Post Doc Landavazo

One of my tenth grade students digs science. Not only does he want to get the highest academic degree possible, he wants to be called Post Doc. Right now. When he walks into our classroom, Post Doc whips out his clip on tie and clips it to his Dallas Cowboys jersey. "I take this class seriously," he told me. Post Doc Landavazo wants to know:

What is the pH of a booger?
Do you drink wine?
Do you go on dates?
What kind of dates do you like?
So if I swallowed one of these pH tablets, what would happen?
Is that math teacher lady your best friend?
What would you do if I mixed up all the soil samples so that our data was ruined?
Who would win in a fight, chemistry or physics?
Who was the last person you punched?
Do you like scientists better than other people?
Have you ever been in love with a scientist?
Who would win in a fight, a scientist or a mathematician?
Who's the smartest person you know?
What will you do when I'm a famous scientist?

Riverbank

The Zuni River flows behind my house and school. That's a half truth. The Zuni River bed flows behind my house and school. In the riverbed, you can see fallen cattails and reeds arching in the direction storm water flows.

Freight Train

November 2009
People say that up to 100 trains a day drive through Gallup. This summer, two friends lived on the second floor of a run down motel across the street from the train tracks. They'd sit on their windowsill to feel the breeze off I-40, Route 66, Santa Fe Railroad air while we talked, but all conversation halted when the trains went by. The train station, where Clare sidled up to the warm walls, is a maze of geometric shadows. Good thing she wore polka dots.

The Origin

Tuesday was the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species. I told my students that if they could memorize the last paragraph of the book, I'd buy them their own copy. "Wait," one conniving student asked. "How about a copy of The Origin and an order of chili cheese fries from Express?"

You Are There

"It was a clear steel blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I've never had the chance for a You-Are-There read of Moby Dick (reading Moby Dick while on rough water in a ship in the Northeast, I mean), but reading Moby Dick while perched on top of a stone toadstool in the Bisti Badlands gave me a similar feeling of terror - or joy - the feeling is mixed. The Bisti Badlands has a lot of nothing. No plants. No animals. No trails. No people. Just a lot of sun and rocks. I climbed through a narrow slot between shaley hills till I finally got hold of some solid rock and climbed through to perch on top and behold the whole world.

It's not the fine shale that draws us, not even the colors of the hills or the odd shapes of the more redblooded rocks which haven't weathered away. Instead it's the exotic, knowing that you could quite easily be lost and never found, the sheer isolation. If I had pulled up in my little four wheeled chitty and seen John the Baptist emerging from the hills in animal skins and munching on locusts and honey, the only question I'd need answered is where in the Bisti he found locusts.

ezekiel cried dem dry bones

Observation

photo from autumn 2006

Hi, I'll be your server today. What'll it be? Limestone coves which enfold you as you slip hidden into a crease of green leaves? Or a wide open space with dust for goats to kick and people who are almost as worn as their old pick up trucks? Perhaps you'd like a long drive to cleanse your palette.

An old man told me I have eyes the size of dinnerplates.