Wetlands and History

We finally made it out to the Santa Fe Botanic Garden's Leonora Curtis Wetland Preserve, just south of Santa Fe on Sunday. It was a beautiful day and we had the best excuse for going there because of an end of season potluck lunch for garden volunteers. The preserve is 32 acres and is bounded in part by a living history museum, Rancho de las Golondrinas. The preserve features a unique wetland fed by water hundreds of years old that has seeped down from the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It surfaces here forming a marshy area and a pond dug out many years ago. The pond water is used occassionally by the ranch to run its old mills I gather. In the photos the yellow tree is a cottonwood surrounded by the grey of Russian olive trees.

I also attended an interesting lecture this weekend by a curator from the American History Museum on the unsettling of the continent - comparing histories of Jamestown, VA, Quebec, and Santa Fe. These are three of the earliest capitals of England, France and Spain in North America. The talk focused on the relationship between the settlers and the Indians in the three areas and why the different motivations of the colonists led to much different relationships with the natives. The end result of the near extermination of the Native American populations in each area may have been the same, but it was much more extreme in Jamestown where settlers wanted land to farm and had little interest in trading with the Indians or in intermarrying with them (with some exceptions in all cases of course).

Moving forward in time, on Saturday night there was a showing of films made during the New Deal. If this series comes to your town, definitely make a point of going to see it. It featured 5 films made by exceptional cinematographers (most were directed or narrated by Pare Lorentz) with scores by Aaron Copeland and Virgil Thompson. The Plow that Broke the Plains is a scathing and heartbreaking film about what led to the Dustbowl. The River rather glorified the construction of dams for the TVA project, but also talked about why the floods of the 1930s were so bad. There was also a film about the National Recovery Program's initiatives for African Americans and a very funny, patriotic film about the National Recovery Act that had the audience all singing "The Road is Open Again". The films were shown in the gorgeous Lensic theatre in downtown Santa Fe. This was the first time I'd gotten to go to something there because every program they have seems to sell out way in advance!