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.