That’s what my late Aunt Mary said when I first told her we were planning to move from the family home town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the terrible high desert of New Mexico. That she was at least partly right obscures the more obvious point of her losing a personal representative in the person of a surly nephew on her old home turf. Chestertown without a “Farr” in residence was unthinkable, so she lashed out to gain control. Guess that worked out kind of wrong.
Lower slopes of Picuris Peak (telephoto)
The cat was scratching at the front door. She’s been known to rattle the door knob, but this wasn’t the case. I opened it, looked down, and she ran in with a rabbit almost half as long as she is. Young, but no baby. Left it jerking and bleeding with its mouth open and its eyes bugged out on the adobe step in front of me. Giving it to the head cat, I guess. I picked it up by its warm hind feet and carried it down the path to the acequia, leaving the still-living rabbit in a sheltered spot back under an old sagebrush. I mean, you never know. My dad once ran over the household Siamese with the front wheel of his Porsche 356. She was still alive but didn’t move. They put her in a towel-lined box in the garage, and on the third day, she arose. So you want to give them all another chance. Went back to look at the rabbit three hours later. Stiff as a board. I picked it up by its cold hind feet and flung the coyote treat as far as I could into the brush.
All in the midst of total possession, blackness incarnate, radiating pain. Danger to all life, destroyer of known worlds. Morning loving fails. “Maybe later when I haven’t been so mean.”
“Right!”
Grownup truth like cool clear water, wash away the tears. (Picked up by my bare feet, laid beneath the sage.) What can happen now?
God, she is so beautiful. Golden aspens in the frost.
Just outside of Antonito, CO. You know as much as I do.
You may have noticed some deletions. The fact is, some posts just don’t stand the test of time. Probably tons of them don’t, but I’m too lazy to go back far enough to catch them all. No big deal, really, just house cleaning. The photos from all posts, deleted or not, are always available at my SmugMug gallery, of course.
One, two, three
There’s a thing about life that few people know. What’s missing or hurting will always show up in some way—you can’t get away, it’s like gravity. From 2003 to 2005, I lived alone in the house in the background. My wife was in Dubuque, and the neighbors were here. Good people. I’d rented the place when she went up to Iowa to find work and take care of her mother. She came back to Taos in ’05 to move in with me. The neighbors were here.
We’ve lived here together for eight long years since. All that time, the neighbors were here. Until 2007, so was the landlord, in a studio apartment in the back of our place. Before he died, he willed the house in the foreground to the neighbor lady and ours to his niece. The two parties have been locked in probate ever since, to my mind entirely the neighbors’ fault, though what do I know—and what does it matter, except they were here.
With both houses hooked up to the same failing septic system, sharing the cost of upkeep and repair has been tricky. (Oh, the sewage stories I can tell.) So have a few other things, partly my fault, like when it got harder for me after their fortunes improved so dramatically and still they were here. With the property in probate, there was little our landlady could do that involved the whole place, and life-improving enterprises like fixing the driveway just never got done. The neighbors bought new things and followed a guru all over the world. We couldn’t travel and struggled to flush. They came back from airports in limos late in the night, to this place beside us, oh golly oh gee, and I never knew why. The windows don’t open, and there isn’t a bathtub. The roof leaks, and so on. For the last six and a half years though, since inheriting the place, they’ve been living rent-free…
And they just bought a house. Now the neighbors are gone. Show me my wounds, Lord, teach me a lesson. Everything’s there if you’re willing to see.
The universe is different now. For however brief a time, it’s like having our own place. I feel larger, more calm. Something will come of this. Something will shift.
We won’t be here that much longer, anyway. Not in this house. We have it in pretty good shape, just in case—winter can jump right down your throat at seven thousand feet, and things move slowly then. But take another look at that photo: it all fits, everything! All that went down, before me and after.
The buildings that weep.
The mountains, the trees.
The air is so clean.
The sun is so bright.
It’s a privilege to have been here. It’s astonishing to be all right.
You have to look the part. Trust me.
Of course I put on my big hat. Wasn’t even going to drive out to the Pueblo at first, until New Mexico Magazine tweeted a link to an bloodless article about the feast day that didn’t even mention the koshares, or sacred clowns. Since I consider them to be the whole point, that meant I was going, and I’m glad I did.
It was a beautiful day. I stuffed cookies and half a sandwich into my cargo shorts, grabbed my water bottle, and took off. There was a fresh gnawed-on cow femur lying in the dirt just past the house. The traffic in town was epic. I watched traffic lights cycle from red to green to red and nobody moved. When I finally got to the Pueblo, I paid $10 to park in a field and took a shuttle to the plaza. I got there just as the koshares emerged from the rooftop of the main building about three stories up. There must have been a thousand people watching.
I’m not going to tell you everthing. I couldn’t anyway. No cameras or cell phones allowed. Pueblo residents in their finest clothes. Native jewelers and vendors from all over. Tourists and Taoseños out in force. An astonishing human parade, real New Mexico, pure Taos, no place for pastel. People sitting in camp chairs or milling around. Walking, visiting, taking in the scene, shopping and eating. No announcements, no schedule. Indian time.
The koshares are painted from head to toe. Mostly white, with broad black horizontal stripes. Headdresses and fake noses of straw. They’re wearing loincloths and they can do anything. Roaring and whooping, they sweep through the crowd. (Think loud crazed lions moving through a herd of wildebeests: maybe dangerous, maybe not.) They pull Pueblo women into a circle and tell them to dance. The women are laughing but do as they’re told. Clueless onlookers may get picked on. The clowns will pull food right out of your mouth, snatch parasols and hats, and mess with your mind. The vendors cover their tables with blankets and leave gifts for the clowns: single items of jewelry, toys, bananas (?), money, and soft drinks. Babies and grandmothers get gifts and respect— sometimes along with a hazing! Minders tag along with the koshares, and tribal police—big guys that look like they juggle elk in their spare time—aren’t far away. A clown spots a kid with a cell phone and chases him. It’s too crowded for me to see what happens next, but I know. Once I saw the koshares dunk someone in the river and roll him in dirt.
This isn’t the half of it. Not even a tenth, but it’s all you get now. I didn’t stay for the pole climb. The last time I did, the guy dropped the sheep. But that’s not why I went home.
I’d already had an incredible time just watching all the people. There’s nothing like this anywhere I’ve ever been, and to think no one can photograph it. You just have to be there, and I was, for four hours standing in the murderous high-altitude sun. I’d almost hit the wall and recognized it—I also realized that if I waited until the pole climb was over, over a thousand people would head for their cars at the same time in a huge fenced-in field with a gate only big enough for one vehicle at a time. No thanks, not now, I was almost dead.
But very, very happy.
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