That’s what my late Aunt Mary said when I first told her we were planning to move from the family home town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the terrible high desert of New Mexico. That she was at least partly right obscures the more obvious point of her losing a personal representative in [...]
Rio Grande
Sagebrush, junipers, and piñon rolling into the abyss
Another three-and-a-half mile fast hike brought me past this spot. Nifty, eh? I almost get a sense of the curvature of the Earth from here. That’s the Rio Grande gorge in the background, over 800 feet to the bottom. It’s also where the tectonic plates are pulling apart, as I am fond of pointing out, [...]
Love the “duck’s head”
Behold these fine New Mexico stones. Pieces of some of the oldest rock on earth, down there at the bottom of the canyon, worn smooth by water flowing over them for eons. So what, huh. Go break a granite boulder or a slab of basalt from a rift, stack it in your driveway, and try [...]
Sometimes a bird is just a bird
Another shot from last weekend’s visit to Orilla Verde on the Rio Grande River near Pilar, this time a Canada goose. We saw a number of them in the canyon, along with a beaver dam in a side channel and three kinds of ducks: mallards, buffleheads, plus one I have yet to identify. It’s so [...]
Rio Grande at Pilar, NM with geese and ducks, looking downstream
One of my favorite early Lou Reed songs, written in 1964. I’ve always identified with this verse, for some reason. More and more, it seems, not less. I wish that I was born a thousand years ago I wish that I’d sail the darkened seas On a great big clipper ship Going from this land [...]
.png)