Mid-November: thirty degrees too warm and not a cloud in the sky. There’s smoke, of course; the giant plume from the prescribed burn west of us has been casting a pall over the whole southwest-to-northwest horizon for days. But when it comes to anything that might provide a healing for the land, there’s no relief in sight.
In theory, of course, we might have rain and or snow this coming weekend; that’s what the long-range forecast predicts, anyway. We’ve seen enough such forecasts disintegrate into thin dry air to know better than to rely on it now.
We have a dry earth, dry grass, but not a landscape that yet looks like impending winter. It’s easily explained; it’s been far too warm. But getting the outside world to realize the deadly nature of this problem, one that it regards instead as a clear benefit, seems impossible now.
We don’t even have a landscape turned golden by season and elements, as should be the case now. By mid-November, even in drought years bereft of late-season grasses and wildflowers, this becomes a place of a gilded earth and stormy silver light. Now, the sky seems incapable of mustering a single cloud, just as the air is unable to produce enough cold to let whatever grasses remains turn their natural dormant gold.
In truth, our customary state of affairs would have seen those grasses — and the invasive weeds that have perforce mostly replaced them now, a product of the colonial misuse of the land outside our borders — blanketed with early snow by now. That, of course, has not been our norm for more than half a decade already, but even so, we would have had sufficient cold to allow the land to rest.
No longer.
And that is cause for grief, but also for fear . . . and also, for a renewed commitment to the work of repair and rehabilitation, of restoration, of the fundamental stewardship that has been a part of our way since the time before time.
The image that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is illustrative — specifically, of that all-too-brief period between the end of ordinary November weather and what we have now, which belongs more to September. Indeed, the photo itself comes from that very period: Wings shot it in digital format four years ago almost to the very day, exactly one week from today in November, 2019.
It’s one that he shot up by our gate, just inside the edge of the highway near the end of the day. The two old cedar posts were once intended to hold a sign; now, they serve as perches for the birds (and impressive subjects for photography, given their relationship to the light). On this day, early winter storms had continued to gather, building and receding again, on all sides. A future post (likely next week) will feature one that he shot moments apart from this one; that one faced the opposite direction, northeast, and showed the dark blue banks of clouds amassed above golden land and light. This one, facing southwest, showed some disintegration of the storm, softer blues beneath middling grays, the white caps of the clouds lit silver by the setting sun.
It proved a haunting contrast with the gold of the earth below, an ordinary color for the season, if not an ordinary form of plant life. These are the invasive tumbleweeds that have bedeviled this land in recent years as the drought has deepened to the twelve-hundred-year-record mark: the same form of tumbleweed that popular cultures uses, erroneously, to characterize these lands, never once realizing that they were introduced by colonial populations who stripped the earth of this place of everything indigenous that could live and thrive. Wings does his best to strip them out, but the local and regional official mismanagement of land and environment has set us an impossible task; for every patch removed, several more sprout and survive.
Still, at least in the year in which this photo was taken, the temperature cooperated; it was, and clearly had been for some time, seasonally cold, sufficiently so to let the green weeds, despite their height, to go the deep rich gold of dormancy. The tall strands, studded and gilded beneath the marbled blue and silver sky, provided the perfect setting for the two cedar posts, branched and twisted and seeming to reach for the iridescent light.
In their way, they linked earth and sky, reaching higher than we ever could, if not really that high at all in relative terms. That’s a function of our own limited perspective, but it also draws our eyes to what’s possible, if we refuse to be bound by lack of imagination, of visions or dreams.
The world needs our imagination now, more than ever — needs our visions and our dreams, and frankly, those of our ancestors, needs fulfillment of their prophecies, too. For this corner of the world, we need a way to imagine, and then to create, an endless hoop of autumns where a gilded earth and stormy silver light are not merely the norm, but a norm of good health and harmony. We need the return of early winter, of ready snow and a land no longer dying of thirst . . . and a population committed to protect it.
~ Aji
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