The South Side

Santa Fe is located between mountain chains that mark the southern terminus of the Rocky Mountains. Geographically the city sits on the Colorado Plateau, which is the area in northern New Mexico that has big mountains, steep cliffs, deep river canyons, and rugged flat topped mesas.

But just south of Santa Fe the high plateau gives way to the Basin and Range part of New Mexico that extends south to the border. It's still characterized by mountains, but the ranges are separated by open basins of dry scrubland dotted with pinion pines and grassy rangeland.

Our house is exactly at that geographical switch point, right where the plateau turns to basin. We are 8 miles south of the city center, and in those short miles you can tell the difference in the climate and in the look of the land.

It's drier here, more open, less treed, and sandier.

Our part of town, unimaginatively called the South Side neighborhood, wasn't even part of Santa Fe, really. Until the 1970s, the town ended well north of here; this was cattle grazing land and the railroad easement coming out of town. Our main thoroughfare was a dirt road to the rodeo grounds until the 70s.

But sleepy, remote Santa Fe grew, and because it's up against rugged hills to the north and steep mountains to the east . . . the growth had to go southwest, where we are, down along the arroyos and out into the pinion scrubland.

Because Santa Fe is such a small city, the South Side is still very much part of the city proper, still urban, just a few miles expanded out from the center. Yet the geography is really different.

I always notice when we drive into town and it gets leafier and shadier and the mountains come closer and it all looks different. Then driving the few miles back home, we see the land fall away into open basin. The dry arroyos widen out and the mountains retreat into blue haze a little more.

And yet both geographies are in the same city, easily navigated and tightly clustered.

But now our neighborhood, which defined the very boundary of the South Side when we moved here, is not at the edge of city and wilderness, or plateau and basin any more. The city now flows beyond us out into scrubland, following the big Arroyo de Chamisos southwest just as rushing summer water does, rapidly building its way down into the basin.

In addition to the vast new hospital, assisted living complex, and 600 home housing development that just got built behind us last year, a 200 unit apartment building is now going up half a mile to the west of us.

For all the new development, though, it's subtle. There are no skyscrapers in Santa Fe. The hospital is the tallest building, at three stories. The dips and crests of crumpled land hide most buildings below eye level. Even the huge new hospital a mile from us isn't visible from our house, only from the highway.

Lit up at night, though, and seen from the highway driving south, it looks for all the world like a massive ocean liner out cruising waves of brown sand in the darkness.

As the South Side grows and grows and new buildings go up beyond us, it really does look like the city of Santa Fe is flowing out from its center, down from the Colorado plateau and into the basin, like ships sailing south.