“Welcome to the valley,” Ricky Medina said when we signed up for a post office box. We had no idea what we were getting into. At that time, San Cristobal had the only legal water system in the entire United States that operated without a treatment facility: just pure water piped into a small number of homes from San Cristobal Creek high up in the mountains. Oh God. Almost 8,000 ft up with 90 mile views to the west. Mostly Hispanic with a few Anglo hippies, artists, and professionals who liked their privacy. A scattering of trailers and adobe houses up and down the two dirt roads. Wretched barking dogs. Elk bugling in the fall and running through deep powder snow illuminated in our headlight beams. Bears, coyotes, golden eagles, hawks, and prairie dogs. The occasional mountain lion. Hummingbirds that flew inside through unscreened windows for me to catch with my bare hands. Stars that strobed instead of twinkled. Bulls in the driveway, rats in the attic…
WHOA! Apologies, you’ll have to read this one at my Substack. There are just too many photos to make it work here. While you’re there, you might as well subscribe. If you do, it downloads in your email, formatted perfectly for phones and iPads. – JHF
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Love to hear about the wildlife, esp. the hummingbirds.
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