The Winter That Wasn’t

Ojo Sarco, New Mexico.

It is early winter, in the year of the Winter Heat Wave, 2012. There has been day after day of temperatures into the 60’s. The sun-filled, passive solar house is heating to the mid-70’s everyday and the adobe walls radiate back their heat into the evening. We make small fires at night, not because we necessarily need the extra heat but more to light up the nights that are dark and long.

The mountains are bare – bare as in zero snow all the way to the tops. Down here in the valley at 7,500 hundred feet, the ground is still not frozen. Confused plants aren’t sure if they are supposed to grow or die.

I don’t recognize my very familiar gardens despite our having lived and grown together for 36 years. It is so warm I still need to water the arugula and fall planted crops; at least those within reach of the well. These plants should have begun their winter rest in damp, frozen ground months ago. In the best of winters they would already to have lain under snow for at least a month, the snow providing insulation as well as wetness.

The pasture was reseeded in early fall. We felt so lucky to have planted in time to catch a great rainstorm, one that lasted for several days. These rains gave us hope. We even let ourselves start to imagine the acres of tall mixed grasses and flowers waving in the summer sun. And the elk and horses that would enjoy eating this lovely food.

But then this turned into the year of the Winter Heat Wave of 2012. It is so dry as to be frightening. Walking out on that newly planted pasture, the grasses brought on by the rains have shrunk. When I walk across the established pastures the grasses are so crisp they snap loudly underfoot.

Stepping off my place into the neighborhood things aren’t much better. The thousands of people employed in, around and or benefitting from the ski economy here in el norte are all nervous. What if some of the ski areas don’t even open this year? Many families will be hurt by not having winter employment.

It seems so strange that government is so removed from us, the people living away from cities but close to the land. Whether human caused or something else, my little patch of mother earth is in a world of hurt. No snow also means fires in a few months when the spring winds start to blow. Looking out across the mountains is a new landscape in every direction – huge naked burns and recovering burns on all sides. Fires have gone from rare events to yearly.

They should close Congress for a while and make the elected so-called “representatives” practice a little deep ecology. The real cliff the country is about to fall over is not a fiscal cliff of accounting and media talking points, it’s the social and ecological cliff the country is clinging to, barely holding on.

Pass a continuing resolution and go outside. Go to your assigned learning site, there are so many waiting for the notice of our “leaders.” Help with Hurricane Sandy clean-up in a way that gets you dirty, wade through the toxic fumes in the shale oil fields, walk through both the flooded and drought-stricken fields of America. Look at the land and the people up-close and personal. Sleep a night in a super-max prison. Attend an inner city school for a week. Eat only the food you can buy on a food stamp budget, live on social security for a month. Spend time one-on-one listening to vets so you hear what is leading them towards suicide in such large numbers, the terrible things they saw and did. Never sleep at home. Reap what you have sowed.

And then get back to work and make a plan to a rebuild a collapsing nation.

Carol Miller is a longtime public health advocate. She lives in New Mexico.

Carol Miller is an Independent unable to vote in the New Mexico primary. She has been working on electoral reform and creating a more democratic electoral system since the 1990’s. Miller recommends that people newly awakened to the unfairness of the electoral system support Ballot Access News (http://ballot-access.org/), Coalition for Free and Open Elections (http://www.cofoe.org/), and Fair Vote (http://www.fairvote.org/).