Amidst this Spring’s starkly unsettled weather, we are also in the middle of planting season. Here, nearly everything needs to be in the ground by the end of May if it is to grow properly. It’s a tricky balance, though, in a season when the weather can change in the beat of a bird’s wing, from a high of 70 one day to snow and ice the next, as happened over the weekend just past. After a winter in which the snow on the peaks was mostly sparse, one dome now wears a solid white blanket.
Irrigation season has arrived, and soon it will be time for Wings to bring down the water. Here, people use a more passively locution to describe, perhaps an unconscious recognition of the fact that, to a degree, the elemental force that is water will do what it will do, despite our best efforts to corral and control and direct it. After taking steps to bring it down into one’s carefully crafted ditches and route it across the land, when gravity and gradient actually accomplish their work, the tendency is simply to say, almost with a shrug and a prayer of thanksgiving, “The water came.”
In truth, it requires work.
The canales and weirs are old, and maintained in the old way, by hand. Oh, some of the weir plates now are old, heavily oxidized iron or weathered wood, and in a few places, concrete has been poured for stabilizing purposes, but the ditches themselves are mostly carved into the earth by hand and blade of shovel, and cleared anew each year by hand, as well. Doing it the old way preserves the surrounding environment in ways that earth-moving equipment can never do, and it also preserves the tradition that insists on a respect for the entire habitat of this place.
Protective coverings are likewise built by hand, strands of barbed wire strung tightly and twisted to hold the gates. Occasionally, a sandbag or two will be placed strategically to help direct the flow, but much of it is still done via earthen dams turned by shovel. We do the same in miniature in our ditches here, and I have stood in waters calf-deep, racing downhill around my boots, and I have turned the earth to reroute the flow, all beneath the warmth of sun at noon and the chill of stars at midnight.
It’s a laborious process, and coming from a land where the rains were always sufficient unto the need for our fields, had I not done it myself, I would not appreciate the work that goes into it, nor the way it ties one to the land itself.
For Wings, of course, it’s something he’s done since childhood, simply the way of things. Some years are more difficult than others, of course; this year, we’ve been blessed with late snow and early rains, and while climate change is the culprit, it will make for an easier planting season, and for that we are grateful.
Still, the heavy work is ahead: Before long, Wings will make multiple trips up the dirt road that leads toward the Rio Lucero for the purpose of shutting some gates and opening others to direct the flow downditch toward the land. If the recent precipitation has filled the waters at the source, the stream runs high and hard, bubbling up beneath the iron gates, splashing against the bundled strands of barbed wire overhead and burbling across the shadows they cast.
Downstream, the flow evens out, slipping effortlessly beneath the strands of the wire fence and coasting softly through a hollow dug in the grass.
From there, it will spread — not merely downward but outward as well, reaching the vegetation on either side, slowly working its way over to the trees. It’s an efficient system, and a communally effective one: The person routing the water to his or her own land on a given day receives the greatest benefit, but the natural canales and loosely directed flow ensure that some water is absorbed on each side along the way, and overflow soaks the lands that line its pathway down.
It’s an agricultural practice that seems odd to outsiders, but here it is merely yet one more aspect of daily life from mid-Spring through Summer (and despite the dominant culture’s tendency to credit colonizers with its invention, it’s a tradition here that predates European awareness of anything beyond its own shores). For those unused to it, the labor involved often makes it seem prohibitive; in truth, the greatest challenge is timing. It is simply the way of things here, and the thoughts of those with land in need of the water turn to it unconsciously well before it is time to bring it down.
Sometimes, though, it’s instructive to look closely, to block out the surrounding structures and protections and tools and guides, and simply look at the water itself.
Even in this desert land, this place where we know that water is life, it becomes far too easy to take its existence for granted. The fact that it may, this year, be slightly more abundant at a slightly earlier date may also fuel that sense of carelessness if we allow it to do so.
And so every year, Wings photographs the water as it comes, capturing in a permanent form reminders of this elemental force, this gift of Spirit, this clear and colorless substance that nevertheless keeps us alive. Once in a while, he finds a vantage point that allows him an image of nothing but the water itself, boiling over the red earth of the ditch, rising and falling and conjoining with the air to bubble and breathe like a living being, to turn and whirl and leap in its own graceful dance to the drum of the earth’s own heartbeat.
It has a life of its own, and a spirit to match, but once in a while, it allows us to harness both for our own benefit. And once again, we will bear witness to new life returning the land, a rebirth begun anew with Wings bringing down the water.
~ Aji
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