Wild Ride III

Southern Colorado ruin

Southern Colorado for dummies. The mountains in the background are New Mexico.

My August 9th birthday trip was the best thing I’ve done in years, totally screaming true-to-myself. I picked roads that scared my wife, but hey, she came, and marveled with me at the staggering vastness. She’s tough. I’m tough. We’re all tough. I drove right past this thing. She said, “You ought to take a picture of that house.” Well, what a surprise, of course I should and why the hell hadn’t I, so I proceeded down the gravel road to turn around in the driveway of yet another long-dead homestead, where a pair of red-tailed hawks flew out of an actual tree and swooped so low, they burned us with their eyes.

The place above is made of stone and sits there daring fate. A broken, faded realtor’s sign lies hidden in the weeds. The property even has a kind of skinny shelter dug into the hillside with the ruins of a dirt roof. How many different ways to fail are built into this scene? A short ways farther west we found a three or four-house town and spied a living human being. She didn’t look up as we drove by and I was not surprised. The poignancy out here is palpable—you could slice it into blocks and build a tragedy. I’d been alerted to a certain memorial nearby but missed it in my birthday rush. You might check out that link.

Since writing those words, I’ve learned that the building in question is actually an old schoolhouse that someone recently bought. It was listed at ninety thousand and came with one hundred sixty acres. The odd long structure with the dirt roof must be where students tied their horses. Oh, man. My correspondent lives just down the road and has wild horses running on his land. He says, “Dreams are built out here. Thinking about building this area up again.”

The space will do that to you. The quiet melts the walls.

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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 About page. For a complete list of all John’s writing, photography, NFTs, and social media links, please visit JHFARR.ART  

  • Sherry August 17, 2017, 12:18 PM

    I’m ready for quiet that will melt the walls. August has sucked so far. Truck totaled, air conditioner broken – twice, car repairs, termites, mice in my kitchen, hospice called for 24 year old nephew with brain cancer. Sigh.

    • Mike Walsh August 17, 2017, 1:49 PM

      Prayer sent.

      • Sherry August 17, 2017, 3:03 PM

        Thanks, Mike. I’m always surprised when people say they are praying for me/us, like I don’t deserve it. I appreciate that simple sentiment more than you know.

    • JHF August 18, 2017, 12:50 AM

      I know whereof you speak. Today has felt like that.

  • vicky Zillioux August 18, 2017, 9:42 AM

    what interesting stories those places could tell.

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