We were driving around Cimarron (pop. 888) and wondering why almost every house, no matter how poor—and there are a lot of those—had some kind of fence around it. As we came around this corner, the answer suddenly was obvious! It only takes one visit from a pair like this to send you down to Walmart or your favorite garden store to get new flowers and veggie plants. In Cimarron, that means an eighty-mile round-trip to Raton.
These deer could easily clear that fence, of course. (At least I think so.) But animals are smarter than we give them credit for.
“Honey, did you remember to shut the gate?”
We watched two of them go in right here. Nobody yelled or screamed. For all I know, the owners might put out bowls of deer chow leading to the garage instead of bothering to grocery shop. Forty miles to Raton, right? Or maybe they just like them.
We did.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
When I was a kid my family would vacation around Cimarron. I remember camping beside the river in Cimarron Canyon.