Albuquerque’s South Valley, September 2026.

I took advantage of the break between Storm 2 and Storm 3 to wander the South Valley this morning. It was a great ride – lots of ditch banks, some weird urbanity (the Walmart parking lot where Frank Hubbell’s farm used to be, read our book to learn about the failed tobacco farming empire of the 1920s that followed Hubbell’s clever sale of the old swampland), a couple of crossings of an actual flowing river (unusual for recent months in Albuquerque) and lovely cool green.

I’ve been burnin’ pretty hot the last month-plus – ushering a new book into the world, teaching (teaching for me is an all in thing), and trying to make sense of a year that by all measures of the policy and personal world I inhabit (water) has been an agonizing outlier. This has been a tough summer and fall. The Rio Grande was dry through my city for three months before Storm 1 and Storm 2 made their appearance two weeks ago. I am reminded of the chaos caused by Thing 1 and Thing 2 in The Cat in the Hat. Trouble! And yet you couldn’t help but love them.

I’m off to Santa Fe tomorrow to talk yet again about stuff in our new book, this time to a room full of lawyers who think about Tribal Water Law. I’ll tell ’em things about Pueblo land and water sovereignty a hundred years ago, which as I said we wrote about in our new book. Ima take the train, no way I’m driving in this. We’re under a flood watch again tomorrow as we await Storm 3, enmeshed with the squishy remnants of hurricane Polo and more record PWAT. Bad things are likely to happen – remember Thing 1 and Thing 2 trying to fly kites in the house? That was so dumb and hilarious!

Clearly Dr. Seuss remains one of my seminal literary influences. And I love the neighborhood kids with their “Dry Gulch Pass” sign. Despite the agonies of 2026, the South Valley remained gently green and seems not to have lost its sense of humor.