IN APRIL 2022 ON A BRITTLE, wind-whipped day, the US Forest Service chose to ignite a controlled burn in the mountains of northern New Mexico, my home for 31 years. Within 4.5 hours their undertaking was out of control and officially declared a wildfire. Then, a week and a half later on Earth Day, the fire, now at 92% containment, was annexed by a red flag warning, wind-bellowed “sleeper” fire, also set and insufficiently monitored by the US Forest Service earlier in the year. In the ensuing months through July, the Hermit’s Peak + Calf Canyon Fire consumed over 342,000 acres, 62 million trees, generational ranchos and abodes, untold wildlife, and our valley's centuries old Indigenous, Latino, and European land-based way of life.

I evacuated twice, the second round for the full month of May. After returning from the first, my charge was to continue prioritizing and packing a life’s work in negatives, hardrives, and portfolios, a family archive, along with the records of modern living. With garden sprinklers repurposed to soak my studio’s exterior woodwork with hopes this would save the building, my neighbors and I mowed desiccated pasture grass and limbed up or brought down surrounding trees, all the while trying to fathom how in peril our homeworld and we were and if anything would remain in the path of a voracious conflagration.