South Fork Fire
South Fork Fire smoke and sunset
A photograph taken yesterday posted early in the day today; cheating a little on my plan to post an image from each day of our vacation but I am not sure whether I will be using the camera today since we will be attending the Taos Pueblo Corn Dance celebration and photography of this religious event is, understandably, not permitted.
The buildings of the pueblo are one of the most amazing sights in North America but I am not entirely comfortable when I visit, no more than I would be walking around a neighbor’s home as an uninvited guest while the owner sat at their kitchen table. The tribe benefits from the money that tourists bring but it must be irksome to have so many strangers wandering through your back yard; a yard that has belonged to your people for a thousand years, been violently taken, and returned only recently and partially. I am awed, honored, humbled and embarrassed when I enter the pueblo.
The photograph, made last night from the road south of Taos, illustrates the scale of the lightening started South Fork Fire burning in the mountains above Abiquiu. It is this smoke that has brought haze to the skies across north eastern New Mexico for the last two weeks, modifying my expectations for the type of images I might collect. Forest fires are a fact of life in the south west states but, like so much else in this colossal landscape, come as a surprise to a modern city dweller. Urbanites expect their inconvenient disasters to be cleaned up quickly, only the bureaucratic disruption of road work lasts weeks or months in the city. The South Fork Fire is a mostly natural event from which the landscape will recover but the drift of the smoke reminds me of the unnatural plumes of another type drifting wider and wider in the Gulf of Mexico; the lumpy haze of that “event” may not be cleaned up in my lifetime and perhaps not in my children’s lifetime either. $2.80 a gallon is not the full price of the fuel for our Austin to Taos drive, the real price has not yet been billed.
