Water? Fire? Which Kind? How Much?
Local News Today August 11 2022.
©SGHolland
Short Term Water?
Long Term Water?
Well Water?
Las Vegas, New Mexico is a dry dry state. Most of the time.
Yes, it has an average of 17.6 inches of rain per year!
At the ranch we have a water gauge right near the house. Every day
the rainfall is measured. We had less than the average the past few years.
And the “monsoon season” came late this year.
A LOT of New Mexico was besieged with wild fires over this past year.
Plenty of news streams in even now while we are having monsoons that
come in on fabulous cumulus clouds nearly every night now.
Monsoons have an awful lot of scorched, parched land to land on. Very quickly after the thunder sounds. the rain begins to fall, these sunny days.
It pours down as hail and turns to bucketfuls of liquid that gardens lap up
like sponges, and then the rain finds a lower level down, swelling the creeks
and pouring through the boulders of the mountains, rushing into to every available hole and crevice to get to lower ground…”finding it’s own level”, as water always does.
Our farm has a well — 80 some feet deep. Waters stay low in New Mexico’s
desert, but a diligent farmer can find some if he spends a chunk of money getting a well drilled. Even so, the water has minerals, for better or worse,
that come out of the deeps. Ours is very soft water with a lot of calcium carbonate in it. I steer away from using it for cooking or drinking. We filter it,
or get bottled (in plastic ) water for a dollar a gallon or more.
Our farm is in a valley and has a few ponds that attract ducks and Canada Geese and even Snow Geese at certain times of the year. If it has water in it.
When a monsoon hits it either irrigates our rolling meadows and leaves water in the ponds, OR it sends way more water down the arroyos of the mesa and little creeks that keep the farm going and spills out over the edges and takes soil and grass and rocks and debris with it to a place lower that our place.
What is left is mud. Clay. One doesn’t use the John Deere huge machinery on
the saturated ground. One doesn’t even drive on the shining mud over the driveway. The mud encases whatever is standing and proceeds to swallow it.
John Deere or gumboots. You are lucky to drag yourself out of that stuff.
People are continually having to evacuate their wonderful, utilitarian, and often grand farmhouses and get their horses and cattle somewhere quickly
when the monsoons let loose. If the fires don’t drive them out, the floods will finish the job.
Las Vegas NM is a very old, historic town. Yes, there are fine homes here and
also a lot of not so grand places. And yes, there are those who are homeless, or seriously dependent on the generosity of better off people in the neighborhood. Now there are public buildings housing many many people who were the “better off” until wildfires swept across their fine properties and left them with no where to lodge.
So many of them. It was not a matter of inviting them to stay for a few nights in your extra room. They and their dogs and their horses were the lucky ones
who got out alive!
They are still going back to see if they can find the structures that were so recently their homes.
We are staying in a place in Santa Fe, south of Las Vegas, that was luckily available. I still have an art exhibit hanging up at Las Vegas in the fine building that stands on the mesa. It did not wash away or burn down.
We are still waiting to see whether the farm structures below will get
through the monsoons that are taking the water we depended on downhill from our rolling land.
Each afternoon the cumulus clouds in the brilliant sunny sky darken up, and the cat hears the thunder before we do, and hides in some dark corner until the monsoon is finished. We watch our patio floor to see if the water that collects there is seeping under the house. We cheer for the plants that are still in the Santa Fe garden. We are wondering whether there will be a viable farm left in Las Vegas after this climate disaster is over. The stream that brings water to our fields flooded (see the link above) has overflowed its banks.
I wonder how my paintings are faring up there on the mesa.
We wonder if we will go back there permanently sometime. We think we might put the paintings into an auction, along with the antiquities left at the ranch house.
