July 28, 2022: Monsoon Season & Rattlesnakes

These past couple of weeks have been an adventure in rain and flood. The other day we got over 2 inches of horizontal rain in less than an hour, a record for around here. A mudslide covered the highway, and our arroyo got so high it was carrying full-sized tree trunks. Strange things, like in the picture below, sped by. Alien artifacts from the Dulce Base?

The next morning, all was calm again. It’s the speed and intensity of the rise and fall of water that is amazing and exciting to watch. Flash floods are life as usual in the southwest, so it’s nothing like what is happening in other parts of the country (Kentucky being the climate catastrophe of the day), but it’s a humbling sight: mother nature wins all, again and again. When will we learn?

We ended up postponing a planned backpack trip to the South San Juans due to the rain. The mountains are getting even more than us. Our route included fording the Conejos River a couple times and, while it is usually 4-5″ deep and pleasant to cross, right now it is chest-high. So, we’ll wait.

Snake

Yesterday, Alan and I killed our first rattlesnake. It was about 2 1/2′ long with 8 rattles, coiled right by the house next to the generator room, where I was working. The snake sprang at Zane, missing him by a hair (Zane was terrified by the attack), then coiled up, rattling furiously. He was invisible against the grass and we could only hear the rattles, not see him, even standing only a few feet away. We were figuring out what to do when he uncoiled and slithered into the gennie room. There, I trapped him under a long pole and Alan chopped his head off with a shovel. It took him a long time to stop wiggling, even decapitated….at least 5 minutes of rattling and snapping his jaws. Eerie. We were sad to kill him; rattlers eat a lot of mice and are a beautiful part of this land, but we didn’t have any way to capture and relocate him safely. (I have since ordered a LONG snake hook and gripper so we can move them a long ways away without harm.)

I gutted and skinned him, grilled the meat and ate some. He was pretty skinny and tough, but yummy. I’m drying the skin and rattles.

It’s amazing how primal our reaction is to seeing a rattlesnake. When I saw him go for Zane, I jumped back 6′ before I even realized it was a snake. Same with Zane. Today, when he went outside, he carefully avoided that part of the yard. (Me, too!) We will wear our barn boots outside more often from here on.

Home Improvements

Alan has made great headway with the 8kw solar array, finishing the trenching and laying the wire, covering it, and getting the ground-mount buried in concrete. (Big truck came in to do that.) The ground is reseeded. Now he’s getting the panels in place. I’ve been working on stuccoing some walls: installing tarpaper and chicken wire, placing “weeps” and other esoteric stucco things I am learning about from watching YouTubes. I know nothing about stucco. After that, I’ll tackle those ugly sheds you see in the background. (They’re getting re-covered.)

Other

Had a great trip to Las Vegas, NM, again to see my brother: a wonderful town, home of Montezuma’s Castle, United World College, and The Hotel Castenada, a hotel from 1898 (closed for 70 years until 2019) where train travelers can still get off and have dinner on the patio.

So, things keep moving forward, mostly fun, occasionally scary, never boring.