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The road my friend and I took to get here, a crashing tumble off a rocky mountain and just possibly the roughest road I’ve ever seen, bears no relation to the gentle thing you see above. Even that turned impassable just around the bend, where far below in a gorgeous mountain valley,* two cowboys on horseback galloped back and forth herding cattle. The bawling, carried up to where we were by a stiff breeze barely in the forties, seemed an oddly domestic touch at over 9,000 feet in the wilderness.

This is national forest, of course, and with any roads at all, one might think it not so wild, but you are absolutely on your own. Consider that for many miles in any direction, your cell phone will not work, there may not be another human, it gets cold as shit, and there are bears. If your 4WD breaks down, you spend a night in the woods and hike out if you can. Break your leg alone, you bleed to death. This concentrates the mind and makes you feel like you’ve done something significant when you get home. (Distracted by our toys, we miss the encounter with a greater energy, but out here you can feel it.)

Vast areas in the West are just like this, especially in New Mexico. There are kingdoms so wild, their natural laws defy casual belief. An hour away from here and almost to the highway, this same friend saw a pair of wolves take two calves down, right in front of their mothers—ten years ago, that was. The way he told the story made me think the circumstances were unusual. Although efforts to reintroduce wolves have been ongoing for some time in other places—not here, I thought, although I could be wrong—the sense was different, more like: up here in these mountains, far back in the woods, we have always had our lobos, but you don’t go tell the world.

I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I ever was afraid.

* Nearby private land

Look around you, it’s happening right now. Everything in this image is a gift, the asters and the chamisa and whatever the hell the others are. The mountains and the sky.

Our trip to Alamosa yesterday, my god. The vistas and the weather. We drove through actual rain. On the way back early in the evening, a giant wall of rain between us and the sunset, glowing pink and orange like another world. This was roughly in the middle of about a sixty-mile stretch with hardly any human habitation. It’s a dramatic landscape under any conditions, but this was just stupendous. If you don’t live in northern Taos County into southern Colorado, you simply can’t grasp what I’m talking about. The impact of the scale and colors and the pure clean air leaves me reeling every time we take that road to sensory overload. In fact, we should have to pay to see this. Oh right, we do.

There was this house in town today I wouldn’t wish on a dog. Well actually, a dog would love it. Typical Taos lunacy, though. Someone had walled in a washer and a dryer to make a “laundry room” but left the doors too small to take them out when they need replacing, which they do now. To install a new washing machine, you’d have to demolish a goddamn wall. Let us not speak of the rest of this gem. There isn’t a single feature that would make me smile, and only $269K. I’m going to have to stop being nice to realtors and simply say, “My god, it’s horrible!” What do they care, anyway? The smart ones know what’s what.

But never mind: I’m going meteorite hunting in the morning. No, really. A friend of mine is taking us into the wilderness to do just that, somewhere near his gold mine. We’ll also look for lightning-killed trees to cut. If I know where we’re going, there could be hundreds of elk. Every word of this is true.

My life didn’t used to be this way. It won’t be the same tomorrow, either.

We had a cat named Clementine once. She was a beautiful short-haired blue-black kitty with dark chocolate colored skin on the bottom of her paws. “Bad to the bone,” I always said of her. We lived out in the country on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. One evening she wanted to go out at sunset something fierce. What could happen? We had several acres, the grass was mowed. It wasn’t like a wilderness, exactly. So we let her out, and that was that. Neither of us saw or heard a thing, and she never came back.

I looked for her for weeks. I walked or biked the little country roads and checked the ditches. I hunted up and down the hedgerow along our property and way back in the woods, listening and calling. With or without permission, I prowled through neighbors’ old abandoned barns, expecting to find a corpse or skeleton I’d be able to identify from the faded purple collar. Months later I’d go drive around the nearby village, looking into people’s yards to see if anyone had stolen her. Several years after all this, I did find a cat’s skull underneath a bush—how often does that happen?—but just the head, no other bones, and certainly no collar. It could have been her, it could have been anything. Maybe she got eaten by a fox or torn up by a pack of dogs.

The thing about Clementine was, she’d let you play with her feet. I especially liked to squeeze her paws just so and make her claws extend—she thought it was the grandest thing and purred and purred beside me. Those were the days I used to stretch out on the sofa and watch TV for hours. (If only I could have known how my perception of that time would be affected by the years!)

Who wouldn’t want to roam at sunset, though? So many things to eat you, make you feel alive.

Crazy life, crazy life. Nothing settled, but all is more or less okay. With lots more money and a better house, this would probably just be normal! Oh god… Beautiful weather yesterday, absolutely perfect. Seventy-five to eighty degrees, twenty percent humidity, almost no wind at all. Front door open, just the screen. The sound of collared doves flapping around the birdseed, barking dogs. Always a barking dog, always, day or night. The mark of Taos, other than an occasional lack of focus one excuses for the “frontier,” or maybe doesn’t. You know who you are.

I have to be a perfect fit, though. There I was on my way to a mini-mart to buy some lotto tickets. Silver pony-tail, funny hat, ’87 Ford that won’t go into gear. Don’t mess with me, I’ve got a few things down. One of them is driving. I am a driving fool. My wife accepted a part-time piano teaching job at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado. It’s just three hours one day a week, and we go ninety miles to get there. The New Mexico portion of the trip is longer and the vistas are outstanding. Colorado is awesome, too. I drive back after dark at twenty mph over the limit and squint ahead for elk. Almost no one’s on the road, of course.

And wait until it snows.