Sunday, February 26, 2012

Ditch Cottonwood


Weather: Some afternoon warmer than usual, some mornings much cooler, some afternoons windier; last precipitation 2/15/12; 11:12 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Biological crust, moss, mushroom.

Tansy mustard and black mustard are coming up, with the one appearing in dryer locations than the other. A few plants are blooming in front of a south facing dark lava stone wall near the village.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, sweet pea, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

Stems of hybrid roses getting greener as are leaves on native yuccas and Japanese honeysuckle.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; weeping and globe willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geranium, bud on pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: In Zia Summer, Rudolfo Anaya’s Albuquerque North Valley detective, Sonny Baca, wakes to the sound of a cottonwood being cut down, one that was more than a hundred year’s old and ten foot in diameter. It had simply died of old age.

“‘Trees get cancer, just like people,’ don Elisero said.”

That tree is the nostalgic image most have of the time before. Most assume that means the time before man when cottonwoods grew dense in the bosques along the Rio Grande


and acquired great girth.


By the time I moved here, the rivers were the wards of the Army Corps of Engineers. The trees growing by the Rio Grande were respectable, good sized trees that had come back from various water management projects, but not the behemoths described by Anaya.


To find those, I have to go to the village. There they grow above the beds of old or buried irrigation ditches. In the village itself, an open ditch stops or is buried before it reaches the church.


On the other side there’s a line of large cottonwoods.


On the orchard road, an open ditch that comes from our local acequia is still used, though it’s currently filled with the remains of late summer áñil de muerto, sunflowers and grass. It disappears when it reaches a crossroad, but you know the water hasn’t all been used, that the surplus has to find it’s way to the Rio Grande.


Toward the river, there’s a line of large cottonwoods.


The pattern repeats itself on the farm road behind the village. There, the ditch today is buried on the west side of the road, but you can tell it exists from the manicured field with the banked, burned edges and flattened bottom of irrigated land.


Here there’s a bit of an anomaly. The line of cottonwoods is on the upside of the road. However, behind those trees is one of the older houses in the area, and behind that our local acequia madre. I’m guessing, sometime in the past, there was a ditch there that’s since been filled when the land was subdivided and sold for small houses.


I rather suspect trees like the one Anaya eulogizes for shading “don Eliseo’s family for many generations” are more the product of the rural life that dug and maintained the ditches, than the turbulent rivers and restless bosques. Like Anaya’s, the ones around the village grew fat and old when they abandoned the chancy life of flood plains for the sure water of village ditches.

Unfortunately, like many old folks, the young regard them as nuisances. The utilities are constantly hacking their limbs. Drivers grow frustrated when they can’t see or have to take turns passing through a road they’ve narrowed. Some cut them down, but others with the spirit of Anaya find ways to accommodate them.


Notes: Anaya, Rudolfo. Zia Summer, 1995.

Photographs:
1. Cottonwood on farm road, 18 January 2012.

2. Cottonwood that fell in the spring of 2008; it took up a great deal of territory, but didn’t leave a very big hole in the ground; 3 May 2008.

3. San Juan bosque, 13 February 2012; the lower level of the woods is filled with shrubs including some sandbar willow.

4. Close up of central tree in above picture, 13 February 2012.

5. Bosque near Española, 23 February 2012; the trees are younger than San Juan and only grass and a few junipers are growing under the canopy.

6. Village road ditch bank lined with Siberian elms and trees of heaven, 19 January 2012.

7. Line of cottonwood downstream from the above ditch, 19 January 2012.


8. Orchard road ditch is the dark area near the fence filled with last year’s grasses, 23 February 2012.

9. Line of cottonwood downstream from the above ditch, 19 January 2012; Siberian elms have taken over the other side; this alley is so narrow, two pick-up trucks cannot pass and various protective posts and warning signs have been installed.

10. Irrigated field on farm road, 13 February 2012.

11. Line of cottonwoods up stream from the above ditch, 18 January 2012; the fallen tree was part of this line.

12. Fence on farm road built around a cottonwood, 17 January 2012.

13. Wall on farm road built around a cottonwood, 11 September 2010.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

River Willow


Weather: Dustings of night time snow early in the week, ending with thunder and lightening Tuesday; 11:12 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard, biological crust, moss.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, sweet pea, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters; tansy mustard germinating.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; weeping and globe willows.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Light slate blue bird in new sand in drive, usual small birds.

Weekly update: Even nice dogs spread madness. After their owners led me to the local acequia, my interest in sandbar willow and its cottonwood cousin was subsumed by my desire to find the source of the ditch.

First I found where the Santa Cruz river flowed through Española. While there are places where large cottonwoods still grow, desolation is more common.


In some places the destruction was probably deliberate, part of the effort to drain the malaria producing swamps in the 1930's. In other areas, it was probably the consequence of damming the river in the late 1920's, an act which reduced the cottonwood habitat and led to its clearance by people fearful of fire.


Still, closer to the river, willow and cottonwood have grown back, with the one closer to the water than the other.


The relationship between sandbar willow and cottonwood became clearer when I drove to a place upstream where the ditch was still following the badlands before it could cross the highway to get to the point where the dogs had led me.

Downhill from the highway, I found willow growing outside a section of concrete walled ditch that trapped draining water.


Although the rest of that section of ditch was generally bare of trees, there were scattered cottonwoods and a few junipers.


When I looked across the flat lands below this section of ditch I could see the course of the Santa Cruz river picked out by red willow. Behind it, on both sides, were the light grey forms of cottonwoods. Behind them, were the occasional junipers.


From there I went looking for the point where the ditch left the Santa Cruz river and came upon a control point on the river that tempers the flow during monsoon storms into Española and the Rio Grande. The ditch diverges just a bit downstream.


Last summer, water, trapped behind the concrete, washed away any vegetation. In January, there were remains of goldenrod, cockleburs and the usual pigweed.


Most important, there were willow saplings, bent but not broken. It would seem willow must be near water to survive, but cottonwood can grow a bit back so long as water is seeping into the soil. As a result, willows must be able to withstand the turbulence of a wild river, but cottonwoods can enjoy the luxury of settled banks.


Photographs: 1. Santa Cruz river in Española near the route 84/285 bridge, 20 January 2012.

2. Santa Cruz bosque behind businesses along route 84/285 in Española, 20 January 2012; the line of red sandbar willow marks the location of the river.

3. Farther back from the above businesses where cottonwoods and willow grow near the river, and Russian thistles and shrubs have colonized the cleared land, 20 January 2012.

4. Willow growing on the banks of the Santa Cruz river behind the businesses, 20 January 2012.

5. Willow growing along the ditch downhill from route 84/185, 3 February 2012.

6. Cottonwood growing along the same section of ditch, 3 February 2012.

7. Bosque from the ditch bank, 3 February 2012. The red willow marks the river, with cottonwoods and junipers behind. The white trailers in the far distance are in the village of Santa Cruz.

8. Willow growing at a control point on the Santa Cruz river near route 106, 27 January 2012.

9. Willow growing in the flood plain of the control point, 27 January 2012.

10. Cottonwood growing along the more tranquil section of the Santa Cruz above the control point, 27 January 2012.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Ditch Willow


Weather: Light snow Monday night, wind yesterday; 10:27 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard, biological crust, moss.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, sweet pea, alfilerillo growing, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

Large Russian thistles have either been cleared and burned or broken away. If they haven’t been destroyed, they’re caught against fences, salt bushes and other obstructions. Smaller plants, especially those ankle high, are still in place.

Many large pigweeds are still in place, along with a great many ankle high plants.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters; tansy mustard germinating.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; weeping and globe willows.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.

When I was taking pictures of the cholla, someone watching came over to see if I’d gotten a good picture of the red-tailed hawk on the utility pole behind the cacti, for that’s why he assumed I was standing on an eroding bank by the side of the road clinging to barbed wire for support.


Weekly update: You can blame it on the dogs. If it weren’t for them, I never would have begun tracking sandbar willows.

It began when I followed a man walking his dog back to a place I could park safely to explore the Rio Grande where it joins the Santa Cruz river. Then I saw some women park their car near some willow growing closer to my house. I followed them and their dogs, and all semblance of sanity was lost.

The willow was growing on the banks of the main irrigation ditch that supports the hay farmers between my house and the village. Suddenly I wanted the answer to a question that’s been nagging me for years, where was that ditch.


At the point I began, the acequia was wide, with dirt banks. Clumps of willow were dense, with occasional cottonwood and sections of brown bunch grass. When I started to follow ditch downstream, the willow clumps became more widely spaced, the cottonwoods more common. Here and there a one-seeded juniper grew, and in one place some Ponderosa pine.


Farther downstream, the ditch was encased in concrete. No more willow. The cottonwoods were more sporadic; four-winged saltbushes lined the ditch instead. Some cholla appeared, as did other species of trees, probably Siberian elms.


In the general area where the ditch changed from dirt to concrete, the ditch was moving back toward the Tertiary badlands. Prior to that point the badlands had been bunch grasses and juniper.


After that point, salt bushes appeared with the juniper and grasses.


The apron between the ditch and the road also changed. In one area that looks like someone once flattened the land with irrigation, there was a large patch of prickly pear cacti.


In another level area at the far end under the concrete ditch, there was that colony of cholla cacti shown above.

The open field was crossed by lines of cottonwoods. I’d already learned when I was looking for safe places to pull over, they were often headed by very large trees growing in open ditches just before the feeding ditches crossed under the road.


I’d noticed the trees were often opposite the oldest houses in that stretch of road. From the concrete ditch, I could see the mechanisms that distributed the waters. In most places, the actual ditches are buried.

The acequia travels in three guises: open dirt banks that seep water when the ditch is running, concrete lined banks that cab collect water on their uphill sides when it rains, and buried pipes that hold water above themselves. The differences in water to the surrounding soil may seem minuscule, but they are differences cottonwoods and willows and other plants detect and respond to.

Photographs:
1. Sandbar willow growing along the dirt banks of the local acequia, 15 January 2012.

2. Cholla growing down water from the concrete lined ditch whose location is marked by the trees and low golden brown plants, 7 February 2012; the red tailed hawk is on the top, right end of the utility pole; juniper and bunch grass are on the badlands behind.

3. Upstream from the above, grasses mix with willow, 20 January 2012.

4. Downstream, along the dirt banks, sandbar willow, cottonwood, and other herbaceous plants, 15 January 2012; ditch on left, wide area is bank.

5. Farther downstream, along the concrete lined banks, cottonwood and four-winged saltbushes dominate, 15 January 2012.


6. The badlands along the dirt section of the ditch with bunch grasses and one-seeded juniper, 15 January 2012.

7. The badlands along the concrete section of the ditch with salt bush, cholla and juniper, 15 January 2012.

8. Prickly pear growing downslope from the dirt section of the ditch, last fall when Russian thistle was finally growing after the drought was broken, 3 September 2011.

9. Row of cottonwoods marking the path of a distribution ditch from the main ditch at the left, 15 January 2011.

10. Distribution point in concrete lined ditch, 15 January 2012.

Sunday, February 05, 2012

Basket Dance Spruce


Weather: Snow Friday morning disappeared by late afternoon; snow Friday night gone in the morning; 10:15 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming: Black mustard, biological crust, moss.

What’s still green: Juniper and other evergreens; stems on hybrid roses and young chamisa; leaves on grape hyacinth, sweet pea, alfilerillo, gypsum phacelia, snakeweed, chrysanthemum, anthemis, strap leaf aster; cheat grass.

Leaf buds emerging or elongating on Bradford pear, Lapins cherry, peach, Siberian pea, forsythia. Unchanged on snowball and lilacs.

What’s red: Cholla; branches on Russian olive, tamarix, sandbar willow, apples, apricots, spirea, wild roses and raspberry; leaves on coral bells, pinks, soapworts.

What’s blue or gray: Piñon; leaves on four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, stickleaf, beardtongues, golden hairy and purple asters.

What’s yellow-green/yellow-brown: Arborvitae; branches on weeping willow more intensely yellow.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Small birds.


Weekly update: The Basket Dance is a part of local change of season rituals that has constant symbolic elements despite variations between Tewa speaking pueblos. Santa Clara performed it between summer and winter in October of 1912, San Ildefonso between winter and summer in March in the 1920's, and San Juan the first of January as part of the transfer of responsibility from the winter people to the summer ones.

Alfonso Ortiz suggests that because it’s associated with a change in seasons it’s one of three dances which requires new songs every year. The others are the Cloud Dance (also called the Squash Dance and the Thunder Dance) with which it alternates from year to year, and the Turtle Dance which precedes it and initiates the transition of power at San Juan the day after Christmas.

Perhaps because the music and texts are only used one time, the dances are considered safe to reveal to outsiders. There’s no drumming, only singing and percussion from gourd rattles carried by the dancers. It’s one of the choreographic elements that’s been extracted from its ritual context and presented outside the pueblos at public performances in places like Santa Fe since the 1920's.

The Basket Dance is also one that’s highly attractive to tourists because it involves both male and female dancers. The latter wear calf length, dark manta dresses, with white maiden shawls. Their legs are wrapped in buckskin stained white by clay.

In one hand they carry baskets, in the other sprigs of Douglas spruce that conceal wooden sticks. At one point, they kneel on blankets laid by clowns and use the baskets to pantomime grinding corn. Then, using the baskets as resonators, they rub wooden sticks against ones that have been notched.

Fertility symbols infuse the drama that describes and reconciles the mythic division of the world into hot and cold, winter and summer, male and female, spirit and human, water supplying and water needing spheres in which the success of summer irrigated crops and human existence is dependent on winter snows.

The baskets are not made from ditch fed willow, but are shallow ones used to carry corn offerings to the spirits. There are times when they may have been purchased from other tribes. While importunings for rain are implied in the wooden sticks that sound like thunder, the women are more strongly associated with water thirsty corn and the Corn Maidens.

Mary Austin was told one of the San Ildefonso songs from the 1920's identified the men with “the Rain Cloud callers” and the women with the “ancient mothers of the Rain Cloud clan.” The singers were asking that

     By the full-shaped womb,
     That the lightening and the thunder and the rain
     Shall come upon the earth,

and

     That the great rain clouds shall come upon the earth
     As the lover to the maid;

so that “their wombs bear fruit” and people have corn “to complete the road of life.”


The association with rain is made through Douglas spruce boughs the male dancers wear around their necks, and, depending on pueblo, in their arm bands and from the rain sashes above their white kilts. In one hand they carry gourd rattles, which have rain power, and spruce branches in the other.

Pseudotsuga menziesii, now more commonly called Douglas fir, grows in the “mountains and deep canyons” above the pueblos where they’re often the tallest trees in the forest, the closest to the clouds. Depending on the day, some may even disappear in the mist. Some clouds, in fact, are called spruce clouds.

For the comfort of the dances, the branches tend to be pliable enough to bend easily around the body. The inch-long yellow-green or blue-green needles are smooth with points that are not piercing. The connections to the wood are only rough if rubbed the wrong way.


The men also wear turkey plumes associated with fecundity. At San Juan they’re worn behind half miter headdresses made from yucca. At Santa Clara and San Ildefonso they’re held in place with rosettes shaped like squash blossoms. Both men and women may wear downy eagle feathers in their hair associated with clouds.

The role of the spruce is more obvious when the Basket Dance is considered as the culmination of a four day rite that natives tell outsiders are spent practicing new songs.

At San Ildefonso in the 1920's, Edwin Curtis said that on the first evening the cacique made prayer plumes for the male dancers to deposit outside the village. On the fourth night, he made more plumes which two or three dancers took the next morning into the mountains where they were left as “offerings to the spirits of Douglas spruce.” They brought back spruce boughs, which the moiety chief blessed the next morning before the dancers dressed.

At Santa Clara in 1912, John Harrington said the day before the dance, the five capitanes went to the forests where they cut eight young Douglas spruce trees. After midnight, they set two up in each of the four places where the dance would be performed.

At San Juan, Antonio Garcia indicates emissaries go to the eastern mountains for trees they hole in “at each plaza with an offering of cornmeal." Before the final rehearsal, the men perform a sacred line dance, an ange’i. In the past they were expected to fast and be celibate, but fasting is no longer observed.

On the day of the Basket Dance at San Ildefonso, Curtis said, the chief of the kosa, the summer clowns, led the dancers from the kiva. After that, two of his assistants took over supervising the dancers. At San Juan, the representatives of the new order, the kosa are also the ones who appear.

The cycle of four songs, which alternate slow and fast sections, is repeated four times, twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon. Gertrude Kurath says the dances are repeat four times in the first and last sessions, and twice in the second and third performances. During the dance segments the clowns stand at the ends of the lines and guard the boundaries of ritual space.

Between sessions the clowns keep the crowd amused, and away from private pueblo areas. In a photograph from about 1920 at Santa Clara, the clowns were shown wearing the sort of feathered headdress associated with plains Indians and worn in the Comanche Dance. A 1942 photograph taken at San Juan by Wyatt Davis showed them wrapped in geometric patterned blankets

According to Ortiz, clowns at San Juan are considered children of the sun associated with changes in weather. As such they’re allowed to dramatize reversals in gender. According to Jill Sweet, their antics were once much more licentious than now, but various forms of outside pressure have limited what they do. They can still discomfort the tourists they ridicule.

The final dance is usually completed just before sunset. It’s followed by another sacred ange’i, this time performed by both men and women. In the past, a ritual bath in the river was expected at San Juan, but indoor plumbing has transferred that function to the home.

At Santa Clara in 1912, the spruce was thrown into the creek that flows from Tsikomó to water the summer corn. At San Juan, the War Chief returns sacred objects to the supernaturals when he throws the spruce and down feathers into the river the next morning.


Notes:
Austin, Mary. “Song of the Basket Dancers,” in The American Rhythm, 1930 edition reprinted by Sunstone Press, 2007. Kurath reproduces a text from San Juan in which the dancers are called Dew Boys and Dew Girls; pleas are made to the rain god Oxua for clouds with “wheat-producing power” and “corn-producing power.”

Curtis, Edward S. The North American Indian, volume 17 on the Tewa, 1926.

Davis, Wyatt. Photographs from 1940 in the University of New Mexico magazine collection; includes one of Steven Trujillo. Photographs distributed by the Santa Fe Railroad taken at San Juan and ones by T. Harmon Parkhurst at San Ildefonso in 1935 are also reproduced on the web. Paintings of the San Ildefonso Basket Dance are available on the web, including works by Gilbert Atencio (Wah-Peen), Diane Calabeza (He Shi Flower), José Encarnacion Peña (Soqween), Alfonso Roybal (Awa Tsireh), Abel Sanchez (Oqwa Pa) and Pablita Velarde (Tse Tsan).

Garcia, Antonio. “Ritual Preludes and Postludes” in Kurath; provides more information on the dance as part of a pueblo repertoire. Rehearsals at San Juan include four nights of practice for the men, followed by four nights of practice for the women, then a joint practice the eve before.

Kurath, Gerturde Prokosch. Music and Dance of the Tewa Pueblos, 1970; contains a photograph of the Santa Clara Basket Dance at Puye Cliffs in 1961.

Ortiz, Alfonso. The Tewa World, 1969.

Paterek, Josephine. Encyclopedia of American Indian Costume, 1996; she includes a painting by Pablita Velarde of a young girl’s legs being wrapped for her first dance.

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916; includes comments on habitat.

Sweet, Jill D. Dances of the Tewa Pueblo Indians, second edition, 2004; includes a color closeup of a woman’s costume taken in 1974 by Roger Sweet.

Photographs:
1. Middle section of what I’m told is a Douglas fir growing where it no doubt was transplanted near the village, 3 February 2012; it’s not native to the river bottom.

2. Lower section of same tree with new springs emerging from the furrowed trunk, 3 February 2012.

3. Twigs on same tree, 3 February 2012.

4. Needles on twig from same tree, 3 February 2012.

5. Same tree in its neighborhood where it’s higher than the utility pole and shorter than the cottonwood growing in a ditch. The shape and curvature suggest it was deprived of sun when it was young. While such trees lose branches from the base in those conditions, this was probably pruned because it’s near a road. Taken 3 February 2012.