The last time I posted appears to be when fires were raging in Ruidoso, and these days the big news in the area is the flooding in the same place. And they're related: when fire makes a huge burn scar, then the rain washes down the dirt, the river becomes incredibly muddy, and the water has no place to go and causes huge damage. My heart goes out to everyone in its path.

I learned a lot from my time with the Sixteen Springs VFD, one of my favorite groups of people of all time. They were just a bunch of people from the valley who got together to ensure the survival and protection of the people of the valley, so their mission was no small shakes in my opinion. Really the hardest things about the job were good maintenance and protection of valuable firefighting resources that didn't get used very often, but when used, were used to their fullest capacity at a moment's notice. They worked to do an impossible job: train me to be be an effective firefighter. I got to drive in a firetruck, but that was about as far as it got.

After a discussion about the second amendment I read the Constitution, and it made a big deal out of local militia. The message was clear: Only the local boys know the land, the hiding places, and what the area needs to protect the local farmers. They should be armed to whatever extent it's necessary and possible, because they're the ones on the ground, who care the most about the area and the houses in it. In my thinking, the next big problem would be the use of drones in hunting; maybe it's already a problem. Who should decide what areas are off-limits to drones or whether we should all just expect to see them everywhere, used for all kinds of deer, elk and cat-hunting expeditions?

But I"ve strayed from the topic of this post, which would be valley preparedness for the likes of the Ruidoso floods. We did have floods in the valley and it's very possible we'll have more. To that end I'll tell a quick story.

The land we bought was at almost the end of a tiny road in Board Tree Canyon, not far off Sixteen Springs Road. Neighbors were rare but we had some; our land backed up onto the Mescalero Reservation and the National Forest loomed around us in the other three directions. It was when we realized it was all a huge tinderbox that we got nervous, though we left for reasons more related to schooling. We loved the area and the people.

But one night soon after we moved there I went out on a short walk and ended up near my neighbor's front gate. He came out, somewhat alarmed and probably armed, wondering what some stranger was doing walking around the road at his house. I quickly introduced myself as the guy who just bought the nearby land and who was out surveying the lay of the land. "I'm wondering about the water," I told him, "and where the rain goes when there's way too much of it."

"Good question," he answered. "In fact it comes right down through here, where we're standing, between our lots and down that way toward the creek." He related the story of a couple of years ago, when a huge flood, similar to what Ruidoso is experiencing, drenched the valley, brought a river down through that area, and ruined his house and barn to some degree ("we're still recovering," he said).

It turns out that New Mexico has occasional very-rainy times when the ground simply doesn't absorb the water, and it has to run somewhere. It will eventually deposit the dirt and dust and detritus somewhere downstream but everyone in its path is going to be affected. The water "has nowhere to go," which is another way of saying the grass isn't well enough established to really absorb it, and mostly what proliferates is the kinds of foliage that can live without water for years at a time - that kind also is not really made to just deal with a large quantity of water.

We in Illinois get sudden, frequent, massive thunder-boomers but we have a lot of green grass and shrubbery which for the most part just absorbs it. We've had some flooding recently in Quad Cities and in iowa; often it is a little more than we're prepared for, but it's nothing like Ruidoso, or Kerrville, or even what happened in OK City or Central Texas. The fact is the floods will be coming fast and furious now, and this is only the beginning. And the other fact is, we only have ourselves: our communities, our collective knowledge, the energy we can devote to the situation - and can't expect the government to help in any of these situations.

It's one thing to own a gun and feel a little safer - to walk outside your house, and feel like robbers aren't going to be pounding through your door, at least not without a price. It might make yoou feel sightly ore powerful, more in cootrol of your own destiny. Folks out there in Sixteen Springs were probably armed in one form or another given that it was the wild west, and there were rattlers, as we discovered, every time you turned around. But it's a lot harder to prepare for too much water, or for fires that can surround you in minutes and leave you to whatever holes you have dug for yourself that could possibly save yourself from an inferno. I don't know the answer. I wish I had a small group though, a community of friends that share my concerns; it made me feel a lot safer, in spite of being about as much in danger's way as I could poossibly have been.

Ruidoso

It goes without saying that those of us with anything to do with southeastern New Mexico have broken hearts about what is happening in Ruidoso: fire, flood, loss of life, loss of houses, etc. It's a tragedy. We send them our prayers.

We wait by the news for more information about what happens when hard rains fall on ashen hillsides - I'm sure the result is not good. I would no longer dip my feet in the Rio Ruidoso or take a dip in Grindstone Lake - it'll be pretty bad for a while. Those who are sheltering in Roswell can do the UFO museums but really no other place is quite like Ruidoso and Ruidoso will never be the same.

From my house in Sixteen Springs I could walk straight back into a narrow strip of national forest, and from there straight over the mountains that you see on your right, as you are making a sharp turn right in the middle of the Mescalero Reservation, when the highway hits Elk Canyon Road. We never walked on reservation land, but I always wanted to, because it's beautiful back there and that road, 244, is about the prettiest I've ever seen. We used to go to Ruidoso a lot to swim, or wade in the river, or just get away from Cloudcroft. It was like our sister city in the mountains.

We are atually climate refugees. After an evacuation, we realized that we were surrounded by tens of thousands of very dry acres of national forest - so dry that a single cigarette could take out the whole region on a slightly windy day. And that's what happened in Ruidoso, though I have no idea if it was a cigarette. Could have been lightning even, not unheard of. But either way you live with that kind of enormous danger to your life and your sanity, and you have to get used to living with it every single day. My wife and I chose tornadoes in the end; it's easier.

We study the maps of Ruidoso and have memories associated with various places. We did a lot of things up on the western side of town, Upper Canyon, places that are now charred to ruins and being rained upon. It may be part of a natural cycle, to burn and start over, but it's painful to watch, and it's taken two lives already. Not like tornadoes, but in some ways worse. And definitely hotter.

Milepost 8

The falling of the mountain (see picture below) onto the road at Milepost 8, or thereabouts, really kind of moved me. I am here in Illinois now, safe from the prospect of living way out in Sixteen Springs and having to drive now seventy or eighty miles to get groceries, rather than the usual forty. Or maybe it could have been fifty or sixty, but it would be more, harder, more difficult. I'm not sure I could bear it.

I'm really surprised they fixed it as quickly as they did. Reports say, the road is open tonight; that means really traffic was disrupted for only a few days. I had given them a month, because I figured the road damage was so extensive they would have to rebuild the road. Apparently it was, and they did, but they're quite good at it. And they could fix the guardrail too, or at least mark it so traffic could get by knowing that hey, the guardrail is broken for a spell here. That's nothing new. I have to give them credit; my hat's off to them. They fixed the road.

I think a lot of people seek out that little mountain corner of New Mexico for its general remoteness and isolation. That is kind of what I liked about it. The majority of people up there weren't afraid of Laborcita Canyon or any of the rocky backroads that could have been taken instead of the highway. They though weren't like me, having kids that needed dentist appointments all the time, or, needing some x-ray myself down in the Gerald Champion. For most of what my life really is these days, I'm grateful to be up in Illinois where I can now go only a mile of flat plowed roads to fill all my needs. I really respect the people who live out there and that's what I'll remember: the ability of people to work together, converge on a spot of trouble, and make the trouble go away. So that life can go back to its usual.

A true mountain tale

I wrote this story about living here:
A true mountain tale

I am busy preparing to move, and I'm very sorry about that; I love Sixteen Springs and will miss it a lot.
More on that later. I'm sure I'll still write about this place. And I've promised, sincerely, to make it all good.

June

The cold hard wind has been blowing for days, at varying speeds and even varying directions. But always dry, dry as a bone, it comes through the mountains and sucks up whatever moisture might have been left from a tiny snow.

I'm grateful for the snow, because it actually put a little green in the grasses, a green that will have to last through the dry season.

In the north they sometimes say, "April is the cruelest month," because, though spring comes and everything is green, nothing is really edible until later in the spring. So, you can see all this life around you, but you can't eat any of it, because none of it's ready. And it's possible to starve even when everything is blossoming.

But I like to say, "June is the cruelest month," because, having waited so long for so little moisture, we in New Mexico have the same problem. There actually is a little rain in the spring, but not much; there is even sometimes a little rain in June, but again not much. Last year we had an unusual situation when the July rains actually came a little early. But generally, June is the cruelest month.

Except that this year, we're leaving in June. We will let someone have these beautiful mountains, just as the rains arrive.