On the Mesa

Nichols' primary objective in this short work of non-fiction is to describe (in intricate detail) a year in the life of a stock pond. He begins with its birth from a flash flood, and then chronicles the happenings throughout the year, including all the small species that live off the fleeting resource. The book is bursting with paeans to rodents, snakes, flies, lichens, manifold species of birds, coyotes, beetles, giant salamanders, etc, etc. Any lover of nature writing will revel in Nichols' skill in bringing this world to life; he executes Thoreau's injunction, and skillfully backs life into a corner and learns what it has to teach. Nichols' relationship with his environment is deep, and the work benefits from his long hours spent in quiet observation of it. The books is also a memoir describing a blossoming relationship with a woman and fellow-nature lover who also frequents the mesa, as well as the author's dealings with a local group of citizens fighting to save the mesa from encroachment. It is in these personal passages that we get the linear narrative, which helps bind together the nature passages. The book succeeds as description of mesa nature, as poetry of the southwest, as memoir of a writer/naturalist, as a chronicle of the loss of nature to development's unthinking rapacity. The chapters are short, on average 3-5 pages, and interspersed with photographs from the author. After reading On the Mesa, I was inspired to get outside (in the middle of winter) and touch noses with the non-human world.

Readers familiar with Nichol's other works might be surprised by On The Mesa. The book differs from anything he's published in the past and more nearly resembles the reflections of writers better known for non-fiction works than for fiction.On The Mesa is the story of one of the skirmishes in the long war over the encroachments of 'post-modern' civilization into Northern New Mexico. Those battles are usually portrayed best in fiction works because they constitute an epic. Bradford's books, Red Sky at Morning and So Far From Heaven are two of the first of this genre, followed by the several Milagro Beanfield novels by Nichols.On The Mesa lacks the penetrating humor readers find attractive in the fiction books by Nichols, but they'll probably be pleased by the reverence, the maturity of tone and the underlying sweet melancholy recognition of an inevitable loss in a noble fight to preserve a facet of the past.