The Rio Grande river runs through New Mexico and most of the state’s population and bigger cities hug the river’s edges all the way through the state, from north to south. The river is sustained by melting winter snow pack in Colorado and this is a good year with today’s river running fast and high. Along its entire length, Indian, state, county officials, and even private individuals dip their hoses and buckets into the currents and draw off water they need for their life and livelihood.
By the time our Rio Grande gets to Texas and Mexico, it is shallow enough in places to walk across, and it’s color is a muddy brown. There are packed legal folders full of legal challenges about who owns this river’s water, who gets to use it, and in what quantities. Our Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico and has always been the lifeblood of farmers, ranchers, outlaws, Indians, miners and immigrants, legal or not, all co-existing inside our state borders.
This afternoon, rafts carry fishermen downstream with paid guides maneuvering clients to some of the best fishing spots.
I don’t know what it cost these fishermen for their guide and raft, but it all adds up to an expensive trout dinner.
This guide will give this sportsman a better than average chance to catch something worth catching.
When you come this far to catch fish you want good pictures to show your buddies back home.
A few extra bucks for a trophy fish,you can brag on for twenty or thirty years, even if it seems way too high, is money well spent.
.
I was told by a brother, Neal, and, by Pat, that the Great Sand Dunes are worth a look so I take a quick side trip to test their recommendation.
The dunes get bigger as I drive a narrow two lane road from the big highway deeper into the National Monument.There appears no reason for the dunes to be here amid natural junipers, high desert grass, cactus. It is, as if, a celestial construction crew got wrong work orders and dumped truckload after truckload of sand right here until some angel woke up from a good night’s sleep and immediately cancelled the project. In New Mexico, we have our White Sands National Monument, but none of those dunes are as tall as these. Here, the sand seems very much out of place, but, nature can’t ever be accused of making mistakes.
At the National Monument visitor center, there are photos, posters, and displays for those who want to be educated on sand. Visitors can climb the dunes by following a path out to them from the visitor center. Visitors, hiking up the dunes, look like ants trying to touch the lazy white drifting clouds.
Not having time to stay long, I get back on the road to Creede, Colorado and Hermit’s Lake.
I’m guessing, even if I don’t see these dunes again, this would be one of the first places a tour of foreign cats, from Japan ,would stop and spend an entire day romping in the kitty litter.
Seeing cats surfing down these hills on boogie boards would be amazing.
Neal and Pat, I decide,on my way out of the National resource, are worth listening too, sometimes.
County road 40, cutting away from Colorado State Highway 69, takes me straight to the Alvarado Campground in the nearby Sangre de Cristo mountains – the end of a long driving day from New Mexico.
The campground,in the Pike and San Isabel National Forests,is where we camp out during the 2019 Mountain Hay Fever Bluegrass Festival in Westcliff. It is a summer July, warm, and these brilliant blue and white flowers are growing in no discernible order in these cow pastures. This pastoral scene should be printed on a grocery store container of vanilla ice cream.
County road 40 is two lane and well maintained and flat as the countryside we are cutting through. On each side of the road are barbed wire fences that keep cattle in their fields as well as designating people’s property lines. In old times, ranching folks hung cattle rustlers and used buckshot on kids getting into their gardens. Now, lawyers shoot it out in court for all of us and disputes in the sandbox are for judges to decide instead of pistols and rifles.
This evening, as the sun drops and night coolness is coming, I can see these cow’s don’t give a damn about fences, or us,or my philosophy, whichever side of the fence they,or we,are on.
I drive past them at 30 miles per hour, the posted speed limit, hopeful that tomorrow’s bluegrass music makes this long drive worth doing.
When you listen to bluegrass music there should be a few cows in the neighborhood,like this, just to make the music sound more authentic.
Setting up camp this evening will be a happy chore long overdue.
The mountain range, to the west, rises ten thousand feet plus into the clouds. These clouds, turning dark and ominous,prompt festival help to lower the flaps of our music tent to protect the performers and us, in the audience, from soon to come wind and driving rain.
The mountains are ten to fifteen miles away and there is a time lapse between something forming out there and something reaching here. There is space and distance around us and between us and the peaks, space punctuated by scattered homesteads stuck in the land like fallen arrows from ancient bow and arrows. Neighbors are not within a handshake and going to Westcliff is an activity you do when you need groceries you don’t grow, hardware you can’t make yourself, stuff you want but can probably do without, or the kids just need to get out of the house.
Change happens here, just like everywhere else, but it takes a while longer to get to you.
In the country, you know you are small, tiny, insignificant, a small sentence fluttering in a big book in the wind.
In the country, folks get together on the front porch to watch weather and talk about the harvest.
In the city, folks lock their front doors,don’t get too close to their neighbors, watch news about what is happening world’s away but feel powerless to affect change on their own block.
in the country, the world is what is in front of you that you can touch. You have time to get ready for events to reach you that start way way way out there, in the distance, in the mountains.
Out here, being lost in space, is literally, and figuratively, true.
Mother Nature makes her own music.
This little brook gently runs through the Alvarado Campground, following a path of least resistance on it’s way to join a larger river, and then, with that river, rambling all the way to the closest ocean.
Nature’s music refreshes, doesn’t ask for applause, or notoriety, recording contracts, or interviews.
Nature’s songbook is this little brook, wind moving through pine needles in tall trees on a cool clear night, a woodpecker carving his home inside a tree trunk, the rustling of brush as a brown bear scurries off the highway and back into the woods, waves coming into shore as the tide rises, hail hitting the roof of your car in a freak summer storm,deer antlers striking one another as bucks fight for dominance.
In a couple of days, I’ll hear fish songs at Hermit Lakes, breaking the lake’s surface as they greedily gobble dragonflies.
Back in Albuquerque, city melodies will be much more staccato and complex. There will be car horns, sirens,bacon sizzling in a frying pan, heavy equipment taking down condemned buildings, nail guns installing shingles, gunshots, light classic jazz in Starbucks, the sound of a well struck golf ball on it’s way towards the pin.
This brook is a comforting, simple, legato melody.
Mother Nature, as I hear her this morning, is a very good composer.
Her melodies remind me that there is no need to hurry.
I don’t think I need to change anything here.
It is good, at this moment, to just be still and listen.
Indian School is an east- west Albuquerque boulevard that ends at the Embudo Canyon Open Space at the far east side of the city..
The parking lot, at the roads end, is the beginning of a city Open Space area that moves into the Cibola National Forest Wilderness. The nature walks and trails, at the cities edge, open at seven each morning and close at seven each evening. If you are bold, you can hike back as far as you want into the wilderness and camp out all night under the stars.
Along our normal hike, Alex and I stop to catch a breath and catch our bearings. Along the trail is a huge city deep water well enclosed by a chain link fence and guarded by government signs showing statutes that warn bad things happen to those who trespass.Wildlife has hidden itself but you see signs they are close by and paying attention to our progress.
By the time Alex and I finish our route,more parking spaces have opened up and the lot is looking empty.
It is funny, to me, to see signs putting Open and Close times on a Wilderness and metal gates locked to keep people out at night.
Starting my car and heading home, I’m very sure no one that lives out here gives a damn about our human time.
Wilderness time and people time use different watches.
On the average, Albuquerque sees the sun 280 days a year.The U.S. average is 205 days.
This morning the Sandia Mountains are hidden behind low lying clouds and visibility is limited. The clouds have no substance yet they hide the towering rugged peaks on our city’s east side.
If you ask Albuquerque people what they like about the city, most will say, most often, ” the weather.”
Now that weather, however, has been ” politicized” it is much more difficult to navigate in conversations. We old crazies, at McDonalds, have debates about “Climate Change” and whether man is big enough to have such an influence.
This morning, the sun is on vacation and wisps of clouds have draped themselves over the mountains like your favorite beach blanket.
The weather man, on TV, will call it ” a cloudy day” with no wind, with a thirty percent chance of seeing the sun in the afternoon.
Walking the trail, I tuck up inside my jacket a little more.
We can talk about weather all we like, but we get what we like and don’t like of it on a regular basis, no matter what climate theories we buy into.
The landscape in this part of Arizona has few trees and even less water.
It has jagged rocky hills that rise from the desert floor like turtle heads coming up out of their shell. The tallest vegetation, for miles, is the saquaro cactus that we first began seeing as our Arizona state highway takes us from higher cooler elevations down to the torrid desert floor.
The saquaro, this morning in Fountain Hills Park, look like banditos and some only have one arm. One has his six shooter pointed at me.
Fountain Hills is a sleepy bedroom community not far from Phoenix, a place to escape the rigorous winters of the East coast and Midwest, a place to leave big urban centers for roadrunners in your front yard and sometimes temperamental rattlers.
This man made lake, with its world famous water feature. makes a good quiet place to stroll as the sun comes up. The fountain used to be the tallest man made geyser in the world till some prince in Dubai wanted to make a new number 1 and made it happen in his back yard..
This morning, the sun rises fast. Palm trees stand like men in lime jackets on an airplane runway waving flashlights at the sun as it docks into its assigned gate.
Mining for memories is Scott’s full time, no pay retirement job.
I never thought I’d see anything that used to be number 1 in the world.
Most life I document isn’t on anybodies list.
Pat reminds me to dig deeper into amber, when I’m in the Dominican Republic, highly valued by Kings and royalty way way back when we had Kings and royalty.
Tunneling deeper, I walk myself to the Museum of Ambar at 454 Calle Arzobismo Merino Street in the Zona Colonia, four blocks from the Plaza Colon.
Brunilda, standing inside the Museo’s front door, opens it as I reach for the door handle,and warmly welcomes me inside with a cheerful ” Good afternoon.” She leads me upstairs on a guided tour of the amber exhibit that gives me a history of the amber industry in the Dominican Republic.
For those who need a refresher on amber –
Amber is tree sap that has stuck around millions of years.
Jurassic Park popularized amber with its premise of bringing dinosaurs back to life by extracting blood from insects preserved in amber who had bit dinosaurs, then using dinosaur DNA inside the insect blood to create real dinosaurs.
Amber sometimes has bark, roots, leaves, vegetables, ants, termites, lizards caught inside it.
Amber comes in lots of colors, shapes and sizes.
“Blue Amber ” is found only in the Dominican Republic and if you hold ” Blue Amber ” up to light you see the blue tints.
Amber,dropped into a saline solution, floats. If the amber you have doesn’t float, it isn’t worth the price you paid for it.
After our tour, Brunilda escorts me to the museum retail store.
Even though I’m sold on amber, i don’t buy anything today.
Not taking money when I go on little expeditions is one of my best travel precautions
I want to see a movie about a tourist caught in amber who comes back to shopping life in the twenty third century.
The first thing he wouldn’t be able to buy would be a battery for his cell phone.
A ten minute taxi ride to the north of the Zona Colonia are the National Botanical Gardens of the Dominican Republic.
The gardens are huge and narrow city sidewalks are traded for wide foot paths to walk freely in wide open spaces This Sunday there is a long wavy line at the admissions gate, before opening time, and the charge to enter is just one hundred pesos -fifty cents U.S.
In the front entrance of the park, there is an orchid sale in progress and customers are carrying them in wheelbarrows to their vehicles in the parking lots. Orchids are very delicate beautiful flowers and it is explained to me, by my taxi driver, that they are very popular in the Dominican Republic. People hang them in their homes and show them on outside balconies. Whether it is Cuenca, Ecuador or the United States, or Santo Domingo, people love flowers and nature.
I can hear the city around me, but can’t see it inside the park’s cocoon of trees. Like the Botanical Gardens in Montevideo, this is prime real estate that people with foresight put on the protected list a long time ago.
Outside the huge cities of the world, however,nature still swings a big bat and the places people don’t want to live, can’t live, or don’t have the resources to go, are many.
Even in a world of seven billion people, there are places to escape humanity when you feel the need.
Even though the city is pressing around us on all sides, the Jardin is natural enough to lift us up this morning, remind us that this planet is still, with exceptions, a Garden of Eden.
Stewardship is mentioned in “Genesis”, in the Holy Bible.
Taking care of what we got should be on the top of everyone’s to do list.
Recent Comments