Water.
It was the one thing last year denied us, almost entirely. Now, successive fifty-degree days are turning two feet of snow fast into the first medicine.
The Gorge embraces the largest watershed in the region: the Rio Grande, although to the truly local population, those indigenous to these lands, it has other names. When Wings captured these images more than a decade ago, it was in the thaw of relatively dry year, the water line visibly low.
Today, that water line seems generous.
Drought is no stranger here; it appears and reappears, irregularly but no less cyclically for that. The cycles are extending now — lengthening, deepening, the most arid years coming with a frequency both greater and faster. Even our “normal” years are no longer normal, and yet our gratitude for their occurrence is outsized now.
Water is a powerful teacher, both by its presence and even more by its absence.
At this time of year, it’s easy to forget what the absence of water truly means. When what otherwise is running medicine is transformed into a quagmire of mud, its gift is disguised as obstacle and chore.
We have the water here today, but dressed mostly as slush and mud.
To see water running in its purer form would require another trip down the Gorge.
It’s not much distant — a half-hour’s drive to the mouth of the canyon, far less as the crow flies. We have been past it on eight occasions so far this year, four round-trip journeys in as many weeks. On each of those occasions, the water has been running hard and fast, if not so high as might otherwise be expected this time of year; still, it’s better than the nadir of last year.
On this day, one in which we are thankfully not required to travel nearly so far, the canyon walls will by now be only slightly snowier than in these photos from a dozen years ago. Blizzards move like the water here — hard and fast, all the fury of a wildfire manifest as the crystalline structures of whirling ice. Their aftermath moves rapidly, too; it takes only a day or two of concentrated sunlight to decimate the ground cover, exposing bouldering slate and basaltic rock interspersed with small squat piñon, the grays and greens of a late-winter earth the same as those of the thawing waters . . . the colors of medicine.
There is not much time left for winter now, not in its official form, anyway. Spring is already nudging its way in, both seasons ready to begin their annual dance of protracted farewell and belated settling in. Perhaps more than at any other seasonal threshold, these two cling to each other like two traders bargaining for time, two warriors jockeying for position. Between them, they summon storms of many sorts, conceiving a new world and birthing it in a whirl of snow, in the running of the waters and the organic magnetism of the mud.
When it all comes clear again, the green will be visible: of the earth, the grass, the new-leafing trees; of the waters large and small and their running medicine.
We have only to wait, and work.
~ Aji
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