It’s warm and windy, the trickster patterns of sprig refusing to releasing their grip on the air of summer now.
These are dangerous days, the kind when a single spark can ignite a conflagration, wildfire springing to life fully formed and racing across lands already dry once more. the forecast suggests a week of monsoonal patterns beginning on Thursday, but the land has three days of hot, dry, dangerously windy weather to survive before then.
It makes our work harder, yes, but also adds directly to the workload itself. There is work that we cannot do in such conditions, requiring us to find alternative paths — and such detours are, of course, never the shortest nor the straightest line to the goal, but rather, usually a tortuous, obstacle-ridden trail that adds new labor to that already facing us.
Some actions must be delayed altogether. Anything that risks creating sparks is forbidden now. And of course, while the heat means there is no need for indoors fires, it also makes the added labor, particularly that performed out of doors, more dangerous, too.
After two days of heavy, steady rains, it took only one day of high winds and higher heat to dry out the earth completely. There’s no moisture left — nothing visible on the surface of the soil, nothing tangible to the touch, either in the dirt itself or on the stalks and leaves and blades of grass. Wings is at work in the evenings, watering it slowly in the cool, darkening hours when it can do the most good, allowing the water to soak into the soil rather than evaporate.
In a place such as this, there is no letting such medicine go to waste.
It’s why we have multiple rain barrels, and they will be at work through whatever storms may come this week and next, collecting the rain as fast as it falls, then being routed out to a thirsty earth in the places where it’s needed most. In this place, summer has always been a season of gathering sky, of drawing down the water and collecting, conserving, preserving it, that our small world may survive, and we with it.
The subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation summons the imagery of such practices, if perhaps somewhat inadvertently, but no less effectively for that. It’s a photo that Wings shot in digital format in early June, if memory serves, of 2013, on a brilliantly sunny midday outside our old gallery in the village. The sky was that perfect clear turquoise blue of early summer, in these last days before the rainy season really gets under way [or, perhaps more accurately, got under way; it’s mostly a past-tense descriptor now], studded here and there with traces of puffy white cloud. The roof of the ancient adobe home provides a clear line of demarcation beneath earth and sky, particularly as the home itself is made of local earth, the rich red-gold adobe clay of which these homes were first constructed more than a millennium ago.
The real subject of the image, of course, is the giant blackware pot being lifted skyward. It’s one of the spectacularly thin-walled post created by Angie Yazzie, a master potter from the Pueblo whose work we carried regularly when we had the brick-and-mortar gallery. The man holding it up to the sky is the buyer, a Native man of another Pueblo who happened to come into the gallery that day and seized the opportunity to own one of her famous works.
That pot was created with the same micaceous clay used in the original adobe of these thousand-plus-year-old homes: red-gold, and infused throughout with mica, which is what creates the shimmer. I’ve seen tourists mistake local pots that are fired to a high polish for copper, the actual metal — that’s how powerfully the mica makes the clay glow. It’s also why the first colonial invaders here, in search, as always, of great riches, were primed to mistake the walls of the old village, glowing in the light of the setting sun, for the legendary [and utterly fabricated] “Lost Cities of Gold.”
So why is this pot black instead of coppery, earthy, a mix of red and gold and brown hues?
It comes from the firing process.
I’ve written about this here before, and in the context of this very pot, at some length:
Blackware has long been a common form of pottery at some of the other pueblos; Maria Martinez, the famed potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo, was one of its 20th-Century masters. The type of blackware for which Ms. Martinez was known, however, was a very different sort: thicker, more solid, with a spectacularly glossy finish accented with incised patterns and sections of matte-finish surfaces. Her pottery, too, began with red clay, only turning black as a result of the firing process (although her clay was matte, without the presence of mica). The color of a finished pot depends on several variables, including the temperature of the oven during firing, the length of the firing process, the material with which a particular piece is covered, and how closely it is placed over the pot. In the old days, dried animal dung was a popular cover, beginning first, most likely, with that of animals such as buffalo, then with that of horses, and now, with the much more readily available cow dung. Dried, it becomes relatively lightweight, and can be placed closely over fragile pieces without breaking the pots or marring the surface. Generally speaking, the closer the cover is placed over the pot and the longer it is left in place, the darker the color of the fired pot will be, and the glossier the finish.
Angie, however, specializes in the micaceous pottery for which Taos Pueblo is known. More, her particular area of expertise lies especially in the creation of pots that are, in relative terms, nearly paper-thin, particularly at their edges. Despite the spectacularly large size of some of her pieces, they are exceptionally delicate and extraordinarily fragile. Such works require extra care in the firing process to prevent breakage, and Angie’s solution is to use dried tree bark as a cover, lightweight and fibrous and softer than more ordinary covers. [She also once told me that the most effective packing material she has found to preserve her pots during shipping is something no one would every suspect: Pampers-style disposable diapers. They provide extra cushioning, and their design permits her to pull the lightweight padding over and around her pots in a way that covers them entirely.]
This was a truly phenomenal work of traditional clayware: giant-sized [and Angie is known for outsized works], and yet impossibly thin, from base to lip [for which she is also known]. She has lately been creating geometric pieces in blackware finishes, some for traditional altars, others purely decorative, and one day, I intend to own one of her square or rectangular prayer bowls or plates. [I suspect that will require a lottery win on my part, which presents a difficulty, since I virtually never play.]
And when the buyer lifted it to look at the pot’s broad, thin base in the light? Wings’s photographer’s eye immediately compelled him to capture the image in that moment.
It’s a beautiful shot entirely on its own, but it calls to mind something else, too: the ways in which our peoples collected rainwater, for drinking, for cooking, for bathing, for storage for future use. And it’s a practice, despite the full amenities of running water, that we still maintain today, this work of gathering sky, because in a land where rain is relatively scarce, there will always be a use for it.
It’s not without a sense of melancholy now, though. Last year, scientists published research showing that there is no longer a single place on earth where rainwater is not contaminated, no longer truly safe for consumption. It’s the heartbreaking reality of a world whose every climate is in collapse thanks to human malfeasance: The one source we thought have a pure water, that which falls from the sky, is no more. And yet, even rain that is thus adulterated is better than none at all, and the latter forms an even greater risk here now. And so we collect it, store it, attach hoses to the barrels and release slowly at the bases of the trees, one more last-ditch effort to keep as many of them alive as possible now.
Not so very many years ago — significantly less than a decade — we did not have to worry about it, although we did it anyway. Back then, we could be assured of enough rain every summer not only to keep our trees and stands of red willow alive, but to allow acres of the region’s best hay and our many gardens to thrive.
Those times are gone.
But whatever else summer has become here now, this is still a season of gathering sky, and we will be hard at the work of it as long as the clouds conspire and the rain falls.
~ Aji
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