By Nellie Curtiss …
A new family has landed in the Valley. I spotted them out the window –while pushing onward, in a 40 miles per gallon Chevy. I was flying down the highway on a mission to find some broccoli and sunflower seeds when my eyes caught their movements. Two regal parents are watching over a stick threaded nest and eyeing human gawkers at the edge of the fence—below their nest.
The mother and father are dressed in their black and white feathered suits: white heads and black wings that stretch and lift even while their claws cling to the three limbs. They look like the American Eagle on a piece of green found in denim pockets throughout the continent. One black and white parent swoops down then away from the long barren trunk and branches that house their nest fattened with their early brood. The other parent dips her beak about her home, straightening the twigs, placing her feathers over the eggs; her instinct commands her to incubate and she knows that mothering is key.
Somewhere across the wind-swept farmer’s land, where once two quarter horses nudged the sandy ground foraging against the heat and icy air, the American icon parent who set himself up as a decoy and a saboteur’s meal slowly treks back to the thorn-like tree where his family grows and warms in the chilly fogs that embrace every lung swell.
Indeed, a new family beckons us to appreciate our world like the edicts in Genesis and words written on tablets,
digital and stone bound. We are bound over as if our world is given over for hydraulic “fracking” of fossil fuels instead of harnessing wind and saturated solar cells.
A new family is lifting its wings over the San Luis Valley like creatures on the precipice or gods watching from clouds. Their feathered presence speaks volumes about our water stewardships and land rights in question for all eternity. Even an Alaskan Trooper in rounding up villains on the tundra finds a glacier’s spit (or outcropping) like a sword, evidence in the unruly extinguishing of earth’s very lifeblood and beasts of the wildwood. In the presence of our heritage, God fearing, and God sidestepping equally, we are witnesses of global changes: changes that bring out oglers and status-quo cheerleaders; changes that migrate the seasonal flocks and natural habitats and increase coastal tides with the disappearing ice caps and polar bears.
In the future, a new family might be moving into the Valley and bringing the memory of lives that were once in an oxygen rich atmosphere; but are now timidly living on the crux of carbon dioxide poisons. For our families’ sakes, we say, we dig out holes without a conscience around what still harms our world, mother earth, the third planet from the sun. We can still embrace renewable energies from the sun and wind, eat broccoli and sunflower seeds, and cherish the bee’s hive and honeycombs.
— Nelda Curtiss is a retired college educator and long-time local columnist. Reach her at columnsbynellie.com or email her at columnsbynellie@gmail.com
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Local cattails habitat located in the Monte Vista Wildlife Refuge. By Nelda Curtiss
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