A few days ago I was wound tighter than puke, loco, in the clutches of the Christmas monster. Fortunately, that passed, but by Saturday morning, I was overdue to take a hike. I hadn’t walked in several days, and already I could feel my knee-bones start to wander. They have their nerve.
It was a stormy hike: cloudy and windy with spitty little raindrops, then a deluge of graupel that wet the trail just enough to make that sticky mud like bubble gum. I only saw one other person on the trail at Taos Valley Overlook. There was also an older van parked weirdly in the lot, as if they’d driven in at midnight and run the vehicle into an embankment. Probably sleeping off some awful drugs or drunk. The windows were fogged up and I saw blankets. Whatever you do, don’t knock.
That afternoon it snowed, huge flakes the size of money no one recognizes any more. Most of that melted, the temperature being just above the freezing mark. A few minutes before sunset, the sun broke through in the west the way it usually does, and I could take a picture. The road of course is ghastly, and no one gives a damn.
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)
The sun (out here) DOES usually — 99% — of the time break through at the end of the day if cloudy. I’ve noticed this for years. I wonder if there’s a word for that? It sneaks under the tiny space left before the horizon and pulls off a mini spectacular show of orange on whatever is east of it. I’m so glad someone else notices this.
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