dearest friends, family, and followers:
i recently had a trip down memory lane and realized that i have lived in new mexico for well over a year now and have had a wild ride since february 2012... a wild, awesome, breathtaking, and revolutionary year. i am pulling together the earliest memories i wrote down from my first few months in silver city, new mexico last year.
you should take the trip with me, i apologize for not having any photos in this blog entry... i had originally many inserted with the text, but these blog entries were from an older blog that crashed (my first blog, "petit a petit") and the photos that were linked all disappeared. in an ideal world, i would take the time to put all those photos back in with these entries... but that is not happening, at least right now. if you really want to follow my photos, i am @cecatlett on instagram, and have spent a lot of time documenting my adventures on my instagram account. feel free to follow me there, too :)
happy reading, it is a good trip down memory lane, promise!
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| sock monkey and i cross the 'border' |
SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2012
fire in the mountains
man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers
have killed our wilderness. some say we had to. be that as it may, i am glad i
shall never be young without wild country to be young in. of what avail are
forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
--aldo leopold, a sand county almanac
it is officially fire season now. after a dry winter, with a
pitiful snowfall (snowpack was less than 50% the average this year), and now
building heat brought in from southerly winds, the southwest stands in perfect
condition to burn.
everyone kept saying it was going to be bad, but how bad we
still have yet to know... if the whitewater baldy fire has any precedent, then
we should go ahead and prepare for some of the worst fires this part of the
country has seen in a long time.
the whitewater baldy fire started in mid-may, and is still
burning... started by lightening, the fire initially spread across a few
hundred acres. for three weeks it has burned now, and has grown to over 220,000
acres. a good portion of the gila wilderness has been burned, and may continue
to burn, given the extreme terrain of the mogollon mountains--steep, brushy
slopes, impeded by craggy, sharp rocks, juniper and pinon, and little roads by
which to gain access to the wilderness. below is a map of the fire from the
forest service, showing the fire's progression as of may 31.
as you can see, there is significant growth since its first
days, the green on the map show the place of origin for the fire. red is the
latest growth... its frightening to see how the fire's path weaves itself into
the steepest of canyons, then rises up the slopes to peaks, before making its
way down the other side of ridges.
as of today, the fire is now 17% contained. this is great
news, considering the first two weeks of the fire were 0% contained. humidity
has been a constant 3% here in the area, which has only made containing the
fire that much worse. monsoon rains are still months away. i am afraid that the
whitewater baldy fire is just the first of many, and maybe worse, fires to
come.
which brings me to my beloved gomez peak, in the gila
national forest, just four miles outside of silver city. i literally ran there
the day before the fire... it was a smokey, eerie day. the air was dense with
the soot that drifted in from the whitewater fire, which is still about 10
miles outside of town. you could feel the fire though, and as i ran though the
woods there, i thought to myself how strange of a day it was.
strange indeed, since saturday afternoon, the day after my
run, fire started to burn on gomez. the cause was probably man, since the
origin was found near the picnic area.
smokey the bear was right to warn us humans to be careful
with our flames, so that we might prevent more incidents like gomez from
happening... but not all fire was created equal, and while gomez is the fault
of humans, and was put out by firefighters immediately, the whitewater baldy
fire is an example of what the forest service has set out as an example of the
middle-ground--between a prescribed burn (pb for short) and a wildfire--called
a "wildland fire". the wildland fire is a fire that is considered to
have positive benefits to its destruction, as fire is a natural way for the
forest to relieve itself of old, overgrown brush, and allow for new life.
the aspen tree is an example of such new life, and without
wildfires, we would probably not have aspen. the aspen grow best in the fertile
ash, left in the wake of a forest fire. yet, their evolution has made their
root system immune to fire itself--a beautiful curiosity. the aspen was for a
long time considered earth's largest single living organism, as their roots are
all connected in one complete system. one aspen forest's root system can cover
several mountains!
the idea that fire should be allowed to burn is a relatively
new one... up through the 1980s forest fire was seen as dangerous and
destructive... the forest service quelled any fire at all costs. then there was
the yellowstone fire in 1988. the fire in yellowstone was too huge and hot to control,
images of flames eating america's most wonderful natural park burned on
television sets nationally. finally, the forest service succumbed to seeing the
brighter side of the fire, as it set out to control the undergrowth of decades
of unchecked brush and debris on the forest's floor. today, the scar of the
1988 fire in yellowstone is still visible, but the new growth there is
blossoming to show that after all death, there is new life.
wilderness itself is just a confused euphemism, coined by
man to place himself somewhere equal to the force of nature. nothing is wild
because man calls it that, but only true wilderness can exist where man's
imagination stops and his footprint has never been.
aldo leopold, the godfather of national parks and wilderness
areas, designed wilderness as a place for minimal human impact, as he had seen
in the turn-of-the-century redesign the landscape of the american frontier from
forests to fields, filling once wild country with cattle and roads, turning free-flowing
rivers to pre-stocked and irrigated waterways that offered 'maximum use' value
to man.
without aldo's genuine gesture to create wilderness, there
is no doubt that america's national forests would be overrun with cattle
ranchers and loggers. thankfully, what little 'wilderness' we have today has
been endowed to us by leopold, who wanted nothing more than a 'blank spot on
the map' for which we americans might mark our freedoms.
living in the southwest has brought me closer to those freedoms,
undoubtedly from the close contact i have with the wilderness here. america's
largest wildernesses, the aldo leopold & gila wildernesses, are my
backyard, and i am free to play in them whenever i like... except when they are
in flames.
but i am happy there is fire in the mountains, as much as it
grieves me to breathe smokey air, and think of little creatures fleeing flaming
forests (images of bambi's final scenes run through my head). i realize that
fire is man's doing, and undoing. it is the thing that made us the bringer of
machine, but is also what stops the machine of mankind.
fire is wild, and man is reminded, in instances of wildfire
such as the whitewater baldy, yellowstone in '88, and many other countless
incidents, that we are not in control. our freedom, if understood as a blank
spot on the map, has the potential to be burned off that map just as quickly as
we imagined it there.
SUNDAY, MAY 6, 2012
country of ciphers and codex
one thing about this country, is it takes a strong,
strong... it breaks a strong, strong mind.
-bill callahan,
"drover," apocalypse
the southwest is a land without explanations... a land of
illusions, of dreamers, and eroding realities.
new mexico, known colloquially as "the land of
enchantement" has another nickname to those who spend their time toiling
in her badlands and deserts, "the land of entrapment."
what little there is
here, it is stunning that somehow life survives... despite little rain, bad
politics, roughneck roads, exploited resources, and isolated and indemnified
populations, people make a living here.
i have come to understand that the people of the southwest
make a living fighting.
fighting for their native rights; fighting for their land
and water; fighting for their cattle; fighting for their wolves and spotted
owls; fighting for their forests; fighting for their jobs; fighting for their
food; fighting for their children... fighting for generations to come.
what will they win? there are little, but highly valued
resources at stake. for a land that has held the oldest civilizations in north
america--the chaco, the mimbres, the aztecs, and the bands of tribes relating
to today's apache, navajo, and ute native americans--this place has a deep and
profound history of life.
what meaning people can carve out of this hard land here in
the southwest is a spiritual connection to the earth.
there is no one here (ok, with the exception of pheonix, the
land of great waste and the keystone of destruction for the desert) that
doesn't get that any day now there could be an apocalypse of resources. there
is less and less to go around here, and so the fighting gets louder and
louder... the battles are deeper and deeper entrenched.
hardrock mines have more water rights than cities... they
flood their waste rock piles so that they will use-up their water rights
"efficiently"... so not to loose them under new mexico's "use
it, or lose it" water policy. cattle ranchers graze on national forest
land, yet the land that they do hold privately they similarly flood for the
same reason as the mines. yet arizona would like to see the country's last
free-flowing river, the gila river, diverted, so that desert diamonds like
pheonix can continue to water their lawns daily, have swimming pools in their
backyards, and fountains in their mall parking lots.
that keeps new mexico beautiful. there is a reason that the
tribes of humans that lived here before our own version of civilization were
warriors and nomads. this land is of ciphers and codex: the translation, the
meaning, the explanation of life is age-old, misunderstood, and eroding
quickly. to be on the lookout for threats to the unstable life led here is
habitual, generational, and will always be the way of life here.
to protect what is left, to argue about what was, and to
dream that tomorrow the rain will come.
this is the only explanation i can give to what life in the
southwest is all about... it is imperfect, and sure to be mistaken. like a
mirage on a hazy red horizon, i realize that anything i think i know is surely
to be wrong, and the closer i get to understanding why i am here, the further
from the truth i will be.
SUNDAY, APRIL 1, 2012
little by little
i don't think i have explained the title of my blog very
thoroughly, and i think that this post's title deserves a bit of the full
explanation... toute doucement means "to go lightly" in french, a
saying that is often forgotten in the hustle and bustle of the everyday. but it
is my goal to delicately skim the freshness of this earth without leaving roots or any trace too deeply as i
cross through the experiences of life, to tread lightly, following a peaceful
and restless existence. as i consider that i have been in silver city for a
WHOLE MONTH now, i can only begin to grasp what has happened to me here... i am
pursuing the idea that i may have some roots that just need to grow in here,
and it could be inevitable. little by little, and ever so lightly, i am testing
the soils here, and feeling my own nature shift from roaming to resting...
on that note, i have been playing in the sunshine, and
digging around the yard with my lovely neighbor and fellow plant-lover,
rachel... and we have been busy! our goal is to plant oodles of veggies and
herbs for this spring and summer, and nurture our sad little yard back to a
semi-natural state of beauty. plus, as i am trying to help start a school
garden at a local elementary school down the street, i thought it would be good
to practice some gardening techniques in my own backyard... southwest new
mexico presents a whole new set of challenges for gardeners!
to start, there is not much water. that is probably the
biggest problem too... we will be hopefully installing a drip irrigation system
and maybe even set up some rain-barrels around the yard too. there is talk of
hoops over the more sensitive beds as well, in part to conserve water from
evaporation, and also to protect the plants from adverse tempertures and sunlight.
that would be the second biggest problem: sunlight. we got a WHOLE LOT OF
SUNSHINE here, and sometimes it can be overbearing... i got a sun tan already
and its april. given, my 'tan' stops at all the places a tee-shirt and shorts
would, and i am hoping to perfect my teva-tan real soon as well.
some of the photos below give a sense of the ever-growing
(literally) project size that we have started on... it seems like everyday new
ideas pop into one of our heads, and we are on another trip to the nursery or
hardware store to stock up on gardening things. my new favorite store in town
may actually be ace hardware... second only to our wonderful silver city coop!
tomorrow is a big day: we have to saw and haul all of the
yard waste (mostly dead tree limbs that have amassed into a 12'x12'
"pile" in our backyard. since its fire-season, it has been decided
that our ultimate bonfire stick pile should go. we will be hiring our
male-friends to help with the sawing and hauling, although i may have to show
off my new-found bow-saw skills, thanks to a tree-cutting lesson received in
the field at work.
the winds kicked up
fabulously today, and during my sunset hike with a fellow sunset-enthusiast, we
laid on our backs and watched the moon grow whiter and the orange skies sink
into purple mountains, leaving us in a world of gray-green desert dusk...
as we dreamed about less perfect things than the magic that
is known as nightfall, we hoped for an adventure, looming on the horizon,
drawing us back towards the western-setting sun... and so it is told: next
weekend we are going to flagstaff, arizona! road trip season begins again (...i
only took 4 weeks off)! more details on the budding aspens, honey-pots, and
good people and places to behold us!
TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 2012
slow it down
well if this was week one here in silver city, it feels like
week four. to be fair, i have been here 10 days; but to be honest, its like,
uh... been a lifetime already.
"turning a new leaf" isn't it at all. its not like
something "new" or even could be called a "beginning".
really, moving to silver city has been a seamless transition that has felt all
too good and too well... if such things can really be in excess.
no, living in silver city is like being exactly where i
needed to be all along. its like my heart had found its home here long before
my person arrived in my subaru two fridays ago. i have always known my soul
lives in mountains, colorado taught me to appreciatethat. but then there is
this interesting piece about me where lately i had been threatening my friends
and family that i was going to live in a hippie commune in the mountains, growing
my own fruit and vegetables, raising goats and chickens, and knitting by a
wood-stove. now that i am here in silver city i can see that reality projected
all around me. what was an illusive threat is actually a very reasonable
reality here in silver. these things happen, and, i would not be surprised if
the majority of folks from this town have shared in such experiences themselves
in this lifetime, and more likely, it is their day-to-day existence.
what i can say for certain is that that this place is real,
more real to me than i had expected. its been like living in a constant state
of self-awareness...
which brings me to my point: slow it down.
life is often confused with some sort of rat-race, social
climbing gig, that in the end, is no fun, leaves you empty handed, and maybe
even empty hearted. i decided when i left the big-cat (because in the city its
cats that run around killing rats) race of d.c. that that was not for me (i
already knew that before, i just needed a big smack on the head as a reminder).
no, i am in it for the glorious moments of silence. for the
sunsets. see below.
how could you not think that life is about nothing but
silence on top of a mountain at dusk?
and so i have begun to understand slowing it down. living
for the silence. listening, not speaking. taking it in. being overwhelmed... in
a good way. seeing, being, believing. i believe that this life is about all of
the above, the experience of it all, and the way we shape and shift our being
accordingly.
and so when someone asks me, "do you miss home
yet?" i think, "how could i?" and i answer to myself, "but
i am home, it just took me a while to get here."
SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 2012
silver lining
soo i made it!
i successfully conquered the midwest, was not killed by
tornadoes, duststorms, or blizzards, nor mugged, robbed, or run-off the road by
a tractor trailer. i cannot say that i really had any real 'hitches'... except
for my AAA tow from middle-of-no-where southern colorado (somewhere in the
desert between co springs and pueblo), no pun intended. all in all, my one
car-incident was minor, after the tow, i was able to get a free examination at
jiffy lube, who determined the cost of my car's blown radiator cap (and thus,
the problematic release of all of my car's radiator fluid onto I-25) was a mere
$6.00. so there, there is a god.
but why am i focusing on the one bad thing, when SO MUCH
GOOD has happened on this trip? there is no good place to begin, nor really a
good telling of an end of this joyful story of happenstance adventures.
highlights: driving through the mountains of west virginia after a fresh
snowfall; meeting my godmother for the first time in st. louis; running through
forest park in st. louis; gaining appreciation (if not becoming converted) for
KU basketball from mamma mahlburg; becoming intoxicated (maybe hallucinatory)
by the vast skies of kansas; seeing how well 4-wheel drive really works in
colorado snow; a quick foray into my past-life as a denverite--including trips
to my favorite neighborhood, washington park, lovely visits with my best
friends, snowshoeing in RMNP, and a memorable dinner at city-o-city; waking up
to another beautiful morning on sunrise lane with my family in boulder;
crossing the new mexico state line; driving through scenic taos and sante-fe
(yay for canyons and mountain passes!); trail-running along the sandinas
outside alburquerque at embudo canyon; devouring a "christmas" chile
burrito; driving through the desert and seeing many a tumbleweed as i harnessed
my car's horsepower amidst 40 mph winds; winding through gila national forest
at sunset, and seeing the sunset four times as i ascended to higher-living in
silver city.
here, in silver city, life is made up of nothing but the
simplest joys. to imagine a life where you might spend your days in the high
desert, hiking, biking, art-making, gardening, and just loving on this earth is
what i have appreciated from the mindsets of those whom i have met sofar in
silver city.
in silver city it is not unusual to plan your day around
hikes and bike-rides, schedule sunset-appreciation daily, hear music from
random corners of town, read articles on yogic lessons for the common-man in
the local paper, strike-up a passionate conversation about saving the gila
river (new mexico's last wild river!) with anyone you pass on the street, shop
at your local coop, realize that there are more people living off-the-grid than
on it here, get invited to enjoy private hot-springs communities, see dogs at
the bar or coffee shop, admire other's prayer flags on front porches, hang your
laundry to dry in your back-yard, tell stories of the "monsoon
season", and remind yourself that it probably won't rain for three more
months.
here, in silver city, i have so much to learn still, as i
have only been here for three days now. but magically, in this short period of
time, i have felt more love and kindness from the community here than anywhere
i have ever been. for me, the pleasant welcome that i have received from silver
city thus far has given me the awareness that i am exactly where i need to be
in this world... and even if it is only for a short-time (i already feel a year
will be over before i know it), my instincts tell me it is going to be a good
time. there are so many opportunities for me to extend myself into the
community, learn from the way of life offered here, and appreciate the fullness
and richness of the simplest and smallest everyday things.
as much as i have wandered over the years, i have suddenly
have seen my own shadow here in the high-desert sun--i have caught up with my
own self, and just like in "peter pan" when peter catches his own
shadow and runs into never-never-land, i have yet to discover where this
adventure in my own version of 'never-never land' will take me.
life is just too awesome and weird to tell.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2012
the art of craigslisting
i owe most of my life to craigslist.
as i travel from here to there craigslist has been a
necessary tool in fulfilling my immediate needs.
just got into town and have no place to live? apartments to
rent.
need to find a roommate? rooms and shares.
need furniture? furniture sales.
need a truck to get your new furniture home? services.
need a bike? bicycle sales.
need new bike parts? same.
need a ski rental? vacations listings.
need ski equipment? sporting sales.
need a job? job listings.
everything on this list i have successfully found via
craigslist. subsequently, i have sold most of what i have acquired via
craigslist full-circle on craigslist.
i really don't know how i would get on with my life without
craigslist.
most of my friends seem to be pretty amazed at my suave
bartering skills on craigslist. to me its not that i am talented, or brave, or
even smart. as much as i would like to take their credit, i just have to be
honest: desperation is key to craigslisting.
you must be willing to put yourself out there, willing to
get a bunch of crap in your email inbox, and reversely, put a lot of emails out
there that will never be returned. you must be willing to drive out of your way
for perfect strangers. you must bring cash. you must bring pepper spray and/or
a friend to a transaction. you must not be disappointed if you don't get what
you bargained for. you must be willing to learn someone's abridged life story
over a handshake and deal in a grocery store parking lot. you must be willing
to give your semi-true life story in a grocery store parking lot.
in the end, you must be willing to be a real person, meet
real people, and talk about real things with real money. i appreciate the vague
honesty that craigslist brings to the marketplace. the sense of personal trust,
nary even a feeling of appreciation and gratitude for a good cut on a deal.
craigslist is like a warm hug from the universe, giving you
a supportive slap on the back that says: "YES! you can pull yourself up by
your bootstraps in this world!"
and, my friends, what could be better than that? as
desperate as i am, craigslist both feeds and staves my hunger for
"things"; while all the while reminding me that indeed, they are just
things... things that have negotiable prices, flawed histories, quirky
owners... and nothing more, nor nothing less.
and so as i get ready to hit the road i get to brag about my
best craigslist score yet:
i needed a car--and i got one.
i am now the proud
owner of a 2000 subaru forester. and yes, i am joining the official car of the
west club. i am even considering rewarding myself with some new mexico
plates... because i have to be honest here, i don't plan on coming back east
this time!
