D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
Getting Desert Exposed
What we've learned in five years living in southern New Mexico.
One of the first things we learned about life in southern New Mexico, shortly after arriving here five years ago this very month, was that, yes, it really does rain here. Despite an overall aridity that gave us bloody noses for the first six months and the fact that skin lotion is considered a basic utility here, like water and power, sometimes the skies simply open up. We would later learn about the summer "monsoons" — a term I still find hard to take seriously, and which my sister-in-law in Singapore, where they have real monsoons, thinks is hilarious — but the occasional late-winter/early-spring rain proved a plenty wet lesson upon our arrival. Just as our moving van pulled up — onto our unpaved, mud-waiting-to-happen driveway — it started to pour.
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We soon learned to expect frequent
visitors like this apple-muncher. (Photo by Lisa D. Fryxell) |
Here we were, moving all our worldly possessions from rainy, humid Cincinnati to the high and dry desert Southwest, and our first big worry was keeping our stuff dry as it got hauled into the house. The second worry was keeping our pale-colored carpets from turning the shade of our increasingly muddy driveway. (Some movers' quick thinking with paper-protected paths won that battle — a pyrrhic victory, as it turned out, once the cats started barfing on the carpets. We now have mostly barf-colored tile.)
We've since learned not to complain about the rain, even when its arrival proves inconvenient. This lesson is apparently drilled into the heads of southern New Mexico children from birth. Last fall, our 15-year-old intern from Aldo Leopold High School was accompanying us on our monthly delivery duties — the hardest work she'd ever done, by the way — when it began to sprinkle. Now, rain is pretty much the last thing you want to deal with when lugging bundles of easily dampened newsprint all over town. But our intern, appropriately schooled from an early age in the demands of life of a dry climate, cheerily piped up, "Well, we need the moisture."
Yes, we griped when our moving day got waterlogged. Now we know better. What's a little mud on the carpets? At least it hides the cat barf.
Soon after our soggy move, we likewise learned the hard way that it snows here, too — especially in what the Albuquerque TV meteorologists call "the higher elevations." In mid-March, returning home from a flight arriving in Tucson, we ran into a spatter of rain just after making the turn off I-10 at Lordsburg. "Huh," we said. "It didn't look like it was gonna rain." And it didn't rain — it snowed. As we drove through the dark down the long, dull, straight stretch from Lordsburg to the heights of the Gila National Forest, the raindrops swiftly turned to sloppy, wet, conjoined snowflakes, splatting against the windshield like giant insects with a death wish. By the time we reached those higher elevations, the snow flurries had blossomed into a full-blown blizzard.
Wasn't this exactly the sort of weather we'd moved south and west to get away from? Much farther south, after all, and we'd be in Mexico. We knew Santa Fe and Taos got snow and had skiing — one of the reasons we didn't want to move to those otherwise glamorous places. Having grown up in South Dakota and spent many years in snowy places like Minnesota and Iowa, we'd had quite enough of the stuff. Yet here we were, about to perish in a blizzard in, of all places, New Mexico.
When we finally emerged from this whiteout, near the mine at Tyrone, we learned something else about life in New Mexico: The weather can be very, very local. A nearly full moon was shining brightly above Silver City, as if nothing was happening in those higher elevations and we hadn't just barely escaped a snowy grave fraught with irony. Not a flake was falling from the starry sky. We drove the rest of the way home as though we'd awakened from a dream.
Learning to live here is not all about the weather, of course, despite my growing obsession with highs and lows, windspeed and rainfall. (I'm beginning to understand my dad's excessive interest in the weather — you'd have thought he was a farmer, fretting over a corn crop. It must be an age thing. You should see the little home weather station I have — I'm already on model number-two since moving here — that lets me track everything short of the number of dew drops on the apple tree.)
As I've written before in this space, over the past five years we've also learned plenty about the area's "critters" (as Larry Lightner would say). We've enjoyed a backyard parade of quail, roadrunners and rabbits, and gaped at the occasional owl swooping down to feast on said rabbits. Just yesterday, a hawk slammed into the sunroom window. We watched it perch for a long moment on a high tree branch, shaking its head to recover its senses and its dignity, before winging off in search of prey not behind glass.
We haven't had to endure any javelina visits, thank goodness, and have seen them for certain only twice: On our first visit here, driving at night through the Black Range (the fastest route to Albuquerque, we were told!), and late last year, traipsing past a gas station in Catalina, Arizona. (The javelina were doing the traipsing, not us.)
Similarly, coyotes have been heard but not seen. Their late-night caterwauling frequently wakes us up, but we have yet to actually see a single "song dog" — discounting roadkill, that is. Ironically, the only live coyote we've seen since moving here was loping along near our daughter's apartment in Nashville.
Mule deer, not surprisingly, have been frequent guests at Chez Fryxell. They like munching the apples from low-lying branches, and have been spotted rearing up on their hind legs to bite fruit otherwise out of reach. Recently the deer (we think) also made short work of our dilapidated Halloween pumpkin; it simply vanished overnight, seeds, stem and all. We've spotted more than half-a-dozen deer slipping in and out among the fruit trees at once, or sipping from the pond. Just a few weeks ago, a deer with only one antler, finding the pond frustratingly frozen, ambled right up to the house to nibble some still-green petunia plants — showing, perhaps, the lack of caution that left him with unbalanced antlers. His massive head bobbed inches from the sunroom window; another step and he would have left nose prints.