MOON GAZER

This sidebar appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of New Mexico Resources, as an adjunct to the article "O Fair (Dry, Windy, Stormy) New Mexico".

During his earlier years, James Hogg of Quemado spent many nights looking up at the sky. Unlike astrologers who study the stars, Hogg was checking the moon for the weather forecast.

"When I was a kid, the Cherokees taught me how to predict the weather by the moon," says Hogg, whose mother also was Cherokee. "If the new moon turns up, it's going to rain because it's full of water that's going to slosh out. Of course, the Zuni predicted the opposite. They say it's not going to rain because it's empty. Neither of us did all that well at predicting the weather, but we had fun."

The 93-year-old rancher says one weather prediction was nearly always accurate. "If you predicted that it was going to be dry, you couldn't go wrong," he says.

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