At this altitude, that’s snow. Not enough to stick, but still!
Days like this make me re-evaluate my wood heat strategy. Whatever warm stretch blesses us in late winter or early spring gives me the notion we can make it until summer, but I always need to buy more wood—precisely when almost no one has any to sell! (These old adobes, man, I tell you…) Anyway, that’s what it looked like this morning after a low of nineteen degrees.
[Edited post & removed orphaned comments. Very good ones, BTW! – JHF]
To be in their presence is amazing
We’re off to see thousands of sandhill cranes on Thursday at Monte Vista National Wildlife Area outside of Alamosa, Colorado! This shot is from January 13, 2014 at a completely different place, and I doubt we’ll get that close, but in Colorado we’ll have snow-capped mountains in the background. To get there means another trip across the vastness northwest of Taos, a region no one who hasn’t been here can imagine, period. Hardly any human beings for the better part of ninety minutes driving. Why do I like this? It’s baseline reality, the way the planet was before we screwed it up. For that matter, so are the cranes. This is precious knowledge. This is why I’m here.
Years ago, driving on the walled-in D.C. beltway, I decided that was no goddamn way to live. Taking the Metro into the city wasn’t any better, never mind the disgusting humidity and heat. What. The. Hell. Moving here was a bitch because I had to do a lot of growing up. (I’m still growing up, it’s hopeless.) But apparently I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.
In ’71, looking like this in Arkansas wasn’t “hip” but dangerous!
[Rediscovered this piece today while culling material for a book. Originally published April 14, 2011—republished here with minor edits.]
One afternoon almost forty-two years ago, I saw a white eagle. It was during my Arkansas woods hippie days. Five or six of us ended up together that spectacular summer of ’71 on 170 acres of Ozark hillside. Yes, spectacular. It felt more desperate than that at the time, but it was still a show for the ages. To think that I did what I did. I mean, I really dropped out. A few of the others were only fooling—in a good way, though. But I was in it for real, to have a completely different life. There was never anyone more committed to going back to the land than I was, nor anyone less well prepared. A revolutionary act, nonetheless, for all its made-up moments.
I never thought twice about quitting my junior college teaching job after I had my twenty-sixth birthday in my sights, because that meant I wouldn’t be drafted. One chilly early fall evening in my little eight-by-sixteen foot shack, I ceremoniously burned my draft card. What a proud moment! To hell with all that rotten, stinking mess, being hounded and threatened at every turn, always only a week or two from either fleeing the country or being rounded up for cannon fodder in a stupid, senseless war. My university years and afterwards had been insane in that regard, but at last I was finally free.
I had $1,200 stashed away, a lot in those days. Two whole months’ teaching salary, actually. It’s hard to imagine forsaking an actual middle-class job with that little for a grubstake now, especially after coming out here from Maryland and watching a fortune fall through our fingers like water. But things were different in ’71. Aside from the military industrial complex and the part of America trying to kill you, it wasn’t a physically threatening time. (That money lasted me about a year.)
Oh yes, the eagle.
Taken with Photo Booth on a beat-up MacBook Air, massaged w/ Photoshop CC
A little cold just now. Scratchy throat, the rest. Knocked out for major segments of the day while my leukocytes fight the microbes. Guiltless slumber, anyway, all for a good cause. In the empty quiet time, remembering the urge to sing…
It’s been happening for months. No words, no special song, just the strangest urge. Like some inexplicable good feeling. An energy trapped inside that wants come out. No, I haven’t actually tried to sing. (Why not?) Once in a while if I’m alone, I vocalize like pow-wow singers, but God knows that ain’t it—tall, pink, and handsome here, for better or worse.
The other day while hiking, I thought this feeling related to a certain steady pitch. That may be something I can try. Then I experienced a mental image of a face or head emerging from my solar plexus! It was me, of course. My own self, giving birth to me? Something is afoot, for sure.
I wish you many miracles. I wish me death of fear.
Two hours on this trail. I met one other person.
The glorious false (?) mid-April weather continues! We’re running fifteen to twenty degrees above average and have been for some time. There are stirrings in the natural world. Ravens are building nests. The big black carpenter ants have awakened from their winter slumber in the rotten vigas and sent scouts into the kitchen. I heard a horsefly on my hike two days ago. Also on the hike and for the sake of research, I smacked a juniper branch with my walking stick to see if I could shake some pollen loose. “Don’t ever do this” would be good advice, but how else was I to learn? I saw no pollen, by the way, but did notice that the tree smelled rank, corrosive, major ugly, and I had to blow my nose for hours afterwards.
On the housing front, we recently looked at a home for sale just a few blocks from the Plaza. Technically it cost too much, but our buyer’s agent read my mind and suggested a savage path to at least a twenty percent haircut. I liked the sound of that, so he and I had a good time searching for washer/dryer hookups that apparently don’t exist while my wife played “what would go in here,” and then we all looked around some more. There were oddly flexible wooden floors beneath the carpet. The appliances were fifty years old. All the window glass was single-pane. The giant forced air heating ducts reminded me of old Midwestern houses from the ’40s, although for what this cost, you could buy half a dozen of those. All that said, it was cute and the location was to die for, but after everything that we’ve been through, we deserve to be able to wash our clothes at home. Come on.
Yesterday we entertained visitors from Wisconsin, my wife’s cousin and spouse, who remarked sagaciously how baffling the “lack of pavement” was. That they noticed did impress me. The reference in this case was to certain downtown streets and parking lots. Yes, downtown. We’re kind of used to that by now, but this is another reason why driving out of state—to Colorado, say–is often shocking. Sidewalks! Asphalt! Not the water-soluble variety employed in Taos County, either. So much of what pavement there is in Taos looks like it’s been attacked by jackhammer-wielding vandals. Maybe it’s a marketing thing. You know, we’re all so edgy and so tough, like visiting Texans who won’t brush the snow off their big shiny trucks.
Taos is such a weird, weird place. If only I didn’t fit in and love the wilderness.
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