Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

On Facing Down Rattlesnakes With a Machete

My task was to prepare and mount three 125 watt solar panels in advance of converting my water supply to solar power. I had to move: in a typical manifestation of a fascinating cultural Type B Phenomenon I call New Mexico Standard Time (NMST), it took literally six months to get the widely-recognized honest well digger Jimmy O to the Funky Butte Ranch. I had a window of one day. It was like planning a Bar Mitzvah.

The panels were heavy, to say the least, and buried under a deep layer of tools and goat alfalfa hay in the FBR barn. I had to haul them about 300 yards to the windmill, where they’d be mounted about 20 feet above the well itself, right on the decommissioned windmill.

As with anything in life, attitude is everything. Instead of whining about the long-term effects of the weight on my skeletal system now that I was essentially a self-employed Porter, it occurred to me in a moment of self-reliant bliss that hauling and positioning a solar panel is an absolutely totemic experience — I was carrying my power, my philosophy, my politics and in many ways the manifestation of my spirituality.

It was all causing me to write a lot of poetry. When I was supposed to be writing my book.

But solar power is in every second of your life in Southwest New Mexico, even when you’d rather it weren’t. For instance, where you put the bananas in the truck matters, if you want them solid when you get home.

This phenomenon, which we can perhaps call Rapid Ripening Syndrome (RRS), is of course getting worse in this era of climate change. Now, I personally experience climate change every time I stick my head out the door: on the beetle killed spruce in the Black Range that feeds my creek. In the proliferation of the woodpeckers who eat those beetles. In the crazy, now-annual Worst Ever Drought Followed By Worst Ever Flood cycle.

But then, I’ve only been visiting this area for 12 years and living here for a year and a half. That’s where my older generation Latino farmer neighbors frighten me. Without invective, these non-environmentalists, to a one (Willy Ortiz, Ruben Montoya, Hank Rodriguez), don’t tell me climate change is changing everything in their crops and orchards. The tell me it already HAS changed everything.

“There hasn’t been a normal rainy season for ten years,” the grey haired acequia elder Mr. Montoya told me when I interviewed him for a radio piece. It’s just not the same ecosystem in Southwest New Mexico that it was 40 years ago. Which might be for the best, since the supermarkets in Silver City and Deming stopped buying local Mimbres Valley apples when all the chains got the McSame California supply in the 1970s. Though neighbors of mine like Sharlene, Frankie and Kate have helped us battle back to local living and eating in the past year with a weekly local farmer’s market right here in our remote, obscure valley.

Rural folks come out of the woodwork to sell their produce by the basket. And this year I plan on being a producer, first with eggs, then with goat milk, cheese and yogurt, all in exchange for things like the Tastiest Apples I’ve Ever Experienced – pre-branded heirloom varieties of golden delicious-like apples that are somehow both firmer and sweeter than what you get even in crunchy markets.

I was actually preparing for two solar installations at the FBR: one this month and one in April. The first one would allow me to pump water from my delicious Mimbres watershed well care of nothing but the sun’s power. It was because of his honesty and efficiency that Jimmy O was so busy. He and his son TJ to made it to the Funky Butte Ranch for that project, of course, in the first of spring’s Insane Wind Storms, which made hanging off a 20 foot high windmill while strapping on solar panels a scary experience (too bad you can’t SEE wind in the photos below, but maybe you can sense the fear in my posture. Probably gusts up to 60 MPH. Or, you know, 20. It was more than breezy. Even my professional helpers were concerned about it.)

And where we placed the array absolutely mattered – in that way it served the same purpose and import as the Mayan priest/architects deciding to position the temple/pyramid so the sacred chamber was illuminated on the summer solstice. (Which sacredness is why I had to do a little rationalization to get my mind straight on why it was OK that I immediately filled my panels with alfalfa hay before installation. There was no place to store it but the barn.) Only the Mayans didn’t have the “crib sheet” of a solar pathfinder that my solar electrician CW is always bringing over (more on CW when we do our April installation which, if all goes well, will convert nearly the entire Ranch to solar power). It’s this cool laminated sundial that you secure to a tripod and it tells you where the sun will shine at that spot on any day of the year.

And it is a satisfying, surprisingly ancient feeling to have my solar panels situated in the Right Place, the way all those old Mayan, Celtic and East Island monoliths are astronomically on-the-money – sunlight beaming in making a serpent shape in the sacred chamber only at high noon on Solstice, for instance. Which only furthers my theory that at least one CW or Jimmy O appears for every culture size larger than 10,000. Which is a corollary of my belief that if my genes had appeared in tribal times there’s be nothing but thatched huts, at best, as the dominant architecture in Paris and San Francisco to this day.

So we slapped the pump in the ground, the panels in the ether, and instantly I had guiltless water pumped up thanks to the sun. And a Danish solar pump.

Idealism and wind storms aside, when a day later (a day with no wind, of course) I tried to check the 500 gallon storage tank I was de-rusting via the 500 gallon rinse method. I got warned away by the biggest and nastiest and only rattlesnake I’ve ever seen.

For a week I was afraid to climb the hill to the tank. Then I took to approaching the tank tentatively in my chainsawing chaps and helmet and armed with a machete. Finally I started throwing a barrage of pre-emptive artillery rocks at the old metal tank area as I climbed the hill. I never saw the rattlesnake again, but I made some interesting dents to my water storage source.

For weeks any sound quieter than a ROAT engine sounded to me like a rattlesnake.

I needed to regularly check on the tank so often because I hadn’t yet installed the auto shut off “float” valve that engages when the holding tank is full. If I wasn’t vigilant in manually shutting off the sun-powered pump, the overflow would provide, for instance, a great riparian ecosystem for hungry and frisky rattlesnakes. If you’ve never heard an agitated, horny rattlesnake yell at you (with maraca accompaniment) on a spring morning, let me tell you, try not to. It’s the scariest sound I’ve ever heard, not counting a Bill O’Reilly monologue.

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