Pecos, Perseverance, and Pretty India

I turned 29 years old almost two months ago in the Pecos wilderness north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I celebrated with “no-bake” cheesecake that had been mixed in a plastic canteen and poured into a metal frying pan and cooled at the edge of a lake. It was topped with M&M’s.

I still think about it sometimes. Not about the cheesecake – although I think about that too – but I think about being in the Pecos. The trip I took this summer was my seventh or eighth; my first was when I was thirteen years old (and during which I turned fourteen), and was required of me as part of a St. Mark’s tradition: all rising freshmen must camp in small groups for a week in the Sangre de Cristo mountains – in the Pecos – during the summer before they enter highschool. And because I enjoyed my trip as a student, I returned as a leader in the years that followed.

Even though I was accompanied by and responsible for a group of teenaged boys, the trip this summer – like all previous trips – was restorative and centering. My group and the seven or eight or nine other groups like it enjoyed relative isolation in the woods; we had only occasional interactions with other campers, and we only rarely smelled packhorses in the distance.

In the Pecos there is a subtle infinity of wildlife: butterflies float and dip over ponds, purple and yellow and white and orange wildflowers grow on the rocky sunny mountainsides, aspen leaves rustle and glitter in the wind, dry moss crumbles under trees, hummingbirds and black flies and yellow bees hover in the air, branches snap, creeks trickle, and small white mushrooms and big flat-topped orange mushrooms line the wet edges of trails; on this year’s trip my group was also visited by jackrabbits close to our campsite at Cave Creek, and by a herd of cows in Horsethief Meadow.

It’s easy to be happy in the Pecos. It’s easy to disregard what’s unimportant, and it’s easy to appreciate things: the hot beans in my dinner bowl, the black ash and soil on my knees, the silence and starlight in the night, the towering clouds in the sky, the fine bloody scratches on my legs, the cold taste of rain in the air, and the dark brown hairs on my arms that redden and shine in the sunlight.

One afternoon this summer, near a small lake in the shadow of a mountain called Pecos Baldy, I met an old Mexican cowboy with two horses and dog. One horse was brown and male and saddled; one horse was blonde and female and free. The dog was black and angular and light and quick; it was fluffy-tailed and very friendly; it seemed more like a fox than a dog.

The cowboy’s name was Leroy, and after asking about my trip, and after talking about his three attendant animals as if they were his children, he asked if I’d seen any cattle close to our campsites; I told him about the herd at Horsethief Meadow, and confirmed they were the ones he sought by mentioning the orange tags on their ears. He was pleased to know where they were, but in no rush to chase after them. He was letting the cows graze and would be moving them out of the Pecos eventually. As he told me this his horses waited with practiced patience; and Leroy too seemed patient and confident, and seemed as if he’d been patient and confident about most things for a long time.

…In a way, my time in New Mexico prepared me for my return to India. I felt strong and healthy when I left the Pecos, and I felt ready to deal with the fast urban chaos of Kolkata after being immersed in the slow sylvan order of the woods.

Now that I’m here, and now that I feel occasionally and increasingly exhausted and depressed by the small stresses of my daily life, I sometimes forget what I learned over the summer. I fixate on minutia. I think of the indefatigable green-and-grey mold that grows on the brown leather belt in my closet and on the brown leather wallet under my bed; I think of the mosquitoes that keep me from eating breakfast on my porch and that sting my ankles while I brush my teeth; I think of the patient named George who every day demands that I pray for his leg – which I do – every day – and I think of my less-than-charitable irritation as I do it; I think of the books I’ve written and the book I’m writing and the invisible goals toward which I blindly continue to strive.

Of course, amid the frustrations of my routine there are many newly or familiarly arresting details and images: there are the open eyes painted on either side of truck-fronts or the spiders flinching on my bedroom walls or the subtle but ubiquitous Hindu swastikas or the dog chewing a rubbery newborn rat outside a rubbled internet café or the too-long but disarmingly earnest puppet show of Mother Teresa’s life I watched last Sunday with a group of fellow volunteers.

Life remains interesting, but sometimes it’s difficult. This is no surprise, but there is an added difficulty that I now suffer or create or observe: October.

Historically, October – and perhaps autumn at large – has always been a challenging time for me. I don’t know if the change of seasons and the diminished sunlight depresses me; I don’t know if other people actually become as preoccupied and self-involved as they seem; I don’t know if the lasting imprint of the academic calendar makes me imagine and sense my own dwindling ‘first day’ euphoria and the onset of an impending never-ending schoolyear’s grind.

But I do know that thinking of the Pecos now – thinking of leafy shady dusty muddy flowery uphill and downhill trails, thinking of the mountaintop where my group sat in meditative silence and of the path we lost in the underbrush, and thinking of a Mexican cowboy named Leroy – gives me perspective and gives me hope.

…In our brief conversation, Leroy impressed me with more than just his manifest self-possession. It was his ability to commit to his work with dignity and joy that moved me then and still moves me. Leroy seemed blissfully bound to a life without a definitive goal; I don’t know about the man’s other ambitions, but herding cattle through the Pecos each summer doesn’t seem to promise any glamour or change; it seems that each year must be very much like the one before. And Leroy told me that – starting at age six – he’d been herding cattle through the Pecos for sixty years.

I suppose that over so much time, a person may observe many permanent changes and many repeated cycles. A person may see seasons begin and end, both those spent as romantically as a summer riding horseback through the mountains or as mundanely as a monsoon typing in obscurity and wiping mold.

I try to remember Leroy’s humble example during overwhelming times; occasionally I do, and occasionally I am heartened by it. I realize that I’m doing what I want to be doing, but I also feel free to admit that it’s a grind. And then I aspire toward patience and confidence; I ask for the strength to persevere. It is challenging to ask, and it is challenging to want to ask. But every time I do – eventually, and because of God’s grace or the power of deliberate personal intention or because of some great cosmic coincidence – I find that strength. I go on.

And I think of Leroy’s blonde horse.

I brush my teeth each morning and try to dodge mosquitoes by stepping from one foot to the other and shaking my legs the same way Leroy’s gentle horse stamped her hooves and twitched her shining flanks and swished her tail; and even though I can’t remember the name of Leroy’s foxy black dog or the name of the horse he was riding, I still remember that blonde unsaddled horse’s name: it was India Linda.

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