Month: July 2022

These past couple of weeks have been an adventure in rain and flood. The other day we got over 2 inches of horizontal rain in less than an hour, a record for around here. A mudslide covered the highway, and our arroyo got so high it was carrying full-sized tree trunks. Strange things, like in the picture below, sped by. Alien artifacts from the Dulce Base?

The next morning, all was calm again. It’s the speed and intensity of the rise and fall of water that is amazing and exciting to watch. Flash floods are life as usual in the southwest, so it’s nothing like what is happening in other parts of the country (Kentucky being the climate catastrophe of the day), but it’s a humbling sight: mother nature wins all, again and again. When will we learn?

We ended up postponing a planned backpack trip to the South San Juans due to the rain. The mountains are getting even more than us. Our route included fording the Conejos River a couple times and, while it is usually 4-5″ deep and pleasant to cross, right now it is chest-high. So, we’ll wait.

Snake

Yesterday, Alan and I killed our first rattlesnake. It was about 2 1/2′ long with 8 rattles, coiled right by the house next to the generator room, where I was working. The snake sprang at Zane, missing him by a hair (Zane was terrified by the attack), then coiled up, rattling furiously. He was invisible against the grass and we could only hear the rattles, not see him, even standing only a few feet away. We were figuring out what to do when he uncoiled and slithered into the gennie room. There, I trapped him under a long pole and Alan chopped his head off with a shovel. It took him a long time to stop wiggling, even decapitated….at least 5 minutes of rattling and snapping his jaws. Eerie. We were sad to kill him; rattlers eat a lot of mice and are a beautiful part of this land, but we didn’t have any way to capture and relocate him safely. (I have since ordered a LONG snake hook and gripper so we can move them a long ways away without harm.)

I gutted and skinned him, grilled the meat and ate some. He was pretty skinny and tough, but yummy. I’m drying the skin and rattles.

It’s amazing how primal our reaction is to seeing a rattlesnake. When I saw him go for Zane, I jumped back 6′ before I even realized it was a snake. Same with Zane. Today, when he went outside, he carefully avoided that part of the yard. (Me, too!) We will wear our barn boots outside more often from here on.

Home Improvements

Alan has made great headway with the 8kw solar array, finishing the trenching and laying the wire, covering it, and getting the ground-mount buried in concrete. (Big truck came in to do that.) The ground is reseeded. Now he’s getting the panels in place. I’ve been working on stuccoing some walls: installing tarpaper and chicken wire, placing “weeps” and other esoteric stucco things I am learning about from watching YouTubes. I know nothing about stucco. After that, I’ll tackle those ugly sheds you see in the background. (They’re getting re-covered.)

Other

Had a great trip to Las Vegas, NM, again to see my brother: a wonderful town, home of Montezuma’s Castle, United World College, and The Hotel Castenada, a hotel from 1898 (closed for 70 years until 2019) where train travelers can still get off and have dinner on the patio.

So, things keep moving forward, mostly fun, occasionally scary, never boring.

In Feb., 1972 I arrived at Franconia College in Franconia, N.H. to restart my college career (aborted so soon at Oxford). If you google it: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2018-09-19/franconia-college-an-experiment-in-the-white-mountains-that-changed-a-n-h-town-forever (great article, by the way) you’ll get a little info about this short-lived school housed in an old hotel between the small towns of Franconia and Bethlehem NH. My father liked to tell everyone that I studied Poverty at the most expensive school in America, which was sort of true. I’m sure it was pricey and I did take a course called “Poverty in the Northwoods”, for which I recorded oral histories with old folks on farms in the area who lived below the poverty line. In exchange for their allowing me to record their stories, I did chores for them: chopping wood, repairing windows, stacking hay. That’s where I learned how to chop wood. I loved that class.

When I arrived in Franconia in my Corvair and with Shasta the dog, I discovered that while my tuition had been paid, my room and board had not, an oversight of my parents, who were settling in London and busy with their own lives. Unable to reach them, I spent the first 2 weeks living on the floor of the “music dorm”. Very quickly it became apparent that I was not cut out for dorm life. I hated the noise and constant partying and felt claustrophobic (something I still struggle with in crowds). By February I moved myself into a tiny abandoned shack built into the hillside several miles down a sugar road (a track that gives access to the sugar maples). It had a wood stove and a great view of the valley. There was 6′ of snow on the ground, and one of my professors (Michael Dorris, author of “The Broken Cord”, married to Louise Erdrich, also an author) lent me his snowshoes and xc skis so I could get around. I loved it and it was my first experience at living off-grid. I told no one where I was living, for fear of being kicked out. Shasta loved it too, and went with me everywhere. I made a little cash babysitting Michael and Louise’s son, who had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (thus his book, above).

No surprise, Franconia was heavy into any drug you could imagine. On Friday nights, bowls of cocaine and dozens of handrolled joints sat on a table outside the dining hall for anyone to partake. PCP, Qualudes and LSD were endemic. Not so much heroin. Pot was allowed everywhere and not considered a “drug”. Already a daily pot smoker, I tried it all, but hated everything but the mushrooms). Meals were organic, local-sourced when possible, with vegetarian options. No one seemed to know I wasn’t supposed to eat there. Classes were hands-on. (Thus the oral histories and chores). I took classes in weaving, starting with shearing the sheep and making dyes from local dried plants. That’s where I began my learning of herbal uses. There were drafting courses, another anthropology class on Northwoods fiddlers. I joined the choir, learned the flute, and loved singing Mozart’s Requiem that spring in several local churches.

I made a great friend, R, who later became addicted to cocaine and died. Another friend, a gifted fiddler, jumped off the roof while high on PCP, playing his violin, and died. That’s what started my fascination with mental health and, in part, led me to become a Certified Addictions Counselor years later. It’s also a piece of why I am a MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) counselor. Maybe I’ll get to Burning Man yet!

That spring, I met a bunch of hippies living on a commune up in the mountains, building an off-grid, self-sufficient, organic community. I stayed there off and on through the end of the semester and the following fall. It was a little TOO hippy-dippy for me in the end; (I was way more practical: more into blue jeans and work boots than flowers and long skirts; still am).

Only 2 weeks into the semester, I drove some new friends to Montreal for a Dead concert. We were just getting to the city when my Corvair died. Smoke and flames billowed from the rear (air-cooled, rear-engine). I pulled off the road and we sat there wondering what to do. Only a few bucks between us. The others decided to hitch to the concert and left me standing by the side of the road. Across the street was an auto repair shop. I walked over and talked to the guys there. They came and looked at the car, shook their heads (doubt they’d ever seen a Corvair, much less had a clue what to do with it). I offered them some of the pot we had hidden under the seat to take the vehicle off my hands and give me a ride to the concert. That was that! No title, no concerns about getting busted in Canada. No thought to the loss of the car. No, getting to see the Grateful Dead was much more important than a silly car I hated anyway! The deal was made, I got a ride, and the next morning we all hitched back to school. That was my first serious experience with the Buddhist concept of non-attachment!

Over spring break, my parents came back to the US for a visit, staying at the Morris County Golf Club. They bought me a car for my 18th birthday: a 1968 Volkswagen bus, the kind with the sunroof and little windows all around the top. It cost $800. I was in love. In order to care for it I took the 40-hour mail-order course that VW offered, sort of a hands-on “Idiots Guide to VW Repair”. I became a Certified VW Mechanic, believe it or not. Actually had the framed certificate they sent me for years. For the rest of my time at Franconia I made money by doing tune-ups on my classmates VDubs.

Several weeks after getting the bus, I was teaching my friend R how to drive a stick. She missed a downshift and turn and crashed the bus through a telephone guy wire and into the concrete embankment by the onramp for I-93 going 50mph. Amazingly, the bus sustained only front end damage (no engine up there, right?). The telephone pole fell, narrowly missing the bus. R was shaken but unharmed, but I split my head open, requiring me to hitch a ride from some students going to Littleton to the hospital with a hoodie wrapped around my bloody head. I got 87 stitches in my cracked forehead and an immense migraine. And arrested for leaving the scene of an accident (charges later dropped). The first of many concussions, and why I keep up on current research on TBIs (traumatic brain injuries).

These are just a few stories from a tumultuous year of my life. One story leads to another and to another and add up to a life that may seem a bit crazy, but made sense at the time. All those experiences are who I am today and go a long way to explain my side of why Alan & I are doing what we do. All things are connected. Butterfly wings included.

Happy Independence Day and we hope you have had a fun, relaxing day. Alan and I stayed home, except for a walk up to our neighbor Lynn’s place to say hi. Yesterday, it rained a lot, and we finally experienced our first flash flood. The creek rose 2 feet in 2 minutes. Having never seen that before, it was pretty impressive and a bit scary. The water in the picture above is actually about 50′ across; normally it is dry or maybe a foot wide. It was exciting, and a test of our new fence.

This morning I went out in my rubber boots and checked the 2 places where the fence crosses the arroyo. One was fine, but the other (above) was piled up with a large log and 4′ of brush and dirt and had ripped out a post. The water was already receded. We got it fixed easily enough, but there’s definitely a learning curve with fences built across arroyos that flood! I was in my element: getting my boots muddy, splashing around in water.

Living this remotely means a type of self-reliance that is hard to imagine if you live in a city or suburb, or even outside of a town like Durango. It’s a 2 1/2 hour drive to Home Depot, so you want to be sure of what you need! In ordinary times it’s a challenge, but with current supply issues, it can be really frustrating. No fun to drive that far to find that they don’t have that 1 1/4″ male PVC adaptor after all. As a result, both Alan and I are improving many skills: in plumbing, construction, even in gardening; making do with what we have on hand has been taken to a whole new level.

Then you get surprised: the Jicarilla Apache Grocery and Hardware in Dulce ( 12 minutes away} has that adaptor in stock today. And Dory, the manager, sells it to you at 70% off and a new story about the UFO he saw last week. What’s not to love?

But all this has made me think a lot about the Right to Repair Movement (https://www.repair.org/stand-up) and its effort to make manufacturers design products that can be repaired by buyers and/or private repair people. This movement became big in the auto industry, when only dealers had the ability to read/repair the computers in our vehicles. Now, thanks to successful lawsuits, that knowledge must be shared with private auto repair shops and individuals interested in learning such as college automotive programs. The Right to Repair movement wants those rights to include (in part) appliances, computers, and tools. If my washing machine breaks down, I need to be able to watch a YouTube that will tell me how to fix it, and then be able to buy the exact parts I need online to do it. There are no “authorized Westinghouse dealers” within 150 miles. Not that I want to repair my washing machine, but I also don’t want to have to just run out and buy a new one just because a cog wore out. As my mother used to rant: “built-in obsolescence should be outlawed.”

The rain has brought back the grass from absolutely dead to lush and emerald green. It’s one of the most wonderful things about the desert: the resilience and adaptability of this harsh land.

A few days ago, the crew finished 3,000′ of new fence. It encloses about 12 acres, including the house, a big meadow and a long stretch of the arroyo. The purpose is to keep cows out and begin regenerating the land. I’ll talk about Open Range laws another time.