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How did the custom of waiting until 5:00 p.m. before having a drink of alcohol ever get started? Crazy, isn’t it? I’ve been waging guerilla war against the practice for decades, rarely with much success, so I’m happy to report that I shot the above scene yesterday at approximately 23 minutes before the hour, with a shot of tequila in my hand and my honey by my side. Living dangerously here, all right.

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Can’t blame it on the Indians. I’d be happy to, but chthonic spirits did this to me. Drop your guard too many times in fifteen years and look what happens! Remember when a golden eagle snatched a tusa from the field next door in San Cristobal and ate it in the road? (Victory! Great Joy! Rodent molecules in pumping blood of eagle-thing!)

They had help. The elk, deer, bears, bulls, cows, eagles, prairie dogs, goats, sheep, horses, coyotes, rabbits, foxes, raccoons, skunks, snakes, lizards, tarantulas, and twice a frickin’ peacock in or near the places we’ve called home. Antelope, cranes, and mountain lions on our day trips. The hummingbirds that let me catch them with my bare hands when they flew in through the open windows. (Especially them!) And now I use a drum to find a house…

With a hand drum and a leather beater, I walk around the old adobe tapping out a heartbeat: bim-boom, bim-boom, bim-boom… (It needs to know we’re here and we’re alive.) When the feeling’s right, I shift into a steady, rapid bum-bum-bum-bum shamanic trance beat. That’s the power play. It’s not all dust and lard and cracking sidewalls, chilluns. Someday one may say of me, if one says anything at all, “Invisible, he sank into the sage.”

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These things happen. Despite all posting safeguards, sometimes one gets through. There is an antidote, however. Feel the Taos moment in the photo up above. It’s cool and humid (!) at 7,000 feet. The wind is blowing. Callie the Wonder Cat has her ears back and we don’t know why.

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This is a telephoto shot (300mm) from the top of our driveway looking south toward Picuris Peak. It’s also from Tuesday morning and will look the same on Wednesday, given the moisture pouring in from the Pacific over Mexico. I love it, though. Just look: nobody up there! We had a visitor from back East once* who inquired of a similar view, “But who does all this belong to?”

“To you,” I said. “To us, to everybody.” National forest, of course.

I’ve hiked back in there where the photo shows. There’s a forest road, a trail. I took a side track of some kind and came across a sign that marked part of the original Camino Real, the colonial route from Mexico City. That blew my head clean off. Imagine soldiers dressed in armor, humping through the woods right there! [clank-clunk, clank-clunk] Riders looking all around, Spanish horse shit steaming on the ground…

* We miss you, Chris!

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