A Plot of Land

Mesa Del Sol was planned as an outpost in the wilderness. Southeast of Albuquerque, developers envisioned a complex fit for 100,000 residents. By the time I visited, seven years after construction began and with only a few hundred homes completed, development had stalled. The land surrounding the sleepy homes had been leveled, parceled, and abandoned. Piles of bricks and overturned buckets recall the zone’s time as nearly humanized. Instead, jackrabbits and coyotes slink through the scrubby grasses. The wilderness was to be subdivided and buried under exurbs; left to pasture, it was again a sort of wilderness. Then again, the area is hardly wild if merely awaiting better prospects for financial return on its development. The fence separating the distant mountains from the tamed lands closer at hand sits bundled and inert. No telling where the one stops and the other begins.

Photo by Author