The summer rainy season started at my place on June 17, earlier than usual. There have been gaps in the monsoon flow but we got another good rain on July 13.
The summer rainy season started at my place on June 17, earlier than usual. There have been gaps in the monsoon flow but we got another good rain on July 13.
My first thought was how extraordinary it is for me to be able to enjoy this view while others suffer. I am an American Boomer and I often feel this kind of privileged-person guilt. This morning it probably was fueled by watching a movie about World War 11 courage and brutality, ”A Call to Spy,” before bed.
My second thought was about standing by death beds and wondering about death. A boilerplate religious answer about living and lives taken, pain and suffering versus happiness and comfort, came next: We have to know one to know the other. But, for me, that still doesn’t dispel the mystery.
My next thought, after going back to bed and working on sentences in my head, was embarrassment about my habit of trying to ascribe human stories to morning mountains, my growing aversion to metaphor.
I really had no answers. I gave up on silly sentences. Time to move on. Time to walk with Cowboy, iPhone in hand but only the most straightforward words worth the while.
I am thankful for iPhones for sure. I can see this mountain from bed but have to get up and go outside for a clear view. I was drawn this morning by the play of shadow and light on the green mountain flanks. I can record the image in seconds, without words.
Maybe mixed up in my thinking, too, was re-reading an E.B. White essay, “A Slight Sound in Evening,” about Thoreau and Walden.
White wrote there about the purity of Thoreau’s words: ” … all things and events speak without metaphor.” He admired Walden for conveying “religious feeling without religious images.”
Dear Dad, I’m sure it’s raining on the east side of the Pecos today. That’s good because I’m afraid the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire has burned all the way west to Hamilton Mesa or at least to Iron Gate.
I guess it’s also burned over where we left your ashes with Pat’s near the Mora River. I won’t annoy you with any biblical stuff about ashes and dust. I’ll just remember how much you loved the Pecos and be thankful that it’s getting good rain for the first time since the whole fire mess got started on April 6. The combined fire is now New Mexico’s largest on record.
I guess I’d better mind my words, though, because now people around Las Vegas are understandably worried about flooding through the giant burn scar. For one thing, the Gallinas River, near where I remember visiting Jean and Swede Johnson in Montezuma when you taught at Highlands in the 1950s, is still a big Las Vegas water supply.
The rain started most places around Northern New Mexico on June 17. At least it will cool things off in the heart of the Pecos. There was another fire there last year in June — the Rincon Fire — that worried firefighters enough that they wrapped Beatty’s Cabin in that weird, fire resistant plastic stuff. This is all climate change, warming and aridification, Dad, all accelerated since you passed in 1995.
But on to happier things. Here you are with Pat and Mus sometime in the 1970s, walking down the Rito Valdez and drinking bourbon and rain water near Mora Flats. I think it was a trip with Gordon and Norma Peters and I’m sure Gordon took the picture. And there is good old Mus in the background. Pat is no doubt warming up her special backpacker’s green chile stew.
Thank you for the trips we took there together, and with Pat and Rob and Phelps. Spare me days, though, like the one in the 1960s, with Oliver McMillan, when we got caught in lightning on Trailriders Wall.
Cheers, Dad. Love, John. June 19, 2022.
See also ”Canyon Road, 1960.” https://dreamranch.blog/2015/03/12/canyon-road-1961-dreams-and-troubles/
Now they’re going to tell me to give up cookies.
I’ll cut back under scientific pressure but I won’t be happy about it. I whistled through an echocardiogram this week, then got zinged for A1C.
Why do I have to be apologetic for my lifelong love of potatoes and pasta? How could a wholesome-looking oatmeal raisin cookie — or two — be a shady character? The list of taboos seems pretty extensive.
I haven’t pleaded bum knees when facing lack of exercise charges. I haven’t eaten a fast-food cheeseburger in years, despite my affection for Blake’s Lotaburger. I don’t like drive-through fries. I can’t remember the last time I treated myself to a root beer, let alone a Brown Cow. I’ve learned how to BAKE apple cider doughnuts at home.
I only use potatoes for breakfast burritos and green chile stew. I admit I might have screwed up during the last A1C testing period by consuming more tortillas while cutting back on bread. Those giant while flour ones are great for my large-diameter breakfast bombs. But where does it end?
I would rather wait for one of those snappy New York Times health stories that challenge conventional wisdom. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t gotten a break since the medical world lightened up on coffee and eggs.
I am not asking to reverse the indictment of cigarettes. I’m not talking about indulging in alcohol after 37 years of aridification. I just got my second Covid booster shot and I wore a mask during my stops today at the Wild Birdhouse and Presbyterian cardiology. I drove right past a beckoning Blake’s after fasting for the damn blood sugar test.
Cookies are about all I ask, although I’ve come to more fully appreciate daytime relaxation in my early 70s. I am RETIRED. I believe in the “keep moving” school of thought but it’s also true that days off from walking, afternoon naps and ibuprofen — another no-no from the sensible health and medical faction — make my joints feel better, too.
Meanwhile, I’m afraid my mission for the rest of the week is to convert my 30-year-old mountain bike, which has been gathering dust in all the wrong places, to an indoor exercise machine.
— 30 —
With temperatures nearing 10O and no rain for 70-some days, I don’t think I regained consciousness most days until near dark.
There were daytime outings but other than my usual post-doctor-visit lunch at the Range, the nights are about all I remember.
— 30 —
The sun is going down on things I thought I knew.
For instance, I might need to start watering the snakes.
I was two rooms away this morning when I heard Cowboy do his snake bark outside but I try to be prepared for surprises here on the human-wildlife interface.
I keep various snake-removal tools at both the front and back doors. This time my store-bought, non-lethal aluminum snake stick with spring-loaded jaws was handy. It was just a young bull snake, seeming to grin up at me, hopefully it seemed.
I grasped the critter with the stick as gently as a could — I’m not a bare-hander like one of my neighbors — carried it across the walled-in yard and lowered it to the ground outside, hopefully without injury. It disappeared quickly, if only to regroup for another climb back over the wall. I usually like to use a hook instead of the jaws thing — less chance of snake injury, I think — but the stick with jaws comes in handy when faster action is required. Cowboy has been to rattlesnake awareness school and he wasn’t happy with the visitor this morning. This slim little critter could have easily scooted past me into the house as I surveyed the situation through an open door.
They seem to be going for water — or maybe mice who I see evidence of but whose hiding places I can’t find. I know snakes get hydration from stuff they eat, too, but I’m giving weight to the water theory because the one I removed this morning was taking the same route to Cowboy’s outdoor water bowl as the one I removed three times in two days last year. In other words, the arrivals and routes have become predictable.
Unfortunately the mice are part of the ecosystem, too. I think they come to the yard because of the seed and nuts spilled by scrub jays, wood peckers and Texas antelope squirrels. I have to keep the bird food inside of my wall to protect it from the free-roaming neighborhood horses. But I am too afraid of hantavirus to water mice as well as snakes. Cowboy would agree. Them meeces scare him to pieces.
The hard part of the snake thing is is that they always seem to be smiling, as if wanting acceptance or just free travel to Cowboy’s water bowl. It is, after all, June and something like the twentieth year of drought. The creek below my house, where neighborhood critters used to convene, dried long ago. This spring, we’ve been more than 60 days without rain.
So, I am more aware in this 21st Century that snakes need water, too. I’ve managed to keep the bird water pretty much just for the many small birds and occasional rodent interloper. Now I just need to figure out a snake watering system that doesn’t also attract wild horses, coyotes, bobcats, badgers and, gulp, cougars.
More 21st Century change: Medical treatments have improved. Leeches are no longer in use.
Just after the snake encounter this morning, when I felt like a border patrolman pushing an innocent family back through the fence, I caught myself almost sending a friend an out-dated book on prostate cancer, most recently copyrighted in 1997, just a few years before my experience.
Fortunately, I had the sense to Google “changes in prostate cancer treatment” before sending off a book that once was the bible but might not contain new treatment options.
Just as the news business has gotten immensely more complicated since my 40 years on the job, my prostate cancer treatment experience now is mostly a matter of looking back instead of forward. My friend needs to listen first to his doctors. Things have changed since they advised me about the gold standards of my time.
(Update: I note that I received excellent care from Presbyterian after my lung cancer diagnosis in 2015. And on both cancer scores, the bottom line is I’m still kicking. I am thankful for effective treatment. All I’m saying is that cancer treatments, like all things, have evolved and improved over time).
And more change, like it or not: Wildfires, like newspapers, ain’t what they used to be.
I have experience as a wildland firefighter as well as with prostate cancer but the weather has changed, too. Fire behavior has become a study of extremes since my couple of seasons with the California Division of Forestry in the early 1970s, just as prostate science, although for the better, has grown since my treatment 20 years ago.
A friend asked yesterday about my fire experience while we talked about the big New Mexico fires this year. I told her that what I dealt with and saw wildfire-wise 50 years ago are nothing like the mind-boggling conditions and fire behavior we see today.
I saw some big fires in eastern and southern California. We were just as wary then of canyons and wind and dry conditions — and California fire seasons even then were long — but my thoughts back then focused mostly on wishing for bulldozers, fire camp steaks and something cool to drink. We were more aware of water, poison oak, slurry soakings, stump holes, widow-makers, paper sleeping bags and the quality of sack lunches dropped from helicopters than climate change.
I was just a CDF grunt but I saw nothing like the Las Conchas fire in New Mexico that burned nearly an acre a second in the Jemez mountains in 2011 or the unstoppable Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak that has burned more than 40 miles, south to north, in the Sangre de Cristo mountains this year. I don’t know that I ever was part of anything as big as the 3,000-person army fighting the Sangre de Cristos fire for the past two months.
We were a 20-man handcrew, cutting line with double-bitted axes, brush hooks, Pulaskis, McCleods and shovels. On web belts, we carried Army surplus, one-quart canteens and files for sharpening our tools. Our always overloaded swamper, in addition to a fire shovel and his own personal gear, carried a little extra water in one-gallon, blanket-covered canteens, sharpening tools and a big, campfire coffee pot strapped to his pack.
Except when we were able to return to a fire camp after a 12-hour shift, we were usually so isolated it was hard to imagine the bigger picture. We were heads-down, swinging tools, squinting through cheap goggles and breathing through wetted bandannas, focusing on our own little horizons of flame and blackened ground.
So, as I keep aging out here in the high desert, I am increasingly wary of offering advice, though I am still trusted by at least one friend. Cowboy has been sticking especially close since the thirsty snake excitement earlier today.
Update:
After my post above, I learned that my next door neighbor might have had a visit yesterday from the same shade and water seeking critter or more likely a sibling or cousin. She took this photo apparently a few minutes before or after developments at my place.
Sister Hope had the right idea in 2006 — when son Will was just a wee lad — except that Big Daddy Matt had to push the BOB — a quote all-terrain stroller — and got a flat tire.
But some things have changed: Hope and Will at Missoula baseball series, May 28-29, 2022.
dreamranch 