If you’d been here today, you might disagree: it was gusting at up to 60 mph and raising clouds of dust, just another early spring day in el Norte.
It was also too damned cold, and the dumpster blew over, but that’s not the kind of air I mean. Usually, in the absence of a fierce west wind raising dust off the dry lower lands between here and the gorge, the stuff is clean.
Now, a person can hear that and think he understands, but most of us don’t know from “clean” when it comes to air. Back in Maryland, the air out on the Eastern Shore looked clean enough, aside from the ever-present humidity haze and the pollution plume from Baltimore hanging low across the bay. We lived miles out in the country, surrounded by woods and corn fields. Flocks of Canada geese would settle in nearby in the fall. It looked idyllic. But I could wash my car, leave it out overnight, and in the morning wipe fine black greasy powder off the windshield. “Soot” from somewhere… a million cars? Power plants? Ohio?? Every day, for 25 years, I lived in a supposed rural paradise and breathed this stuff. But once we came out here, the change was dramatic.
Beautiful air from a couple of days ago
I’ve described it before, and I’ll try to again: breathing CLEAN cool, dry, air (emphasis on the clean) is like a tonic. It energizes and sustains. What’s more, it’s as if the air has flavor — not the flavor of what’s on the wind, but the taste of oxygen itself. I’m perfectly serious. It’s a somatic thrill. Your lungs become sensory organs. There is simply nothing like it in the world, or rather there is: this is how the whole world should be. This is our birthright, the natural condition of the atmosphere before we trashed it.
If you want to get the full treatment, head out to Valle Vidal or some similar place up in the mountains where the population density is much, much less than the county’s already Gobi Desert average of 14 people per square mile. There the air is like a food. Your nostrils open wide, your chest expands, you take it into your body, and it gives you sustenance. It does lots more than that: it also makes you high. That’s right, it gets you off, even in town. Just stand for a moment on a chilly morning in a sunny patio and breathe in deeply… DAMN, brothers and sisters!
This puts you in touch with original Nature. With God, if you will. And if you wake up here, it’s free.
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You lucky bastard. We’ve still god waist-high drifts of the white stuff in our yard and temperatures can’t seem to make it above freezing. Wet snow fell again yesterday and the skies were pewter-gray from dawn to dusk. Dull, damp and cold. At times like these I long for the glare of the sun and the choking dust of the never-ending West Texas wind. Supposedly it was the wind that drove newly arrived Easterners half-crazy. One of those pioneer ladies wrote a book about the hardships she had endured (which included Comanche raids, drouth and near starvation). However, the title she gave the book named the thing she hated most – “The Wind”. Personally, I’d give away this glacier for some of that wind.
So how many mini sand dunes have piled up in the windowsills, John? A true testament to Spring! One thing that makes the air so sublime in NM is that it’s DRY! One deep breath and it finds its way into every bronchiole. I lived in Texas for a while and I swear taking a deep breath of that humid summer air was like inhaling a bucket of water. I never got used to it.