- revisited

‘Way below, you’ll find the original WILD WINDS trip.

Coming immediately next, our 2010 September into October San Juan trip with our Oklahoma friend, Judy. - enokidancer

THE SAN JUAN II 2010 – no WILD; no WIND!

SWALLOW nests on the San Juan 28 Sept 2010

IT’s THE JOURNEY

Curt has said before that on any trip, there are two rivers. The first is the actual physical river , with its sand bars and sand waves, rapids and eddies, still places and wild wind, and the passing cliffs and mesas, buttes and washes. The second is the journey within. The one that you take with your spirit.

San Juan Buttes from 'Big Stick' campsite. Late afternoon.

I only know, after we put in the first day, and make our miles to the sheltering cottonwoods of what I consider the loveliest camp site on the upper San Juan, I am home. I never seem to get over the wonder of the way the evening sun can highlight first the cluster of golden flowers above the bank, then light up the deep red butte up-river, then the orange-red sandstone just across the river.

In a sense of peaceful wonder at the stillness and richness all around me, with my companions I chat and cook, and eat and talk, and do dishes, all the while basking in being back here, in the freedom and blessing of a Southwestern river canyon.

Same San Juan Butte, evening light. sept '10

And then, night settles over us. The stars still welcome me. The river sounds, and the familiar sense of sand and rock and the earth under me are like the deep, soothing thrumming of a mothering heart.  I’m the lost child who found her way home. Here, I know I am loved.

= = = = = = = =

Judy’s rivering with us began, in a sense, about three years ago, when we first invited her to accompany us on a canoe trip down the Green River, in Utah.

Judy @ Cottonwood campsite. 28 sept 2010

We were to put in at Ruby Ranch and take out at Mineral Bottom. She didn’t go. Unfortunately, a friend of hers in Oklahoma, a former whitewater kayaker (daredevil?) regaled her with scary tales of death by water or potential death. She wasn’t ready to  go. Of course, I believe that, later, the kayaker friend realized we were canoeing down the Green, and tried to take back the sturm und drang.

(…to be continued.. enoki.d.)

September 26, 2009       Tags: Iona prayer, San Juan River

(original story)

THE WILD WINDS of the SAN JUAN

The Wild Winds of the San Juan, Easter, 2009                                                      

    Deep peace of the running water to you,
    Deep peace of the flowing air to you,                                   
    Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
    Deep peace of the shining stars to you…

               the Iona Community, Scotland

Norma @ Mineral Bottom, Green River, Utah. Oct. '06.

We both came home from our Easter Week raft trip on the San Juan relaxed and happy, both saying, “What a beautiful trip!” This was our second trip together on the San Juan.  Our first was by canoe in June, 2006, the story I wrote up as “High Water Hellacious.”

I tried to write about this Easter trip, and what it meant to me, but the words eluded me. I tried to tell the story in the order of events, but discarded that effort as unsatisfactory. However, I suppose some chronology is necessary to understand the outcome.

My chronological telling would have to begin with my being almost irreversibly cold the first night on the river and bummed to a new low because of my inability to spring back into the boat like a trout after a plod through the cold river to help dislodge the raft from a submerged sand bar – my spring was sprung! – more like flopping. I got cold that night. I wasn’t able to recoup my body warmth before bedtime, nor during the night.

The second evening, we overshot the campground we’d hoped for, Big Stick, where we had planned to camp with some Colorado people, and were stuck on river-left, on Navajo land, where we weren’t supposed to be. There, as it turned out, we were near a group of amiable Flagstaff river guides.

Then, I’d have to tell about the excitement and exhilaration of Curt’s successful oarsmanship bouncing us grinning over most of the rapids, easily maneuvering the  Four Foot Rapid, and, after that, heading into The Eight Foot. Needing to enter “right of the big rock” we were swept to its left, and, as the raft curved around, the left pontoon swung up fast and hard at a steep angle onto another big rock to its left, tilting the raft up abruptly, throwing me from my chair. Falling, I caught a couple of the bars with my hands, and did not get thrown overboard. Curt’s balance was stabilized by his having both hands on the oars. Later, noting blood spots on the calf of my pants, I found a superficial cut on my leg.

The traverse was a big success, since several of our friends had told us they always got dumped on The Ledge. We stayed upright and smiling,only to get hung up at the bottom with the pontoons straddling a big rock. This time we were able to get free by shifting our positions within the raft, and didn’t have to get down into the wild, cold water.

Next, I’d have to chronicle the insane and never-ending wind of the third evening, whipping the trees and sweeping rough sand into our eyes, faces, teeth, destroying our efforts to use the new tent as anything but a flattened envelope to slip into to hold back the wild and inhospitable night. Inside, though, it was warm and cozy.

The blow-by-blow story would include my feeling of unease that day as the usual brilliant blue sky took on a suffocating, darkening aspect, choked by a heavy sandstorm filling the canyon, blurring sight, filling one’s senses, seeming to have no beginning and no end.

I would have to relate the frustration of what should have been our last day, Wednesday, when, pushed there by the wind, we sat in our backed-up-to-a-steep-bank raft, thwarted, and “becalmed”. That is, if one can be becalmed by a hard, unending wind blowing upriver. The pontoon points in front of us were swaying north with the wind one minute, then south with the current the next, and back, and forth, and back, the wind nullifying the force of the downstream current and all Curt’s attempts to row downriver to Mexican Hat.

San Juan - downriver

But that’s not my story, not the point of the trip. Not what I want to tell. This, maybe, is the picture, starting the last night out:

The wind cannot be ignored. We have stopped for the evening, seven or eight miles short of our goal for today, which was to have been the take-out beach at Mexican Hat. We have accepted the gift and the dictates of the river. This will make our take-out at least a day later than we have planned. We do come prepared with the ingredients for an extra meal or two, extra packets of oatmeal, and snacks or fruit which do not require cooking, so we are okay if we choose to delay even up to two days.

Once again, as on our first trip down the San Juan, when we were twice catapulted from our canoe into the wild waters and swept along boatless for two miles, we have surrendered to the forces of nature, this time to the inexorable wind sweeping up the river, at times strong enough to push us back upriver. Nature is in control; we defer to her power, and acquiesce with as much grace as we can muster.

After a breather at the site on the river where the wind and the current had our pontoons swinging downriver-upriver-downriver for about an hour, Curt has gathered his strength and powered through the high wind and waves down a stretch of river bordered by steep banks, to put in at a flat area which looks promising as a place to stop for the day.

He gets out to investigate the possibilities. He decides that the hill up the bank, with the backing of the wind-breaking cliff behind it, will do for our camp. I get out of the raft. Even with my ironwood staff, I can barely walk against the wind, and have to stop several times, bowing down my head into the blow to keep my footing. We later find out that the wind gusts were 45-55 miles an hour.

We climb to the campsite up to the base of a low cliff above the river. There are many small trees, mostly tamarisk, although there are also willows and something that might be Arizona alder. Some deceptively fragile-looking baby bamboo plants have settled in, here and there.  I might think more tenderly of them, except, of course, here they are just another invasive plant.  All along the base of the cliff there is a projecting ledge that will serve as a sit-upon, table, and kitchen, so there is no need to unload the kitchen box, nor the chairs, from the raft.

Curt unloads the basic necessities from the boat and carries them up the hill, fighting the wind. He clears out a place for the Paco Pads against and immediately below the low red cliffs, behind a delicate screen of tamarisk saplings, beside a couple of good-sized trees I will later be able to use as support.

Our meal this evening is spaghetti with beef sausage. He has brought up our new little single burner stove. Since I have pre-cooked the pasta and the sausage, and the sauce is fresh in a jar, it makes a one-pot meal. We eat and talk, watching the river. No one else passes.

We climb into our shelter before sundown. It seems to stay light forever. The wind is calming, somewhat. The sounds of the river are peaceful and reassuring, and we kick back and talk and peacefully slip into night. 

I find the place indescribably lovely. As we settle down to sleep, I feel that this place has an enchanted quality. The ethereal, graceful tamarisk fronds above barely move in the gentling breeze. The air is delightful, fresh. The problems of the day have been solved. I am presented with a habitation fit for a fairy queen. The walls of my bower are transparent before me, revealing a living and breathing landscape and the eternal, symbolic river. The headboard of my bed is cliff, rich, ancient, and curiously figured. The mythic sweetheart  is found, and beside me, friend, lover, protector.

Night falls. There’s nothing between my eyes and the stars. The Little Dipper is at eleven o’clock, pointers due north, which, on this winding river, I have already discerned. Great, glowing, somewhat blurry patches of stars shine all about overhead, faint, familiar constellations creating my dream sky.

My glasses are tucked away in my personal bag. I don’t reach for them, because the impressionistic sky is perfect like this. It presents a dreamlike quality. And it is glorious to me. My primitive soul is home in a way that it has not been for years.

ngc6164_gemini 4000 light yrs away toward s. constellation Norma

One of the last times I remember sleeping, tentless, beneath the stars, was years ago, in the fifties, when my brother Paul and I camped out on the ground outside the Hopi villages, where we had gone for the Butterfly Dance. I could barely sleep that night for the wonder of the great black sky and bright stars above, all splayed out across the heavens in a display that might have been just for me. The sky was there all the time, every night, for the looking. For some reason, I had to travel to find a place to lie free beneath it.

OLD photo Hopi village

The air on my face is cool, with just the faintest breeze, and a waning gibbous moon sits in the sky at about three o’clock on my right.

Beside me, our heads toward the sheltering cliff wall, lies Curt. The release of the night after the excitement of the wild, constant wind, and the work and trial of the day has us in and out of sleep, talking quietly at those times we are simultaneously awake, softly, as if not to disturb the utter peace of this glowing night. 

Our Paco Pads are on a downhill slant. Throughout the night, I slide a bit, following gravity, sleeping and awake. My feet are ensconced in my mummy bag. Two little trees stand down at the foot of my pad. Each time I awaken, it requires a muffled scrabbling with my covered feet to find the trees and push myself back up the incline.

Curt has spread the tent fly from our unused tent over our bedrolls. This is good, because the night becomes exceptionally dewy, and deposits a lot of moisture on this impervious layer. At least the condensed dew doesn’t freeze into frost as it did the first night on the river. I stay warm.

A great peace settles over me. I feel happy. I am charmed by the place and our choices. I am impressed and reassured by the way Curt has handled with grace a difficult situation which might have caused others to sink into anger, a feeling of futility, or frustration.

We have decided on future trips to build in a lay-back day, and, if all things go well, to utilize it to kick back and rest. Thus, if anything else unforeseen might come up, we would be prepared to accept it as a matter of course.

Maybe that is the point of this story: On this journey, in each case of adversity or struggle, in each difficulty, we’ve kept our heads, our equanimity, and our senses of humor, and faced it together. There are solutions to each problem. We adjust. We adapt. Neither of us is alone. Once again, we learn as much about each other as we do about the river.

Before I was twelve, I had devoured every fairy tale book on the two shelves in the Flagstaff Public Library. Since I rode the bus in to school from the country, the teachers at Emerson, which stood on the corner of Sitgreaves and Aspen, would let me go to the library at recess, just on the other side of the Rio de Flag. I returned with the five books allowed, and would lug them home on the bus out to our place near Bellemont. Dug in, in my books, in our faintly-lit country cabin, I lived a far different life, rosier, somehow. Enchanted.                 

Now, here, by the river, with Curt, I am once again at home in what might seem a dream. A rosier life, an adventure. Here, under the cliff, after the winds and the struggle, I inhabit a world extravagantly beautiful, peaceful and still, and far, far from ordinary. I touch the earth. I sleep with the starry night above my face. It’s mine. My story. I don’t think I could have made it up, nor dreamed it.  

It must be a gift. I say thank you.                   

Anticline, San Juan

This is the FIFTH year of this event at

PINE MOUNTAIN AMPHITHEATER

FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

17 – 18 -19 SEPTEMBER 2010

Saturday, 18 September 2010:

THIS IS OUR THIRD YEAR TO VOLUNTEER  AT THIS EVENT. We started working with the first production. We missed working the last two years. Once because of my youngest’s wedding, the next, due to a river trip schedule. We’re back!

The last time we volunteered, the second year of the production, among the many great performances, the marvelous KRUGER BROTHERS were our ‘discovery of the year’! They had just written a composition and were positioned to appear with 80 symphonies that year! We were blown away by their surprising presentation, their depth and virtuousity! This April, 2011, they will be here with the Flagstaff Symphony. We plan to be there.

Tonight, there is a great CONTRA DANCE at the Ashurst Auditorium, Old Main, on the NAU campus in Flag. When I was in southern New Mexico, I went to the Contra Dances @ the Old Mesilla Community Center. It was the sort of thing where you could go alone, with family, or with a friend. No need to draggle along your own partner.

Area musicians would get together earlier in the week to jam/practice, and then perform – one Saturday a month. I used to joke that it was the only place in town where you could go and everyone there would have a silly smile on his/her face! That, of course, was due to two things:  the variety of mistakes possible . . . AND . . . everyone was having a great time.

Today and tomorrow, we continue our volunteer stint out at the Amphitheater. It’s a great place to see a lot of happy people and dancing children.  According to Curt, who worked the campground yesterday afternoon, the campgrounds are full. Some family groups came in in plural vehicles. Sort of mini-reunions going on.

Y’all come!  Enokidancer

It’s Tuesday, September 21. PICKIN’ in the PINES 5th Annual FESTIVAL was a great success. The crowd was huge, but all relaxed and happy, filling the concert seats under the amphitheater canopy, and good-humored folk and free-spirited children spread like the Rubiyat’s gathering, “star-scattered on the grass.”

The entertainment included performances by the Burnett Family Bluegrass, Seldom Scene, Audie Blaylock and Redline, Muskelunge Bluegrass, Freighthoppers, Great Bear Trio, Dixie Beeliners, John Reischman and the Jaybirds, Town Mountain, Providence, Titan Valley Warheads, the Knockabouts, the Jeff and Vida Band, Andrew and Noah Van Norstrand,  Tony Norris and Friends,  and the Flagstaff Festival Singers. The ambience of the whole festival seemed light-hearted and joyful.  A lot of toe-tapping, smiles, pleasant nods, and unspoken communication. The weather was terrific, with those deep-blue North Country skies you often get up here @ 7,000 feet above sea level.

Curt said, “While the Burnett family was playing, one old-timer asked me if I was from Flagstaff. When I said yes, he said, ‘ They sure make great ambassadors for your town.’ And they do.”

Saturday and Sunday evening & afternoon, I volunteered in the Festival T-Shirt booth. I worked with Sylvia and Debbie, from Mesa and Tucson, respectively. Susan Billingsley was the organizer. I went early for my first shift and got to train on the satellite credit card reader, complete with tiny printer. This little electronic wonder was loaned or rented to the PIP organization by National Bank of Arizona, one of the major sponsors of the Festival. My joke was, we just turned our eyes to the sky and asked if this person really wanted to buy a T-shirt.  And the sky invariably said yes.  How easy it made our tasks!

It got a lot of use during the afternoons when I was there. I guessed that over half the sales of CDs and other items, including shirts, were purchased through use of credit cards.

I can’t say enough for the organization of the event. Everything moved so smoothly. Big Blue Sound professionally took care of the musician’s performance needs. Native Plant and Seed  graced the stage background with living, potted trees and shrubs. I had the distinct feeling that the trees were absorbing the joy inherent in the music and in the appreciation of the audience.

People were there from all over, even a few who said that they had just seen the sign on the highway, and followed it in. People were congratulating themselves for coming.

When we came home, I immediately got tickets for the Flagstaff Symphony / Kruger Brothers performance, slated for April 8, 2011. They are also doing a concert for Flagstaff Friends of Traditional Music while they are here. Henry Kaldenburgh, with whom Curt was working Friday night, said that the Krugers love Flagstaff so well, that they will just jump in the car and drive here @ the least provocation.  If our early experience among the folk drinking in their exquisite performance at the 2007 Picking in the Pines is indicative of Flagstaff’s regard for the Krugers, Flagstaff loves the Krugers back!

Pickin’ in the Pines is one of very few such festivals put on by a non-profit organization. Volunteer labor (one might read “love”) makes the Festival go ’round.

If you’ve not been yet, you’ll probably want to make it out to the loveliest venue in the West next fall!

Y’all come! Smiles.

Enokidancer

www.pickininthepines.org/

www.krugerbrothers.com

San Francisco Peaks from Meadowlark Drive, Flagstaff, AZ

WATER. FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

OUR LOCAL GOVERNMENT RECENTLY HAS BEEN STUDYING A PROPOSAL TO SELL DRINKING WATER TO THE ARIZONA SNOWBOWL, A SKI AREA, FOR ARTIFICIAL SNOWMAKING.

A MUCH-CONTESTED CONTRACT WAS SIGNED OVER FIVE YEARS BACK, ALLOWING THEM TO SELL RECLAIMED WATER TO THE SNOWBOWL.

NORTHERN ARIZONA NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES PROTEST RECLAIMED WATER ON THE SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS, AS DESECRATION.  THE PEAKS ARE SACRED IN THE MYTHOLOGY / TRADITION OF AT LEAST FIVE TRIBES – NAVAJO, HOPI,  HUALAPAI, HAVASUPAI, UTE, AND, I BELIEVE, THE APACHE.

ONE AUTHOR OF A  LETTER TO THE ARIZONA DAILY SUN EDITOR CITED A DROUGHT IN THE EUROPEAN ALPS DUE TO EXCESSIVE TAPPING OF THE AQUIFERS FOR ARTIFICIAL SNOWMAKING.

Norma  4 September 2010

Schultz Pass Fire, San Francisco Peaks, summer, 2010. An abandoned campfire destroyed 16,000 acres of Ponderosa forest.

MY LETTER

Do not contract to supply public drinking water to a private business for private profit. ”Man cannot buy or sell the sky.” Nor can he create drinking water.

We live in the desert Southwest. There is no reason to expect, nor try to duplicate, the amounts of snow that would prevail at higher latitudes, or elevations, or in a humid continental climate.

As human stewards of a rare and dwindling life-giving resource, we cannot with conscience contract with a private, for-profit entity, promising to sell a steady amount of drinking water that most likely will be needed in the future to sustain human life. And that includes reclaimed water.

Aquifers all over America, and the world, are being depleted, and, in some cases, defiled. There must be respect for the long view. Surely there must be a limit to the limited view that “if it exists today, use it, it will still exist tomorrow”. Rapacious policies toward earth’s resources in the name of “progress” in the past have led to desertification and barren wastelands.

Years ago, Dr. Agnes Allen of the NAU geology department said, “The coming crisis is not the population crisis, but the water crisis.”

Earth is in a water crisis. The Southwest is in even more of a crisis.

Our very bodies are mostly water. We cannot exist without it. Life cannot exist without it.

It is illogical and should be illegal to sell a life-giving public resource to a private business.

Norma Russell

Flagstaff, Arizona

4 September 2010

GRAND FALLS of the Little Colorado River, Northern Arizona. Runs only after spring snowmelt.

Cooper’s El Vado Ranch to

Christ in the Desert

Monastery . . .

Northern New Mexico     May 9th-14th 2010  

GROUP TRIP, Thank Goodness! (…. NEVER leave your GROUP! … mmm … repeat! …  NEVER leave ….) 

WILD? between 2 reservoirs! SCENIC? YES!

What first comes to mind is WHEE! I’m HOME!  Instead of vini, vidi, vici - this particular outing was more like: I came, I camped, I ate - (WELL! too well!) - and … I survived …  LOW water rafting!  This phenomenon was a trial totally unlike our first canoe trip, delineated further down in the blog as “High Water Hellacious”.

This was our first time to meet not only super-low water in a river, but water flow that was being steadily lowered by El Vado Dam controllers upstream on the Chama River. As it turned out, the dam people had only a small window of opportunity to try to build up the water reserve in El Vado Dam before they once again had to open the spillway/s to send everything downstream fast, in order to meet water rights obligations along the mighty Rio Grande, for which the Rio Chama is a major player, conveying the wonderful spring-melt run-off  of the extensive snowfields of this New Mexico/Southern Colorado high country down to the fertile valleys of the Lower Rio Grande. Remember Hatch Chile?

Low water is HELLACIOUSLY challenging to rafters … and lowering it adds a new & continuously lurking psychological element, the potential of sheer and total frustration. Cliff & Curt oared our NRS 16-foot pontoon raft. As we started out, it was the only raft w/ four people on it, and we were transporting Aaron’s portable sun/ shade/ rain shelter, a heavy-weight nestled in with our heavy-weight gear. The first day, before the initial put-in, the hand pump had gotten packed under a ton (or so) of gear BEFORE Curt had an opportunity to top off the air already in the tubes/pontoons from the automatic pump.  The pontoons were noticeably puny. The automatic pump had whipped out of camp with the shuttle brigade. It filled the baffles only to 2 psi. We shoot for 2.5 psi.

Our raft rode LOW. An uneasy excitement comes from a certain shared dread among the raft team on the lowest-riding raft when they hear the rubbery squelching sound as the pontoon works its way up a submerged rock – or rocks! Or, of course, the sickening CHUNK! when the point of a rock comes up between the raft floor and a bar of the raft frame, imprisoning the raft & its occupants in the middle of a”rock garden” in rushing water of uncertain depth. Fun? Doesn’t it SOUND like fun??

AARGH! STUCK AGAIN!

Due to the continuously-lowering water, we were the privileged recipients of the skills & knowledge of physics – and the physical strength - of a swiftly-assembled team employing the Z-Rig Rescue system. Aaron had learned it as a “woofer” – he is a wilderness rescuer & EMT who is also a cartographer, and experienced riverman Ned from Bluff had the pulleys & rope. Needless to say, Tuesday evening in camp we all received from Aaron – and Ned - a great lesson in Z-RIG RESCUE, and some new and improved knot-tying techniques. I think it was the best and most important lesson I have ever learned on the river, besides the new thought, firmly etched in my mind: never travel alone! Our past solo river experiences had always worked out well enough for us. However, this teamwork thing has laid a new and valuable understanding before us.

I love to learn. I went to sleep that night mentally looping ropes about each other. One can really focus on new ideas when having just passed through a dramatic real-life experience where the knowledge and techniques have just been so adroitly and successfully applied!

Leaving Flagstaff @ 8 a.m. AZ time on Sunday, We drove up to Cooper’s El Vado Ranch on 9 May, Mother’s Day. We traveled I-40 east to U.S. Hwy 491 – the former “666″- due north up the New Mexico side of the Navajo Reservation to Shiprock.  Heading about due east on through Farmington and Dulce to Chama, we gassed up (you would not believe how our truck drinks!) and headed straight south on 84/64 to El Vado, taking CR 112 in to Cooper’s.  At Cooper’s, we camped among Ponderosa pines out of reach of a rough wind in the lee of a hill by Cooper’s portion of the river. Dinner that night was pre-cooked. Aurilla brought fried chicken and potato salad, and that made camp set-up more or less painless and gave our group a chance to begin to get acquainted.

Patty, Norma, (Curt's back) & Aurilla, just before lift-off!

We put-in on the Chama the next morning, after the women had worked together to shuttle four of the five vehicles down to the Big Eddy take-out, where, on our 2009 FIRST trip down Rio Chama, we had our take-out. We rode in the fifth vehicle back to Cooper’s. The Cooper family would shuttle it down to Big Eddy for $80.00, a fee which our group shared. This would greatly facilitate our take-out. The year before, there had been an issue of a pouring rain during the approximately 2.5 hours that the shuttle process entailed. There is also a fee – about $5, to the Forest Service Ranger, Del Dubois, and a similar amount to Cooper’s, plus $10 a vehicle for camping overnight. 

We camped, cooked, socialized, and ‘rivered’, of course! Before put-in on Monday we found that the dam people @ El Vado Dam had drastically cut the river’s flow to 600 cubic feet a second. We were expecting 1800 cfs! We decided to try it; obviously a challenge!

Our organizers, Bob & Aurilla, had scheduled two “lay-back” days, two stops when we camped two nights in the same spot. It was a great decision. Meal prep was assigned by duos: husband/wife, brother/sister, partner/partner, raft occupant/raft occupant. Each group was responsible for one breakfast and one dinner. We enjoyed exquisitely spiced Thai food one evening, fajitas another, accompanied by the smoothest guacamole, and a marvelous chile/stew with delicious corn pone “Johnny Cakes,” a specialty of Patty’s. One breakfast was Bob & Aurilla’s thick, beautiful “McChama sausage muffins.”

MAKE YOUR OWN SHADE. AFTERNOON CHAT in camp. Lay-over day. Photo: Bob Kratz.

Aaron chowing it down .... mapitguy

flashback notes: 14 May 2010 …. Home in Flag!  Just got in @ 10:30 p.m., from a 5-day raft trip with Curt and 6 other Flagstaffians, one Californian & one Utah-an, down  northern New Mexico’s Rio Chama . When we got up this morning, to be our last day on the river, we found to our dismay that the river had dropped another two-and-a-half feet! Our three rafts were reduced to rock-hopping, practically tiptoeing over the exposed rocks, some of them potential de-flators. 

WE CALL IT "ROCK GARDEN"... SUPPOSED TO BE A RIVER! photo: Aaron Seifert

One rafter referred to our traverse of  one rocky rapid as “a pin-ball ride!”  (boing-boing-boing!) (TILT!!!)

We rowed and ricocheted and pushed and pulled and fulcrum-ed, shifted weight around within the raft, waded – and some slipped and fell into – the icy water, and dislodged our rafts, nursing and nudging them down to all but the last eight miles of our planned goal. Our friend Patty, new to rafting, “manfully” jumped into the water and pushed and pulled with the most experienced. Not a very good way to stay warm! We left the river early, at Chavez take-out, just beyond the monastery, the first take out that the road came in to!

Back home, Curt looked up the USGS water level records for our last hours on the river. River runners, read this and weep!  

Friday, 14, May: 4 a.m., the flow was 198 cfs.  I believe we still had about 13 (?) miles to travel. At  6 a.m., the Rio Chama was flowing  @ 206 cfs.;  @ 9:30, when we put in for our last day, the river was running @ 206 cfs! 

The lowest level recorded during this time was the 198 cfs. Go figure. It’s really hard to row rocks.

At Chavez take-out, we were eight road miles from the vehicles, parked at Big Eddy. Due to the special skills, strength, resolve, and extremely positive attitudes of two of our younger women, they volunteered to take off with car keys, hitting the dirt road. Aurilla left first, walking rapidly, hoping, of course, that someone might come along and give her a ride the eight miles to the parked vehicles. Heather, a rock-climber and runner, took off next. Even though she’d had a few hikes, she said she hadn’t gotten nearly enough exercise, and was prepared to run the eight miles. As it turned out, about a mile up the road, the two women were offered a ride to our vehicles. This probably cut off at least three hours of wait.  

AURILLA - CREATING COMMUNITY

The road is dirt, and 16 miles long, coming in from Hwy 84/64, the “Chama Highway”. We were about 14 miles from the highway @ Chavez. The road is  FR 151, familiarly known as “Monastery Road” due to its ending at Christ in the Desert Monastery, a Benedictine facility well-known for a number of reasons, not the least being for a couple of its past noted visitors, the iconic artist Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and influential American Catholic author.

NED & BOAT ... photo by Aaron Seifert

 One thing I’ve noticed about my approach to this report – I have neglected to mention the beauty and grandeur of the Rio Chama country and of the wilderness area. Or the way I feel about the people up here in this land of Rio Arriba!  This wonderful cliff country represents Georgia O’Keeffe’s old Southwestern “stomping grounds”.  Her 7,000-acre ranch nestles within the arms of Ghost Ranch’s 21,000 acres just south of our take-out area. Anyone familiar with her paintings will see in them representations of this glorious area, the “Piedra Lumbre”  the “land of the glowing stone.”  And, if  you have seen this country and later familiarize yourself with her art, you will find the Piedra Lumbre again and again in her paintings.

I was lucky enough to live in Chama & teach in Tierra Amarilla for eight years. For three years prior to my move into the area, I volunteered summers at Ghost Ranch, doing physical labor in the mornings, and teaching afternoons in a summer program I devised for the children of two villages, Abiquiu and Cañones, where I taught Spanish reading and writing, following a method devised by a New Zealand teacher, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, which she called “organic learning.” 

In Chama when I lived there, a tall, local, well-known, well-liked, expansive figure, Jonathan G., had the habit of entering a room or a restaurant where the gathered folk invariably included many friends, and flinging out his long arms and big hands, and exclaiming, “God! I LOVE this country!!!”   And this country loved Jonathan. Unfortunately, he met an untimely death.  But I always think of his cry when I look at these cliffs, these forests, this river …. and the people I know here …. God! I love this country!

GROUP - Rio Chama 2010- Heather, Aaron, Bethany, Norma, Curt, Cliff, Patty, Ned, Aurilla & Robert

  – photo: Robert Kratz

We debarked and de-rivered at Chavez, unloading our rafts, getting everything up the bank & away from the river, retrieved the vehicles, re-packing our gear aboard the vehicles, carrying metal frames and rolled rubber – large rolls of raft, smaller rolls for the pontoons. Speaking of strong, competent women, Bethany, who is a fledgling guide, besides being a Flagstaff pediatric nurse, is also one HECK of a river hand, and rower, and really strong physically, helping unload w/ aplomb. Bethany is also a “woofa” – a wilderness rescuer in training!  

TAKING OUT @ CHAVEZ BEFORE THE RAIN

BETHANY - DRESS UP NIGHT ... photo by Aaron Seifert

To me, it’s always so amazing to find out more about people, and an “experience apart” like a river trip allows for a lot of that. For instance, I found that Ned Krutzky of Bluff, and his wife Tina, are Quakers. Tina’s work schedule did not permit her to join this group, so we often found Ned writing in his journal in order to more fully share the trip with her. Ned does custom carpentry, and has retro-fitted and built homes for people with special physical needs, or those who foresee the approach of such needs as they age. As a boatman, he is quiet and sure, and doesn’t seem to make mistakes.

BOB IN O'KEEFFE COUNTRY ...photo: Aaron Seifert

Bob seems to be the most experienced boatman.  His many trips down the Grand Canyon and on other whitewater rivers throughout the West have seemed to have given him a quietly confident approach to the wildest water situations. He is perhaps the strongest person on our trips.

Also,  Aaron more than once proved that he also held strength in reserve, pulling and pushing boats out of bad situations time and again.

BRO SIS AARON & HEATHER - DRESS UP

 Our runner/rock climber, Heather,  is in biomedical engineering. Aurilla, an incredible organizer and planner, and the rock around which our human eddy swirls, sells insurance.

Cliff is a systems analyst. He is getting ready to spend a month on his motorcycle, solo, covering the 48 contiguous states. When I heard about a year ago that he was going to “do the Four Corners” on his bike, I thought, “Oh, yeah, I like the Four Corners!” and then found out that the corners were Maine, Washington State, Florida & Southern California.

… added later: Cliff left on his 48-state motorcycle tour this morning, 22 May 2010. His blog: http://azhigh.blogspot.com/  …

Patty volunteers with the raptor program at the Arboretum, where Bella, the beautiful black-eyed Harris Hawk, is one of her favorite  birds. With a background in  graphic design  and advertising, a current delight of Patty’s is mentoring and supporting her granddaughter, Aubrey, who, as a high school freshman, is competing on the state level in tennis. 

RED WIG! SEQUINS! LEI! HAWAIIAN SHIRT! BOB & AURILLA.... DRESS UP NIGHT! photo by Aaron Seifert

On our way out of the Piedra Lumbre, Curt & I stopped at Bode’s @ Abiquiu for gasoline and coffee – fuel.  There, a man called out to us something about the Rio Chama, and we motioned to him and his wife to pull in by us where Curt was gassing up the truck. He was one of the men I had called out to when their two-raft party was passing our camp on the river. This was the party from Laporte, Colorado, which included another Flagstaffian, Tim D.  He was the one who told us that on Wednesday the Dam people had again reduced the water flow 200 - 300 cfs more, leaving only a comparative trickle. ‘Tweren’t nearly enough!

Though we missed seeing our bear this year, we enjoyed ourselves, and learned a LOT!  Like the Z-RIG RESCUE!  And KNOTS! LOTS of KNOTS!

Ahhh … HOWEVER … It’s ALWAYS  good to be HOME!

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv?site_no=08286500

http://www.newmexicohistory.org/filedetails.php?fileID=495

http://christdesert.org/Visiting_Us/index.html

http://www.ghostranch.org/

http://www.bodes.com/

Exquisite. By Robert Kratz. Can you name this flower?

Dear Governor Brewer,

I would beg that you see fit to veto the mean-spirited Arizona Senate immigration bill SB 1070. I first came to Arizona in 1945. I grew up with Hispanic and Native American kids. They were good friends, good neighbors,  and good citizens, the best.

The way this bill is presented I consider racist and a slam against a whole ethnic group, and anyone who even appears to be Hispanic. This bill appears to be designed to foster harassment and racial profiling.

I have witnessed fellow teachers of Hispanic origin, whose ancestors settled the Rio Grande Valley 200 years ago, when it belonged to Mexico, stopped at highway check points and treated as aliens, because they “looked Mexican”.

We already have means to permit law enforcement to investigate people suspected of breaking legal rules.  To me, it seems that this law is an ugly extension of hatred and intolerance, and exhibits a petty small-mindedness on the parts of its legislative supporters.

Norma Russell

=====

20 May 2010

TODAY’S SHARED COMMENTS:

Date: Thu, 20 May 2010 12:00:12 -0700

Subject: SB 1070

My son Clay captured this rattlesnake near his home in New Mexico, and transported it into the wilds to release it in a less populated area. He found this one when he was on a walk with his  Shepherds. They were inquisitive pups at the time, but had been trained to SIT and STAY. Thus, they sat back and waited patiently, rather than following their eager curiousity and bouncing in to be bitten. 

He began handling snakes when he went on scientific trips with a herpetologist friend. People  in his little town call him when they need a rattler removed from their yards.

RATTLESNAKE in situ. New Mexico

RATTLING IN BUCKET

This photo shows the BLUE BUCKET in which Clay transported the rattlesnake.

And this one shows the friendly local pit viper with his forked tongue out, sensing his environment.

RATTLER - FORKED TONGUE

personal snake stories to follow. enokidancer

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #2 / enokidancer / norma

SNAKE @ SCHOOL

The last snake I caught with my hands – non-poisonous, in my case, of course - was on the grounds of Tierra Amarilla mid & high schools in northern New Mexico, where I taught. A number of the boys there were not known for gentle attitude toward small creatures.*  It was lunch break. I was on grounds duty, and some of the younger children had run up to tell me that there was a little snake by the mid-high building, and it was in danger of being killed. I caught the little snake and took it over to the barbed-wire border of the school grounds, and threw it as far as I could into the alfalfa field. I think some of them thought I was a witch. Some others, the quiet ones, were pleased.

*When I locate it, I’ll share a piece I wrote for publication – both in the morning announcements, and as a poster – to them, called “BIRD KILLERS”. 

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #1 / enokidancer / norma

SNAKE @ FOREST SPRING

The first snake I can remember catching was when I was in third or fourth grade. My family was living out by Bellemont, and my brothers and  I rode the bus the 12 or so miles each morning to Emerson School in Flagstaff. That day, my class was taken by bus on a picnic or field trip out to a forest spring, a pond. I saw, pursued, and caught a little snake. I liked the fact that it caused certain other people discomfort. While we were at the spring, an old man, I thought possibly a prospector or sheepherder, brought his donkey, laden with a pack, down to the spring to drink.

I loved horses. I walked over to see the donkey.  I put the snake in one hand, and held it behind my back to approach and pat the donkey with the other. Of course, my hand went toward his velvety nose. The donkey threw his head up violently, reared, and began to buck. He had smelled the snake, others told me.

I kept the snake to take home, show my family and friends, and turn loose. Riding back on the bus, I let it ride in the breast pocket of my shirt, and it climbed up around my neck. I had the bus seat all to myself.

= = =

FOUR PERSONAL VENOMOUS SNAKE STORIES from GHOST RANCH - and a non-venomous FIVE: #3, #4, #5, #6 and #7. Lay-tah!

= = =

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #3/ enokidancer / norma

 At Ghost Ranch, it was the unstated policy to capture and resettle rattlers unless they were encroaching dangerously close to the human population. When their area of activity intersected that of the human workers and visitors, they were killed.

SNAKE @ BARLEY FIELD

1985.   Ghost Ranch. We’d been out in the field of the experimental farm a couple of hours harvesting the rare Caspian Barley, having started early, trying to avoid the hottest sun. The rare seeds had been shared from another seed bank. This crop, though small, was the largest crop of Caspian Barley anywhere in the world in the 20th century.  We were working with short hand sickles, with our faces down by the barley, swinging along bent over from the hips, trying to save every drought-resistant seed for the next crop.  A old pickup eased onto the farm road, raising a tiny cloud of powdery dust, and approached us.

        “It’s Tim,”  said Helen, another harvester, speaking of  her son, “And Paul, they’ve come to take us for an iced tea break.”  We all piled into the back of the pickup, rode down to the shade of the huge cottonwoods around the dining hall, wiped our sweaty brows with the backs of our gloves, bandannas, or shirt tails, and sat and enjoyed our cold drinks.

        When Tim and Paul drove us back to the farm and stopped on the dirt road that got us closest to the barley field, we headed toward the tailgate, and started to jump down out of the pickup.  A man on my left jumped first.  Looking down just before he landed, he said, “Snake!”

        I was already jumping off the tailgate, down to the right, saw its tail, and said, “Rattle-snake!”

        Jumping close on my heels, one of our companions, a thirteen-year-old girl, the granddaughter of a professor at Iliff Seminary, came off the tailgate right in the middle, and landed with one foot on the snake’s body.  I remember her looking from left and right as she landed, but up, not down. The man and I simultaneously grabbed her upper arms from either side and swung her up off of and away from the rattler.

        The two teenagers who were our drivers, Tim and Paul, leapt out of the cab, one grabbing the upright shovel stuck in a hole in the frame of the truck bed, and  quickly beheaded the snake.  They buried its head in the field, cut off its rattles and gave them to me.

        We knew it was ranch policy not to kill rattlers in the wild, but when they encroached upon human space on the ranch, they usually were quickly dispatched. And we did have our hands and faces down in the barley.

        We went back to work.  But my mind kept playing with the incident.

        “You see,” my wicked joke evolved, “there was this snake,  a regular-guy kind of rattler, out for his morning slither.  He’s crossing this road on the farm, like any other day, but suddenly he hears a huge roaring, and a massive dark shadow passes over him.  He barely has time to think:

“TRUCK!”  when someone steps right in the middle of his back. 

“GIRL!”  he mentally moans.  When she is jerked off his back, he rapidly starts to slither off into the barley, when a quick motion above his head catches his eye. 

“WHOOPS!” …. he thinks, “SHOVE….!”

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #4 / enokidancer / norma

SNAKE  in  the THE ROAD /

                  or:   HOW DO  I STEP ACROSS THE SNAKE?

1986. It was the summer of the hoh’gahn @ Ghost Ranch. The two summers before, I had worked mornings on Service Corps, building, shoveling, making trail with a personable group of like-minded volunteers. In the afternoons, I had started a program in two villages, Abiquiu and Cañones, teaching kids reading and writing in Spanish, in a summer program. I had written the program to last two years, the summers of ’84 & ’85. This year I had arrived at the Ranch with a broken arm, which precluded my participation in the physical labor of Service Corps, and no program planned in the villages, and with a tent, prepared to camp on the ground, just to be again on the sand beneath those sustaining cliffs and sky.

       Upon the suggestion of my friend, Helen,  I found the hoh’gahn’. It was one of three ‘demo’  hoh’gahns’  that had been commissioned from and built by a Navajo man some 30 years before, as examples of three traditional styles of  hoh’gahns’. The screen door had been broken off. The inside was caked with dried mud that had fallen or been washed from the chinked log walls. Sunlight shone through numerous places in the walls, easily large enough for reptilian heads and bodies to pass through. The screens were torn on the window and smokehole. Aluminum cans and trash and broken and dirty cots had been abandoned inside. The walls and ceiling were covered with spiderwebs, some of them the cottony-sticky webs I’d always associated with black widows.

        I sat on a stump in the dusty semi-darkness of the interior of the hoh’gahn’ and listened. In the stillness it seemed that the chamisa and sage and juniper outside were moving and rustling; in the dry sunlight of desert early afternoon, life, in its many and variant forms, was a whispering, moving entity.

        My cast had been removed the day before. “Too early,” the unfamiliar doctor had then said. My arm looked atrophied and felt uncomfortably stiff, and hurt when I tried to move it.

        Sitting on the stump, I awkwardly gripped my wooden flute, trying to remember how to hold it. I blew a few soft, tentative notes, then tried “Greensleeves,”  and followed it with “Be Still, My Soul,” perhaps best known as “Finlandia”.

        I finished playing and rested the flute across my knees. The quiet was so complete that it seemed to me that each and every listening thing outside had stilled itself, to listen to the fluting notes from the hoh’gahn’.  The chamisa at the window screen seemed almost to be peering inside, trying to get a sense of who I was.

        The utter silence seemed to persist a few more heartbeats, and then the rustling began again. “Who is she? Is she one of us? Do you think she’ll play the flute again?” Stepping outside, I promised to bring them all water, and flute music.

        From the hoh’gahn’ and its living neighbors, I felt a sense of rightness and receptivity and a strong sense of the possibilities of utmost peacefulness. I knew this was where I needed to be.  I began cleaning out the hoh’gahn’.  My arm was weak, so I tucked the end of an ancient broom under it, and worked with the other hand. A passing group of photographers from Boston stopped. “Won’t you be afraid all alone out here? What about … men? snakes? the dark? brujas?”  (The photographers didn’t mention mountain lions. Remind me to tell you a story!)

        I laughed and said, “It’s a time when I can get all my fears together in one place, and face them.” And it was.

        Although I distrusted poisons, it seemed wise to spray some anti-arachnid mist into the cracks between the ceiling logs. I had perfect rows of dead spiders on the floor, patas pa’ arriba, under the cracks.

        I gathered some strong-smelling mud and not a little semi-dry dung and mixed a potent adobe, applying it to the holes in the walls to decrease the possibility of reptilian incursion into my dwelling place. I mended screens and re-hung the screen door, seeking non-broken places on the frame for the tiny screws.

        I painted the cement floor with one good hand, muttering inelegant things when clods of dry dirt fell from the ceiling and walls and splattered and scattered on my wet paint. The paint was light gray, which should prove in good contrast, I thought, to running arthropodan bodies and little legs.

        I placed flat stones on the eroding slope outside before the door. I trimmed back the sage and chamisa closest to the door so that I would eventually be able to see the expected occasional visiting pit viper. I was.

      I practiced being non-verbal when I could. Not an easy task for me. I usually ate only one meal a day with other people, having a solitary breakfast and supper out on a flat rock under the juniper behind the hoh’gahn’, mornings and evenings. In my removed and self-imposed silence, I could hear what seemed to me to be the almost-hysterical clamor of people’s voices as they waited in line for supper at the dining hall, probably a good quarter-to-half-of-a-mile away.

     One afternoon, after a somewhat sweaty day on the Ranch, I decided to run down for a shower to the bathhouse at The Casitas, while everyone was at the dining hall. I grabbed my towel, soap, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, and some clean garments, and headed down the dirt road toward the bathhouse.

      I followed the dusty road downhill where it crossed the arroyo, then up out of the arroyo to where the incline of the road flattened out below the bathhouse. My straightest shot to the entrance would be to the right, through the oak leaves under the Gambel’s oaks between the road and the bathhouse door. The other entrance, a bit farther to the west, was on the road that went up to The Casitas, past the bathhouse.  Just at the point where I ordinarily would turn right to climb the leafy path up the bathhouse door, I stopped, uncertain.

     Across the road, at my feet, lay a large rattlesnake, stretched out full length, immobile. Totally still.  He was about three  feet long.  His body – and his intimidating presence - pretty well occupied the road. He seemed to be asleep. There was a stiff breeze playing through the oaks. I guessed that the vibration of  the wind in the trees had masked my sandaled footfall.

     His nose was to my left, facing the hill on down to the stream. His tail, rich with rounded rattles, was to my right, toward the oaks, leaves, and bathhouse. I surmised that he had slithered down the hill. I also guessed that if he awoke, or were startled in any way, he would turn and go back the way that he had come.

     There was no way I could bring myself to walk with my bare feet and ankles in front of his nose and fangs. Nor could I walk past his tail, since I believed he would turn and run in that direction, awakened.

     Beside me just off the left side of the trail was a large sandstone rock, about 10 inches by 8 inches by perhaps 6 or 7 inches thick. I visually appraised its substantial weight and size.  And, just when I was thinking about it,  judging whether I might be able to pick up the rock – after, of course, laying down all the things I was carrying - and smash the snake’s head,

HIS HEAD JERKED UP, HE WHIPPED AROUND, AND RACED BACK UP THE HILL THROUGH THE LEAVES TOWARD THE BATHHOUSE.

     He reminded me of nothing so much as the snake in the cartoon “B.C”, when the Fat Broad is after him with a club, and his head shoots up in alarm.

I was left with the distinct impression that the snake maybe had read my thoughts, but DEFINITELY had read my INTENT. He sensed danger.  Survival instinct! Nothing to sniff at!

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #5 / enokidancer / norma

SNAKE by the HOH’GAHN’

     A young Frenchwoman, Orit, had asked to come out and see the hoh’gahn’, and how I had fixed it up as my domicile.  The afternoon she came for a visit, I showed her the interior and explained my rather simple accoutrements. After a brief talk, we were headed to the experimental farm for a lecture. She preceded me out of the hoh’gahn’, as I stopped to pick up a notebook and fasten the doors.  When I stepped out, closing the screen door, I saw Orit in a squatting position, her right arm outstretched, and her finger pointing – not  three feet from the nose – and fangs – of a small, coiled-up and rattling, greenish rattlesnake  in the shade of the hoh’gahn’, a little looped venomous spiral under the corner where the cabin logs interlocked.

      In her fairly charming accent, she said “Oh, luke, a leetle snek!”  I snapped, “Orit, get back! That’s a rattlesnake!”  I sent her running to the Long House, probably the equivalent of over a block away, to phone the office and tell them that we had a rattlesnake at the hoh’gahn’. I would wait and keep track of the rattler so I could direct whoever came with the snake stick.  She ran. I stood and watched the rattler, who watched me.

    Orit came roaring up the road in her car, surprising me. I didn’t know the cable was down. I turned to speak to her. She told me that Tim was coming. When I looked back, the snake was gone. Earlier that day, I had noted a streak of sunlight from that direction on the floor inside the hoh’gahn’ and realized I had a potential problem crack that I needed to fill up. Now the snake was missing. Not good. I needed to know where it was.  Had it gone inside my room? Or run to the grass outside?

    The snake catchers were on the way. I really needed to produce that snake.  First I went inside the hoh’gahn’. I clapped my hands, hoping that it would rattle if it were there. Nothing rattled. I grabbed my ancient broom and went outside. I systematically beat the dead grass on the west side of the hoh’gahn, the side nearest the corner where the snake had been, working in a grid pattern out from the logs. In a short time, a rattlesnake raced up out of the grass and climbed up on the exterior bottom log of the building, stretching out full length.

    To me, it looked bigger than the little fellow that had been rattling under the logs, and not greenish at all.

    Tim and his helper arrived. They caught the snake with the loop on the snake stick, took it across the road, and beheaded it, burying the head.

    People are funny. Orit told me that her father had barely survived a viper’s bite in Israel. To me, it would have been a clue to be somewhat cautious when confronted with a pit viper in New Mexico.  A doctor, a guest at the Ranch, warned me seriously that afternoon NOT to go back to the hoh’gahn’, because, he said, ”The dead snake’s mate will come looking for you, and fall on you when you least suspect it, maybe when you are asleep.”  Probably not too scientific, but it made a good story.  I listened, but it did not quite ring true with what I, to that point, knew of reptiles.The hoh’gahn’ remained my comfortable and comforting home.

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #6/ enokidancer / norma

     HERDING RATTLESNAKES

    My volunteer work-life limited in 1986 by the broken arm, I had been handed the task of walking Harry to his pre-school classes in Piñon. His mother, a friend and former co-worker from Service Corps, had to rush to get to her morning tasks. I had gone down to the dining hall to have breakfast with her. As I recall, we had gone to a morning service.  Harry was four, and an articulate companion.

     As we walked between the Ghost Ranch Library and the Dining Hall, a little dark rattlesnake undulated out of the grass and began to cross the dirt road in front of us. It saw or sensed us and turned, and started back across the Library lawn, headed in the direction of a small tree that the little children sat around in the afternoons for their story.

     I told Harry, “Run into the cafeteria and tell them that Norma has a rattlesnake on the road and that we need a shovel!”  He ran. Amazing kid!

     I took out after the snake, ran around in front of it, and began to hit the earth in front of it with my straw hat, to turn it, and get it away from the long grass where the children would later sit. It turned, I pursued it, hitting the ground with my hat, knowing that I had to get it onto the hard-packed dirt of the road to enable anyone coming to secure it long enough, and to have a hard enough surface under it, to kill it.

    About the time I got it out to the center of the road, Harry ran back. He was accompanied by my friend, Helen, and her son, Tim. She carried a broom. He had one of those little green folding Army shovels. They dispatched the snake.

    Helen later told me that, since the only shovel in the dining hall was that short one, and they didn’t know how big the snake was, she grabbed the broom to help hold the serpent in place while Tim beheaded it.

     How about that Harry?  And how about adults smart enough to listen to and respond to a small child, and trust that a child can speak words of truth, necessity, and wisdom?

PERSONAL SNAKE STORY #7/ enokidancer / norma

                ”THE LONGEST SNAKE”

                                           OR: “AND JUST HOW BIG DID YOU SAY IT WAS?”

    This one starts out like a fish story . . . “and how long WAS it?”  The longest, biggest snake I ever saw UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL  in New Mexico, besides the boa constrictor that the zoo folks brought to school, was at the hoh’gahn’, in 1988.  In fact, it was IN the hoh’gahn’, with me, by the time I saw it!

     When I first started living in the hoh’gahn’, in 1986,  I evolved a tentative plan  that I might follow  if ever a rattlesnake did get into the hoh’gahn’, and if I had the time and space to react in a self-life-saving manner, and might possibly be able to exit without a dose of venom in my body. 

     The plan, loosely, was this:  In the hoh’gahn’, I slept on a rollaway cot that Kathy Morrison had sent up for me. The mattress was thick enough to be comfortable, and thin enough to pick up and move.

     My thought was, if a snake did get inside the room, and it wasn’t under the bed when I was on it, and I had at least a temporary bite-free zone for my ankles, and IF I had to get out the door post-haste, to swing the mattress off the bed and hold it in front of me, between the snake and myself, and try to maneuver my portable bite-proof barrier and myself on out through the narrow door.

     Of course, this Plan A required that a lot of things had gone my way … I’d have to be awake, alert, aware (Plan A!) … the snake had to be non-threateningly apart from me, and I’d have to see him first. As it turned out, when the Great Mythical Snake finally appeared, Plan A was no longer an option.

     I lived in the hoh’gahn’  all summer in 1986. The next summer, in 1987, I took my version of an epic journey, camping out all along the Continental Divide from Chama, New Mexico, up  to East Glacier, Montana, and then cutting West to the coast, winding up to spend a week with my brother and his wife in Anacortes, Washington. I interviewed people along the route, mostly women, about their social concerns and activity, what ELSE they were doing with their lives to help the world and its folk. Upon returning to New Mexico, I went to the Ranch, cleaned out the hoh’gahn’ again, and used it as a base in which to write. From Chama, during the year, I also would go down to the Ranch at times for breaks and weekends. I missed the place, and the peace that it always engendered.

     This was the summer of 1988. Since I had immersed myself by choice in the middle of Hispanic northern New Mexico, I decided to take the two-week Spanish language immersion course then offered by the Ranch. Needless to say, I asked permission to once again live in the hoh’gahn’. Once again, I cleaned it out, this time having to make only minor repairs.

     Our class was a true immersion, morning, meal times @ the Spanish tables, all afternoons, and some evening involvement, for two weeks straight. The only time I had free was a little bit at noon. And, since the hoh’gahn’ was at no little remove from the main part of the Ranch, and I was always afoot, any visit to “my house” engendered a hike out to the hoh’gahn’, and a hike back to class, leaving very little time to accomplish anything.

     On the day of  THE LONGEST SNAKE, I had decided to clean during the short break time at noon. I usually did so by sweeping out the hoh’gahn’, gathering the dust and sand on the dustpan, and carrying it out the door, across the dirt road, to dump it in the little ditch that was eroding, and needed all the dirt it could get. Usually, the next step was “mopping”, which involved dumping the contents of the water bucket I had lugged up the road onto the floor, and sweeping the water out the door. Of couse, in that arid climate, it took no time for the floor to continue drying itself.

     Today, I propped the wooden door open outside with a rock, and propped the screen door back with a rock inside, so nothing would impede my progress, running out with a dust-laden dustpan, and back inside ready to sweep again. To add to the ambiance, and, of course, not to waste a minute NOT learning Spanish, I had my little portable tape player, volume UP, cranking out Linda Ronstadt’s “Canciones de mi Padre” …. and I MIGHT have been singing along.

     Da-da-da-DAH – dah! …. I carefully swept a dustpan full, lifted my head, and rose up to head out the door with it, glanced toward the door, and froze in mid- “dah-da-da?”  On the left side of the door, where the two propped-back doors formed about  forty-five-degree angles, one outside, one in, lay the curved body of a snake, as big as your arm, the pattern of its skin a mottled brown and gold, its tail under the wooden door outside, its head under the screen door, inside. From the three and one half or four feet of unending snake body I saw, not counting its unseen head and tail, I estimated that my visitor was at least five feet long, maybe longer. He looked solid and muscular.

    To say I paused is an understatement. I froze. My mind immediately discarded Plan A. It would be too cumbersome – and too close to the snake - to get to the bed & remove the mattress. Furthermore, it might disturb the snake, and make him move further into the room, disturbed! - and probably directly confronting me, fang to face, so to speak, placed even more directly between me and the open door.

     At the moment, the snake appeared to be totally still. The interior of the hoh’gahn’ was cool and shady, and my painted cement floor was smooth and cool. To me, it appeared that he had just slithered into the first available cool, smooth spot. Maybe for a nap. I hoped.

     Maybe he just liked Linda Ronstadt.

     My intuition suggested that I try to sneak out the door behind him. I reasoned that it would take a bit for him to re-coil himself out from under the door, and I would be able to see the gathering movement of his muscles in time to scoot on through the opening.

      I thought that, with the thudding vibration of my too-loud “Canciones” as a distracting cover, if I moved smoothly, silently, and somewhat swiftly, with no change in the light until my shadow and I had actually passed through the door and were “home free”, beyond his nose, I had a chance of making it without disturbing the big snake.  Decision made.  As a precaution, I held my weathered broom in front of my feet, and exited sideways, my eyes on that muscular, beaded back. I was careful not to bang my head on the lintel, this time. I couldn’t afford to pause for pain. 

     Once outside, immensely relieved, I laid down the broom and ran for the Long House, and the phone. I phoned the office, and, once again, they dispatched Tim and a helper. I ran back to the hoh’gahn’, before they got there. When I arrived at the door, the snake was not in sight. I reasoned that obviously, he might have turned around, come out, and slithered off into the bushes around the  hoh’gahn’.

     But my intuition said that he probably followed his head, and, if he had not sensed nor seen me, due to the music or his perusal of the cool, dark interior of the  hoh’gahn’, he would have continued on inside. Sticking my head in the open door and not seeing him directly across the room nor to my left, I concluded that he was probably to the right, hidden by the screen door, under which he had been headed when I first saw him. I held onto the door jamb and leaned carefully into the room, and gingerly tugged the screen door toward me until it swung closed. Thus, if he were inside, he would stay there.

     The young men arrived. Tim had the snake stick. I explained that I thought the snake had gone on inside. Tim reached for the screen door. His helper, a Ranch neophyte, drew back and gasped and said, “You mean we are going in there with that thing?!” Tim opened the screen door and went in. His helper went with him. He called out, “Well, he’s not a rattler, because he’s not rattling.” I don’t know if that was for my benefit or for that of the young man with him.

    As usual, Tim caught the big snake, this time, a non-venomous bullsnake, and removed him from the hoh’gahn’.  He told me that the snake had climbed up on the horizontal logs behind the screen door. His head and part of his neck were on about the third or fourth log up. The major part of his body was stretched along the next log down. The back end and tail went on down and then along the lower log.

They transported him some distance away and released him. I was doubly happy that he was a non-venomous snake, triply, in fact - for the comfort and sanctity of the  hoh’gahn’, for the young man who was brave enough to follow Tim inside, even though he was inexperienced and scared, and for a life spared, one large galumphing snake who may, just may, have liked the music of Linda Ronstadt…

= = = =

This is a borrowed Internet photo of the species to which my visitor belonged:

BULLSNAKE, FORKED TONGUE

www.texassnakes.net/BullSnake.htm

And another photo. Note the markings!

BULLSNAKE SIDE VIEW

www.schmoker.org/BirdPics/BullSnake.html

= = =

MORE TO COME ….

Have you got  a snake story to share?

  …… And this is my beloved floor design…. first sunlight on finished design, before touching up boo-boos and reinforcing lines. Diagram on chair in background, little electric heater for drying stains, of course! I STILL like the pattern! Smiles! Enokidancer …

First Sunshine 26 Feb 10 Image & Diagram.

This is going on outside. Front yard.

And this is inside:  Finally finished the floor. Three coats of Super Krete RED stain. The floor has something of a mottled, antique appearance, due to a varied consistency of concrete surface … it’s really smooth in some places, almost ‘glassy’, and rougher and more absorbent in others. I am extremely pleased at the outcome. While it is not a modern, glossy surface, its appearance is like something out of Pompeii. Seasoned.

HOH'GAHN' CEILING, OCTAGON, UMBRELLA, SPIDER WOMAN'S WEB. ANCIENT, CONTEMPORARY. THIS IS GOING ON INSIDE!

EL SUELO!SUN ROOM FLOOR!

THIS IS OUTSIDE. I AM INSIDE. IN THE SUN ROOM, YEA!

With regard to the snow and ice, March is our springtime, almost. The face of spring is a little different, here. The new room makes all the difference. It allows me to be warm in the middle of the storm.

 We moved the hot tub into the Sun Room yesterday. Luke, our electrician, is due in to hook it up. Curt is constructing me an art table along the East wall, and a writing table along the South wall.

I’m sure that you can understand: I feel surrounded by good.

“Above me beautiful. Below me beautiful. Before me beautiful. Behind me beautiful. All about me beautiful.” 

… from the Navajo Blessing Way. Pollen for the Sun Room.

Blessings to you all! In Peace, Norma

HERE ‘TIS!    I told her that it will be the very HEART of our Sun Room!

Is it not beautiful?  Can you see how it will be with the morning light shining through it?

Christina Norlin's design for stained glass piece for East window in our new Sun Room.

 CHRISTINA’S “RAVEN’S EYE GLASSWORKS” -

 Christina Norlin

N’OKI Lost Wax Design  (WHAT ELSE I DO WITH MY TIME …)

N’OKI Lost Wax Design

Al-dai-sa. N'OKI Ring. Charlotte Acker photo.

When I retired from New Mexico, back to my hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2001, I asked myself, “What do you most enjoy doing?”  (Besides my volunteer & church activities).  At the time, the answers I came up with were “swimming” and “making rings”. I decided that I should be up and about it. At first, the swimming was easy, with pools available to the public @ MEMS and NAU. Making rings was a bit more complicated.

I had discovered lost wax casting years before in an art metal class taught by Chet Lombardi @ Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In class, I diligently worked at all other aspects of art metal that had been presented. All were do-able,  most somewhat a little difficult to master. Each was interesting, but not to the point of inspiring any unquenchable thirst for continuing along those lines. I most preferred cutting large stones with the big diamond saw.

When, finally, in the course of the class the art of lost wax was introduced, I found the spark that had theretofore been lacking for me.  The art deeply appealed to me. Its aspect of sculpture, originally. The malleability of the wax, the use of fire, the molten metal, the exchange involved, molten metal for wax, excited my imagination, and fired a deep interest and curiousity to see what I could do with it.

In 2001, in Flagstaff, I talked to Roger Rowland, at the time the owner of the Arizona Handmade Gallery. I told him of my interest in lost wax, and in continuing to pursue the art. He encouraged me to start. I began with making rings, thirteen designs. I now make sterling silver rings, earrings, bangles and crosses. I call my style N’OKI.

Roger told me that people liked to understand the process involved in making the pieces, and something about the artist. Here in the blog, I’ve picked up and copied a section I wrote for an early brochure to explain the process, and a little segment about myself, to “explain the artist”!

N'OKI Ganado Cross on petrified wood. Photo by Charlotte Acker.

N’OKI Lost Wax Design

LOST WAX objects are shaped first of wax. A cast is made, and the wax is melted out. Sterling silver is melted and forced into the hollow left by the lost wax form. When it cools, the object is a perfect replica of the original wax object, in solid silver, and it will last practically forever.

STUDYING the N’OKI silver designs, friends have seen a crown of thorns, a bird’s nest built of twigs, with the berries still on, bubbles, an effervescence; they’ve seen grape vines and grapes, sans leaves. 

I see the lines of the land I love. 

A blind friend found her name’s first initial in Braille on her ring; others say there seems to be an almost-decipherable message from some lost civilization; and possibly so, for the art of lost wax goes back centuries, to ancient Rome, and to the Guinea Coast of Africa.

The name N’OKI originally came from that of the cultivated Japanese gourmet mushroom, enoki-take, whose delicate young stems reminded Patricia Stewart, a print-artist friend, of the slender strands of silver seemingly woven into these designs. But, if you extrapolate a bit, N’OKI also stands for Norma Jean, Oklahoma-born, ergo - N’OKI.

Norma Jean, about the Artist

Norma @ The Arches National Park, following 2007 Colorado River Canoe Trip.

As a child I was brought out of the Dust Bowl and Depression

to the Great Southwest, this land of grace,

here to live beneath great dormant volcanoes and the spare lines

of cliff, and mesa, and butte,

to yearn with heart and eyes far into the red sandstone escarpment

that marches across the high desert into the heart of the land of the Navajo.

Here I was handed kindness, and fragile, sweet piki bread to munch,

chile and beans, venison, tortillas, and corn bread to share with mi amiguita Cecilia

and with the Jones boys, half Apache, half Laguna;

to know that I, too, belonged here, that I was a part of the trilogy

our three peoples were writing across this land,

beneath the clear domed sky that has never ceased

to spread its translucent blessing over my head,

and over the life-giving, trickling waters, the solid, twisting,

eternal canyons of the Colorado Plateau;

over this place that will last,

this place to trust,

this place to belong.

                                                            ©2001 Norma Russell

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February, 2010.  N’OKI Lost Wax Jewelry is currently shown in: The Weems Galleries, Old Town, Albuquerque, NM, the gallery in Electica on Main Street in Moab, Utah, and at West of the Moon Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona. A friend has asked how to find N’OKI by mail or e-mail. Carolyn Young, at West of the Moon Gallery in Flagstaff, Arizona, has agreed to handle distance requests. She can be reached:

Carolyn Young, West of the Moon Gallery, 111 E. Aspen, Ste. 2, Flagstaff, AZ 86001; Phone: (928) 774-0465;   e-mail: westofthemoonaz@aol.com. Website: WESTOFTHEMOONGALLERY.COM

This is from the early brochure:

Bangle bracelet on stone. Charlotte Acker photo.

N’OKI Lost Wax Design

These are the place names of the Colorado Plateau, & names of the N’OKI pieces, except for one, Al-dai-sa, my mother’s name, which comes from the Plains people of Oklahoma. Within these names lies part of the story of a people. Norma                

RINGS: Náz-lí-ní•running crooked / makes a turn flowing/ Kin-la-ni•place of many houses / Kayenta•corruption of “Téé’n dééh”  (boghole) “Animals fall into Deep Water.” / Wupatki • Hopi: Wupatki kuh: Tall House Ruins/Long-cut house /Al-dai-sa• Plains: found among the flowers. / Bitter Springs •“Dích’íító”/ “Not as bad as the name indicates.” H.S. Colton/ Tangled Waters • (Leupp) “Tó Nanees dizi:” Place of  water rivulets / Luk-a-chukai •patch of white reeds extends horizontally out of pass / Window Rock•Tsé gha’ hoodsání” / perforated rock / Klag-e-toh • KLeeyi’tó”/ Water in the ground /muddy water / Shiprock •“Tsé Bit’a’í” winged rock /rock with wings / Kai-beto • place of many reeds / Willow Spring / Chinle• place where water runs out of a canyon/  Betatakin●house on a rock ledge.     

CROSSES: Ganado ●Spanish: flocks/ Lók’aahnteel “Wide band of reeds up at an elevation”/  Teec Nos Pos● TIs nas bas/ Circle of Cottonwoods.  

BANGLES: Tsegi● steep canyon/ Tuba City/ named for Tuve/ Tuva, Hopi leader. 2.75” dia.  Tsé BínááyoLi ‘Chloe’● rock the wind blows around/ Beclabito/ spring underneath. 2.5” dia.

EARRINGS: small:  Tse Awee● baby rocks a. Cactus blossom. b. Waterfall/  large: Tsé zhin Dilkooh●(Dilcon) smooth lava rocks. a. Flash Flood. b. Chaco Road.

Sandy, Judy, Jackie, Lana, Nancy and Carol wearing N'OKI rings in Broken Arrow, OK.

 

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I explain to people that to clean  an N’OKI silver piece, one should use a silver cloth or gentle soap and an old toothbrush. Baking soda is good. Chemical cleaners may destroy the oxidation, which emphasizes the high relief.

When people want to get an N’OKI ring, they have to remember the old adage:

“When they made him, they broke the mold.” 

Since the rings are cast in molds, each design is one size, only. A ring can be cut down, but the 360-degree design requires a good and dedicated jeweler to do so. And, to some degree, a design might be annealed and stretched.  Once again, by a good jeweler! A person almost has to order by his/her size.

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My plan was to be able to use four colors of Super-Krete, outlined in black. Curt & I  liked my test design of three colors on an old chunk of concrete from the former patio,  so much so, in fact, that the design incorporates the three: Terra Cotta, RED, Baja Red, and an additional fourth color, Yellow. The rest of the floor will be Super-Krete RED.  These are water-based stains.  All will be sealed by Super-Krete concrete sealer. All of these items I found @ Border Construction Specialties on Enterprise Drive, in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Sun Room Floor Design - partial

At this point, I still need to go back and re-inforce my black outlines, and touch up flaws in my painting and delineation of areas. And, of course, finish the plain sections of the floor in RED.  The old lesson I have learned: I LOVE creating! To envision something, and to bring it to fruition! That’s what the Sun Room is all about!  A place planned for the growth of spirit, and peace, and the satisfaction of creating. Yes!

My question to you:  WHAT DOES THE DESIGN REMIND YOU OF?

I have my own answers, of course. And, in accordance w/ the Navajo tradition of leaving a planned mistake in each weaving, so the soul of the weaver can slip back out, I have one planned  aberration in the design.

REALLY WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR COMMENT!

Norma

Sun Room Floor Design ONE

Sun Room Floor Design TWO

Sun Room Design THREE