I’ve received my volunteer position description for the Nogales project! (Por fin!) Training is tomorrow in Tucson, then I’ll be in Nogales for about a week, then in the desert aid clinics near Tucson, then back to Nogales.
The volunteer description is:
“Currently, No More Deaths in Nogales works in the space of a variety of partners who operate on a daily basis in Sonora, Mexico. We offer free telephone calls to family members in the U.S. or Mexico/Central America. Sometimes we have volunteers who are available to provide basic first aid to migrants in need. We document peoples' stories and also abuses of people in immigration custody. We sometimes volunteer at the main migrant shelter or help with operations at the soup kitchen for deported migrants. We also help people recover their personal property that has been confiscated by Border Patrol and not returned to them upon release.
One project that we hope you all will be able to participate in is to document stories of family separation due to migration experiences as well as deportation.”
I am absolutely thrilled! I’m concerned that my Spanish isn’t sufficient to really interview and record people’s stories in good detail, but I can hardly wait to speak with people about their experiences, their families, the pressures they face.
Since 1994, between 3,000 – 5,000 people have died along the us/mex border while attempting to cross into the US, (according to U.S. Dept of Homleand Security BSI, Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations, and other records).
In 1994, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between USA, Canada, and Mexico went into effect and border walls were developed near popular and populated migration points (El Paso, San Diego, and Nogales), pushing migration into rural desert areas. Many people crossing the desert have few resources (food, water, money, directions). They face extreme heat, exhaustion, heatstroke, blisters, sunburns, as well as physical violence.
For me, working with NMD is a natural progression after studying in desert country, a wonderful educational and emotional opportunity, and a personal obligation as a human being who lives near the border and has some applicable skills and the inclination to provide aid. As an American citizen, I can vote for immigrant labor rights and immigration reform, provide support along the US-Mex border without fear of discrimination or deportation, and be a voice and a pair of working hands for those who don’t have the proper papers to speak up for themselves.
I realize I’m naïve about the Arizona – Mexico border. My personal experience is very distanced from immigration issues, and I’m bound to make many blunders in an effort to understand the politics and social issues in the region and provide support. But jumping into the thick of things, meeting with people involved in and affected by the border, seems like the quickest and most earnest way to learn and help.
For a good set of articles and timelines on the border, humanitarian aid, NAFTA, US-Mexico relations, etc., the No More Deaths website has a great set of readings: go to the “Documents” section, go to the “Volunteer Documents” folder, and select the “No More Deaths Reader” PDF.
Tonight, the thunderclouds are rolling in from the SE, and lightning is kissing the edges of the valley. Monsoon season is coming! I can hardly wait for the rain rain rain.
Enough rambling for tonight.
With zest, hasta pronto,
madelyn
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Good morning, Tucson!
Yesterday afternoon I nearly danced out of my seat as we flew into Tucson. The view out of the plane window gave me goosebumps – capillary systems of sun-baked creekbeds and green veins of greasewood along flowing creeks; mountains breaching sharply out of the desert floor as ribcages, lizard tails, goliath knuckles, forceful and comforting; the indigo of distance that stains the mountains and desert floor farther and farther away.
I feel comforted and invigorated by being in the desert again. I love the smell of juniper in the heat (mid-nineties), the lobes and colors of prickly pear, the skitter of lizards, the intensity of sunset.
I’ve been reading Going Back to Bisbee by Richard Shelton, and a few other sources, to set this place in a historical context. In 1822, the territory of and around AZ was freed from the Spanish and had become part of Mexico. Less than two centuries ago, this region was celebrating its independence from Spain as part of a Mexican state. About three decades after this independence, however, Arizona was purchased from the Mexican government by the U.S. with the Gadsen Purches, or Treaty of La Mesilla, in 1854. The 29,665 square miles of territory purchased (AZ and NM) was defined by water; the Rio Grand traced the east side, the Colorado marked the west, and the Gila River defined the northern border.1
The sale was made by Santa Anna, the dictator of Mexico at the time. Many interpretations float around of US and Santa Anna’s intentions and the balance of power between the two. In Going Back to Bisbee, Shelton writes,
“[The territory], as is generally believed, purchased from the Mexican people or from any duly constituded Mexican Government. It was privately and secretly sold by the one-legged dictator, Antonio López de Santa Ana, who had already played a leading role in Mexico’s loss of another chunk of real estate now know as Texas. …He billed himself ‘The Napoleon of the West,’ and needed much money to maintain his army and his style. …He lived in gilded, rococo luxury, and loved parties and huge celebrations… He also sold the natives of Yucatán slaves to Cuban plantation owners at twenty-five pesos each [to make ends meet from government expenses].”
In 1856, when the treaty was finalized, U.S. troops marched into Tucson, replacing Mexican troops. Bisbee writes of the transition in the town of six-hundred:
“…hoisted an American flag over Miles’ store, with loud cheers, while the Mexican troops ere filing past on their way out of town. It was an insult. …
Some [of the Mexican civilians] packed up amd moved south across the newly established border. Many of the older residents stayed. They had already lived under two governments, although on the ragged frontier of both, and they would wait and see if this one would be different. …Nobody had consulted them about whether or not they wanted to become part of the American era.”
This history is so fresh. A century-and-a-half seems like a long stretch on the US timescale of history, but for most nations, these stories are still a part of family memory, are still playing out.
1Source: Finley, Monique, et al. "Gadsden Purchase clarified U.S. boundaries." Borderlands 18 (1999-2000): 7. Borderlands. EPCC Libraries.
I feel comforted and invigorated by being in the desert again. I love the smell of juniper in the heat (mid-nineties), the lobes and colors of prickly pear, the skitter of lizards, the intensity of sunset.
I’ve been reading Going Back to Bisbee by Richard Shelton, and a few other sources, to set this place in a historical context. In 1822, the territory of and around AZ was freed from the Spanish and had become part of Mexico. Less than two centuries ago, this region was celebrating its independence from Spain as part of a Mexican state. About three decades after this independence, however, Arizona was purchased from the Mexican government by the U.S. with the Gadsen Purches, or Treaty of La Mesilla, in 1854. The 29,665 square miles of territory purchased (AZ and NM) was defined by water; the Rio Grand traced the east side, the Colorado marked the west, and the Gila River defined the northern border.1
The sale was made by Santa Anna, the dictator of Mexico at the time. Many interpretations float around of US and Santa Anna’s intentions and the balance of power between the two. In Going Back to Bisbee, Shelton writes,
“[The territory], as is generally believed, purchased from the Mexican people or from any duly constituded Mexican Government. It was privately and secretly sold by the one-legged dictator, Antonio López de Santa Ana, who had already played a leading role in Mexico’s loss of another chunk of real estate now know as Texas. …He billed himself ‘The Napoleon of the West,’ and needed much money to maintain his army and his style. …He lived in gilded, rococo luxury, and loved parties and huge celebrations… He also sold the natives of Yucatán slaves to Cuban plantation owners at twenty-five pesos each [to make ends meet from government expenses].”
In 1856, when the treaty was finalized, U.S. troops marched into Tucson, replacing Mexican troops. Bisbee writes of the transition in the town of six-hundred:
“…hoisted an American flag over Miles’ store, with loud cheers, while the Mexican troops ere filing past on their way out of town. It was an insult. …
Some [of the Mexican civilians] packed up amd moved south across the newly established border. Many of the older residents stayed. They had already lived under two governments, although on the ragged frontier of both, and they would wait and see if this one would be different. …Nobody had consulted them about whether or not they wanted to become part of the American era.”
This history is so fresh. A century-and-a-half seems like a long stretch on the US timescale of history, but for most nations, these stories are still a part of family memory, are still playing out.
1Source: Finley, Monique, et al. "Gadsden Purchase clarified U.S. boundaries." Borderlands 18 (1999-2000): 7. Borderlands. EPCC Libraries.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
para empezar (to begin)
I'm starting this blog in hopes of sharing my experiences while volunteering with No More Deaths in Tucson and Nogales, to develop an image of the Arizona - Mexico border, to stay in touch, and to express and explore the environmental/social issues in the places I move through and love from Alaska to Mexico.
In two days I'll be in Tucson, and I start volunteer training for No More Deaths/No Más Muertes on the 31st. NMD is a humanitarian organization dedicated to preventing death and trauma on the US/Mexico border and recording human rights abuses. As a volunteer for the Nogales Project, I'll be living in an apartment with other volunteers in Nogales AZ and working in Nogales Mex. I expect that most of the volunteering I'll be doing will be at a medical clinic near a deportation center in Nogales, providing first aid and documenting deportation practices and abuses. (For more info on NMD, the website is: nomoredeaths.org ).
Today I'm in West Virginia and savoring the humidity. It rains often, and when it does, the air smells like sweet rotting oak. Camp (where I'm working) is nestled into the hills in the Monongahela National Forest, and I feel completely embraced by the tree cover and the community. Nogales will be a sharp contrast to Bartow WV, but I'm looking forward to being in desert country again and watching sunrise and sunset in dry air.
Hasta pronto,
madelyn
In two days I'll be in Tucson, and I start volunteer training for No More Deaths/No Más Muertes on the 31st. NMD is a humanitarian organization dedicated to preventing death and trauma on the US/Mexico border and recording human rights abuses. As a volunteer for the Nogales Project, I'll be living in an apartment with other volunteers in Nogales AZ and working in Nogales Mex. I expect that most of the volunteering I'll be doing will be at a medical clinic near a deportation center in Nogales, providing first aid and documenting deportation practices and abuses. (For more info on NMD, the website is: nomoredeaths.org ).
Today I'm in West Virginia and savoring the humidity. It rains often, and when it does, the air smells like sweet rotting oak. Camp (where I'm working) is nestled into the hills in the Monongahela National Forest, and I feel completely embraced by the tree cover and the community. Nogales will be a sharp contrast to Bartow WV, but I'm looking forward to being in desert country again and watching sunrise and sunset in dry air.
Hasta pronto,
madelyn
Semester in the West #4, 10/22/2010
10.22.2010
Hello out there!
Today is Day 59 (past half-way!) and day 12 without a shower or creek-dip. This morning we are leaving Comb Ridge near Bluff, Utah and driving into Arizona to visit a chapter on the Navajo Reservation and a coal-fired plant near the Grand Canyon Dams.
Wow, it’s been a long while. Mmkay, breeze-by:
[[September 20th – 26th ~ Escalante, UT. Working with ecologist Mary O’ Brien in Dixie National Forest . Mary is a passionate scientist with an obsessive love for litigation, a long wolf-gray braid and the stride of a graceful primate. We took a breath away from desert land and slept in the lullabies of whispering aspen leaves. I greedily soaked up every leaf of green I could, and for the first time on this trip, it felt like autumn. With Mary, we sampled all sorts of field work: vegetation transects, cow-counting, ant-mound monitoring, aspen stand surveys. At Fish Lake, we surveyed beaver dams and studied their role in restoring watersheds damaged by cattle-grazing and beaver-trapping.
September 27th ~ We stopped at the Lectrolux Café (one of two stores) in Baker NV, population approx. 25, to speak with Terry Marasco. Terry brewed coffee and tea with artistry, served us rich chocolate cake for Eric’s 21st, and taught us a thing or two about water exploitation in the arid west. Terry and the county are fighting to prevent the development of a water pipeline that would extract 90,000 acre-feet of “fossil water,” or deep stores of ground-water, from an aquifer underneath Spring Valley. The water would be pulled from the rural west for the growth of neon Las Vegas.
September 28th ~ Jackpot NV. Met the fabled John Marvel, who spites the fences that trace desert fields and dreams of the day when cattle and their ranchers will disappear from the American West. He is a one-man army bellowing his way through ranchlands, hated by cattlemen and praised by academic circles for water rights. I don’t know what to think of him.
September 30th ~ Lava Lake Ranch near Craters of the Moon, ID. Lava Lake Ranch started in 1999, when Bryan and Kathleen moved in from San Francisco, bought the land of 5 old ranches, and started up a sheep-herding operation. They work with conservationists and field biologists who are searching for the sweet spot where livestock-raising meets land health and conservation.
The history of sheep-herding is colorful; first came the Irish, raising their wooly herds. The Irish were gradually replaced by the Basque, who left cursive carvings of names, dates, and women in the aspen bark. Today, the majority of sheep-herders are from Peru on work visas.
October 5th – 8th ~ Rafting down the Colorado River, from CO to UT. We were in the middle of the craziest storms. Our first night camped on the river, the tents started going airborne, and one of the paddle boats flipped over four rafts before landing in the water again. Lightning was cracking on the edges of the canyons above our heads. I understood why Wind can be such a forceful figure or personality in mythology, carrying messages or power or forewarning. On our last day on the water, we dug tamarisk trees, an invasive species, out of the sand banks with a National Parks Service crew.
October 9th – 12th ~ Journalism and podcasting workshop with Michelle Nijhuis. Driving into Paonia, Colorado, we passed farmers markets with crates of apples and pumpkins and jugs of cider. Much apple crisp was consumed. We stayed on Michelle’s property, where she and her husband, Jack, (and little girl Sylvia) have built several straw-bale houses with Jack’s students in sustainability classes. Jack and Michelle are both free-lance journalists, or “a kind of professional amateur” Michelle liked to say. We got to play with a few different articles, discuss journalism hurdles and tactics. We listened to some radio clips and started rough pod-casting projects. Met with High Country News, the non-profit journal of the American West, that focuses on public lands, tribal issues, environmental policy, water. There were garden cherry tomatoes sitting out on the table, beside books on water rights and a home-made altar to the West made from scrabble letters, glitter, and plastic cowboys and Indians.
October 13th – 15th ~ Slept in cabins in Eastern Colorado! We stayed at one of the Westies’ family cow camp outside of Aspen, CO. It was frosty and crisp in the morning and evening, and the cabins are nestled in golden aspen and snow-dusted mountains. We met with a few different speakers on renewable energy solutions (solar and hydroelectric). But more importantly, we explored downtown Aspen and spent a night dancing to a bluegrass band at the “Belly Up.” I spent an indulgent afternoon in a bookstore curled up with a mountain of fresh books and a mug of tea. Aspen is absurdly affluent; as Kate put it, it’s a white-pants and cardigan town. Most of the houses on the hill are owner’s third homes, larger than most highschools. Some homeowners will turn on all their lights at night before flying out of Aspen so they can see their houses glowing from thousands of feet up.
October 16th – 19th ~ Writing (hiking) workshop with Craig Childs in Canyonlands Utah, outside of Moab. Perhaps our most poetic experience yet. Every morning we rose at 6:45 am and gathered silently on the sandstone. Craig played the flute while we watched the sun rise over the La Salles mountains. The colors before sunrise are beyond a human palette. For all the poetry and pigment that we create, I don’t think we would ever have the capacity to bottle or pen or play the color and light just before dawn.
During the day, Craig led us up and down and through the canyons he loves, climbing and exploring and writing in spurts. One day he let us loose into a stretch of redrock, and I found an alcove above the canyons where I napped and wrote. That day it rained, transforming the desert smell and dampening the color of sand and juniper. The raindrops and raven calls were the only sounds for miles.
October 20th ~ Near Bluff, Utah, with Jo Pachak. I’m still in complete awe of this day, and haven’t yet unearthed the tools in my mind with which to understand the stretch of human history we observed. Jo took us on a hike into Navajo sites thousands of years old. We walked through dwellings and kivas in alcoves that have stood for at least two-thousand years. You could still see the handprints of families painted on the cave walls in ochre, yellow, sienna, black. Some had traced spirals into the palms. The mud pressed around the stones in the walls were dimpled with hand- and finger-prints, even children’s feet. The dry washes we walked through were filled with chipped stones and ceramic pot shards. We visited a panel of rock art filled with human figures with three-fingered bird hands, people traveling with crook-necked staffs, deer and pronghorn, infants carried on backs, yucca plants, snakes. Reverence. Wonder. Bafflement.
The mesas across the valley rolled out like gingerbread dough, thick, cracking along the edges of the flattened pancakes of flour, butter, egg, sugar, molasses. Someone baked the giant raw sheets, not having the patience to cut out walls and roofs and bite-size men and women. Then they left the mesas to cool and forgot them on the desert floor, they go stale and crumbs slide down cliff-faces to make a sweet skirt of red and white boulders.
Mounds of sandstone slide across the valley floor, spilt piles of wheat flour that clump and crack in the rain. The lumps of stone wear down smoothly into the fine grains of flour if you rub them against each other. Lobes of sandstone calve off into loaves of bread. Human roads are highlighted in the distance where the wear of wheels scrapes off the layer of green mold: juniper, sagebrush, ephedra and buffalo berry growing slowly on the surface. ]]
Gracious, I’ve written too much. I apologize for the deluge of words, but plan on sending this anyway.
Been writing a lot of lists lately, I’ll end with this in hopes for a shower and laundry.
Thinks that Give a Clean Feeling:
Brushing my teeth after breakfast
Smell of wet the morning after rain
Vegetable broth
Clair de Lune
First morning light
Lemon zest
Simple haiku lines
Folding mint leaves in my fingers
The deep breaths after crying to the stars
I miss you all loads and hope you’re having a wonderful autumn!
Very much love,
madelyn
Semester in the West #3, 10/5/2010
10.5.2010
At a coffee-shop in Santa Fe, I met a man named André who had lived there for the past four years, after living a while in Seattle WA. He worked behind the counter and chatted animatedly while his co-worker steamed milk. He grew up in Brazil, and had lived in 4 states and 4 South-American countries by the age of 18. He called New Mexico “the land of entrapment,” and I think it perhaps is. New Mexico is enchanting; it feels like another country. I’ve felt pulled to the old Spanish towns and Northern valleys here more strongly than any other place we’ve visited on this trip.
We spent four days in El Valle de San Miguel in Northern NM, about 7500 ft up, with William deBuys for a welcome stint of writing, hiking, and farming. Where we were camped we could see the snowcaps growing on the mountains around us, and a quick hike offered a view of the small adobe town of Las Trampas below. Seeing the area through Bill’s eyes was beautiful. On one hike, he paused to explain the poor health of the forest we were in – a history of fire suppression, drought, clear-cuts and the like. “This forest, screwed up as it is, is dear to me,” he smiled. “Loving the thing that is imperfect is a challenge to us all,” but, to him, is a necessary and fulfilling endeavor. He spoke of more than his love of the forest, “how we love imperfection in others, nature, in ourselves…” I am so grateful for the time spent in his, and his forest’s, presence.
We walked from Bill deBuy’s place to his neighbor’s through the Piñon pine and juniper, Teague and his fellow farmers at Gemini Farm. Around their small adobe house were salvaged Amish farm tools, home-made bee-boxes, a thrown-together skid sled with runners made of old skis. Tattered flannels dried beside the yurt they built two years ago, a pile of garlic bulbs and straw smoldered in front of their root cellar. Soft smells announced baby chicks hidden in hay-bales. The thrown-together, live-simple, bare-dirt look and their unkempt beards reminded me of Arctic Organics, felt surprisingly like home. Teague, Mike, Annaleise, and Brett wore tattered Carhartts, layers of worn wool, fading bright scarves, and drank tea from mason jars. They make their own cheese from their goats’ milk, bake sourdough, make sauerkraut and wine and apple-mead. They employ an old washing machine to dry lettuce. They use mules instead of tractor-power.
Teague was a funny character. As Bailey put it, she’d never met a non-Amish person who was so excited about being Amish. His mother is from Poland, his father from the UK, and his voice adopts some mix between Polish, English, Spanish, and a farmer’s drawl. He used to fly at least once a year to Poland to see family, but hasn’t stepped foot in an airport in 8 years. His life is deliberately simple. Walking through the parsley, he turned to us, “There’s somethin’ to be said for pickin’ up a handful of earth and smellin’ the sweetness, smellin’ the life in it.” He spoke of the land as “a gift from our foremothers,” which we are all entitled to work and harvest, but not to own. Beside his spiritual farmer language, he pulled out words like “bro” and wore bright scarves with flair.
We spent the day digging up carrots and Jerusalem artichokes (also “Sunchokes,” or “Fartichokes”), the only harvested tuber that is native to North America. They’re four times more productive than potatoes, and taste like potatoes crossed with jicama and turnips. I was glowing in the smell of carrots and the feel of soil, dirt-stained fingers and heart-breakingly rich sunset.
In Las Trampas we visited the old church of San José de Garcia, built by the Spanish in the mid-1700s. The restored adobe walls were soaked with honey evening light. The floor-boards were worn and thick and smelled like human history, if old wood can give that smell. Hundreds of old graves lay under the church floor and the city streets. In the church’s entrance, simple designs are signed onto the ceiling from the original twelve families. On the altar wall, the painted beasts and saints have full, red lips and calm eyes. In a painting of “Nuestra Señora del Carmen” on the right wall, bare women with placid faces are bathed in flames like chili peppers. They reach their arms languidly upward towards a virgin Mary, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, or cross them to cover their chests. The virgin looks over the pews with indifference.
New Mexico is mostly Hispanic and Indigenous. A figure I heard gave that only 20% are Anglo in Northern NM. New Mexicans seem to identify strongly with their histories, whether native or Spanish, with a deeper understanding of ancestry than I’m accustomed to in the US. We visited a pueblo near Taos that didn’t allow running water or electricity. Phil (our program director) said these pueblos remind him of rural villages in China. There’s an old church and a small creek in the center of the town, and the homes and shops are modest one-to-two story adobe (clay-mud and straw/grass). The doors are teal-blue and the paint peels, and carmine strands of chilies hang from doorways. Scrappy but sweet street dogs move in small packs through the dirt paths.
Last night we camped in a strange, flat site outside of Roswell, NM. Just west of us was an old military base that closed down in 1991. It housed Nike missiles and other weaponry in bunkers as a defense against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The fences around it, now broken, still stand, and you can walk into the old bunkers. All around our site were oil wells, and they make an arythmic, constant beating sound, like amplified heartbeats or drums. In the afternoon, gunshots joined the oil-well’s dipping, target-shooting by the bunkers. During the day, we counted Harvester Ant mounds in the Chihuahuan Desert, and saw the craziest creatures! Jack-rabbit, baby Diamond-back rattlesnake, a tarantula, black grasshoppers with red wings, a grasshopper larger than my palm! So much life! And today, I found two praying mantises! I’m perplexed and enchanted by the intricate insect life and the busyness of this desert.
As for today, we’re camped beside a swimming-hole! Life, then, couldn’t be more splendid. We’re in the middle of our final ecology unit, and tomorrow will bring a long day of hiking and exploring near the Carlsbad Caverns.
For now, bedtime.
Wishing you fun and sending lots of love from this wacky desert,
madelyn
Semester in the West #2, 9/18/2010
(Digest or disregard as it pleases you)
9.18.2010
Hi there!
Today we are driving from the Owen’s Valley in California, where we spent the past week, to Escalante, Utah. This morning we left the lap of Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower-48 at 14,494 ft above sea level, and at 9:30 am we were playing in the sand dunes in Death Valley, the lowest point in the US somewhere around -282 ft. We were running below the sea! As we drive on through the hills of billions of shades of brown, I like to imagine the valley filled with water. Big blue whales float towards the Sierra Mountains, coyote-sized crabs scuttle around sagebrush.
The changes in altitude have been squishing my head in funny ways, and I marvel at the physical affects of altitude. Paul Hoornbeck, a visitor who guided our writing unit this past week, encouraged us to embrace hypoxia and dehydration as inspiration for our “epiphanies,” the end-products of this week’s writing. I think, in some cases, it’s been working. Near the beginning of the week, we drove up to 10,000 ft to visit the Bristlecone pines, the oldest trees, yet another superlative in this dynamic landscape. A bristlecone will grow for thousands of years, letting segments of its body die away in order to survive. Their wood twists in intimate, animated curves.
Most of our writing was done just outside of Lone Pine, CA in the Owens Valley. The Owens Valley is a tangled region with a historical identity crisis. The mountains on the East of the valley were once peppered with silver mines. The hills were so rich and the mines so penetrating that the tents of the mining camps were fashioned with silver grommits. However, the Eastern side was too arid to supply lumber, so the mining camps logged the Sierra Mountains on the valley’s West. They diverted creeks into a flume to transport lumber into the valley floor before powering them up the other side of the valley. Those living in the camps introduced bass, blue-gill, and bullfrogs into the remaining creeks for their food supply and recreation, which quickly ate or out-competed the native pupfish and chew-chub.
The Owen’s Lake is a terminal lake that once covered 110 square miles in a naturally alkali water. Historically, the lake has been a briny hub for hundreds of migratory bird species. “Phalaropes” are a funky fuzzy little bird. The female is the colorful, flamboyant sex of the species, and she courts the drab male, who incubates the eggs while the female continues traveling. The phalaropes arrive here from the Andean salt lakes in Bolivia, weighing one ounce, and feast on the brine shrimp that thrive in Owens and Mono Lake) and double their bodyweight before continuing another 3,000 miles to Canada to nest. The Baird’s Sandpiper’s path stretches even farther, from the Arctic Circle in Northern Alaska to Patagonia in Tierra del Fuego. The world’s smallest sandpipers, Lee’s Sandpipers, pause here after their nesting season in the Copper River Delta, AK. When we visited the lake’s diminished shoreline, a few of the juveniles hopped near our feet. Today, each bird that feeds here is an environmental victory in flight. In the 1920’s, all the ponds and tributaries that contributed to Owens and Mono Lakes were diverted into the Los Angeles aqueduct, which flows from Mono Lake to LA. The aqueduct sucked Owens bone-dry, and silty sediment at the floor the once-lake was let loose to the air. From 2001-2004, 78% of the dust events of the US occurred in this valley. Owens earned a new superlative as the largest source of air pollution in the US. The air quality eventually caught the attention of the EPA, and under the Clean Air Act, Los Angeles was required to restore the lake. They’ve been piping in water from the aqueduct and mixing it with a salty solution pulled from deep under the lake floor to rehydrate the valley. Currently, 18 square miles of the lake is actually wet and viable habitat for brine shrimp and feathered visitors. Progress here is arduous and slow, and socially inflammatory. Mike Prather, the conservationist we spoke with, is a calm, friendly man who taught biology in Lone Pine for decade. But because of his position as a conservationist, his desire to recover habitat, people will walk to the other side of the street to avoid him on the side-walk, “give him the stink-eye,” as he put it.
Beyond the current environmental identity of Owens Valley, it’s also the home of Manzanar. Manzanar was once a fruit orchard, an apple oasis in the middle of the desert, but it fell in disrepair from poor water management. During WWII, it became a war relocation center to imprison Japanese and Japanese-Americans living near the West coast. 120,000 people were stripped from their homes and funneled into the artificial town of Manzanar. We toured what was left of the camp, and Dana and I found some of the remaining fruit trees behind the school house. We tried to pick the pears – they were coarse, bitter, unripe. They left a film in our mouths.
In other news, I am learning to fall in love with this place. We have been surrounded by beautiful, bulging granite boulders that beg to be climbed on. I drink in the sunrises and sunsets, thirsty for color in the desert palette. Never have I ever been so spoiled with such beautiful views as I pee.
This upcoming week is our next unit in ecology, studying aspen with Mary O’Brien. I can hardly wait to play in Utah red rocks. Looks like we’ll have a full moon while we’re here, too!
I’ll stop rambling now and let you on your way,
Much love! Have fun!
Madelyn
Semester in the West #1, 8/29/2010
[These entries of Semester in the West - SITW - are from fall 2010 and preclude my wandering south into desert/border country. They cover some environmental issues through the arid American West (WA, OR, CO, UT, NM, AZ, CA, NV) and follow a steep learning curve of loving dry land.]
Good MOOrning all!
Good MOOrning all!
It's a chilly morning here in Hell's Gate Canyon! I'm all bundled up in long johns and down and rain gear and boots. The soil here is soft and almost clay-like from the rain, and riddled with fist- to melon-sized chipped rocks. The shrubby ground-cover smells a bit to me like a mix of grapefruit zest and sage, and the beige canyon slope below us is shadowed and outlined by tall, bushy spruce trees. The mountains farther out, shaded blue, are tipped a powdered-sugar dusting.
Yesterday was the first official day of Semester in the West after a few days of orientation at the Johnson Wilderness Center in Walla Walla, WA. After much packing and bundling and a mild overload of information, we hit the road yesterday and drove out here in our 3 suburbans and the trailer. Phil, the program director, suggested we can almost see Idaho to the East from this vantage point in Oregon. We arrived in camp a bit late and set up tents in the rain (in the 30s last night), which was all the more fun in a frigid sort of way as we giggled through the cold. This morning, we can see robin's-egg-blue skies lifting in from the West over the Wallowa Mtns, and are quietly hopeful for swimming-hole weather.
In a few minutes we'll all gather together for our first real discussion on "THE WEST." We've been gifted some beautiful readings on the history and environmental culture of the West and what it means to live in and love a place. I am daunted, but entirely and almost excessively excited to dig into our discussions and our texts. I feel like there is some great thundercloud of "Issues in the West" looming behind my shoulder, and I'm waiting for it to pour. I'm a little anxious to spend a semester in desert country; I don't think I've ever been in such an arid climate. But I hope to approach each landscape and each person we meet with humility and reverence. I hope to learn from the desert to listen.
SITW is a funny program in that it's similar to a study-abroad program, yet it's very close to home. Yesterday, on the drive, I was read from "A Sense of Place" by Wallace Stegner,
"Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it."
I think one of the objectives of this semester is to introduce us to the beauty and complexities of the local world we live in, to discover awe and respect for the land and people of the American West. Or, I spose I hope that's what we're shooting for.
Anyways, my fingers are starting to protest my typing. I love you all very much, and hope to hear of your adventures this semester! I'll do my best to keep you posted as we go. Communication this semester will be mainly by email, some phone, and we have 3 mail pickups over the course of the semester (our first pick up is Sep 15, I'd happily send you the address). I hope the (real or metaphorical) sun is shining in your pockets of the world this morning!
With much joy and loads of love,
madelyn
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)