It's
That Deadly Time of Year
by
Dick Prosapio
© 2002
Most regions of the US have four seasons, or something
approximating four. We in the desert southwest have five. The addition
being "Fire Season". Admittedly, Fire Season could be folded
into late spring and Early Summer, but it does have distinctive
properties of its own, it's very hot, very dry, and very windy. In
each of these the emphasis is on "very".
A few weeks ago we saw a long, low
cloud on the eastern horizon just as the sun was coming up. Usually
this kind of cloud is a ground hugging fog which, during the night,
has settled onto the low plains. But the humidity was in the single
digits so we knew it wasn't fog. When we got a whiff of it on the East
breeze a few hours later we knew what were seeing was a wall of smoke
from the fires near the Colorado border some one hundred a fifty miles
north of us.
This morning a plume of smoke rose from
the Pecos Wilderness northeast of our place, about thirty miles from
us. Two years ago at the same time Los Alamos burned; we saw an
immense column of smoke rising in the eastern sky like the mushroom
cloud of an atom bomb. That was the Pecos fire and that one burned for
weeks. We couldn't believe our eyes this morning when we saw yet
another burn going on in the same area. Hard to understand what there
could be left.
Awhile later we heard the drone of the
four engine Forest Service fire bomber as it flew over our place on
the way to do battle with this latest outbreak of flames.
Our state has not been as badly hit as
Colorado yet. The weather reports each night begin with a map showing,
not fronts, but fires in New Mexico. But Colorado! Colorado is burning
this year the way we burned in 2000..and no rain now or on the way. No
rain anywhere.
It was a 30 year drought that chased
the Anasazi out of their marginal living spaces in the 14th Century.
So far, this is the worst dry spell I remember in my time in the
southwest. That would be about half a century.
Maybe this one isn't really the worst.
Fact is, I've never had to really deal with the consequences before.
During the last big dry spell I recall, I lived in the city and all it
meant to me was that I didn't have to wash my car for a very long time
because it was always dry and sunny. People who live in the cities of
the West don't, for the most part, get it that this is serious stuff.
For them there problems may boil down to the hassel of not watering a
lawn every day or being urged to get low flow toilets. Now that I live
on the land the story for me is a lot closer to home. Literally.
Our trees are stressed all around us,
that means their needles are starting to turn brown on the pinon and
juniper..and these are tough trees. Trees that know how to live in
hard times. The fields are full of wild grasses that are brown and
breaking off at the top of the root systems. There is no standing
water anywhere and every river in the region is either at the lowest
flow rate anyone can remember, or completely dry. Some of our
neighbors are surrounded by Ponderosa Pine. In good times life among
those giants is magical. Right now it is like living in a fire cracker
forest. One dropped matchand you won't have time to run-for-your-life.
And everyday we pray for rain.
Some of the fires we are experiencing
are lightning started. Maybe ten percent of them. The rest are human
caused either by recklessness or stupidity, or worse case, on purpose.
Forests and prairies and animals and houses are burning. These days it
looks like a war here in the West.
Right now nobody is winning this one.
