Diary of a Bad Year, Ad infinitum

I’m here in El Valle and it’s 90 degrees outside but I’ve closed all my doors and windows and have every fan I own running full blast (I only have two) so that I can breathe without coughing. The smoke from the Las Conchas fire above Los Alamos has settled over our valley for two days now, so thick it’s almost impossible to differentiate between smoke and cloud, except for the orange striations that spread across the plumes along the entire southern horizon. Ash particles so minute that sometimes the only way they are visible is when they are caught in cobwebs (or as my neighbor told me, on her white skirt), rain upon our downwind communities. So here we are, eleven years after the Cerro Grande Fire that burned 47,000 acres in two weeks throughout the Los Alamos area, watching and breathing a fire that has burned 61,000 acres in 36 hours.

The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated as the fire approaches from the south and west towards the mesa canyons full of legacy waste and the active Los Alamos National Laboratory technical areas that store nuclear weapons and waste. I’ve made an arbitrary decision that if the fire reaches Tech Area G, where waste containers sit in nylon tents waiting shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico, I will load up my dogs and leave for Albuquerque to move in with Jakob and Casey. But really it’s just an excuse to stay here in El Valle as long as possible (I pity the poor Los Alamos residents who had to leave their homes as I curse those complicit in this nuclear madness) because I know I’ve already been contaminated by the radionuclides, PCBs, and other toxins that reside in the ponderosa pine, piñon pine, and mixed conifer forests that are now exploding fire balls, desiccated by years of drought and federal agency mismanagement.

I say “load up my dogs,” but this means somehow getting a seventy pound, 14 year old dog who can barely walk and a 10 year old cocker spaniel who is deaf and almost blind into my car and transporting them in 100 degree heat to Albuquerque. I already asked my neighbor, a former Los Alamos construction manager, if he will take my chickens and put them in with his brood. But why should he stick around to take care of my chickens when he should be getting the hell out of Dodge with his parents, of whom he is the caretaker (his dad, Orlando, figures prominently in my blog post “Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up.”) The only place they might go is Española, where his brother lives, but as we saw in the Cerro Grande Fire, that town will no doubt be a smoke-filled hell hole as well.

When I venture out in the smoke to feed the chickens I see that a little water is coming down the acequia into my orchard, which I’m struggling to keep alive between a long rotation of 22 parciantes in a summer of drought the likes of which I’ve never before seen. I’d asked the mayordomo to let a little water come down from an irrigator up the valley, and his response was, “Go ask them.” I didn’t, but for some reason the water is there, so with a wet bandana across my face I manage to at least wet down my trees before the water disappears several hours later. As my former vecino Jacobo Romero said (in William deBuys book, River of Traps), “never give holiday to the water,” even if the fires are raging and this Diary of a Bad Year has become the Diary of the Bad Year That Never Seems to End.