Couse House Taos

What a day.

Those who doubt climate change should have been here yesterday Saturday when a chilly monsoon storm enveloped northern and central New Mexico leaving us surprised and wet and shivery if we weren't bundled up like ticks. The weather forecast was sunny-ish and warm. Day before the temperatures were in the 90s. Not so yesterday Saturday.

The trip up to Taos from our place takes about 2 ½ hours on a good day. Yesterday it was closer to three thanks to the rain that stayed with us or followed or preceded us pretty much the whole way.  Sometimes light, sometimes torrential, it rained and rained and rained. There were plenty of thunder claps and flashes of lightning, a few of which fell quite close to the road we were taking, the Low Road to Taos it's sometimes called, as opposed to the less traveled but better known High Road.

The Low Road to Taos back in the day

The lady in the first car looks thoroughly exhausted, and I bet she is. The road is a little better now and cars are a bit more comfortable, but it can still be a challenge to get up the hill to Taos along the Rio Grande -- which was flowing deep and fast and brown, full of rafters intent on running the many rapids, no matter the weather, before the end of the Fourth of July weekend.

So we went, and we went for a specific purpose, to attend the opening of an exhibition of photographs of Pueblo (primarily Taos Pueblo) Indians used as models by E. I. Couse, in the early 20th century.

It was.... interesting... There were a couple of dozen photos in what's called the Luna Chapel which E. Irving Couse had used as a studio until he built a new one onto the side of the house. Two models were featured over and over again, Ben Lujan and Jerry Mirabal.

With a few exceptions, they were posed crouching. The crouching Indian was a consistent theme of Couse's and it would show up in the works of a variety of other Taos and Western artists and probably still does, though I haven't really checked recently. The Cowboys and Indians genre is very popular in Southwest, but it's really not my thing.

The Couse House is a rambling adobe and frame house perched up on a tiny mesa top down the hill from Mabel Dodge Lujan's Los Gallos place where we've stayed a number of times over the years and where we feel surprisingly at home. Perhaps in our previous lives we were guests of Mabel or maybe it is something else.

The Couse House has been preserved by the artist's granddaughter pretty much as it was when he died in 1936, whereas Mabel's place has gone through a number of overhauls and other uses since she passed in 1962, most notoriously its phase as Dennis Hopper's Mud Palace.

Couse was an original member of the Taos Society of Artists, arriving not long after the artist "discoverers" of Taos, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips whose broken wagon wheel made them linger in Taos while it was fixed in 1898.

Couse had a long time association with Joseph Henry Sharp, whose studio is on the premises, and who, in Paris at the Academie Julien suggested to Blumenschein and Phillips, and later to E. Irving Couse, that they head West and check out Taos and New Mexico for a breath of fresh air and the endless inspiration of the people (especially the Indians), the land and the sky. And so they did. Sharp had been in the area earlier -- I think 1893 -- but he hadn't settled there, nor would he, so far as I can tell, for many years after the initiation of the artist colony which became the Taos Society and its successors. In fact, though Sharp had a house and studio adjacent to Couse's place, he may never have actually "settled" in Taos at all. He may have been more like Blumy, who had a house and studio of his own in Taos and spent summers there, but did not "settle" until 1919, long after his first visit, and even then, he was on the road a great deal of the time he lived in Taos.

Much art would be -- and is today -- made in Taos, but then and now, it has to be sold somewhere else. Taos is today a small town (abt. 5000 population) and back then, it was tiny. It could be and sometimes still is a challenge to get to and get out of. The market for Art was elsewhere, and to a large extent, it still is. One may create there (as I have done on occasion), but if one is serious about selling (as I am not) one must locate other places for outlets -- even though now there are lots of galleries in Taos.

The "crouching Indian" theme was what drew us to Taos over the weekend.  Sure enough, we weren't disappointed. There were dozens of photos taken by Couse of his Indian models crouching by the fire, crouching in the grass, crouching along the trail, crouching, crouching, crouching, and in his studio, there were more prints and paintings of crouching Indians examining pots, wearing bizarre and un-Pueblo-ish costumes, and the last painting Couse was working on, still on its easel, barely sketched in oil, shows yet another crouching Indian. It was his thing.

I took few pictures while we were there and this is not the painting he was working on when he died. It is an example, however, of his crouching Indian genre.

Ms. Ché wrote and read a Crouching Indian poem during one of her sojourns in Taos, and she's going back for a writer's conference on the upcoming weekend. I might go over to the Blumenschein house just to compare...

Meanwhile the new It-Boy in Western art, Mark Maggiori, sold one one of his cowboy paintings at the Scottsdale auction for almost $100,000 with fees. Before last year, he was barely a blip on the artscene. How quickly they rise!

Rain, Glorious Rain; or Too Much of a Good Thing

We went up to Cuba yesterday for lunch -- a 230 mile round trip to be sure, but it is one of the most scenic drives in New Mexico, among so many scenic drives, and the weather was beautiful for such an adventure.

We saw dark clouds gathering on the Jemez Mountains, and we could locate where the rain was falling in the draws and ravines and side canyons. There was none near the road or our destinations, but parts of the high ramparts of the mountains looked to be getting well soaked. Good. Cut down on the fires, break some of the drought.

When we got back to Albuquerque in the afternoon, the sky in the north was still very dark, but the storm, if that's what it was, seemed to be stationary. We stopped at the Sandia Casino to look around and play a bit -- we hadn't been there since its expansion more than ten years ago (I think) -- and when we chatted with some of the staff, they said there had been torrential rains in the late afternoon, early evening for days, and they were worried it would happen again. Little did they -- or we -- know.

Out in the Estancia Valley, we'd been getting a little bit of light rain now and again, but nothing memorable since the first day of monsoon rain on June 30. There was rain every day for about 2 weeks, then scattered infrequent showers except along the mountain sides where the rains were sometimes measured in inches per hour -- or seemed to be. We didn't realize the rains had been so severe or so frequent in Albuquerque lately.

When we left the casino around 5:30pm or so, the sky was pretty dark in the north, and there appeared to be some showers falling on the Sandias, but not a lot and not extensively. As we drove along Tramway there was no rain at all, and it was dry going through the Tijeras Canyon. The clouds in the east were lit up gloriously by the early evening sun, just beautiful piles and piles of brilliant white, like the fanciest vanilla ice cream scoops in the sky.

After we got back to our place, we did our usual futzing about, and I said I'd go into town (locally) to pick up mail (we don't have home delivery) and rustle up some grub for dinner at the rib joint. When I got there, the place was hopping. It was after all Friday Night Cruise Night, and we were on Route 66 in summer time, so what do you expect?  Nice cars! Big line for ribs and chicken and stuff, so I had a fairly long wait. Checked out the vehicles, chatted with neighbors and other folks, and all of us watched the darkening skies in the north. Deep, deep dark grays and purples lit here and there with pink and orange fringes from the setting sun, and now and then flashes of silver from the lightning inside the clouds.

"Oh shit. This is going to be a bad one," someone said out on the patio. "Nah, ya think? Really?"

"Yah, look a that," pointing to the massive black cloud looming ever closer. "It's gonna be hell."

"Nah, we'll be lucky if it drops anything."

"Just you wait. I say, take cover, and better get these cars under wraps, too."

Cold Global Warming

Well. Here we sit in central New Mexico, on the east side of the Central Mountain Chain, and it's darned near freezing, well, close enough, 60° at 7:45pm.  

According to the "news" the whole rest of the country is roasting in high heat and humidity, and I checked some of the places we know well for temps right now (7:45ish PM MDT):

77° in Sacramento
74° in Los Angeles
81° in Seattle
63° in San Francisco
84° in Chicago
87° in New York
74° in Sarasota
91° in Baltimore
62° in Flagstaff
67° in Albuquerque
66° in Anchorage

It's seems we're in the coldest place in the country at the moment. The sky is cloudy, there are individual drops of rain from time to time, but no real storm. The wind was high for a little while today, but not like some days when the dust rolls in (we've had a couple of major dust storm incidents the past couple of days). The weather people say the weather we're having now is part of a storm over Texas, moving into New Mexico slowly overnight, fed by moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, and it would be "Classic Monsoon" except that the weather is rotating in the wrong direction. Very strange.

We've had rain most days since June 30, and some people say it's almost enough to break the drought, but I don't think so. Despite the rain, we still have to irrigate some of the plants. It can be hot and very dry in the daytime. The sunflowers sometimes take the heat and daytime dryness particularly hard. But the last couple of days have been very mild and now it's almost cold. They say there will probably be heavy rain during the night, and more tomorrow. Cool or moderate temperatures to continue through the rest of the week and into the weekend. Amazing.

Rain! Glorious Rain!

We had at least 40 minutes of steady and sometimes hard rain yesterday, the greatest amount of rainfall in months. And months.

I wouldn't say the drought is broken by any means, but it was so exciting to see any rain at all, we made fools of ourselves. While visiting a friend, we heard a loud clap of thunder outside, and shortly thereafter I could hear the rain on the roof. "It's raining!" I said. Everybody looked as if I'd gone mad. I said, "Rain!" and got up to go open the door, and sure enough, it was pouring. We all stood around gawping.

Then we went outside and stood around in it. Splashed and played in the puddles. Got muddy. Wet. And thrilled.

I know. Simple things...

We're grateful for the rain.

Let there be more...

Weird Weather

June 7, 2011.

I thought I heard the rain again outside my window. Cold. Damp. Dreary. Yes, it has rained in June in the Central Valley from time to time in the many years I've lived here, though the incidents are rare and the amount of rain is usually slight.

But despite the constant official cries of "drought!", this part of California has actually been in an extended wet spell. As I noted some time back, it's as if this section of the state had been bodily moved a thousand miles north. This is Seattle weather. No, it's British Columbia-southern Alaska weather.

It's not just the frequency of rain, it's the continued low temperatures (well, for here, anyway, in the 50's and 60's) and the sense that it's not going to stop.

I was in the backyard yesterday, "puttering" as they say. Well, we've had some work done over the last couple of years or so -- some trees cut down and heavily cut back, a new fence put up, the exterior of the house painted, and I've been working on landscaping the back, something that couldn't be done when it was lost in the shade of bushes that had been planted when the house was new (1940) and had been left to become huge trees. Nothing would grow back there but the rankest weeds. So for years, we essentially just left it. Once the trees were cut down, suddenly the possibilities of actual landscaping were opened up, and I've been planting lawn, flowers, making paths and sitting areas, etc, having a grand time really. But yesterday I was pulling ivy and some other vining plant off the house. The east and south side of the house were becoming buried in vinage after less than a year since the house was painted. There's been English ivy in the back since we've been here, but it has never almost covered over the house like this. And the other vine (I'm not sure what it is) has been here for a quite a while, but never grown to this extent nor has it ever come this close to entirely covering the whole east side of the house.

As I was pulling this stuff down, I noticed how extraordinarily lush the foliage was. The leaves are broad and dark, glossy green, and there are new shoots all over the place. It's been less than a year since the ivy and vines that were on the house before were pulled down to paint the place, and they've all grown back and much, much more besides.

This can only be attributed to the rains, rains, and more rains. The other trees and plants in the back have also grown remarkably in the past year, even in the last couple of weeks. And it is raining again today.

Yet this is the Dry Season. Things should be turning golden and brown and brittle. That's the course of life for the native plants around here. Come May, they're drying up, and by June they are completely dry. There would ordinarily be no rain in the summer at all, and relatively frequent irrigation is necessary just to keep a lawn alive, non-native plants green, and flowers blooming. But we're used to it, know how it goes, and we're adapted to water conservation (after all, we've been in a "drought" for years now -- just recently declared "over.")

This year? Hardly had to turn the hose on at all. Rain is that frequent. And the green stuff has responded to the rains gleefully and spectacularly.

The reason for the change in the weather is said to be warmer temperatures in the Arctic Ocean which have resulted in much less ice cover and less enduring sea ice which in turn has caused the cold weather patterns that typically circle the north pole to wander southward through Siberia and North America, looping down over the Pacific and drenching California again and again. It is said to be an active demonstration of the consequences of Global Warming.

So far, for this part of California, it is A Year Without A Summer. That will likely change, of course, and we will be in searing heat and dryness. But not till July, maybe even August. You never know anymore.

The irony here is that though the current weather pattern in these parts is thought to be a factor of Global Warming, even though it's cold and wet, these are the conditions that can lead, in due time -- and not a long time, either -- to an Ice Age. It was recognized back in the 1950's that Ice Ages in the Northern Hemisphere depend on warmer ocean temperatures in the Arctic which were thought to be due to changing Gulf Stream flows.

The illustration below, taken from American Heritage magazine, April 1960, explains how Maurice Ewing and William Donn thought it worked back in the day. In other words, "warming" leads to ice.



What fun.