Home

or Small Graces

I think of them as "rain in the desert" experiences, those moments of refreshment and ease that come to you out of the blue and green you up again.  Some dear friends visited from Denver over the weekend, and suddenly I understood vines, sending up inches of bright new growth overnight after a rain.  With the friends came another small refreshment:  the thought of a job in Denver, with the best colleague possible.  The details turned out not to be workable, but for a couple of days I was considering leaving Albuquerque for my home town.

Elena Gallegos Open Space Park, Albuquerque

Mixed in with the hopeful excitement of opportunity, though, was a level of regret that surprised me, a fierce ache at the thought of leaving this landscape.  I had thought that I just loved it as I do the west in general, and that in my heart New Mexico was more or less interchangeable with Colorado, only with less snow.  It isn't.  It has its own place, and to leave it, no matter for what other gains, would also be a loss.

Colorado... I do still miss it sometimes.  Compared to New Mexico, it has such an easy beauty, both more spectacular and more...traditional.  The Rockies there are higher and craggier, not like the comparatively rag-tag (sorry, New Mexico!) mountains here at the tail end of the range.  After high-desert aridity, the semi-aridity to the north seems lush and green.   New Mexico, on the other hand, can be harsh and (even more) prickly, inhospitable and, outside the mountains, endlessly brown.  Its spectacular places are more odd and twisted (though that's part of their fascination).  The less spectacular places demand a lot of you.  You have to work harder, look closer, engage further, to love them for what they are.

Which just makes the rewards all the sweeter when they come.

Yucca glauca (I'm pretty sure)

The day before my friends arrived, I had taken a vacation day to mosey around in one of my favorite places, Elena Gallegos Open Space Park, in the foothills at the eastern edge of town.  I'd never been there before when the yucca was in bloom.  Yucca grows all sorts of places, from Iowa to Texas to Alberta.  It grows in Colorado; it's hardly unique to New Mexico.  Somehow it comes across differently here, though, more as a burst of frivolity than as a sign that you've reached "here be dragons" country and are about to get stuck by sharp leaves.  In New Mexico you already know you'll have dragons (or similar) to deal with, and may well have already been stuck by a prickly pear or cholla (or similar), so the beauty of yucca in bloom is pure bonus, a grace, an unexpected gift in a dry land, from the deep color of the unopened flowers:

to the way they pale as they open, and let the creamy inner petals show through:

to their unexpectedly delicate stippling.

Other things were blooming, too—white New Mexico evening primroses (except that it was morning), tiny daisies, spiky blue penstemons, all pleasant surprises as you round a bend in the path and find a new patch of bloom amid the dry grasses.

Claret cup hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus triglochidiatus) (I think), one day too soon

Musicologist Donald Tovey used to riff on the idea of purple prose by talking about "purple patches" in music:  moments of lush harmony or texture or orchestration that interrupt a more straightforward context.  They're the moments you remember after the concert, or that you rewind and replay over and over at home, the ones that melt you into your seat.

New Mexico is thrifty—stingy—with many things but generous with its purple patches.  Sometimes you grow weary of dust and wind and sunshine so bright that it hurts and hard-scrabble poverty everywhere you turn, but if your eyes are open, somewhere around a bend in the path a moment of beauty will be waiting to take your breath away.  I find those moments extra-moving here, in this harsh, prickly, inhospitable desert.  They command intense loyalty, because they ease such deep thirst. 

Small graces, like rain for the soul:  the visit of friends, an inkling of change.  A stand of yucca in bloom.  A sprinkling of daisies. 

A purple patch, brightening the way home.

The Gold in Them Thar Hills

or Making Hay While the Sun Shines

Nothing with "nauseosus" in its name should smell so good.  Even if the word does just mean "heavy-scented," it doesn't sound like it means anything pleasant, certainly nothing like the heady fragrance coming from the stand of rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus nauseosus) on the far side of the parking lot.

The scent bypassed floral altogether and went straight for honey, for thick, musky ambrosia.  No wonder the bees were so giddy—they must have felt as if half their work had already been done for them.

Like no other month, October (in the northern hemisphere, at any rate) seems to show every place in its best light.  Just breathing the air or looking at the sky can be a sonnet-worthy experience.  I always take a week of vacation around mid-month to make the most of the gorgeous sunlight and weather while they last, and try to spend every possible minute of it outside.  Among the short day-trips I took this year was yet another excursion to Elena Gallegos Open Space park in the foothills on the edge of town.

Cholla, juniper, blue grama grass, and rabbitbrush

I'd been looking forward to this visit for months, ever since the first time I drove up the gently curving, suburban road to the park and saw the roadway lined with rabbitbrush (or chamisa, as it's known here) from bottom to top.  Like blue grama grass, rabbitbrush is one of the signature plants of western North America, growing from the panhandle of Texas west to the Sierras, from Mexico to Saskatchewan.  I have loved it since early childhood—Dad used to call it "bunny bush," which for some reason sent my five-year-old self into endless fits of giggles.  Its golden flowers are still among my favorite sights of autumn.

The sky is another.

The park was as glorious as I'd hoped, at least where the rabbitbrush held sway.  It's about the last of the high desert plants to bloom, so it had to hold the fort pretty well on its own.  Here and there on my walk I saw a dyspeptic aster or two, and once a dull patch of mounding peppergrass, but nothing to keep the bees and butterflies satisfied.  Instead all the pollinators descended on the rabbitbrush in droves, making the most of its flowers while they could.

A more or less cooperative variegated fritillary.

I knew that rabbitbrush was an "opportunistic" plant, the kind that colonizes disturbed places.  It's common along roadsides and ditches, and on open range-land it can indicate over-grazing.*  For some reason I didn't expect that to translate into easy photographs, but it did, as the rabbitbrush was wonderfully thick in all the most accessible places—on the edge of the parking lot, beside the paths, near the occasional ramadas.

As thick as the stands of it were, though, they're not long-lasting.  Rabbitbrush sends down deep taproots as well as lateral roots that allow it to take hold fast; they make it valuable for stabilizing the soil and beginning the process of rebuilding.  But for some reason  all those roots and the plant's general sturdiness are not enough to make it a particularly strong competitor.  Once the next phase of succession begins, the rabbitbrush colonies will fade away.  I can't believe I'm saying this with a straight face, but they really do have to make the most of the bad, disturbed, barren soil while they can.

I love thinking back over a day trip later that evening, letting memories bubble up.  A few of them always stand out from the rest and become emblems of the day.  In this case the "signature" of the walk was the fragrance, drawing in the bees and the butterflies (and, less usefully, me) that will help the rabbitbrush set seed.  This winter, those seeds will drift on the wind to the next disturbed place (rabbitbrush:  the Mary Poppins for unhappy soils), where a colony can start over again, and make another autumn day golden in time.  Maybe in a subtler way, too, there was a kinship between the bees and the butterflies and the rabbitbrush and me that drew us together later in my mind—a sense of exuberance, of living it up.

We were all opportunists, making hay while the sun shone.

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* It's also a staple in xeriscape gardens and commercial landscapes, and (for what it's worth) it is one of the all-time most spectacular plants ever in a high wind.

Soft Focus

or A Missed Opportunity

If only I'd had an epiphany, then everything would have been perfect.  The thing with epiphanies, though, is that you have to be looking for something, following some metaphorical star in the East toward enlightenment, for enlightenment actually to happen.  (Which doesn't mean that the enlightenment you get will be the one you were looking for, of course.)  I wasn't looking for any enlightenment at all.  I was just out for a hike walk dawdle at the Elena Gallegos Open Space Park on a day off from work.

Seeing the same place in different seasons endears it to you like nothing else—it becomes a friend in a way, as you discover more and more about it.  You learn its moods and celebrate its accomplishments—the lone flower that's turned into a patch, the fledglings grown to independence—and shake your head at its foibles:

Galls on the leaves of scrub oak (Quercus turbinella) (I think)

This is the first time I've seen the park in late summer, and it is lovely indeed.  The day was a soft-focus one, with high "mare's-tail" clouds, some noncommittal thunderheads, and a breeze that wasn't quite all there.  In the brief, vital weeks between monsoon rains and frost, the grasses have begun to bloom, especially the blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) and what I suspect is an escaped pink muhly (Muhlenbergia capillaris), as have the wildflowers—southwestern paintbrush, sand verbena, bahia, mounding peppergrass, globemallow, broom snakeweed, spiny asters, and the unfortunately named but beautiful clammyweed.

Red-whiskered clammyweed (Polanisia dodecandra)

The spiky, tufty textures so characteristic of the southwest have softened and grown together, as if they've finally learned to write in cursive.  They blend, they blur, they marry.  I took one look at this scene and for the first time in my life wished that I were Piet Oudolf:

Mounding peppergrass, globemallow, pink muhly (?), and blue grama grass (and who knows what else)

Even in the haphazard breeze, the grasses were in full swing, sway, flutter, wave, dip, and bob.  I kept blinking my eyes, before realizing that they weren't out of focus—the grasses were.  That subtle, not-quite-constant motion made my camera's autofocus rebel altogether.  Almost every wildflower I saw was veiled in grass; unless you looked to the junipers in the middle distance, or to the mountains a step beyond, it was impossible to find anything with clear outlines.

So when I encountered this Say's phoebe, it held me enchanted.  Its muted colors against the impressionistic backdrop seemed to epitomize the day.  Even the cholla it rested on looked tamed, softened by a vicarious gentleness.

Yes, well.  Then the phoebe pounced.  It had seen—I don't know what.  A beetle? a cicada?  Something big enough to put up a tussle, at any rate, because a fast and furious battle amidst a pillow of asters ensued.  I think the phoebe won but wouldn't want to place any bets.  The gentle shadings of its exterior clearly hide a well-defined strength and hunger, just as those vague, out-of-focus grasses disguise the landscape beneath them.  The cholla may look tamed, but trust me, it isn't.  And just try wading into those impressionistic, blurry textures in your soft-sided sneakers:  in ten steps tops you will have encountered an all too well-defined prickly pear or yucca or anthill.

The sense of layered experience, of a vague exterior hiding something more clear-cut beneath, reminded me of the way that letting your focus on a quandary go soft, letting the winds of consciousness blow haphazardly, sometimes allows the solution to materialize like some craggy peak out of the fog, or a juniper from the grass—clear, definite against an open sky.  I always think of the conscious mind as being well-defined, and the subconscious as nebulous and hard to pin down, but now I wonder if it isn't the reverse:  the conscious mind is where all the vague, billowy stuff happens, whereas the subconscious holds hard, adamant truth.  At any rate, my walk through the park would have been a perfect occasion for an epiphany, if only I'd been looking for one at the time.

Globemallow, cholla, pink muhly (?), and blue grama

But I wasn't.

Depth Perception

or In Praise of (Dry) Grass

Elena Gallegos Open Space Park, Albuquerque, August 2011

When I lived in Vermont, May and June confused me. They came along in between the first flush of spring and the onset of summer flowers, and they were green, green, green. The meadows were a uniform, deep green. The Green Mountains were, of all things, a uniform, deep green. The cornfields were that same U.D.G. Nothing but lush, healthy greenery met the eye for miles.  (It was really, really green.)

I grew up in Colorado with parents who taught their children to look for beauty in the arid plains by tracing the contours of the landscape, the subtle changes of color as one kind of grass yielded to another, the stippling of the different textures, the play of light and shadow. You had to be willing to engage with what you were seeing; it wasn't the kind of easy beauty that you could passively let wash over you. Bringing the same approach to the U.D.G. in Vermont, though, to that untextured, late-spring landscape, I felt as if I'd entered a two-dimensional world or been deprived of one of my senses. How can you orient yourself in scenery that's monochromatic, where everything is the same, easy-on-the-eyes green? What entry point can you find? How can you perceive depth or distance or difference?  It was only when the grasses began to flower and set seed and the Queen Anne's lace and chicory began to bloom that I found my bearings again.

Let's fast-forward now to this summer.  Two months ago I sat on a well-placed bench at an open space park in the foothills and looked out at this scene:

At the time we'd had no significant rainfall in six months, and while the junipers and cholla were plugging along fine, the grasses were brittle and dry, dead to all outward appearance. Since then, however, the foothills have had an inch, maybe (if we don't mind a little hyperbole) an inch and a half of rain, a few millimeters at a time. An inch (and a half) of rain doesn't last long, not with afternoon highs still in the upper 90's. Even so, yesterday, from the same well-placed bench, the scene looked like this:

(With a bonus, which totally made my day):

Southwestern paintbrush (I think) (Castilleja integra)

The grass isn't exactly rainforest green, but then, it never will be, no matter how much moisture we get. It's mostly blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis), a native to the western half of North America, and like most western plants, it is generally trying not to photosynthesize any more than it absolutely must; it doesn't have much chlorophyll to begin with. What you see in the photos is pretty much its deepest color, more of a spring or golden green than emerald or kelly. But it's still green, on an inch (and a half) of rain in eight months.

Just because the grass is greening up, though, doesn't mean that the brown has all gone away.  No one is running around the foothills de-thatching them.  Since we don't have heavy winter snows or rains to flatten the past seasons' growth, it's still standing tall, blue grama's hallmark "eyelash" seedheads still fluttering in the wind.

Those seedheads, waving above the new growth, also catch every ray of light and gleam with it.  The "floor" of the landscape really has two layers:  a green "substance"  layer and a floating, golden "shimmer" layer.  In the top photo, you can almost determine the contours of the land, every little dip and rabbit hole, by tracing the light on the grasses alone.  The distance is marked, tuft by tuft.  In the photo below, even the weight and solidity of the stone in front and the juniper's shadow behind can't overwhelm the shimmer layer's delicate airiness. 

In case you hadn't noticed, I am a westerner through and through.  I am in love with that year-round, gleaming light like nobody's business, and with textures and contours and subtle contrasts.  I enjoy a landscape that doesn't give up its secrets easily, that asks you to invest yourself in it first, and then rewards you with dramatic mountains when you need some easier beauty for a while.  (I do appreciate green, lush, gentle landscapes, of course; they're just not my native language.)  Every time I get to spend time outside—really outside, not "around town" outside—all those things I love hit home again.

They live in the shimmer layer of memory.

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...

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Desert humor