At least I’m getting out more now, ja?

The occasion was an informal impromptu get-together on the part of a few fellows who wanted to shoot their muzzleloaders and blow up things. This was to take place somewhere way up in the mountains and sounded like great fun. When I told my wife, she said she was happy for me. When I added that we were meeting first at the Taos Diner for a manly breakfast before heading out, she said, “Fuck you!” (Clarity of communication in a relationship is everything.) We men had a fine time, of course, and breakfast was delicious. [Duck!]

Here’s some of what went on:

Ka-boomin’ in the canyon

I’ll have more to say about that in another post, but I got to shoot a rifle and a pistol from the 1790s. The pistol was especially satisfying, just enough BOOM! and smoke and a punch like a solid handshake. My own firearms experience is quite minimal, although I probably killed at least one example of every species of small mammal, bird, or reptile that ever inhabited West Texas with my pellet gun before I was 14. The point is, I don’t know if one can safely extrapolate from this, but just having something like that pistol in my hand evokes a wish to hear it roar. That could explain a lot of history, or maybe not. We are mysterious creatures.

As I write, the house is in full sunshine and it’s snowing on the mountains just 10 miles away. You can see it as a whitish fog along the bottoms of the clouds rolling in from the northwest. They rake the ridges and leave a dusting. If they sink lower down, the whiteness thickens. The forecast low for tonight is 13 degrees, all the more reason why I’m so lucky to have discovered this yesterday on the way to kill a bunch of milk cartons:

Oh my soul

It turns out the the place we drove to is not only close to where I live, but the road we used to get there offers even deeper access to the mountains than I would have guessed. From the first half-mile on, I was in another space. Another field of being. That’s just how it is with me: I get stoned by wildness. It’s really why I came here. If you listen to the podcast mentioned in the preceding post, you’ll hear the same thing from a slightly different slant, but this is where the truth lies: I wanted to live in a place where Nature dominates man, and not the other way around.

We followed that river all the way up to a perfect meadow where we stopped. I lagged a bit behind so I could take pictures along the way or just go nuts. When I got out of the truck and looked around, I couldn’t believe how blue the sky was. The trees were much taller than I had seen in quite a while. Their tops were flexible and dancing in the wind like aquatic plants waving in the current, tall pines moving in an ocean of air. I wandered around, stupidly happy. This is how it’s supposed to be. This is what was given to us. We weren’t tossed out of the Garden of Eden, we fucking split, because we thought we knew better than God.

Since I started writing this, the clouds have come down like a big gray rug. It’s snowing across the valley, and I can’t even catch of glimpse of Taos or the mountains. This is just a taste. By the end of the week, we’ll have 70s again, and I know just which road I’ll be heading up slowly in the dusty old Ford.