Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

The rim road in the Guadalupe Mountains
August 20, 2003

During the snow and ice storm on February 18th, I warmed myself with the memory of one evening in late July last year. I had to go to California to look after a new grandbaby, and needed to produce three stories to be published while I was gone, so I got out my notes from a trip last summer. On that July day, I had driven the “Rim Road” southwest of Queen, New Mexico. It had been five years since I had been there. Since high school it has been my “special place,” where I go when I need time to sit and think and make decisions. I stopped at Buck Vista about two hours before sunset. Forty yards off of the road, a buck mule deer watched my truck as it rolled to a stop. I rolled the window down to enjoy the Guadalupe Mountains air at elevation 6500’. The buck gazed at me, flopping one big ear as a swarm of gnats hovered over him and the Gregg’s ceanothus below his chin.

All of the surrounding alligator junipers, pinyons, and sandpaper oaks were perfectly still. I could not ever remember another windless day on the rim. In every direction thunderheads were swelling, so the windless atmosphere was doubly peculiar. The buck lowered his head after a few minutes and gently gummed the ceanothus. A gnat must have lit on his nose, for he snorted and jerked his head. In hunting season he would have left the scene at the first crunch of my truck’s tires on the gravel road. Many Lincoln National Forest hunters are roadhunters – a pitiably lazy way to fill a tag. The Guadalupe range is the large public hunting area closest to west Texas.

Two dragonfly tenerals (sexual immatures that hunt away from water) swooped into the swarm of gnats and the swarm drifted towards me, riding the gentlest breeze that began a quivering in the new growth of the junipers next to me. The gnats lit on my windshield and drifted through the open window, where a dozen lined up on the sill. Two lit on my arm, and along with the breeze, tickled the hair. The buck blinked as I jerked my arm. To his west the ground fell away for a thousand feet, a series of stair-stepping cliffs down to Dog Canyon. Beyond him, the twin peaks of the Cornudas sixty miles away seemed only twenty miles away.

Feathergrass, a popular xeriscape plant on the Llano Estacado, formed a perfect edging along the road. The breeze stopped again, so their tawny panicles did not dance and sway as is their normal way. Fifteen miles south, a thunderhead over the highest peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains loosened a slender drapery of what meteorologists call virga – rain that never reaches the ground. Almost immediately the thunderhead began to collapse, and what had been glorious cloud sculptures began fading to haze.

When I need to quiet my worries and ease my stresses, the immersion into the daily activities of the animal owners of the world absorbs my attention. The simple necessities of their existence, such as the procurement of enough food to fill their belly for another night, remind me of the blessings of life in modern America. A bird, all black, with red eye gleaming, and crest raised wiggling in alert wariness, swooped past me from a nearby pinyon. Phainopeplas are a magical species for me. When I see them, I know I am in the Sierra Madrean oak and evergreen mixed forest of the foothills and lower elevations of the sky-island mountain ranges of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Their culinary specialty is the sticky berries of mistletoe, but most of the year they flycatch.

Another flycatcher, a Cassin’s Kingbird with yellow belly and gray back swooped up from the slope below and hovered awkwardly above the hood of the truck, his beak snapping audibly. The Phainopepla fussed at him with a sweet syrupy beep. I lowered my head to make notes of the actions of the birds, and as I watched my pen spill words, the buck took advantage of my inattention. He somehow silently disappeared. How can such a big animal maneuver so silently and sure-footedly on the gravelly slope – did he use soft clumps of feather grass to achieve such stealth?

A rock wren popped up from below to bounce and bow in a lively dance along the edge of the gravel road. He buzzed a quiet trill before jamming his bill into a tiny seedling juniper below my window. Juvenile junipers have stiff pointed needles, not the soft green fronds of adult growth. I itch if I touch the bright blue needles, but the wren did not even blink as he pulled out a moth that must have just emerged from his diurnal refuge. The wren whacked the moth on the largest chunk of gravel near him, then tossed it twice before grabbing it headfirst to gulp it down. Sunlight blinked a reflective flash from my glasses, for the wren beeped loudly and dove down the slope and out of sight.

A steady breeze from the east cooled the air. Another small thunderhead slid over the Brokeoff Mountains west of the Guadalupes. The first vehicle in the two hours that I had been sitting there cruised by, a young family waving and smiling happily as we shared the cool of the mountain evening. I had driven four hours for the delightful experience, while a magnetic sign on their truck informed me they lived in Carlsbad.

The sun became an orange orb through yet another collapsing thunderstorm over the southern end of the Sacramento Mountains south of Cloudcroft. I could see the Sierra Obscura to the west of the Carrizozo lava fields. The far-reaching vista is the reason I love the Rim Road. As the sun sets, the vista expands. Further south, the Organ Mountains east of Las Cruces became backlit as well. The twin Cornudas Peaks seemed only a few miles away, and on their north slope I could see the Franklin Mountains above El Paso pimpling the skyline. Sierra Blanca, near Ruidoso, materialized out of the haze turning from blue to pink, over the furthest northern reaches of the Guadalupes in the direction of Weed and Mayhill.

A strong breeze began making the trees dance. My little truck quivered in the strongest gusts. A boy and girl in a Crown Victoria zipped by, their dust plume drifting over my Toyota. The twisted spires of old sotol stalks bucked in the wind. The only bird in sight was a scrub jay facing the sunset, his blue more turquoise than the shiny blue of western bluebirds I had seen in Robinson Draw on my way to the rim.

I enjoyed the imagined image of three vehicles, parked at three different vistas along several miles of the rim road, a loose gathering of human souls seeking the glorious view. I drank in the rich piney smell of the breeze, feeling it open the alveoli of my lungs. Orange searchlight beams of the sun limned the edges of clouds far to the west, cascading into the purple ridges of the mountains. The sunlight found a larger opening, and a fifty-mile swath of the vista filled with an intense glow as the orb of the sun reappeared for a few brief minutes before sliding beyond the horizon. The scrub jay dropped into his pinyon to sit close to the trunk, his eyes closing after giving a tremulous cry – a prayer to make it to the sunrise. I slowly drove away, unknowingly headed to an encounter with four rattlesnakes.