Hunting season

I've been here a couple of years now, so I've gotten to see the whole cycle of hunters and RV people (often the same) coming up on certain cold fall weekends, and going home either with deer, with elk, or without. Some, I think, come up for turkeys or maybe even other things, but I don't see that clearly into what they're hauling out, unless they've strapped it to the back of their pickup trucks and the antlers are sticking out.

We in the mountains object when they just cut the antlers off or just cut the whole head off, and leave the rest for nature to pick clean, but that doesn't happen all that often. Mostly they seem to be polite and respectful to our ways and I would have to guess that if they haul a buck off on the back of their truck, somehow they've paid the state for the hunting permit that made that possible, and the state obliged them by allowing it all the while keeping their own eye on it. What I'm saying is that the majority of what I see appears to be legally obtained, all more or less above-board, and it doesn't seem to be endangering any of the species involved, or I think some of the locals would be bothered about that. I used to notice that lots of the larger deer and elk would simply go to town during the peak of the hunting season, knowing that the village itself is probably the safest place for them, but I think it's more accurate to say they know about the hunters and their schedules, they avoid any place with human contact at all during that time, and we are not as likely to see them as usual.

Another crowd that comes up here in this time is the Christmas-tree-foragers, who pay a fee to the National Forest and then just cut and take whatever tree they want - usually they trudge into the forest for a ways, as opposed to taking something out by the road which I think the Forest Service has asked them not to do. We see more trees on trucks this time of year than deer or elk - it's easier to catch a tree, which after all can't run away - and you're more likely to come home with a successful haul to unload when you get there.

So actually I'm all in favor of these things, though I know hunters in particular have their detractors. To me it's ok to have a small group of people maintain the skills and practices of using nature to feed themselves. against all odds, even though it requires carrying around all these firearms which I know can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I'm a little quesy myself in the presence of blood and guts and a sharp knife and a big mess, but I still respect them for the ability to do it and wouldn't want them to have to stop just because some people aren't comfortable with the killing of animals. We humans were born with two very sharp teeth and to me that means we were probably made to eat some red meat every once in a while, although nothing in my natural instincts seems to say anything about guns except to avoid them in the hands of angry people at all costs.

The RV's sometimes just park in the middle of the forest, but on the forest road, and I recognize that they are hopefully carrying out everything they brought in, including their own poop and garbage, as we have literally no services there in the middle of the forest. Sometimes these guys sleep in the RV's during the days, so they can go out into the forest in the middle of the night, but if they are bringing back carcasses with them, I am rarely seeing it, and I'm often wondering how you'd handle that with just an RV, and all that blood and guts all over the place. But that's their problem, and my guess is they'd have to be pretty comfortable with blood and guts before they'd even try such a venture anyway. I sometimes wonder if some of these RV people aren't just trying to get away from it all, get away from the city, get out and be left totally alone, and don't really want to hunt at all. But what do I know - I leave them alone, no matter what, just drive by, and though I can sometimes see whether they have guns and are wearing camo. (most often yes & yes), other times, I only see the RV, and don't know anything about it. Sometimes you'll come up behind someone, and they're driving really slowly, and they're driving in the middle of the road, looking both ways all the time and trying to keep from driving right off the side of the road, and often they don't even see I'm there, and don't know to pull over and simply let me pass, since, if they don't, I'm kind of stuck. For a few moments there we share the road in the middle of the national forest, but the animals themselves are long gone, knowing full well what's up, and the scenery is nothing I haven't seen a million times in the last year. Pines and more pines, and the possibility of other critters, if you hang around long enough.

Covid ravages the village

Otero County has a vaccination rate of about 50%, it says, and the hospital is full: no more visitors, no more elective surgery, no more hospital cafeteria, etc. It has to make room for covid patients so it doesn't, like hospitals in Hobbs and Carlsbad, have to send them to Albuquerque. It's kind of a statewide crisis.

So how does it affect us out here in Sixteen Springs? We are nervous because we are retired and vulnerable (though vaccinated, along with our three teens), but we use the roads a lot, and may need that hospital someday, if not tomorrow. We are kind of astounded at the casual attitude various people have - going around, no mask, no vax, having parties, hanging around inside. I will stand in a restaurant or business place sometimes, usually with mask though I'm known to forget, and hope that my vaccination will protect me and mine from what comes down the pike.

It's a long drive from the village and the hill out here, over James Ridge, down into Sixteen Springs Canyon, and way back into our part of it where there is virtually no one coming close to us except the UPS driver who is able to hand us the package without getting close really. The fresh air, the breeze, and the relentless New Mexico sun, even in late fall, makes us feel somewhat safer than most. And I believe that, as conservative as our neighbors are, most of them are vaccinated, actually. If you use 50% as a guideline, you tend to say, some groups are over fifty, some under, and you never quite know, because we definitely don't ask. But you walk into a place like Dave's or the Texaspit and you have whole crowds, unmasked, probably unvaxed too. The folks at Allsup's who are buying Powerball tickets are definitely not the ones playing the best odds, namely, skipping a vax out of fear, but exposing themselves in a place like Allsup's to anyone who might come by. Somebody is gonna get it, and it will probably be them, and it will probably happen sooner, not later.

One local guy I know said it probably won't get the mountain too bad; this was a while ago, and to some degree he's already been proven wrong. But he seemed to feel that we just have a different lifestyle, more isolated, more outdoors, maybe more health-and-survival conscious. I'm not so sure about the health part. I know that in general suspicion of government, distrust of institutions, hostility to collective do-my-part cooperation in the nation's health - these are all big here, and it will be hard to convince people that they should go down the hill and get stabbed for everyone else's good if not theirs. They're not much into everyone else's good, having moved out here pretty much to get away from everyone else. But since it's possible to be out here and stay away from everyone else, as we tend to do, maybe that's our saving grace.

I stop and talk to the neighbors every once in a while. When I do, we're outside, with a breeze and hot New Mexico sun between us. I feel that, vaccinated as I am, I'm probably ok most of the time. They don't seem to be spreading it amongst themselves although I might not even know if they were. Some may be going down the hill or across the state, and participating in communities that I myself would ordinarily avoid. But it's really hard to tell about these things - who is bringing it up here? Who is spreading it? Who should all these unvaxed people be avoiding? I'm not sure the tests are giving us all the answers. All I can say is, stay safe, stay out of the hospitals.

Just Passing Through

Autobiography and true stories from out there

$4.39 on Kindle
$8.80 + shipping paperback, through Amazon
also on Kindle Unlimited
working on other methods of selling

an august Saturday

 So I'm sitting on the boardwalk, typing this, as some music is being played across the street, possibly at the Noisy Water. It seems maybe they have done something to provide Saturday afternoon entertainment for people coming to the boardwalk.

Now I have to admit I'm not sure about the details. We do seem to have lots of tourists; earlier I found it difficult to even find a place to park, and Burro is closed anyway rendering much of the area where I'm sitting (at the Green Mountain) a dead end. Now that it's after five, it's a little less crowded, but still among the people I see going up and down the boardwalk, most are not from around here. And my guess is that Noisy Water would like to attract them to stop, stay a while, taste some of their product.

My hearing is really not so great these days. I have these high-powered hearing aids but they increase the volume of everything, most noticeably the echo. So I hear a lot of echo real loud, and it's hard to tell within that if the music is any good or not. It's gotten so I don't listen to music for fun, although I do hear it, and can no longer distinguish whether it's in tune or not.

But I'm not here as a music critic anyway, I'm a Cloudcroft critic. Or rather, I'm someone who is enjoying ending up on a boardwalk bench at the age of 67, in a small town 87,000 feet up, watching the late afternoon settle on Burro Street. It's a nice town. If my whole life is Sixteen Springs and this little town I could be doing much worse. In fact I've done much worse through most of my life; I moved here from Lubbock. At the time I was going under the illusion that it didn't matter that much where you planted your roots and set things going. I was wrong; it mattered a lot.

Other cities have these five or six-lane freeways curving in to take you to their downtowns. Green signs and exits every half mile, people switching lanes as per their hurry or their need to show off their reckless youth. Our commute is a steep hill, winding up from Wimsatt, cliff on either side, possibility of elk or deer around each corner. Yes there are some who want to do it at seventy, uphill or down, but they will pass, recklessly or not, and life goes on. The wildflowers fill the meadows on the sides of the road. Hail occasionally hits the canyon and everything turns white and sometimes there is a fog that goes with it. It's a lot different from Chicago, I assure you.

Back at home, the new deer families will be walking around as I drive the last of the dirt lane. There seem to be more white-tail these days, fewer mule deer, not sure why that is but it's definitely something I've noticed. The rain has gone on unabated and now it's late August. Last year, it had stopped altogether before even the middle of August. And we know that, except for a snow or two, once it's stopped, it's all over until next July. Unless things have really changed for good. 

who'll stop the rain

As I sit here on Saturday morning, it has been raining now for days, weeks, maybe even a couple of months. It started in late June. We had a few breaks, where I could get outside and do some stuff. But the last four or five days, nothing but rain.

As far as I know, there has been some flooding, but most of us are ok. We only have a few thousand people in the mountains, and water goes downhill, so there are a few in the valleys or whose houses are on the downhill slope of wide washes, and there has been some flood damage I'm sure. Whole mountainsides have washed down into roads, leaving them a muddy pile of gravel until the road guys come along with their bulldozer. In some cases I'm nervous to drive to town because the water in the road is deep and it's impossible to tell how deep. After dark it's worse. The ground is saturated; the water is not seeping into it at all.

Over the long haul, because there was a drought of over twenty years, most people are grateful that the drought is at least somewhat alleviated. The whole southwest has been pulling water out of the ground for decades, by the billions of gallons, knowing full well that it wasn't being replenished. That's why, in my own analysis of what is the most urgent problem of our present environmental crisis, I've always said there's way too much water in the system. That is, the system of rain, hurricane, thunderstorm, runoff, swollen rivers. Iowa, where I used to live, has had three or four hundred-year storms in the last fifteen years. Key West is going under.

Of course, some of this, like Key West, is due to melting ice from Arctic and Antarctic. That's a crisis too. But if the southwest thought it could just pull these billions of gallons out of there without consequence, maybe now we'll look at this and say, well here's one consequence. A monsoon season with 25 inches and counting.

I'm not even sure how many inches we've had, or what all the consequences are. I think that when the ground stays so saturated for so long, other things start happening besides too much runoff. And I'm also sure it's a joy to see water in some of the rivers that haven't had it for years - like the Rio Grande, the Colorado, etc. People have been fighting so hard about that water they haven't even looked up to see, maybe it will come back. In spades.

A bigger consequence, for us, is that places might be overrun. It seems to me that a lot of lowlanders, people who are tired of being pounded and losing their houses to a foot of mud, will just be seeking higher ground. It won't be people that threaten our lifestyle, necessarily, but the increase in rent, land price, taxes, and those things. Mountain people are right - our lifestyle is threatened. But the reason really is that they shouldn't have voted in a guy who couldn't have cared less about the destruction of the environment.

Monsoon

There's been a lot of rain lately; Walker Canyon Road has been just about impassable. The worst of the rain seems to be east of here and slightly over the ridge, down in James Canyon over by Iron Gate. But we've had plenty; I think we had more before the fourth than sometimes we get all year. Since the fourth, it's been more of a typical monsoon maybe. For example, today it's looking a lot like rain but not raining.

I don't pretend to hold it out as evidence that the whole world is going down in a climate-change microwave, but there's plenty enough evidence for that without me even having to provide any. Hundred thirty in California, fires all over the place - is this because we are hording the rain? Are we getting what rightfully belongs to someone else?

It's a ritual, I think, to poke around the ground hoping that some of the water is still close to the surface, taking its good old time getting back down to the water table. I myself will feel better if some of it makes it down to the water table. I feel like everything needs water, all the way down, even the things that live maybe ten or twenty feet below. They're all parched. They've been waiting for years.

Then, as to the problem of restoring the balance, that has been thrown way out of whack by everything from over-fracking to pulling enough water out of the aquifer to provide for vegas' fountains, all I can say is, let's get to it. I hardly know where to start, but I could start with myself, pulling a little less water out of the ground, and using it a little more wisely. I think people are not used to thinking this way, and may have some adjusting to do once we realize we have no choice.

Space Rocket

 I thought the news out of New Mexico the other day was stunning, international news, the biggest thing since the day they dropped the bomb on New Mexico. And yet you may not know what I mean right away, unless you read the title.

That's right - a private space rocket was launched, with people on it, and it went into space, and it came back, and they made it back ok. I find all this a little hard to believe. But apparently it launched from the site near Las Cruces. So now we have private expeditions into space from our own back yard, allegedly.

I was out in my yard with my weak hearing and new powerhouse hearing aids, and an incredible roar came and stayed in the air for a few minutes. I was a little surprised because I saw nothing, but it was so incredibly loud, I figured it had to be up there somewhere. Usually when a sound is that loud you expect the plane to be right overhead, but this time, there was nothing I could see. But based on that experience, I believe that it happened.

Now another thing happened that might actually be a coincidence. A fire started in the night or early morning, over in the scrubby mountains between Alamogordo and here. In Alamo, it looked dramatic, but then Alamo always looks dramatic, with those huge dry mountains right up against it. Well anyway, this area where the fire started is way back there, out West side road where almost no one ever goes without four-wheel drive, an extra tire pump and gasoline, you get the drill. Who could have been out there? 

My wife says, lightning did it, obviously. I say, maybe the space rocket did it. How could you launch a space rocket and not make a few sparks?

OK so here are my questions. First I believe it happened because I heard it. But was it really manned, and if so, where are the people? Second, can they assure us that it will not drop sparks, as some years a single fire like that one could wipe us all out; this whole season, January to July, we have an average of about a half inch per six months, and a single spark, poof, we could be gone. What if that space rocket did start that fire? Third, is that incredible noise just something we and the other creatures will just have to get used to after these launches become regular things? 

Just wondering.

Let's deal with the wild horses

 

I am disheartened by the news that someone shot the four wild horses in the middle of the village, but then someone (perhaps that same person?) went and shot two more out on a rural road.

I think most people in the community have profoundly mixed feelings about the horses, which technically are feral, not wild, ok, but which have an increasing presence in the mountains around us. My version of what has happened goes something like this: They have for many generations been allowed and encouraged on the Apache reservation, where they've flourished; now they are expanding in territory, being somewhat too successful out there; and, in coming toward Cloudcroft, they don't always even know that hanging around the village will cause problems.

The problems people point out are somewhat like those that elk and deer pose: cars hit them, with great damage and sometimes fatality; in town, they are not exactly friendly, so that people who walk up to them might get hurt or trampled. We are especially concerned because some of the best grass is in the city park and the schoolyard, and that of course is where they are hanging around.

Now I think some private landowners have ways of getting rid of them if they really don't like having them around. Making noise is one that comes to mind; it's not necessary to shoot them, is it? But the problem for the village is that nobody did anything. They were there for about a week before whoever it was came by and shot them.

Then, I guess he/she thought that if he got away with it, he could keep doing it.

I would like the village and the area to take a stand and say, please stop shooting the horses. Maybe if we have too many, we can invite people to come and domesticate them. Or maybe we can just shoo them off into an area of the forest where there's plenty of room. But shooting them, and then leaving them for someone else to pick up, seems heartless and cruel.

I think we need a community plan to deal with them. I say this vaguely, knowing I'm not the mayor, and won't be in charge, and can't even drive a fire truck. Nevertheless, someone should do something, don't you think? There are plenty of possible positive outcomes for this, that don't involve needless killing of innocent wild animals.

Pioneer Leveretts & the 1600-mile journey

$5.99 in paperback on Amazon
$3.99 on Kindle
Free on Kindle Unlimited

Part of the Leveretts in the New World series

OK I admit this is for my family, as it's about my great great great grandfather. A legend was always told in our family about a 1600-mile stagecoach journey from Maine to Illinois, and I finally found enough information about it to put it in a book. That journey was in 1834, so this book starts at the beginning of the 1800's and moves right up through the Civil War. It is third in a series. I am finding it extremely interesting that truth, sometimes, is way cooler than fiction, and, it's true. Enjoy!

Tall Corn State

My first novel
$6.99 + shipping on Amazon
$6.00 on Kindle
on Kindle Unlimited
ACX coming

There wasn't much crime among the Actualist poets or the vegetarian restaurant people of Iowa City in 1975, but there was crime in the town around it. This is a crime and coming-of-age novel about those communities at that time.

e pluribus haiku anthology: 3487 haiku

Available by paperback on Amazon: $5.99 + shipping
Available on Kindle $4.99
Available on Kindle Unlimited

This volume combines all the haiku from e pluribus haiku 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and the original, e pluribus haiku (2011). The 3487 refers to number of haiku, not kind, as they are all 5-7-5, given a somewhat unique style. This single volume will ultimately replace the others, as it contains everything that is in each of them, with an updated style.

Being Part of the VFD

The Sixteen Springs Volunteer Fire Department is very active. When things happen, they are there. We all have to stay alert during the fire season because we could lose so much so fast.

I joined the minute I got out here, but then the pandemic hit, and my efforts to do my part had to take a back seat to just getting four teenagers what they needed without endangering the family.

This post is basically an affirmation of my commitment to get it all going again. To really be a member (of any service) I should complete thirty hours or so of computer training; I'd gotten about two hours into it and just petered out. It may be that I'm the kind of person that can't do self-motivated, online training without someone watching over me, slapping my wrist when I fail. But I've gotten absorbed in the business of being a writer, and just haven't got that stuff out in a while.

We know that the department is necessary, because a few years back a fire snuck up on Mayhill from behind and ended up burning hundreds of acres up by our way - if we go west, or even south, we come to a "burn scar" where literally everything was just burned up. ten years later, and it's still trying to recover. this may be the natural way that things always were up here, where it's real dry, and spring is the windy season, and fires can start from just about anything, but for the purposes of protecting our homes and families, having trucks and water ready, and the people to manage them, is at the top of the list of survival tactics.

My point is, I'm in. I'll do what I can to help. I'll tell all the mountain people to join your VFD; I'll try to do it myself. A few hours by a computer is nothing, in the big picture.

Hiking

My wife is on the cautious side of this whole covid thing. But she's on the cautious side of the whole hunting season too. She doesn't want me walking back in the canyon during hunting season.

The thing is, I've found that it's clear and beautiful out there, and though it's a little rocky beneath your feet, generally it's really easy to figure out where you are and what you are doing. I've mostly been walking straight back from my house, into Board Tree Canyon, and then I'll go out to the border of the reservation, or over west toward the little valley where gullies come down from the highlands back north beyond the high mountain. This road snakes around that mountain back there, and I guess you would call it a jeep trail; I wouldn't want to drive my car on it, but it's not bad for walking. And it's very beautiful back there.

Slowly I become accustomed to deer poop, elk poop, and cow poop; there's plenty of them all. I like that because I know they're around, and I also know they hide pretty well when I come walking. None of the critters seem to want to mix with me. And there are no people at all.

My wife says, watch out for the hunters. I say, I think I'll be able to spot them from miles away. But who knows? I haven't been doing it all that long. Maybe they let me go for a while, but then if I keep coming back around, they spring on me because they don't want that. They don't mind me showing up every month or two, but if I make it a regular habit, then they have to let me know who owns the place.

Sometimes, you get a good view of the mountains. My plan, as I may have said, is to walk to Cloudcroft. It's about seventeen miles, more or less straight west. I probably can't go there and back in a day, but I could get pretty far. Overland. In the forest. On trails. And where people can find me, if things go bad.

It's just a plan, a dream, an aspiration. Stay posted.