Holler at the Squalor

When the snow and ice has been around so long, it doesn’t just melt. It rots. That’s a thing you know now.

It was a long, drawn-out week at Big Pink as another phase was entered in the writing of my latest novel, The Wrong Kind of Dead. Progress made on other fronts as well, namely, weight loss. With time, I hope to accumulate enough accomplishments to talk about either one in a separate post. 

On Sunday, I got enough photographs of the melt-off from the last couple of balmy days to complete a post I’d meant to do sometime last summer after a rain. Save for the slight washing out in the middle of some photos due to burn-in on my 10-year-old pocket camera’s lens, these shots turned out to be more representative of what I was going for.

What I was going for was maximum ugh. As in, “For Pete’s sake, Monte Vista, would it kill ya to put some drainage in?”

When even a small potato farming town like ours rocks that Big City aesthetic.

I like how the wheel rut makes a straight canal between the two bodies of water.

With the exception of the eye-bleach at the end, all of these photos are of alleyways in town. If I drove around I could get shots of the vast ponds swamping parking lots along U.S. 160. Parts of this high desert valley town look like the Louisiana bayou after a long summer rain or a winter melt-off. 

Mosquitoes obviously aren’t an issue in February where we are, but the water itself is. The nearby Rio Grande needs as much if not more than is taken out of it by the county. As part of the water rights agreement we’re bound to in our part of the wild, dry west, we have to put so many gallons of treated wastewater into the river each season for the benefit of farmers downstream.

Storm drainage systems don’t come cheap but water is far more dear. All this water left to make mud and slowly dry away into the atmosphere is money left on the table. It says much that after so many decades of agricultural expansion in a land given to drought, no one has bothered making better use of what little comes from the sky. Someone in Denver did make sure a law was passed prohibiting individual property owners from collecting runoff from their roofs, though, so there’s that.

Ah, well, as the ancient saying goes, whaddya gonna do?

Gotta love these lakefront view dumpsters.

We’ll gradually dry things up here, then apply the eye-bleach.

This is one of the worst alleys for water retention. Fortunately, the breeze was aimed this way today. The heck of this is the alley does have a storm drain behind where I’m standing. It’s just that the alley isn’t graded in that direction. It might look that way from this angle, but it’s not.

Remember movie drops? Pepperidge Farms is struggling.

I like the arrows here. Nothing a general sandblasting and a coat of paint won’t fix. Yeah, I wouldn’t want that bill, either.

Another perspective.

May the blessings of unobstructed sunlight shine upon your alley....

Honestly taken on this very same walk. Oh, you bet it stood out.

...and a well-accessorized cheeseburger await you at the end of your travels.

For all you cats out there.

All photographs Copyright 2020 © Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.