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.