Most regions of the US have four seasons, or something approximating four. We in the desert southwest have five. The addition being "Fire Season". Admittedly, Fire Season could be folded into late spring and Early Summer, but it does have distinctive properties of its own, it's very hot, very dry, and very windy. In each of these the emphasis is on "very".

A few weeks ago we saw a long, low cloud on the eastern horizon just as the sun was coming up. Usually this kind of cloud is a ground hugging fog which, during the night, has settled onto the low plains. But the humidity was in the single digits so we knew it wasn't fog. When we got a whiff of it on the East breeze a few hours later we knew what were seeing was a wall of smoke from the fires near the Colorado border some one hundred a fifty miles north of us.

This morning a plume of smoke rose from the Pecos Wilderness northeast of our place, about thirty miles from us. Two years ago at the same time Los Alamos burned; we saw an immense column of smoke rising in the eastern sky like the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb. That was the Pecos fire and that one burned for weeks. We couldn't believe our eyes this morning when we saw yet another burn going on in the same area. Hard to understand what there could be left.

Awhile later we heard the drone of the four engine Forest Service fire bomber as it flew over our place on the way to do battle with this latest outbreak of flames.

Our state has not been as badly hit as Colorado yet. The weather reports each night begin with a map showing, not fronts, but fires in New Mexico. But Colorado! Colorado is burning this year the way we burned in 2000..and no rain now or on the way. No rain anywhere.

It was a 30 year drought that chased the Anasazi out of their marginal living spaces in the 14th Century. So far, this is the worst dry spell I remember in my time in the southwest. That would be about half a century.

Maybe this one isn't really the worst. Fact is, I've never had to really deal with the consequences before. During the last big dry spell I recall, I lived in the city and all it meant to me was that I didn't have to wash my car for a very long time because it was always dry and sunny. People who live in the cities of the West don't, for the most part, get it that this is serious stuff. For them there problems may boil down to the hassel of not watering a lawn every day or being urged to get low flow toilets. Now that I live on the land the story for me is a lot closer to home. Literally.

Our trees are stressed all around us, that means their needles are starting to turn brown on the pinon and juniper..and these are tough trees. Trees that know how to live in hard times. The fields are full of wild grasses that are brown and breaking off at the top of the root systems. There is no standing water anywhere and every river in the region is either at the lowest flow rate anyone can remember, or completely dry. Some of our neighbors are surrounded by Ponderosa Pine. In good times life among those giants is magical. Right now it is like living in a fire cracker forest. One dropped matchand you won't have time to run-for-your-life.

And everyday we pray for rain.

Some of the fires we are experiencing are lightning started. Maybe ten percent of them. The rest are human caused either by recklessness or stupidity, or worse case, on purpose. Forests and prairies and animals and houses are burning. These days it looks like a war here in the West.

Right now nobody is winning this one.

		CORPORATE SPONSORS Syndicated careers columnist Dr. Marty Nemko offers open public access to his archive of career advise: How Do I Become a Corporate Sponsor? COYOTE ARCHIVE Dick Prosapio aka, Coyote is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, ceremonialist, psycho- therapist (ret.), author, leader of men's experiential workshops, & Co-founder of The Foundation for Common Sense. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stanley, NM		by Dick Prosapio