Seasons

To most of the world, the desert’s seasons are a secret. That’s why a few human visitors each year, relying on the obvious dryness of arroyos that look as if they hadn’t seen water for decades, park in them and lose their car, or their lives.

As everyone in Doña Ana County knows, the seasons this year have been even more extreme than usual: a record freeze in February that killed plants that had been around for decades; a record drought; and some violent rainstorms of late. It’s been cheering to watch the revival of various plants that appeared dead from the freeze.

Meanwhile, Dael and I begin learning more about the rhythm of the desert.

Our friend Bud, who has lived on our land just north of Dona Ana county for more than a quarter-century now, records everything. All summer dozens of hummingbirds buzz and battle around his place .  (After all, for migrating birds the Rio Grande is the Interstate, and our land borders the river.)  Every year but one they have returned on the same day. Only once in all those years, he says, have they failed to appear on April 1^st. They were two days late this year, perhaps because of that freeze..

Among our friends is this fellow I photographed behind the house a year ago, when we were just visiting.

We were quite taken with him. Dael discovered him under a datura leaf. Datura plants are poison to us and many other creatures, but he loves ‘em.   He also felt safe in them from predators:

He’s a sphinx moth caterpillar, I’m told.   Manduca sexta.

To the thrasher, he’s delicious.

To our neighbor, he’s the enemy.

He’s also known as a tobacco hornworm in South Carolina, and mistakenly called a tomato hornworm elsewhere; because along with datura he likes, and destroys, tomato and tobacco plants.

We were happy to see him – or, more precisely, one of his descendants – again this year. We photographed him hanging upside down from a tomato plant; and here (at right) he looks as if he’s peering over a wall, looking for more plants to destroy. He has a neat face. (It took me quite awhile, actually, to realize that the end with the red horn -- green in young ones -- is the rear.)

This year, now that we live here and have our own tomato plants, he did us a good deal of damage. His green is so indistinguishable from the curved leaves of a tomato plant that you can look right at him a while without seeing him. Rather than killing him and his brethren, we carry them around back to various datura plants.

More recently we have found a several more, including some young ones, on a bush near the house.   Here’s a shot from this morning.  It suggests how effective her camouflage is.

At the same time, her elder brother whose photographs we took only two or three weeks ago, is no longer a caterpillar. At dusk and sometimes dawn, we seem him fluttering about. He still favors the datura plants, but also likes bird of paradise, the desert willow, and even . . . the hummingbird feeder:

He’s a colorful fellow, and big for a moth.

I hope to get a better shot of him soon, without some ugly man-made feeder in it.

Meanwhile, here’s a quick video bit in which he visits the desert willow (the other night) and the feeder (this morning). Unfortunately, the feeder remains of interest to others:

Dael says these critters live just 30-50 days.  They "wander" in search of a good spot, then pupate underground.  (They spend 18 days in their tiny burrows.)  As with hummingbirds and orioles and much of the natural world, the males are more colorful than the females.  There's even a word for that, I just learned: sexually dimorphic.

I'd like to say something profound about the brevity of their lives and ours, but it's dusk, and perhaps I can improve on that video right now.

Desert Photography

In the Desert

We live in the desert, a world so quiet and calm that folks passing through briefly on the way from their cars to their houses might think it was peaceful. In fact, it’s a constant battle for survival.

In early afternoon I spot an unusually large bird flying low down an arroyo behind our house. Dael says it’s one of the golden eagles who nest higher in the foothills of the Organs. As we watch, the eagle dives suddenly and comes up with a rabbit. The rabbit is heavy enough that the eagle lands to enjoy his meal, so I wander out that way with my camera. 

I don’t get any particularly good shots of the eagle, but on the way toward him I spot a desert tortoise, upside down and long dead in the arroyo, so close to the house I’m surprised I haven’t seen him before. On the way back I turn him over, and look closely. The shell is intact, and rather an appealing pattern; and his head still stares out from the front of it, though the eyes are now just huge holes, like the eyes of the mummies in Guanajuato.

It has been a difficult year: record drought more than 200 rainless days surrounding a near-record freeze. Did the turtle die of thirst? Heat? Cold? Did a coyote toss him around in a vain effort to break through his shell? (I don’t think so.) In any case, he has a certain dignity, in death. Most of his body has dried out, or been consumed by ants; but those eye-holes keep on staring.

Hours later I’m standing on the old wooden deck out back, watching the late afternoon light catch Scott’s Orioles and make the yellow parts of them explode with brightness. Just below I spot a rabbit, just lounging around like a cat or a dog. The light’s lousy, except for the way the late sunlight back-lights the rabbit’s thin ears. But I’m laughing as I shoot the picture.

Next I pass the hummingbird feeder just as one of the birds pauses to fuel up.

The sun, even lower now but still bright, turns the bird’s throat a bright purple. As I walk, I glance at the screen on the back of the camera to see how the focus was.

Suddenly there’s someone else just in front of me, looking at me, motionless:

a snake, seven or eight feet of snake. He isn’t the young rattler I saw a couple of weeks go. I think he’s the local bullsnake. After a startled moment, we just stare at each other. He flicks his tongue, I flick my camera, and we both know neither means the other any harm. (Bull-snakes, it turns out, are among the continent’s largest. They sometimes use their similarities to rattlesnakes as a defense mechanism, beating the ground with their tails to simulate the sound of rattles; but sometimes people shoot them out of fear that they’re rattlers.)

I call to Dael, and tell her to join me but not pass me. The two of us stare at the snake. He’s beautiful and strong. He stares straight ahead, not much caring that we’re there, and then I realize why: hardly a foot in front of him, so still that I’ve been standing here a couple of minutes without seeing it, a baby bunny stands beside a small cactus. Apparently he hopes his stillness will deceive the snake. It ain’t working too well.

We watch awhile, wondering how it will turn out. Finally the bunny, afraid of us or the snake or both, jumps and tries to run, but bumps into the rocks, and the snake strikes and misses. The bunny, scampers away along the bottom of the rock pile. The snake turns and follows, but it’s not a close race.

We follow too. The snake slithers along through the rocks in the direction of the bunny. His sinewy form catches the reddish late-afternoon light. We feel glad the prey escaped – but apologetic for the snake’s disappointment. Maybe our presence distracted him at the critical moment.

We’re also grateful. It’s too bad something usually has to die, in order for something else to live; but it’s a fact of life, and – as with most facts of life – it’s better to see it clearly than turn away.

The deer eat the leaves off the pomegranate tree for which we dug a hole in this difficult terrain just a couple of weeks earlier. The coyotes’ nocturnal howling and the occasional scat of bobcat remind us to keep our cat inside. The occasional scorpion, tarantula, or black widow reminds us to pay a little attention even in the house. But these inconveniences also remind us we’re a part of something.

P.S. Below is a 47 second video of the bull snake on his search for the escaped baby rabbit:

Coming Home

New Mexico has felt like home for a long time, although I’ve been elsewhere too long.

In August 1969 I was a New York City cabdriver. I’d dropped out of college in 1967 to work with kids in Harlem, and then started driving the cab to make money. Earlier in 1969 I’d delivered a drive-away car to someone in Arizona. Initially I drove 48 straight hours, on plenty of coffee and cigarettes. At sunset on that second day I hit Albuquerque. The sun was setting. It was beautiful. When I got back to New York, I kept thinking about New Mexico. I decided the best way to move here would be to go back to college. UNM wanted a $10 deposit with an application, but NMSU only demanded $6. Easy call.

I thought I’d be here a year, but stayed until August 1977. I wrote poems and fiction, shot photographs and movies, worked on a Hollywood film, lived out on a farm in Brazito, advocated an end to the Viet Nam War, camped in the Gila, and eventually worked as a full-time journalist, starting a Las Cruces Bureau for the El Paso Times in February 1974. I loved it here. When I left, I figured I’d be back in three years. It was home.

It took a long time to get back, by way of Massachusetts, San Francisco, China and Tibet, Washington-D.C., Perú, and other stops. I’ve worked on films in Kuwait, been a trial lawyer in San Francisco, wandered around various countries on the cheap with a camera, published a few poems, and ridden a lot of miles on motorcycles. For decades I visited New Mexico frequently, always planning to move back here. I only managed it when I finally met Dael. When I returned from Perú in late 2008, we went out together and realized, pretty much instantly, that we wanted to be together ‘til death parts us. She fell in love with New Mexico, too, and is of stronger character than I, so all my babbling about getting back to New Mexico finally got real.

Home is the oldest and probably the smallest home out in Talavera, a stretch of desert I used to dirt bike on my way up to Soledad or Ackenbach Canyon or Cuevas. There wasn’t anything out here then but a few dirt roads and, hidden up in the hills, the Cox Ranch. Now there’s a string of often obscenely showy mansions. It’s sad.

But in late 2009, when we were looking at houses in town, Kevin Wilson showed us this place, and it seemed like us. Small. Unpretentious. Open to the four acres of desert land around it. Breezy. Quiet. And, we could afford it.

We find it hard to drag our asses into town. There is too much to do at home. Besides planting a few trees and just watching the world go by and trying to write the occasional poem, there’s a surprisingly varied world of flora and fauna to keep up with. It’s a full-time job just watching (and, yeah, photographing and videotaping) the comings and goings of hummingbirds, road-runners, woodpeckers, various kinds of birds and snakes, vinegaroons and scorpions, deer, coyote, and the pair of golden eagles we see at a distance now and then.  I find it endlessly fascinating – but will mercilessly edit whatever I write about it here, I promise!

Being back in Las Cruces has engendered a mix of feelings. Of course I’m appalled at how much bigger it is, even as I enjoy some of the benefits of that growth, notably a greater variety of restaurants, a minor league baseball team, a greater selection of food (at the Mountain View Co-Op, Toucan, and the Farmers’ Market), and the extension of water-lines and electricity out to our stretch of desert.

People I drank with or argued with (or both) have become names on buildings or street-signs. Bob Munson, Jake Hands, and others.

The hot spring in the Gila we used to backpack to and camp at for days without seeing anyone has a name, and the Sun-News recently printed a detailed set of directions to it.

A guy I wrote about during perhaps his first trial, when he was a visibly green young lawyer, has been a judge for years.

The Fountain Theater, where I acted in a couple of plays, is now home to a great film society that shows excellent and relatively new films that otherwise wouldn’t make it to town.

Much more, though, is familiar. Particularly the intimacy with some old friends, and the quickness with which new friends sprout and grow out here.

This blog will share, with friends and strangers, some political and cultural observations, as well as notes (and photographs) on the wars and habits of the various creatures that surround us out here – and perhaps other matters, as well.

In a general way, the new blog results from the move. Home again. More specifically, I’m starting it today because I’ll also be starting a column soon in the Sun-News, a fortnightly Sunday column. In a sense, it’s like coming full circle: when I was the Las Cruces Bureau Chief for the El Paso Times (a fancy title that initially referred to just me and my dog – we lived in a school bus and didn’t even have a telephone until the Times paid to install a telephone pole next to the bus - but eventually included a staff and a small office on Water Street) I wrote a column three days a week; so maybe I’m back where I started.