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

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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
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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.