And Still, I Will Forget

Elephant Butte Reservoir, NM. Day 39 of Desert Solitude.

Over the past few decades of diminishing water at Elephant Butte Reservoir (about which I shared last week), a dense riparian zone has formed along the eastern and western crawl of water in this wide canyon carved out by the Rio Grande eons ago. That the water levels have been diminishing here diminishes not the abundance of life. It merely changes its forms. Everywhere evident life takes hold in always adaptive ways; all is always in flux; all is always tilting toward efflorescence in nature.

I walked along a narrow path through wine-colored bushes yesterday afternoon and heard an unfamiliar cry of birds in the distance, something between the call of geese mid-air in autumn and that of gulls at the shoreline in July. The call came long before I was close enough to see any signs of the birds uttering it.

I moved closer to the water, walking along what was once the river bottom, the sand still soft and forgiving. Schools of fish once bedded and laid eggs here, and so, too, frogs and fres…