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Valley of the mountain link
The sign in Spanish serving as my column title caught my eye as I was driving through a place called Ojo Sarco yesterday. At first I'd only caught the "sin pinos" (without pines) portion and thought it must be someone selling firewood. You know, "Without this wood, no warmth," or something like that, just the sort of thing the locals might put up to sell you a cord or two. Since I was driving by myself and had no schedule, I turned around and cruised back by the sign a second time. When I could read the entire message, I knew it really meant, "WITHOUT PINE TREES, THERE IS NO WATER." Now that was different. And below it was a URL: www.sinpinos.org.

It isn't every day you see a URL hanging on a rusty fence in Ojo Sarco, I can guarantee you that. When I got home from my excursion (about which more later), I typed the letters in and found a simple, single-page Web site that jolted my memory about something I'd read last week and then forgotten. What we have here is essentially a one-man effort to get people to think about what's really going on and try to spread the truth. I'll fill in the blanks in just a second, and kudos to whoever's behind SinPinos.org for being so polite and forceful (you'll see), but I'd put it all another way, of course: something along the lines of how the same lying, fearmongering, b.s. that's so in vogue these days is now employed to steal the trees!

The disastrous wildfires of the last few years have stimulated a debate about how to manage the situation. Critics of the administration plan to save the forests have ridiculed it as a ploy to give the timber interests what they want, and I've seen little to refute that. Thinning of dangerous masses of underbrush and smaller trees is what we need, but what the companies are getting is open access to old-growth forests in exchange for token cleaning. It isn't right and everybody knows it, but hey, there's a war on (only not the one you're thinking of).

My country, 'tis of them
Here in New Mexico we also have a water problem. Climate change that isn't happening, to hear some tell it, may be spreading a decades-long drought across the Southwest. Snowfall in the mountains is well below normal this year ,and skiers are coming close to scraping bottom. Everyone is scared to death of an early fire season and the prospect of empty streambeds in the spring. The other day I read an article that said our water problem had to do with too many trees in the mountains... The snow is supposedly hanging up in the branches, where it melts and evaporates before it reaches the ground, haha. Can you see where this is going? Or rather, can you see where this is coming from? Quoting from SinPinos.org:

"The current 'wisdom' of the United States Forest Service is that too many pine trees prevent the snow from landing on the ground, so clearcuts and selective cuts can increase water yield as snow pack increases in the resultant forest openings.

However, a major problem with this scenario is that the absence of shade-producing pines actually accelerates the melting of snow pack due to direct sun exposure. The snow prematurely melts and rushes downstream to fill the dammed reservoirs, where the water can be gobbled up by big corporate users like Intel Corporation (which requires millions of gallons per day to manufacture computer chips)* and Las Campanas, the gated luxury community and golf course.** Meanwhile, the upstream users who have basic needs for water, like drinking and family agriculture, are left high and dry."

Read this Molly Ivins column to learn how closely government works with hard-right propagandists who equate environmentalists with Marxists (or worse). This is really happening, as radical a reversal of policy as I have ever seen. Last fall I read about the government defending toxic waste dumping by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Potomac River near Washington D.C. Conservationists had sued because the chemicals were killing fish, of course. The argument put forth by cynical Justice Department lawyers was that this was beneficial to the fish because it discouraged them from moving on downstream, where they were more likely to be caught by fishermen. They've tried this same "rationale" in other cases, in particular one involving migratory birds. Clearcutting the national forests in New Mexico to "let the snow land on the ground" (an insulting idiocy and perversion of science) is just as callous and deceitful, amounting to a resource grab that rewards a few campaign contributors and nothing more.

"Kill it, it's free!"
Microsoft, meanwhile, has a problem with open-source software. Mainly, open source is cheap or costs nothing at all, so how dare we use it? The spinners of Redmond have even declared the free sharing of code a a threat to everything that makes this country (Microsoft) great. Their latest ploy is to suggest that Microsoft will have to (a) sell software for less, which is actually bad because (b), the stock will come down, thus (c) endangering the nation's economy (?), not to mention (d), forcing retiring baby boomers to learn to love mobile homes and dogfood. A vaguely similar argument has been underway for some time now concerning digital copyright management. In the area of music, Hollywood says that if recording companies have to take a hit from all the CD-burning going on, there won't be as much cash to rain down on the little guys (supposedly), as if musicians ever got an even break from management. Well, I don't know about that. What I do know is that Apple prefers to leave enforcement of this kind of thing to individual conscience, and that's a better way to go than building awkward, crappy "features" into things that used to work just fine until we had a stupid law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

Free opinions, an endangered species if there ever was one, can come in for a slap upside the head as well. Take this email someone sent me in response to a sarcastic, critical article I posted about the Defense Department's cyber-warfare problems: "Hey I've got an idea. Let's all escape reality by retreating to New Mexico! " Aw, geez ... I guess he feels that anything we think we have to do to "protect" ourselves is brave and worth the pain and danger to our souls. I happen to differ. I think it takes more courage to push for openness and freedom. Putting billions into screwing up the Internet doesn't turn me on the way that using the same money and brains to grow the information highway would. Yes, we've done some clever things. The special forces already in Iraq, for example, are hacking into phones and telecommunications like it's going out of style, and maybe this will save some lives. My problem is that later, when the war is over, everyone will want to play with their new toys, and I have not an ounce of trust in anyone attracted to the service of our dear attorney general. Bah, humbug.

What we need is altruism, empathy, compassion, truth, and hope. Anyone can be a bully and a jerk. "Oh you poor naive S.O.B.!" Well sure, maybe. But what we're dealing with here is process, a continuum. If no one stakes down the other end, the whole thing caves in on itself, a big black hole of doom. I've never claimed to know everything, but I sure as hell won't claim to know NOTHING, and neither should you. That just leads to more and more secrecy and restrictions, loss of civil rights, declaring fish and trees and open source illegal, and then you have no choice at all. Microsoft or the highway, you might say. Shut up or disappear for good.

It's the trends you have to keep an eye on. Today, "digital copyright management," tomorrow, maybe only corporations will have any rights at all. War now, war later, how do we plan to stop? And so on and so forth. THAT's why I'm sitting here "escaped" and all in waterless New Mexico on a sixth of our old income, making a digital stink on the ole 8600. Speaking of which, AAAGHH! -- my built-in Zip just died! Damn thing permanently ruined four new Zip disks in a row before I figured out the trouble. Oh, I'm escaping from reality, all right. (Are we having fun yet?)

Oh heck, maybe I will :-)
There's a lot to like about "retreating to New Mexico," of course. If enough people buy my books, I might even fight my way into the black before the wife flips off & out and leaves me hitting on waitresses or writer groupies young enough to be my daughters (please don't tell me writers have no groupies). Assuming Plan A turns out to be a hit with God, I might arrange to spend some time each year in a place like this (below). Just imagine what it's like in spring and summer with the trees leafed out and no humidity, ahhh ... I mention that because those seasons only come in humid packages for most of us. This happens to be one of the few remaining mostly-normal mountain villages in New Mexico. I drove through here on the same day I took the other pictures on this page (2-9-03), and there wasn't a realtor's sign or California plate in sight. Not one! No trash along the roadside, either, which inversely says a lot about the state of things when people feel compelled to sell their heritage. The people in this valley don't, and it shows.

All right, enough of that. You don't care where I live or how it makes me feel, but there's something about the absence of crap in so-called "empty" forests and mountains that touches a certain neglected spot inside my soul. The resonance is vital, 'cause it tells me that I HAVE a freaking soul. I dunno, maybe you feel yours by visiting a deli or having breakfast with your kids. Truth is where you find it and being here has helped me find my version, which I'm letting grow inside, in case I'm off to Dingo-Land or Monkeyburg or who knows where someday. I'm not scared of anything except myself and that's not really brave, but I wish more people felt that way. After all, fear is for losers, and blamers are scaredy-cats. It's taken me an awfully damn long time to realize how the two things go together, I have to admit. Zipless and running on empty, then, I hereby dedicate the rest of this week to being crazy and free.

If anyone has a better idea, I'd like to hear about it, but under the circumstances, I'll bet you don't!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr is happy to hear your praises and complaint and reminds you that the last five editions may be the best ones yet.

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And don't forget the special photo-essay, "What It Is About El Rito," a very personal look at a very special place,. There's also info about some property for sale (not mine! :-) ...

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