Eric Schwennesen: Mustard -- five feet high.

This piece of Arizona got a winter this year, literally. On New Year's Eve a soft white cloud descended from the heavens and blanketed everything from Albuquerque to Phoenix. It stayed for a day or two, putting a lid on this whole country the likes of which we can't even remember seeing before.

People these days are battered by continual news reporting calculated to keep us alarmed: whenever possible, words are used to describe events in lurid, unsettling terms. But our soft white cloud was just that; a gentle quilt of silence and calm among the crags of our mountains. Elsewhere, radio reports told stories of closed highways, blocked traffic, threatening cold; we just had a brief quiet spell with a lid over our existence.

And then it floated away, leaving a cloudless blue sky and a very different landscape from our usual scene: still recognizable, but all done in white. This was the first time in many years that the word "winter" actually had anything to show for the name.

That was the beginning of a four-month dance with Spring that has only now faded away. The snow melted slowly; the land soaked up the moisture that in the past lasted hours rather than weeks. The arroyos, barren for more than a decade, began to run trickles of water; the trickles fed the main channels; the Creek grew in volume and once again we heard the sound of rushing water as we slept.

Desert landscapes usually look lifeless. It takes a snowpack, not a torrential rain, to bring out the cautious seedlings; enough slow melt to replenish the subsoil and encourage hidden seeds to finally take that chance and come forth. And they did; tourist companies across the continent shouted out the news of a wildflower season like no other: Mexican Goldenpoppies and Lupines created dazzling carpets, even on the most barren gray flanks of our mountains. 

Anywhere level ground could be found, wild mustard, improbably called London Rocket, took over, creating a glossy green floor so bright the livestock were wary to step on it; they stood in the sunshine, staring, as if unable to believe what they were seeing. Gradually they learned that it was also good forage; but so much of it that in a month hardly a sign of grazing could be seen. It kept growing. It filled our corrals so that it was hard to tell if cattle were in or not. Around the house it was given free rein; far be it for us to suppress such exuberant life after a decade and more of empty erosion pavement!

And it kept growing...   Once or twice before we had seen a brief shadow of a Spring, a few short days of mustard green before the sun withered it. This time we watched a groundswell of plant vitality in action; you could almost hear the plants growing; and over weeks we gradually sank into a sea of unruly vegetation that began to obscure the lower limbs of our fruit trees. 

Today the "weeds" have finally exhausted themselves; but Jean's trip out to the clothesline demands battling through dense mustard stands, in places more than five feet high.

Eric Schwennesen is a commercial beef rancher in the Mogollon Rim country. He grew up in Belgium, cowboyed in Nevada, and helped Navajos and many African peoples with rangeland conflicts for over 35 years. He recently published "The Field Journals: Adventures in Pastoralism" about his experiences.