28 Oct

Posted at 21:31h in Uncategorized by
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There's a trail I like to take back of the small cluster of houses where I live outside Las Cruces.  If I can I walk it early mornings and evenings just before dark.  When I was a kid I did something similar, walking the pasture behind my parents' house.  On good days I'd spot a horny toad or two, ground squirrels, and puzzled over holes.  Did they harbor a rattlesnake? Here, near the Rio Grande, I'm entertained the same way: a prairie falcon one day, a Black Phoebe the...

22 Oct

Posted at 03:59h in Uncategorized by
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It's the title of John Graves' 1960 memoir of his trip along the Brazos River before a series of dams forever changed its landscape.  And his. And ours. I'm reminded of what we all share of rivers altered and mostly forgotten when I see the Rio Grande near Las Cruces, New Mexico "turned off" each year.  Yes, the flow from Caballo Dam near Truth or Consequences is throttled usually in early fall, and by the end of October you cross a bridge over a mostly dry sandy river bed--save...

12 Oct

Posted at 19:50h in Uncategorized by
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I'd just finished reading Jerry Rogers' manuscript about his big brother lost in the kamikaze hit on the USS Franklin during World War II.  I'm to blurb the book--one of those endorsements you read on the back covers--and I was struggling to find the right words to celebrate Jerry's lasting brotherly love and talents as a historian in recovering Elden's story from the family's cache of letters. And then I checked Facebook, always interested in my nephew's and great-niece's posts--the best way to stay in touch with this long-distance...

06 Oct

Posted at 03:29h in Uncategorized by
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I wish I had thought of that title.  Yes, it's i quotes. Yes, it's someone else's--Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times.  My hat is off to Thomas for writing about the threat of extinction, well, not just the threat: the reality of it. One of the most devastating numbers he gives--"The African elephant population is in drastic decline, having shrunk about 30 percent from 2007-2-14." This is unprecedented and reflects a population dropping by 8 percent a year due mostly to poaching.  Go read a book called...

29 Sep

Posted at 18:04h in Uncategorized by
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I walk daily near my Las Cruces home, really a bit out of town across the banks of the Rio Grande beneath an ancient volcanic cone called Picacho Hill.  Farm land lies east and west of the Rio Grande so that my sunrises and sunsets feature not only the Organ Mountains in the distance but acres of chili, alfalfa, and pecan orchards. It's a lovely site despite the development--on up the road a golf course, ritzy houses, and BMW's during rush hour. I live in what I call "the...

20 Sep

Posted at 21:05h in Uncategorized by
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Back when I was visiting Peggy Pond Church at her retirement facility in Santa Fe, I would arrive some mid-mornings to find a note on her door:  "Napping, come on in."  Peggy, a poet and writer in her 80's, was an early riser (4-ish), so 10 am was a perfectly respectable nap time.  In a little while she would emerge from her bedroom; as I waited I never failed to take note of a post card of a coyote stuck to her filing cabinet drawer. From l983 to l986...

13 Sep

Posted at 20:09h in Uncategorized by
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It reminds me of the circumstances years ago surrounding the proposal to sink the nation's first high level nuclear waste "dump"( facility) in Deaf Smith County near my home.  There were meetings where inscrutably long documents in what seemed almost like another language circulated.  Some of us sat in our seats cradling them hoping the oral presentations would make more sense.  But there was a feeling talk was so much mumbo-jumbo.  After all, when the DOE left and the waste site with them (a rider on a Reagan...