Meadow Lake

We come to a desert but it is not to our liking. One wonders why, then, we came to a desert, but no matter. We can engineer our way out of this:

Meadow Lake was never much of a meadow. It was too wild, too wide, its sage-studded plains golden with buffalo grass and endless sunshine spilling, sparkling toward the blue shadows of the Manzano Mountains to the east.

But there had been a lake.

In 1967, the lake – fed by eight wells and stocked with trout, bluegill and catfish – had been the focal point of a 1,700-acre community planned by Albuquerque developer D.W. Falls.

That’s my colleague Joline Gutierrez Krueger in a sad piece about the ambitions of land development on the greater Albuquerque metro area’s south side. Journal photographer Dean Hanson added some nice ruin porn of the gutted mobile homes that are, along with crime, now Meadow Lake’s hallmark. And no lake.

As so often is the case, we learn late that can’t engineer our way out of this.