Waiting for the Monsoon
Goods Shed Door, Chama Rail Yard
It seems that I may be shooting more abstracts and close ups on this vacation than on past trips to New Mexico, at least to begin with. An 11,000 acre wild fire, the “South Fork Fire”, is burning in the Santa Fe National Forest about 20 miles west of Espanola. That’s maybe 60 or 70 miles from Taos but the prevailing winds have been in this direction; the smell of burnt wood decorates the air and a haze blurs the landscape. The normally bright New Mexico light is diffused; the contrast is low. So it goes.
Apart from the smoke, the skies are cloud free and blue; we wait on the storms of the monsoon season to douse the fires, wash out the smoke and bring drama to the landscape. Our vacation is a week or two earlier than normal, and the chiaroscuro contrast of dark storms and sunlit hills that patterns New Mexico summers has not yet begun. I wait as patiently as I can for the first rain.
The “Goods Shed Door” image for this post comes from the rail yards of the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad in Chama. We drove to Taos by way of Chama in order to meet up our daughters, Rachel and Katherine, who started their summer with a friend in Colorado; arriving in town an hour before the appointed meet I had some time to explore. At the dinner table of our rental home in Arroyo Seco, seven miles out of Taos, I allowed the girls to select today’s blog image and they chose the heavy contrasts of this corrugated iron door. I was leaning towards the pink sidewalk stains of the thumbnail on the right but sometimes it is healthy to listen to other voices than your own stale one when selecting pictures.
