The Dry Spell by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Chapter 6
July 7, 2005; Slippin’ and a slidin’, sneaking’ and a hidin’, turd river, threats of incarceration, victorious freedom under the red, white and blue.
The fear of fire overwhelmed Corrales just prior to the July Fourth weekend. Indeed, it had been very dry, but so had it been every other summer. Doesn’t anybody remember that this is a desert? Duh. Anyway, the intrepid brigade of local officials concerned about my safety; “Thank you so much.”, closed the Bosque for the first time in my experience and someone wrapped yellow police ribbons and posted a sign on the metal gate at the end of Romero Road, stating that “Violators of the dictate will be subject to a fine of $500 and/or 90 days in jail.” To make matters more curious and annoying it had been drizzling the last two days.
Daisy and I decided that we were unable to read English and that if stopped I would say that “I thought the ribbons were a juvenile attempt at humor. It’s been raining!” I have no idea if it would have worked, but it was the best shot I could think of. We had an advantage in those days. We would leave early, sometimes before sunrise, before the audience woke up, or at least before they could gaze out of their floor to ceiling surveillance equipment.
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So, it worked fine for a few days, as I quickly led Daisy through the open area, to where we would be better hidden from the levee path by trees in full bloom. When we get to the King Cottonwood, I start to relax, as its branches provided invisibility. I decide to hold Daisy there and take a good look at my temporary protector. His trunk is massive, covered by perfect gray bark and the black lines drawn make islands and streams of the gray. The three inch shiny green leaves weigh down the younger of the lower branches, so they end at my head level and I have to be careful walking there. I stood still as long as Daisy would allow and quite frankly, the thickness of the branches and trees precluded me from the ability to analyze, or even see any more of him above 10 feet. I’d have to be content to observe from a distance, losing all hope for precision, at best settling for an impressionistic study.
For now the only other things I can see are the two rope swings someone attached to the lowest large limbs. The yellow ropes support a small seat and people use them to swing into the water, far enough from shore, to reach at least three foot deep water. I wondered if that hurt. I’ve seen branches eventually broken by this practice on other cottonwoods. For some reason I think you’d be willing to tolerate some pain, if as a consequence, your friends had a good time. I said; “Was it okay with
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you?” In the cloudy still morning I couldn’t even hear a leaf rustle.
I decide to continue the journey, so I stop holding back Daisy and allow her to pull me further on. When we get another 150 feet under the protection of dense smaller trees, I again stop a disgruntled girl who looks at me as if to say; “What now?” I hold up my right index finger, which she knows means something like; “Bear with me a minute.” I look back hoping for a more thorough examination, but now I’m too far away to pick up any nuance and all I can see is by far the largest cottonwood expressing its irregularity by displaying an enormous crown. I don’t have any scientific measuring devices with me and probably don’t know of any capable of making the type of measurement I want. I would say that the top quarter of him contained more mass than the lower three quarters. As a result the majority of him has an unobstructed view of everything. I don’t know of any other land based products of nature capable of claiming that. I guess birds might be an almost answer, as they technically have the ability to remain on the ground and sometimes do, but prefer the sky and tree branches. I can’t notice anything at the moment, but wouldn’t it be logical that the birds would prefer to make a home in his top. They’d have the best of both worlds; while at rest they could retain their view of the sky. They must have energy retaining considerations. Just lay back and
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enjoy the beauty that comes your way. I realize that I’m getting so serious that I’m probably making my leafed friend uncomfortable attested to by the continued silence. I call out;
“Hey, is your big head looking out for semi-human intruders?”
The answer that pops into my mind is; “I don’t desire to just look.”
Daisy’s patience level is being tested and as I’ve already noted, I’m not getting any particular insight by looking back.
It’s hard enough to see clearly from this distance, so again I let my black and white furry little girl lead the way. We can either cut through the soft six foot tall green reeds and go to the river, or remain on the inland sand which has a small amount of bushy vegetation, more brittle and capable of inflicting injury, but nonetheless, it’s an easy walk, without any obstacles on the ground. The injuries most likely to be received, if any, are really pretty minor scratches and are unintentional on the part of the bushes, anyway. The only worry is the minor chance of getting a stick in the eye at full speed.
Daisy decides to take the sandy route, probably sensing coyotes, who seasonally reside in the area. She thinks they want to play with her and sometimes they do, but that’s another story. She sniffs around and has picked up something, but no coyote playmates are in sight, so I follow her from bush to brittle bush, trying to keep abreast of her circular pattern.
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She digs a little bit at the base of one of them, making me consider the possibility of a rabbit, or worse, a dead one. She has always been fascinated by the scent of death, apparently equating it to a lunch call. No early lunch was delivered, as she resumes her search, frantically looking for something I can only guess at. She is moving closer to the levee and as we leave the sandy ground we enter a mature forest of cottonwoods, beautiful, but containing areas open to the observation of anyone so inclined. Damn! It’s Nora with her two dogs on the levee path, wearing her customary skin tight blue jeans and a simple white button up blouse, topped by an orange fishnet light covering. I haven’t met her yet and have two thoughts; isn’t she old enough to have realized that fishnets, if any, belong on the lower half of a woman’s body, even in garish bright orange?
and that this is a signal of some kind of officialdom and I hope she doesn’t use her cell phone to inform the police that an unauthorized trespasser is creeping around in the moist bottom land on fire prevention day. I see her for a few brief seconds, but she keeps her eyes straight ahead, very obviously choosing not to notice us. Maybe she’s waiting until she gets to a spot not visible to me to make the call. In the future she would tell me that she did see us on a few occasions, but chose not to say anything about it. When I asked her why the procedure, her eyes would flutter and she would shake her head almost
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imperceptibly, as if to say; “Stupid question.” I obviously didn’t feel like it.” The danger past, I let Daisy continue her search in the light woods, until she decides that all of her efforts have been in vain and leads me home where she knows lunch is waiting.
The next day we had the same itinerary, getting to the Bosque early enough to not have a visible welcoming committee and go straight down the path to river’s edge, as has become customary, this spot becoming one of Daisy’s preferred swimming and drinking spots. But today she balks at jumping in because the river is high, moving fast and most importantly is brown with wall to wall turds. Her look says; “What the hell happened? I can’t go in there.” We both stand still and stare at the giant toilet flush and watch its strength start to break up some of the old islands. This put a damper on her desire to walk and investigate, as she lost her water source. We poked around a bit, but went back home, possibly unnoticed. In the coming week I told a number of people what we had seen, but was looked at askance, possibly due to a perplexing lack of local credibility and possibly because things like that don’t ever get mentioned in the paradise known as Corrales. How gauche.
A few weeks later, the obviously out of step “Corrales Comment” reported the incident, with attendant-color pictures taken by another trespasser with a cell phone camera. Rio
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Rancho then admitted that its waste treatment plant had another of its “accidents” and apologized in their well-practiced manner.
Of course we again returned the following morning and though the river was now as absent of floating feces as it has ever been, Daisy decided to let a few months pass before again venturing into yesterday’s streaming cesspool. We had a bigger problem. After completing our short walk we walked up the mildly graded levee at Romero Road and when my eyes got over the hump I saw a Police Car resting in the parking area. I said;
“Uh oh,” which Daisy understands very well to mean trouble and she followed me quickly back down the slope and we scooted to the giant cottonwood and stopped, at least me being out of breath. We were no longer visible from the levee and my mind momentarily considered the great one’s predicament, stuck there right next to foul water. The river level was lower today and I hoped that yesterday’s high tide didn’t have the audacity to pay a visit to the big beauty, trying to ignore the wet ground surrounding his base. I got some of my breath back and we slid through the mud a few hundred feet and then turned toward the levee. We climbed and went down a steep spot, hoping that no one was in the vicinity. We didn’t see any and that may have been the case, so we crossed the “clear ditch,” went through twenty feet of brush and met the ditch path that was legally
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walkable, the excruciating sun of the day completely drying me, by the time we got back to Romero and the patiently waiting cop.
He remained in his car and seemed not to even look our way, so we just kept walking, fully confident of our law abiding current status.
I’m paranoid about being considered paranoid, but as there was no apparent danger present, my mind wandered to what might have been a possible reason for the last few days’ events. Why close the Bosque when we were the beneficiaries of a light drizzle? Because, the powers that be didn’t want anybody to see something? Was that something the conversion of the Rio Grande River to a temporary sludge farm? Did Nora alert the police about Daisy and me surreptitiously? Why else would they be waiting for our exit the following day? As Nora always carries a camera, why couldn’t she, with full view of the river get a picture of the brown event? Did her orange fishnet covering confirm her status of one in on the “official” take?
Not to worry. It’s now July tenth and the garden spot of Corrales is again legally open to the public. I’m relieved and very relaxed bringing Daisy to our favorite hangout, the hot dryness of the last few days doing its work on the muddy dirt path by the river and I no longer have to slide through. I say I, because Daisy has no trouble going through mud, simply due to her having four legs. In coming years she would come to see my
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problems and give me a break when I would say; “Mud, mud. Very bad mud.” She probably doesn’t fully understand, but kindly regards it as a disability of my species, or of a clumsy me.
Today the sun is so strong that its color, viewable only in furtive glances, appears red and its demeanor punishing. The brightness is potent and manages to make the river appear completely blue and tranquil. The few friendly white cumulous clouds seem prepared to hide from the flaming orb imminently, but for the time being are intrepidly holding their ground.
Feeling so free, Daisy makes her customary stop at the river, looks at it, then looks at me shaking her head slightly, still not ready to take a swim. Instead of her usual southern predilection, she must feel adventurous today and turns left toward the north and the culprit Rio Rancho.
It takes all of a minute to engage the undesired but inevitable happening, when we hear a male voice call out; “I’ve seen you walking all over Corrales hundreds of times. Why do you take that roundabout route to get here?”
As I’m deaf in one ear and therefore can’t tell what direction a sound is coming from. I watch Daisy to see which way she looks. Following her eyes I see a guy I’ve never seen before. He looks fairly ordinary, about fifty, shaven, combed short black hair, black chinos and a light brown short sleeved shirt.
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I say; “We live near the river, but there’s no legal access there. Daisy is deathly afraid of the car, so we circle around the ditch paths to get here. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before, though.”
“I’ve been in the woods lots of times when you’ve been here, picking mushrooms that grow in the shade.” He pointed in the northern direction of the drain field and continued; “I live just a few houses west of the channel.”
I wondered why he had never made contact in the past, but chose to today. I told him that we often walk there and successfully tried to pinpoint which house, by determining that his was the one which backs up to the spot on the clear ditch where a single log traverses it.
The surreptitious mushroom man continued; “I saw some eagles today,” pointing toward the river.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen any, except a dead one out there,” pointing south toward Albuquerque. He seemed somewhat disturbed, so I added; “Every once in a while we find plenty of dead birds.”
“I think the Rio Rancho sewage treatment plant
‘accidentally’ emits their product into the river every night around 2 AM. If they get caught the fine is less than it would cost them to properly process it.”
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I surmised that this had something to do with dead birds, but didn’t know exactly what, so I was silent.
He animatedly said; “The next time you start finding a lot of dead birds, you come and tell me. You know where I live.”
“Okay.”
He started to walk somewhere, but turned and added; “I’m serious.”
Again I said; “Okay.”
He was soon out of sight and I pondered whether I had met yet another Bosque psychiatric case. I decided “Borderline, more information necessary.” He must be a secret member of the Gawk family, adept at hiding. Yet he seemed normal, at least by New Mexico standards, so far only displaying a predilection for conspiracy theories and an inordinate agitation over a few dead birds. In the near future we never encountered more than four or five fowl carcasses on any given day and I didn’t consider that to be anything more than a small coincidence, so I never visited his house. A few years later, I did meet a couple who had an interest in hallucinogenic mushrooms and told them about him. They were very interested in meeting him and coincidentally rented a house two doors away from where the mushroom man said he lived. They told me that they’ve been looking for him for months to no avail.
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Daisy and I continue her intended journey, passing through a generally wooded area, with the bulk of the wood dead, lying on the ground. There are many salt cedars near the water, which seem to be a magnet for cobwebs. Both of us have to stop regularly to get them off. We don’t have a lot of options in our route, as in some places the dead limbs are not passable on foot. Clusters of thorny Russian Olives effectively guard their own privacy. Construction garbage and pieces of barbed wire fencing round out the seen impediments. This has got to be the ugliest, most barriered part of the Bosque we have yet encountered. What are they hiding here? Daisy safely stays on the winding dirt path and after a mile or so, we come to an opening. In front of us is a twenty acre field with two foot shrubs, giving the impression that it is occasionally mowed.
There is no clear path through it, but there are tire tracks going from one side to the other. However, before we follow the tracks Daisy make a right to the river, where we find a lagoon of almost stagnant water, an almost undisturbed long peninsula on the side and a concrete pipe protruding from the elevated shoreline emitting warm water. We would later learn that this was the exit for Rio Rancho’s supposedly treated wastewater and a location favored by local fishermen, perhaps capitalizing on the groggy, lethargic marine animals. After a cursory inspection, Daisy backs out of the murky area and we follow the
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tire tracks across the flat dry field. We later find out that the field is periodically under water, either when too many in Rio Rancho flush at once or the controlled river is allowed to rise. What looks like a series of concrete handball courts to our left is actually the channel, which is said to divert water accumulated in the field. The first time it was needed during our travels, its job was stolen by five neighboring backyards, probably including the mushroom man’s, assuming any of what he told me had any credibility. I’m sorry. My jealousy is showing. Wouldn’t it be an improvement to be on a perpetual acid trip? Imagine the hilarity and absurdity. Infinite amusement at the human condition, especially my own. No wonder they’re looking for the mushroom man and he in turn, has to stay hidden to avoid the onslaught.
Unfortified, Daisy and I move into spaces unknown. There is little indication of human traffic. We have a number of choices available into and around the wooded section. Today she chooses to be as hidden as possible and she leads me down an overgrown dirt path in the center, replete with piles of broken logs we are able to painstakingly surmount. Visibility is so limited on the winding thin path, that I’m constantly afraid that something will plow into us, from the opposite direction.
In actuality the only people I would ever see was a group of twenty laughing very senior citizens amused that they might not
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be able to get all the way back to Romero Road. I think they found the mushroom man’s stash. After a mile or two the land opens up a bit and we find that if we duck under a group of salt cedars we can enter a “tunnel” created by pine evergreens, which sun never hits, leading to a beautiful clearing with well-spaced cottonwood trees growing out of the foot long grass land bordering the river. There was no evidence of human traffic, garbage, or many broken limbs. This would come to be my favorite area due to the beauty and Daisy’s favorite due to the abundance of small furry animals she hoped to eat. In a few years the area will be completely destroyed by the MRGCD, citing it as a fire hazard.
Good, good day. When Daisy and I get near Romero Road, I think I see someone I have not seen in ages; Rick, the lawyer who would much rather have been Rick the basketball player.
He’s got an anger problem, prompting him to have engaged a psychiatrist from time to time, stemming from the fact that he would like to kill his old high school coach, who changed his shot in his senior year, carrying the badge of a very successful basketball mind, having gone to the final game of the state championship each of the last three years, ignoring the other facts; that he just happened to have had the first player from New Mexico to make it to the NBA in those same years, as well as two others who went on to play division I college. The weight
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of his expert opinion coupled with Rick’s inability to transfer to another school, resulted in him acquiescing.
Rick is the best shooter I have ever seen and I’d include people I’ve only seen on television. He can stand on the pro three point line and make it as often as pros make free throws.
When we played one on one a few years ago, he would let me win 20% of the time, just to keep it somewhat interesting.
When we got to talking about shooting in general, he told me about the coach and I was incredulous at the time, prompting many questions. Rick currently shoots the jumper with both hands over his head as “Mr. Success” advised on the premise that it would be easier to get off than Rick’s former shot off the chest.
Partially because I’m not capable of blocking his shot anyway, after a while, when we played he started using the off the chest version again and in a matter of weeks could sink an uncontested NBA three point shot 90% of the time. I tried not to compliment him too much, because that served to remind him of the old coach, but it slipped in because I had never seen anything like this. Pure precision. He would hold the ball in his left hand over the middle of his chest and gently push it out with his right. The minimum of movement minimizes the things that can go wrong and you cannot get any more minimal than Rick.
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When Rick sees me with unmistakable Daisy, the only Dalmatian in Corrales, he stops staring at the river and with Rusty in tow, an Irish Setter, another unusual dog for the environs and walks toward me.
We laugh and do our Michael Jordan punch handshake both saying; “Hey, man” solemnly. Since he’s twenty some odd years younger than me, I ask; “Have you been playing any ball lately?”
“Hardly anything. I tapered off a lot after you quit.”
I felt very complemented and embarrassed and didn’t know what to say, so he added; “And I’m beginning to hate the damn game anyway.”
I thought back to some of the players we used to talk and laugh about recalling one 6’8” overweight black guy who was supposed to have played some college ball. If you could get him the ball down low, he’d just turn and jump right into the defender and if the guy didn’t get out of his way, he called
“foul”, so he’d either score or his team would get the ball back. I had forgotten his name, so I said; “Getting more guys like that chubby big black one who jumps right into you?”
“Worse than that. All the old farts try to show how good they were, in their now idealized memories and everybody goes one on one. If you pass the ball there’s no chance of getting it back.” Daisy was wildly sniffing Rusty, as we spoke and
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Rusty seemed somewhat surprised and reserved, but also liked the attention.
A lull took over as we slowly walked in the direction of the parking area. He said; “So what do you do with yourself all day now?”
“Walk Daisy, clean and fix the house and argue with my wife. Typical bourgeois, I guess. Pretty boring, right?”
This time Rick didn’t have any direct response and kept his head and eyes toward Rusty. Remembering that Rick once took a sojourn from his lawyering job, to make a private investigation of the pharmaceutical industry as a salesman, I said; “Are you working as a lawyer now?”
“Yeah, six days a week and church on Sunday.” As he got Rusty into his SUV, I said; “See ‘ya, man.” He said; “See ‘ya.”
As we parted, I remembered that I may not see him for some time, maybe never again, who knows? So I was again compelled to say what is honest truth to me. I said; “Hey Rick.” He looked up from his crouching ready to sit in the driver’s seat position and I said; “You were the best.”
He smiled; said “**** you” and drove off.
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