same contradiction, over and over: his memory of freedom, hers of keeping him in a sphere of knowable risk.
When I try to imagine the scene, it plays out like a children’s book. A road paints itself into a blanched white horizon. There’s the frame of a window, but the cityscape is blank. The child on the bike leaves and doesn’t leave. He hovers at a threshold I cannot picture.
We ascend the life zones of the mountain. As we approach the crest, we hit the transition point marking the territory of the Ponderosa pine. It’s distinct as a portal: trees arch over the path, and through that arch, pines soar, snow heaps, white dazzles against dense green and red-tinged bark. A passage into winter. A wardrobe, then. We’ll call this part of the trail Narnia. It draws us forward, marks an inflection point.
My sisters and I grew up in Albuquerque in the `90s, when kidnapping terror eradicated time spent outside without supervision. Ours wasn’t the family that camped, skied, sent children away to log-cabined camps. We stayed home together, played in our backyard, biked the neighborhood. The Sandia Mountains reminded my mom of her father’s beloved Arequipa, guardians monumental as El Misti, and yet we never visited our mountains until we were old enough to go alone.
To leave your country is an unknowable risk. I think of my abuelita staring out that window, not knowing all she would lose, the things she wouldn’t be able to protect her children from. A city becoming, already, a phantom.
In hikes with my sisters, there’s something of a line between safety and danger. There’s something, too, of learning the land we’d come to. We couldn’t know the places our parents and grandparents lost, what it really meant in each of their hearts to feel safe. But with this step, we could come to know something for ourselves: the language of a place, when you can risk knowing and loving it. The names of the pines. The details of the road.
We’ll visit Narnia many times into adulthood. We’ll wear flannels and cargo pants when snow is dense, balance-walk across the same fallen trunk. One day, we’ll hike the intersecting Tres Pistoles trail and find a turkey vulture perched on an outcropping. We’ll sit and watch it and lose time.
We decide, one Christmas, to do a photo shoot as a gift for our parents. My friend Eliade photographs us at sunset at the base of our trail. He’s brought an off-camera system of flashes that he positions around us. He takes a picture; the light surrounds. As we finish, night-neutrals and cold descend, the last of the sun caught in the feathered flowers of Apache plume.
In this liminal dark, Eliade hands each of my sisters one of the flashes and works the shutter. The lights go on and off, warming their hands. The air smells of woodsmoke. Their faces illuminated in stops and starts. I hold the picture of them: my sisters, starbursts flaring under their fingers, as the sun gives way to winter dark.
