Return of the prairie dogs

 

They're back. 

Here we are, just barely into the new year and a long way away from spring (this photo was taken in summer a year and half ago), and the first little sentries have emerged from their burrows to check out what's happening in the snow-covered upper world and grab a bite to take back below, to the nurseries full of new pups and proud mothers, safe from the fox and coyote that currently own the wintry Colorado landscape.

We've shared our property with several colonies of these little subway diggers for two and a half years now, and last year, which was exceedingly dry, they discovered and ravaged my behind the house vegetable garden that I imagined I'd skillfully managed to conceal. Which means: this year, fencing. There just wasn't enough for them to eat in the other two acres of the property, and what there was had dried into tasteless, barely nutritious scrub, and as the heat persisted, they ventured closer and closer to the house, eventually discovering our trove. 

These guys are considered pests by the farmers and ranchers in the area, but we've grown attached to their chattering signals, their gossip, their warning calls and seemingly hysterical laughter. And we recognize that they're a keystone species - who knows what sort of hardpan we'd be dealing with if this crew wasn't constantly engaged in aerating excavation work. We don't mind sharing the land with them, but it would be nice if they left us just a small portion of what we're able to coax out of these arid and alkaline soils.

Another Year

Ordinarily we send out cards at Christmas and a brief letter to friends and family letting them know how our little project is progressing, with best wishes for the year to come. But, of course, 2020 was no ordinary year. One year later, here's where we're at:

And so, that happened . . . 

20/20 vision is supposed to be a good thing, possibly the best kind: sharp, clear, focussed. Near and distant. Good news from your opthalmologist or optometrist!  Hindsight, it is said, is 20/20 – meaning, that as you look back on the landscape you've traveled through, things make sense – both the paths taken and the ones that were obscured from view at the time.  Ah, nowI see.  If only we'd known . . .

The new year started with a bang (remember?), a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad International Airport that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. So, another Middle East war appeared to be in the offing, this time with Iran. Oh, and the Chinese government had just let it slip that it was investigating the outbreak of some kind of respiratory illness in the city of Wuhan. But, y'know, nothing to get concerned about, because . . .

The House of Representatives decided on January 15^th to impeach the President on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.  Sent the articles right over to the Senate.  Where they soon died, after Senators voted not to hear from any actual witnesses. At the annual Davos conference of the rich and powerful, President Trump proclaimed, “We have it under control. It's going to be just fine.” He was talking, of course, about the coronavirus. China had just quarantined the entire city of Wuhan. By the end of January, Trump had banned travel from China and, as we now know, actually considered the disease much more dangerous than he was publicly letting on. He just didn't want us all to, you know . . . panic.

In February, Trump delivered his State of the Union speech, a first salvo in his re-election campaign (“Just have a look at that stock market, will you?” which later morphed into his “This election is rigged!” campaign), and Nancy Pelosi tore her copy of it in half behind his back. A day later, the Senate acquited Trump of the impeachment charges, which freed him to start punishing (i.e., firing) people who had testified against him in the House proceedings. By the end of the month, we'd had our first reported coronavirus death in the U.S., but we can honestly say we weren't paying that much attention – were you?

Because all of the top Democratic contenders for Trump's office were dropping out of the race in March – and many of them were endorsing Joe Biden. So long, Bernie. Goodbye, single payer health care – we've got other things to worry about. 

And then there was that Monday, early in March, when we happened to glance at the stock market chart and noticed that it had plunged 2000 points. That'll get your attention – for us, it was like spotting a tsunami on the horizon, wondering how tall the wave would be when it finally crashed ashore. A couple of days later, the World Health Organization officially declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and people started seriously talking about lockdowns. The Dow fell an additional 2300 points, and President Trump declared it (the coronavirus, not the stock market) a national emergency. Later, he decided to withdraw from the World Health Organization. During a pandemic. 

Meanwhile, in Louisville, Kentucky, the police mistakenly broke into the apartment of an unarmed black woman named Breonna Taylor, firing mutiple shots and killing her. None of the officers involved was charged with her death. The beginning of a long hot summer of Black Lives Matter protests, riots, and additional killings (Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, George Floyd in Minneapolis, and others).

Worldwide, everything was shutting down, and hospitals – especially in the big cities and in whole countries – were begging for personal protective equipment, ventilators, testing, and contact tracing which govern-ments seemed unable or unwilling to supply. By April 10^th, my 71^st birthday, the U.S. became the first country to report 2000 coronavirus deaths in a single day. It took us until June to become the first country to reach 2 million infections, by which time people were begging to be released from imposed lockdowns; and a steady Internet chatter of partisan belief swelled, under the stress of record unemployment, business closures, and a bitterly contentious election, questioning the science of pandemic spread and fueling bizarre conspiracy theories.

And so, all that happened. And more, much more – a summer and fall of catastrophic fires, floods, a record number of hurricanes – the collateral damage of a rapidly changing climate. During the heatwave here in August, everything turned crispy dry, and an army of hungry prairie dogs discovered and consumed the backyard vegetable garden. As we write this, at the beginning of December 2020, our little mountain community of Paonia, Colorado, to which we moved in the summer of 2018, is somehow managing to stagger forward, aiming at arbitrary targets – Christmas, the New Year, the start of a new presidency. In the month just passed on the national stage, sabres are still being rattled with regard to Iran; coronavirus vaccines are being prepared as the pandemic rages; and our one-term incumbent leader is still claiming that his opponents stole the election and is refusing to concede. Here in rural America, political signs have come down, but deep divisions remain as winter approaches. 

For us, personally, this long season of social distancing and isolation has slowed to a crawl our plans for building a home – and a homestead. At a time when the years remaining to us seem more precious and irreplaceable than ever, we appear to be hiking up a very long steep slope on an unmarked trail. Turning around and looking back over the landscape reveals few clues as to what may lie ahead. Is there a kind of vision where 2021 brings order to chaos, snapping into focus a shared and trusted set of values? 2020 offers no assurances – just hope and a sincere wish for reconciliation, for whatever love and connection the coming seasons may bring to you, your family, and all of our friends and neighbors.  

Courtesy of my weather station

Shouldn't come as a surprise - it's January 27th.

Traveling In Circles

Turning away, from the expanding city to flyovercountry 

        – yes, I see you up there, sky travelers! I see your winking stars signal 

           progress, east to west, west to east, toward your coastal destinations – 

           I've sat wedged into that same seat, rapt in airtight metal and plastic, 

           watched the tiny proxy plane skim graphics on the screen before me 

           while out the fogged windows, fuzzy smudges flow below, 

           fungal inflections sliding slowly behind in the darkened landscape. 

           I've looked down, too . . . somewhere below, where now I stand, 

           looking up, watching as you pass – 

yes, when you make that move, expect to hear, “What are you doing here?”

Read the pattern, connect the lines – triangulate an answer.

At the trailing end of a final arc, I uproot myself from occupation

        – inhabited over forty years – the last share in unchallenging retirement, 

           all expenses paid, base consumption and reduced usefulness – 

           radically transform the terms of my life, concluding function of an unsolved equation 

           begun – oh, decades ago, though I was unaware of calculation, off-course, 

           heading in retreat – landing here ('til the end? some other bearing?) 

The Future rushes forward to articulate my newfound position with uttered words,

in a place still strange and unknown, outer worlds beyond my window, 

beyond the country road threading this snow-covered mesa, beyond 

the ghostwhite peaks, impending – compassed constellations in the clock of the sky 

careering out of control towards . . . an avalanche, unraveling. 

         One of a certain religious disposition (which I am not) thinks of this 

         as the re-animationof ancient prophecy, or karmic reimbursement – 

                    – though I have told myself tales, in times past, 

                       of dark foreboding, I've not wandered about 

                       to slam to a sudden heart-stopping 

                       terminus. 

          No – not on the iron rail of divination but as a sum of tributaries too numerous, 

          large and small, gravity-made, on a mountain of opened presents heaped up in the past, 

          spread out before us. Track the turning points (they fall like flakes outside my window), 

          survey the landscape, even with the biased glass of urban eyes, 

          scry the general shape and flow of the watershed, its downward trend . . .

Coming of age in earth-awareness, the globe altered – a wounded stag, 

assaulted by our gang of hungry predators, steadily wearing it down, 

weakening and bleeding it out – could we but change: modify our diets, 

mitigate our desires. We could turn away from the path of prehistoric drive.

The Old Ways fail us – but, just in time, the new will forge 

a different track: to the garden we would go and the leaping stag recover. 

         – it has fallen many times – revived to continue running, dodging like a stream, 

            seeking a course invisible before it, inevitable after – still, 

            nothing comes to its rescue, and the untiring pack pursues. 

Is it possible, I wonder, to turn the famished mob aside – invest it in some other current, 

another soil, a tract someplace we once passed by?

            Return to stolen lands and plant the seeds. Winter encircles us, springs to follow. 

            Snow melts and pools beneath the sun of a warming world, turning away.

                                                                                        – Los Angeles - Paonia

                                                                                           January 2019

Oil & Gas

An ongoing problem around here is the push to achieve what's called "energy dominance" by the current administration, applying pressure through the Interior Department to lease BLM public lands for oil and gas development -- specifically, for purposes of fracking. The North Fork Valley is right on the front lines of this fight -- just to the north of us, extraction of coal, once a cornerstone of the economy here in the valley, has left a toxic time bomb in its wake in the form of methane leaking into the atmosphere from the mines that have shut down. Ironically, it's the abundance of natural gas that has kicked the pins out from under the market for coal, resulting in the mine closures.

Colorado passed a new law last year requiring the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission to put the health and safety of communities as the top priority in assessing additional development, and, possibly as a response to that regulation, COGCC has started to include flow line information to their GIS online site. Good to know if you need to start digging somewhere.

The little red cross at the center of the map (14S91W) is my location. The little brown dots seem to be existing well pads. The green circles seem to be potential drilling sites. By the way, that cluster of existing and potential well sites to the north of us, running along the 133 highway, also is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the state.

You can add to or subtract from the visible layers on the map, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at the surrounding watershed (below).

Rivers and streams in the neighborhood (the expanded blue areas around some streams are apparently regarded as "buffer" zones.

Where does the water come from (when it's on)?

The violet line near the top is a pipeline running from the Minnesota Ditch over there on the right side of the frame, delivering water collected up on Mount Lamborn and conveyed by gravity. The ditch, when it's running (usually sometime in April/May), is divided by a weir according to a precisely calculated placement.

The water eventually runs downhill to a pump house over on the left side of the frame, adjacent to a storage pond. The pump lives at the junction of the violet line and the yellow line on the banks of that pond and an overflow stream. There the water starts it's long journey uphill again in the yellow pipeline. Head pressure will take the water back up again to somewhere just below the lower pipe, midway in the field, but the pump is necessary to push it all the way up to the top, where it was formerly used to flood irrigate the field. As I see it, that would have sent a lot of water off to the sides of the central ridge, and off the property altogether.

I'll use the system as it stands in conjunction with the top swale to initiate the planting of trees, but I'm hoping I won't have to depend on it for long into the future. If I can infiltrate water at the top of the property, I can start to build the earthworks necessary to get it where it needs to go.

Profile(s)

So, based on the Google Earth contours and slope profile, here's a picture of where I decided to dig out a few swales by hand last year. Again the actual, on-the-ground measurements put those swales in slightly different positions. And, they don't precisely follow the contours at the edges, since I want to direct whatever water flows there in, across the valleys, towards the center ridge (or into a series of storage ponds.) The only swale that is operationally functional at this point is the one up by the house - and it's covered in snow. But eventually these contours may serve as guides for ripping the subsoil in parallel lines down (i.e., heading north) the hillside.