Wildfire smoke from Colorado and Wyoming cleared some Sunday morning and more birds stopped by, including this Williamson’s sapsucker, the guy with the red throat and yellow chest. I wonder why he evolved with such colors, why God made him the way he did. I don’t see the questions as mutually exclusive.
They come to the water mostly grouped by size: Small, medium and large. Juniper berries linger on trees nearby. The finches and bluebirds share with everybody. The little guys are wary. Everyone scrams when the scrub jays arrive. Maybe unkindly, I call them the bully boys.
Cooler weather. Fall traffic picking up. Non-migratory robins seem to have moved down the mountain. Still trying to get good focus and identify what I think is a very colorful sapsucker. I can’t tell whether it actually has some yellow on its breast, like a Williamson’s sapsucker, or whether that is morning light reflecting off green juniper branches to white breast.
I turned 71 last month and decided it was time to grow up. My Dream Ranch blog suddenly seemed immature.
Weighted down by COVID-19, wildfire smoke and political gloom — and some wild criticism to boot — I stopped blogging on June 30. I’ve been searching for other ways to channel my morning words and photos. I haven’t landed on anything firm but this morning’s bird visitors got me going again.
So, for lack of another plan, here I am with some vague sense of Dream Ranch Phase 2. Maybe things will just be shorter. I don’t know. Most of the older stuff is still linked in the tag cloud to the right, including Beans of Fame from 2017.
Sunset and Cabezon through wildfire smoke from Arizona, New Mexico and Navajo Nation. Photographed across the Rio Grande from Placitas, June 30, 2020. Had to use my little Canon Powershot SX740 HS. I seldom use anything but my iPhone, except for birds, but the iPhone couldn’t seem to handle all the smoke.
I’ve become pretty clever about stocking up on staples during the coronavirus crisis, finding new space to stack boxes and cans. Now I just need to figure out where I stashed that extra bag of Cowboy’s kibble.
I’m sure it’s someplace cute. My last “aha” was the guest bathroom, but apparently I have been cuter than that.
You might think I’m worrying that Cowboy knows something I don’t, but he is not the sort of dog to overeat. Maybe I need to write poems to lead me to the whereabouts of hidden things, but that seems like a tiresome Santa Fe trick.
Home maintenance and personal care during the COVID era have already brought surprises.
I think online orders, paper packaging and maybe letting them air on the porch for 24 hours might have led to the baby tarantula wandering along my kitchen counter the other night. We usually don’t see tarantulas on the move until October and this was the first I’ve ever seen inside the house.
I gave myself my first selfie haircut as soon as the Amazon-ordered clippers arrived. I felt refreshed until I ducked my head in front of the computer and saw some thinning had already occurred.
I joke around that all I need is another respiratory issue. But for my own sake and the sake of others, we always know where I have stashed my masks.
Waking in the living room at 3 in the morning with the TV still on isn’t so bad when the screenplay is by A.B. Guthrie Jr., from a book by Jack Schaefer, and the scenery includes the Tetons and the Snake River.
Two of my favorite actors, Ben Johnson and Jack Palance, are in the cast.
“Shane” was published in 1949, the year I was born. Schaefer moved to Santa Fe in 1955 and died there in 1991.
The film came out in 1953, starring Alan Ladd. The fabulous cinematography was by Loyal Griggs and it won him an Academy Award.
By the way, a movie from Guthrie’s most famous book, “The Big Sky” came out in 1952, starring Kirk Douglas.
I’m still wondering where that river crossing is in “Shane.” I guess it’s a shallow stretch of the Snake. But, heh, it’s 3 in the morning.
We were celebrating your 60th birthday with this 1989 hike in Colorado, but the photos will do for Father’s Day. My late father, Bob Robertson, 1929-1995.
The sky is so gray with smoke sunrise doesn’t wake me.
Western wildfires in June are predictable, but with climate change they seem more frequent — and larger. The smoke this Thursday morning, June 18, 2020, obscured the Sandia Mountains to the south and Indian Country mesas to the west. I could barely make out the Jemez Mountains to the northwest. The smoke is mostly from the 100,000-acre and growing Bush Fire, northeast of Phoenix, but others in Arizona and New Mexico are spewing smoke northward.
It lifted a little before sunset but my eyes still burned.
Almost 50 years ago, I fought wildfires in California and thought little more of them than as a way to earn good overtime pay. Too many of today’s fires, in size and intensity, are practically unfightable.
Tomorrow is Juneteenth, celebrating the emancipation of African-American slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, and the end of slavery nationally, more than two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. (Washington Post: An original “Juneteenth” order
found in the National Archives). On our smoky Thursday, historian Michael Beschloss tweets a June 19, 1964 photo of Martin Luther King Jr. flashing what I guess is a combination victory and peace sign, after learning that Congress has finally passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Twitter then showed a photo of the Arthur Ashe monument defaced on Wednesday with “White Lives Matter” initials in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia.
Trump soon tweeted criticism of the court, calling the DACA ruling “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”
The city of Albuquerque, 30 miles south of me by road, issued a health alert because of the smoke. I decide against a morning walk. Cowboy and I were forced to play in the yard, my combination COPD-COVID bandanna hanging around my neck.
CABQ Environmental Health @ABQEnvHealth·
@CABQAir
The City of Albuquerque has issued a health alert for elevated ozone levels this afternoon and elevated fine particulate levels tonight into Friday morning. The alert expires at Noon Friday. Those with respiratory conditions should limit outdoor activity. @MayorKeller@abqfire
People who are at higher risk for respiratory issues from wildfire smoke are also more susceptible to infection and severe health consequences from COVID-19.
The not-forgotten past, often still part of the present, has underwritten many recent current events.
The New Mexico Legislature began a special session to deal with fallout from the coinciding crises of coronavirus pandemic and oil market collapse. The 112 “citizen lawmakers” might also consider voting protections and police use-of-force reforms.
Efforts on Wednesday to communicate the session by video because of coronavirus and security got off to rocky start. The headline in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal was “House members hit with racial slurs.”
Bill Soules, a veteran Democratic state senator and former public school teacher from Las Cruces, tweeted the night before: “I’ve been threatened with bodily harm twice in the last two weeks. I reported the incidents to state authorities each time. The negativity from people who disagree with my views is astonishing and frightening.”
Elise Kaplan, a reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, who has been covering protests, armed militia presence and violence in Albuquerque, along with reporting partner Matthew Reisen, also tweeted on Wednesday night, sounding exhausted.
“I’ve now clocked at least 34 hours in the past three days and I am signing off.” she wrote. ‘There has been a lot said from both sides and we do hear you. All this stuff is hard.”
dream ranch 