March 9, 2013 3:21 PM
by JHF
in
Taos
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My desk is by the window with the lamp
Oh, it’s old, all right. Taos is really old. Back East, people often act as if there wasn’t any history before the English—one can only wonder why—but here the millennia get in your face.
Aside from whoever showed up with armed Spanish expeditions, many early European settlers were actually Sephardic Jews chased out of Spain (and Portugal) after 1492 who first sought refuge in Mexico and then fled to the farthest reaches of the empire, i.e. present-day el Norte, when the Inquisition came to New Spain in 1536 or so. And of course, the country wasn’t vacant. Up and down the Rio Grande stood Native pueblos full of people whose ancestors had been here for thousands of years already. Some of the latter died of thirst or maybe ate each other. When that feels right, then you know Taos!
No place for the young, not really. Just living here can make you ancient. The rocks in the gorge are billions of years old, how can one forget? Eternity is, well, eternal—at night, the spirits pull your covers off and leave you shivering in the dark. Easy to get stuck here in that awful Taos time warp where Comanches ride through town and steal the servant girls.
It’s getting worse, too. Every audience a sea of gray. Gatherings like hostage parties on a UFO.
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Tags:
el Norte,
history,
old Taos,
snow
The path to the acequia is next
It can’t be her, obviously. She is my sunshine. Every day I plunge my miserable soul into the neon plasma and begin again. Sometimes it doesn’t take, and I scuttle around the floor of my invisible cage like Kafka’s cockroach. Like when I consider that she could have had anything, and she chose me. Mostly, though, I’m stunned and beaten up with all this light.
“Stop and let me take your picture,” I called out.
“Okay, here I am with my rifle,” she said.
She has a rifle, actually. A beautiful Iver Johnson single-shot .410 shotgun that belonged to her mother. One day early on her father took her mother out hunting with the then-new gun. Pulling the trigger for the first time, she shot a squirrel right out of the tree. “Okay, that’s it,” she said, and put the weapon down.
Only reason I’m alive, boys, only reason I’m alive.
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Tags:
history,
love,
marriage,
New Mexico
March 8, 2013 12:34 AM
by JHF
in
Nature
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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 to blunt the edges with a garden hose. Man, we oughta have more respect.
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Tags:
Orilla Verde,
Pilar,
Rio Grande,
water
March 6, 2013 12:48 AM
by JHF
in
Nature
{ }
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 amazing to be able to drive for 15 minutes and find real live waterfowl in the terrible high desert. This is also a good place to spot bald eagles when they’re around. I’ve even seen a couple of herons.
These same creatures occasionally turn up even closer to our rented adobe on the hillside. The beaver dams on the Rio Grande del Rancho off NM 518, just a couple of miles away, have created a rather extensive area of wetlands. I stepped outside to get some firewood one evening a few weeks ago and saw a small “V” of Canada geese heading in that direction. Coming here from Maryland as we did—where many thousands of them winter over—it was quite a shock to hear their calls.
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Tags:
Orilla Verde,
Rio Grande,
wildlife
March 4, 2013 7:57 PM
by JHF
in
Personal
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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 here to that
In a sailor’s suit and cap
Away from the big city
Where a man can not be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don’t know
Oh, and I guess that I just don’t know
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Tags:
Pilar,
Rio Grande,
water
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