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British poet and author D. H. Lawrence spent much of his time reconciling the relationship between the blissful, heavenly state he occasionally visited and the concrete, often painful world in which he lived. I consider this balance as I head down a dusty road into the northern New Mexico village of San Cristobal, where the novelist, best known for the novels Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Women in Love, lived for nearly a year in the 1920s, after being expelled from Cornwall when authorities accused him of spying for the Germans during World War I.
Fifteen miles north of Taos on N.M. 522, the village spreads across a valley of broad grass fields cut by San Cristobal Creek. Cottonwoods shade the acequias and century-old adobe homes. Though Hispanic homesteaders have inhabited the area since the 1860s, San Cristobal is best known for the D. H. Lawrence Ranch.
It’s no surprise that Lawrence became so enamored of the area—like much of New Mexico, it has a luminescent beauty. San Cristobal resident Alfred Cordova, whom I meet in the village, agrees. His home, where he and his wife, Susan, raised their two children, sits along the creek; in their back yard, acres of smooth grass stretch toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Looking out across the fields, I try to imagine living on land passed down from generation to generation, as Alfred lives.
