Month: July 2016

no big thing. just maybe interesting.

/ greg stene / 2 Comments

What kind of bugs are doing this damage to our sunflowers? I’m misleading you. It’s birds. Sparrow-like yellowbellies. They land on the “branch” of the leaf no further out than the leaf head. Any further and the leaf would break away. And they slam their beaks into the leaves at that point to get the small caterpillars there, ripping that small section of the leaf away, leaving holes or enlarging them. That’s why all the damage is up at the top of the leaf, and none below. I watched this. Never seen anything like it. Please, don’t ever call me Natureboy.

ghost town II.

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Tucson. No, you’re somewhere else this very early morning. The sun scratches at your eyes through your closed lids, and you lift your stunned sleep-grogged head from the steering wheel and discover you’re outside Ira’s Bar in Nara Visa, New Mexico. Fear and disorientation take hold because you don’t remember getting here. You live 650 miles away. Just a ways down the road, relatively speaking, in terms of the vast open spaces of the great Southwest. Distances aren’t so great here. So, take a deep breath, reach over and turn the key, fire up that engine, turn the heater on to wear large holes in the blanket of the cold of dawn clinging to you, and head Southwest for those short 650 miles and stop a little ways down the road, when you reach Tucson, Arizona. It’s going to be okay, there.

ghost town I.

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Tucson… From there, it’s only about 650 hard miles NE across dry desert and mean hills to Nara Visa, NM (pop. about 112). Nara Visa is only about 100 miles from Tucumcari, NM, which was made famous by Lowell George, founder of Little Feat, in a tune about a hard-driving trucker who’d driven to “Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah,” and was willing … to keep moving if you gave him enough weed, whites, and wine.. Nara Visa missed being in that song and becoming famous by being right next to Tucumcari,(you know … Tucson to Tucumcari and Nara Visa, Tehachipi to Tonopah) which it wasn’t “right by” by 100 miles. Just missed all that fame by a couple inches on a map, like most of us. This shot is of the SW wall of Ira’s Bar in the center of Nara Visa. Ira’s Bar is closed. Sadness. We will never be able to gather there and hoist a few. It would be so cool if we all did. We’d number more than the people of the town. We’d be our own mobile township.