Sky and lone piñon, walking home at sunset.
Sky and lone piñon, walking home at sunset.
Equinox moonrise.
Nearly full.
Quiet time.
Sixty miles.
Changing colors.
Changing skins.
Looking for love.
Good piñon growth.
Very many berries.
Love and late grass.
Home, home on the range,
where dream ranch is mine, mine, mine
and editors can’t mess with my head;
where mundane thoughts roam
and publishers have no sway;
where seldom is heard a disparaging word,
and my prose is not cloudy for at least part of the day.
(Photo of my sidekick, Cowboy, by our real photographer friend, Allie Murphy. Neither has endorsed this verse).
This ship of state — this self-obsessed, rusting hulk of retired newspaperman — steadied the moment I felt the stillness of the coming autumn air. 
No pain this morning, only a sense of the gentle season ahead. I put out fresh water for scrub jays, finches, titmouses and Texas antelope squirrels, grateful that the rattlesnakes and I avoided a water trough rendezvous.
We encountered a bull snake the day before, approaching the house from our morning walk. Our big, brown dog friend, Sara, who was bitten by a rattler a few years back and later went to rattlesnake avoidance school with Cowboy, darted for the door as soon as she saw the just-as-frightened reptile writhe away. All good signs.
My first sight after the orange and blue and salmon sunrise today was Cowboy, lying across my chest to look out the window, my mixed herder pal monitoring indoor and outdoor movement at the same time
The wheels started turning as a I poured dark-roasted coffee into my red cup. I remember that the last two words I scribbled in a notebook last night were coffee and basil, the start of a grocery list. Sitting in the dark, reading on the iPad before going to bed, I managed to gavel Supreme Court nominations out of my head. But my last Google search was “blogging as a literary form.”
I nodded off wondering: Do I really have any interest in reading other people’s blogs? I’m not talking about websites with essays or thoughtful reports, like Larry Calloway’s Crestone Conglomerate. I read essays and history. I have less interest in whims of the day, at least those other than mine.
I know that my own website — or blog as even my friends invariably call it — has been a handy vehicle for a lot of flotsam, like autobiographical junk. I remember the Paris Review interview with Annie Proulx, when she was asked if she missed a boat by starting to write later in life.
“The world is spared lots of crap,” said Proulx.
In the morning, I am as undisciplined as my 2-year-old dog. My first pursuit, sitting researching the plural of titmouse. A dog walk is next. Later, I might drift away with my Wooden Boat magazines. I am no Tolstoy.
I woke up on the wrong side of the bedroll this morning or at least I made the mistake of reading Twitter before climbing out to look at blue sky, rustle Cowboy’s breakfast and make myself a pot of coffee.
Someone had complained about Serena Williams’s conduct at the U.S. Open in her title match Saturday with Naomi Osaka. I didn’t get to see the match, but in the middle of the night I had read (click here) Sally Jenkins’s sharp piece about unequal treatment of male and female players. I shared it on Twitter for friends. Someone commented on my site, “Tired of her,” apparently meaning Williams.
I am not tired of Williams. I have followed her career since that first big story about Serena and her sister, Venus, being taught to play by their father on a public court in Compton. She’s already a champion, but I hope she still has a long way to go.
Just by comparing Williams’s behavior Saturday with examples of male player conduct and their treatment by court officials, Jenkins convinced me that chair umpire Carlos Ramos needed to be called out.
(Robert Deutsch/Usa Today Sports)
So, that got me started. Or maybe it’s that one of my neighbors — an intrepid writer, editor and high-desert gardener — keeps jarring me by posting photos of rattlesnakes. I admit that I looked at Facebook too early, too, and I know she only posts them cheerfully for friends.
Still small-minded before my morning walk — and avoiding my neighbor’s place — I began compiling a list of things I can live without.
And before I rebooted with gorgeous white clouds in blue sky and a big cup of black coffee, the list got this far.
Things I can live without:
1. Murder as a plot subject
2. Luxury cars
3. Meatloaf.
I’ve been wanting to take the shot at meatloaf ever since two of my favorite journalists, Jennifer Steinhauer and Frank Bruni, disappointed me by applying their huge talents to a book titled, “A Meatloaf in Every Oven.” In my book, no matter how much you fancy it up, it’s still cardboard with gravy.
I like the unfussy reliability and room of my old Dodge pickup and nearly as old Honda Element.
And every time I set out to write a commercial success, or watch a BBC mystery on Sunday night, I question why homicide seems to be such a requisite theme. I mean, is Oxford, England, really the murder capital of the world?
Curiously, rattlesnakes did not make my list before I changed my morning tune. I guess they are just part of the New Mexico drill, and I like my neighbor, who treats them so thoughtfully. As for the apparently short-tempered chair ump, I urge him to wake up and smell the coffee.
It is a stage of life when fondness for the Range’s linguine with basil cream sauce 
keeps me awake most of the night, but I doze the next afternoon to stretch my legs over the mesa in the evening with my young dog and see rain walking over San Felipe and Santo Domingo pueblos, against darkening shoulders of the Jemez, returning home happy to ice water and Antiques Roadshow from Austin and Bismarck, even after interruption of my hike by Presbyterian Health Services, my cell phone for a moment breaking the silence of empty public land with Pachelbel’s Canon in D. It is good.
Morning rain in New Mexico and thugs going down on the East Coast can really mess with your writing.
You know: You start feeling all cozy and don’t want to get out of bed, seduced by rare rain in the high desert. Your brain starts thinking with introductory clauses and you end up staring at the shrouded mountain instead of the crystal-clear keyboard.
Until the slightly damp dog, discovering you are awake but still under the covers at 6:30 a.m., flops down on top of you while you check your phone for the latest spelling errors in Trump tweets and Mueller-attracting stumbles by his cocky squad of ethical underachievers.
I remind myself not to gloat. I know there are still miles to go before ex-President Eddie Haskell walls himself in at Mar-a-Lago.
My Twitter friends tell me the Rio Grande is running at near historic lows, that summers are only going to get warmer and winters drier. But I have hope decency might soon return to Washington.
I used to look at satellite maps of the U.S. at night to remind me of where I want to live. I looked for the darkest, emptiest spaces in the West — in daylight, places where you can see mountains and sky. Now, I look at maps full of wildfire smoke and wonder what’s next.
The NOAA smoke map I saw this morning showed wildfire smoke stretching clockwise from California, Washington and British Columbia over the northern Rockies, Nevada and Utah and, in the forecast version, dropping into Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico.
Cowboy and I hurried out for our morning walk, seeing it coming. I wanted to make our rounds while I could still see mountains and breathe decent air.
I have had smoke reports in recent days from sisters living in beautiful country in Washington, Utah and Montana.
“Hot, windy and smoky,” sister Hope wrote from Big Sky country the other night.
The smoke here today — or haze, as some weather people are ineffectively calling it — is dense enough that my friend Liz Staley posted this on Facebook on Sunday afternoon: “The Corrales Fire Department is asking residents to stop calling 911 to report the smoke from Oregon, Washington and California. ”
From Corrales, Liz said she could not always see the giant Sandia mountain looming across the river.
Cowboy and I are stuck inside now with these views from the home office. They include my longtime email handle, jemezview, now obliterated, to the northwest.
We’ve gotten used to seeing wildfires in nearly 30 years in Placitas homes: We are in the flight path for slurry bombers flying to the eastern side of the Santa Fe National Forest; the Jemez Mountains, just across the Rio Grande, are close enough that we readily see smoke, especially since fires have gotten more extreme, like Las Conchas in 2011.
Las Conchas fire on Wikipedia, seen from Placitas.
We have gotten a lot of Arizona smoke in past years, but I don’t remember so often being enveloped in smoke from fires two or three states away.
My closets are full of cold-weather clothing I no longer need to wear in climate-warming New Mexico. I know my smoke complaints pale in comparison to the destruction and costs of fires in progress in other parts of the West. I surely am writing about smoke instead of actual fire because we’ve been lucky this year in my neck of the woods. The 416 fire burned for weeks just north of Durango, Colorado, where I used to seek the refuge of greener and wetter country. The Ute fire in northeast New Mexico nearly burned into Cimarron. My two sides of the upper Rio Grande have been mostly spared, except for some lightning-burns that got some rain in the nick of time.
The last official update on the Venado fire in the Jemez carried a now familiar note on smoke:
“Smoke/Air Quality: Smoke may be visible from Highways 4 and 550 as interior pockets of unburned fuel are consumed by the fire. Smoke-sensitive individuals and people with respiratory or heart disease should be prepared to exercise precautionary measures. Information on air quality and protecting your health using the 5-3-1 visibility method can be found at the New Mexico Department of Health’s website https://nmtracking.org/fire or by calling 1-888-878-8992. For information on the HEPA filter loan program: https://www.santafefireshed.org/hepa-filter-loan-program/”
Nearly 50 years ago, I worked wildfires for a couple of seasons in California. Those fires, whether in eastern Sierra timber or southern California brush, almost seem petty compared to what’s going on now. If I were a reporter again, this new era of fires is the assignment I would want. Things are happening that I don’t think we yet fully grasp.
dream ranch 