That's intended as a joke and certainly isn't directed at you, Philip. I just had to say it somewhere.

Perhaps it's bright and clear where you are, but from about Socorro north by the Rio Grande Valley, the air is getting more polluted by the year.

My parents and I moved to Albuquerque in fall of 1961. Albuquerque was just north of 100,000 population, and NM itself had just cracked 1 million people. ABQ, on the east, ended at Eubank. Montgomery was a dirt road. And the air was so clear you could cry. My wife grew up on a farm in Bosque, about 15 miles south of Belen, in the 50's and 60's. No indoor toilets...they had a 2-holer out back. Her mom made fresh tortillas every day. Spoiled her rotten :).

I remember driving to and from Socorro at night and seeing virtually no lights between San Acacia and Belen. No longer.

I first noticed pollution---I suspect from Albuquerque---in Polvadera (just north of Socorro, 65 miles south of ABQ) in 1973. The plume from APS' coal-fired plant by Waterflow (ironically located in NM, since it has been one of the prime polluters in the state) was visible from space in the 60's (my memory may have failed me on the timeframe but it's close).

Nearly every afternoon, I drive into Santa Fe from the north and quite often there is brown crap in the air.

It just isn't going to get better, no matter how many RailRunners we get going.

As well, water and human-caused global warming are serious issues, especially for New Mexico.

2004-2005 was an epic season at Taos Ski Valley. Seriously, they had so much snow that they had terrain open I'd never seen open in my nearly 20 years skiing there. Great! But. It *rained* up to about 9,500 feet elevation in February, 2005 (this year, in late February, it rained up to about 12,000 feet in the San Juans by Telluride. Scary!).

This year's ski season was the antithesis of the previous: one of the worst ski seasons on record. But skiing is secondary, no matter how bitter and crushed I'd be if Taos Ski Valley were no more.

We are in the middle of a terrible drought, although recent rains have brought some small relief. New Mexico is nearly wholly dependent on the storage system that is the snowpack in the mountains. What is now happening is that snowpack is trending smaller, melting earlier and melting more quickly. This doesn't provide as much aquifer recharge as in the past. That's bad news for the people living here. And, of course, the population is growing.

I could go on, and I know that NM isn't the only casualty of its beauty. Colorado, Utah and Arizona are slowly dying as well. As much as I hope you could, I doubt you'd be able to write the same words about the skies here in fifty years.

I know this is somewhat tangential to the primary subject of your article, but romanticizing a dying ecosystem will just result in it dying more quickly. I am part of the problem, to be sure, by simply living here. But perhaps raising awareness of what was and what is now will change things.

This might be a little old fashioned, but at a visit to El Morro National Monument this summer, I picked up a copy of Willa Cather's _Death Comes to the Archbishop_. It served as a great guide to the pueblos all around Santa Fe as well as a historic peek at the issues at hand when Americans were the unwelcome immigrants threatening to take over Mexican territory.

A number of local legends are interwoven into the main plot, which focuses upon the establishment of the bishopric of Santa Fe from 1830 to 1870. Readers will hear the legends echoed as they visit area pueblos like Acoma and Isleta. I must have passed over this book in bookstores hundreds of times. Now I consider it an excellent guide to one of America's most beautiful regions.

07/17/2006

I found Connors' description to be provocative in the best way . . . I will be thinking about my home state for awhile, and in a different way than ever before. I was born in Alamogordo, grew up in Carlsbad, and came back in the late 1970s for a brief time at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Taos remains a favorite destination for my wife and I, especially in September during the San Geronimo festival at Taos Pueblo.

The cultural linkage, the logical connection of the zia and Shiva, the atomic bomb, is not something I had thought of much until watching Carnivale on HBO a year or two ago. Connors has further embellished the connection for me.

In memory of the victims, I want to name the site of one of the most egregious ethnic cleansing by Europeans - Acoma Pueblo - first cutting of all the Indian mens' feet, then killing every male for their revolt against "christianity."

For further literary insight into the Land of Enchantment see John Nichols' trilogy and a movie made from one of the three volumes, Robert Redford's Milagro Beanfield War.

I was fortunate to spend a couple of days in Taos This past June, and even more fortunate to get there by driving from Albuquerque through the mountains. The sky is blue and the clouds are puffy in a way not seen in any other part of the world that I have been in.

Thanks for my virtual visit again today through your description, Mr. Connors.

In addition to the excellent list of titles offered in Phil Connors' article, I have to add Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony which simply gets better with each subsequent reading. The land of the Laguna and Jemez pueblos, of New Mexico itself, becomes the primary character in the novel, relegating the human characters to secondary supporting roles. Tayo, back from the eastern theater in WW II, a participant in the Bataan Death March and a witness to the west's frightening weaponry which has been pulled from the very ground of his home, offers a potent image of the postmodern protagonist's nihilistic dilemma, rootless and divorced from the land. Mt. Taylor's avatar, the female genetrix Ts'eh, offers him (and us) a pathway out.

And if that wasn't enough, for those feeling particularly motivated, Silko's The Almanac of the Dead explores the frightening collision of cultures throughout the southwest. Both of these books offer ample rewards in exploring the layered cultural soil of New Mexico.