Northern Lights: A (hopeful) distraction.
Adventures afield and the realities of a changing climate.
There’s something to be said about the whims of school board officials. One year you are trudging along from August to November, just hobbling through until you get to the first real break of the year, Thanksgiving. The next year you’ve got a whole week of wonder to fill (or not) in early October. This is the second year my son has had a “Fall Break”. Last year we didn’t do anything special because I was eating much of my PTO for physical therapy or various doctors appointments as I worked through some health issues. This year we trekked over to Santa Fe to hole up in a cabin on the Pecos for a week.
My husband found this cozy cabin in the valley of the Pecos River back in 2022 for our 20th anniversary. That year the region was swarmed with wildfire outbreaks, and most public lands were closed, whether they had a fire burning on them or not. We did not get to hike in the Santa Fe National Forest that year and had to find smaller tracts of land to explore instead. We returned this year to cooler weather and thankfully no fires. The sound of the Pecos bubbling 50 yards away from the cabin paired with the flighty caws of the Steller’s jays made for a peaceful setting away from the rest of the world. These were true October fall days, with chilly mornings as you waited for the sun to rise above the mountains to the east, warming the valley, and then cooling again as the sun slid behind the mountains to the west. I found myself thinking about moving to New Mexico, somewhere I could be comfortable in October, not too hot or cold, though we did meet some locals in the parking lot of La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs who warned that it was far milder than is typical for the region this time of year. I wasn’t going to complain though, it wasn’t Texas where it was/is still in the mid to high 90s, until we get a break in the warmth later this week.
But as we’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, there are no climate refuges. Asheville was touted as a climate haven and yet it suffered catastrophic flooding that those along the Gulf Coast are all too familiar with. Thankfully everyone I know IRL or on the internet who lived in the region is ok, though they are all still working through various levels of catastrophe aftermath. It certainly made me eye-ball every single cabin in what amounts to some level of the floodplain of the Pecos last week. Warning signs about flash flooding and debris over the road are placed every so often along the two-lane road that winds through the canyon. It’s hard to imagine this place flooding but I know it happens. We saw recent evidence of a flash flood that happened on the Frijoles Canyon at Bandelier National Monument in early September, the vegetation debris still twisted in knots and caught in grasses and trees, with portions of trail still closed. Then I looked to the north and thought about the cliff dwellings and archaeological remains of the structures of the Pueblo peoples who once inhabited these dwellings in this region. How many flash floods did they survive? Their structures were surely built to withstand and be out of the danger of these events, right?
This kind of resilience is something on my mind for my next essay. We’re at a precipice and we’re either going to fall off the cliff or find a way to climb out the hole we’ve dug for ourselves.
Meanwhile in Texas…ugh. The temperature swing as we lowered in elevation, heading east towards home, was not pleasant. It was getting crispy on the landscape in the weeks before and was crunchier when we returned. Trees are showing signs of wear and not just for the typical phenological reasons. I hate to ask for rain knowing it typically comes in the form of a deluge around here. Maybe a few slow inches of rain?? Please? At least we get the cool down later this week.
I did indulge in some book buying while in Santa Fe. I love this used bookstore called Op.Cit. Books, located inside an older, quiet mall. The bookshelves are covered from floor to ceiling but in the middle of the store are piles of boxes and books that I’m not even quite sure the owner/workers have even gone through to price yet. It’s literary chaos! Ideally I would spend several hours here, however both of my visits here have been short on time, so I have beelined it to the natural history area for efficiency. After much debate, I picked The Quiet Extinction by Kara Rogers and Listening Point by Sigurd F. Olson, and as I walked past another shelf I noticed Julia Cameron taunting me and The Sound of Paper jumped into my arms on the way to the checkout. Rogers’ book is about T&E plants and how many go unnoticed. The cover reminds me so much of Georgann Eubanks’ Saving the Wild South, with a similar subject. I look forward to reading all three!
Last newsletter I asked folks to send in questions/AMA about book writing/Texas hiking/nature/outdoors. I got a couple of questions but would like a few more to make it more meaningful to use as a whole separate newsletter. Please ask and I’ll answer in a future newsletter!
A few things from other folks…
“Again, one lesson from Helene is that we humans are ensnared within—that we depend upon—a world of concrete and cables that is inherently fragile. That means we will always depend on not just our neighbors. The question of our era—the question of our species, maybe—is whether we can scale up paradise and expand our sense of neighborliness. Whether we can realize that it’s not just the folks down the road that need help, but everyone, everywhere.” - Surviving as an ‘infrastructure species’, via
“The weather these days always seems a little off. Like the seasons of memory have gone for good, subtly morphed into weird, uncanny valley imitations that have broken free of the basic meteorological parameters we long took for granted. And you can’t help but think they’re just getting started.” - Apocalypse Macaroni and Other Signs of Fall, via
“It was probably for the best: my idea was to open a restaurant that would specialize in clam chowder and gazpacho, depending on the season. We would be unique in the region, although there are many good reasons why a restaurant with such a specialized menu does not, and never will, successfully exist in the desolate northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.” - (Further) Adventures with Marfawitz, via
“The power of storytelling during this hurricane season - a wild mix of oral, mythical, journalistic, factual, propaganda - is not lost on me. But it seems like the guardrails of critical thinking are truly off when college-educated people in your Instagram feed are sharing wild takes about the government orchestrating storms. The stories have gone gonzo in the worst way.” - What are you building? via
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
Thank you for the shout-out, Misti!