Flamingos are often seen in front yards as plastic yard ornaments, and double as stir sticks in fancy lounge drinks.
This evening, the Albuquerque zoo is hosting a music concert. Surrounding the stage, families and friends have spread umbrellas, blankets, folding chairs and wait for Ryan McGarvey, a local boy made good, to sing and play his electric guitar. Newspaper stories say Ryan has performed with the British rock and blues legend Eric Clapton.
Flamingos at the zoo, this evening, can’t be charged with not sticking their necks out.
Tonight’s concert will sound, to them, like the bellowing of hippos and their tall graceful necks will move to the music like a conductor’s baton.
Julie and Nathan, California Chris’s sister and her boyfriend, like the concert, and especially love the rain and stormy skies.
Spectators huddle under umbrellas, blankets,plastic tarps, and the music, all by itself, out- dramas the weather.
Seeing flamingos in New Mexico is as surprising as it would be seeing roadrunners in Florida.
Hanging out with those of your own kind seems to be rooted in nature.
We humans are always trying to outdo nature’s design.
Fish are streamlined for propulsion.
Their bodies create little friction between them and the water that supports them. Light filters down from the water’s surface where we watch them take graceful turns around their aquarium tank’s curves.
In another aquarium, jelly fish, who aren’t moving like the fish, have dangling tentacles shown off with back lighting.
The jelly fish are almost transparent, catching food in their tentacles and letting themselves be propelled by currents or by ingesting water and spitting it out to move in the direction of their prey.
They are other worldly.
Floating with ocean currents is smarter than fighting them.
Personally, I watch for tentacles, both in the water, and out, all the time.
Jellyfish aren’t the only organisms on this planet that have a sting.
When you see clouds turn this color, the sun obscured, visibility shrunk, the odds of it being the ” End of the World ” increase. I expect to witness armed Angels riding down out of the smoke on horses breathing fire, drawn swords ready to take off unrighteous heads and cut out un-repenting hearts.
On my way to California to see Chris in a trauma center,whisked close to death in a car accident, these clouds are brewing in the desert north of Phoenix. They are the color of burning rubbish and are caused by forest fires to the north of Flagstaff.
Ancient man must have seen these same clouds.
They would have said the Gods were angry.
We say a camper was careless with his matches.
Pulled off the road, taking pictures, I preview the end of our world.
We don’t all get out of this life the same way, but where we go next is a true travel mystery.
Snakes don’t have fingers, toes, arms, or legs. They are coldblooded and need sun to get stirring. Cultures throughout human history have worshiped them, reviled them, and eaten them.
For photography and curiosity reasons, Joan, visiting from Boston, has pinpointed snakes as things to see and do in Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque Rattlesnake Museum is reviewed on Trip Adviser, open for those tired of New Mexican chili, curios, Navajo pottery, white church spires looking down on a park gazebo,adobe architecture, private residences with signs warning “Trespassers Beware.”
These snakes are behind glass. They represent more than one species and are hidden before our eyes in their captivity, the same colors as the leaves, rocks, sand that surround them. They are not loquacious creatures and use simple rattles to warn us away.
Snakes don’t win popularity contests, but, this morning, they are strangely beautiful, quiet, pensive in their captivity.
Snakes don’t hold a candle to human scheming but, this morning, they are exceptionally photogenic.
Most people call these ” clouds ” and stop.
A few go further and describe them as ” beautiful clouds,” or, if a scientist, ” atmospheric conflagrations. ”
My aunt called them ” buttermilk ” clouds when she was hunched in a bird blind shooting photographs of eagles nesting in the top branches of cottonwood trees on her ranch.
Tonight, these graceful puffs of smoke move languidly through the cerulean sky, just before sunset turns the heavens reddish yellow.
These cloud fingers are delicate as a concert pianists hands,look like Octopus tentacles reaching for prey near a coral reef, resemble the crust on a fine pastry in your town’s best bakery.
No matter how you describe this natural phenomenon, the safest posture is to bow your head and appreciate your good fortune for a world you didn’t make but get to live in.
The creek is in better shape today than fifty years ago.
Then, creek banks were crowded with brush. Now, you can stand on the bank and easily cast your tackle. There are still cat tails in the creek but they are controlled by a local wildlife biologist for a monthly stipend.
Fifty years ago there were perch in the water, small fish that strike impulsively, put up a fight, and have lots of bones to work around at the dinner table. We ate them fried in a blanket of corn meal along with cornbread, black eyed peas and Texas toast fixed by Grandma. In the creek, we kids waded in undershorts seining for minnows to use as bait. For city kids, the creek and the ranch were a place to look forward to visiting when school shut down for the summer.
The water today is dark, opaque, ten foot deep in the middle. It’s surface is a mirror reflecting trees on the other side of the bank. Like so much of nature, you can feel a lot more beneath the surface than you can see.
Growing up, I had no idea I would be fishing the creek when I got old.
Even the future can’t swim away from the past.
Los Altos Golf Course was built in the 1960’s, near Eubank and Copper in Albuquerue.
Owned and operated by the City of Albuquerque, this public links course is open to all. In an age of dwindling play, escalating water costs, cries of environmental ruination., golfers still suit up in shorts, golf caps, spikes, and golf shirts with “Just Do It ” stitched above their shirt pockets.
The driving range,south of the clubhouse, is wide open this morning.
A rainbow makes a gentle arc across the sky, the same arc as a well struck five iron from an uphill lie into a well trapped green.
Rainbows and golf are always welcome on Scotttreks.
Both are about physics and spirits.
Outside the front gate of Christianville, you take an immediate right to go to Haiti Made, a local cafe, coffee and smoothie shop run by Americans.
An eighth of a mile down the rock strewn, bumpy, water puddled lane, that barely makes a foot path, is the landmark Old Well.
It is called old because it is a deep well drilled in the 1950’s when the Christianville Bible University occupied the hillside above the well. The University was taken out by one of Mother Nature’s hurricanes some years ago and all that is left of it is a concrete shell of a building at the top of the ridge, obscured by battered trees and beat down vegetation.
Often, at this well, there are vehicles, motorcycles pulled off the road while men and women fill yellow five gallon plastic jugs with water to take home for cooking, drinking, and bathing.
I splash water on my face, direct from the spigot, stopping my walk to Haiti Made for a moment.
A hurricane, taking out this Bible University on the hill, is ironic.
If the well had been taken out too, the tragedy would have been exponentially worse.
While having a God helps us survive, not having water is a death sentence.
Mogpog has typhoons. Colorado has snow.
This morning Colorado vehicles have a snow blanket of white and a rising sun is beginning to melt the blanket.
The United States has launched cruise missiles into a Syrian military base claiming chemical warfare was used against other combatants in an ongoing proxy war. Russia is moving a carrier to the gulf and adding missile defense systems to Syrian military installations. North Korea will start a nuclear war if attacked by the U.S.. American troops are moved to Poland. The stock market continues to go up as earnings and U.S. GDP goes down. Fifty million Americans are on food stamps. Homeless vets hold signs on corners asking for loose change.
This snow is a message that the Philippines are very very small in my rear view mirror.
In Mogpog, I didn’t worry about tomorrow, think about World War 3, or dream about fire cutting through big cities where apocalyptic wandering lone wolfs fight each other for survival.
In Mogpog, we sat next to a little fan on the front porch and watched lazy clouds hopscotch across the sky.
I should, I suppose, be seeing the Eiffel Tower, or Mount Everest, or kangaroos in Australia,but tomorrow I drive back to Albuquerque.
New Mexico, for those who don’t know much about it, isn’t even a flyover state.
I would book a trip to the moon if it was affordable and available, but, for now, I’m stuck on this planet driving a vehicle that uses fossil fuels and requires me to drive it.
March is one of the dryer months on Marinduque but, even in March, it rains.
This is a morning rain that lasts an hour, steady. Rain runs off the tin roof and puddles in the yard. After thirty minutes, soil turns to a mud so thick you can’t shake it off your shoes.
We stay indoors and wait.
I listen to the rain make drumbeats on the roof.
Nature makes good music.
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