As the snows recede, spring’s formal arrival this year is on the anticlimactic side.
Most years, March’s chief feature is not the cold of the remnant winter, but the gale-force winds that herald the warming season. We have had the winds, but a month early and of shorter duration. We will have many more, and for much longer, but for now, the windy season is relatively mild.
Mild, too, is that other feature of this month (and of spring more broadly), a feature that escapes the notice of others but is an annual benchmark by which the locals who yet live by the land gauge the year to come: the flow of the waters.
We are, much like the Rio Grande itself and its tributaries, rushing headlong into the warmer months, planting season and irrigation and cultivation all moved up on the land’s now-altered timetable.
The green waters of the Wild Rivers turn the turquoise of the spring sky as they flow southward, limned on either side by shale and slate and ancient basaltic rock studded with sage still silvered from the cold. In a good year, a year that follows a winter of heavy snows, the runoff is epic: a violent thrashing, tumbling, rushing torrent of white-capped waves, bubbling high and burbling over the banks as they race southward toward drier climes. It may be a smallish river, as such things go, but it forms real rapids, the kind that will happily dash the unwary on the rocks as it flees all efforts at harness or control.
Even further south, where the grade levels out between the less arduous terrain of the lower peaks, the current remains strong enough to carry one away.
At this time of year, the downriver waters turns to turquoise glass, but of the as-yet-unsolidified sort: It is glass in its thick and flowing form, what looks from a distance like indigo syrup, but is thin enough to sweep a being downstream and drown it in its depths in the beat of a bird’s wing.
It is, indeed, only the birds who dare venture upon the river at this time of year — the water birds for whom its cold torrent holds neither risk nor fear, but only life itself.
It is a season for the goldeneyes, those whose windows upon the world are the same color as the river’s sunlit banks. They bob and skim and race across its surface, ascending back into the winds only to swing low and scud across the water, leaving a trail of watery blue diamonds in their wake.
Back in the lands that are the heart of Red Willow, the Rio Pueblo will be flowing at its greatest height and speed of the year, save perhaps for those monsoonal storms of late summer that add momentarily to its volume.
We are now in the late days of the long ceremonial season, those that cross the threshold from winter into spring, and the Pueblo remains closed to outsiders. When it reopens, one of the early orders of business will be the cleanup of the river and the ditching system, a communal effort that ensures a safe and healthy water supply and an adequate flow for irrigation.
Here, on the lands that extend toward the farther reaches of its boundaries, individual families will be readying for an early planting season.
It’s done the old way here, bringing the water down from the reservoir of the Rio Lucero, allowing it to flow through great culverts and small channels until it reaches the weirs, a system of makeshift gates that are turned and changed by hand to direct the flow first onto what set of lands, then onto the next.
Steel plates and rebar and barbed wire are all relatively recent additions to a system that predates the colonial presence by centuries. But piñon posts and the labor of strong backs and weathered hands remain as reliable as ever, and as important to the process, too.
Of course, the people of this place have always known that water is life, but they have also always known, too, that, at bottom, water goes where it will.
It’s why, on this first full day of spring, Wings said to me those words that are so much a part of this place and its spirit: The water came.
It’s a truth known well to those of this land, that water is an elemental power and animating spirit, and while we are permitted, to some degree, to harness its power, it comes and goes as it pleases, and only the unwary or unwise challenge it too much.
And so this morning the water found its way down to this land, wending its way through ditches still overgrown from winter, trickling down, down, down and around, and it now flows, slowly but surely, into the pond to pool on the dry earth at the bottom.
As of this moment, there is not enough water in the pond to call the water spirits, nor enough warmth, either. It is only the smallest of puddles, surrounded by a bed of what can barely be called mud, dry earth that is, at least for now, no longer entirely parched.
But the water spirits will soon come: the bullfrogs who hide themselves deep within the rushes and reeds and water stalks, the grasshoppers and their kin who paddle industriously across the pond’s surface, the dragonflies and damselflies whose dance of love forms a conjoined heart.
But not all the water that flows here does so across the land. Some flows in rivers and seas of sky.
There is an old traditional design found among the work of Native silversmiths of this region, one that appears mostly around the wide band of plain rings. It looks much like ocean waves, and I’ve seen it so described by non-Native dealers, always with such assurance.
It’s an image of water, of a sort, but it does not represent ocean waves.
It’s a symbol of clouds.
This is the season when the wave clouds appear, long high rivers of white across the vaulted blue. They hold water, yes, but not enough to reach us. In lieu of the rain, they give us a gift of another sort: the beauty of rippling waves across a blue lake of sky. There were some perfect ones today, toward the west, but I was busy holding a horse and had no camera nearby. These are from Friday, a day the outside world celebrated in honor of a Catholic saint from Ireland — and the day that, here, the weeping willows first participated in their own wearing of the green for the year, leafing out earlier than usual.
Here, it is the season to celebrate the water.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
