That last post on politics was an aberration, exactly what I’m struggling to avoid, and is no more. Back to nature, then, where more silence is probably required.

Last night we had dinner with an older couple (yes, older than I am), people of very limited means, who somehow own a piece of land way up in a canyon with a long pond and a roaring stream. There were FROGS croaking as the sun went down, muskrats swimming to and fro, and a pair of wild ducks, I kid you not, all this in a freaking desert with snow-capped mountains in the distance. I haven’t heard frogs — pond frogs, not tree frogs — for years, maybe decades. It stirred something very deep inside me that I was meant to feel. By that I mean that the experience was so strong, I took it as a message.

This very morning outside the back door

Afterwards I thought about the place. The house is terrible by normal standards: all owner-constructed and nothing built to code, outlaw plumbing and electricity, a drafty, dusty, limited, hipster hovel of a home, though filled with beautiful, special things and blessed with lots of windows. Tended with more love than technical competence, to be sure, but serviceable. Now, it’s more than possible to live that way, and I have. There can be great satisfaction in taking care of yourself outside the rules, but money can be a problem. The conditions sometimes encountered raise deep ancestral fears of deprivation in my wife, who would rather stroll on sidewalks instead of mud, but she’s an elemental nature goddess in her heart. I know she feels the pull of living in a beautiful, spiritual, natural setting. That can transmute pain that comes from living on the edge, as I know it does with our hosts. When I stand outside in a place like that, it’s like stepping out of a dream.

With me, it’s always been the land. I care about a house, but the land it sits on is far more relevant. When I picked up the paper today to look at the classifieds, I realized I would never pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a featureless rectangle of dirt just because it has a house on it. N-E-V-E-R! I wouldn’t rent that kind of home, either. Where I differ from our friends is that I don’t see anything wrong with having pros put in the plumbing, so to speak, and we all deserve a break. Considering my wife’s piano studio needs, our next place is likely to be pretty modern.

I got the message yesterday, however. And now, back to contemplation of what this means…

[hiss...]

I do like to eat a fine, juicy hamburger — why do we call them that, anyway? — preferably with cheese, while sitting at the Taos Diner eying the waitresses, north county hippies, Indians, and crazy people. Such a comforting milieu.

But what about the cows?

Eerie in the afternoon

It’s something in the eyes, especially the black one on the right. Sometimes I think about them, standing there or lying in the crap at night when it gets down to 20 degrees. They just do whatever we tell them (so to speak), and then we eat them. I’m sure if I figured this all out, I’d have to be a vegetarian.

Next lifetime, perhaps.

The area where we live was once made up entirely of family compounds — you wouldn’t exactly call them farms — and to some extent still is. Livestock would be corraled here and but herded elsewhere in the neighborhood, like up on the mesa or down in pastures in the valley. It looks sort of like a little Vermont over that way. Well, a dry Vermont, but there is a river, trees, and green pastures with grazing horses and cows. You could come to Taos as a tourist for years without ever knowing such scenes existed, but there they be.

There’s just something about a cow

This fine specimen and a couple of dozen others are currently domiciled about 200 yards away in a corral just over the top of the hill from here. Most of the year, that corral is empty, but then on a few occasions and without warning, suddenly it’s full. They must drive the animals in from somewhere close by, which would be a sight to see, but I’ve never been there when it happens. We do see a neighbor on a horse herding a flock of sheep every once in a while, and that’s pretty cool. So far, I’ve never encountered the animals on the road and had my camera at the same time. I do like living in a place where I might have to stop to let sheep and goats go by. And for now, we have the cows.

Boy, do I have a lot of cow stories. We can start with this one, an excerpt from an old column for MacAddict, of all things, called “Spanish Cows.” The setting is San Cristobal, New Mexico, sometime in May, 2000.

“Those are THE cows,” his landlady explained.

He’d wondered about them, the small herd of a dozen or so rough-edged beasts he saw nearly every day. They were not quite like any others he’d ever seen, with their thick, curly, dust-colored hair, “nappy” as she described them, and their nasty-looking horns. They usually hung out just behind the rusty wire fence on the south side of the dirt road leading up the valley. Every evening a woman came down the hill with a bale of hay in a wheelbarrow and heaved their dinner into the near end of the narrow little pasture. The ground here was bare except for cowflops and a few rusty pieces of machinery — an old truck axle, a wheel or two, and three-fourths of a dead tractor. But the cows didn’t seem to mind.

“They’re descendents of the original herd brought over by the first Spanish settlers,” she continued. “An old breed they’ve kept going all this time.” Well, no wonder! That accounted for the scruffy, wild, yet tired look these bovines had. THE cows indeed. (The much larger bulls lived next door in an adjacent pasture and sometimes got loose. Once he’d encountered a rhino-sized good ole boy blocking the road and was glad to be in the truck instead of his Nissan two-seater!)

Hmm. Take a look at these. A couple of them bear a resemblance to the above.

A couple of days ago I noticed a neighbor of mine, “Joe,” carrying old tires up the muddy road. Now that was interesting, taking them to the road instead of away, so I hiked up the driveway in the melting goo to see what was going on. What he’d been doing was remarkable.

Whenever a vehicle churns its way through the mud, the tracks make a sort of channel for the runoff. This is great as far as it goes, but as soon as someone else comes through, the impromptu ditch gets blocked again. In order to keep the water off as much to one side as possible, Joe had taken a shovel to the most promising water-carrying ruts and brought them together, channeling the bulk of the water down the west side of the road. The tires were a stroke of genius, as he was laying them out so drivers wouldn’t wreck the drainage system.

Upper Llano diversion canal

We’re coping pretty well now, except that neither the newspaper girl nor the garbage truck driver are willing to risk coming this far up the road. It’s a lot better, too, thanks to the New Mexico sun and the efforts of a couple of stalwart volunteers. Yup. When Joe was gone, I suited up and hit the mudworks myself. In fact, I’ve spent the last two afternoons playing in the mud. Today I even did some grading with the hoe, knocking the ridges back down into the ruts and breaking up the clay, so it will dry faster.

How I’m draining the driveway

Oh, it’s a grand thing. Now if only the neighbors on the lower part of the road would do their part — but they’re terrorized by the devil dog!

The most universally ignored law in these parts — and that’s a BIG category — would probably be the one requiring dogs to be tagged and kept confined. One such unvaccinated, free-roaming miscreant lives somewhere in the vicinity of the muddiest curve between us and the good road. Her “owner,” if that’s the proper term, has another dog that stays eternally chained in a bare circle of dirt in front of the house and barks when you walk by. The devil dog, however, barks incessantly, and she’s never confined. Here’s a picture of the beast stalking me a few days ago:

Welcome to the real New Mexico

Because the newspaper delivery girl is afraid to hump her Honda through the slop, she puts the paper, securely tied inside a plastic bag, beside a stop sign about 100 feet from where the above photo was taken. My wife gets up early, while the mud is still frozen, and walks down the road — past the devil dog — to retrieve it. At least she did, the first couple of times. For four straight days now the dog has gotten to the wrapped newspaper first and carried it off. Joe told me that he put his muddy work boots outside the door to his trailer, and the animal stole those as well!

“I know the girl who lives there,” he said. “She works at Wal-Mart. I’m gonna go tell her she owes me a new pair of shoes…

No, that’s not a new band!

This will never make sense without an understanding of how this house is put together (or isn’t), and I don’t know exactly what I could do to give you a picture. It’s just so weird.

But the southwest side of the old adobe is a semi-modern (35 years old) addition consisting of the kitchen and bathroom. This portion of the house is built with concrete blocks, stuccoed over with cement in the kitchen. In the, uh, bathroom, we’d have an utterly bare concrete block outerwall, except for the fact that rough boards are loosely “hung” down in front of it, so that there’s a mysterious black widow spider space where humans stick their hands between the actual wall and the would-be decorative boards. The salient point is that there could be a passageway for something small in there. And why is my mind going in this direction?

Well, my wife found cat food, the little pea-sized dry stuff we give him, in the bathroom. I hope you’re writing this down, because we don’t put kitty kibble there. It wasn’t even on the floor, but inside a little ceramic cup that sits on a shelf behind a curtain beside the bathtub. See, I told you this wouldn’t make sense. We had about a tablespoon of dry cat food, inside a small ceramic cup, three feet off the floor, on a shelf behind a curtain. The only cat food in the house that’s sitting out in the open is in the kitchen, so…

Uh-oh.

Behind the spot where she found the cat food is an old hot water bottle, a heating pad, and the box an old blood pressure monitor once came in. That stuff hasn’t been touched in a couple of years, perfect cover. In other words, I think we have a mouse: a very tiny, cute as hell, itty-bitty high desert mouse like I’ve seen once before, resourcefully caching pieces of cat food she probably had to carry one by one. It was nine below the other night, what’s a rodent to do?

[sigh]

Come daylight, I have work to do.

All evening long we’ve been hearing a succession of thuds and clunks coming from the roof. “It’s either chunks of melting frozen snow falling off the trees, or we have raccoons dancing on the roof,” I told my wife. She laughed. If she’d seen the three ‘coons I saw last month, she might have locked herself in the bathroom instead.

Those were really big guys (?), and there were three of them. I’d heard some kind of clonking just outside and decided I had to look. You don’t always want to, but sometimes you should. Grabbing my Wal-Mart spotlight, I opened the front door and looked around. Hmm. Nothing there, then YIKES, about six feet away stood a trio of the biggest, bushiest, ugliest, brown raccoons I ever saw. “Mountain raccoons,” the kind that carry off small horses and cows. Come to think of it, they may have been pigmy buffalo or some such, they were that big and brown and raggedy. Whatever their species, they ambled off, but I thought of them again tonight, up there with the chimney soot and rotting elm leaves, trotting around in the slush.

I think they hang around where the stove pipe comes up out of the roof. When I walk outside after dark to dig a piece of firewood out of the snow, they stand up there warming their paws (hooves?) in the smoke and watching me with shiny dark eyes.

More iSight video silliness, but only about 24 seconds long. Hey, there’s a cat at the end, don’t complain:

I mean that in a good way, of course, and I’m talking about piñon jays like the ones below.

They sure look healthy, don’t they?

They usually travel in big flocks of several dozen or more. If they land at your bird feeder, look out — it can get like those old wildlife films of vultures descending on a zebra carcass. But they’re really very shy. The slightest movement send them off in a roar. For some reason, I’ve always liked these birds. They just make me feel good. It helpls that they’re shy, because I feel I’ve been rewarded when they show up. This wouldn’t happen if we didn’t live on the edge of the wide open spaces, either, because these birds don’t generally show up in town.

The reason I call them “high desert seagulls,” however, is for the “kee-kee” sound they make in flight. It does sound eerily like seagulls flying over the harbor.

Here’s something a little different to get you going today. I found this at one of my favorite weird Web sites, EnglishRussia.com [linked in sidebar], a Russian photo-blog that always has something seriously unsettling to offer. They’re calling this a “prehistoric fish,” and it does look out of time, but what the hell is it?

That is not a horseshoe crab

The above creature turned up in a deep construction ditch filled with water from “an underground river” in a place called Chelyabinsk. The thing is (supposedly) five feet long and the photos clearly show a thrashing tail. There’s a strong resemblance to a horseshoe crab here, obviously, except for the muscular tail. If anybody knows what this is, please leave a clue in the comments.

(Here’s what modern horseshoe crabs and their extinct relatives look like. It isn’t any of these…)

UPDATE: I didn’t get around to googling “Chelyabinsk,” but one of my commenters did: it may be the most radioactively contaminated place on earth! The people who say that resembles a certain two-inch shrimp and the “five feet long” guys may both be right.

He sleeps this way all the time. No, I haven’t tried it. Would you?

In the middle of the day, too

Egad! I just saw wet snowflakes blowing past the kitchen window. Maybe he’s not such an idiot after all.