A Field Trip to the Past

A Field Trip to the Past

Our fearless leader, Sylvia, took us on a field trip to Pilar, then across the Rio Grande to US 285 and Ojo Caliente and on to Ghost Ranch at Abiquiu. Quite the adventure. We stopped at the Visitor’s Center in Pilar to look at the topo map of the Rio Grande as it runs down through New Mexico from our northern border in Costilla to where it flows into El Paso and becomes the Texas-Mexico boundary in Big Bend country. The most interesting thing about the Rio Grande is that it flows through a continental rift, the second largest in the world. (The largest is in Africa.) One of my fellow students, Peggy, who is up on her geology, explained that the Rio Grande Rift is not the river itself, but the valley it runs through which, in Arroyo Hondo, spans thirty miles from the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos in the northeast to Tres Piedras in the southwest.

A rift is a tear in the crust of the earth where the continent is slowly being pulled apart by opposing forces. We have some small tremors around here from time to time, but Taos Pueblo--about a thousand years old--is still standing firm. (A major earthquake would tumble an adobe structure like the Pueblo.) Peggy pointed out that on the northeast side of the highway we were looking at tall, sandy cliffs that were once the beachfront of an inland sea. Behind us on the southwest side of the highway rose a steep hillside littered with volcanic basalt, dotted with piñon and juniper.

We drove along the Rio Grande upstream toward Taos Junction Bridge. This section the riverbank is crowded with salt cedar (tamarisk), an invasive non-native tree that sucks up salt and deep groundwater. When it rains, the salt is washed off the leaves and eventually into the river. The salt inhibits competition from the natural flora and can even alter the chemical composition of river. Entomologists are considering releasing swarms of hungry Asian beetles to eat the leaves, but scientists are not so sure this is a good idea.

Over a decade ago I helped an earnest group of environmentalists plant young cottonwoods along these banks where beavers had cut down many of the native trees. Our class examined the current cottonwood transplants that were protected by fencing. Sylvia noted that because the beavers couldn’t get to the fenced trees, they had cut down a natural cottonwood instead.

We stopped near the bridge to study the opposite hillside where—strangely enough—mature cottonwoods were growing out of the otherwise barren hillside. Sylvia said they grew along fault lines tapping seepage from the water table. I never would have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out.

We ate lunch not far from Abiquiu on a cliff overlooking the ruins of an ancient pueblo, Poshuouinge. The Santa Fe National Forest guide says it was still inhabited around AD 1420. Perhaps several thousand people lived here and many others visited. They don’t know why the site was abandoned in the late 1400s. At my feet I noticed a small circle of dark, baseball-sized stones. “A marker,” Sylvia said. I thought it was a fine place for a lookout with a broad view over a dry riverbed that snaked through the cliffs, a place to make a signal fire.

Sylvia said, “How many stones are there?”

We counted twelve.

“What’s the significance of the number twelve in the Pueblo culture?”

Darned if I knew. In classic religious architecture, twelve symbolizes the twelve disciples.

The rich light of sunset washed over the layered cliffs of Abiquiu as we turned at the entrance to Ghost Ranch. It was here that Georgia O’Keeffe painted many landscapes of the dramatic red, white and yellow 1300-foot escarpment. She made Ghost Ranch her permanent home from 1949 until her death in 1986. She was ninety-nine years old. Her ashes are scattered here.

Ghost Ranch was the site of the University of California-Berkeley digs from 1928 to 1934--the Hayden Quarry excavation. In 1947 George Whitaker found one of the earliest dinosaurs in North America preserved among at least three hundreds of skeletons in what must have been a flash flood or sudden flow of mud-like silt. This was the Coelophysis bauri (SEE-Low-FY-sis bar), a six to eight-foot dinosaur that lived 220 million years ago that was assembled from three different skeletons. The mount is on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. A large block of these fossils was carried to where the Ghost Ranch Museum now stands and other blocks have been distributed to museums all over the world.

We were treated to an animated lecture by a paleontologist who had been busy extracting dinosaur bones from a mass of rock and assembling the pieces. It was exciting to catch him in the act as he wielded a small paintbrush, plaster still on his hands. We examined and passed around huge curved incisors while he explained that some of the dinosaurs had feathers; the only surviving dinosaur relatives today are birds.

After dinner we climbed a steep hill above the ranch to look at the night sky through a digital telescope. Once you have the coordinates, you can punch in the number of the planet, star or galaxy you want to view, fine tune the focus and then let the telescope track it electronically while people take turns looking. Without electronics, you’d have to refocus the telescope every three or four minutes.

We peered at the new moon just as it was about to set. The reflecting edge glowed orange while on the border between light and shadow, we saw many pocked craters. Next we looked at a double star in the constellation of Lyra, named for the harp of the mythical musician Orpheus. A yellow star and a blue one circled each other in measured dance. We also viewed my favorite, the blue star Vega. I fell in love with that star the first time I saw it ten years ago. I thought it was a private love affair. I was surprised to discover that Vega is a popular star. Our guide, Willy, said it was the fifth brightest star in the sky and the farthest west in the summer triangle. Vega is twenty-five light years from Earth. In the cold night air it shone with the purity of a blue diamond.

We also took a peek at Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun and eleven Earth diameters wide. This huge planet is actually a ball of dense gases, hydrogen, helium, water, nitrogen etc. that surround a small rocky core. Jupiter was perfectly round and crisp, shining bright so I couldn’t see the ring of dust around it, but four of its moons were in staggered orbits, all on the right. Willy explained that’s just where they happen to be right now. According to the NASA website, Jupiter has sixty-two known moons and they are still counting. One of them, Ganymede, is bigger than the planet Mercury.

The last and best thing we viewed was a vast rainbow-colored nebula at the bottom of Orion’s sword, a veil of gas that looked like angel wings which spread thirty light years across the constellation. It probably contains thousands of stars. In the lower corner glittered three “baby stars” that were born from those gases. Mysterious and beautiful.

I stepped back and saw a “falling star” from the famous Leonids meteor shower. The night wind was cold on my face. I felt humble and exhilarated.

What's 350?

What’s 350?

I’ve been asking my friends, “Does the number 350 mean anything to you?” Even though there have been a couple of articles in The Taos News and a local conference on climate change, some of my friends knew nothing about it. So I took it upon myself to inform them.

I didn’t know about 350 myself until a couple of weeks ago when I wrote a story on it for Enchantment Magazine, the household organ for Kit Carson Electric Co-op of which I am one of 29,000 members. The number 350 means 350 parts per million (ppm) that scientists agree is the safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Right now we are pushing 387. (For the full report, see the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): www1.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/index.htm. The main activity of the IPCC is to provide at regular intervals Assessment Reports of the state of knowledge on climate change.)

On October 24^th, 2009, a day of “climate awareness,” was observed in over 181 countries around the world. I went to www.350.org to see the slideshow of events and learn more about it. Here were photos of people displaying the number 350 in ingenious ways: an aerial photo of people lying head-to-heel across a football field, their bodies forming the number; a surfer coming in on his board holding up a card with 350; a bungee jumper plunging off a building toward a target of 350; children in classrooms with hopeful grins holding up 350; a courageous lone woman in Iran standing in front of a bare wall holding up 350; a parade of people in India, crowds in China, Australia, Britain and France, smaller groups in other countries such as Malaysia and Africa. Not to mention big cities in America: San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. The enthusiasm and hope in their faces brought a lump to my throat.

Some of the thrust for worldwide education is thanks to our former vice president, Al Gore, winner of an Emmy for “An Inconvenient Truth” and winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He personally trained 3,000 volunteers to go around the world and spread the word about the potential dangers of climate change and possible solutions. (See www.climateproject. org.)

Here in Taos we observed 350: International Climate Awareness Day with a panel discussion in the morning and, in the park in the afternoon, a giveaway of 350 pumpkins and 350 compact fluorescent light bulbs. An aerial shot of the bight orange pumpkins that were arranged in 350 would look great in the www.35.org slideshow.

The morning panel included some well-informed and righteous people like Tod Thompson from the New Mexico Energy and Minerals Department, Carol Miller, Chairwoman of the Solar Finance Committee, Bill Brown of The Climate Project, Erik Schenkler-Goodrich of Western Environmental Law Center and Luis Reyes, the CEO of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative.

Most of the discussion revolved around how to conserve energy, get off oil and coal and make the transition to clean, green power. Of course there are obvious things we can do such as weatherizing our houses and changing light bulbs, building greenhouses and going with wind and solar energy wherever possible, but it’s going to take more than that. I was not surprised to hear that the generation of fossil fuels is subsidized by hidden taxes to the tune of $75 billion a year while renewable energy only gets $12 billion. Why is that? Perhaps because even in our area where the UNM-Taos campus is powered by a solar array and many people are environmentally aware, less than five percent of our co-op members have signed up to buy blocks of green power. Our energy generation station, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, will generate more green energy if we convince them that there’s a demand.

Reyes said right now 70 percent of our electricity comes from coal. He was concerned about the rising cost of gas, oil, and electricity, and cap and trade agreements that are being argued in congress. “Green energy is not expensive. Forty cents per 100-kilowatt hours equals two dollars per month.” If 29,000 co-op members each bought one block, what a powerful message that would send to our legislators and to Tri-State.

With one million member-consumers across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming, Tri-State also generates renewable energy in several ways: hog methane biomass production in Nebraska; Colorado hydro plants at Crooke Falls, William’s Fork, Lemon Dam, Vallecito, Ouray, Coal Creek and Jackson Gulch, and wind turbines in Wyoming. Looking ahead, in northeastern New Mexico Tri-State and First Solar are planning to build a 30-megawatt power plant that will utilize a solar field of 500,000 two-by-four foot photovoltaic modules. The Cimarron I Solar Project will be one of the largest solar photovoltaic facilities in the world.

During the question and answer period, participants wanted to know how we could get Obama to attend the Copenhagen conference on climate awareness in December. Carol Miller said that the U.S. is responsible for a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we should shoulder a large part of the responsibility. “So if the U.S. president doesn’t go, what kind of a message are we sending to the world?”

Indeed! The United States was the only developed country that refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol treaty that was adopted by consensus in 1997 and ratified in May 2002. According to www.environment.about.com “The Kyoto Protocol is an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty intended to bring countries together to reduce our collective greenhouse gases and to cope with the effects of temperature increases that are unavoidable after 150 years of industrialization.”

After the election, Obama said, “If you want something done, make me!” If you want to tell our president, “Get on the jet to Copenhagen. You go, guy!” you can sign a petition on www.care2.com.

P.S. I know there is an ongoing argument about whether or not the earth is warming and is it our fault? I also know that Northern New Mexico has been in drought for the past ten years, that thousands of piñons have died, that we have been plagued by forest fires, that the aspens are threatened by winters too warm to kill insect invasions and disease. I can’t do all the research on climate change myself, so I go to sources I trust--the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona and Sierra Club. One of their sources is the IPPC.

P.P.S. This just in from www.algore.com: “President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled next month.”

What’s at stake here? The whole planet. Many agree that right now we have all the technology we need to make the transition. The only thing lacking is our collective will.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity

The almost full moon is peering through my window. The weather has turned warm again. Thank you! I need more time to get the storm windows up, the firewood cut. Prepare for what may be another winter of deep cold with heavy snow.

I’m surprised that the black bear hasn’t gone into hibernation yet. When I step out in the moonlight, I look around. The other day my young neighbor to the west pointed out a big pile of bear scat under her fruit tree. The scat was bright with apple peels and plum pits. I took a picture of it.

A couple of weeks ago, coming back from a long trip, I sighed with relief as I pulled into the driveway. But sat bolt upright at the sight of a huge black bear standing eight feet tall by the back door, looking straight at me. His head was about two feet across. All he needed was a ranger hat and he would have looked like Smokey.

“Oh my God!” I rolled down the window and raised my camera. But the bear turned and ambled back toward the orchard. I scrambled up the ladder to the roof and caught five seconds of him before he disappeared. Just to prove he was here.

My young neighbor to the west also mentioned that she had seen a large herd of deer right outside her window, “About twenty-five of them.” I borrowed a video camera. On Saturday evening I went looking for the deer. Couldn’t find them. But I ran into a couple that had been hiking in the hills behind my house. The woman smiled when she saw my big camera. “Are you looking for the deer? They’re up there,” she said with a jerk of her thumb. “A huge herd.”

Panting, I climbed “up there” but saw nothing. Disappointed, I asked permission to keep the camera one more day.

On Sunday I woke from my afternoon nap to a russet light that blazed across the field. I had forgotten about the time change! The deer were coming down as they do every evening to browse in the fields and drink from the river. I had planned to jump in my car, drive around and find them before dusk.

I rushed through my chores, fed the horses and climbed the hill in front of my house. In a few minutes the sunlight would be gone. I snatched my car keys and camera from the kitchen counter. But when I rounded the corner of the house I saw two does and a yearling grazing in the back yard. Their heads came up and they stared, but I froze on the path, opened my mouth and sang. They are curious creatures. They did a double take and went on grazing as if to say, “Oh, it’s that crazy woman who sang to us last year. She’s harmless. But keep an eye on her.”

I turned on the camera and followed their movements. The yearling stayed close to her mother. As I sang, more does appeared out of the tall grass or emerged from behind boulders and trees. They took hesitant steps on slender legs and filled my screen with graceful, juxtaposed forms. They nibbled on the quince bush and picked their way across the lawn in a stately minuet, pausing now and then to lift their heads and stare at me, radar ears wafting toward my song. My voice wobbled and cracked and I couldn’t remember the tune. I made up the words. They didn’t rhyme. The deer didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes it happens like this. The longed-for moment of synchronicity. The camera is loaded, the light is right and the subject manifests right under your nose. I couldn’t find the deer, so they came to me. I filmed them for about ten minutes in the dying autumn light. A blessing. A gift. I’m so grateful.