There's nothing like living in the high desert to make you seriously appreciate rain. Worship might be a better word for the reverence we feel for wet stuff falling on our land. You'd be hard pressed to find a Big Bend country native complaining about a succession of foggy mornings and drizzly afternoons. (We CAN find something to do when our softball games and picnics get rained out.)  We always love a good rain.  Even a bad rain is okay by folks out here.  We brake for frogs and we invite mosquitoes inside for dinner. And that's how we, the citizenry of Far West Texas felt about rain before the recent wildfire burned a crispy thirteen by seventeen parched miles of home.

At the time of that June 4, 2008 fire, here in the Davis Mountains, where the rainfall should be the greatest, we'd measured a grand total of one-one-hundreth of an inch of moisture... that would be since October 2007. That record deluge apparently was meant to last us all year.

Then, a week to the day after that Hughes Ranch fire, rain-swollen clouds moved in to tease precipitation over the scorched and the unscorched alike. That first misting of rain worked an instant transformation on Jeff Davis County. Ranchers, previously known to their wives as "Bears" let forth with smiles over their coffee cups. In the narrow aisles of our local grocery, shoppers dropped their droughthy scowls long enough to visit awhile. Every conversation within a hundred miles inevitably began with "how much rain'd you get?" Ranch animals and wildlife perked up and started exploring territory beyond the troughs and feeders they'd come to depend on. I realized I might soon be able to leave home without worrying that home would burn up while I was gone.

With that first day's clouds came cooler weather. Chilly, even. We hiked that morning in drizzle. Jim and I imagined we saw green shoots pushing through brown clumps of dessicated, nutritionless grass. Still cognizant of the smoke I'd inhaled the week before, I felt like a band had been removed from my chest; I could breathe again. Birds must've felt that way too, because they sang these spontaneously outrageous songs that made us humans blush. We saw the first tarantula of the season.
 
Painting inside wasn't even an option. I gobbled down a breakfast bar, strapped on my easel and started hiking. I suspected this was to be one of those "it's the journey, not the destination" days. I had no idea what I meant to paint in such flat light, just that I wanted to paint something joyous before it (hopefully) rained me out.

I try to keep my plein air setup simple and compact. Regardless, at six thousand feet, I seldom get far with an easel full of pastel sticks strapped to my back. Breathless from following a narrow game trail uphill (why do I always choose the uphill route?), wishing I'd brought more coffee, I turned to look below me. Predictably, there was Blue Mountain, looking all shadowy and somewhat mystical. The neighborhood mountain specializes in shadowy and mystical. It's a great mountain to paint. But above Blue, a delayed sunrise spilled and glowed through those promised storm clouds. I had my subject, and it matched my mood. It took me a few minutes to find a place to set up where I wouldn't tumble down the mountainside every time I shifted my weight, a position straddling rocks after finding some that weren't too sharp to stand on. A hour or two later, when Jim and the dog finally located me—they kindly worry about both my safety and about whether I've run dry on coffee or tea— raindrops were falling on my head and I was happily packing up, finished painting in tow.

Just as those dreary, early clouds promised, that morning proved the start of our monsoon season—the beginning of the color green and a county full of smiling people.



MORNING'S PROMISE    4" X 8 " plein air pastel    by Lindy C Severns copyright 2008
              available at KIOWA GALLERY, Alpine, TexasAugust 2008  $475
 
Enjoy more scenes from the Davis Mountains and the Big Bend on my website
OLD SPANISH TRAIL STUDIO.COM  (Pack an umbrella.) 
                          Or shop the studio store for cards depicting Far West Texas landscapes