Water In Home Places

 

 

We are very fortunate at Hidden Springs where our home is perched over a number of springs that fill a pool that may hold as much as 5,000 gallons.  Those springs and pool are at the lower end of the land we steward.  Even with natural springs we have brought water into closer proximity to our home.  Visitors to our front door are greeted with a small pool fed by a trickle of recirculated water that sounds like the tinkling of tiny crystal bells. The window in the studio of my artist wife Penny (http://artjourney-penny.blogspot.com) looks out over what we call the Studio Gardens complete with an ornamental pond, water lilies and other plants, frogs, and the frequent raccoon or two. One additional ‘water feature’ is located on the slope below the window in my study.  I can’t see it but I often see the other residents of Hidden Springs who come to water there.  During the late summer of 2013 an Eastern Whitetail doe had her fawn in the rhododendrons within a few feet of the house.  For the first few days, while her fawn was growing steady legs she took water from the small pool below the Study window.  It may be that the oldest recorded water gardens, or perhaps water features, were in what is called the Cradle of Civilization in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. But the idea either spread rapidly or occurred almost simultaneously involving Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, China, India, Japan, Rome, Persia and a number of other places among the evolving peoples of Earth.  What is it that we look for in these often quiet places and still waters?

A Deep Place in the Earth III

Continued from the preceding post.

Looking down at the Rio Grande from the rim rock. (Photo by Tom Baugh)

As I have said several times before in this blog, I’m attracted to the study of water…I like to play in the mud.  In early May 2013 this attraction led me, along with my artist wife Penny Baugh (http://artjourney-penny.blogspot.com) to the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge in an area referred to by the USDI Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as the Wild Rivers Recreation Area.  The Rio Grande and the Red River flow through this region of sagebrush, pinyon pine and juniper.  But it was the Rio Grande that called to us this day.  We had decided to walk down into the canyon 800 feet below to visit Big Arsenic Springs. 

Big Arsenic Springs on the Rio Grande. (Photo by tom Baugh)

The trail dropped away steeply below our perch down through layers and layers of ancient lava flows until rock flowed into water.  From high above, the river looked peaceful along some stretches and turbulent with white water along others.  In driving along the miles of roads and through the thousands of acres leading into the site we had not seen another human since the community of Cerro some miles back.  The BLM visitor center was closed. And there were no other cars on the roads or parked at the campsites. To the best of our knowledge, we were alone in the immensity.  It was a very liberating, and I suspect these days a very rare, experience.  

Our descent along the crumbly surface of the trail took longer than any other mile-long stretch we have ever walked.  But eventually we reached Big Arsenic Spring at the river’s edge.  According to the story, possibly a myth, the spring was named by a hermit who wanted to keep the water all to himself.  Perhaps somebody finally did the science, found out that this was not an arsenic spring, and the hermit lost his exclusivity.  A flow of 5000 gallons per minute makes Big Arsenic Springs a rarity in this parched region of the earth.  This artesian, subaqueous spring rushes from the base of a great tumble of lava rock and bursts out into the river in a white plume.   We had the spring all to ourselves that morning and it was not until our journey back up the trail, when we had almost reached the rimrock, that we encountered a party of four, the first humans we had seen that day.

The canyon rim above the Rio Grande. (Photo by Tom Baugh)

A Deep Place in the Earth II

Continued from the preceding post.

The lower end of the Rio Grande Gorge near Pilar, NM. (Photo by Tom Baugh

We also had the opportunity to visit the river at the lower end of the Gorge, near the community of Pilar, New Mexico.  This is a different river, more gentle and much less dramatic.  A road winds along the east bank of the river through the small community of Pilar and up river past Bureau of Land Management campsites until it ends at the confluence of the Rio Grande with the Rio Pueblo de Taos.

The Rio Pueblo de Taos is the same stream that passes through the Pueblo community of Taos on the north side of the present day tourist community of Taos. From Pilar the river flows south through increasingly open and arid land, exits New Mexico, enters the US state of Texas, and eventually joins with the Gulf of Mexico.  Although this lower end of the Gorge is beautiful, it is for some reason here that one becomes increasingly aware of the aridity of this region of North America. During the days that we spent in the Taos area we never purchased a local or regional newspaper that failed to mention the declining water resources of the region.  It is difficult to conceive of anything that will, over the long run, increase the amount of water available to New Mexico.  And yet growth continues to outstrip the sparse water resources.  The situation here is no different than that facing many other parts of the world.  Our populations continue to grow, our needs for natural and processed resources continue to expand but water, the most essential resource of all and the most limiting next to air, continues to decline.

A very small seep from a volcanic hillside above the Rio Grande (Photo by  Tom Baugh)

Continued in the next post.

A Deep Place in the Earth I

Rio Grande River hundreds of feet below the bridge. (Photo by Tom Baugh)

My wife Penny (http://artjourney-penny.blogspot.com) and I recently had the opportunity to visit the Rio Grande Gorge in the northwestern part of the US state of New Mexico.  Although not as deep and nowhere near as wide as the Grand Canyon, the Rio Grande Gorge is a very impressive rift, a very deep place in the Earth.  The Taos Mesa is an immense extent of sagebrush covered land, dotted here and there with the signs of humanity,  that stretches for miles. Even on a sunny day there is a brooding aspect to this place.  The frequent patchy clouds sail across the sky, pushed by the ever present winds, and darken the earth below in great shifting patches of a natural melancholy.

Dwarf yucca among the lava boulders. (Photo by Tom Baugh)

You can visit the Gorge in several different ways.  For example, you can drive across the Gorge on a bridge located a little north and west of the community of Taos.  The Gorge isn’t obvious until you are right upon it.  One moment you are driving on a hard asphalt surface with high desert seemingly on all sides and in the next moment you are suspended in space on a thin ribbon of concrete and steel with the Rio Grande winding far below and nothing but very empty space under you. It can be a breath-taking experience to come upon  the Gorge and its namesake river in this way.  This is an incredibly fractured lava land with great chucks of black rock descending from the rims of the Gorge deep into the river itself.  

Continued in the next post.

Green Aesthetics II

Continued from the previous post.

Along with our human neighbors, on this often wind-swept ridge, we are frequently visited by deer, turkey, opossum and pesky raccoon (or two).  Bobcat, foxes, and coyote wander the streets and the bird population is colorful and varied.  The black bear moms bring their cubs to the spring-pool below the house and Bill, the six and half foot long black snake patrols the landscape and the hardscape for the frequent deer mice and the occasional copperhead. Red, a wood pecker, never fails to visit and greet me with a small screech when I sit in the alcove on the south-facing front of the house to read and soak in the sun.

I hope that my work over the past five decades of my 70 plus years, much of it mentioned in this blog, has contributed in some small way to help maintain the beauty of life on Earth and will continue to do so over whatever time I have left.  

Let me conclude these posts with the closing lines from the Navajo Night chant sometimes called House Made of Dawn.




In beauty it is finished
In beauty it is finished

Although I will post occasionally to this blog, this is the last of my regularly scheduled bimonthly posts.

Coyote Stories II

(Continued from preceding post)

Like many mammals, coyotes like to play with things. The coyotes at the preserve not only liked to play with things but they had a playground in the field right in front of where their tunnel  through the brush opened onto the meadow.  And their playground was strewn with toys.  From somewhere they had, collected a very old plastic container that once held bar and chain oil.  Another favorite was a green soda pop bottle.  They also liked the plastic cap I placed over the shallow pvc well I had installed in one of the basins or ‘pans’  in the heart of the preserve.  I used the well to check the water depth in the shallow basins or pans that wander through the Preserve and the coyotes use the cap as a toy.  If I didn’t put it on securely I was likely to find it almost anywhere in the preserve with the tiny indentations of sharp little coyote teeth all around its perimeter.  (I tried to remember to put it on securely.)   

Another item that seemed to fascinate the coyotes was an amber plastic rain gauge.  I didn’t mind the well cap, after all, just as it was my responsibility to make sure the cap was securely fastened to the well pipe, it was the coyote's responsibility to try to remove the cap.  But the gauge was another matter.  You don't have a bog if you don't have water and you don't understand the bog if you don't understand  how water works in, on, and through the bog.  Consequently, I took weekly precipitation amounts at the bog.   After losing several weeks of data to the coyote's inquisitiveness I placed the rain gauge on a high pole.

The coyote's favorite toy, however, was a plastic yellow duck.  I first discovered this duck nestled among the reed canary grass. It wasn't until the staff began to remove the reed canary grass that the coyotes discovered the plastic duck.  This is not a small toy, nor is it light, so it must have taken some effort to carry it back to the playground and that is where I found it one day among the other toys...the green soda bottle, the black bar and chain oil container, some Styrofoam and the yellow duck, with its head missing.

The coyotes at the preserve were often a highlight of my weekly visits.   Always good for a chuckle and a smile, some times of tolerant frustration, I looked forward to seeing them, catching a glimpse of them as they followed behind me, and hearing them sing.  For some reason the coyotes left the preserve after I’d been there about a year and a half.  It wasn’t long after that I completed my work and moved on. The place just wasn’t the same without the coyotes.

Coyote Stories I

The coyote, Canis latrans has been as much a part of my family life as my brothers and my sister.  I spent my childhood in Southern California during and following the Second World War.  Early in my Middle School years my family relocated to the San Gabriel Valley at the base of the San Sierra Madre Mountains.  Things were much different in the LA Basin at that time.  There were fewer of us and much more open land.  From the back of our bright new post-war home to the base of the mountains were hundreds of acres of orange groves and thousands of acres of oak scrub and brush.  There were dove and quail, and rabbits and raptors.  There were also the coyotes.  I learned to listen for these little wolves and to watch for them along the sides of the dirt roads that, at that time, still crisscrossed the fields and orchards of Southern California.  During high school others things captured my attention, and imagination, and I didn't think so much about the coyotes.   But they were never far away and I would hear the yips and howls of what author Jack Couffer calls the Song of Wild Laughter on my way to an early morning college class or to my job washing dish and bussing tables in a small, local restaurant.   

My work with federal natural resource management agencies brought me East and along with me came the coyotes spreading across land they have once occupied.  From Washington, DC, to Florida, to Georgia, and now to North Carolina, this ubiquitous little wolf has only been a walk at first light, a full moon, or a shadowy glimpse away.  

For several years I served as Steward at Bat Fork Bog Plant Conservation Preserve,  a small native plant preserve almost in the center of Hendersonville, North Carolina.  It did not take me long to realize that coyotes were among my companions at the preserve.  The Preserve is located only a kilometer, possibly a bit more, from downtown Hendersonville and only a few blocks from the main fire station.  The coyotes liked the fire station; they especially like the sound of the sirens as the large red trucks lumber out of their barn-like shelter and roar-off on their missions of mercy.  The coyotes often accompany the sirens with their high-pitched howls.  I remember one of the neighbors living on the high ground to the west of the Preserve asking me if I was afraid of coyotes.  I told him I wasn't and he said "good, cause you sure have a lot of them in there," gesturing toward the boggy lowlands below us. 

(Image courtesy of Google)

(Continued in the next post)