"Energy is eternal delight." -- William Blake (1793)
I call it my engineering aesthetic. But because of it, others call me an apostate. After all, what's natural is always better than what's artificial. So I have been told. I must respond, and I do. In rebuttal I insist that we humans are naturally makers, inventors, and builders. Just look at children supplied with finger paints, construction paper, and paste. In short, human nature is nature. But there's no use arguing any further. Suffice it to say there are particular products of human artifice delighting me. In such joy, I rest my case.
Prowling the western horizon with binoculars first suggested them, but these summer sightings were not yet definitive. That would wait for a clear winter's day, a western wind steadily blowing, and a willingness to shiver a bit watching from my third floor balcony.
Earlier this week, that day arrived.
Unintentionally, I caught sight of them. Out on my balcony I had merely sought to assess the weather and determine how I warmly I might dress. To my unaided eyes, they appeared to be white whiskers of winter frost. These whiskers seemed to sprout from land, desiccated and scrubby, stretching far, far beyond human habitation. I sought my Celestron 8 x 56 binoculars and looked again.
Holding the binoculars steady, I must have seen 15, or so, wind mills, winding the western wind, somersaulting slowly and steadily, twisting counterclockwise. Like pinwheels of childhood, spinning spryly in the spring breeze, they delight. Remembering, I smile still.
Actually, "wind turbines" is more correct. As later research revealed, these monumental three-bladed beasts can crank out 1.6 megawatts each! Megawatts! I would have guessed a few hundred kilowatts at most. They are not what they seem. Originally, I estimated them to be much smaller, and far closer. Yet my web searches using keywords "Albuquerque wind farms" turned up nothing. How could that be? Because their home, I discovered, the Red Mesa Wind Farm, is 48 miles due west. How then am I seeing them from that distance? Because each of them is 270 feet in diameter with a central hub 262 feet above the ground. Giants, graceful giants, 64 in total, turning in the breeze atop a mesa at an 8000 foot elevation. I lack the telephoto lens and tripod needed to photograph them. In lieu of that, I offer a satellite view of three of them.
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Satellite view (via Google Earth) of Red Mesa Wind Farm,
Cibola County, New Mexico, 35.261 N, 107.376 W.
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"But they kill birds." (So, too, do your cats.) "Not in my backyard! I might see them from my hot tub." (Heated how? By electricity? Generated how?)
We both agree, don't we, that the earth's climate is changing, and not in a good way? We need energy, as always, and new sources that do not put carbon into the air. Here then, in the distance, is a part of the answer. Were I a better writer I might more fully express what I see and what I feel: hope, elegance too, and a new spring, a rebirth of possibility. Percy Shelley expresses it well, in the closing words of his "Ode to the West Wind" --
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of prophecy! O Wind
If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
posted: 2019-12-09, last edited: 2019-12-09
This is a lovely piece, Paul. I first spotted these when I summited Mt. Taylor, after being absent from New Mexico for 17 years. There's a sign for the Red Mesa wind farm in the vicinity of Seyboyeta, NM, north of Laguna. In central New Mexico, there are large wind farms atop Mesa Jumanos and on the plains northwest of Encino, New Mexico. Thanks for sharing. “Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!” - Anonymous
ReplyDeleteThank you Anonymous for your comment, and snippet of poetry. To it, let me respond with words of P. Shelley: "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!" That spirit turns the blades at Red Mesa.
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