Lost in Translation

or As Cheap as Dirt

Find an old adobe home in New Mexico's pinyon-juniper country.  Junipers planted along the north side of the property might offer a windbreak.  An elm or so to the southwest, close to the house, will extend shading arms.  Otherwise not a single thing will be growing near the house—not a lilac bush, not a weed.  The house will be surrounded by bare earth, hard-packed by the tires of pickup trucks and booted feet and the paws of the lanky mutts who come running to greet you.  Walk on that bare ground, and you won't raise a cloud of dust.  Walk on it barefoot, and you'll feel the give of the land and its gently uneven texture.  It may not be soft like grass, but it's friendly underfoot, more yielding than concrete or flagstone or brick.

Once upon a time, not that many years ago, my garden had earthen paths. 

January, 2008, right before the sand cherries and their pals took over. 

I liked walking on them barefoot on a hot summer's day, but I didn't think living with them long-term was a good plan.  When I lived in Vermont or in western New York, where Precipitation Happens, dirt all too often turned into mud.  Luther was a great tracker of mud on clean floors.  He was good at escaping from towels, running through multiple rooms, and then leaping onto the sofa to give himself a zealous grooming on the upholstery.

Luther T. Dog, Champion Dirt Tracker

In damp kinds of places—the kinds of places where gardening books almost all seem to be written (perhaps because they're good places to garden?)—hard-surfaced garden paths are useful.  Gravel, brick, pavers, bluestone, flagstone:  they all keep mud from your door, and give you stable footing over soft, wet ground.

Deserts, if I may keep stating the obvious, don't often have damp conditions.  When I started my garden here in Albuquerque, Luther tracked wet dirt—you couldn't really call it mud—into the house a good three, four times a year.  Even after a rain, the ground just doesn't stay damp for long.  Now Luther's gone, and nobody has to track dirt in at all.  If my shoes are wet, I can just slip them off and take awestruck photos of them at the door.

August, 2012

So why did I want brick-style pavers?  Probably because I was still in Soggy Northeastern Mode.  But also because pavers, or flagstone slabs or travertine tiles or whatever, stand for a kind of polish.  Their usefulness may not translate well to this climate, but they still have a certain social cachet.  Gardens in magazine photos do not have packed-dirt paths. 

It's a pity that I don't actually like the paved paths as much as I liked the bare earth.  Why, I'm not quite sure.  Maybe they add hardness in an urban environment where hardness already abounds.  Maybe they make the circle shape of the path too strong and obvious.  Maybe they seem a little too highfalutin for my low-key lifestyle (let alone this mostly very lowfalutin state).  Maybe not every hard surface in the garden has to be terra cotta-colored.

The pavers get hot underfoot in summer and shelter waterbugs under their cozy, sun-baked warmth in winter.  They glare in sunlight. 

(A not particularly xeric section of) the Albuquerque Botanic Garden, April 2012.
Even the crusher fines used here—a great choice for constant foot traffic—glare in the light.

It's that last bit that's pushing me to rebellion.  They glare in sunlight. 

Social cachet is such a silly thing.  It may have its genesis in usefulness, but once that usefulness has been sloughed off (by scorching desert winds), cachet does not get to trump comfort in my book.  And when that cachet is an idea you've imported from abroad, with no basis in the culture where you now (happily) reside, it's time to eat a bowl of green chile (or red, if you prefer) and get your perspective on straight.  So I'm about to throw polish to the winds.

Dirt paths are cheap.  No goods have been conspicuously consumed to create them.  No one will be impressed by their elegance.  But they go well with New Mexico's rough-and-tumble landscape and informal lifestyle, its long history of old adobes and haphazard coyote fencing, the rough shagginess of native plantings.  Sometimes you just have to observe, and think, and realize that people in old adobe homes did know what they were doing, and let social cachet and garden magazines be hanged.

An Albuquerque garden featured in the Native Plant Society's garden tour, August 2012.
To me the randomly placed flagstone shows how soft and comfortable the dirt paths really are.

I won't do anything radical yet—those pavers took six weekends of precious physical energy to put down, and I'm not in a hurry to pick them up again.  But they'd make a good sized raised bed on the patio by the kitchen door, just right for a cold frame of winter veggies.

Now that would be useful here.

"The Clock Stopped Long Ago"

or Sandia Park, New Mexico

The sandstone glowed in late afternoon sun.  A raven called as it passed overhead, a deep, throaty croak that rang briefly before melting away.  Its wings beat with audible effort—not the quick flutter of the Oregon juncos and scrub jays darting between junipers, but a good, sturdy flap as it pulled against the air.  That, too, melted into nothing.

The afternoon leaned against a vast backdrop of silence.  Small sounds leapt out, like grasshoppers from a meadow, without disturbing the silence at all.

Away from Albuquerque's urban junkyard of a soundscape, on still days in the piñon and juniper deserts of the lower Sandias, white noise disappears.  Not just from cars and airplanes and swamp coolers and power tools, but from nature, too.  No constant, companionable sounds fill the space around you:  no mountain brooks gurgling and splashing, no clattering leaves in aspen trees or big-tooth maples, no grasses thick enough to rustle.  Silence surrounds you like sandstone, shaped only by the sweeping wind.  The coyotes, howling at sunset or in the chill dark before dawn, make little pinpricks of sound, like stars glimmering one at a time in the enormity of space.

Doesn't the rock look like a coyote?

I found myself pondering the middle layer of experience between the very small and the very large—the shady-tree-and-gurgling-brook level of experience—during a few days' stay at a casita in Sandia Park last week.  Ansel Adams said of New Mexico,

"It is all very beautiful and magical here, a quality which cannot be described.  You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake you into it.  The skies and the land are so enormous, and the details so precise and exquisite that wherever you go you are isolated in the world between the micro and the macro, where everything segues under you and over you and the clock stopped long ago."*

The micro and the macro.

Sandstone

The view from that particular bit of sandstone

To say that New Mexico is a place of extremes is certainly true, but maybe not quite enough.  It's more that the stuff that ordinarily lies between extremes, the broad stretch of middle ground where humans tend to look for ease and comfort, is absent.  I can think of many places of spectacular grandeur—the Colorado Rockies, the Grand Tetons, Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains—where you are dwarfed and awed by the magnificence around you.  You have companions in dwarfishness, though.  The forest trees may tower over you, the lakes may be deep and cold, the elk may bugle hauntingly out of a chilly late-summer night; but they are all still somehow on a human scale, comprehensible, embraceable.

Here, though, you feel like the odd one out.  You may be dwarfed by the whole of the landscape, but you are taller than most of the things that grow on it—when anything grows on it at all.

You are like Alice in Wonderland, if she'd been caught between the Eat Me and Drink Me phases, a little too large, or much too small for your surroundings.  You're isolated between the enormous

and the exquisite,

 in awe of both, but not belonging to either.  You feel vulnerable



in an exhilarating way,



and after a long, glorious day of vulnerable exhilaration you are grateful to the junipers, with their soft, shaggy bark,



and to the piñons, with their fair to middling size, for bringing things back (somewhat) to scale.



You know it isn't really a timeless place.  The clock keeps ticking; the modern world does intrude.

Poised as you are, though, between pointillistic details

and wide expanses,

in that deep quiet, you find balance, and a peace that does seem timeless.

And you wish with all your heart, that for a few more days, time really could just stand still.

__________________
*Quoted in New Mexico. A Guide for the Eyes, by Elisa Parhad.

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.

Kasha-Katuwe

or Making an Impression

The rock crumbled beneath my hand.  I had leaned on it for balance to take an odd-angled photo, expecting it without thinking to be solid.  Instead it was ash, pumice, tuff—I'm not sure which, but one of the softer volcanic layers comprising the white cliffs of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument.  The cliffs and hoodoos there look strong and imposing, but at a touch the edges wear away, filling your regretful hand with dust, the six million year old relic of a cataclysm.  You let it fall, and it leaves delicate, white traces on your palm, as if you've just set free a moth.

On the last of my vacation outings a couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon wandering the short trails at the monument.  I think of Kasha-Katuwe (White Cliffs, in the Keresan language of neighboring Cochiti Pueblo) as a "heart of New Mexico" place—it embodies many of the most distinctive features of the region, all in one exciting area.  The rock formations, where wind and water have worn away the softer layers beneath hard capstones, are certainly fascinating.

I apologize for my bad habit of photographing light-colored rocks in the desert at noon on sunny days.  In the center left, though, you can see more of the hoodoos with capstones; another clearish one is at the lower right.

When the hoodoos lose their capstones, erosion takes place more quickly (and maybe even more dramatically).

The contrast between extremes is strong:   one minute you're driving through sleepy settlements in hardscrabble land, aware of boarded-up windows and dust in the little village of Peña Blanca, and the next you're walking through wonders in Kasha-Katuwe's Peralta Canyon while crows hint of darker mysteries in the sky just out of view.

You are conscious of the elements not in the gentle, domesticated way we play with them in gardens—a pool of water, a set of wind chimes—but as untamable dynamos with weight and strength and power and relentlessness behind them, as mindless forces before which you are soft and small.  You see how the wind chisels away layer upon layer of crumbling stone.

You walk through a slot canyon formed by flash floods and (always) more wind.

I'm 5 foot 7 and don't recall bending under that huge stone in the left-hand picture to go into the slot canyon.

Even in the mild days of autumn, you're aware of the fiery strength of the sun and grateful to the trees and hills that shade you from it.

You see life—stubborn, insistent, resilient life—in all its creativity and passion for continuity:

The people in the first two photos give a sense of scale to the roots on the ponderosas.

and you are aware of it hanging in the balance, walking the razor edge with oblivion:

In many of the earth's other extreme places you can be aware of existence both reduced and exalted to its bare bones.  This is the corner I'm walking in now.

Sometimes all you can do is wander in awe.

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.

___________________________

* 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.

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.