Residents in Northern New Mexico burn scar keep their faith for Christmas
Dec. 24—CLEVELAND, N.M. — A small Catholic church in this rural community hit hard by wildfire is a place where residents' strong faith intersects with the disaster's devastating effects.
Outside the door, a cloth depiction of the Nativity scene is draped over a wooden stand bolstered by sandbags.
More sandbags are piled near a walkway leading to the church property off N.M. 518 — remnants of the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire and the raging floodwaters that followed.
Homes decorated in bright lights in celebration of Christmas dot the region as night takes hold, showing the desire of resilient residents to lift the spirits of others in this holiday season. Inside those homes — from Las Vegas to Mora, Cleveland and Holman — they are living, hoping, praying.
Residents are still struggling with losses from the largest wildfire in New Mexico's history.
But they have not lost their faith.
"The people here are very resilient," said Joseph Griego, director of the Mora Head Start program.
The preschool has expanded its mission, providing an array of resources to people affected by the 340,000-acre blaze that sparked in April in the mountains northwest of Las Vegas from two federal burns. It consumed homes and livelihoods.
Many people wonder if what they lost can ever be restored.
"They are for the most part thankful for what they have," Griego said of the wildfire's survivors. "But the hard part is when you look at the holidays approaching. They still have faith that things are going to work out, but it's hard to see any peace — any sense of, 'Where do they go from here?' "
Abandoning home
Payzley Lujan is delighted her grandmother is living at her family's home in Las Vegas. It means lots of hugs when the 7-year-old climbs into Erlinda Fernandez's lap in the glow of the lighted Christmas tree.
Fernandez and her husband, George, moved in with her daughter, Rosemary Lujan, and four grandchildren after summer flooding destroyed a well at their Encinal home.
"There is no way we could live there," said Fernandez, who will turn 72 this month. They had no running water.
She had grown accustomed to hosting a family Christmas gathering at her place, 35 miles north of Las Vegas. This year's celebration will be different.
"Different, yes, but to have my kids and grandkids around means it will be a good day, a great Christmas — as long as my family is around," Fernandez said.
She paused for a moment. "There's nothing like your home," she added.
Her husband has been trying to make repairs so the couple can move back in sometime in 2023.
The family has faced many challenges. Lujan is battling cancer and a brain tumor, and another family member died recently from cancer.
Before the flash flooding, Fernandez thought she had endured the worst.
The fire came within 8 feet of her backyard and killed the couple's pigs. She and George evacuated to Santa Fe for two weeks. When they returned, their house was spared from flames but damaged by smoke.
Flooding followed in June.
"After we escaped the fire, we thought we were OK," Fernandez said.
The punches were not just physical but emotional: She realized she would have to abandon a place she has called home "all my life."
They evacuated to Taos, and then to a Las Vegas hotel and now to their daughter's mobile home.
The Christmas tree with gifts underneath is a sign of hope, she said. Neighbors gave the family a second tree, and the children decorated it.
"God's going to help," Fernandez said.
To others impacted by the fire, she advised, "Have faith in God. Only God can help us. Just have faith."
Down, but not out
Anita Moss can still smile, somehow, as she stares at the charred rubble of the cabin she had shared with her husband about seven miles north of Mora and the studio where she had made art.
Blackened trees line both sides of the dirt road leading to her house on a hill, marking the path of fiery destruction in the spring.
Don't ask her what day that was.
"Some people remember death dates," said Moss, a longtime Mora resident in her early 50s who is native to Minnesota. "I remember birth dates."
She and her husband, Jesse Drager, a U.S. Marine veteran who works in the oilfields in Texas, were living in the cabin while building a new home just up the hill. That house remains standing, thanks to a sprinkler system they installed, though the windows cracked from the heat of the flames.
Little else on the property was left after what Moss called a "fire tornado" swept through.
She and her husband survived, along with their two dogs. Gone, she said, are not just memories, but objects she had used to make art, her artworks and an array of new and antique tools the couple had used to work the property.
Gone, too, are her father's ashes, which she had kept in an urn.
Moss appears to be a confident, take-charge woman, but her heart breaks over the losses. She recalled finally crying for the first time about three months after the fire destroyed their property.
She is slowly moving forward. She just finished her first art piece since the fire — a quilt she plans to give to a local UPS delivery man as a Christmas gift. He and his wife are expecting a baby, and they are good people, she said.
Moss proudly displayed the quilt.
She hasn't decorated for Christmas this year; maybe she never will again. After the fire, she realized "stuff seems ..."
Moss paused.
"That money can be better spent on things people need."
As one of the Mora Mountain Mommas, a social group that gets together once a month, she plans to help host a Christmas Day community dinner.
Moss has faith in God. The community's response to the fire also reaffirmed her faith in others. "People have been helping each other all along," she said.
One gift God gave the community, Moss said, were the firefighters who strove to turn back the flames at every turn.
She and her husband fed them one day when they were camped nearby.
Moss understands and respects the pioneer spirit she and other people in these remote communities embody. It's all about survival, she said.
"If you move here, you know what you are getting into."
A strong front for the kids
Elizabeth Montoya's house is way up a dirt road off another dirt road that leads to another dirt road somewhere in the Holman area.
If you drove in the area at night during the holidays, you might spot her home by its light display and the loud but friendly dogs who roam around out front.
The wildfire had surrounded her house but spared it while taking so many others. She escaped and then returned to flooding that turned her dirt road into a river.
"It looked like the Colorado River," Montoya said.
She has lived in this canyon community alongside a creek for at least four decades. Most of her family members live nearby. Kinship keeps them together in tough times, and these are tough times indeed.
Her brother, Andrew Padilla, succumbed to cancer Dec. 19.
Her mother died in mid-May, shortly after the fire forced Montoya and her family to evacuate.
"I'd like to throw my hands up in the air and say, 'That's it; I've had it,' but I have my children, my grandkids," said Montoya, who is nearing 70.
Montoya, a retired special education teacher in the Mora school district, had never experienced a disaster like this one. She recalled driving with her daughter over the mountains to see the distant flames shortly after the wildfire started in early April, long before it reached her valley.
"Poor people," she remembered thinking as she watched the flames. "They're losing a lot."
Then the fire was upon her, like a harbinger of more loss to come before Christmas. She has been frustrated by attempts to deal with state and federal officials who she felt did little, if anything, to help.
Montoya and her daughter, Isla-Jo Montoya Cordova, said they still feel resentment toward federal officials who started the prescribed burns that raged out of control and decimated "our beautiful valley," as Montoya called it.
It's difficult to celebrate, both women said.
In past years, the holiday season was full of cheer, dinner around the table at Montoya's home, Christmas Mass.
This year, plans are up in the air. But they're trying to put up a strong front for the little ones.
"They're young," Montoya Cordova said of her children before breaking into tears. "It's not fair because the world is falling apart around us. It's not fair to them that we're not celebrating or appreciating the good in the world.
"It's like we still have to keep living, although it still hurts."
