2005-09-22 – Zozobra
I’ve been in New Mexico for 2.5 months already. I’ve yet to fully comprehend that for the first time in over two years, I will be staying put for more than three months. Since March of 2003, I’ve been on the move, settling down in a place only to have to once again transport my life.
Luckily, the place in which I’ve hunkered down continues to fascinate. Just last night, on yet another trip to Las Cruces, I watched Mars rise up over the horizon, and identified the constellation Scorpio for the first time. My attention was fixated on a cloud that seemed to follow us; I soon realized that I was seeing the Milky Way (Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” found its way into my head). Shortly after I realized the nature of this “cloud,” a shooting star streaked across it, small, slow, dull rusty red.
Today we’re headed back to Albuquerque. We watched on our left as winds lifted a wall of dust, miles long along the foothills of the mountains, then unleashed it to howl across I-25, casting an ominous yellow pall, a dry fog, across the road. We feeble motorists struggled against the gusts as they threatened to push us off the road. The voices on the radio spoke of the hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, and we pondered what disasters could possibly hit sleepy New Mexico (except poverty and political corruption, joked Susan). Through the dust we watched lighting bolting across the sky, and before long, our yellow cloud of desert dust gave way to sheets of rain.
Even in a town as laid-back as Albuquerque, things are happening at a breakneck pace. I’m involved in a local Italian-speaking club that meets every Saturday morning, and I’m taking salsa dancing lessons ever other week from a co-worker and his talented wife and daughter. I just finished a course in effective cycling, and I’m putting together a lunch presentation to teach the people at my firm a few tips and tricks about using their Macs (ah, life in an Apple-friendly office!)
A few weeks back, Santa Fe had their 81st annual Burning of Zozobra festival. The event has its roots in Spanish Catholicism, but it was turned into a spectacle just last century by a local artist. Zozobra is a giant bat-faced statue, more like a 50 foot tall piñata, an effigy of a bogeyman who is stuffed with old parking tickets and police reports and fireworks, and set on fire each year as a cleansing of the soul, an out-with-the-bad, in-with-the-good sort of ordeal.
The event is full of fanfare, with musicians, fire dancers, and fireworks, and they way people chant “Burn him! Burn him!” is eerily reminiscent of witch trials and public executions. But my questions about the darker parts of human nature fell to the wayside as the thousands in the crowd grew silent as the beauty of it all overtook them. Puppeteers made Zozobra wave his arms and gaze around at the audience, as the fire dancers laid their torches to his base. The flames climbed inside his stuffing and up his sides, and fireworks began to leap from behind his head and all around him. The crowd stopped chanting and were simply spellbound. A look back across the field showed everyone – toddlers on their parents’ shoulders, high schoolers, old folks, everyone – with their faces lit up in wonder and illuminated by the white-blue flashes of the explosions. After 10-15 minutes, Zozobra was nothing more than a smoldering, wiry frame, which came crashing down, sending up a shower of embers.
A puddle in a rainstorm in Bandelier National Park, near Los Alamos, NM.
OK, think back to that volcanic ash scattering. Naturally, the vast majority of it wound up covering nearby territory, sometimes landing in drifts up to several hundred feet thick. When the ash settled and compacted, it became the soft volcanic rock known as tuffa, the very same material the Romans used as building blocks.
Labor day falls at the end of New Mexico’s “Monsoon Season,” where the weather is fickle and entirely unpredictable. We were cruising along with the windows down one minute, then the next we were kicking the wipers up to full blast to see through the cloudburst that was overtaking us.
Continuing northwards, we find ourselves at the Valles Caldera. This was the site of the Toledo Eruption, many many millenia ago. This volcanic eruption, they say, had 600 times the explosive power of Mount Saint Helens. It blew the top off this mountain, leaving a crater over 13 miles wide and scattering volcanic ash as far as Lubbock, Texas.
On Labor Day, I headed north of Albuquerque with my neighbor Kushal, who had just flown in from Calcutta and had not seen the US outside of Albuquerque. We took I-25 one hour north to Santa Fe, had a spicy Thai lunch that was as eye-watering as it was mouth-watering, and then cut west and south in a loop that would take us back to Albuquerque.
The horizontal emphases in this shot seem almost planned. The water, the wide stretches of land, the clouds…