Quenching and Slaking

or A Dry Heat

Not All of N.M. Burning 

Or so said the headline of a recent article in the Albuquerque Journal.  The governor had issued a message encouraging tourists to visit, pointing out that the wildfires raging in the southern part of the state really cover only a small part of the whole, and that most places are still open for business as usual.  But the headline made it sound as if the fires are so bad that saying what isn't burning is easier than saying what is.

The largest fire, the Whitewater-Baldy fire in the Gila Wilderness, has seared almost 300,000 acres, or 464 square miles.  It's 87% contained, but in the most rugged, inaccessible terrain, "islands" of fire are still burning.  The Gila will have to wait for the monsoon rains in July to quench the blaze, to extinguish it completely.

Quench is such a wonderful word, wet but with a snap to it:  as if squelch and crunch are in cahoots. It's a word that's crossed my mind often this week, the first of summer, with the sun at its zenith and temperatures in Albuquerque mounting to 99°F/37C while humidity levels sink to 4 or 5%.  This is the one time of year when walls around a small garden, trapping and concentrating heat, do not help.  The garden is thirsty.  The spring plantings are struggling.  While the established things can take the heat, I'm doing a lot of hand-watering to keep the new ones alive.  Every so often I forget one—or two, or three—or don't judge its needs quite right.  (Prairie smoke/Geum triflorum:  who knew it would be so fussy?)  After two or three days the survivors among the younglings, despite thick mulch and deep watering, are already thirsty again.

I know how they feel.  I don't think I've stopped being thirsty since moving to New Mexico, and summer is something else again.  Summer is thirsty with exclamation points.  With ashes from the latest fire in the bosque blowing on a hot wind, stinging your eyes and catching in your throat, a drink of cool, clear water is a precious thing.  One glass follows another, all day long.

Thirst isn't really something you can quench.  Slake, yes—another wonderfully wet word; a slurp in league with a lake.  Slake comes from slacken, to let up, to ease.  You can slacken thirst, offer it a little more play on the line.  But you can't extinguish it.  You can't put it out.  You may think you have, but in a little while you, like the garden plants, will be thirsty all over again.  The only way to quench thirst for good and all is to stop being alive.

I've always seen thirst, whether my own or the garden's, as kind of a nuisance.  It's a need, a neediness, when there are more interesting things to do than to stop for a drink of water.  In a way, though, needs like thirst are really signs of life.  If we stop needing, we'll have stopped living.  As the old saying goes, where there's life there's hope—and what is hope but another kind of thirst?  You certainly don't want to quench it as if it were a wildfire, something dangerous and out of control.  Instead you rejoice when it's slaked by even a trickle of whatever is water to your spirit.   That trickle satisfies like a long, tall drink of water in a dry heat.

Trickle:  a drip befriending a tickle.

At least for a while.

Watering Holes

or Birds of a Feather

When you turn on to New Mexico highway 247 in the little town of Corona, this is the sign that greets you:

U.S. Highway 285, 48 miles away.  The next event on this road isn't a town.  It's an intersection, and the next intersection—the very next time you see a cross-road—is 48 miles away.  (Bonus:  you can't get lost on NM 247.)  Not even a little county road meets you until then, nothing but the posts and crossbeams marking the dirt road entrance to a ranch here and there.  You might meet another vehicle somewhere along the road.  Then again, you might not.  You'll see small herds of black Angus lying in the blue grama grass and cholla or congregating around a stock tank; you'll probably come across some pronghorn antelope grazing.  Crows, hawks, yesterday even a badger (a badger!); toward evening maybe some mule deer.  But people?  Likely not.

The scenic route between Albuquerque and Dexter, in the southeastern corner of the state, zigzags along various roads through some 200 miles of low mountains, high plateaus, and scrub desert.  It reminds you what a large, empty place New Mexico is:  2 million people in an area larger than Poland—and half of them live in Albuquerque.  In the ranching areas heading south, there's a lot of open rangeland, and not much else.  When you do come to a town, the parking lot at the local watering hole is usually full.  Folks drive for miles to meet in company over a green chile cheeseburger and a drink, to enjoy being social animals for a while.

My sister and brother-in-law's house is a watering hole in its own way.  Their home near Dexter is the kind of place where strays drift in with the tumbleweeds and needlegrass:  cats, dogs, skunks, waifs in general, and the occasional sister looking for a Thanksgiving dinner.  You can be assured of a good meal and good company (human, feline, and canine), and hey—if you ever need de-worming, well, they probably have something for that, too.  A holiday done right is also an oasis of sorts, a pause in your journey through the year, a chance to flock together with others of your kind and be refreshed.

I've been thinking about watering holes because of the more-or-less traditional, day-after-Thanksgiving excursion that my sister, my nephew, and I made to Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge along the Pecos River east of Roswell.  Like the Rio Grande's Bosque del Apache, the wetlands there are the winter home to snow geese and sandhill cranes—possibly record numbers of them this year, as the continuing drought in Texas sends waterbirds elsewhere.  During the day they go off to feast in cornfields, but when the sun begins to set they return to the shallow waters that keep them safe from night-time predators.  Only once have I seen a sandhill crane alone, and it was standing sentry (or had maybe been put in time-out).  They are highly social creatures, impressive in numbers and in their apparent singleness of thought and purpose.

When I returned home from the holiday and went out to the garden, I startled a trio of goldfinches, which had been perched forlornly on the empty birdbath making little "tsk"ing sounds.  They don't ever bathe in the birdbath, but they do drink from it; I'm not sure what other water sources they have in the neighborhood.  Cleaned and refilled, the birdbath now welcomes them to congregate on the rim of its garden-variety wetland once more. 

And here I am, playing on the World Wide Web, that watering hole extraordinaire, where we flock together to meet in company and enjoy being social animals (of a kind) for a while.

If nothing else, driving through the desert does fixate you on water...

Open Space

A curve-billed thrasher (I think) on cane (or tree) cholla overlooking Albuquerque

or Going Wild

A day for small wildnesses—whiptail lizards, chickadees, scrub jays, the kinds of things you find in the foothills on the outskirts of town in a park where mountain bikers race through and artists stand contemplatively at their easels.  The Elena Gallegos Open Space Park in northeast Albuquerque at the base of the Sandia Mountains isn't exactly wilderness, but it flirts with it enchantingly.  I spent a couple of hours moseying around there last Monday, surrounded by the drone of cicadas, and serenaded by the hiss of lizards passing through dried grasses, rustling through dead leaves:

A New Mexico whiptail lizard (I think)

It was a day for remembering what "high desert" really means.  Compared with the shady bosque along the Rio Grande, with its cottonwoods and willows, the piñon-and-juniper habitat in the foothills is exposed and inhospitable (though still enjoyable on a June morning).  And it's parched.  We're holding at 0.19 inches (5 mm) of moisture for the year so far, and up here you know it.  The grasses have "kindling" written all over them.  Where the cool greenery in the river valley offers an easy beauty, higher up, away from the lifeline of water, things are rougher around the edges.  But there's still beauty to be had in plenty.

The view from a well-placed bench—juniper and cholla, with some prickly pear lurking in the grasses

One of those beauties, of course, is the sky—the grandest, most spectacular feature of open spaces in any western landscape.  I wonder sometimes if mountains seem wilder than plains simply because in the mountains you can't see as much of the sky at once.  A huge sky puts things in perspective:  a six-inch lizard (plus tail) would be exciting and wildlife-y in the mountains; its presence would hint of larger and more spectacular things out of sight behind the next tree.  Under the open sky it's a cute little lizard.  Cholla ("choy'-a") can get large enough to tower overhead, but they always look small under the sheer, horizon-spanning mass of sky. 

But even among the spines and barbs closer to the ground, beauty is not far away:  yucca seed pods, opening up like flowers; the perfect domes of cholla buds; the "swallowed coin" roundnesses in the living stems, and the wind-flute airiness of the dead ones; the way prickly-pears echo the tumbled rocks they thrive on, the twists and turns from one perfectly rounded pad to the next.

Yucca seed pods, cholla buds (the flowers are magenta), and living and dead cholla stems

Cholla "trunks"

Prickly pear dribbling down the side of an arroyo, shaded by scrub live oak (I think)

I've been thinking lately about a comment that Dave, the Anxious Gardener, made a couple of posts back, about how on the one hand New Mexico seems like an alien environment (especially to his own garden in Sussex), but then on the other hand we grow some of the same plants and fight the same pests.   Getting out in the open space and taking a good look around made me aware of just how domesticated the gardens here are.  I mean, for Pete's sake, in my last post I was rambling on about Easter lilies, and in this one I'm watching out so I don't step on a cactus.  We really have wrested gardens (and lawns and shade trees) out of a land where theoretically they don't belong.

You can see the green(er) Rio Grande valley near the horizon line, about 1,500' below the altitude of the park.

It's a little nerve-wracking to realize that quite so clearly.  Words like "unsustainable" and, well, "unsustainable" keep flashing on and off inside my head.  I'm reasonably responsible with water now, but am jolted into thinking about the next step—perhaps "undomesticating" a little bit and planting more really wild things.  It wouldn't have to be anything radical—just small wildnesses.

Let the Easter lilies beware...

______________________________________

Desert humor

Taking Flight

or Against the Sun

Perhaps it's because I'm usually there on winter afternoons when the sun is low enough to catch in feathery seed heads and dried grass stems, or perhaps it's because those afternoons glow for weeks in my memory, but I always think of days in the bosque—the wooded area along the Rio Grande—as backlit days, seen against a scrim of radiant light.

I had heard some sandhill cranes fly over the garden on Saturday, headed due north, so high that they could barely be seen—so high that they weren't just moving from one cornfield to the next but had to be set for the long haul.  They were probably just the vanguard of the migration to come, but in the next few weeks the cranes will be taking flight in earnest.  I will miss their creaky purr once they go—they are among my favorites.  So, wanting to see them once more before they leave, I took advantage of the three-day weekend to spend an afternoon at the Bernardo Unit of the Ladd S. Gordon Waterfowl Complex about 50 miles south of Albuquerque. 

The cranes were there in the thousands.  The thousands.  I cannot get over the sheer numbers of them.  With my car parked on a dirt road between wetlands on one hand and a cornfield on the other, I sat on the hood for over an hour and—I can't even say "watched" them.  I experienced them flying past from pond to field.  A grouping of a dozen, then another, a few odd strays, another dozen, perhaps a hundred birds a minute.  A brief pause, enough for a handful of breaths.  Then another series of small groups, another hundred birds.  A pause.  Another group, stream after stream after stream.

And all the while that purr is filling the air, first on one side, then another, from one V higher up, another farther out—and then suddenly a group flies past in silence, so that you can hear the air whistling through their wings, beating with each downstroke.  Their shadows play along the ground, while light shimmers off their wingtips against the sun; the red spot gleams on their foreheads.

A little later, from a bird blind overlooking the wetlands:  the cranes can't see me and are no longer veering to one side or flying high in wariness.  I am surrounded by rushing wings and that primal, throaty call.  The thrill of wildness runs through me—heart leaping, I find myself wanting to shout, "Yes!  Yes!  Wait for me, I'm coming!"

(Fortunately, they are just going to the next corn field, and I can follow in my car.)

Later still, between wetlands and cornfield once again, I am waiting for sunset—a sunset free of telephone wires and rooftops and antenna towers.  Shortly before the sun skims the horizon, the curfew sounds from every voice at once, not only from the cranes but also from ducks and geese and songbirds and crows, a free-for-all of a warning bell.  The fields take flight as bird after bird returns to the water side of the road to roost, their silhouettes dark, almost shapeless against the lowering sun.

At one moment, overhead I can see all their different models of flight at once:  the frantic wingbeats of ducks, the air singing shrilly around them; the Canada geese flapping just as frantically, but on a larger scale; the steady thrum of the cranes, their wingtips turned gracefully upward even as they struggle for more height; a flock of blackbirds rising and falling in clouds, like the day's ashes blown on the wind; and above them all, a lone hawk circling, its wings from the distance looking perfectly still.

In a haze of gold, backlit by the sun, the cranes are returning home.

In Our Element(s)

or Staying Off Balance

The breeze this morning was a gift from our friends in Canada—fresh, brisk, invigorating.  And, not to sound critical or unappreciative or anything, it was also rather...cold.

The sun, on the other hand, was strong and warm—warm enough that despite the cool 23° temperature I could take advantage of a day off work to spend some time on the patio.  Dressed from head to toe in black to soak up the sun's heat, I was perfectly toasty.  Wistful, perhaps, to be all dressed up to be in a spy movie and then not to have one handy, but toasty.

The contrast between wind and sun was a delicious one, the line between cold and warm sharply drawn.  Each was experienced with the same intensity at the same time—they reminded me of a sink in an older house, where the hot and cold water run from separate taps.  It was the kind of day in any case where you're vividly aware of wind and sun, a giant blue-sky day free of clouds from horizon to horizon, the kind where you soak up freshness, space, the blue of the upper atmosphere, the white-hot ball of sun burning its arc across it.  I guess I don't normally experience wind and sun quite so independently of each other as I did today. Their separation had something bare-bones about it; they were reduced to their elements:  Air.  Fire.

Earth.  Once I started thinking about elements, earth wasn't really hard to find.  In the garden plenty of bare earth still shows, whether in the bed I haven't yet had the energy to mulch with gravel, or in places where the winds have stripped away the bark and leaf mulch.  At this time of year, it is a dusty place, and a microcosm of the New Mexico landscape in general, where plants always seem to get stuck playing second fiddle to the plain old ground.  Usually, every wind carries a comet's tail of dust along with it; today's didn't, and the earth stayed put.  It was kind of nice.

The only element missing from the picture this morning was water.  That's really no surprise in the high desert—if I had to come up with an elemental recipe for Albuquerque, it would be something like three parts each of air, fire, and earth to one part water.  (Mix until crumbly.)  The normal balance of the elements is one that's out of balance. 

Even for here, though, things are dry.  Last week's snow and ice didn't yield much moisture, since the wind evaporated them before they could melt.  We really haven't had much precipitation since a wonderful rain in December, and the ground is dry for a long way down.  I was trying to decide this morning whether to water when it warms up this weekend—whether to tip the balance a bit more in favor of moisture, in favor of the young plantings that probably don't have the roots to withstand prolonged drought just yet—or whether to leave the balance off-balance, and let the plants' need for water play second fiddle to earth, air, and sun for a while longer.  Normally when I try to fix things like that, I mess them up instead, so for now it's probably better to let the balance take care of itself without my interference.

After all, in the wild the plants don't seem to mind second fiddle.

Mi jardín es su jardín

or
Share and Share Alike

I expected gardening to be about plants; I didn’t expect it to be quite so much about morality.  Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice describes morality as the struggle to balance the needs of the self against the needs of others.  A variant on the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, it brings the occasional (frequent?) tension between the two into the foreground in a way that I find rather a relief.

I had originally planned my garden as something approaching a potager, with native fruiting bushes and Mediterranean herbs in a semi-formal design, and vegetables grown in containers.  I live in a new, urban infill development which, when I moved in, was still surrounded by vacant, weed-infested land.  I was the first of my neighbors to plant anything, and that first summer, every leaf-roller, aphid, potato leaf-hopper, flea beetle, and cabbage moth in the neighborhood descended gleefully on my fledgling garden.  My infant trees were leafless by July, every tomato had withered with curly top virus, and the vegetable greens were all eaten away to the midrib.  Only the native plants and herbs survived.  (You can pretty well bet that any plant native to New Mexico does not need a lot of coddling.)

I read more widely about organic forms of pest control and, at my sister’s recommendation, came across Sally Jean Cunningham’s Great Garden Companions.  Cunningham suggests creating a welcoming environment for garden beneficials by including habitat plants, introducing water at ground and (human) waist height, and interspersing nectar-rich flowering plants among your edibles.  This attracts beneficial insects (and other wildlife like toads and birds), which will then keep the pests down to manageable proportions.

Since then, I've tried to apply Cunningham's principles, which are partly about attracting, but essentially about sharing.  The bird and bugbaths are always filled.  The portion of my garden given to flowers and habitat plants has grown, and the part devoted to edibles has shrunk.  I grow vegetables primarily in a 2’ x 4’ “micro-garden” (the main planting area is about 15' x 15'), and while I still have fruit bushes and herbs, the rest of the garden is “beneficial” planting.  The air hums with honeybees and bumblebees.  Mr. Jackson overwinters in my potted mint.  Finches maintain a running commentary from the tree branches.  And I have seen hoverflies, orb weavers, lace wings, praying mantises, lady beetles, and parasitic wasps enjoying the flowers, the water, and the aphids.  The pests are minor irritations rather than plagues (though the leaf hoppers still get to my tomatoes every year, confound them!).

In “sacrificing” growing space to foster an ecosystem, the ecosystem has given back to me.  In giving more of my garden over to nurturing the urban wildlife, the part I have reserved for myself has flourished.  My harvests have increased (and the headaches have decreased) as I have learned to balance my own needs against the needs of the creatures in my environment—even the pests among them.

Is this morality?  Enlightened self-interest?  Good karma?

Or is it just the way things are supposed to work?

Pride and Prejudice

or On Pigging Out

You will never catch me saying in public that I like to eat pigweed.  Not even in private.  I don’t even think it in private. 

Burgundy Amaranth seedlings

On the other hand, I would love to drop into casual conversation, “Amaranth?  Oh, yes, one of my favorites.  Lightly sautéed with just a soupçon of garlic and a little spritz of lemon—or perhaps with a béchamel sauce—it’s too, too mahvelous, dahling.”
 
Amaranth.  The word just rolls off the tongue.  It evokes sundrenched climes, pungent spices, complicated and subtle cuisines.  Mmm.

redroot amaranth

Pigweed is (believe it or not) a weed that happens to be good fodder for pigs.  Amaranth, on the other hand, is a highly edible plant much loved in warm climates, its leaves eaten raw or cooked in stews, its seeds prized for their nutty flavor and nourishing goodness.  The seeds have a nearly complete amino acid profile, making amaranth a valuable source of protein—in fact, it boasts more protein than wheat.  The leaves are rich in more vitamins and minerals than you could possibly want to hear me enumerate (just trust me, they’re there).  Amaranth grows well in hot weather and needs minimal water, making it an invaluable summer green in a place like Albuquerque.  And as an added bonus, it’s an incredibly easy plant to grow.  It grows almost like a—well, like a weed.

By an astonishing coincidence, the Latin name for our local, native pigweed is Amaranthus retroflexus, otherwise known as redroot amaranth.  (Bet you saw that coming from a long way off, didn’t you, gentle reader?)  It flourishes in vacant lots and disturbed places and incites people to roll their eyes and make irritated sounds if it grows in their neighbors’ yards.

Tiger-Eye Amaranth seedlings

One of my neighbors, who is not overburdened with the domestic virtues (but who is otherwise a lovely person), has had it growing in her weed-patch of a yard for several years, where it casts its thousands of seeds far and wide.  I roll my eyes and make irritated sounds at it, and this summer, when I found it coming up in one of my containers, I came very close to uprooting it.  Fortunately, a little irony came along and smacked me between the eyes just in the nick of time.  The very day I was about to yank out the pigweed, I was also planning to plant Burgundy and Tiger-Eye Amaranth (note the capital letters—they make all the difference) from seeds I had purchased from a pricey little heirloom seed catalogue…
 

redroot amaranth

I decided to leave the redroot amaranth (as we shall now call it, though alas, without the capitals), and it’s actually turned out to be a beautiful plant.  Granted, it’s growing in good soil and getting regular water, so it’s probably more attractive than it would otherwise be, but its coloring and symmetry are wonderfully ornamental.  I just harvested six cups of leaves from it.  And dahling, sautéed with a soupçon of garlic and a little spritz of lemon, it was too, too mahvelous.  (But you will never catch me serving it with a béchamel sauce.)

Toad Hall

or

A Place for Everything,

and Everything in A Place

What I love about toads is the way they ignore me. They're useful bug-eaters, of course, and I appreciate that. But I love the way they go about their business as if--well, as if I didn't particularly matter to them.

My garden has a toad--a chubby, unflappable, cool cat of a toad--that has made itself at home in a potted mint plant. In my ongoing quest to encourage murder and mayhem in the garden (but only the good kind of murder and mayhem), I've tried to create a toad-friendly habitat. I've provided a "bug bath," a shallow dish filled with pebbles and water at ground level; and I've created toad houses from broken pots and cinder blocks, hoping that the shaded hollows would appeal to a cold-blooded creature during the heat of the day. And instead of these cool, private shelters, "Mr. Jackson" prefers the potted mint that sits in the sunshine on the patio. Every morning while I sip my tea, I watch him hop over from some other part of the garden and clamber awkwardly into the pot. I harvest the mint regularly; he blinks at me. I water it daily; he blinks at me. I occasionally whap him with the hose by accident; he blinks really quickly at me.

It's not even a pretty pot.

In its own mild way, the situation radiates a whole "the best laid plans" thing that I regard with wry amusement. (I'm reminded of how I originally designed my garden around Luther's habits. He always used one area as his privy, so I made a clear pathway to it and left it unplanted. He never went there again. That area is still an odd, empty space that nothing seems to fill properly.) In another way, it's eloquent of the best spirit of gift-giving--that a gift, once given, takes on a new life, new meanings, in the hands of the recipient.

The real gift in this case was water--as good as gold in a region that gets eight inches annual rainfall, and much more interesting to a toad in any case. The "bug bath" is what drew him and what encourages him to stay. One morning when I had forgotten to refill it, I found him looking at it (blinkingly) and watched him stretch out a foot to the basin and rest his chin on one of the dry pebbles. He stayed that way until I had filled the dish with water (he didn't bother to move), and after a good soak he went merrily about his business (which was to climb into the mint pot).

Of course, the water wasn't a real gift if I was hoping to get something out of giving it--a toad at my beck and call, ready to eat ants and flies on demand. I did get a toad, yes, but beck and call? Not noticeably. And I find his complete obliviousness to the choices I had pre-made for him so beautiful that it almost takes my breath away. The sense of interaction--of creative give-and-take with an alien species--fills me with delight, and that is far more wonderful than the smug satisfaction I would have felt had he moved into those concrete blocks. Above all, I can't help wondering now what he will do next, and what pleasure I might have in responding to his new choice.