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Yet another sunset! Compensatory charm, you might say. I posted this image to Twitter early Friday evening: “From a wretched little dirt road on the south end of Ranchos de Taos,” as I recall. This is the only place I’ve ever lived where you can find trailers, dead cars, mudholes, and loose cows on top of a ridge with a ninety-mile view. In Colorado there’d be driveways with squeaky-clean trucks and probably curbs, but this is broke-dick motherfucker wild New Mexico.

I remember when we first moved here, there were always these horror stories in the news. Someone in Deming would kidnap his ex’s kids and cut their heads off driving down the road because they had the devil in them, things like that. It was practically an epidemic. A woman was feeding her son’s three German shepherds while he was away and they ate her. (That one was local.) I looked at a house to rent in Arroyo Seco that had a rotten deer’s head wired into a tree with old coat hangers next to the front door. I mean, they did it up right. More recently, some poor fellow living in a trailer with his brother tried to kill himself by swallowing prairie dog poison—the stuff that gives off poison gas when it gets wet—that worked, all right, but not before turning his body into a weapon of mass destruction that locked down the the emergency room in Taos for a day and a half.

As I was typing this, there was a knocking at the door. Assuming it was a Jehovah’s Witness, this being Saturday and all, I put on my best get-the-hell-out-of-here face and flung it open, only to find a well-dressed sobbing woman in her thirties who wanted to use the phone. It seems her boyfriend had picked her up in Abiquiu and brought her to the house at the end of the road, where they’d had a fight. He’d taken her purse (and phone) and she’d hit the road on foot to call the cops. I loaned her my cell phone and let her hide in the yard so said boyfriend wouldn’t see her if he came driving by, which happened shortly after. Whoever she called—911? A deputy?—showed up about thirty minutes later, not in an obvious cop car but a big white four-door pickup truck, and the two of them drove off together.

I have no idea whatsoever what any of this means. Great sunset, though. And so it goes.

This was Thursday’s sunset, but the colors are similar to what we saw on Tuesday evening coming back from Alamosa, Colorado on U.S. 285. The drive is spectacular under any conditions, and you get this hugeness in the West. That last hour from the Colorado line to Taos just kills me fucking dead. The isolation and the grandeur, the freedom of driving like I’m piloting a plane. On Tuesday night a beam of sunset under heavy clouds lit up the mountains forty miles away. Yellow aspen flickered on the slopes of a volcano. Sheets of virga glowed orange and purple all around. It was just impossible to take in. Nothing on Earth could look like that, and yet it did. I could hardly drive.

We’ll do this every Tuesday for the next two months. My wife picked up a piano teaching gig at Adams State and I’m the hotshot driver. It’s ninety miles each way. Up to now we’ve had it easy heading back at 6:00 p.m., but two days ago we hit the halfway point at sunset, so pretty soon we’ll be leaving Alamosa in the dark, aiee. The scenery will shrink and I will have to focus. Out there in the vasties, elk and pronghorn sometimes hang out in the road. (Because the pavement’s warm, I tell myself.) The Vibe has high-zoot aftermarket headlight bulbs that light up half the goddamn desert. If the buggers do show up—and they are big—we’ll have more time, or maybe not. I saw a smallish something up ahead the other night. A rabbit, maybe, in a dip beyond a gentle rise, shadowed from the high beams. When we shot past, a large coyote whirled to face me a split second in the glare!

My camera wasn’t with me, but I won’t make that mistake again. You never know what we’ll see out there on starry nights, this lonesome journey home.

It was a stupidly beautiful Sunday afternoon. Dry as old bread, breezy, hot in the sun and cold in the shade. The few clouds that drifted past the sun sent alternating waves of warmth and coolness rolling down the hill. Juan del Llano slouched a little lower in the dead landlord’s patio chair to rest his head on the top of the cushion and watched the woodpeckers and the doves until he nodded off. His slumber didn’t last, though, not the way he felt. Half-awake, he kept his eyes closed tight and listened.

Dogs barked everywhere, though not too close. The wind hissed through the chamisa and rustled the elm tree branches. A woodpecker hammered on the dead aspen tree down by the acequia. Someone far away was playing with a chainsaw. Doves cooed out their useless mating calls. Every now and then an idiot kicked a cow. Juan allowed his eyes to open as a magpie chattered overhead, but the bird flew off and left him pure. That could have been unpleasant, he thought, sensing life and danger everywhere.

Six hours later, the moon rose over the mountain. A total eclipse was already well underway, with a sizable arc of the orb in darkness. Juan stood outside and watched a long time in the strange warm air. More dogs barked than usual. As the sky grew dark, he imagined it was colder and went back in the house. Outside adobe walls, the wind picked up in bursts, unsettled, looking for something to push. The edge between the worlds was open if one knew to smell it. Unlived lives shot out from holes.

In the morning Juan awoke some ounces lighter in his heart. It was not known how this came to be. Later he bought a belt and shirt at Walmart on a whim. The flashlight batteries he’d come for were too expensive and the windshield washer fluid the wrong kind, but he kept them anyway. It was clear that nothing perfect was forthcoming and it didn’t matter.

The next time Juan sat down to write, he waited calmly for the voices. For once he didn’t wonder how to sell the words but let them pile up any way they wanted. There was beauty hidden in the thing, no intervention. The end result was short but pleasing, something of a mating cry, as if he were king and queen of weird and just got married to himself.

Let’s just leave it at this! More news soon…