It’s ninety-three degrees. That number will climb, substantially, before the day is out.
This is not normal August weather here, even accounting for the truth that we have no “normal” now.
If August is historically the green heart of summer here, climate collapse and the record drought attending it have stripped the land’s body to the driest of bones. There is no rain, no water; the Great River is running at a trickle, relatively speaking, and a filthy, polluted, contaminated trickle at that, the shallow water that remains filled with sludgy yellow silt from the mudslides up by the old moly mine that its corporate owners are still, whole generations later, refusing to remediate properly.
This is life downstream, downslope, downwind from a Superfund site during the worst drought in more than twelve hundred years.
Our own water, other than that which falls from the sky, come from the Rio Lucero, up in the backcountry in a somewhat different northerly direction. As little as ten years ago, we were ruing the labor involved in irrigation three or four times over the course of a spring and summer, the hard, heavy work of bringing down the water and sending its medicine across a greening land. The land remains, but the medicine and the greening, not so much, and I find myself nostalgic now for those midnights, calf-deep in freezing water in the dark, turning small earthen dams the old way, by hand with a shovel, to reroute the water across the fields.
The fact that, should I be forced to find myself out there at midnight tonight doing exactly that would no doubt also find me swearing a blue streak? Entirely beside the point. Yes, we complain during the process; that’s human nature. But we’ve always been grateful for the conditions that gave us such an opportunity. And now? Now, we feel their loss even more deeply.
It’s nothing compared to what the land feels, of course. There are still lines in the soil from the streams last Monday’s cloudburst carved through the earth, rivulets of mud now hardened into place like the striations in sandstone. The plant life, such as it is, is hard, spiky, spiny, sharp — grasses once green and flexible now brittle, pointed ends capable of stabbing through socks and skin.
The sky above is a merciless blue, a few puffs of white scudding here and there on a listless breeze. The trees are yellowing rapidly, whole sections gone gold, even whole smaller trees on the opposite side of the highway dressed for November now. Overdevelopment continues apace, as does the current colonial invasion of wealthy exploiters with no sense of community and no conscience with which to grow one.
But we remember. We know what it was like when there was a “normal” here, and we know the abundance, the true prosperity, of which this land is capable. And as always, we will outlast their short, greed-focused attention spans and their destructive profiteering. True, there will be much destruction to repair, and most of the remediation will come to fruition well beyond our lifetimes, but that is only all the more reason to do our own work now, to do what we can to ensure that such renewal becomes fact, even when we are not here to help.
The image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation is one from a summer’s day a decade or so ago, perhaps more. Some of the transfer data suggests that it comes from May of 2015, but that might only be the time I loaded that batch of photos onto the drive. What I can say unequivocally is that it comes from one of Wings’s trips upstream to bring down the water, turning the weir to route it down to us . . . and to points along the way both above and below our lands. He shot a series of photos that day this one among, called Below the Wire, showing the small stream flowing crossland, under the strands of barbed wire and along a natural path it had long since created for itself between the stands of piñon and other trees.
I suspect, in truth, that it was in in fact taken in May: The bits of golden-brown grasses and a few remnant dried leaves attest to a land not long warm enough for full leaf and flower yet. May would also likely have been our first round of irrigation for the warm season, and back then, the latter half of the month was also planting season, already warm enough for the earth to take fragile seeds and keep them safe. That’s no longer the case; freezing nights persist even into June now, even as the daytime temperatures rise higher than normal, making it impossible to plant according to our usual cycles.
But what shows here in the photo is a land still mostly in good health and harmony. That, too, is something we no longer have. And that makes me ever more glad that Wings chose, occasionally, to memorialize such mundane seasonal work, for now we have a record — of what this land, stewarded properly, can do, and what it might be induced to do again.
It’s inspiration, motivation . . . it’s also ignition, of anger at what has been done to earth and waters and sky, here and elsewhere, the kind of righteous rage that keeps us from surrendering, keeps us fighting for its existence.
And our own.
Resistance is never optional. Neither is the fight itself, not at times like this. We are committed to the restoration, the rehabilitation, the renewal of that which is even remotely within our control, returning the sight of medicine across a greening land to summer’s normal state of affairs.
This world needs us . . . and we need it.
~ Aji
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