Last week’s snow may not have amounted to much, but that forecast for this week is expected to deliver even less.
Still, hope is a stubborn thing, especially at this time of year.
We are likely going to need to make one more trip down to Santa Fe before the holidays, and in a good year, that requires planning around the forecast. This year, not so much, although even in this drought, dangerous conditions can still materialize seemingly out of nowhere. But the two thoughts combined to put me in mind of a series of photos Wings shot nearly three years ago, three of them captured from roughly the same vantage point at two different times of day on an earlier winter’s day trip to Santa Fe and back. One appears here today; the other two will bookend tomorrow’s post. And while they both feature a Great River enshawled in a little snow cover, even then, the operative phrase was “a little.”
We have not had a real winter here for four years or more.
We made just such a trip a couple of weeks ago. The purpose of our journey, and its results, were wonderful; the drive itself, far less so. It’s a trip we had to make many times over the course of this year, and we were dismayed to see how low the water levels were at the start of the summer; dismayed further still to see that it had not stopped the rafting companies from exploiting the fragile watershed throughout the entire warm season in pursuit of tourist dollars.
But our journey two weeks ago showed a river in extremis, water levels so low that new sandbars had formed, stretching from one bank to the other. Worse, throughout the entire trip through the Gorge, both down and back, we saw not a single bird in what has been one of their traditional habitats, both migratory and permanent.
And when I say “not a single bird,” I mean exactly that. It’s not merely that no birds paddled on the surface of the water or swooped low overhead in search of fish; the fish supply was probably long since destroyed by a combination of drought and colonial exploitation. But there are always wild birds soaring overhead: ravens and crows, magpies and the occasional jay or flicker, finches and sparrows (and, of course, the much rarer sighting of crane or heron, hawk or eagle). Not a single bird appeared on or in the water, and not a single one flew overhead.
Our habitat is truly in jeopardy.
Wings has, of course, captured countless historical images of our small world in better days, but the memory of what it was and should still be makes the contrast all the more stark now. Still, it seems useful, occasionally, to revisit those images, to remind ourselves of what has been as well as that for which we should work again . . . and to be grateful for the knowledge of both.
Today’s photo meditation, on a mid-December Monday when the mercury is far too high, returns us to the starkly colorful beauty of real winter here: a post-storm world of fast-flowing waters and a hard-edged land and sky, when the snow sits softly upon the fields beneath the sharply watchful gaze of several ridgelines. Wings caught this shot in mid-afternoon, as we made our way back home, only the very edge of the green Great River visible in the foreground, with a sage-studded field wrapped in remnant snow newly visible under the shifting angle of the sun.
It was a reminder, too, what a gift snow is here: the water that outlasts the sun’s fire. On our way down that morning, the field was wholly in shadow, the ground cover protected from melt. By now, the hour was late enough that the snow would remain for one more night, ensuring that it merged in a hard and thirsty earth slowly enough to be absorbed properly.
At the time this was taken, drought had already been transforming itself into its twin process of aridification for a year already. To say the land was thirsty was already a phrase rapidly losing all meaning; now, three years on, the chemical composition of our soil has altered dangerously to the point that mere water is no longer enough.
No longer sufficient, but certainly necessary, and we no longer have even that.
On that winter’s afternoon, the air was clear and calm and bitterly cold; the sky was a brilliant hard blue and much of the landscape as green as the water, thanks to the profusion of sage and small evergreens that lined the river’s banks. There are fewer of those now, just as there are fewer acre-feet of water racing downstream between those banks.
But the intensity of the colors and the clarity of the light remain. Occasionally, a few clouds appear around the horizon; now the forecast suggests a small dusting of snow for Wednesday. It won’t be enough to fill the river — it won’t even be enough to cover that small field. But it will be a place to start.
Because it will be not rain, but snow — the water that outlasts the sun’s fire, at least for a time, and brings the land a deeper healing.
It brings that medicine to us, as well.
~ Aji
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