Tag: New Mexico

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On Elko

The halfway point of winter in the northern hemisphere has arrived here in Idaho with dry and warm weather. Trapped in some kind of drought, I suppose I should be saying stuff like, “We need snow in the mountains, we need rain on the flats,” or maybe I should be circling around dancing with my arms stretched towards the sky. But I am a pilgrim here from southern climes and must say that I enjoy the mild weather.

Last week we peregrinated down to Elko, Nevada for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and the mild days and cool nights were much to my liking. We still got to take photos of the snowy flats below Wild Horse Crossing, and the blood red and yellow-orange willows that ganged the banks of the frigid east fork of the Owyhee River. We captured images of lipstick red berries backed by river ice. We shot pictures of horses and pronghorns and starlings and eagles and the thin clouds that scraped the blue like whispered rhymes from the mouths of poets.

Berries and Ice

We took photos of poets, too, and cello players and singers. We took pictures of partiers, painters, big Stetson hats, red cowboy boots, gold-tinted neon signs and all manner of other things Elko. We listened to an array of tunes from traditional drover songs to a capella pieces redolent with the new that lives in the old west…we heard jazz, the blues, folk, cowboy music, Mexican lullabies and Crow Indian chants.

I think the number of visitors to the Gathering must have been down this year because things seemed a little less frantic in Elko as we trooped around and met with old friends and new friends. That’s one of the most important things Elko is to me….friends. An amazing compendium of styles…political, poetical, musical, philosophical and generational show up and mingle. A tolerant mood holds forth and accepts long hair and short hair, cattle rancher and sheep man, octogenarian folk singer and yodeling ten-year-old.

Owyhee Horse

Elko is surrounded by mountain ranges that capture snow and shadow like a painter’s canvas. When the winter light lies down at low angles, the land seems to smother the sheen, leaving a splendidly muted scene where ice and rocks and cottonwoods meet. The long draws and dips of the foothills remind me of a soft-voiced mother singing a lullaby to her child.

There have been years when you could hardly get out of Elko because of the snow and the wind. One year I set out south to view the Ruby Mountains, but a gale got up and drove the snow so blatantly as to blind me. That year it seemed to snow every night, all night and it was a chore to clean off the windows of the car so you could make it the half mile to the venues to hear Paul Zarzysky recite his poems. Or Henry Real Bird chant in Crow, or Wallace McRae throw down a bucolic challenge to oil and mining companies ravenous for the raw fuels that percolate beneath the surface of the west.

This year, the Western Folklife Center brought in a lot of performers from the southwest and that fluttered the chambers of my innards. I lived many years in Arizona and New Mexico, so the music and the poems and the stories all delighted me, drawn from agricultural milieus flavored with the curious mingling of Spanish, Anglo and Native American.

Cowboy Poets

That stuff makes my blood run hot. Takes me back to a memory home. A place I can only return to in my mind. The wild land as remembered is now homes and cars and racetracks and highways, but in my mind, my memory, I can see blankets of sheep cover the draws beneath the conical hills of the Sonoran Desert. I see the pine-clad peaks that jut up like isolated islands in a sea of ocotillo and saguaro. I can hear the songs of tamales and conquistadors, of the time before the white man, before the Native American tribes now on the land, the time before….the time of Anasazi, Hohokam and Mimbres culture…petroglyphs and rock art and primitive irrigation systems that served thousands, adobe castles crammed into the naves of canyon rock.

It was once my land, the land in which I lived, and still it’s the land of my mind.

All hail Elko…where memories rear up out of verses of poetry and song.

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Gesture

Four days before Christmas last Betty and I ventured to Socorro, San Antonio and the Bosque del Apache on the Rio Grande River in central New Mexico. We went in search of photography and nature and hot chili.

Dodging uncharacteristic assaults of big blizzards, we spent a day and a half seeking and photographing the great migratory birds; cranes and snow geese. We went in search of the Owl Cafe and green chili cheeseburgers. We sought raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, cottonwood trees, fiery skies, roseate sunrise and sunset. We found all of that.

Bosque del Apache, San Antonio, New Mexico

At dawn the sandhill cranes awoke and began their morning gestures. They skraked, croaked, walked and pranced, flapped their great gray wings and pirouetted against each other like high school kids sparking at an after-football-game dance.

Sandhill Cranes

Then the snow geese rose off the water and flew in wide formations towards their corn field feeding grounds. They reminded me of upset old drill instructors yelling at each other over recruits, this all magnified by the thousands. The geese’s great World War II bomber-like formations etched against the dull gray skies that threatened us with foul weather.

The racket bounced off the flat water and hustled up to the sage covered hills. It was cacophony. Music. Conversation.

Bald eagles watched from dead snags in the middle of ponds and pintail ducks with their elegant necks dabbled, quacked and whistled. Ladderback woodpeckers ascended the trunks of cottonwoods, the willows captured solstice light with a color quality of polished Spanish doubloons. Patches of cattails blew puffs of cotton-like pollen that gleamed in the glare of the sun.

Redtail Hawk

Avian mayhem carried the day punctuated by cries of alarm when fancy-coated coyotes sneaked around with their tongues dangling from the sides of their snouts. Javelina gangs rooted in the roads. Roadrunners lifted fancy crowns, then hid them, then lifted them, as if sending us signals.

At the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, where Conrad Hilton cut his teeth, green chili burned our lips, our palates, made our foreheads sweat. Not once, not twice, but three times, we let the savory flare of chili reconnoiter our mouths and conjure our ancient New Mexican memories.

Threats of a big blizzard kept showing up with other rumors: an Aplomado falcon on the south end of the preserve, a herd of elk grazing in one of the corn fields, mule deer bucks locking horns along one of the ditches on the east side, a bobcat darting across the road just below the visitor center. For us, these rumors all remained unfounded.

Sandhill Crane

We went armed with our photography gear, waiting for the gestures, the moments that told us something was afoot not tied to our Anglo-Saxon lexicon. Something in the way a wing gets lifted, or how the sun shines off the white pate of a bufflehead duck. Gestures that communicate something different from what we know. Or that tell us something common to all of us: humans, birds, New Mexican dirt, the aurora borealis, the universe.

Maybe we found it. Maybe we didn’t and imagined that we did. I am not sure there is a difference. The thrill often lies in the quest. Seeking holds much meaning.

The bird song, the crane cries, the goose flight, the rough coats of the javelina illuminate my thoughts.

Leaving Socorro, where we spent the nights, specks of snow dotted our windshield as we went in search of our next adventure.

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Leaf Peeping

I am a desert rat and have since childhood mouthed dialogue about the beauty of the mountains vis à vis the desert. The mountains generally have no sand and wind that drives the sand and pits the paint job on your new Mercedes Benz, no short-legged plants, no spiny cacti, but trooping phalanxes of spruce and fir and pine. But here I am after a life lived and I’m still in the desert. The mountains are close, but I still hover around the roots of the big sage, the bitterbrush, the winter fat.

Once it was mesquite and palo verde and saguaro and Indian wheat. The names have changed but the milieu remains the same. Relatively dry, relatively warm. Big open vistas, a certain beauty to the landscape, even if it is harsh, or its ambiance is harsh.

Yet the harsh nature of the desertscape is no more dangerous than what one encounters in the pine-clad high country to the north of Boise, Idaho, where we live. I’d say fifty below is harsh even if it inhabits the pristine beauty of a winterland of ice crystals and frozen mist and miles and miles of spear-point spruce sheathed in an armor of ice. Maybe that is why I stick to the lower extremities of earth.

Regardless of my obvious preference for desert climes, for six years I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico and the legacy it left me, among other things, was a love for the turning of the leaves. Once I read an essay in The New Yorker Magazine by Stephen King about “leaf peepers.” When I saw the title I was curious about leaf peepers and what kind of insect they might be that sat on leaves and peeped their lives away in search of sex, breeding and compliance with the ultimate command to all life on earth: survive. When King described the leaf peepers, I was surprised to find out they are the people who come to Maine to watch the colors of the maple trees change from green to red and gold. As I read that article, I knew right then that at heart, I was a leaf peeper. I admit it. I am a tourist of foliage, a consumer of ripe reds, and orange tones that look like phosphorescent tints, and rusty hues that are redolent with memories of old Caterpillar engines left out in the rain for ages.

Two weekends ago, Betty and I, along with friends, ventured to Sun Valley, Idaho for a number of reasons, one being to take part in leaf peeping. We arrived on a Thursday evening and were disappointed with the color, but it was spitting a mixture of rain and snow and there was snow in the high country and I figured as soon as it cleared off, the frost would arrive and then the color change would accelerate.

On a Saturday morning that broke clear and fresh, we pulled out before sunrise and headed north out of the Wood River Valley, over Galena Summit and down into the Stanley Basin. As we broke over the summit, the Sawtooth Mountains on the west of the basin and the Boulder-White Clouds on the east reared up with their high shoulders, their peaks covered with fresh snow. The sunlight was just breaching the dawn and lighted up the peaks of the Sawtooths snaking from south to north. Sawtooth is an apt name for the peaks that remind one of the saws lumberjacks used to employ to knock down the big trees, long before chain saws showed up. Saws with large, sharp teeth that could bite into live wood, or flesh.

Fog and mist and nary a hint of air pollution hung in the air. Pronghorns grazed in the pastures of cow and sheep outfits with names like Busterback Ranch and Stanley Basin Ranch and Sawtooth Mountain Ranch.

I love aspen and learned it I suppose from the huge groves that cape the cold sides of the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. Aspen grow in huge gangs there, and love places where the snow gets deep and stays deep into the spring. Elk and deer and black bear seem drawn, as do I, to the groves.

When autumn arrives, the trees know (do they know like we do on some epistemological level?) that they need to go into survival mode to make it through winter. The green color in the leaves vacates and leaves the underlying golds and reds behind. The sugar in the leaves gets trapped and the frost, when seared by sunlight, reacts with the sugar and the leaves take on even more brilliant hues. This is what I adore, this chemical reaction turned into art….art….art.

When I was young, I went on camping trips with the Boy Scouts up to Holly Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was usually August, so the leaves had not changed by then, but I still wondered at the way the Rocky Mountain Maple leaves reminded me of Picasso-like hands and how the sunlight caught in the dimples of the aspen leaves and shimmered as they quaked in the alpine breezes. (The locals called them “quakies.”)

One summer as we loaded vehicles to head out of the high country, we discovered a porcupine climbing an aspen. Since porcupines tend to be nocturnal, I suppose it was climbing up to find a notch in the limbs to sleep the day away, or maybe it was headed for an aspen leaf breakfast. I watched with…with…with what….horror? as some of the bigger boys bombarded the creature with stones, then large rocks and big rounds of aspen we had cut down for firewood. I recall the porcupine fell to the ground and I refused to look at it as they laughed and finished it off. I walked away and got in the back seat of an old green Chevy Suburban and we drove out of the mountains, back into the Sonoran Desert.

But on this latest leaf-peeping trip of a couple of weeks ago, the violence of humanity was not so readily apparent. Nestled in the coves, the rincons, the draws of the mountains and foothills lining Stanley Basin were stands of aspen in varying degrees of leaf peeper heaven. Yellow, gold and a red tints that seemed to capture all the glitz of Times Square as they shined at us, neon-like, as we drove the road toward Stanley. And they shined something else at us, a promise…a promise of more color to come.

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Putting Up String Beans

Tuesday I went out back into the garden and picked a mess of green beans. Of all the things I harvest back there, the beans are my least favorite, not because I dislike their flavor but because they grow at just the right height for me to have to bend my knees and lean in to pick them. After a while, my knee joints and back hurt. The leaves are verdant and lush and the beans hide in among them, a strategy, I suspect, developed in the long millennia before we domesticated and hybridized them. That ability for the beans to camouflage between the thin stems and the broad leaves means other things are hiding in there too—yellow jackets and arachnids—and I might get stung or bitten on the bare hands that I snake in to find the beans.

But I had no mishaps except a sore back and knees and I picked myself a mess of string beans. That’s what my father used to call them, and I remember when I was a kid we used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the big wood-cased radio that sat in the front room, and there was a character called String Bean on that show who strummed a banjo and cracked corny jokes. My dad used to laugh at him a lot, but he wasn’t always so jovial when he demanded that I eat my string beans at dinnertime. The only ones we ever got in our house were the kind that were canned somewhere in California or came frozen from Safeway. Not like the ones I picked on Tuesday.

I picked them, and washed them and cut off the ends and then sliced them into inch long cuts and then blanched them in boiling water, chilled them in ice water and then froze them, but not until I had eaten a plate full…just plain, no pepper, no salt, no butter. Just plain. They were sharp and sweet. And even though they are frozen now, when we pull them out in November, when the slant of the sun’s rays lay like back porch light refracted off the icy bird bath, they will still be mighty fine chow.
There is something about growing and harvesting beans and broccoli and squash and tomatoes and beets that sets my mind at ease. I don’t know exactly what creates the satisfaction. The work is simple, things I learned long ago that besides the vagaries of the weather and water, seem to work no matter what, and I get a crop and I share it with friends and eat it and put it up. It is ….hmm…is it fun? No, I think it is more than that.

I always wanted to be a farmer since my high school days back in Casa Grande, AZ. The majority of the economic activity there was agriculture related so it was in the blood, so to speak. I even owned part of a farm one time in Lordsburg, NM; a big, twenty-five-hundred acre corn farm with ten wells and houses and a mule out in the trap behind the barns. The farm sat just below the foothills on north side of the Pyramid Mountains and the upper fields were steep with long runs so the irrigation water was like a torrent when it sluiced into the bottom end. We never farmed it. It was in the 0-92 program with the United States government. If we grew zero crops on it, they would pay us ninety-two percent of the historic yield of the crops grown on the place.

We got the farm from a bank in a trade and I doubt they knew about that particular largesse or they probably would have kept it. We spent the money on other things besides seed and fertilizer and tractor parts.

When I told all my farmer friends we were on welfare with the 0-92, they got a little antsy in their pants, because most of them were on some form of income redistribution where the government transferred money from the United States Treasury to their pockets for growing a particular kind of crop, or as in our case, no crop at all. A lot of those farmers used a strategy where they farmed the subsidy program, and not wheat, or cotton, or corn.

I used to get a chuckle when I heard them talking about the state of the nation and all the poor folks in Phoenix and back in Chicago on the take from the government. I pointed out that so was I, and so, in many cases, were they. According to their ways of looking at it, their kind of income redistribution was okay, other kinds not. Occasionally there were sharp words thrown around, some threats and then a wife or two would have to step in to keep the peace.

Once my partner and I palavered about planting a field of beans on that Lordsburg outfit because beans were outside the 0-92 program and we had a patch of land that we could have tilled and sown and watered. According to the professors at the agriculture college the price of beans was high right then and if we hit a lick we could make some money. Above and beyond our welfare payments.

But we didn’t. It might have turned out to be a lot of hot work; sore knees, sore hands, sore back. Instead, I think we went bird hunting.

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On Charlie Yazzie and Chee Begay

Betty and I had dinner last night with friends and we talked travel and places to visit, and the red rock country of the four corners area of the American southwest came into the foreground of our discussions and stuck in my mind all night and into this morning.

It was 1963 and I had turned 16 and my father sent me up to St. Michaels, Arizona, a patch of private ground in the middle of the Navajo nation. I rode up with a bull hauler in a semi-truck loaded with dry ewes for slaughter at the kill plant owned by old family friends. The bull hauler and I drove north through desert, mountains, canyons and plains all night, thunder and lightning and hail, boulders crashing into the highway from the ragged red cliffs up above. It is hard for me to imagine the drought Arizona is having now after living through the summers of 1963 through 1966 when hard rain was plenty.

We arrived at dawn as a damp hint of mist hung on the chilly country dotted with piñon and juniper trees. Scruffy pups ran alongside the road, woofing at the semi tires as the bleats of frightened ewes bounced off the rust-red rocks perched alongside the muddy bar ditch. I recall sitting in the cab, looking out over the harsh land that at that moment was covered with summer grasses. I recall wondering what the Navajos thought of us driving into that valley with a load of ewes, the three bullhorns on top of the cab, each one clarion-blaring, waking everyone up.

After breakfast, the truck driver headed back south to his and my home in the Sonoran desert but he didn’t make it five miles before he went to sleep and rolled that semi. We hurried out there and looked at the crushed cab, the mangled trailer.

The man who ran the kill plant at St. Michaels also owned that truck. He growled and gruffed and huffed and swore he’d mated with a female diamondback and then he disappeared on a seven day drunk, and left his two teenage sons and me to run the plant.

Early the next morning we rose before the early orb peeked over the red ridge to the east. We got in the cab of an Army green Ford pickup. Our frosty breaths created momentary ghosts as we chugged down a tire-worn track and picked up the butchers. They lived in hoogans, the octagonal type, not the newer square hoogans one now sees out on the red, sandy land the Navajos call home. The butchers stood in the dark at each dwelling as we arrived. They wore Levi jackets and old cowboy boots, and wore scarves tied around their graying heads.

We got out and spoke, “Yá át ééh,” and shook hands. Back then, Navajo men did not squeeze hard in a hand shake. I had been forewarned that they did not grip like I had been taught, “like a man,” so though I didn’t like it, I kept my mouth shut. I remember two names particularly, Chee Begay and Charlie Yazzie. My friends referred to these men as “chiefs.” They were probably born before the 20th Century rolled into its own so I recall wondering what they thought of riding in the back of a pickup as the dawn chill slapped their brown, wrinkled faces.

At the kill plant we tied the legs of the dry ewes and then the butchers came in and slit their throats, capturing the blood in shallow pans for making blood pudding. I looked away and thought of the mountains off to the west. Later we watched as Chee Begay, Charlie Yazzie and the others skinned and severed and cut and pulled and cleaned the carcasses that then went into a big walk-in cooler where we hung them on hooks that moved back and forth on wheels that fit into tracks on the ceilings. Each of us got to don a white meat cutters jacket that hung down to our calves and we thought we were pretty hot stuff. I did anyway.

Later in the day, we loaded 55 gallon barrels full of the remnants of the offal, not the offal itself, the guts and stomach were all things that could be stewed and fried and sauteed. What was in the barrels was the contents of rumens and reticulums and guts and intestines, half-digested browse and the makings of manure. It had a particularly foreign smell and I held my nose. The butchers, including Chee Begay and Charlie Yazzie, got in the back with the muck drums and we went to the dump north of Window Rock.

My two friends decided I should get the hang of disposal, so they ordered me to dump the barrels. The scent clambered up my nose and my stomach began to retch. By then the heat was up and the big green blow flies were already circling around, buzzing and diving, as were the meat bees, whose black and yellow bands emanated a ghostly glow in the afternoon light.

The younger of my friends giggled and pulled out a Winston and lit it up with a fancy metal lighter he pulled out of the front of his Levis. He took a long drag and told me to smoke it as I dumped the barrels. I took a drag off the cigarette. The smoke burned my mouth and nose and lungs as I held my breath and turned the barrels over and watched the miasma of leavings slither down the red dirt bank. I choked and almost vomited. Chee and Charlie laughed right then. My other friend came over and handed me a pint of VO and even though I didn’t like the taste of whisky, I took a pull. When I swallowed it, the flavor, or should I say the gnash, of the whiskey caused my torso to shiver and my spine to clack. Chee and Charlie laughed again, almost as if we were friends. I shot them the finger and called them Navajo names I had learned that day. Words I will not repeat in this piece, even if I knew how to spell them. They stopped laughing and grinned at me, or was it sneering, and then they turned away as if to look back over the red ridge to our west and the valley that they called home.

We took them back to their hoogans and yelled,”See you next week,” but they didn’t really answer, just waved their hands back at us without turning around. As we bumped back to the kill plant I thought about those two chiefs, Chee and Charlie, and wondered what they were chiefs of, and wondered if they’d led raiding parties that raped and murdered white women and then I counted in my head and decided they hadn’t been alive long enough. I also suspected I had deeply offended them by calling them names, but when I voiced my concerns, my two friends said, in unison, “Don’t worry, they are only just a couple of old Indians.”

Later that week the three of us were called on to deliver mutton carcasses, some of which had been split in half, to trading posts in Lukachukai, Window Rock, Fort Defiance, Ganado and Chinle…all Navajo towns, and on into the Hopi mesas at Mishongnovi, Shongopovi, Old Oraibi, where the 800-year-old pueblos crammed up against each other. I imagined there were like 19th century New York City high rises. The sharp smell of mutton got beneath our fingernails and on our skin and made me wish for my mother’s hamburger and TV dinner kitchen.

The whole time I was there, the rains boiled up every afternoon and punished the land. We got stuck in the reefer truck, broke an axle on the Army green Ford trying to pull the reefer truck out of the muck. We got in fights, every day, two ganging up on one, the arrangements forever changing. We went back and picked up the pre-dawn butchers again when another bull hauler in another semi delivered a load of dry ewes who bleated as if they knew the end was nigh.

Once, coming out of Window Rock after we went into town and chowed down on burgers and fries and chocolate malts, we slowed. A harsh thunder storm had just forged on into New Mexico as we passed a wagon drawn by two blue roan mares. A thin Navajo dressed in Levi pants and a blood-red velveteen shirt with a huge silver and turquoise squash blossom sat on the wooden seat. He wore a red head band that kept his gray hair in check. I yelled, “Stop, stop, that looks like Chee Begay.” My two friends just laughed, “Naw, that ain’t Chee, it’s just some old Indian.”

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A Day at the Races

I cleaned my office this last weekend and as I straightened the bookshelves, J Edward Chamberlain’s, Horse (Blue Ridge, New York, NY), fell on the floor. Horse is a narrative that laymen can read about how mankind and the horse have developed a somewhat unique, symbiotic relationship.

As I hefted the book, an image of the racetrack vaulted into my mind. Not just any racetrack, but the racetrack at Ruidoso, New Mexico where they specialize in American Quarter Horse racing with the distance being a quarter of a mile, the money pot being in the millions.

Ruidoso crouches beneath the shoulders of Sierra Blanca, a twelve-thousand-foot peak in the southern part of the state. A lot of big Texas “awl bidness” money hangs around the restaurants, boutiques and honky tonks. There is a ski area and more important to horse folk, a racetrack.

One of my father’s younger brothers, Hugh, and his wife Lona Beth, owned a house on the Rio Ruidoso in the older part of town. They had box seats at the race track, too. Betty and I, for a time, lived thirty miles south in the more modest village of Cloudcroft. But we got invited to the track and we sat and watched the races and we bet from the sheet and lost money until Aunt Lona Beth pointed out that one shouldn’t bet the horses. They should bet the trainers and the jockeys and the owners. I thought, but geez, that means you have to know them. She read my mind and smiled as she went back to her racing notes, and then to the window to get her winnings.

The rest of the day I imagined I witnessed(or maybe I really did see it) the jockeys on the favorite horses in particular races pulling back on the reins so that one of the other horse owners could win some money and pay a feed bill, pay the veterinarian, pay for his daughter’s wedding in Telluride or Steamboat Springs.

Right then, I understood what was meant years earlier in the palaver I heard in Prescott, AZ about jockeys holding the horses back. That was in1976 when I summer-long hung out at Bruno’s Buffet just across the main drag from the racetrack. Bruno’s was chock full of horse owners and trainers and jockeys, not to mention the other gambler denizens. I was more interested in the vintage pinball machines against the back wall and the homemade tamales and burritos and of course the Coors and the schnapps and the Dewars and water. But I do recall the men sitting at the bar winking and giggling about shenanigans at the track. Drugs to speed up a steed or slow him down, or her if she was a filly. They fought, too, bringing their competitive natures from the track into the bar where the liquor started doing the talking and then fists started cracking faces and the pointed toes of ostrich skin cowboy boots bomb-shelled into opponents’ soft groins. Humans are a competitive bunch and they sling their drive to win onto the shoulders of all kinds of things: their hands, their feet, their fellow man, their brains tied to poker hands of aces and queens, the back of a horse, a pinball machine.

Back in the early 1970s I used to hang out on Sunday afternoons outside of Casa Grande, Arizona at the weekly races sponsored by the Los Conquistadores, a local Hispanic caballero club. Cars would line up along a makeshift track, their trunks open and loaded with Corona and Dos Equis and Coca Cola and orange sodas from Fanta de Mexico, or Jarritos, and better yet, fresh tamales and burritos, lots of jalapeño and Serrano chile slices laced among the beans and meat. The kind of food that made your mouth burn and your nose run and your head sweat and goosed you so you felt like you might just get out there and run beside those elegant caballos whose owners let them strut and kick up puffs of dust to whet betting appetites. A lot of cash changed hands out there one race after another, the green hundred-dollar notes flapping in the breeze as one man agonized and another rejoiced. Sometimes the tempers flared and men threatened others, but then one of the gentes managing the race stepped in and refereed, negotiated.

Back then I used to work at a large agricultural concern out west of town in the flat Sonoran desert plain below Dick Nixon Mountain and Table Top. One of the owners’ sons, whom I will call Butch, loved racing horses and bought a fancy prancing young dun stud he hoped would win him money and fame. He didn’t ride it himself; he hired one of the hostlers who worked for the company instead. That man was a slight Vietnam Vet whose seamed and ruddy face told stories he would never relate. He sat a horse like he was part of the animal; they reminded me of a centaur. The dun stud and the hostler would lope across the flat, greasewood-pocked ground leaving their caliche clay signature on the wisps of the wind. That dun was a moody, cranky thing and the only man who could handle him was the hostler.

Late one Saturday evening a strange pickup truck and horse trailer pulled up outside the office and some Chicanos I had seen all my life, but did not know, unloaded a big dapple gray gelding who stood around and sniffed with suspicion the eighty-two-thousand head of Hereford, Brahma, and angus cross-bred cattle in the feed pens.

I asked a cowpoke what was up and he told me there was a match race for big money. Of a sudden, cars and pickups began to arrive and the hostler brought the dun out and it snorted and cavorted sideways as the hostler talked soft words of comfort in its ears that reminded me of radio antennae the way they checked out the hubbub building with the powdered dust of the parking lot.

All of a sudden too, big white Panama-hatted cowboys and long-haired hippies and Chicano dudes arrived in large groups, drinking Dos Equis and speaking Español; also a couple of Yaqui Indians who hung back, leaning against some sucker rod fence as they laughed at all the proceedings. And yes, the greenbacks started to flash and a lot of harsh talk, as if words of intimidation from one man to the next would make a difference in how a horse would run. One man had a .357 Magnum six-shooter sticking barrel first in his left rear pants pocket. I hoped it wouldn’t fall out, go off and hit me.

The jockeys jockeyed their horses to the line. A cotton farmer with a long-barreled .22 Magnum said something about the race, although I was more interested in the array of weapons I saw sticking out of boots, hanging on belts. I wondered when the war might start. Was this a horse race or were we going to invade Baja California? All the Chicanos and most of the hippies sided with the owner of the dappled gray. Most of the cowboys and some of the hippies sided with Butch, the hostler and the young dun stud.

A stocky man stomped back and forth between each group, swearing in English and Spanish as the horses snorted and jumped around as if infected with the sense of competition. The bets continued. I kept my wallet in my pocket.

The stocky man flexed his fists like he wanted to hit someone and I heard talk that he liked to drive sixteen-penny nails into railroad ties with those fists. I doubted he could do that and smiled, but only on the inside, as I thought how that might feel, to pound a nail with the fist. Why in the hell would someone want to do that unless to show somebody else up, I reckoned as I inched my way to the back of the cowboy crowd.

While I was watching the hammer-fisted dude slinging his vernacular of violence around, the .22 Magnum reported and as I stood on the toes of my boots I saw those two horses, the muscled dapple gray and the young dun stud, erupt like funny cars at the drag races. They were gone and each of the jockeys, especially the hostler, leaned off his ride, slapping at the other jockey with his quirt. A lot of the men in each crowd were busy hurling epithets at counterparts on the other side and missed Butch’s dun win the race by better than two lengths. An anti-climax, for sure.

I moved back and stood next to the Yaquis, anticipating the fireworks to come. My heart sped up with the thought of some fist fights, a knifing, a shooting; but while the winner’s crowd ganged around Butch, the hostler and the dun, the loser’s crowd quickly sneaked off, leaving a lot of hot-tempered talk about welching on bets and the like.

It’s amazing, I think, how a man and an animal can symbiotically interact and create an entire industry—horse racing—that so perfectly corrals some of the essential best, and worst, of human emotions. The horse usually being the one that does most of the heavy work. The humans creating the rest—the hubbub, the competition, the hate, and yes, the love.

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Science, Spirituality and Water Witches.

Last week I was yarning with a couple of buddies about water witches. I snatched images out of my memory from way back in my life, thirty years almost and longer. We were standing in a RV park in Lakeview , Oregon and I have no idea why I got started on the subject but ever since I told them this stuff, it has been right there, sitting on the front porch of my consciousness, not trying to kick the door of NOW in, but not going away either.

So, here goes. Back in the 1980s my good pal and business associate, Robert Moser and I were involved in a southern New Mexico mountain real estate development. We got government approvals, put in great roads, phone service, power lines but no matter what we did it seemed like it was never enough to satisfy most potential purchasers. They wanted water. I can’t really blame them, since in New Mexico, having ample and suitable water is always an issue when contemplating a purchase of real estate.

Just to show someone that water was on the various properties, we decided to drill a well. This particular lot was a fairly flat spot on top of a pine and fir studded mountain ridge that poked nine-thousand feet into the clouds. It was a pretty good lot and we convinced a well driller to drag his rotary rig up the mountain. We picked a spot after discussing the theory of water, the geology of fractured limestone mountains, and the reliability of water witches. The well driller was a big, gruff man who guffawed when we asked him if we should witch the lot for water. He barked, “You don’t believe in that crap, do you?” I don’t know about Robert, but just being semi-accused of believing in something like a dowser made me roll my shoulders over like I was guilty of some crime.

After a thousand feet of dry hole we quit that well and of course since there is no guarantee of the driller finding water, it cost us plenty. The well had been drilled in a dike that went all the way the way to the portals of hell. While up there cussing that dry hole our surveyor showed up and recommended we call his Uncle Lester about getting the lot witched. The well driller was there so of course we went to pawing the grass and scoffing around but then asked about Uncle Lester. The well driller glared at the surveyor who said, “He’ll give you a good deal. $25.00 a lot and he don’t charge unless you hit water.” What had we to lose other than our lack of faith in the unseeable? The threat of another dry hole was a hell of a lot more threatening than hiring a well dowser. Not that it’s always this way, but right then, greed and spirituality were on the same side.

Imagine my surprise when I drove up to Lester’s house and found out he was damned near blind. I recall sneaking a look around to see if anybody I knew noticed me in front of his house. And to boot, he was pushing eighty years of age and the surveyor and I had to help him get in my rig and he made us stop by Fresnal Creek and cut him some willows sticks, one long one and a forked one that we had to trim down just so. By then I was wishing I was at the bar even though I had quit drinking the year before.

Lester bragged all the way from the six thousand foot elevation where he lived up to the nine thousand foot lot we wanted him to witch. He boasted that when he was younger he never could sleep at night until he met an old Bruja over in Cuchillo, New Mexico just west of Truth or Consequences on the Rio Grande. She advised Lester the reason he couldn’t sleep was because he was a water witch and was sleeping over an underground river. He laughed after he told us that part as if it was the commonest thing, to go home and move your bunk into another room because you were a water witch and couldn’t sleep over an underground river. He said, “And I never slept better and that’s when I became a dowser for hire.” I could hardly keep from breaking out in uncontrollable laughter, so I lit up a Winston and just grinned.

Up on top, we led him to the lot and he put the two ends of the willow fork in his hands and the surveyor helped him negotiate Douglas fir roots, chunks of limestone, bushes and holes. I followed them and kept my eyes on his hands so that when he turned them down I could see for myself what a fraud Lester was.

Not ten feet from the dry hole the willow fork turned its snout down and he said, “Here. Now give me that other willow limb.” He sat on the ground and began to count. The end of the stick began to point and bob up and down where the willow fork had indicated water should be. Lester began to count as the end of the willow stick went up and down with each number he said, or maybe the numbers came out of his mouth as the end of the stick pointed at the ground. I tried to see how much of all this he was causing with his hand but I really couldn’t tell. When the point of the limb stopped bobbing up and down he said, “There. You got strong water at two-hundred ten feet. Better than ten gallons a minute.”

I scoffed but on the way down the hill we had him witch four more lots, just for fun and since it didn’t really cost anything, why not? Two weeks later the well driller hit 12 gallons a minute at 208 feet. I didn’t know what to say but we sent Lester his $25.00 check and when we hit another well, on another lot, right where he said, we sent him another check.

I am not a spiritual or a religious man, so I am not sure how to explain all of this although yesterday I read something interesting by the journalist Arianna Huffington. She was blogging on her experience of receiving an honorary doctorate at Brown University in Rhode Island and the professor who acted as her guide. He is a biologist who believes that Darwin and the theory of evolution can be reconciled with the notion of a supreme deity, a God. He says that given enough time, science will repeatedly show that the mysteries of life are the work of a supreme being, or at least that’s how I read her post. Maybe water dowsing is something that can be explained by science.

I am not sure I feel that science and a supreme deity are the same thing, although lately things in my life seems to act as if they were meant to happen and I think back to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time where he ruminates on the creation of the universe. What he says intimates to me that sometimes it seems we were put here to see it all happen, black holes, super-novas, galactic movement, water witching. Sometimes I feel that way, that I was put here to see what happens, and for what purpose, to report it? To just witness it? For what purpose, but then I think about all the random stuff that slams you and then it’s like, No, everything is random, within the sphere of the laws of physics and there is no intelligent design.

All of this doubt reminds me of a man I knew who was an accounting client of my mother’s. He was a trained aeronautical engineer who became a real estate developer. Although a Catholic, he was a person who believed in the rules of physics. Later in his life he got into buying farms so that he could control and later sell the farms’ water rights. He and I were talking farms, wells, water rights and water. I asked him if he ever drilled wells on those farms after he purchased them. He said he did. I asked him if he ever used a witch. He said “Yes. Everytime.”

I said, “Do they work?”

He nodded. I must have let my skepticism show because he shrugged and said, “I don’t believe in water witches but I never drill a well without one.”

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Vernal Equinox

Last Sunday, when the equinox bumped into Boise, Idaho, the wind scattered last fall’s leaves around and around the patio. Sullen clouds in both the east and west grayed the day as the full moon reveled in its gravitational attachment to earth, or so I imagined. Betty and I ventured out and tried to capture on camera this “supermoon” but haze and clouds obscured our moment. Like some kind of super moment, I thought, or wished, a marriage of moon and season, but actually it was just another advent of spring.

 Most people I know like fall of the year best, but I think I am partial to spring. In Idaho, I definitely believe it is the best time of year. Southern Idaho is a harsh landscape to the eye, anyway, but now the grass will green and the hills will take on an ephemeral, emerald hue. In northern California, where Betty and I just visited, spring was erupting in greens and yellows. Like blares of horns announcing a new symphony, they showed up along the roads, in the meadows, in the marshes, in the vineyards, and the apple orchards. Yellow and green mixed with dabbles of fruiting-tree blossoms painted pink, and lavender and white.

When Betty and I lived in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, lambasting snowstorms roared in during spring. Twenty inches on the first day of April, and later in some years, and you would think that spring would never arrive. But when it did, the grass’s music rang as true as any tune out of the beaks of mountain bluebirds, and the pollen of Douglas fir scattered over the land like Moses’ manna, a dusky gold that blanketed cars, roads, patches of ice, the ferns that struggled to recover from a cold winter.

In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, spring, if any amount of rain showed up, would turn the sand and powdered caliche a short-lived green, peppered orange and purple with Indian wheat and filaree and six-weeks fescue, pink-eye weed, poppies and lupine with buds as big as the end of your thumb. Spring is a strange time in the Sonoran Desert, but balances on a short span of time caught between a winter, which many places call summer, and a summer which Dante might have imagined while penning The Inferno. I recall going to work one April morning at 4:30 under a clear, starlit sky. I rolled down the window and rain drops blew in. A storm front thirty miles away announced its life-giving arrival. In the star-spangled sky I was seeing Lynx and Leo, Canis Major while tasting the pure dew of raindrops on my tongue. The anomaly shocked me into understanding how the things we think are opposites are really just parts of the whole. 

In Vietnam, where I spent two springs, the first was wet and hot and delivered doses of heat prostration, leeches and bamboo vipers; the song of the AK-47 rang out, too. But lucky for me, the song was just slightly out of tune. My second spring was cold and wet—fog and mist and fog and mist and rain, rain, rain, and the song of napalm and M-16—death and decaying flesh’s stench were the only flowers I noticed in 1968. If beauty existed, I don’t recollect it. The only beauty I saw that spring was the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro when my plane landed in California, where it was ….green, green, green.

Back here in Boise, the starlings seem to be a harbinger of spring. Three weeks ago they arrived in my back yard, black bodies in late winter plumage, speckled with yellow and hints of red and indigo. They strutted around in my grass and then got on line like Marines policing the parade ground. They goose-stepped across from end to end, probing and gleaning I don’t know what…worms, larva? It’s gotten to be a ritual here: every year, just around the turn of spring, they show up, front yard and back, c leaning up whatever it is they clean up.

Last spring robins nested in the crook between a rain gutter, an eave and the corner of our house. That little drama went on for several months.  We photographed the three blue eggs, the nestlings dressed in their voracious voices, their first flights crashing on the ground; rising, then falling, then rising and flitting like tunes on an iPod over to the ash tree in the corner of the yard.

Once, in an earlier spring, Betty lay on the couch listening to robins in a neighbor’s pine tree. The young ones were raising a ruckus with their constant ravings for more food. But a raven barged in and gobbled them up. You could hear mom and pop robin as they shrieked for what…. for help, or to scare the raven away? I don’t know. Whatever their goal, it was futile. I watched it all transpire as Betty put her hands over her ears to defeat the dissonance.

This bird world is a nasty place sometimes—spring, summer, winter, fall—but not unlike our own world (and I mean that in the sense of our own ken). I suspect the drama of birds reflects the drama of our own existence, without the BMW or the HD TV, but still it reflects, emulates; birth, life, nurturing and death. Winter and spring.