TUMBLEWEED BY TONY TEDESCHI
🎶
It never rains. It never snows. That God-damned 🎶 wind just blows and blows.
From late winter to the onset of summer, the wind blows out of the west across the eastern New Mexico plateau with such force it lifts the red dirt of the bone-dry land into great red clouds, disheveled thunderstorms laden with grit instead of water, chasing vanquished armies of rolling tumbleweed, racing in all directions to escape the onslaught. Windows in the houses are locked down tight, even sealed with masking tape, but to little effect, as tiny red dunes form on windowsills in a mockery of any wet rags, which would turn them to crimson-colored mud. The red dust whistles beneath garage doors, collects on engine blocks in automobiles, creeps beneath the coverings of outdoor grills, dusts the green leaves of any garden plants, which survive the wind’s fury.
My first reaction, of course, was visceral. She was the incarnation of a ‘60s chick, in a place where you’d least expect to find her: the eastern New Mexico/west Texas plateau. Here, the only skyscrapers were mostly oil rigs and some grain silos; the music was not Big Brother and the Holding Company. Nonetheless, she was a reminder of the braless chicks back in Greenwich Village, who were just into their more aggressive, feminist-expression stages when I’d been forced to leave to go fight a war on the Indochina Peninsula, where, honestly, I really didn’t have any argument with anyone and certainly not
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