SNOWSCREEN: Chapter IV "Critics cry fowl over runaway rooster"

Plus a snowpack check-in for Dec. 1

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❄️ Snowpack Checkup ☃️

Happy first day of meteorological winter! It seems like a good time for a routine check-up on the status of the snowpack Water Year 2024, which is two months old already. The diagnosis? Let’s just say there’s some bad news and some good news.

The Bad News: The Upper Colorado River Basin, which is where most of the water for some 40 million people comes from, has suffered one of its slowest starts to a water year — snowpack-wise — in over a decade. Makes you kinda wonder about the feds’ decision to ease up on coaxing states to further cut water consumption from the river and its tributaries.

While snow levels vary from place to place in the sprawling Colorado River watershed, pretty much every sub-basin, from the Animas-San Miguel-Dolores to the Yampa-White-Little Snake, has lower-than-median snow levels — even after the bountiful Thanksgiving weekend storm that hit much of the region. The Upper Rio Grande Basin is experiencing a similar dearth of snow, so far.

Interestingly, the same snow drought seems to be plaguing most of the West. Idaho’s Salmon River basin has less than half the normal snow water equivalent for this time of year, and the snow cover in the Flathead, Bitterroot, and Upper Clark Fork in Montana is similarly thin. Only in the southern Southwest — the Gila and Salt River Basins in Arizona and the Lower Rio Grande in New Mexico — are things near or even above normal.

And then there’s Alaska, which has been getting positively hammered with precipitation as of late. In Wrangell, some three inches of rain atop already-saturated soil resulted in a landslide that killed at least four people; scientists are attributing the excessive rainfall to climate change. While much of that is coming down as rain, there’s also some big snows: The Wrangell Mountains have received nearly twice the median snowfall for this date.

The Good News: The water year is still young and there is plenty of time for the snow situation to turn around. In fact, the last time things were this dire was the 2007-2008 winter, which followed almost exactly the same near-snowless pattern of this October and November, and then in early December all snow broke loose from the clouds and it ended up being one of the biggest winters in a long time (that much of the West is under a winter weather advisory as I write this bodes well). Oh, and this is an El Niño winter, which typically means more snowfall in the Southwest, and that pattern doesn’t usually manifest itself until January, so there’s something to look forward to.

R.I.P. John Nichols, the author of the Milagro Beanfield War, who died this week at the age of 83 at his home in Taos. It’s a good time to go back and read Erin Halcomb’s wonderful little profile of Nichols for High Country News from 2007. Then go back and re-read Nichols’ books.

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SNOWSCREEN: Chapter IV "Critics cry fowl over runaway rooster"

Read the previous chapters

As Matt Jaramillo led Malcolm and Eliza through Silverton’s streets to his apartment, where Malcolm would be staying, they played an uncanny version of the used-to-be game. It was uncanny because nearly every used-to-be statement from Eliza or Malcolm was followed up by a still-is statement from Jaramillo.

“Jack Todeschi used to live there,” Malcolm said, pointing to a freshly painted Victorian house. 

“Still does,” Jaramillo replied matter-of-factly, not bothering to explain how a guy who must have been in his early 90s two decades ago was still kicking. 

Variations of the exchange kept repeating, much to Malcom’s befuddlement. The one exception was when Malcolm or Eliza would say something relating to the former cost of a piece of property or rent they paid for a place. In those instances Jaramillo would simply chuckle in disbelief. And then there was the bizarro revelation that Blake Conway was now the sheriff and Ed Antonis was the county judge; Brautigan and Santos had shared many an illicit substance with those two in the day, and now they were overseeing law and order? Oofta.  

The whole thing served to bolster Malcolm’s sense that something had gone askew with the universe back in June, when Eliza’s husband and Malcolm’s friend Peter had been buried and presumably killed when an old uranium mine in southeastern Utah caved in. From that moment on Malcolm had felt as if time had been warped somehow, or at least his own sense of time had been altered, perhaps by the explosion (if that’s what it was), perhaps by the psychoactive alkaloids in the datura flower he had ingested.

So it was that he nearly fell down when they turned into the alley behind Town Hall and rounded another bend into a walkway leading straight to Eliza’s old apartment and Eliza and Malcolm’s former love nest, when they were lovers, that is.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Eliza said. “You live here? Malcolm’s going to be staying here?!” 

“Uhhhh, yeah. Is there a problem?”

“No, it’s just that … I … er, we, used to live here.”

“Well, I guess you still do, sort of.” 

As they were working this all out in their heads a nasally call — something about the story of the century — came from the alley, prompting our trio to swivel around. It was, of all people, Betsy Abzug: a local gadfly who had moved to town back when Malcolm was running the Dandelion Times. She used to be a bit of a pain in the newspaper editor’s ass and, judging by Jaramillo’s nearly audible eye roll, still was. 

“Oh,” Betsy said, her own dark brown eyes growing wide. “Malcolm? Eliza? What are you doing here?”

“Hey, Betsy. Long time … we’re, uh, I’m filling in for Matt for a little while so he can take some time off for once.” 

At this, Betsy smiled a smile that conjured up certain memories of a certain unsavory evening in the Avon’s walk in cooler that involved copious quantities of liquor, several cans of whipped cream, a case of frozen beef patties, a box of American cheese singles, and, well, one Betsy Abzug and one Malcolm Brautigan in flagrante delicto. Though the scandalous event had occurred more than two decades ago, and was not repeated, it remained indelibly stained on Malcolm’s memory.