When I met Raymond Gallegos for the first time, we were in a dirt parking lot.
Today the place is known as 'Windsurfer Beach' at Navajo Lake State Park, near Colorado's southern border with New Mexico. But 70 years ago, it was the Gallegos family homestead.
"The reason I chose this location is that this is on our property," Gallegos said, shielding his eyes from the sun and pointing down toward an empty slope of sand and rocks that ran all the way to the water.
"That’s where our home was – straight ahead, into the water," he said. "Back here, our property line comes straight up and goes back just before that ridge line there."
I noted to Gallegos that he was talking about the homestead in the present tense.
"When we arrived here, you said, 'this is our property...' You used the word 'is,' not 'was'," I said.
"It is. It still is," he said. "It belongs to the government now, but it’s still, in my heart, still our property."
When the federal government flooded these river valleys in the early 1960s, the Gallegos family had to leave and start over like hundreds of other residents.
Raymond is 76 now. But in his mind's eye he can still see all the places on land and into the water, where the family lived for more than a decade.
"We were extremely fortunate with our parents, and my grandfather," he said. "We were dirt poor and didn’t know it. Money-wise. But we had everything else. It was just a fantastic life."
Times of hardship, times of abundance
The homestead was the result of a life of toil and hardship by Raymond's grandfather.
Ramon Ezequiel Gallegos had grown up nearby in the town of Rosa, New Mexico. The town is gone now, its remnants covered with silt somewhere near the bottom of the reservoir.
"He was a big man. He always wore a big hat," Raymond Gallegos remembers. "Born and raised Catholic, went to mass every Sunday he could. Prayed to the rosary. But he didn't push it on anyone. He didn't even push it on us kids."
It had been in Rosa, where Ramon had met Raymond’s grandmother. Sometime in the early 1900s, Ramon got a mining job and moved to Silverton, Colorado, with his wife and young family.
"He would tell stories of working in the mines, that they were cold and damp," Gallegos said. "It was miserable in the mines when he was working in the Silverton area."
Then came 1918.
"The Spanish Flu hit, and my grandmother passed away there," Gallegos said. "She was one of the very first ones to pass away from the flu."
Ramon Gallegos didn’t want his wife to be buried in a mass grave in Silverton; he wanted her laid to rest in Rosa, New Mexico. It was illegal at the time to transport a body across state lines, so he brought his wife home secretly.
"Because he didn’t have anyone to take care of the kids, they remained with my great-grandparents, while he went off and worked," Gallegos said.
Ramon returned to the mines in Silverton. His four children stayed in Rosa. Six years later, in 1924, the two oldest children died from diphtheria.
"He worked his whole life. He was sending money back for his in-laws to take care of his kids," Gallegos said of his grandfather. "By 1945, he retired, and he had saved some money, and he bought the property here in August of 1945 when he retired."
The family settled in. Raymond’s parents moved into the larger house. His grandfather lived in a smaller place nearby. After so much time living apart from his family, it must have been a kind of heaven for Raymond’s grandfather Ramon.
"Our house was about 30 yards from the river. We had our own swimming hole right next to the house," Gallegos said.
On a third of an acre, Raymond’s grandfather grew everything they needed.
"It was all river bottom land where we were. Pure river bottom land," Gallegos said. "You could grow anything on it. No fertilizer required; it would just grow."
The family grew corn and alfalfa, potatoes, beans, green peas. They had raspberry bushes, apples, plum trees.
Raymond remembered one day when a guy showed up at the house selling produce.
"He had a lot of green chile, and he said, ‘I’ve got the best chile you’ll ever see.’" Gallegos said with a chuckle. "And my grandfather says, ‘Come with me.’ And he took him out to the garden and said, ‘Look at this.’ It was just long ten-inch chiles…And the guy says, ‘Oh ’...."
They were part of a tight-knit community of Hispanic residents whose ancestors had migrated to the area from New Mexico. Almost everyone in the area was Catholic. Most families spoke only Spanish. They all lived off the land, helping each other survive from year to year.
"My mom always said, 'Esos eran los tiempos de abundancia.'" Gallegos recalled. "'Those were the times of abundance.'"
Pack it up and find a new life
In the late 1950’s, community members in four small towns along the Piedra and San Juan rivers started hearing about plans to dam the San Juan and flood the area with reservoir water.
By 1959, federal employees started knocking on people’s doors to let them know their land would be assessed. The news spread quickly, and community members were upset and alarmed. They felt powerless.
"Relatives, friends....They weren’t happy about it," Gallegos remembered. "My grandfather was a very strong-willed man. But he knew there was nothing we could do. (The government) was going to buy it, or take it. Make the best of it."
The Gallegos family found a new property and started salvaging what they could from the property, tearing down buildings, saving lumber.
Anything left behind would be bulldozed, and then submerged under water. The family decided to move their house to the land they’d purchased with money they got from the federal government.
Gallegos remembers the last time he saw the family house on the homestead land. He'd had to go to school that day, and when he got home, the house was sitting on the back of a flatbed truck.
The rising waters of Navajo Lake displaced the Gallegos family and hundreds of other people. Four small towns were wiped off the map too. Everyone had to take what federal assessors offered, whether they could afford to relocate or not.
In some cases, multiple families owned a single parcel of land and had to share the money they got for that land; other families didn’t own their land at all. But compensation could not account for the way that these tight-knit communities were pulled apart.
"This is the thing that devastated them," said Patricia Tharp, an historian who has published two books of oral histories on the communities displaced by Navajo Lake. "When they were evicted from the land that their fathers and grandfathers had settled on and told they had so many months to leave. Pack it up and find a new life. Can you imagine telling your grandmother who'd lived maybe in the same house all her life, 'It’s gonna be gone!'"
"You can't go back to visit," Tharp added. "That's a weird experience not to be able to go back to where you were raised."
For people who grew up in the lost communities of Navajo Lake, many can never go back. Their homes and ranches are now at the bottom of a reservoir.
Raymond Gallegos is lucky in this way–he can still walk on his family homestead, all the way down to the edge of the water, and he can stand there, looking out onto a flat, blue surface. He can occupy a space in between what’s still here and what’s been erased forever.
"It was home. It was where I grew up," Gallegos said, standing on the shore of the reservoir, on land where his father and grandfather had farmed. "My kids will never be able to envision what it was. They can come out here and see the lake. The trees are gone. It's just water that covers the memories. But they surface."
When the water in the reservoir runs low, the memories literally surface.
Two years ago, water levels were way down, and Raymond found what was left of his grandfather’s place. The old foundation looked like a footprint in the sand.
Then Raymond and his brother walked down the beach and found the old community church.
Stepping inside the foundation of that old church was both gratifying and surreal; seeing and touching what had been lost for so many decades.
"You’re stepping on the ground you lived in, that was supposedly gone forever that you couldn't see again," Gallegos said. "And there you are. You’re actually there. You’re some place that was supposed to be underwater, hidden. You’re just there."