HERE, WE CAN REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Don’t Buy Fool’s Gold
During a bout of insomnia last night, I watched CNBC to see if any of the talking financial heads thought my retirement funds might stop disappearing, and there it was. Perhaps the biggest environmental, wildlife habitat and water quality problem we don't like to discuss. Yes, it's touchy, but that has never stopped me, so why start now.
We all need to stop buying fool's gold.
LET'S GET OUR WORDS STRAIGHT
Wilderness is Multiple Use
Have you ever heard somebody say they prefer "multiple use" over Wilderness? I have what seems like a thousand times, and every time I hear it, I say, silently, to myself, wrong!
So, it seems like a good time to say it out loud because the words, "multiple use" have been lost in the Wilderness.
Western Photographers
An Interview with Desert Photographer Stephen Strom
Stephen Strom has been photographing the deserts of the American Southwest for thirty years, creating arresting images of forbidding, breathtaking landscapes containing geological formations and striking colors like nothing else on earth. Strom worked for over a decade as an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, where he first began to “love the desert.” Strom’s photography has been featured in several books, including the recent Otero Mesa: Saving America’s Wildest Grassland and the new Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 96 pages, 43 photographs, $45), which collects his entrancing photographs of multi-colored mudhills in New Mexico, the red rock formations of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and canyons, cliffs, and desert lands throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. This fall, Strom will present Earth Forms at several galleries, including Tucson’s Etherton Gallery (book signing on October 17, 3-5 p.m.), the Tubac Center for the Arts in Tubac, AZ (book signing on October 28), and Santa Fe’s Verve Gallery of Photography, which will display Storm’s photos from November 13 through January of next year. I recently interviewed Strom via email about his work process, his explorations of the desert, and how the desert at times becomes “a two-dimensional painting.”
New West: What first attracted you to the desert landscapes that you photograph?
Stephen Strom: The time I spent in Tucson from 1972-83 (as a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) transformed me into a confirmed desert rat. I learned to love the desert, and over time, began to see and feel the subtle rhythms – color, sculptural, floral – of what appears to most people to be desolate and lifeless.
New West Book Review
A Reissue of “Antonio Montoya,” Rick Collignon’s First Guadalupe Novel
The Journal of Antonio Montoya
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 214 pages, $15.95
This month Unbridled Books reprinted Rick Collignon’s The Journal of Antonio Montoya, first published in 1996. Antonio Montoya was the first of Collignon’s four novels set in the New Mexico town of Guadalupe, and it establishes this traditional, insular, and unchanging desert place through the story of Ramona Montoya, an artist who tried to leave it behind. It’s a contemplative, gently humorous novel, and reading it is an experience that fills one pleasantly, like the nourishing food that Ramona’s resurrected grandmother cooks throughout the book.
As a young woman, Ramona moved away, but the people of Guadalupe seem to be like plants that can’t take root outside of their native ground, and she returned in mid-life after she inherited her grandparents’ old adobe, which she suspects is “turning back to dirt.” Oddly for Guadalupe, Ramona lives alone, passing the days painting pictures of the town, until her brother and sister-in-law are killed in a car collision with a cow, leaving their son José orphaned. José is to live with his mother’s relatives, but then his mother, Loretta, sits up in her coffin at her funeral and asks Ramona to raise José.
Beetle hysteria has raised its head again, and I am not talking about the Fab four. A prominent article in the New York Times titled “Tiny Beetle Adds New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” quotes many foresters and others who suggest that beetle-kill trees across the West will create larger wildfires and by implications are “destroying” our forests.
For instance, Montana’s State Forester Bob Harrington said as much at conference recently, as in the article. While it may seem “intuitively obvious” that dead trees will lead to more fires, there is little scientific evidence to support the contention that beetle-killed trees substantially increases risk of large blazes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest otherwise.
At the heart of this and many other media reports are flawed assumptions about fires, what constitutes a healthy forest, and the options available to humans in face of natural processes that are inconvenient and get in the way of our designs.
New West Book Review
Ghost Ball: Rick Collignon’s “Madewell Brown”
Madewell Brown
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 213 pages, $23.95
Rick Collignon returns to the town of Guadalupe, New Mexico for his fourth novel, the quietly powerful Madewell Brown. The title character is a mystery man, long gone, who turns out to have been a talented pitcher for a Negro league team out of Illinois. Brown lived for seven years in a shack on the outskirts of Guadalupe, barely interacting with the townspeople, before he disappeared without leaving much of a trace. Guadalupe is a town that keeps its secrets, counts family loyalty above all else, and doesn't welcome newcomers, so if Cipriano Trujillo is to uncover the truth behind the ancient canvas bag stamped "Madewell Brown" that he finds after the death of his father, he's going to have to overcome the congenital reticence of the older townspeople who might know something. Collignon takes his time settling the reader into the story, told in spare, acute prose, mainly through flashbacks, and the novel gradually gains in momentum as the pieces fall into place.
Collignon begins the tale in South Cairo, Illinois, where an elderly former Negro league ballplayer, Obie Poole, encounters an 11-year-old orphan named Rachael Parish, whom he recognizes as the granddaughter of his old teammate, Madewell Brown. "You've got your granddaddy written all over you," he says.
Obie begins to tell her stories about the man he believes is her grandfather. "I played ball with a man named Madewell Brown my whole damn life and never did I see the likes of him. You put a ball in that man's hand and he'd turn bats into kindling and buckle a man's knees so bad he looked the fool." Rachael and Obie become friends, intensely drawn toward each other's company to ease their isolation, though they keep up a cranky patter with one another, never admitting their strong bond out loud. Obie's death, when Rachael is in her twenties, sets her to seeking information about her grandfather.
Rick Collignon will discuss Madewell Brown at the Main Santa Fe Public Library on June 1 (7-8:30 p.m.) and in Las Vegas, New Mexico at Tome on the Range on June 13 (4 p.m.).
