The storm is gone, even from the peaks. Here at Red Willow, our small world shivers beneath a clear turquoise sky.
The mercury read zero at dawn, with a wind chill of nine below. Wings was up just before five, and said then that actual temperature was minus five, with a wind chill of some sixteen below. We have not had such readings in years, and never, as far as either of us can recall, this early in the season; the subzero temperatures usually arrive no sooner than the last week of November.
Blue skies notwithstanding, this is dangerous weather.
It’s impossible to live here for any length of time without developing a healthy respect for the elemental powers. Or perhaps I should say that it should be impossible; truth be told, every year, in every season, someone who originally hailed from elsewhere challenges their force, and loses to one degree or another. The people who belong to this land (and to whom it belongs) have always known better. It’s how they have survived for more than a millennium, many even today without such contemporary conveniences as heat (beyond a woodstove or small propane tank) and running water.
It’s all a question of knowing how to live in harmony with one’s world.
There is precious little harmony in the wider world now, Spirit knows. The irony is not lost on me that even as we dig out from near a foot of snow in subfreezing days and subzero nights, two states away the world is on fire. We are waiting for word even now regarding one of our friends whose home would have been in the middle of the conflagration. With such devastation, modern technologies are useless; we can’t expect to hear from her for some time yet. And so we have filed our report, and we wait, and hope. And pray.
Here, our challenges are far less than they have been in years past: We have a real roof over our heads at long last, with thick insulating adobe walls and two well-functioning woodstoves that heat both levels superbly. Our pipes have not frozen (for the first time ever in winter weather); the water heats in good time. The truck, an old ’73 Ford, was unwilling to start this morning, but it roared to life after a few hours’ worth slightly warmer winds, and our old car started on the first try.
We are blessed, and well aware of it, but after years without such pure luxuries as these, we know better than to treat the earth and her children with anything less than the utmost respect.
The images in this space today were taken almost six years ago, in the earliest days of 2013, when our world plunged into a similar post-blizzard deep freeze. There was . more snow on the ground, then, but it was the season for such events. At the moment, there is green still visible where Wings has plowed, and the red willows have not yet gone so red. Still, the imagery looks remarkably the same overall.
It is also true that there is not as much snow on the peaks: Above, El Salto shows itself almost entirely white, while today much of the brown craggy cliff faces show through beneath a white dusting. Still, we have not seen this much snow on the mountains in several years, and it seems a welcome return to normalcy . . . even though we know it’s not.
Here at Red Willow, there is perhaps no “norm” any longer, unless perhaps one counts simple unpredictability. We have spent more than a year buried beneath the sands of drought the likes of which almost no one alive is old enough to remember. Even for those who do, this one is of a decidedly different character, weather driven by climate change and earth riven by its attendant damage. This was the first year we were utterly unable to irrigate — how, when there is no water? — and the first time the fields were left to burn themselves brown beneath the sun. No gardens, no corn, almost no wildflowers, and trees that turned autumnal shades of gold in the first week of July. “Summer” consisted of part of June and the first days of July, with a return to temperatures in the eighties in October for the third year in a row.
The boundaries of “normal” are not merely changing; they shift shape and shade faster than Coyote himself.
Climate change or no, this corner of the world remains spectacularly beautiful. It’s simply beautiful, at times, in ways different from those to which we have long since grown accustomed. In this kind of weather, the chamisa is gilded by the sun, the earth spangled with diamonds. It is a cold sun that can work such magic; warmth destroys clarity, and with it, the jeweled nature of the world.
It’s a lesson to us: Consistent comfort may be easy, but it is the harsher angles and harder edges that reveal the kind of extraordinary beauty not found in more temperate latitudes.
The snow gives us another gift, too: It reveals the form and shape of the earth in ways that are invisible to us without it.
What looks like a vast expanse of white, no variation, no change in height or depth, becomes a gently undulating surface beneath the sun and shadow. We see Mother Earth’s body in new ways — the curve of a shoulder, the line of a flank, the roundness of face and angle of chin. She rises and falls, flows, seems visibly to breathe.
And we find our own space in her cosmos, our own place within and upon this cool clean surface of her skin in ways that remain hidden from us in the midst of warmer winds.
Because the snow shows us the lines and the shadows, reveals the hidden spaces of the world. For a time, however brief, it shows them to us, and we can see that they are beautiful.
~ Aji
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