Hope at Work
by
Dick Prosapio © 2006
Our
plant life here in New Mexico is the very personification of "Hope".
We are in a drought here and, for those of you who have the luxury
of not experiencing that, it means that everything dies.
At least, that would be true anywhere else a
drought would strike, like Kansas for example. But here it means
everything waits. Everything with the wisdom brought about
through experience that is.
By "experience" I mean that these are the natives
of this place.....anything introduced will die. The native grasses
here don't even poke a single exploratory blade above the dry dust
during the drought. So if you take a walk in dry time(s) you'd guess
that there was nothing to step on but hard, dry, dusty soil.
Then it rains........it rains fast and hard for a
short time and there is nothing apparent... at first. The water runs
a short distance in a rivulet and then soaks into the ground.
Gone.
Then it rains again, harder this time and longer.
And it soaks into the ground. That might be the end of it. But if
this is the harbinger of the monsoon season, the advent of a plume
of moisture being drawn up from Mexico, it rains again. And
again.......and it rains like clockwork, the process being a
relatively clear dawning followed by a few spare clouds by
midmorning and then the next time you happen to look up those clouds
have multiplied ten fold and begun to billow.....and by mid
afternoon there is serious cloud building going on until soon great
cumulonimbus anvils are appearing all around and the sky darkens as
one builds over your very spot and the thunder rumbles strong and
deep and long.......and the downpours begin.
They fill every depression and every "arroyo"
("gullies" where you are) and they roar and surge and pour down hill
and mountain sides rolling rocks the size of your head and sometimes
your torso if it's a big enough storm. Awesome (in the appropriate
use of this adjective) displays of lightning fill the sky and the
thunder booms well into the night and usually doesn't fade until
around midnight.
The rains fill the low-lying flats and soak
everything. The trees, the pinon and the juniper glow with life, the
cacti fill up like fat people at the hot dog feast......and, once
the storm has dumped its tons and tons of water, and the silence
returns to the high desert a sound, sometimes unheard for years,
begins to build;
.......the frogs.
The frogs have been waiting buried deep in the
hard, dry, clay and now have clawed their way to the surface of the
run off filled cattle tanks (the man made and natural depressions in
the land that collect water) and they are desperate to mate lest
there not be another chance. They will sing all night for days, and
if more rain comes, for weeks, and they will not fall silent again
until the rains stop and those magical ponds go dry.
Then they will dig deep into the disappearing mud
and go back to their waiting again. And a day or two after the frogs
began to sing, the land will have turned green with the tough
survivor grasses of the high desert country.
It's then that you "get" the lesson about how much
patience and endurance it takes to keep hope alive in a place like
this.
........and you begin to understand what
"Enchantment" really means.
In places where there is always "plenty", places
like the Pacific Northwest for example, a wholly different myth
system evolves very unlike the myths of the Southwest. There is so
much available all the time that struggle is a stranger. There is
little need for the kind of energy put into icons of Hope there.
It's about "pot-latch" and "Give-Aways" and huge Feasts of
thanksgiving and wet forests and streams filled with fat fish.
In the Southwest, it is a celebration to find a
flower growing in a crack in a boulder, a blade of grass pushing up
through the clay, a single frog singing in the desert. That is
reward enough to keep funding hope.
This is not to say that one is "better" than the
other.....or that one builds "character" while the other nourishes
indulgence. This is to say, that life experienced in the Southwest
will breed a far different person than life in a place where
struggle is not a daily undertaking. I suppose that anyone who likes
a reminder of the availability of miracles prefers this kind of
country.
I guess I'm one of those people.
