“hooligan” in the time of pandemic

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railroad track graffiti, Albuquerque’s North Valley off Vineyard

My current favorite word is “hooligan”.

It’s origins are murky, but the authors of the Oxford English Dictionary say it first appeared in newspaper stories in 1898, to whit:

1898   Daily News 8 Aug. 9/3   The constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves ‘Hooligans’.

The story behind its emergence is unclear. Again, per OED:

The word first appears in print in daily newspaper police – court reports in the summer of 1898. Several accounts of the rise of the word, purporting to be based on first-hand evidence, attribute it to a misunderstanding or perversion of Hooley or Hooley’s gang, but no positive confirmation of this has been discovered. The name Hooligan figured in a music-hall song of the eighteen-nineties, which described the doings of a rowdy Irish family, and a comic Irish character of the name appeared in a series of adventures in Funny Folks.

And so, from the beginning, it has carried a combined sense of thuggishness and rowdy comedy.

In the Time Before, my friend Scot and I had begun exploring combination train/bike expeditions for our weekly Sunday ride. Several involved meeting up at the Albuquerque depot and taking the train north, being deposited at various places up the Rio Grande Valley for a long ride home. As such, the train took us through the raggedy light industrialness of Albuquerque’s North Valley. The tracks are lined with the most remarkable graffiti, and every train trip through, I was reminded that I needed to find a way back in, to enjoy the space at leisure.

Train tracks are like alleys, corridors through a city largely forgotten except to their denizens. It’s where I find the best graffiti. But unless you’re on the train, they are largely impenetrable, fenced off save the intermittent street crossing. Impenetrable, that is, to all except the hooligans.

I was riding last week across the North Valley, trying find a new way to cross the tracks when I turned, not quite randomly, on a street called “Vineyard.” (I’ve been working with a couple of UNM Water Resources graduate students piecing together the history, nature, and structure of agriculture in the region, so Vineyard Road has been of interest for a while. In pieces, I’ve ridden the length of it. There are no vineyards remaining. This is what we mean by “#geographybybike”.)

Vineyard Road had the usual “No Outlet” sign. On the bike, I’ve learned to ignore them. Where cars cannot go, pedestrians often find their way. In this regard, Vineyard did not disappoint.

Where the street stubbed into the railroad tracks, the fence was cut, admitting me to the rich alleyworld of the railroad tracks. The hooligans, once again, did not disappoint.

the hooligans did not disappoint

 

Albuquerque’s Rio Grande Oxbow

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Rio Grande Oxbow and the city of Albuquerque, looking SE

Rio Grande Oxbow, 2020-04-09, by John Fleck

I was talking last week with one of my collaborators about the challenge of working. All the things that so fully occupied my time and brain seem so inconsequential right now.

I envy friends filling the quiet with productive work.

Me? I ride my bike.

In the Time Before (was it just two months ago?) my UNM friend and colleague Becky Bixby and I delightedly tromped around Albuquerque’s Rio Grande with Mary Harner, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska who’s leading a fabulously eclectic study of the Rio Grande and some other rivers.

I first met Mary 15 or 20 years ago, when she was a PhD student at the University of New Mexico doing Rio Grande bosque ecology. She’d done some neat work back then using repeat aerial imagery to look at how the river system had changed. The new work is in some sense a return to that.

Mary and her Nebraska collaborator Emma Brinley Buckley have been in and out of Albuquerque for several years studying our Rio Grande with fresh eyes. Combining science with digital storytelling, they’ve been trying to make sense of the changes our river has undergone over the last century.

On their last few visits, they’ve been zeroing in on the stretch of river through the heart of Albuquerque, collecting old aerial maps and photographs. Emma’s done some nice repeat photography (see example here), and we spent a fruitful day in January poring over orthorectified aerial images over time.

the Rio Grande “oxbow”

One in particular drew our attention – an area along the west side of the river for which Mary and her colleagues had found two images taken in 1959, one in the early spring and one in fall. It included a place we call “the oxbow” – an old cutoff meander at the base of a long, steep bluff along the river’s western margin.

In Life on the Mississippi, one of my pandemic reading diversions, Mark Twain offered a marvelous explanation of how such cutoffs form when a river decides to straighten out a sinuous bend – “the water cleaves the banks away like a knife”.

“There is something fascinating about science,” Twain wrote. “One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” So have Mary, Becky, and I been reaping returns on the facts of Mary’s aerial photos. In 1959 it seems not to have been a river straightening a sinuous bend, but rather humans directing heavy equipment to straighten the Rio Grande here, to more efficiently deliver water downstream during drought. You can see the cutoff happen in the before and after 1959 pictures.

Those of us who work and play on and around Albuquerque’s Rio Grande have long wrestled with this central fact – a river that once meandered a flood plain, straightened and channelized in the 1950s, turning it from river into water delivery ditch. Mary’s aerial photos electrified me when I first saw them, a snapshot in time capturing that central fact.

If you look closely at my picture at the top of the post, you can see a line of “jetty jacks”, metal structures installed that summer of 1959 to help stabilize the river’s flood plain. They show up in the second of Mary’s 1959 images, and they remain today. The oxbow itself also remains, the only sizable swampy bit along this stretch of river.

Neighborhoods have encroached on the bluff above it, save one piece of protected city open space park and one undeveloped parcel that is the subject of intense politics right now. Well, which was the subject of intense politics in the Time Before. Hard to know what new home development looks like in the Time After, if there is such a thing.

As I said at the outset, I’ve not been able to focus on the deep work that used to so fill my mind. We’re keeping the UNM Water Resources Program’s trains running, and I’m struggling mightily to figure out how to teach students who I can talk to face to face. But that’s about all the brain share I have right now.

So I ride my bike, to the bluff above the oxbow, and take pictures for Mary and Emma, who can’t be here.

Bud Light empties in the time of pandemic

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Cabezon Peak, a bike, and a Bud Light can. Photo by Kevin Carns

My friend and former student Kevin Carns is a truly gifted Bud Light can photographer. Cabezon Peak, the bike, the can – a compositional masterpiece.

Some years ago when we were out riding, my friend Scot pointed out that the empties we saw a long the roadside were almost invariably Bud Lights. So we began documenting them. The resulting Twitter photo essay is but a sampling. If we stopped to photograph every single one, we’d rarely get past the first few miles of a ride.

While it has been suggested that it would be a service to pick them up after photographing, that would conflict with the prime directive of Bud Light can photography – do not touch the Bud Light can. Plus how would I carry them? I’m on a bike!

Over time, friends have begun sharing their own Bud Light cans, which I’ve happily added to the growing Twitter thread. We’ve seen them from as far away as Jeff Kightlinger’s entry from Oxford, Mississippi.

Cabezon Peak is a landmark here, an old volcanic neck out along the Rio Puerco west of Albuquerque, so largely statuesque that you can see if from many miles away if the angle’s right. Kevin seemed surprised when I suggested the above was my favorite of the genre –  “any semblance of masterpiece is by pure accident, it was the end of a long ride and I snapped a quick pic.”

The humility of a truly gifted Bud Light can photographer.

Water flowing in the Colorado River Delta

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water flowing at Laguna Grande, March 2 2020

UNM Water Resources Program student Annalise Porter tipped me off to this, from Audubon’s Jennifer Pitt:

 

Jennifer took the picture in early March at the Laguna Grande restoration site along the Colorado River in Mexico after a pouring rain. With a crazy wet March down there, water’s been flowing off of the normally arid landscape into the old river channel, which is dry mostly all the time. This isn’t a managed environmental flow release along the lines of what we saw in spring 2014 – it just rained!

Working with University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students this spring modeling the Lower Colorado, we’ve been watching the impact of the wet weather north of the border. Blythe, for example, had its second wettest March in records going back 70 years – here’s an updated version of the graph we “discussed” in class this week:

Blythe’s wet March 2020

As a result the Palo Verde Irrigation District, for example only diverted 38,000 acre feet of water from the Colorado in March, a bit more than half of what it took in March a year ago. Imperial Irrigation District’s March diversions this year were about two-thirds of what it took last year.

Buried in the Bureau of Reclamation data on flows in this stretch of the river is a remarkable amount of runoff from wetted lands into the river, which is what Jennifer said is happening in Mexico. When it rains, ag water demand goes down, environmental flows go up. As Jennifer said, in the midst of the bleak and uncertain, this is a nice thing to see.

I Miss My Students

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When I emerged from my office at home after recording my first university lecture of the pandemic era, Lissa told me I’d been using my radio voice.

As a young journalist – before newspapers, before books, before my crazy new career as a university professor – I did radio. It’s been nearly forty years, but even now when I slip into a public communication mode, I drop into what Lissa calls my “radio voice”. So without thinking, sitting at a computer in my home office talking to students disembodied in both time and space, I went there.

So OK, I guess that’s the way I’ll have to think of this task. I’m doing radio.

But I still hate it.

I am super sad.

I miss my students.

tacos in the time of pandemic

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Westward Ho

In retrospect, the red taco truck represents the moment it all changed.

a red taco truck

Taco truck, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 2020

It was parked along Central, old Route 66, on Albuquerque’s west side. My friend Scot and I, out for our Sunday bike ride, had been debating the wisdom of our usual bike ride brunch – tacos from one of our local market food counters.

We discussed best risk reduction practices. Maybe one of us should go in and get the tacos, to eat outside? Maybe we should skip the tacos entirely?

From the vantage point of our world circa March 15, 2020, skipping tacos was inconceivable.

And then, like an apparition, the fire engine red La Pichorrita appeared by the side of the road, a clump of cars pulled over helter skelter around it.

Our Sunday ride is always the high point of my week – hours of often aimless rambling, both in route, and conversation. There is time to double back to be sure we’ve covered everything – again, both in route, and conversation. On this particular Sunday it seemed desperately important to engage in idle conversation and idle wandering.

a poor substitute for tacos

This stretch of West Central is not exactly scenic in conventional terms – old Route 66 motels (the “French Quarter” across the street from where we got our tacos, and the wonderfully named “Westward Ho” just down the way). But it’s Albuquerque in a way that we love.

Our discussion after pulling over to the taco truck seems, from today’s vantage point, a vast ten days later, quaint. One of us would order, while the other stayed back, away from the other people also waiting for their tacos. All stood awkwardly, or waited in their cars, as the first responders of barbacoa made our brunch. We took our tacos and sat on a concrete curb in front of a Penske truck rental place. They were delicious.

The ride that day went on forever, down South Valley ditchbanks until we could ride south no more. We didn’t want to turn around.

I’m still riding every day. It remains a mental health anchor. But that was the last ride with Scot for a while, and the last ride with tacos.

On my desperate trip to the supermarket to stock up (we all did that in those early days, didn’t we?) I stood impatiently in the breakfast bar aisle, hurriedly looking at labels to see which bars could serve as a pocketable caloric substitute for tacos.

I am now the owner of several months’ supply of peanut butter and dark chocolate chewy protein bars. They’ll do, but I refuse to learn to enjoy them.

 

 

Stream gaging in the time of pandemic, Episode II

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From the comments, DG elaborates on the task of stream gaging

And I can see our intrepid hydrotech out on a walkway at the ‘gage’ (thanks for that), laptop in hand. He’s cabled up to a Data Logger dumping the collected data that had accumulated since his last visit to the site some 4 to 6 weeks ago. He also checks the calibration of a Shaft Encoder a Pressure Probe or Bubbler. Any of these sensing elements needing some form of recalibration (they all drift to some degree). It’s windy and cold on the walkway but that doesn’t hinder our technician. As the log dumps into the laptop, he checks the site battery and the solar panel for the ever present bird droppings that accumulate on such an appealing perch. He mutters to himself that he’s sure glad that the avian flu is not his enemy this time around. Oh my? What is this? The mice have gotten back inside of the gage and have left their calling cards behind. The Gager rememberers a few years back about warnings of the Plague and the mice. Every Field Tech in the Southwest had heard about that and kept mice out of their beloved gages. He quickly gets a mask on, sprays over the soiled area and cleans the area to where it’s cleaner than an operating room. The mask, his gloves and soiled towels sealed tightly in a plastic bag.

Of course he muses to himself that working alone at this remote gage is the ideal example of Social Distancing. Nobody comes out to the gage on a cold and windy day. He would be in more peril back in the office next to hydrotech Johnson who is currently wheezing away…