The workweek dawned clear and bright, if a little hazy, but now, in late morning, the clouds are moving in rapidly. They will hold no rain, only cover, but they carry with them a feeling of unease, as though our small world here is holding its breath, waiting for something and wondering whether it will be benign or terrible.
The arrival of the clouds is a welcome development, actually. Aside from their essential gentleness and ability to take the edge off the day, their presence also tends to reduce the violence of the winds slated for the afternoon. And while some of the wildfires around the state are finally seeing some sort of containment, there is a new one just over the mountain in Mora County, ignited late yesterday, and not only is it entirely uncontained, but the surrounding areas are on evacuation alert, with voluntary evacuations already under way.
And a few moments ago, Wings pointed out smoke in the area of Truchas Peak. It’s unlikely, given wind direction, that it’s from the many-miles-distant Cook’s Peak plume, which would mean that there is yet another ignition nearby.
That, in turn, means that much of our cloud cover now is not actually “cloud”; it’s a thin veil of dove-gray cloud mixed with a low-hanging haze of smoke and remnant dust still suspended in the air from yesterday’s winds. Even at this distance from the flames, we are both struggling with the effects of the haze: congested sinuses, a nagging hoarseness, an intermittent cough that has nothing to do with pandemic sources. As though the pollen were not enough, nor the dust and dirt, now we have a far earlier far season — and a far more dangerous one.
And so it is that this day finds me nostalgic for spring seasons past, when at least the wind was usually the only real danger, and the only other inconvenience the mud from late snows. It’s historically been the case that we get at least one last big snowfall in mid-April: a dozen inches or more overnight and into the early morning hours, virtually all of it melted by noon.
The forecast into early May makes clear that there s no chance of that now.
Of course, time was, too, when spring was otherwise inevitably clear here, no daytime cloud cover and certainly no rains, and to the extent that has changed, it’s been welcome. The image above shows just such skies, and it was welcome then, too, if colder than it is now: mid-April in 2014, some three years or so into such seasonal changes for this time of year. We had had to travel down to Santa Fe to set up for Wings’s one-man show at the Cocteau Theatre, and remarkably for April, we were granted a cloudy day in which to make the drive, one with occasional bits of mild precipitation but nothing to impair the roads. We stopped at one of the many scenic points along the way, one of the bends in the river through the Gorge where the banks were still heavy with cottonwoods in new leaf (and a few old warriors serving mostly to house other life now).
There are fewer such trees along those banks now, but those that remain will be leafing already. Here, in our small space, the only leaves in sight are the faintest tips on the globe and weeping willows; all else is still bare branches studded with catkins opened and dripping strands of pollen. But as the day wears on, the skies look more and more like those from this moment captured eight years ago, and it’s a good reminder that there is in fact a gentle green to come, even if it has not reached us yet.
When the world around us is in both metaphorical and literal flames, ablaze in the harsh and deadly fires of colonialism, a few soft gray clouds and a little green are welcome now.
~ Aji
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