This might look warm. It wasn’t! More like the low forties when I took the shot six days ago, and it’s snowed twice since then. Not much, but still. The hummingbirds are back regardless, and the raccoons found the feeders I put up. Now I have to bring them in at night and put them back out in the morning. (Either antecedent works.) A dog could earn his kibble here, but within oh, say one hundred yards of us, are enough of them already to eat your cows. Must be why we get the damn raccoons.
Just oh my and gibber honk tweet
Three days past one full year ago, to be exact, I was standing in the ocean on a beach in Maine. I have a photo of my foot in a few inches of water from a receding wave to prove it, but I just looked and there is nothing to be gained so never mind. The ocean, on the other hand, is overwhelming. How any human being from planet Earth could do anything but worship and protect what you see here is incomprehensible to me.
We used to live in Maryland, but even there we hardly ever got down to the actual sea because I didn’t like the crowds. Once we visited a lonely winter beach in Delaware and that was cool. The long lost weekend with a bunch of friends and someone’s in-laws down at Hatteras was even better, and I have to write that story down before I die. But none of that was on my mind when I was touching the Atlantic. I was completely there. Only later did I figure, what with life and jobs and being busy and then moving to New Mexico, ye gods, it could easily have been twenty years since I last smelled salt water and felt the waves go whoomph against the sand.
It’s good to know those things, just like it’s good to know the desert sky and watch the clouds go drag across the peaks. Water of the living Earth! I was so excited, I wanted to bring a little of the ocean back for my wife to sniff, and I filled a jar I’d brought along for just that very purpose. Back at my aunt’s place however, I tried and couldn’t smell a thing. Meanwhile, I was flying home the next day and didn’t want to be arrested. Mystery liquid in your carry-on, they blow your brains out. So I poured it down the drain.
It was about an hour from my late aunt’s house in the wooded hills outside Augusta to where I took that shot. I was there to sort out her possessions, which I’d inherited, everything except the house. The property was extensive (over 30 acres), an astounding value compared to housing in el Norte, and I considered buying it. No doubt the trustees would have given me a deal. After so many quasi-rooted years in Taos, the house exuded welcome and I felt relief I can’t describe. All that plugging us into that required was an instantaneous, total shift undoing everything we’d known up to that point. One can do these things. That, and moving to the whitest state I know. I’m white, so I can say that. They also still smoke cigarettes* there—in public!—and elected a “human bowling jacket” for governor. It just did not compute. Too strange, too far away from where I was inside my head to ever go back that direction. (This boy’s escaped, where does the sun set?)
I packed five boxes up to mail and shipped a rifle that I’d found, a semi-automatic carbine that holds seven rounds. Most of what was in the house I set up to be auctioned or donated to the local Grange Hall in Vassalboro. My haul included things like fish knives, a gold watch, forceps, two shot glasses, and a boomerang, but mostly I kept books and photo albums. My grandfather was a prolific and dedicated family historian in his later years, and I have documents that no one would believe. No one will understand them when I’m gone, either, because my surviving siblings just don’t know that much. It’s here and yet it’s all forgotten lore.
That was me a year ago. Most of what I brought back is five feet from where I’m sitting now, stacked behind me on the floor. Bins of photographs, books, the fish knives, Granddad’s straight razors and other keepsakes, covered by a couple of wallaby pelts as old as I am. Sitting on a solid mudfloor smoothed out right on top of solid ground, I should point out, in an old adobe house at 7,000 feet about as far away from oceans and family as one could ever get, and yet they’re here though, aren’t they?
Good God!
* Shaddup, you! My friend K.G. can light up anytime she wants. [wink]
Not nearly as peaceful as it looks
This one’s a killer! The wind is epic, monumental. When the front rolled through late Saturday afternoon, the town of Taos down below was instantly obscured by dust, then rain and snow. I left two hummingbird feeders up, because the birds are here, and spotted one braving the blast to poke his beak inside the swinging reservoir. That one I brought in after dark, the other one was smashed. This morning the patio chairs were in the sagebrush. The clouds are blowing past like freight trains.
Thank God we still have firewood!
Transformation
This is “down by the acequia.” Water is running high in the ditch just beyond my feet here where you can’t see. The reddish shoots are willows that the ditch cleaning crews usually cut down, but this year I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t know what the blooming tree is. The dark one in the foreground is an apple tree. Each year most of its fruit drops into the water and is carried away. I grab what I can without falling in.
Aspens and cottonwoods grow huge beside the acequia. Woodpeckers are going crazy now bashing holes, especially in the half-dead trees. Yesterday I saw an epic flicker fight: one was chasing another up and down the hillside. They flew right over the house, circled around, and then corkscrewed through the tallest cottonwood in the neighborhood, where I lost sight of them. Ten minutes later they flew back over the house, still fighting! These dramas go on all around us all the time, and hardly anybody sees.
The air my god the air
The photo cuts too close and overwhelms me. I had to shake and wipe some tears away. “This world’s on fire, John!” no lie. It’s not the place, it’s not the image. It’s certainly not “Taos.” Forget Taos. You know what I mean.
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