As I draw near my umpteenth birthday, I like to joke about what I long considered the cruelest celebration of my special day.
As I was going from 12 to 13 at the end of my last year in Little League in Socorro, New Mexico, the coach was planning to take the team to an Albuquerque Dukes baseball game on my birthday.
That would be a great (the best) birthday yet.
Yet that wasn’t to be.
My folks had made plans to join another ancient couple (also in their 50s) for a get together and some fishing on Elephant Butte Reservoir.
My perfect birthday visions of endless Cokes and hot dogs watching the Dukes play was to be replaced by chunking rocks into the warm lake waters and pretending I was throwing someone out at first base.
I went to Google to pull up the photo of Elephant Butte to go with my column to demonstrate just how distraught I was.
As I looked at the photos of the lake and state park, I was distraught for a different reason.
The photos of Elephant Butte were shocking – just like all lakes in the south central and southwest U.S.
Elephant Butte was created as water storage/recreation reservoir
on the Rio Grande about halfway between Socorro and Las Cruces.
The website I went to for the photo indicated the reservoir was
at 6% capacity and probably would drop to 1% after this summer’s irrigation was complete.
Instead of a possibly amusing image from my boyhood past, I was looking at photos like Lake Mead or, closer to home, Travis and Buchanan.
I stopped at Truth or Consequences – the town nearest the reservoir - about 15 years ago, but it was what you’d expect of a reservoir in the middle of a desert.
Lines high above the water level, according to the information, showed the good times when the reservoir benefited from snow melt from the mountains where Ruidoso and Cloudcroft are to the east and above Albuquerque to the north.
I was headed for Colorado mountains and thought I would check in on a long-ago memory.
Instead I stumbled upon another state’s ravages from drought and searing heat.
Interesting that Elephant Butte Reservoir is considered part of Texas under the Rio Grande Compact, which governs water deliveries between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
The decades have wiped away my long-ago faux outrage of my scuttled minor league baseball game and replaced them with the grim visages of climate change.
