A good land

Northern New Mexico--if I did not know better, I would ask if elves dwelt here. The air is dry and clear, stars gleam like sunlight on stream droplets, mesas and cajas stand and meditate on the seasons, and the desert blooms pink with Apache plume and cholla cactus.

Tolkien’s elves would love our mountains, where pine and aspen line the rocky streams, but the valley elves would need to be less English and more Spanish or Greek. (DOES Spain have elves? Greece, I know, had a pantheon full of minor deities.) Northern elves need water and green plants. They will find some in our mountains--high, where it is often chilly even in July, and where moss and wild strawberries humbly do their thing--but the lowlands are different.

But the lower ground has a wild beauty that Virginia, soft and green and damp, can’t match. Even the dust charms. (Dust is the stuff of miracle, you know. Out of the dust He created man, and to dust we will return.) The mountains are blue in the distance, and slope down to the foothills. There the vegetation fades from pines to the shorter pinons and junipers, and the blue fades to honey. Nearer than the foothills, mesas are sliced by canyons, so the layers of Bandelier tuff sit in all their weathered orange glory above the red sandstone.

A sudden little mesa juts out, all brown, for no reason but the sheer joy of it. Along its edges, the roots dangle where softer dirt has eroded. An arroyo slices through the valley floor from the hills to the river. The arroyos are empty now, but when a summer thunderstorm comes, they will be full and wet. When the waters subside, wildflowers and chamisa will pop out, green and pink and yellow, and bloom madly. If the monsoon season is good, it may stay green for weeks.

Shrubs and grasses dot the earth as far back as the mountains, to where trees fade into the general blue with a paler blue above.

Elves once dwelt in the land of Hollin, between Rivendell and the Mines of Moria. Hollin yet retains a wholesome air. Much evil must befall a land before it forgets the elves. Here is a wholesome air, in truth, but where did it come from? The dwellers of this land have never, as a people, poured from terra cotta pots libations to the Maker of this dust, but only to the sun and thunder and crop gods, or, more recently, to Lady Science with her whispers of power and knowledge, and to the tyrant-queen of everyday life, who appears with a calendar in one hand and car keys in the other.

But the monsoon rains continue to fall on the just and the unjust alike, and the drought has ended. The valleys are green as they have not been for years. The rivers are full and the rocks still bright. The sun travels by day and the stars by night. Praise to the Maker!