Just doing what we can here, less than two hours from our rented adobe on the hill. Remember, we drove past this amazing place to get to this amazing place, the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in southern Colorado. There were thousands of Canade geese and sandhill cranes, dark blue ponds, and mountains looming all around. Sixty degrees (15.5°C) and not a breath of wind.
We saw antelope on the way back
That’s what it looks like in northern Taos County, with southern Colorado about ten minutes away. Take extra care up here. It’s baseball-bat-to-the-head bizarre. There’s an alligator farm just up the road. The gators live in pools fed by geothermally heated artesian wells. Free hot water! What else would you do with it, right? The little towns have legal marijuana stores. The area is a hotbed of UFO sightings and cattle mutilations. People don’t talk about it much for some reason, but I know a journalist who used to work that beat. He told me he once saw a dead cow in a tree.
This is basically the drive north from Taos after you connect with U.S. 285 at Tres Piedras. That first view of the range of jagged snow-capped mountains behind the old volcano is a shocker. Pretty much everything you’re looking at except the mountains is included in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument now, thank you President Obama. I took this picture from the base of an even larger extinct volcano, San Antonio Mountain. It’s a powerful damn place.
You see him, right? Captured at Monte Vista NWR on 3-10-2016.
Facing the mountains from which he drew his strength, he felt the life force flow into his bones and once again remembered. Safe among the cranes, he had waited for millennia and no one knew.
Blessed duck at Monte Vista NWR in southern Colorado
She has always smiled. No matter what she faced in days gone by, she could always smile—beautifully too, no halting, held-back concession to politeness. A being of light and love, she lives for music, gentility, and grace. (When I read her stories of bigotry and hatred on the campaign trail, she starts to cry.) She’s at home in the center of the universe.
Years ago before the dawn of current time, she had tickets to the opera at the Kennedy Center in Washington. I had psilocybin mushrooms left over from the Grateful Dead. A match made in heaven? Perhaps. At my retelling the other night, she who never touched the stuff flashed me the smile and laughed, remembering that I’d eaten them in the parking garage before we went inside. The opera was Wagner’s “Parsifal,” I think, and five acts long, but something doesn’t jibe. At any rate, the hardest thing I had to do was find the men’s room during intermission, the next was making something happen at the urinal. My primary impression of the opera, however, was that it had to be the shortest thing I’d ever seen— “That’s it? That’s the final act? It’s over?”—cementing forever in my mind the benefits of psychedelics and the arts. (That’s probably how I’ll be when my time’s up, if that day ever comes.)
“Let’s go explore that neighborhood where we’re gonna move,” she said a little while ago. I don’t prepare for endings, anyway, so that sounds fine. This is where it happens, and right now.
Makes no difference who you are
What a trip we had today, and this is part of it—ninety miles to Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in southern Colorado to see the cranes. Almost all of these are Canada geese, but please look closely. Just the other side of the road from here (turn 180°), there were sandhill cranes to the horizon! We were in a frenzy of appreciation. Sandwiches and chocolate milk inside the car. Sixty degrees, no wind. Windows down. Honking, squawking, quacking, croaking birds outside. Glorious clean air. I got out and walked around, shooting pictures like a madman.
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