God rest ye merry, gentle reptiles
By Zach Hively
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Dogs and humans evolved together. We learned, genetically speaking, to complement each other and share a deeply meaningful symbiosis, as well as food. Never is this relationship more apparent in my house than during lizard season.

I, being the man of the house, am disposed by my DNA to lift my feet off the floor and climb onto the tallest available furnishing whenever any small, quick, crawly creature enters the picture. This is not a reflection of my bravery. Rather, it is a reflection of each and every one of my ancestors. They all—ALL—survived long enough to procreate, largely because they evaded mice and cockroaches underfoot, plus every other creature comprising less than 0.1% of their total body mass.
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These ancestors o’ mine were able to ensure their bloodline would continue precisely because they had dogs whose own evolutionary conditioning taught them to go ballistic at the mere distant rumbling of a UPS truck. And also at the sight of a lizard

You see, after one of our intense monsoon rains, Ryzhik and I went on a walk. Ryzhik was on leash, because he would chase a string of lizards from here well into California. I stepped on some relatively solid mud, and then I stepped into quicksand. I sank right up to my knees.

I’ve watched just enough cartoons to know that this was a critical moment in my own survival. I could have sent Ryzhik for help, like Lassie or other mythical dogs. But he already had a lizard in a bush in his tractor beam. “Ryzhik,” I said. “I need you not to pull me for a minute. I’m stuck.”
And what did he do? He released the lizard from his mind and came to my side. Not all the way, fortunately; he is smarter than I am, smart enough to stay out of quicksand. He did not once impede my desperate attempts at de-suctioning my legs and my shoes from the muck. He seemed, in fact, quite concerned for my wellbeing, because I had not yet fed him breakfast.
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This, though—this is why dogs and humans have forged such a perfect partnership. Without Ryzhik, what would I do? Chase my own lizards? Not likely. Once I get out of this mud, I’m climbing up on a countertop, and I’m staying there.

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By Zach Hively

​For the rain keeping things cool.

If there’s one thing that defines being New Mexican in the United States, it might well be this: We know we are special, while at the same time we feel indescribably inferior to other places. Maybe it’s because we’re not widely known as superlatively anything, or big-league in any way but the nuclear ones.

(It’s fitting that our most major sports team is a joke from The Simpsons. We’re a Triple-A state in a lot of ways to a lot of people. [I don’t think so, but they do.])
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I remember being a kid and talking with this other kid, from Phoenix, about how hot it gets. He bragged that you can fry an egg on the sidewalk in Phoenix. I hated that Phoenix was hotter than Albuquerque, where I lived. We only occasionally kissed 100°F, usually sitting squarely in the nineties, maybe even the eighties. I don’t really remember, except that A HUNDRED was a really impressive threshold that meant, somehow, we had made the big time. It wasn’t 120° or anything, but it was the upper echelon of hotness, and we might taste it for a brief moment in July before the monsoons rolled in.

This is the sixth June that I’ve been back in New Mexico. With ten days to go—fingers crossed—it will be the first one not to hit a hundred at my house. Every other one has, and not just sporadically, but long enough, consistently enough, for a newsworthy Isotopes winning streak.
Climate patterns take place on a long-term scale. One good June doesn’t give me much hope. But I still welcome it—along with its welcome rains.

For this season of reprieve—long live temps in the eighties!—I offer a sage poem.

Images Courtesy of Jessica Rath
​By Jessica Rath

Isn’t it glorious to live close by a beautiful river? If you grew up here and lived here all your life, the Chama River sustained and nurtured you and for someone like me, who lived in big cities for most of her life, the river was a blessing and a friend. I love everything about it, the different sounds it makes, the various shades of blue and brown and grey, all the different critters one meets when one sits close by for a while and silently watches. I never knew there were so many different kinds of ducks! Buffleheads, mergansers, various teals, mallards, shovelers – they often came by, with cute babies in tow.
 
And the fireflies! There’s hardly anything more magical than blinking, dancing fireflies at the river’s edge on a dark night. An unforgettable sight.
 
When I did some research about the Tsama Pueblo, I finally learned where the name of the river came from. The Tewa people who lived in this region for hundreds of years before the Spanish settlers arrived had a different name for the river: they called it P’op’įgeh, which means “River-red-place” in Tewa. It’s an almost startling sight if you’ve never seen it. During monsoon time, when the water comes down in buckets, the river really turns red. But why is it called “Chama” now? Well, the Tewa called their pueblo Tsámaʔ ówîngeh, which means “Wrestling Pueblo Village”. It was right near the river, one of the many small villages in the area.  By the 1600s, the Tewa had slowly moved away into larger settlements, and the Spanish settlers had slowly moved in. Over time, the name for the pueblo became the name for the river; maybe  Tsáma (which became Chama) was easier to pronounce than P’op’įgeh for the new residents of the area. 

​Last year, the river was extraordinarily full. You remember that the dam of the reservoir further upstream, El Vado Lake, needed to be repaired, and all the water had to be drained. For a while, Abiquiu Lake’s bridges and picnic tables were under water, and the Chama was just wild. The image below was taken in May of 2023 while the one underneath is taken from the same spot in 2017.

​And below the dam, the river can flow so quietly that it acts like a mirror. The cliffs, trees, rock formations, the clouds and the sky – everything is perfectly reflected.

Even after I didn’t live right next to the river anymore, I’d often go on hikes that would take me near the Chama. Maybe it’s just negative air ions (NAIs), but I feel better when I’m close to the river, and I’m grateful for this beneficial gift.
 
That’s why I was rather shocked when I read that the environmental advocacy organization American Rivers, which has worked for over 50 years to protect and restore rivers throughout the U.S., declared the rivers of New Mexico America’s most endangered rivers of 2024. Not a specific river or a stretch of a river, but every river in our state. Clean drinking water, irrigation, fish and wildlife habitat, rivers, streams, and wetlands are threatened because they lost federal protection. A U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2023,  Sacket vs. Environmental Protection Agency, ruled that  “only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water 'forming geographic[al] features' that are described in ordinary parlance as 'streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes' “[1] would fall under the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction.

​This leaves New Mexico’s waters particularly vulnerable, because the state has such a large percentage of intermittent and ephemeral streams (96% of New Mexico’s streams according to the New Mexico Environment Department), as well as closed basins. Many streams run through arroyos, but only during the rainy season or for some time after snowmelt: they’re intermittent or ephemeral.

[1] SACKETT v. EPA

​20% of land area of the state are closed or endorheic basins, which means they don’t flow into other bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but drain internally. All these waterways have lost their protection and are in danger of pollution.

So far, New Mexico doesn’t have its own surface water permitting program, one of only three U.S. states without one.  Wastewater treatment plants, mines, industrial sites, development projects, etc. needed to get permits under the  federal Clean Water Act, but the Supreme Court decision stripped the protection for small streams and wetlands, leaving them vulnerable.
 
“These rulings fly in the face of established science and ignore the value that small streams and wetlands have to their broader watersheds, communities, and economies, particularly in places with dry climates like New Mexico,” according to American Rivers.
 
“The Clean Water Act was established in 1972 as a promise to communities across the country that we recognize the critical importance of clean water. The Sackett decision flies in the face of that promise,” said Tricia Snyder, rivers and waters program director for New Mexico Wild.[1]
 
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state legislature are beginning to implement a comprehensive state permitting program that will protect all of the state’s rivers, streams, and wetlands, including those that are still protected by the EPA. $7.6 million have already been allocated to the program. This will make sure that critical wildlife habitat, as well as water sources for drinking water, irrigation, and recreation opportunities, will be secured for future residents of New Mexico, human and non-human. It’s extremely urgent to implement such a program, and so far, progress has been slow. So far, there’s not enough staff and not enough money. According to the Progressive Magazine, the program that is needed would require between $43 million and $54 million annually. In January, the state legislature approved the Land of Enchantment Legacy Fund, and in May the government released its new Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan, which intends to strengthen water infrastructure, supply systems, and treatment facilities.
 
Water quality is an extremely serious problem. If we want the Rio Chama to nurture many future generations, we need policies that can be implemented really soon.

[1] One Year Post-Sackett

By Zach Hively

Be human: Procrastinate with me!

A disturbing thing happened to me. I was procrastinating by appearing, to myself, to be busy and productive. I do this by checking email.

I know—because I read it in a book, which for me is another powerful justification for not actually working—that the most efficient relationship I could have with my inbox would be to check it at a set time once a day and deal with all important correspondence at that time.
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This limitation reduces the sense of urgency that colleagues, marketers, and other robots imbue their emails with. After all, nothing truly urgent gets communicated in an email. That’s what tagging me in a post is for.

You can’t tell me that letter-writing is anything more than Victorian procrastination.

Yet the problem with being so efficient with the inbox strategy is that it leaves one with all this available time to fill, and nothing much to fill it with—except the truly fulfilling work that one needs (for a variety of deep and unresolved psychological reasons) to keep punting to a distant future that I haven’t finished earning for myself, alright?

So I have gotten terribly, wonderfully efficient at pretending that I will check email only once a day. I have gone so far as to relocate my email app to the second screen on my phone. Actually, though, I check it much more often, such as every time I think of it, and many times when I don’t. It just happens. It’s involuntary. Like sneezing, or finishing a tube of off-brand potato chips when in reality I just got up for a glass of water.

Now, I do not generally do anything with the emails when I check them. They sit there, filling my screen until I get enough new emails to bump them off the screen and out of my life for good. Sometimes I will open one and click “unsubscribe,” under the guise of preventing myself untold hundreds of future emails. For this, I applaud myself. If there is no “unsubscribe” button, I simply reply “unsubscribe,” which has greatly reduced the use of my inbox as a form of social interaction.

But for the most part, the emails just keep piling on, increasing my anxiety for all the not-yet-done things still to do, making me feel like I must be Very Important Indeed. Such people do not—cannot!—waste time on things with a risk of failure, things like creating art, or learning new skills, or making friends. We do not have, as Very Important Indeed people say, the bandwidth for that.

Which is where the disturbing thing that happened to me comes into play. I am ostensibly, if you have not yet noticed, a writer. I write things. Mostly on deadline, or not at all. But emails—emails provide such a reprieve from the pressures of productively writing things because they are writing-adjacent. We writers, who (based on our anxiety levels) are Very Important Indeed, can rest very late at night with the comfort of having written something during the day.

Then my inbox changed on me. I opened some email or other, fully intending to type “unsubscribe” my own damn self so I could sleep that night, when the compose window popped up another window proposing my very own AI Assistant that would, it claimed, craft responses for me.

Maybe this does not disturb you. Maybe you dread crafting your own responses. Maybe you’re one of those early adopters who use new technological breakthroughs when the emphasis is still on “break.”

I will own up to being a late adopter. I treat technology a lot like dogs in this way: I like to adopt one who has worked out enough glitches to pee outside reliably rather than in.

A gift, signed to my dogs, by New Mexico artist Ralph Sanders.

So, no, I am not the AI Assistant target audience. I am, however, powerfully offended. Why would I, a self-appointed writer, want to replace myself? I mean, okay, I genuinely do want to replace myself most of the time. But I want to replace myself with other human writers—ones better than I am, if I can afford them, which I can’t, because I’m a writer. Writers need the work, dammit. And we need all the help we can get.

Right now, all around us, marketers and other robots think just because they are robots that they can trust other robots to do all the work for them. In some ways, I get it. Let’s hire robots to talk to other robots and free up the humans to get really freaking uncomfortable with all their free time. So uncomfortable that we have no choice but to make art and other creative things, because it’s either that or talk to each other.

I just don’t trust that’s how it’s going. So far, every breakthrough that promises more time, like automated dishwashers and motorcars and the ability to play podcasts at 1.5x, simply demands that we humans get more productive with that time. We’re squeezed dry.

This, I believe, is my increasingly-resolved psychological reason for procrastination: I am not a machine, even when I act like one.
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So I’ll keep typing “unsubscribe” myself, thank you very much. It’s a small thing, but I think that human touch will mean something to the robot on the other end. Something disturbing, I hope.