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.
