Of Need and Want, Longing . . . and Love

Elephant Butte Reservoir, NM. Day 35 of Desert Solitude. I wake this morning to sunrise shimmering over water in the southern high plains of New Mexico. It is a soft, supple dance, this shimmering light. Where the earth seems parched, it strikes me as strange to let the eyes rest on a body of water stretching to the north and south as far as the eye can see. If I close my eyes, I taste the dazed wonderment one might have happening upon a mirage in a desert so thirsty that everywhere abounds its opposite, a floodplain of water.

I am sitting atop the eastern edge of the western range of what seems to be a bulging gorge from the distant past. It is apparent visibly that water from the Rio Grande once filled this valley to the brim. This is no longer so. A wide swath of white mineral deposits paints the lower shelf of earth about twenty feet in height above the reservoir’s water line. Even a reservoir cannot claim water that does not come.  

I seem to be at a northern reach of a string of d…