As I type this, it’s fifty-two degrees (11°C) and the backyard Lift-o-Matic is full of drying laundry. That means nothing on racks by the wood stove. Good. When it’s truly cold, nothing on God’s earth beats great blistering waves of actual heat from a real fire, but if it’s only middling cool like today, I’d feel like I was “wasting” firewood by using it to dry my underwear. Anyway, here you go, Taos Mountain, a.k.a. Pueblo Peak, elevation 12,305 feet or thereabouts. The town is already 7,000 feet above sea level, so you’re looking at a whole vertical mile of mountain! New Mexico has room for things like that. Not many places do.
The amazing 2007 Pontiac Vibe. About 115,000 miles, over 30 mpg all the way. Great car!
Drove into town today to buy weird things to eat before the colonoscopy. Oh yeah, that’s happening—figured I’d jump on it now before the bastards screw up Medicare. You can guess the condition of the road. By that I mean the whole other dimension between us and the pavement. The holes are almost big enough to drive into and out of. Can’t imagine Mountain Moving & Storage sending their truck down that thing, even if we were ready, which we’re not. It’d be like those old Western movies where the Indians spook the horses on the wagon train. The preacher’s wagon hits a boulder, flips, and dumps his family in the dirt. Camera zooms down on a lady’s locket with a broken chain. A small girl screams. War whoops. Gunshots. Horses whinnying.
After midnight and it’s snowing now, a strong wind pushing it into drifts. We won’t be going anywhere tomorrow. I went up on the roof today to check the chimney—hard to imagine that right now—because the wood stove wasn’t drawing air the way it should. That usually means it needs a hippie chimney cleaning with a big long pole to knock the soot down. The piñon we used to burn would start to clog it in a week! This red fir (and something else) I have right now hardly soots up the pipe at all, though, and there was nothing for me to do but be amazed at all the branches on the roof. One of them is too big for me to lift.
I remember when it fell. That was the morning we not only couldn’t leave the ranch but but lost our Internet connection. We get TaosNet wireless from an antenna on the roof. I spent about an hour running diagnostic tests, comparing all devices, on and on, and then remembered to try AirPort Utility. In just a few seconds, it told me the ethernet cable was disconnected. Oho, the one that runs from the antenna to the router. The Apple Extreme base station was obviously hooked up, so that meant the roof. It’s never fun to climb a ladder in the snow, especially when the temperature is in the teens. But hey, the Internet, come on.
When I got up there, I discovered that the very teeny-tiny tip of that same huge dead branch had indeed just managed to snag the cable and pull it loose from the antenna. The ethernet port was down inside a plastic cover that was frozen shut. I ended up fetching a glass of water to thaw it open, pushed the cable into place, and got the Internet back up so I could read and freak out instead of writing. A day like any other, although cold. But I was proud enough to email the head man at our local ISP and tell him what I’d done and how I’d saved his guys a service call. He loved it, naturally, and I was back on Twitter.
It’s almost two a.m. now. When I open the door, the wind has that faraway moaning sound that tells me this has legs. Time to take a bath and go to bed and let it come. The procedure is on Thursday and the same applies. Every day a testing on the wild frontier!
Another iPhone 6s Plus shot, tweaked in Photoshop
We’re going out to eat tonight to celebrate our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. Being married this long has to be the greatest accomplishment of my life.
Meanwhile, the weather here is the worst I’ve encountered in seventeen years—it’s gruesome and wet, day after day. The famous New Mexico sun has vanished along with the the mountains. The two hundred yards of dirt road is passable but shreds self-esteem. Sometimes we can’t even bear to walk to the mailbox, the mud is that bad. I can’t wait to be permanently gone, however we do it and wherever we go. That will be the next greatest accomplishment of my life! There’s a third one in there, but it’s implied.
Tonight is for her. May I be worthy and stand tall.
Not a hamster but our Pontiac Vibe three days ago
“Ouch! He bit me!” I thought hamsters were supposed to be cuddly little beasts, but this one was out for blood. I was only ten or eleven at the time, which didn’t help. This was a long, long time ago and I was on my own, a nerdy Air Force brat in Germany. Elvis had just been drafted. NATO was ready to nuke the Russians at the Fulda Gap, and you could still buy a DeSoto in the States.
The family lived in a very nice third-floor apartment in a former Luftwaffe officers family housing area at Rhein-Main Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt. The reason I say I was on my own is because I mostly was. I hardly remember my mother at all from those days, and my father was often gone. (My duty as an Air Force kid was to understand the way things were and take it.) Somehow I was allowed to have a pet. That’s the really strange part. I have no recollection of buying or being gifted with a hamster, neither can I imagine where on earth he came from or why I wanted one. Boys my age were into snakes and dogs, neither of which were options. Maybe I thought he’d come with me in my pocket to play pranks in school.
I’m pretty sure I named him “Fang” after a song by Nervous Norvus. This was intended to be humorous and was, especially since no one dared to tame him or knew how. Nowadays you can Google “how to pick up a hamster” and find out you have to lift him up from below so he knows you’re not a predator. Apparently you also have to sing.
You’d think the thing would go but you would be mistaken
“I fucked up! I can’t stand it! I fucked up!” she yelled, sobbing and staggering through the snow. Yesterday was her turn, the day before was mine. At least she’d actually tried to do something, namely pull out of the driveway into the frozen bog we call a road. Right away she gave it too much gas and had the car nearly perpendicular—before I could stop her, she tried again and slid off into the deep stuff in the bushes. I could see her crying before she opened the door. “I thought I was supposed to gun it,” she gasped between sobs.
“Well, no, not exactly,” I replied. “It all depends…”
She was not the first. The day before, I’d broken down before I even went outside to shovel, yelling and cursing and crying that I couldn’t take it any more. “Jesus Christ, last winter broke me, and goddammit we’re still here!” I didn’t want to pull on my boots or leave the house. For sure I didn’t want to chop ice off the windshield or dig a path out to the unplowed road, but what were we to do? She treated me with kindness and only yelled a little (“I don’t want you to be this way!”), although I must have scared her at least as badly as I scared myself. Thank God there’s not a pistol in the house (I’ll never have one) and the gorge bridge is too far away. Grown man crying in the snow. I wonder what the juncos thought.
All she’d tried to do this time was make it into town and run some errands. The car was less than twenty feet from the road. There was hardly any snow at all where we’d been trying to get out, but it was packed and turned to ice from near-zero overnight cold. The tires simply weren’t up to it with a few degrees of slope to overcome. After telling her a dozen times it wasn’t her fault and dear God was I so sorry, she went back into the house and I took over. Wood ashes, dirt, pine needles, old rags, dig-dig-dig and try some more. Eventually I got the car a few feet farther up the drive, but that was it.
Before I gave up again myself to go call AAA, I saw that maybe I could pull forward just a tad, turn hard right, and get the poor car back into its parking spot. That worked, and I was right back where she’d started, only now I saw the left rear tire was flat! Of course it was, and my own fault. There must have been a nail down in the ashes that I’d spread, a remnant of the awful winter last year when I’d broken up some pallets that I’d stolen from a neighbor because the wood guy kept postponing our delivery.
.png)