Chapter 21
It had been a pretty exciting last several days in Albuquerque, but now things seemed to be settling down. Keith was putting in considerably more hours than usual helping Duke City Software get its new trading post web site contract off the ground. Both he and his mother were excited about their business prospects. They had recently landed a contract for web site expansion and maintenance with ALBUQUERQUE, THE MAGAZINE, a very trendy periodical that appealed to those moving to new forms of customer cultivation.
All the US Geological Survey field men were out and about getting their sampling stations in order for the arrival of the monsoons. They wouldn’t really be seeing each other until follow-on lab work started in the fall once the summer rains had stopped. Not seeing David Arthur Cabot Ward on a daily basis was a Godsend as far as Clark was concerned. There weren’t many people in this world that Clark didn’t care for, but ‘buddy Dave’ was certainly one of them and David seemed hell-bent to nurture that unfortunate relationship. Clark had confided in one of the older fellows at work about the problems he had getting along with David. Apparently everyone, but Clark, knew that David’s father had returned from the war with one of those military service combat syndromes and maintenance of the family rested on David’s shoulders. Why David had chosen to blame Clark for the misfortune was beyond Clark’s ken. His grampa had told him that folks by nature look to big-in-stature males as authority figures. His older co-worker had pondered that idea and replied, “I think that’s true, but, if David is blaming his disappointments in life to you by transference, I couldn’t say; I’m not a shrink.”
Sure enough, David had been assigned the lower Puerco station at Bernardo. He also had the Rio Salado south of there, the Rio Grande diversion channel at Isleta Pueblo, the Rio Salado at San Ysidro, and the Jemez Dam outlet channel.
The Jemez Dam reservoir rarely contained water so no recreation was allowed there. The dam gates were almost always wide open. The project was just upstream from the confluence of the Jemez with the Rio Grande and neighbored Santa Ana Pueblo land. At the dam overlook high on the south wall of the canyon, there was a perfect painter’s-eye view of El Cabezón off to the west. There are even picnic tables there, but the spot is relatively unknown – seemingly anachronistic. Some felt the entire project was built by the Corps of Engineers to placate the Santa Ana folks who needed jobs, but who made no bones about the fact that they didn’t appreciate visitors on their tribal lands. Besides, most of the Jemez run-off was used near the headwaters for irrigation. There was just no modern history of significant erosion. Much of the channel cut through igneous rock which was prime rattlesnake country. David was welcome to that station in Clark’s mind – it was appropriate restitution. There had been numerous reports of rattler sightings at the dam outlet by USGS field men.
The Rio Salado at San Ysidro was an up-river tributary of the Jemez. Just as there are two Rio Puercos, there are two Rio Salados in New Mexico. As various streams were being named by early travelers, it was primarily for navigation. Whether in English or in Spanish, a good descriptor was paramount; duplication after several day’s travel was not of that much significance. Puerco simply meant dirty or muddy. Salado simply meant salty. The mighty present-day Colorado River was categorized as a great or grand river too and was once depicted on English maps as the Grand River - hence the city of Grand Junction in Colorado, where the Gunnison River joins what was then known as the Grand River, now the Colorado. The same applies to the Grand Valley in Utah now watered by the Colorado. The canyon in Arizona first traversed by John Wesley Powell was the Grand River Canyon, but now is known as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River.
The Rio Salado at San Ysidro drains an interesting area of alkali, limestone, sandstone, and gypsum; it’s home to hoodoos and fossils, but very little water in its diminutive watershed.
Clark’s assignments included the Rio Galisteo, the Rio San Jose, and the middle Rio Puerco. The Galisteo provided his baptism under fire last summer. It drains a wide area to the east of the Rio Grande from the Dolores Hills south of Santa Fe and near Cerrillos around to the Ortiz and the San Pedro mountains – pretty much everything that doesn’t drain into the Estancia Basin (which, of course, has no outlet). The Galisteo runs across the base of La Bajada where the highway to Santa Fe gains over a thousand feet. The sampling station is next to a rickety bridge north of Domingo next to the BNSF railroad tracks. Clark watched that stream go from two feet deep to ten feet deep in less than a minute one August evening during violent rainstorms off to the east. He swears the wall of water coming downstream was louder than any engine he had ever heard on the nearby tracks. He was so impressed that he buried a sediment sample bottle at the high water mark on the far bank. It was still there the last time he checked.
The Rio San Jose was his favorite sampling station. It was at the far west end of Bernalillo County outside of a dying whitewashed bar, gas station, and post office known as Correo. The Arroyo Colorado joined the San Jose just up-river from the station. The two streams drained the area from Bluewater Lake in the Zunis, north to Mt. Taylor and south to the Malpais. The composite torrent carried a less intimidating flow and required a much smaller span for the cable car.
The field man would bolt his sampler reel to a steel plate on the front end of the cable car and secure the ‘fish’ to the wire on the reel. The fish had a hinged front end that permitted insertion of a sample bottle. When the hinged part was closed, it sealed the top of the sample bottle except for a quarter-inch diameter steel tube that allowed water to come into the bottle and a downstream exit hole that permitted air to escape the bottle as it was displaced by the incoming water. The rear end of the fish was finned for hydrodynamics so that the entire apparatus would point upstream. From the middle of the river, the operator would crank the fish down to the water surface and slowly lower the fish to the bottom of the stream and back up thereby ‘vertically integrating’ his sample to be representative of the entire depth of the water, being careful not to let it stir up silt at the bottom and being careful not to ruin the integrity of the sample by allowing the sample bottle to overfill. This was not rocket science, but nonetheless required a skill that was not always easy in coming. The fish would then be cranked back up to the cable car, the sample bottle removed and capped, and the pertinent data penciled on the etched portion of the sample bottle. When sampling after dark, a car battery and spot light from the supply locker would be placed on the floor of or affixed to a cable car railing respectively such that the operator could see any debris coming toward his line while in the midst of taking a sample. Getting the line caught in a floating tree limb could prove more than exciting. Wire cutters were part of the cable car supply and put in a small metal basket next to the reel for just such emergency action – it would be goodbye fish, but a welcome relief to a sudden panic as the cable car was being pulled downstream like a bowstring. Flotsam was always most critical on a rising flow, of course, before all new deadwood in the channel had been carried away. Clark says he got religion the night he saw a dead steer float right by his line. When the sampling was done, a cable puller, the simplest possible design of a ratchet wrench, was used to get back to shore. Then the gauge height would be posted on the sample bottle. The procedure was repeated every fifteen minutes until the flood had passed and the gauge height stabilized.
Downstream from the sampling station just about even with a railroad siding named Suwannee, the Rio San Jose carves out an impressive, yet seldom seen cataract as it cascades down a rocky outcropping on the edge of the Dough Mountain mesa before it joins the Puerco maybe fifteen miles downstream. The Correo to Los Lunas cut-off, NM-6, is the shortest route to the middle Puerco sampling station. Interestingly, this was Clark’s least favorite sampling station. The weir was part of the BNSF railroad bridge over the Puerco at that point and it had river-wide concrete steps to lower the elevation of the river without incurring erosion. This was the BNSF main line out of Belen with tra
ins passing with quite some frequency. The bridge was probably some three hundred feet long and had no room for pedestrian traffic. Clark was forced to look both ways for trains and hoof it out to the central pier rather quickly to be on the ladder down to the gauge culvert before the next train came along. The cable car, while upstream from the weir, was also his least favorite. It was longer and higher than any other in the system, the roar of floodwaters pouring over the weir steps was indeed deafening, and there was quicksand in the area impounded by the weir. Absolutely no one waded for samples here.