Entangled

After a summer of rare, drenching rains, tumbleweeds took over the Valley. Dislodged by September winds, the skeletal clumps huddled along our dirt roads, skittered across stones, bounced hopelessly in the wake of speeding vehicles. They ventured out of the rural areas and ended up in town, always in the most inappropriate places. One afternoon I passed a pickup truck driving down the highway with a weed stuck in its grille like a jaunty brown corsage. Another thistle-ball, at least two feet in diameter, blocked State Street across from our favorite coffee shop, mocking that small attempt at civilization. 

Uprooted flocks raced across the plains when the wind kicked up, their passage blocked by barbed wire fences. They clung to the wire with grim desperation until a November blizzard released their grip.

softening under snow

the harsh entanglements
of autumn

Christmas 2013

El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico
Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie - December 2013

Abandoned Furniture

Locals who've been in the Valley for awhile say the snow hasn't been this deep east of Alamosa since the early 1990s. We got about a foot-and-a-half last week in Blanca Flats. Wind-sculpted banks lay over the furniture left by one of our neighbors. I explored the site with the dogs this afternoon and found an unoccupied sofa, a lonely silhouette of civilization against a wilderness of white. 

There was also (of course) a broken toilet peeking out of a snowdrift. Imagine using the commode in this hypothermic environment, meditating on the monochromatic hills . . . .

Signs of Winter

October morning --

the mountain's blue couloirs

have already gone white

*   *   *

Tufts of ghost sage

turn to powder between my fingers:

all the words I've forgotten

Autumn Moon

I feel guilty about my failure to keep up with the seasons on this blog. I've watched the chalky summer prairies turn a dozen shades of green in the rain. I've seen that same rain bring the first snow to Blanca Peak weeks earlier than usual, then leave her brilliant green from the waist down. Phrases flicker through my mind, rarely stopping long enough to form three coherent lines. Sometimes being an observer is all I can handle. 

But as I looked back at my haiku diary today (the old-fashioned kind of diary, the one you don't show anyone), I realized that I had three haiku about the autumn moon, in different states of being. 

New moon --

over darkening fields

the white pendulum.

*   *   *

Equinox moon

transparent in a hard blue sky

at high noon.

*   *   *

Harvest moon;

the tumbleweed's brown spines

have turned magenta.

Passengers

Lately I've been taking the back roads to work to avoid the stress of construction on our rural highway (as a former resident of Denver and the San Francisco Bay Area, I know we're spoiled here, but I still hate traffic obstacles of any kind). When the land along Stanley Road shifts from acres of flat crop circles to the grassy bogs that border the Rio Grande River, the scenery turns from utilitarian brown to lush green. Cattle and horses graze in knee-deep grass along the river. Empty stuccoed farmhouses and gently toppling fences dot the meadows, with the occasional John Deere tractor or combine bringing me back to the 21st century.

This abandoned train car sits motionless at the edge of a pasture just beyond Road 102N. Old freight cars are a frequent sight in a valley whose economy was once dominated by the railroad, but passenger cars like this one are much less common. The car's interior is haunted by birds; its shattered eyes are lidded by the flapping remains of its window shades.

Nervous about being caught with my camera on private property, I jumped at a flock of shadows that suddenly filled the car. My overactive imagination told me that although years have passed since this car went anywhere, its seats might be occupied by apparitions of the past.

In reality, the abandoned house and its empty car seem to welcome visitors. I saw only one sign posted on the property, a faded placard that read, "No Hunting." I assumed that the sign referred to shooting wildlife, not hunting ghosts or memories. 

Wild Horses

Irrigation

Sleepers Awake

Snow melts in warm dust --

under a net of pebbles,

the snake's eye opens. 

In the desert a whole ecosystem thrives under the dry topsoil, where it's protected from the hard winds, extreme temperatures and predators of land and sky. As the days grow warmer, new generations of rabbits, mice and birds populate the landscape. Underground the snakes and insects begin to stir, their spines and wings unfolding as the snow disappears from the mountains. Soon the rattlers and bull snakes will come to the surface again in search of  prey and water. 

Sentinel

The crow guards two posts;

at the thud of my footsteps,

he rises skyward. 

This pair of old corral posts stands about two miles from the house. Those faded wooden stakes remind me of a gate without a fence, the entry to a parallel world. One day as I was jogging up the dirt road at my usual slow pace, I saw an enormous crow perched on one of the posts. He sat there, a dark sentinel, as I thudded up the road, then slowly lofted away as I approached. For a moment, I thought he would let me get close enough to touch him, but he took to the sky -- as I would, if I had wings. 

April Wind

Housecleaning

A new tribe of ants

carves tunnels in the sand --

time to clear the dust. 

When Nothing is There

These lines from a poem in Mary Oliver's recent collection reminded me why I love this place so much:

I go out
to the pale dunes, to look over
the empty spaces
of the wilderness. 

For something is there,
something is there when nothing is there but itself,
that is not there when anything else is. 

*   *   * 

from "Extending the Airport Runway"
in A Thousand Mornings
Mary Oliver, Penguin Press 2012 

From the perspective of a culture that revolves around cycles of building and manufacturing alternating with cycles of consuming and discarding, it does seem that there's nothing out here. It's not even a very good place for recreation. One of our "neighbors" set up a tent on their property the summer before last, apparently hoping to enjoy a little fishing and camping. They left the tent in place when they went home, and it quickly blew down, exposing the belongings they'd left to the sun, the wind and the scavengers who haunt Blanca Flats. When they returned a month or two later, they set up a pre-fab shed. The shed lasted for awhile before it finally gave in to the wind and fell apart.

Jake and Shelby have always loved to sniff around the remains of that place. There were apparently a couple of canine guests on the property at one time, and our dogs are either attracted to the scents they left behind or to the burned traces of a barbecue. When I walk with them down that road, I always have trouble dragging them away. A few days ago, just to see what the dogs found so enthralling, I went to explore the site.

There's nothing there now but a big hole in the ground, where the people have set up an impromptu landfill. A faded black sofa inhabits the landfill, along with the discarded toilet that seems to be an obligatory part of the landscape around here (there's one of those on our property, too, left by the previous owner). So this parcel of property has devolved from a campsite to a storage space to a dump.

Why do some people think that in landscapes like this, where nothing is there to appeal to the building/consuming mind, the only acceptable alternative is to use the land for waste disposal? It's more than just a practical decision, I think; it's an act of contempt, a gesture of resentment against a land that didn't welcome them on their own terms.

Making a Path

Snow masks the sheep trail

where fat finches browse for seed;

we make our own path. 

Buried Thorns

Hidden ring of thorns,

the snow-covered prickly pear

lies in wait for us. 

Lost Villages

The basalt hills rise

like abandoned villages

from clouds of snow fog. 

Distance plays tricks on the eye here. I can never photograph the San Luis Hills the way I see them -- so close that every shadow and hollow is visible from my window. In the aftermath of snow, they stand like empty buildings in banks of white fog, like the mirage of a failed human settlement. 

I'm always a little dismayed by the way my mind projects the images and sounds of civilization onto this barren landscape. The wind sounds like the voice of a radio announcer; the hills look like broken huts; the full moon is a streetlamp behind my shoulder. If I moved back to Denver, would I hear the North wind in the drone of traffic and see basalt hills in the skyline?

Looking back at the photos I've taken of the view facing South, I'm reminded that there's a stark monotony in this landscape. You have to look carefully to see the variations that unfold through the hours and the seasons. As hard as I try, I don't capture the way life proliferates here, even in the winter. The fat cottontail rabbits bouncing across the dirt roads . . . the noisy finches squabbling over seeds . . . the enormous black raven who's taken up residence near the house.

Instead, my imagination dishes up empty villages. And the cries of ghosts. 

Skeletons

Tangled skeletons

of tumbleweed and sagebrush --

winter survivors. 

Surprise Guests

Two yellow flowers

on a new tomato plant

bloom against cold glass. 

We didn't expect that one of our indoor tomatoes -- left for dead when winter blasted into the Valley -- would give birth to a new plant, much less that two fragile blossoms would develop on its branches. Who am I to say whether it's too early for fresh tomatoes? Stranger things have happened in our sunroom garden, like green-and-orange bell pepper mutations and red Roma tomatoes dangling from the vines long after summer. This plant is an offshoot of one of our orange tomatoes. These plants produce bright fruit in Day-glo colors, sweet as candy. 

Winter Voices

Sounds engulf the house:

wind, coyotes, and ghost voices

broadcasting warnings. 

New Year with Ghosts

Each post emerges

like a separate gray soul

on the snowy road. 

On the last day of 2012, I went for a long run. A light snow fell. Milky banks of fog shifted across the landscape. Along the sides of the rutted roads, old fenceposts and signposts materialized one by one, like memories stepping forward from my subconscious. Beyond the border of the road, the horizon was a cloudy sea, marked by underwater dunes and mesas. In the distance, the Dome reminded me of the volcanic rock that rises out of Morro Bay in Northern California, where I spent so much of my life. 

I often miss the Pacific Ocean. But has it ever left me? Have any of the faces, seas or skylines I knew in the past really left me? I thought once again of how this ancient lakebed acts like a canvas for the imagination, how its shapes and sounds evoke remembered beauty or pain at every shift of the seasons, at every turn of the light. 

According to a Chinese superstition, ghosts of the past shouldn't be mentioned on New Year's Day. We should look forward to the future, focusing our thoughts on the coming months. But I don't fear these ghosts, or regret them anymore. I live with them comfortably now -- much more comfortably than I did when I was younger. I greet them like old companions on the road, like the old wooden corral posts that I've come to know so well.