Neither moon nor peak is visible now, albeit for partially different reasons: the new moon is only two days off, meaning that the moon, when it rises, will be barely more than the tiniest sliver tonight. That is, of course, if it’s visible at all; the crags of El Salto are entirely hidden at the moment, shrouded behind a white veil of snowclouds that have brought us no more than a few flurries here at their feet.
After the recent rain and a thaw sparked by a mercury rising inordinately high for late winter, we live once again in a world of visibly red earth dusted here and there with white.
The outside world gains a distorted view of this whole broader region, tending to think of New Mexico as entirely desert scrub — when, that is, it regards New Mexico at all as a part of the same country within this continental land mass. People still think of “the Southwest” as unceasingly hot, arid and drought-ridden, with no rainwater and temperatures insufficient to produce snow.
Even in the southern part of the state, where such a description is a bit more apt, there is a monsoon season, and snow is not unknown in winter. But here, snow is a seasonal norm, and so is the cold; we spend more months in coats than we do in shirtsleeves.
Still, such flurries as we have had today were unquestionably a spring snow: soft and scattered and light, tiny individual flakes drifting like microscopic feathers, as much horizontal as vertical before vanishing in the moment they land. The air seems impossibly cold for the season, the chill running damp and deep to the bones. And still the earth reasserts itself, insisting on showing its rich red-gold face beneath trees still silvered in the wintry light.
We shall have occasion, soon, to travel a bit further south than is usual for us. It will be warmer there, and yet they have had plenty of snow and freezing rain, too. And, like us, they have their own peaks that turn coral in the light. They, too, are Indigenous lands, inhabited by Wings’s distant cousins and traveled by his direct ancestors. This was once an enormous and extended trade crossroads, one that brought goods up from lands far to the south and down from the Arctic north, that connected travelers and traders from one ocean to the other.The trade consisted not merely of a sharing in supplies and small trinkets, but in ideas, in traditions, in images, in words. It was a trade in whole worlds, criss-crossing a red earth that was, climatically and otherwise, a world unto itself.
It still is such a world, colonial anthropogenic change notwithstanding. The first day of official spring may be near three weeks off yet, and there may a great deal of winter weather still behind it, but the earth has already begun to turn its own face to the sun. The leaves and flowers will come later; this is only the groundwork, so to speak. But despite a chill wind, we walk now upon a warming earth, one ready to emerge from its snowy sleep and show itself in the light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
