New Orleans One of ACORN’s organizers from the Alps/Rhone region of France, running from the fires towards his annual holiday, was in Leeds, England the other day visiting the ACORN staff there. They took him out on the doors. The Yorkshire accent was challenging, he reported to me on Zoom. He wasn’t sure he understood a word. Being from the mountainous region of France, he was looking for mountains in England, so was heading to the Lake District, where they were rumored to exist. Being from the western US, I scoffed at the notion of mountains anywhere in England. On another conversation days later with Scotland, I queried the organizer about English mountains and with disdain was told, not there, but Scotland has mountains.
Later that evening I sat on the porch of a cabin in the Ozark Mountains in northwest Arkansas. These are old mountains, worn down by time and erosion, unlike the hard, sharp-faced Rockies, but mountains nonetheless. It had been hot and dry much of the week, interspersed with two cool days ranging from the upper 50s to the mid-70s, providing fuel for bragging in calls to family, blistering in heat and humidity on the home front in New Orleans. We had seen young deer daily even at midday, having come down to the creek for a drink, but we were finally getting some much-needed rain. Intermittently, the sun would break through the storm clouds casting a glow across the field with mist and fog rising in the valleys. Over my shoulder to the east, a rainbow predictably appeared.
During the week, we had never seen so many hummingbirds. Mi companera had made the birds a major project. We now had nine feeders hanging about and sometimes as many as six hummingbirds feeding at the same time, when they weren’t chasing themselves from feeder to dogwood to oak to mimosa to pine, red cedar and back again. I heard their wings buzzing madly from before dawn to dark in their feeding frenzy.
Weather in the mountains constantly changes, but that’s true in the bayous as well. The temperature was sometimes the same, when we looked. The difference was the humidity, as Orleanians often note, it’s never really about the heat. We could sit on the deck to eat, read, phone, and enjoy a cup of coffee, worrying only about sunburn, if we stopped paying attention, but none of the buzzing came from mosquitos. Walking in the woods, ticks substituted as a concern instead.
Living along the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast bayous and wetlands is special, but it’s hard to beat the mountains as well. Part of it might have been listening to The Vast Enterprise, a new book on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It seemed like years since I had been to Wyoming or Montana. Chaco and I camped in the San Juans in Colorado during the pandemic, but that was in the rearview mirror now as well. The Ozarks are a good reminder, but it’s time to see the deserts and mountains of the great American West again, before Trump turns all the public land into data centers, oil wells, and rock mining.
Join me!