When accusations were first heard from women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment, it was possible to pass them off as cultural misunderstandings, perhaps between northern and southern ways of interacting. Because the women were anonymous, one didn’t know anything about their appearance, race or class background.
Then, Sharon Bialek spoke out.
Cain was right. It wasn’t sexual harassment. It was worse. It was abuse of power.
She reported his response to her protests at being groped was “You want a job, right?”
Abuse of power isn’t something most politicians and journalists recognize as a problem. In fact, most don’t recognize it at all. They continued to believe he was a viable candidate for president.
Finally, Ginger White became so disgusted with the way Bialek and others were being treated, she announced she’d had an affair with Cain that lasted for years.
Again, Cain claimed sex wasn’t involved. And, again he was right.
He went on to tell the New Hampshire Union Leader that “She was out of work and had trouble paying her bills, and I had known her as a friend” so he gave her money because "I'm a soft-hearted person when it comes to that stuff.”
He revealed himself to be a predator of an entirely different order, one who feeds off women with financial problems whom he may also suspect are defenseless.
Before he suspended his campaign, rumors were still burbling about other women. Many, if they ever surface, may turn out to be what we first expected, the consequences of a flirtatious nature that occasionally errs from a failure to recognize others don’t see things as he does.
They are not what made people uneasy. It was the nature of the cases that came to light that revealed something more dangerous than sexual harassment was involved.
The media and politicians may tolerate lustful men, but even they get a bit uneasy with more vicious predators.
Notes:
Henderson, Nia-Malika. “ Sharon Bialek Accuses Herman Cain of Sexual Harassment as She Sought Help Getting a Job,” Washington Post, 7 November 2011.
Knickerbocker, Brad. “Herman Cain Admits Payments to Ginger White, Edges Toward Quitting,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 December 2011.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Black Friday
The holidays of fall have changed since I was a child.
Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.
Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.
In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.
The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.
Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.
Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.
In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.
The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Arthur Upfield
My last experience reading Tony Hillerman wasn’t simply unpleasant, it was aggressively so. After I finished the fifth chapter of The Dark Wind, I didn’t want to go on. When this happens, I usually put a book in the garage or trash. It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to finish what I began.
In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.
After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.
I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.
Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.
The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.
No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.
The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.
Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.
In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.
I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950's accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.
Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.
I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.
In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.
Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.
Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.
In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.
After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.
I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.
Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.
The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.
No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.
The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.
Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.
In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.
I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950's accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.
Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.
I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.
In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.
Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.
Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Tony Hillerman, Part 2
I’ve now finished the second Jim Chee novel and can tell you why I don’t like Tony Hillerman novels. This is obviously the place for someone who disagrees or who hasn’t read his books to stop reading.
At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.
A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.
There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.
When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.
Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.
I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.
Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.
The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.
Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.
He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.
The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.
I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.
When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.
In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.
In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.
Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.
The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.
It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.
At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.
A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.
There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.
When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.
Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.
I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.
Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.
The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.
Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.
He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.
The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.
I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.
When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.
In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.
In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.
Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.
The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.
It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Mysteries as Morality Tales
The oldest division in mysteries is the one between the English cozy, whose audience is supposed to be the older lady of genteel literary interests, and the American adventure story which appeals to the average, book-reading, if that’s not an oxymoron, male. The one goes back to Arthur Conan-Doyle, the other most famously to Dashiell Hammett.
While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.
The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.
Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.
And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.
In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.
The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.
The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.
One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.
In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.
One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.
I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.
Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.
While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.
The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.
Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.
And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.
In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.
The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.
The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.
One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.
In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.
One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.
I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.
Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Tony Hillerman, Part 1
Mystery books fall into many categories, but the most important are readable and unreadable. The distinction is all a matter of taste, for there are many very popular writers I put in the second group.
There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.
Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.
This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.
For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.
Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.
Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.
The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.
The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.
As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.
In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.
The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”
These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.
The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.
Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.
The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.
In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.
In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.
The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.
In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.
In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.
Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.
There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.
Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.
This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.
For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.
Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.
Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.
The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.
The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.
As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.
In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.
The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”
These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.
The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.
Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.
The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.
In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.
In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.
The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.
In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.
In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.
Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Of Guns and Men
Recently, the husband of a customer went after our foreman with a loaded gun.
It would be amusing if this were some kind of soap opera and he believed his wife had been fooling around and assumed the good looking Argentinian who parked his painter’s truck in the drive was the villain.
But it was no such thing. My boss had come back from meeting the interior decorator and told me to tell the foreman to go pick up a cupboard door to make a paint sample. I thought it a bit strange, but assumed my boss and the designer had made arrangements. I told the foreman to check the details with the boss, but that man is sometimes difficult to talk to.
The foreman assumed it was a house under construction and was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood. He called to confirm the address. At the time I was watching torrential rain send water over the curb to within 6" inches of the building I was in. I was wondering how I would know if our carpet was flooded.
He pulled into the drive to wait out the storm.
The people inside weren’t expecting him, and started imagining the worst. When the rain finally stopped, the man of the house went out with the gun and aimed it through the window at the foreman’s head.
The foreman called asking for the number of security. I gave him the one for the development home owners, rather than the county sheriff. I figured they really needed to know about his man.
According to my boss, who got called over, the security person had to treat the residents as the aggrieved party, but he felt she really thought it was all way over the top. As he said later, what kind of thief is the one who calls the police?
I suspect it was a case of an isolated man in his 50's who listens too much to scare media because he believes it’s a dangerous world, but doesn’t know the threats. Illegal immigrants are everywhere the bogeyman.
He and his wife recently moved from the city of Santa Fe to one of the exurban developments that advertise one acre rural estates. Like many such places, it’s been hard hit by the real estate crisis. Many houses are vacant, many more are for sale. Problems with break-ins at night are common. They, no doubt, got their house at a good price.
I recently talked to another resident there who had just spent the morning out with her dog looking around the owl nests for a missing puppy. When she got back, the seriously traumatized puppy was home.
We continued to talk about the dangers of living on the edge of wilderness here in the southwest where no one lets a small animal out unsupervised. Hawks are the worst problem.
She said she never goes out without a large stick. She said one time a pack of coyotes came at her and her dog. She was lucky to find a broken juniper limb which she swished at them until they left.
More recently I talked with another customer who lives in a slightly less isolated exurban area and installs electronics. He’s been experimenting with surveillance cameras. He put one in his yard to see which neighbor’s dog was messing with his trash.
The first time he caught a coyote. The second time he filmed a fox in his yard. The last time a bear was tearing into the garbage.
And this man’s worried about someone who parks a truck in the drive in daylight.
I live in rural strip development where my property abuts unsettled reservation land. I hear coyotes at night and once came upon a rattle snake in my neighbor’s yard. My neighbor’s dogs bark all night at wandering threats.
When I see someone suspicious I watch and try to remember the vehicle description. If I ever felt threatened I’d call a neighbor or 911. If I felt even more threatened I would try to find a way out of the house and onto the reservation behind the wood fence where I could walk away unseen. Or maybe I’d just try to get into the car, lock the doors, and lay on the horn.
These are things you do consider when you live in these kinds of places
I do know, even if I had gun, I certainly wouldn’t go out to confront a stranger with it.
And, I would never, ever go out at night to see what was disturbing the dogs. It’s been a dry year and food must be scarce.
This man has a lot to learn about real life.
It would be amusing if this were some kind of soap opera and he believed his wife had been fooling around and assumed the good looking Argentinian who parked his painter’s truck in the drive was the villain.
But it was no such thing. My boss had come back from meeting the interior decorator and told me to tell the foreman to go pick up a cupboard door to make a paint sample. I thought it a bit strange, but assumed my boss and the designer had made arrangements. I told the foreman to check the details with the boss, but that man is sometimes difficult to talk to.
The foreman assumed it was a house under construction and was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood. He called to confirm the address. At the time I was watching torrential rain send water over the curb to within 6" inches of the building I was in. I was wondering how I would know if our carpet was flooded.
He pulled into the drive to wait out the storm.
The people inside weren’t expecting him, and started imagining the worst. When the rain finally stopped, the man of the house went out with the gun and aimed it through the window at the foreman’s head.
The foreman called asking for the number of security. I gave him the one for the development home owners, rather than the county sheriff. I figured they really needed to know about his man.
According to my boss, who got called over, the security person had to treat the residents as the aggrieved party, but he felt she really thought it was all way over the top. As he said later, what kind of thief is the one who calls the police?
I suspect it was a case of an isolated man in his 50's who listens too much to scare media because he believes it’s a dangerous world, but doesn’t know the threats. Illegal immigrants are everywhere the bogeyman.
He and his wife recently moved from the city of Santa Fe to one of the exurban developments that advertise one acre rural estates. Like many such places, it’s been hard hit by the real estate crisis. Many houses are vacant, many more are for sale. Problems with break-ins at night are common. They, no doubt, got their house at a good price.
I recently talked to another resident there who had just spent the morning out with her dog looking around the owl nests for a missing puppy. When she got back, the seriously traumatized puppy was home.
We continued to talk about the dangers of living on the edge of wilderness here in the southwest where no one lets a small animal out unsupervised. Hawks are the worst problem.
She said she never goes out without a large stick. She said one time a pack of coyotes came at her and her dog. She was lucky to find a broken juniper limb which she swished at them until they left.
More recently I talked with another customer who lives in a slightly less isolated exurban area and installs electronics. He’s been experimenting with surveillance cameras. He put one in his yard to see which neighbor’s dog was messing with his trash.
The first time he caught a coyote. The second time he filmed a fox in his yard. The last time a bear was tearing into the garbage.
And this man’s worried about someone who parks a truck in the drive in daylight.
I live in rural strip development where my property abuts unsettled reservation land. I hear coyotes at night and once came upon a rattle snake in my neighbor’s yard. My neighbor’s dogs bark all night at wandering threats.
When I see someone suspicious I watch and try to remember the vehicle description. If I ever felt threatened I’d call a neighbor or 911. If I felt even more threatened I would try to find a way out of the house and onto the reservation behind the wood fence where I could walk away unseen. Or maybe I’d just try to get into the car, lock the doors, and lay on the horn.
These are things you do consider when you live in these kinds of places
I do know, even if I had gun, I certainly wouldn’t go out to confront a stranger with it.
And, I would never, ever go out at night to see what was disturbing the dogs. It’s been a dry year and food must be scarce.
This man has a lot to learn about real life.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Mission Accomplished
I assume the Las Conchas fire is finally out. Of course, I don't really know, and because I don't know I’ve begun to understand people’s loss of faith in government and contempt for experts.
Given the nature of the fire and the constraints of money, I believe the fire fighters did all that could be done. The problem is the way their managers presented themselves. They showed the effects of years of budget cutting and politics that drives away all but the most malleable.
The lack of money is most pernicious. It has converted the discovery that fire is part of the natural cycle of prairies and forests into a rationale for not doing things unless capital assets are threatened. Last year’s South Fork Fire was in rugged territory northwest of Española, and, once the perimeters were contained, it was left to burn itself out. Later, the Forest Service claimed it as a success because prior controlled burns stopped the fire from reaching the FAA control towers on Cerro Pelon Hill.
The fact that lingering smoke and ash could affect the lives of people 15 miles away in the valley was not a quantified into a metric. When questions are raised about monitoring air and water quality, they’re perceived as public relations problems for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has an already existing audience of skeptics. If any monitoring gets done, it must establish that nothing dangerous escaped from the hill. That really isn’t the question. Most of us aren’t that paranoid about the lab. The question has been and remains, what’s coming from the fire.
The fact LANL was involved distorted many priorities, because people in Los Alamos never feel enough resources are devoted to their security. It meant the first day, when the fire spread towards Cochiti, bureaucrats were concerned with the safety of lab property. It meant a few days later, when the fire escaped to the north, bureaucrats were too involved assuring lab executives and city officials to listen to Santa Clara.
There was always the feeling there wasn’t enough money, that decisions were being made within constraints. It’s unfortunate the Willow fire was still threatening southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico when our fire began. Fatigue coupled with the already mentioned hope this wasn’t another Cerro Grande didn’t help. On June 30, the southern fire was 95% contained and still required 991 people. Our fire was only 3% contained, but only had 210 more people.
While the number rose well over 2,000 in July, after the fire was out of control in the northern canyons, there never were the numbers here, when other fires were also burning, as there had been in Arizona, early in the season, when John McCain and other politicians were making highly publicized visits.
Honesty would have helped. No matter how much money is available, there’s a limit to how many highly trained, seasonal workers should exist. It can never be enough for the worst case. But such realistic appraisals are never made public. The pretense that everything possible is being done breeds more anger than the truth would have. However the first is hidden even if malignant, while the second can be public and volatile.
While timidity and the hope this wasn’t another bad fire characterized the first responses, the serious problems in credibility began when senior managers arrived. Every institution has a gap between the skills needed to carry out day to day operations, and those needed to deal with outside decision makers, bankers and Wall Street analysts for corporations, Congress for government agencies. The difference can only be more extreme with a group like the Forest Service where the basic mission requires leaving home for extended periods to work out doors in dangerous conditions, but managers must be desk people.
There was a marked change in the reports posted on the local web site before and after the fire status was elevated. Before, the reports focused on the fire, and what people had done to combat it. We were told if crowning was occurring or if fire behavior was extreme. We were able to understand the red lines at sunset and smoke.
After senior managers arrived, the focus became the daily action plans for the management team, especially the public meetings they were holding in Cochiti and Los Alamos. The audience became the people who controlled money and promotions, and secondarily reporters for Albuquerque television stations who didn’t need to drive farther north than Los Alamos. This became a story about the Dixon Apple Orchard whose customers live in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
One small example of the use of officially important facts instead of useful information is the way the Forest Service website identified the materials that were fueling the fire. For the South Fork Fire, it had said it was Ponderosa pine; for the Donaldson Fire, that broke out while this fire was active, it said it was Jjuniper-Piñon grasslands. For this one, it said: “10 Timber (litter and understory) FM8 and FM10."
These terms are the ones used by fire fighters to assess the potential dangers a fire poses, and only have meaning to supervisors releasing resources. Certain codes no doubt justify more danger and, therefore, more money. They mean nothing to the rest of us.
While fighting the fire requires highly skilled individuals usually from native, rural or working class backgrounds, much of the support work can be done by the educated. While local men were hired to run the dozers that created the fire lines, archaeologists were hired to direct them away from important sites. It took time for the fire service to allow representatives from the pueblos to advise them. The outside experts and the locals had different interests, the one in the past, the other the present.
Whenever opportunities exist for someone other than emergency workers, avenues for corruption and political influence follow. Remediation after the fire is ripe for exploitation. While the Cerro Grande fire publicized its attempts to give school children native seeds to plant near town, this time aerial crews are spreading cereal barley, slender wheatgrass and little blue stem.
According to William Dick-Peddie, little bluestem is widespread in Juniper-Piñon woodlands and savannahs, but it’s western wheatgrass that’s found in this area, not slender. Barley isn’t mentioned. Likewise, little bluestem is found in various lower montane Ponderosa pine environments, but not wheatgrass or barley.
There have been many failures here and in Europe with attempts to immediately sow indigenous seeds. Barley may in fact grow more quickly than other plants, and thereby anchor the soil so nature can replace it in time. To one who doesn’t know, this list suggests the influence of those who want to sell what’s available for a wide range of situations, not what’s appropriate for this particular one. It’s those kind of suspicions, which develop when useful information like the nature of the fire fuel is not made available, that lead to distrust and the leap to conspiratorial thinking.
More interesting, the Burned Area Emergency Response team can only work with federal land. They can only hope their activities will “positively influence adjacent lands under private, state, tribal, pueblo and government ownership.” Fortunately, the fire fighters have no such constraint, although I wonder how much that also influenced their prioritizing the lab over the pueblos.
So, those of us who are staring at Santa Clara land are condemned to see burned out mountains for decades, for it will take that long for nature to fully recover. There will be no reforestation or other remedial efforts unless the pueblo diverts money intended to expand the casinos that support its people.
The effects of this are already evident. Dixon’s Apple Orchard has been the most vocal about having to fight the ash polluted runoff by itself, as it negotiates its way through government agreements. It’s planted on state trust land leased from the State Land Office.
Less publicity is given to run off elsewhere which is just as visible when you drive north out of Española.
Even in areas that are blocked by ridges from the direct run off air born ash fell.
On my side of the river, August rains revealed soot had also fallen here and suggested my concerns about air quality had been legitimate.
When conscientious people are faced with impossible situations, they’re told to break problems into smaller units which can be solved. So instead of putting out a fire, they can contain it and stage a “Mission Accomplished” event and go on, leaving the base problem unsolved.
So, as high level managers were looking for an exit strategy for themselves from a difficult wildfire, they said the fire was 100% contained and that “transition to the local agency is scheduled for August 3.”
In the fine print they added, “This will be the last report on this fire until the fire is declared controlled.” Now, what in Orwellian bureaucratese is the difference between contained and controlled?
Are we controlled yet? Is the fire out? There are have been no further postings.
I know because I looked when steam was rising from the canyons after we finally got some rain.
When I asked neighbors or people in Santa Fe if the fire was finally extinguished, they shrugged and said “I thought it was out months ago.”
Mission Accomplished
...if the mission was to isolate the curious and leave them questioning the role of government, even when it was as successful as it could be.
Pictures were all were taken after August 3 when senior managers declared the fire 100% contained.
Picture 1. 11 August 2011, about 6:45pm, ash, smoke or steam rising from the canyons between the ridges as warm air meets cooling air before sun down.
Picture 2. 20 August 2011, about 7am, bare area within the green dotted mountains behind the badlands.
Picture 3. 28 August 2011, about 4:10pm, arroyo north of Española, possibly Rio de Oso, looking upstream at bottom land mud stained by soot and ash.
Picture 4. 31 August 2011, about 9:15am, arroyo on main road through San Ildefonso land, possibly Garcia Canyon, looking downstream at grey bottom land.
Picture 5. 5 September 2011, about 9:25am, road towards the local arroyo where soot amassed into rivulets during a serious rain.
Picture 6. 3 September 2011, about 5:30pm, smoke or steam rising after a storm.
Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.
Dyson, Stuart. “Flooding Becomes Real at Fire-Scarred Apple Orchard,” KOB website, 29 July 2011.
Florida Forest Service. Fire Risk Assessment System (FRAS) Training Student Reference Text, prepared by Space Imaging Solutions, 2002.
United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Las Conchas BAER Treatment Update, 24 July 2011.
_____. Las Conchas Fire Update, 3 August 2011.
_____. “USDA Forest Service Wildfire Risk Reduction Success Stories: South Fork Fire.”
Given the nature of the fire and the constraints of money, I believe the fire fighters did all that could be done. The problem is the way their managers presented themselves. They showed the effects of years of budget cutting and politics that drives away all but the most malleable.
The lack of money is most pernicious. It has converted the discovery that fire is part of the natural cycle of prairies and forests into a rationale for not doing things unless capital assets are threatened. Last year’s South Fork Fire was in rugged territory northwest of Española, and, once the perimeters were contained, it was left to burn itself out. Later, the Forest Service claimed it as a success because prior controlled burns stopped the fire from reaching the FAA control towers on Cerro Pelon Hill.
The fact that lingering smoke and ash could affect the lives of people 15 miles away in the valley was not a quantified into a metric. When questions are raised about monitoring air and water quality, they’re perceived as public relations problems for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has an already existing audience of skeptics. If any monitoring gets done, it must establish that nothing dangerous escaped from the hill. That really isn’t the question. Most of us aren’t that paranoid about the lab. The question has been and remains, what’s coming from the fire.
The fact LANL was involved distorted many priorities, because people in Los Alamos never feel enough resources are devoted to their security. It meant the first day, when the fire spread towards Cochiti, bureaucrats were concerned with the safety of lab property. It meant a few days later, when the fire escaped to the north, bureaucrats were too involved assuring lab executives and city officials to listen to Santa Clara.
There was always the feeling there wasn’t enough money, that decisions were being made within constraints. It’s unfortunate the Willow fire was still threatening southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico when our fire began. Fatigue coupled with the already mentioned hope this wasn’t another Cerro Grande didn’t help. On June 30, the southern fire was 95% contained and still required 991 people. Our fire was only 3% contained, but only had 210 more people.
While the number rose well over 2,000 in July, after the fire was out of control in the northern canyons, there never were the numbers here, when other fires were also burning, as there had been in Arizona, early in the season, when John McCain and other politicians were making highly publicized visits.
Honesty would have helped. No matter how much money is available, there’s a limit to how many highly trained, seasonal workers should exist. It can never be enough for the worst case. But such realistic appraisals are never made public. The pretense that everything possible is being done breeds more anger than the truth would have. However the first is hidden even if malignant, while the second can be public and volatile.
While timidity and the hope this wasn’t another bad fire characterized the first responses, the serious problems in credibility began when senior managers arrived. Every institution has a gap between the skills needed to carry out day to day operations, and those needed to deal with outside decision makers, bankers and Wall Street analysts for corporations, Congress for government agencies. The difference can only be more extreme with a group like the Forest Service where the basic mission requires leaving home for extended periods to work out doors in dangerous conditions, but managers must be desk people.
There was a marked change in the reports posted on the local web site before and after the fire status was elevated. Before, the reports focused on the fire, and what people had done to combat it. We were told if crowning was occurring or if fire behavior was extreme. We were able to understand the red lines at sunset and smoke.
After senior managers arrived, the focus became the daily action plans for the management team, especially the public meetings they were holding in Cochiti and Los Alamos. The audience became the people who controlled money and promotions, and secondarily reporters for Albuquerque television stations who didn’t need to drive farther north than Los Alamos. This became a story about the Dixon Apple Orchard whose customers live in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
One small example of the use of officially important facts instead of useful information is the way the Forest Service website identified the materials that were fueling the fire. For the South Fork Fire, it had said it was Ponderosa pine; for the Donaldson Fire, that broke out while this fire was active, it said it was Jjuniper-Piñon grasslands. For this one, it said: “10 Timber (litter and understory) FM8 and FM10."
These terms are the ones used by fire fighters to assess the potential dangers a fire poses, and only have meaning to supervisors releasing resources. Certain codes no doubt justify more danger and, therefore, more money. They mean nothing to the rest of us.
While fighting the fire requires highly skilled individuals usually from native, rural or working class backgrounds, much of the support work can be done by the educated. While local men were hired to run the dozers that created the fire lines, archaeologists were hired to direct them away from important sites. It took time for the fire service to allow representatives from the pueblos to advise them. The outside experts and the locals had different interests, the one in the past, the other the present.
Whenever opportunities exist for someone other than emergency workers, avenues for corruption and political influence follow. Remediation after the fire is ripe for exploitation. While the Cerro Grande fire publicized its attempts to give school children native seeds to plant near town, this time aerial crews are spreading cereal barley, slender wheatgrass and little blue stem.
According to William Dick-Peddie, little bluestem is widespread in Juniper-Piñon woodlands and savannahs, but it’s western wheatgrass that’s found in this area, not slender. Barley isn’t mentioned. Likewise, little bluestem is found in various lower montane Ponderosa pine environments, but not wheatgrass or barley.
There have been many failures here and in Europe with attempts to immediately sow indigenous seeds. Barley may in fact grow more quickly than other plants, and thereby anchor the soil so nature can replace it in time. To one who doesn’t know, this list suggests the influence of those who want to sell what’s available for a wide range of situations, not what’s appropriate for this particular one. It’s those kind of suspicions, which develop when useful information like the nature of the fire fuel is not made available, that lead to distrust and the leap to conspiratorial thinking.
More interesting, the Burned Area Emergency Response team can only work with federal land. They can only hope their activities will “positively influence adjacent lands under private, state, tribal, pueblo and government ownership.” Fortunately, the fire fighters have no such constraint, although I wonder how much that also influenced their prioritizing the lab over the pueblos.
So, those of us who are staring at Santa Clara land are condemned to see burned out mountains for decades, for it will take that long for nature to fully recover. There will be no reforestation or other remedial efforts unless the pueblo diverts money intended to expand the casinos that support its people.
The effects of this are already evident. Dixon’s Apple Orchard has been the most vocal about having to fight the ash polluted runoff by itself, as it negotiates its way through government agreements. It’s planted on state trust land leased from the State Land Office.
Less publicity is given to run off elsewhere which is just as visible when you drive north out of Española.
Even in areas that are blocked by ridges from the direct run off air born ash fell.
On my side of the river, August rains revealed soot had also fallen here and suggested my concerns about air quality had been legitimate.
When conscientious people are faced with impossible situations, they’re told to break problems into smaller units which can be solved. So instead of putting out a fire, they can contain it and stage a “Mission Accomplished” event and go on, leaving the base problem unsolved.
So, as high level managers were looking for an exit strategy for themselves from a difficult wildfire, they said the fire was 100% contained and that “transition to the local agency is scheduled for August 3.”
In the fine print they added, “This will be the last report on this fire until the fire is declared controlled.” Now, what in Orwellian bureaucratese is the difference between contained and controlled?
Are we controlled yet? Is the fire out? There are have been no further postings.
I know because I looked when steam was rising from the canyons after we finally got some rain.
When I asked neighbors or people in Santa Fe if the fire was finally extinguished, they shrugged and said “I thought it was out months ago.”
Mission Accomplished
...if the mission was to isolate the curious and leave them questioning the role of government, even when it was as successful as it could be.
Pictures were all were taken after August 3 when senior managers declared the fire 100% contained.
Picture 1. 11 August 2011, about 6:45pm, ash, smoke or steam rising from the canyons between the ridges as warm air meets cooling air before sun down.
Picture 2. 20 August 2011, about 7am, bare area within the green dotted mountains behind the badlands.
Picture 3. 28 August 2011, about 4:10pm, arroyo north of Española, possibly Rio de Oso, looking upstream at bottom land mud stained by soot and ash.
Picture 4. 31 August 2011, about 9:15am, arroyo on main road through San Ildefonso land, possibly Garcia Canyon, looking downstream at grey bottom land.
Picture 5. 5 September 2011, about 9:25am, road towards the local arroyo where soot amassed into rivulets during a serious rain.
Picture 6. 3 September 2011, about 5:30pm, smoke or steam rising after a storm.
Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.
Dyson, Stuart. “Flooding Becomes Real at Fire-Scarred Apple Orchard,” KOB website, 29 July 2011.
Florida Forest Service. Fire Risk Assessment System (FRAS) Training Student Reference Text, prepared by Space Imaging Solutions, 2002.
United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Las Conchas BAER Treatment Update, 24 July 2011.
_____. Las Conchas Fire Update, 3 August 2011.
_____. “USDA Forest Service Wildfire Risk Reduction Success Stories: South Fork Fire.”
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Flight
The Las Conchas fire has moved on. It’s still active to the north and they’ve been doing proactive burns to the south, but it’s no longer visible here.
The smoke cleared enough that it was possible, for the first time, to see the damage. On the large mountain that seems due west of my back porch, there’s a large triangle of furrowed grey.
The only time I know I saw the fire itself, and not it’s reflection in the smoke, was on July 4 when an orange line appeared, soon followed by another. They expanded into a triangle, then into a cave that began to resemble a snow globe as smoke swirled above.
I don’t know if that particular episode caused the damage I see now, or not. It’s nearly impossible to see the same thing day and night when the only landmarks are utility wires and uniquely shaped trees.
The fire may have moved on, but the conditions that made it so serious linger. Normally it snows several times. Each time, the snow would have stayed in the shadows for several days while it seeped into the ground. There would have been rains in early spring and a hurricane in the Gulf that sent us a long soaking rain in late June or early July. Then we would have settled into a period of dry air, broken by occasional storms, until fall.
We’re in the period of dry air when everything becomes hazy. Only this year, neither of the two snow storms left more than two inches in my yard and that melted immediately. There was no spring rain. There’s been no hurricane. The drought gets worse when the humidity falls to 17% like it did yesterday in Los Alamos. Any benefits we had of the few short rains evaporated immediately.
With our drought, the first storm of the season would be threatening regardless of the fire. However, the local Forest Service is warning us the rains could be catastrophic on those heat baked soils. They were working in the Santa Clara canyon this week trying to save the fish before draining a pond when some rains came and caused a mud slide. They had to destroy a bridge that had become a dam. Their road is now under five feet of mud.
Since carmine lines are no longer visible in the hour after the sun sets, it’s possible to believe the worst is over. The smoke blends into white clouds during the day and in the night when the sky overhead is clear. It’s only at sundown and sunrise that the tricks of light turn the smoke dark grey and reveal clouds that could have come from Pittsburgh or the McConnellsville coke basin where they burned coal day and night in the 1940's to send fuel to those blast furnaces.
Even though it’s invisible, debris from the smoke is felt through the day. My eyes burn, my nose itches and runs, I’m breathless from the slightest exertion. I talked to a local woman who had a serious asthma attack when she took her son to softball practice and to a deliveryman who’s now taking inhaled steroids after three days on a route that went from Los Alamos to Angel Fire.
Last Sunday I realized the reason I was so tired wasn’t just because I was sleeping badly in the heat. My already weak lungs simply weren’t getting enough oxygen. I got into the car, cranked up the air conditioner, then wondered where I could go. Certainly not west.
I didn’t want to go south: the pollution is always worse in Pojoaque where the road comes down from Los Alamos and bad in Santa Fe where the smoke mixes with exhaust fumes. I didn’t want to go to Chimayó because the narrow, winding road is dangerous when there’s as much traffic as there would be on a Sunday afternoon.
That left the road north to Taos.
As I drove out, I could still see the smoke over the mountains when I got to Alcalde. It only disappeared as I entered the lava fields north of Velarde. When I got to the Taos plateau, everything was dry, dead looking scrub steppe broken by a few junipers. It looked like the most severely overgrazed land in the valley.
I remembered nature may need fire, but trees are not the first plants back. It sometimes takes thirty years for piñon to start growing under the protection of shrubs that have had to reach maturity. That bare spot will not be reforested for some time, unless trees are deliberately planted and nurtured. It’s hard to safely irrigate a slope.
Yesterday, I fled again, but I didn’t want to repeat that drive through the scrub. I turned off the northbound road at Dixon. The road rose high into pine forests, until it curved and dead trees were visible to the north. Signs along the side warned of flash floods. A fire had burned that part of the Carson National Forest on June 1.
There is no escape until it rains enough to extinguish the fire and drown the smoke. To me, the most frightening thing is not that we’ll have those destructive rains, but that we won’t.
Notes: Nichols, Jay. “Update 7/15 for Las Conchas Burn Area Emergency Response,” NMFireInfo website 15 July 15 2011.
Picture 1. 4 July 2011 about 8:40pm, just before it resembled a cave.
Picture 2. 16 July 2011 about 8:20am.
Picture 3. 15 July 2011, about 5:04am.
Picture 4. 15 July 2011, about 6:08pm
Picture 5. 15 July 2011, about 7:56pm, after smoke from the deliberately set fires to the south have settled into a caricature of the original fire.
Picture 6. 17 July 2011, about 1:32am when a full moon it the white clouds.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Of Fires and Wars
Images of war have replaced metaphors of a great hunt as the figurative language to describe the Las Conchas fire.
Any war, all wars, jumbled together. But especially the trenches of World War I and the eastern front in World War II where neighbors fought one another to settle old scores while matters were being decided elsewhere.
There’s the unremitting greyness when smoke obliterates the landscape, a greyness that resembles grainy newspaper photographs from the 1940's.
Also from World War II are the exotic names that taught many their European and Asian geography. The Jemez has always been a western flat behind the proscenium arch of everyday life, an undulating shadow of dark forms that stretched from the Black Mesa to the raised triangle in the north. Now there are names, Guaje, Chicoma, Polvadera.
On Jan Studebaker’s map for the Los Alamos Mountaineers, the peaks are a concave ring of teeth circling the great caldera. From a car they change location each time the road shifts to pick its way through the ridges and mounds of the lowlands. From my back porch, the Jemez are part of a great convex rotunda that surrounds me. They have no set form.
Finally, like young boys from many wars who finally seek the great atlases in public libraries to see where their fathers are stationed, I started pulling the USGS maps of the area. I found my location and moved west and found absolutely nothing. Lots of contour lines indicating changes in elevation, but no place names.
If there’s no reports from officials on what I see each evening, it’s partly because there really are no words for it. It’s in canyons and drainages that have not been tamed for human use. I begin to understand the necessity of names like Porkchop Hill.
There’s the sound of aircraft that disturbs the quiet of the countryside. When the helicopters are visible, they recall footage of the Korean mountains in M*A*S*H. Once in a while, for no obvious reason, they fly quite close and drop ammunition on areas that seem removed from the front.
As the days warms and smoke begins to tickle my nose and burn my eyes, there’s the recollection from the Hundred Year’s War that peasants far from the centers of action are often the greatest victims. When it mingles with car exhaust to make me light headed or turns brown from the maneuvers of the planes, I try not to think about what war did to civilians in Vietnam.
When my lungs are finally so full of smoke particles I no longer have the energy to stay awake, I flee for Taos in my air conditioned car and ponder the meanings of collateral damage.
Many afternoons bring false rumors of liberation like those that sent slaves fleeing plantations to find refuge with the Union army in the Civil War. Clouds gather to the north and east, sometimes thunder is heard. A couple times actual rain has materialized, but not enough. The heat and drought continue.
And then there’s the evening when the planes return to roost and trucks return from the mountains. Men foregather to assess the day’s progress, issue their press releases that focus on containment, that great metric of the Cold War. Then, victory was declared when communist armies didn’t attack Greece. The fate of the peoples in the Balkans, who had fought so hard for one side or other in the 1940's, were mere hot spots within the perimeter.
And so, each night we’re given the containment percentage for the war. We’re given insights into the strategies of this war, and how well we’re progressing. Dramatic, sometimes harrowing, photographs of men fighting on the front are posted that drown out those from bloggers that protest the unending sameness.
I suddenly realize, containment is also the defense of those who can’t fight within the perimeter. Our armies, whose technology and men come from urbanized environments, couldn't deal with the jungles of southeast Asia, can’t deal with the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Likewise, we justify our inability to deal with fire in the wilderness by saying our priorities are areas already domesticated by humans, the cities and their remote communication towers.
The efficiency of the public releases machine erases previous postings that suggest it always takes time to amass the equipment and organization to fight a war, time exploited by the enemy. Popular histories remember raising the flag at Iwo Jimo more than the Blitzkrieg, the burning of Atlanta more than Bull Run.
When the press release doesn’t answer questions raised by observations of the day, people become Kremlinologists, parsing every release for what’s not said. What does it mean that only progression maps are available today, not the one that shows yesterday’s hot spots? Are those realistic seeming comments just that, or are they intended to cover up something that might emerge tomorrow. What does it mean when they say “with expected ‘monsoonal’ rains, the fire may be extinguished naturally?”
As the sun goes down, heat drives those without aircontioning from their homes and they can see for themselves. Some nights the smoke rises from the nameless ridges, some nights it does not. The spots of red become fewer, and seem to appear farther away, higher up. Perhaps, at last, the fire is burning out, moving away, leaving battle scared land and destruction.
Finally, the night air cools the smoke and flames, the stars come out. The illusion that things have returned to normal is only disturbed by the smell of smoke. The stench of war is what people remember.
And the sense, that this will go on and on, repeating itself day after day with variations in smoke, but that, once started, fire and war follow their own inevitable logic. A kind a apocalyptic hope replaces the paranoia of isolation and media-induced ignorance that promises something, a great bomb, a great leader, a great storm, something will end the endless war.
Picture 1 Helicoper flying over the uplands, 9 July 2011 about 8:05pm; mountains are invisible.
Picture 2 Western mountains and uplifts hidden by smoke the day the fire flared in Gauje Canyon, 7 July 2011 about 4:10pm.
Picture 3 Helicopter spraying dry grasslands in front of the uplift, 7 July 2011 about 4:58pm; mountains are invisible.
Picture 4 Looking towards the western mountains as rain drips off the porch roof, 8 July 2011 about 7:38pm.
Picture 5 White smoke rising in the valleys before the far western mountains as the sun sets, 8 July 2011 about 7:57pm.
Picture 6 Fire reflected in smoke rising from behind, not in front of the mountains, for the first time, 9 July 2011 about 7:11pm.
Picture 7 Clouds over the uplands behind the Puye Cliffs gas station, 8 July 2011 about 8:10pm; mountains not visible.
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Fire as Seen by a Wise, Old Man
Light had two sons, Sun and Fire. The older was everything a father could ask, dutiful, hard working, dependable. The other, like so many younger sons, was rebellious, impulsive, easily bored. Where his brother was wise, Fire was cunning.
Sun had a chum, Water, whose childhood rages moldered into sullenness as they grew into adolescence, for Sun would sometimes get into scrapes with girls, but Water would be the one blamed. Still it was Water who married and sired children, Thunder and Lightening.
Sun could never change his ways enough to go with a woman. He drifted into a fusty bachelorhood, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, eon after eon. He never questioned life, never thought much about the women who no longer flirted with him. His routine became all he craved.
His brother Fire also had an old friend, Wind, who was even more shiftless than he, and a daughter Smoke.
No one knows where Wind and Water came from. Some say they were children of Light’s slave women. Others that they were the unrecognized offspring of Light’s sister-in-law, a woman of uncertain virtue. The half-brothers were raised with Sun and Fire, but were always aware they weren’t quite part of the family.
There was also a sister, Moon, but no one thought much about her. When they were children Sun tried to boss her, Fire teased and taunted. She moved as far from them as possible, raised her children in darkness.
This story begins soon after the solstice in New Mexico the year Water took a long trip to the Mississippi where he was thinking of moving. In his absence, the earth had grown dry. Plants suffered. Some never bloomed. Some flowered only long enough to produce seed. Some simply stayed underground.
Fire had gone to Arizona. After losing a month long war with Joe Reinarz and the Feds, he was slowly limping home. He spent a week in Pacheco Canyon near the Nambé, then went to the Bosque to recuperate.
Wind was alone and bored. Walking through the forest, he kicked an aspen out of his way. It fell against a power line. From nowhere, Fire jumped over Wind to grab the line which sent sparks flying. The tree ignited. The line melted and fell to the ground.
Wind’s spirits revived. He and Fire romped through the woods. Fire picked up glowing balls of flame and lobbed them at Wind who blew them away. One landed on a golf course where they used dead branches to drive it from tee to tee. Fire scooped handfuls of charred needles and challenged Wind to blow them across the river.
The authorities saw them, thought they had damaged maybe 9,000 aces. Later they discovered, Fire and Wind had gone through more than 43,000.
Sun was appalled. He called Water for help. Water said no. Sun reminded him of all the wonderful things his father Light had done for Water as a child. Water was in a stubborn mood, would not be convinced. He liked it in North Dakota.
Sun told him how wonderful he was, told him he alone could help. Water had heard this before. With the Missouri rising he didn’t need Sun to flatter him.
Sun insinuated his mother would be disappointed if she knew Water refused such a simple request. Water was not persuaded, but did agree to send a subordinate.
Water’s lieutenant waylaid Smoke by the river, and as their bodies mingled a heavy dew rose to hide the damage of Fire. When Sun rose in the morning, only the highest flying birds could see what havoc Fire and Wind had wrought.
As Sun plodded through the day, his heat dried water from the mist. The dust grew invisible. Smoke rose again. Men who had sent out planes to fly with the birds learned what Sun had hidden. They summoned the man who had driven Fire from Arizona.
Fire too looked over the damage and saw he couldn’t do much more to the south without effort. He saw he was hemmed in up north by the scars they called Cerro Grande. He knew anything he did to the east would rouse the Feds. The west simply wasn’t amusing.
Fire knew the power of the men he was threatening and he knew the limits of the men who were coming.
Since Water was still refusing to leave the midwest, Fire called his son Lightening. Together they found a sheep ranch in Lincoln County owned by someone with power. Not as much as the men held in Los Alamos, but someone who knew everyone who was important. They started a fire on Sam Donaldson’s land that spread to the Mescalero Apache reserve.
With three highly visible blazes threatening three sovereign nations, Fire had time to plan. He watched the men send out their planes every night to measure the widening gyre of destruction. He listened to politicians and newscasters. He saw people flee Los Alamos and herd animals into trucks in Hondo.
He could turn his attention to his brother who was so utterly predictable. When he was engaged, Fire never ceased acting, but Sun would be growing weaker and vainer every day. Fire let him have his triumphs with the morning mist and noon clarity that fooled the Feds into thinking they were in control.
Then, each day, when Sun began to tire, Fire ordered Smoke to rise. A pink glow lay along the tops of the mountains, under the blue darkened by brown soot. Above the hottest part of the fire, Smoke turned pink, her edges gilded by the light. At dusk, she stood side by side with Sun, mocking the old man with her painted finery.
As Sun stooped lower, Smoke shot wisps his way. First Sun turned yellow, then red. As he sank below the mountains, Smoke slipped behind to prance in the last light. The place he left turned more brilliant than Fire himself.
In the night she returned to Water’s lieutenant by the river.
Fire was content with his second day.
He decided to stay low, let the flames spread where they would. He knew the Feds would be too occupied compiling the reports they needed to get reinforcements to do anything. He knew Water had probably found some old friends, was likely sitting around drinking somewhere in some rundown bar.
By night of the fourth day he was ready. The conflagration was nearing the upper edge of his last adventure in the area. The Santa Clara were upset, but he knew they didn’t understand the best way to deal with a man like Joe Reinarz who only counted buildings as wealth, not acequias or herbs.
He told Wind to be ready. This time they ran through the headwaters of the Santa Clara creek they’d missed ten years ago.
Smoke in her darkest dress spread herself across the mountains. As Sun raged, she covered him in scarlet, flaunted an orange ruffle. Wind bellowed.
When Sun finally retired, a white line appeared above Los Alamos, pulsing like Moon’s son, Northern Lights. Behind a thin veil borrowed from Smoke, an orange band glowed along the ridges.
Wind eventually got bored and went to sleep. Moon’s daughters in the Big Dipper came out. Smoke went down to meet the lieutenant. In the morning, Sun saw dew again covering what had happened.
The Feds were not happy. They don’t like being told they failed to protect something significant to a sovereign nation. They had already sent a new commander. Joe Reinarz was still there, but he had to answer to Dan Oltrogge, a man the lieutenant remembered from Hurricane Rita.
And so began the long battle between the Feds and Fire.
They brought in a psychologist to study Fire and predict his ways. Then they paid men from the valley to dig great earthen works to stop him. Sometimes, Fire would get so curious he would follow them. They were delighted they had him figured out. Other times, though, Fire could not be baited, would take a look, then walk off in some other direction. He had tripled his domain.
Some nights Smoke would meet her lieutenant. Other nights she would tease her Aunt Moon by turning her as red as she had her Uncle Sun. The haughty Moon would simply ignore her, continue on her path and, when she was beyond the reach of Smoke, call out her Star daughters.
Then there were the nights Smoke would be too disgusted by the soot smirching her veils. Then she left her soiled clothing on the mountains and retreated for the night. On those nights, the lieutenant tried to amuse her by conjuring small, white clouds from water he’d stolen from the fire fighters.
When Sun woke in the morning he would see a dark band stretching from badlands into the sky, cutting off the legs of those bright white pastries.
Other nights Thunder and Lightening would prowl, sometimes with the despondent lieutenant. One time they took out the power in the valley for six hours.
The worst nights for Sun were the ones when Fire would jeer at the Feds by throwing up spots of red for Los Alamos and the valley to see. Sometimes those dots would merge into lines, sometimes would diffuse into blurs. If the Feds could catch him, they would throw their suppressing chemicals at him. Usually, he was too fast, would start another flare before they had finished with the first.
The very worst were the evenings when Fire would watch men get into their trucks and start the long drive back to the valley. As they left, he would glower in their rear view mirrors.
Sun remembered the time Light had mused someday there might appear men so smitten with their own prowess they could no longer understand someone as unruly as Fire. When those men appeared, Light warned, it would not be enough to keep up appearances. Even Fire could do that. Sun must do more. Sun must maintain his standards.
Sun would rise every morning to tidy away the messes left by Fire and Smoke. By mid-mornings, the sky would be blue, the badlands would reflect back his light. In the cities people could believe what the Feds said, that Fire was at bay.
But Water remained in his drunken stupor. Nothing was there to stop temperatures from rising when Sun toiled so hard. When air on mountains born of fire would heat, the flames would also burn hotter.
At some time, Water will waken and call Wind to come get him. They’ll meet in some dive off the gulf coast, throw up another hurricane, then Water will ride back with Wind and finally listen to Sun. Fire will leave to recuperate at one his hot springs. The Feds will rush to the hurricane zone.
When this round of battles is over and Sun again rules supreme, no one will think about the forests where they fought. Sun will go on drying the ground. Fire will destroy what’s been weakened by drought. Water will dislodge the ashes so Wind can blow them away. Men who reseed will continue to think they’re in charge.
Nature alone will pick up the pieces. What else can she do? She needs Sun to feed her leaves, Water to feed her roots, Wind to fertilize her corn and other grasses, Smoke to sprout her seeds. She even needs Fire to periodically come through and clean her debris.
Sun had a chum, Water, whose childhood rages moldered into sullenness as they grew into adolescence, for Sun would sometimes get into scrapes with girls, but Water would be the one blamed. Still it was Water who married and sired children, Thunder and Lightening.
Sun could never change his ways enough to go with a woman. He drifted into a fusty bachelorhood, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, eon after eon. He never questioned life, never thought much about the women who no longer flirted with him. His routine became all he craved.
His brother Fire also had an old friend, Wind, who was even more shiftless than he, and a daughter Smoke.
No one knows where Wind and Water came from. Some say they were children of Light’s slave women. Others that they were the unrecognized offspring of Light’s sister-in-law, a woman of uncertain virtue. The half-brothers were raised with Sun and Fire, but were always aware they weren’t quite part of the family.
There was also a sister, Moon, but no one thought much about her. When they were children Sun tried to boss her, Fire teased and taunted. She moved as far from them as possible, raised her children in darkness.
This story begins soon after the solstice in New Mexico the year Water took a long trip to the Mississippi where he was thinking of moving. In his absence, the earth had grown dry. Plants suffered. Some never bloomed. Some flowered only long enough to produce seed. Some simply stayed underground.
Fire had gone to Arizona. After losing a month long war with Joe Reinarz and the Feds, he was slowly limping home. He spent a week in Pacheco Canyon near the Nambé, then went to the Bosque to recuperate.
Wind was alone and bored. Walking through the forest, he kicked an aspen out of his way. It fell against a power line. From nowhere, Fire jumped over Wind to grab the line which sent sparks flying. The tree ignited. The line melted and fell to the ground.
Wind’s spirits revived. He and Fire romped through the woods. Fire picked up glowing balls of flame and lobbed them at Wind who blew them away. One landed on a golf course where they used dead branches to drive it from tee to tee. Fire scooped handfuls of charred needles and challenged Wind to blow them across the river.
The authorities saw them, thought they had damaged maybe 9,000 aces. Later they discovered, Fire and Wind had gone through more than 43,000.
Sun was appalled. He called Water for help. Water said no. Sun reminded him of all the wonderful things his father Light had done for Water as a child. Water was in a stubborn mood, would not be convinced. He liked it in North Dakota.
Sun told him how wonderful he was, told him he alone could help. Water had heard this before. With the Missouri rising he didn’t need Sun to flatter him.
Sun insinuated his mother would be disappointed if she knew Water refused such a simple request. Water was not persuaded, but did agree to send a subordinate.
Water’s lieutenant waylaid Smoke by the river, and as their bodies mingled a heavy dew rose to hide the damage of Fire. When Sun rose in the morning, only the highest flying birds could see what havoc Fire and Wind had wrought.
As Sun plodded through the day, his heat dried water from the mist. The dust grew invisible. Smoke rose again. Men who had sent out planes to fly with the birds learned what Sun had hidden. They summoned the man who had driven Fire from Arizona.
Fire too looked over the damage and saw he couldn’t do much more to the south without effort. He saw he was hemmed in up north by the scars they called Cerro Grande. He knew anything he did to the east would rouse the Feds. The west simply wasn’t amusing.
Fire knew the power of the men he was threatening and he knew the limits of the men who were coming.
Since Water was still refusing to leave the midwest, Fire called his son Lightening. Together they found a sheep ranch in Lincoln County owned by someone with power. Not as much as the men held in Los Alamos, but someone who knew everyone who was important. They started a fire on Sam Donaldson’s land that spread to the Mescalero Apache reserve.
With three highly visible blazes threatening three sovereign nations, Fire had time to plan. He watched the men send out their planes every night to measure the widening gyre of destruction. He listened to politicians and newscasters. He saw people flee Los Alamos and herd animals into trucks in Hondo.
He could turn his attention to his brother who was so utterly predictable. When he was engaged, Fire never ceased acting, but Sun would be growing weaker and vainer every day. Fire let him have his triumphs with the morning mist and noon clarity that fooled the Feds into thinking they were in control.
Then, each day, when Sun began to tire, Fire ordered Smoke to rise. A pink glow lay along the tops of the mountains, under the blue darkened by brown soot. Above the hottest part of the fire, Smoke turned pink, her edges gilded by the light. At dusk, she stood side by side with Sun, mocking the old man with her painted finery.
As Sun stooped lower, Smoke shot wisps his way. First Sun turned yellow, then red. As he sank below the mountains, Smoke slipped behind to prance in the last light. The place he left turned more brilliant than Fire himself.
In the night she returned to Water’s lieutenant by the river.
Fire was content with his second day.
He decided to stay low, let the flames spread where they would. He knew the Feds would be too occupied compiling the reports they needed to get reinforcements to do anything. He knew Water had probably found some old friends, was likely sitting around drinking somewhere in some rundown bar.
By night of the fourth day he was ready. The conflagration was nearing the upper edge of his last adventure in the area. The Santa Clara were upset, but he knew they didn’t understand the best way to deal with a man like Joe Reinarz who only counted buildings as wealth, not acequias or herbs.
He told Wind to be ready. This time they ran through the headwaters of the Santa Clara creek they’d missed ten years ago.
Smoke in her darkest dress spread herself across the mountains. As Sun raged, she covered him in scarlet, flaunted an orange ruffle. Wind bellowed.
When Sun finally retired, a white line appeared above Los Alamos, pulsing like Moon’s son, Northern Lights. Behind a thin veil borrowed from Smoke, an orange band glowed along the ridges.
Wind eventually got bored and went to sleep. Moon’s daughters in the Big Dipper came out. Smoke went down to meet the lieutenant. In the morning, Sun saw dew again covering what had happened.
The Feds were not happy. They don’t like being told they failed to protect something significant to a sovereign nation. They had already sent a new commander. Joe Reinarz was still there, but he had to answer to Dan Oltrogge, a man the lieutenant remembered from Hurricane Rita.
And so began the long battle between the Feds and Fire.
They brought in a psychologist to study Fire and predict his ways. Then they paid men from the valley to dig great earthen works to stop him. Sometimes, Fire would get so curious he would follow them. They were delighted they had him figured out. Other times, though, Fire could not be baited, would take a look, then walk off in some other direction. He had tripled his domain.
Some nights Smoke would meet her lieutenant. Other nights she would tease her Aunt Moon by turning her as red as she had her Uncle Sun. The haughty Moon would simply ignore her, continue on her path and, when she was beyond the reach of Smoke, call out her Star daughters.
Then there were the nights Smoke would be too disgusted by the soot smirching her veils. Then she left her soiled clothing on the mountains and retreated for the night. On those nights, the lieutenant tried to amuse her by conjuring small, white clouds from water he’d stolen from the fire fighters.
When Sun woke in the morning he would see a dark band stretching from badlands into the sky, cutting off the legs of those bright white pastries.
Other nights Thunder and Lightening would prowl, sometimes with the despondent lieutenant. One time they took out the power in the valley for six hours.
The worst nights for Sun were the ones when Fire would jeer at the Feds by throwing up spots of red for Los Alamos and the valley to see. Sometimes those dots would merge into lines, sometimes would diffuse into blurs. If the Feds could catch him, they would throw their suppressing chemicals at him. Usually, he was too fast, would start another flare before they had finished with the first.
The very worst were the evenings when Fire would watch men get into their trucks and start the long drive back to the valley. As they left, he would glower in their rear view mirrors.
Sun remembered the time Light had mused someday there might appear men so smitten with their own prowess they could no longer understand someone as unruly as Fire. When those men appeared, Light warned, it would not be enough to keep up appearances. Even Fire could do that. Sun must do more. Sun must maintain his standards.
Sun would rise every morning to tidy away the messes left by Fire and Smoke. By mid-mornings, the sky would be blue, the badlands would reflect back his light. In the cities people could believe what the Feds said, that Fire was at bay.
But Water remained in his drunken stupor. Nothing was there to stop temperatures from rising when Sun toiled so hard. When air on mountains born of fire would heat, the flames would also burn hotter.
At some time, Water will waken and call Wind to come get him. They’ll meet in some dive off the gulf coast, throw up another hurricane, then Water will ride back with Wind and finally listen to Sun. Fire will leave to recuperate at one his hot springs. The Feds will rush to the hurricane zone.
When this round of battles is over and Sun again rules supreme, no one will think about the forests where they fought. Sun will go on drying the ground. Fire will destroy what’s been weakened by drought. Water will dislodge the ashes so Wind can blow them away. Men who reseed will continue to think they’re in charge.
Nature alone will pick up the pieces. What else can she do? She needs Sun to feed her leaves, Water to feed her roots, Wind to fertilize her corn and other grasses, Smoke to sprout her seeds. She even needs Fire to periodically come through and clean her debris.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
The Fire That Didn't Happen
What the forest service lost Thursday, June 30, when fire spread through lands of the Santa Clara pueblo, wasn’t a battle with fire. I’d learned from their own local website that all fire fighters can do with big fires is try to direct the flames away from human targets. It's always the hurricane fed monsoons that actually extinguish them.
What they lost was the trust people like me had developed last summer when their website gave honest reports on a fire in rough country in the Jemez to the north. That credibility had increased with their reports on the Wallow fire in Arizona and the Pacheco fire near Tesuque.
I wasn’t angry at any particular person, but at the display of cultural values that have been evolving in the decades since Ronald Reagan until they threaten to overwhelm any alternatives.
There was first the suspicion that the forest service was undermanned for a catastrophic fire season. Modern managers have learned to detest labor intensive enterprises and replace them with better managers of machines. Government doesn’t have to hire businessmen or business school graduates to get this attitude in their employees: it’s what the young absorb growing up.
A Congress willing to barter funds to help people whose towns were destroyed by tornados is only a culmination in a trend of budget cutting.
At its height the Wallow fire had something like 4,000 people fighting it. There were less than 800 with the Las Conchas fire Wednesday, before reinforcements arrived. That same day, there were still 1,320 people fighting the 538,049 acre Wallow fire, 530 assigned to the 10,116 acre Pacheco fire, and 326 fighting the 72,650 acre Donaldson fire started by lightening Tuesday in Lincoln county. And these weren’t the only fires burning in Arizona and New Mexico this week.
Realistically, there are only so many people the government can keep trained and ready for what is seasonal work. In the past, the National Guard would have been used as a highly disciplined additional resource. That stopped when George Bush the elder converted the National Guard into the regular army in Kuwait.
We learned the consequences of they’re not being available when hurricanes hit New Orleans in 2005, but we’ve only responded by deploying even more men overseas.
Our Tea Party supported governor has been willing to call them out, but either she or their commander can visualize no role for them greater than standing guard. That’s all they did for the first few days they were utilized when we had no power last winter. With this fire, their primary purpose seems to have been aiding the evacuation of Los Alamos. It was the sheriff and the state Livestock Board who helped move animals from dangerous juniper grasslands in Lincoln County.
The perception of modern business and modern warfare is that people can be replaced with machines, especially in situations were aereal support is more effective. The problem is various types of planes cost money to buy, require skilled crews to use and expend fuels that are sensitive to inflation.
The most recent incident reports indicate Las Conchas has18 helicopters, Donaldson has 5 helicopters and 3 air tankers, and Wallow has 2 helicopters and air tankers available if needed. The last update for Pacheco on June 28 indicated they had 9 helicopters.
It wasn’t simply the problems with not having enough resources to fight the fire that made me angry It was the outside managers who appeared to be more interested in protecting their careers than in fighting the fire, something that may have been necessary given the level of politicians and power involved when the lab feels itself in danger.
The local fire information website stopped being informative. Indeed, for a few days, we were directed to another website altogether, the national Incident Information System. At the bottom of each entry there’s a form with standard categories like Basic Information, Current Situation and Outlook. The second item includes Fire Behavior. Whoever has been updating the information has been including Fire Behavior for the Wallow, Pacheco and Donaldson fires, but not for Las Conchas.
Each day the fire fighters have been issuing maps of the fire based on the nightly infrared reconnaissance flights. One June 27 they issued both a PDF and a Jpeg (picture) version of the map. On June 28 the map was a Jpeg, on June 30 and July 1 they were PDF’s that were not readable by older versions of Adobe, and on July 2 they returned to Jpegs.
On Tuesday the 27th, the map showed the fire edge, location of previous fires, and points of intense heat where the fire was the most active and points of isolated heat where it may have been preparing to spread. Since the fire had not spread north of Los Alamos, no territory to the north was shown.
On Wednesday, the map still showed the areas of intense and isolated heat, but no longer showed the previous fire scars. At the time, the fire was active to the west of Los Alamos and so nothing to the north was included.
A later map of Wednesday added a third day’s spread and showed the boundaries of Santa Clara pueblo lands for the first time.
The map for Thursday when the fire spread north did show the footprint of the Cerro Grande fire, but gave no place names. Instead of the daily growth, it showed only the perimeter of the fire. The only way you could tell the general location of the pueblo was with the county line.
On Friday the map again showed only the fire perimeter, but this time it included the spatial organization of the fire fighters. The legend didn’t explain all the symbols used, but Santa Clara appeared to be divided between two groups by the county line.
On Sunday, the map returned to its original format, showing the growth by day with a clear indication of what was destroyed when it entered Santa Clara land. It’s useful to finally have information I can use to know what it is I’m seeing and smelling, but it appeared two days after it was needed.
Those changes in format, those omissions or delays in information suggest some blunder was made in predicting the behavior of the fire, and that ever since men have been denying an error that could easily have been made in allocating scarce resources to fight a fire growing in all directions.
At 8:30 Thursday morning the Incident Information System reported
“Firefighters are monitoring long-range spotting, which have been seen as far north as the Santa Clara Pueblo. Firefighters will also be dealing with unfavorable winds which may result in extreme fire behavior and continue to push the fire to the north. Firefighters will continue scouting for potential fire line and burnout opportunities to prevent the fire from spreading.”
At the same the local Wordpress blog said “As of Thursday morning, fire crews reported the northern finger of the blaze is extending northward toward the Santa Clara Pueblo.”
Later that same day the Santa Clara suggested that that “long-rage spotting” or “northern finger” had “exploded across the western third of the reservation” producing the smoke visible from my back porch.
That night, the fire fighters described that as short runs with “spotting less than 1 mile occurred on the north head of fire” and then said it had crossed “moved northeast past NM Hwy 144 and spread into parts of the Cerro Grande burn area.” 144 in fact is a forest road west of Los Alamos and may represent the western side of the fire’s movements, but it does not appear on the maps they publish or on many other state maps.
Once the Santa Clara issued their press release, they have not been mentioned in the daily reports, except by obscure references to forest road 144 and the Cerro Grande scar.
Indeed, once the pueblo said they had “attended briefings and given recommendations and data to the Incident Command” and “repeatedly asked that adequate resources be devoted to the north end of the fire” another cultural game began: the one that says how dare a minority claim to be a victim.
Right after they issued their press release, the lab issued one in which the lab director discussed all the real victims of the fire, those who worked for the lab and lost their homes. They still had their lives and their way of life, but the loss of a tangible private asset made them the greater victims. He even listed the communities involved. In order they were: “Cochiti, the Jemez mountains, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and communities to the North.”
Then, like Princess Di, the lab director stopped in at “the Santa Claran Event Center in Española and the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque” to personally meet with refugees from Los Alamos. He noted “one of the messages I heard loud and clear from evacuees was that many of them are isolated from information sources and they do not have a good understanding of what is happening at the Laboratory.”
The forest service also held community meetings in Jemez Springs, Cochiti Pueblo and at Santa Clara. They said local residents “received updated information on the fire and had their questions answered.”
On Friday they also began adding that “archeologists work with our dozers, graders and hand crews to minimize damage to sensitive areas.” They now also report “All firefighting crews receive a daily briefing on sensitive historical and cultural sites within the fire area.”
However, when they list the sites that are closed they don’t mention Puye Cliffs. It was damaged by the Cerro Grande fire and only reopened in May of 2009. The nearby recreation area is still closed. When I drove by Saturday there was check point indicating only authorized people could go beyond the gas station.
I suspect the basic problem, apart from not having enough resources, managers who are under extreme political pressure from a narcissistic lab, and directives that use economic criteria to define priorities, is that many do not understand the difference between the forest as a recreational alternative to urban life and its existence as an extension of an agricultural life rooted in a migratory past.
Economic impacts are easy to define. Los Alamos has more than 12,000 people and the lab employs many more from places like the Española valley. The Pueblo is less than 1,000. Measuring the comparative social and psychological impacts is impossible.
The real shortage hasn’t simply been firefighters, money, or time to respond. The real problem is there’s been no rain, was almost no snow, and the storms we’ve had so far have been better at starting new fires and taking out power than quenching flames.
Notes: Daily postings at nmfireinfo.wordpress.com and its link to the Incident Information System. Information is updated often, even in an existing report, and old postings are discarded.
Los Alamos National Laboratory. “”LANL Director Expresses Concern for Communities Across the Region,” 30 June 2011 press release.
____. “LANL Director Visits Los Alamos Evacuees,” 1 July 2011 press release.
Santa Clara Pueblo. “”Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.
Pictures Taken the Day after an Unrecorded Event
1. Looking towards Los Alamos, 1 July 2011 about 7:03pm.
2. Driving into the afternoon void on highway 84/285 somewhere between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
3. The air turned brown from smoke coming down from Los Alamos as the road entered Pojoque; taken at La Puebla exit, 1 July 2011 about 6:17pm.
4. Looking west towards Santa Clara lands, 1 July 2011 about 7:36pm.
5. Looking north towards Española, 1 July 2011 about 7:37pm.
6. Sun coming in the car window between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
Fire Breaks Loose
Fire is a wily beast.
Anyone who dismisses that as too anthropomorphic risks being blinded to the dynamics of wind and flame by his or her material view of the universe.
On Sunday the Las Conchas fire had exploded in the Bandelier National Monument. It quickly spread to 60,740 acres, then seemed to slow down. In the next three days it grew another 36,982 acres to 92,722 acres, a sixth the pace.
To the south where it had threatened Cochiti it encountered lighter fuels that slaked its appetite. To the north it was hedged by the grassy remains of the Cerro Grande fire of 2000. It seemed content going west.
At noon on Thursday, June 30, the Los Alamos fire chief said “We’re starting to turn the corner on this fire.” The fire service’s information officer had already assured people that “fire is a science,” that a fire behaviorist could study the way a fire behaves and predict what it would do. There were even hopes it would rain.
Driving home the sky was dark and stormy. The winds were picking up. When I turned into my valley, I left the clouds behind, but I could see a rainbow to the east from whence I’d just come.
To the west there was strong plume of pink smoke rising from the Jemez.
While we were being lulled by pronouncements that the fire was held at bay at the borders of the lab, it had been inching north unheralded. When you looked at the infrared map from that morning, you could see it had entered Santa Clara land where it was already even with the scar’s northern tip.
Just as it moved north of the limiting old fire bed, the winds picked up.
While I was at work, the pueblo governor had declared a state of emergency. The fire had burned 6,000 acres in the watershed, all the land in the headwaters of the Santa Clara creek that feeds their irrigation system.
The winds continued to rise. The sun turned red. The pink plume turned dark grey, The smoke rising above turned orange in the reflection of the sun.
Then the sky grew dark. The lights of the gas station at the base of the road that leads to Puye cliffs and Santa Clara canyon came on to the right of my neighbor’s Siberian elm.
The winds were howling about the house. Dots of orange appeared above a ridge. Then the dots merged into a broad U-shaped line with a blur of red to the north where I could see shadows of bare tree trunks.
When I woke at midnight, the winds had stopped. The stars were out. The big dipper hung off the west end of the porch. Los Alamos was a white line, either from the fire or lights in town. The Santa Clara fire was a long static red line, no longer pulsing.
When I woke again at 5:45, the dew had fallen. The mountains were gone. There were no signs of smoke or fire. A half hour later, the lights of the gas station are out. The sandstone cliffs were etched in the sun. Those who had slept through the night woke reassured man could master the universe.
Notes:
Baca, Joe. Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.
Pitassi, Brad. United States National Forest Service, Southwest Area Type I Incident Management Team information officer. Quoted by Staci Matlock, “Los Alamos Residents Flee Growing Las Conchas Fire,” Santa Fe’s The New Mexican, 27 June 2011.
Tucker, Doug, Los Alamos fire chief. Quoted by Carol A. Clark, “Fire Battle Begins to Turn Corner,” Los Alamos Monitor, 30 June 2011.
United States National Forest Service. “Las Conchas Progression” map, 30 June 2011.
Picture 1. Smoke from the Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 7:56pm; just to the right of the Siberian elm in the center is the gas station at the base of the road to Puye cliffs.
Picture 2: Rainbow to the east, 30 June 2011 about 6:24pm.
Picture 3: Smoke from the Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 6:25pm, where the rainbow as shining to the east.
Picture 4: Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 9:19pm; the red blur is above the gas station. With the high winds and slow shutter speed, it was impossible to get a picture that doesn’t have some camera movement.
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