Must have been some thunder while I was out: Signs that poor Cooper took shelter in the (cold) fireplace.
Must have been some thunder while I was out: Signs that poor Cooper took shelter in the (cold) fireplace.
Above the Ute creeks confluence, Weminuche Wilderness, 1992. Your 64th birthday trip. Typical smart-ass son, I made you walk to some place I had only been to on horseback. No fish, but reading weather good. And it was good to share a tent on your last mountain trip.
Big Daddy: Resting with Mus, Canyon Road, Santa Fe, May, 1970.
Sure is great to have a niece and two nephews. Wish I been with them on this late May get-together in Montana. One of these days.
One of the coolest maps ever: John Wesley Powell’s watersheds of the West.
And mapped in another way by A.L. Kroeber (?) in 1939: Map 1a. Native Tribes of North America. University of California Map Series. No. 13.
Native Tribes of North America
Trusting the Internet reaches heaven, I just wanted to say hi, Marcella Jean Robertson.
You passed on this day 26 years ago. Sorry I never got you that escalator. Now I’m thinking voice recognition software.
Rest in peace. Here we are, all together, you with your head on your brother’s shoulder, just as you would like it to be.
And here’s another, with Dad supporting you back when you were kids, and Pa standing by.
Here’s what 29 years of sobriety, nearly 65 years of age, 40 years in the newspaper business and rare indulgence in spicy, fatty foods will do to you: I succumb to a pizza craving, which results in a fitful night of Fellini-esque dreams, ending with an ethics discussion with an investigative columnist, somehow involving fistfuls of plastic camping utensils. At least it got me up early. Now on to trying to make sense of the day’s news. And, by the way, it was snowing when I woke. For real.
I live by your golden rules today. I miss your company.
Seven kids: three boys and poor baby Sally, then three healthy girls, almost 20 years later. We lost Rob, who you are tending to here way back when. Now, two of your daughters have kids and you have grandchildren, too. I wish we could watch your wonderful brood from the front porch. I wish we could have a cup of coffee, go to town for a club sandwich and, for the special occasion, tailor-mades. We are spread out but, as you wished, friends. And, I’m sure, you are in all of our hearts.
Some days, when I get off track, I just stare at my surroundings. Luckily today, scarlet globemallow came out in my courtyard. I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds too. Some days the other birds get the left over water. The New Mexico locust gets dishwater. That’s it. They grow slowly, but the Arizona ash, the New Mexico olive, the Apache plume, the Mongolian whatever it is, the lilac and the rest seem to do fine on their own. In spring, I get blackfoot daisies without encouragement. Purple asters in the fall. Penstemons at random. I have a new sunflower that showed up last year. Always, there are the piñons and junipers, and the piñons are slowing coming back from the 2003 die off. The slope down to my house has been a carpet of yellow Fendler bladderpods for the past several weeks. There is enough outside that I have just one plant inside — a Christmas cactus that I douse with unfinished drinking water once a week but otherwise don’t nurture. It blooms every Christmas and serves as my Christmas tree. I really am not any kind of landscaper at all. Just lucky and blessed with sight.
P.S. I should note that trees that I started, like the ash, the locust, the New Mexico olives and the Mongoloian thingamajig, got supplemental water at least in their first year. I have had about 50-50 luck transplanting native piñons and the big problems here might be over-watering and wind. And I’m afraid a piñon seedling given to me by Manny Aragon, via the state Forestry, didn’t make it. I tried.
I don’t want to tick off everyone over at Acoma by even writing about the guy, but for years windy springs in New Mexico have brought Don Juan de Oñate to mind, particularly when I’m driving up the Camino Real.
I can’t help but imagine several hundred Spanish soldiers and their leader, with grit in their teeth and down their collars, struggling up the Rio Grande toward Ohkay Owingeh through billowing gales of New Spain dust.
I know it was an important mission for the crown, and I’m sure has a lot to do with why I’m here now, but in my experience few things are worse than working outdoors in the spring. The worst job I ever had was building fence in the Owens Valley in March. I’m guessing that trekking 350 miles up the Rio Grande for King Phillip II between April and July was a bit more of a chore.
Now, I admit the roughest of my experiences this weekend, four centuries later, was driving last night in a Honda Element to Santa Fe for a reunion of near-colonial journalists at the even more historic Tiny’s Restaurant and Lounge. Both hands grasped the wheel of the bulky vehicle even before I got to the wind-warning signs at Tonque Wash on San Felipe Pueblo. I think most of Algodones already had blown by me on its way to Tucumcari. Today, Cooper and I put off a hike for a mere drive to the grocery store in the truck, with even Cooper seeming glad that the windows were rolled up. Even so, with much of Arizona moving through eastern Sandoval County, my sinuses are throbbing and my thoughts are again drifting to the probable miseries of an expeditionary force long ago.
We’ll go out for an evening walk if the wind settles down, but for now we are in full retreat.
There’s been a mysterious golfer — maybe more than one — around here for years, driving balls off mesa tops and landing them perilously close to the windows of my faux-adobe hideaway. So far, no harm done. But if he or she ever beans one of Placitas’s free-roaming horses, who also regularly leave things in my front yard, I’m sure a posse will be organized.
P.S. I took a drop for the photo.
—
dreamranch 