Apache Christ Church |
In 1916 Father Albert sat in the Tularosa, New Mexico train depot waiting for Ralph Shanta to pick him up and take him to the Mescalero reservation. This was his first assignment after becoming an ordained priest of the Franciscan order. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he came from a world of culture and comfort. This was not that world. Sweat poured down his back as he stared at the striated cliffs of the Sacramento Mountains. The sun seemed to hit those walls and bounce back with increased intensity. Cacti and mesquite thorns pricked his flesh; images of punctured St. Sebastian flooded his imagination. He had no idea where he was going or what would become of him.
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Ralph showed up in a rickety cart drawn by two Spanish mules. Father Albert was hauled aboard and they set off up the canyon at a spine jarring pace. Two hours later, just when Father Albert was about to volunteer to walk the rest of the way, they reached the tribal center at Mescalero. Excitement turned to dismay when he was dropped at his new parish. Could this be the Lord’s House?
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The view from Round Mountain, facing west across White Sands to the San Andreas Mountains.
Photo by the Author.
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On a warm January day I climbed Round Mountain to see what I could see. The cone shaped peak was 1000 feet above the 4500 foot high desert floor. My sea level legs and lungs strained into a climb that should have been easy. The path up was actually a shallow gully washed out by rain. Yucca challenged my progress with drawn bayonets. Here and there a cluster of juniper had to be sidestepped or crawled through. The altitude, more than the steepness, left me wheezing at the top, leaning against an immense granite boulder. The top is solid rock.
As Lord of the Mountain I slowly panned my realm. The sinuous dark ribbon of US 70 stretched seven miles southwest to the village of Tularosa. Beyond that the White Sands were spread like a rumpled sheet across the brown valley bed. The San Andreas Mountains rose up to block my view. Black Top Mountain, Gunsight Peak, Skillet Knob, all familiar forms. A hundred times I have watched the sun pass behind them, opalesce into dazzling glory then expire in its own red juices.
The San Andreas Mountains belong to the military. The whole range is off limits. And because the sign says "DO NOT ENTER" I am drawn like a moth to those forbidden places. How I would love to clamber up and down the hillsides, look for the abandoned homesteads of Joe Pete and Christopher Columbus Woods who killed the last bear in the mountains. Locate the haunts of Mellie Potter whose picture in a historical publication showed a girl of uncommon beauty. And the Prather place, where eighty-two year old John Prather literally stuck to his guns and refused to clear off his ranch, the only one to do so. Confronted by his willingness to die for his land, and embarrassed by public attention, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men tucked their tails between their legs and slunk back to the Pentagon. They took all but fifteen of John’s four thousand acres for the missile site, but they left him alone and he died there.
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