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Just the photo now. Don’t need that other stuff, it just feels better this way. Deleted much appreciated but now out-of-context comments, too. Enjoy!

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I‘ll never get over New Mexico skies. If we ever move away, I’ll miss them terribly. It’s possible there are others—this is one heaving big planet—but in my perversity, I’ve not allowed myself to wander more.

Taos is a strange place, though. A very strange place. The sky and wonders of Nature are one thing, the rest another. It’s not a “nice” place, either. Anyone who tells you that is mad. I’ve often commented on this. (Just ask D.H. Lawrence.) It’s probably easier to be Hispanic or Native in the terrible high desert; they have community and culture going back four centuries and unknown millennia respectively. Awfully old, for being in the supposed New World. The rocks at the bottom of the gorge predate the continents. Extinct volcanoes litter the vastness. The chthonic energy is strong. Light and shadow are both there in plain sight. The spirit of nature and the spirit of evil stand tied back to back.

“Just look at that sky!”

And in the fourteen years I’ve been here, there was a triple murder at a gas station a mile away, two men kicked a kid off the gorge bridge, someone’s German shepherds killed and ate the lady of the house, an enraged citizen murdered a man by pickup truck in front of a local bar, and others have jumped, fallen, frozen to death, or been executed unseen in lonely places nearby. All this, and we haven’t even gotten to real estate, kickbacks, nepotism, rich idiots, fake hippies, gluten police, green Subarus, marketers, gamblers, and charlatans of every stripe. I’m sure I’ve forgotten all manner of gruesome, horrible things. Someone once even stole the left taillight from my ’87 Ford F-150, possibly for comic relief. The contradictions are stark, at any rate, whether you believe the metaphysics or not!

Doubtless the same kinds of things go on in your home town. Iowa, which I have some familiarity with, is possibly a good example. Things happen in quiet farmhouses and on back streets of the city that no one talks about. People are also mostly white and prosperous and have good teeth, supposedly. But hang out at a highway rest area or your local mini-mart and stay open to the vibes. It’s all there, though some places are darker than others.

So Taos doesn’t bother me in that way. I came for the Nature in any case, and that is spectacular. (Read this from someone who gets it, though she doesn’t live here.)

“Just look at that sky!”

All right, I will. Deep blue and clean and impossibly tall, over lizards and gorges and condos and all.

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Oh, my God… I turned this up looking through my photo archives for September 18th. That’s my ’87 Ford F-150 when it was in good enough shape to be my rolling motel. There’s the Swedish camp cot with the antique quilt for bedding, the thermos with the drip coffee cone on top, the single-burner propane stove (I’m boiling water in that silver can), the prayer flags hanging in the cab, the rocks behind the wheels for don’t-roll-into-the-abyss insurance. (Yes, there was a mighty hole in the earth nearby.) If you squint real hard, you can even spot the oriental carpet on the floor. I knew how to travel in those days.

My wife had moved to Iowa to find work and help take care of her mother. I had less than no money and was suffering hard. How did I ever pay for the gas on this trip ten years ago? At any rate, I’d decided to visit Chaco Canyon. How could I live just a few hours away and not go see the mysterious place if I had a chance, no matter how messed up I was? (That’s not where I took this early morning photo, but Chaco isn’t far.)

I got to Chaco about 90 minutes before dark. An old pickup truck is no grand touring machine, and I was exhausted. To my horror, the campground was almost full. I hadn’t anticipated a lot of people and wanted none, but I found an empty slot next to a tired old picnic table and backed the truck in. There were kids riding by on those plastic “big wheel” trikes and teenyboppers running back and forth. A radio was blaring. Every now and then an SUV would rumble past, and there were mountain bikers whizzing down the road. It was noisy just from all the nearby voices. No way was I going to be communing with the ancient ones, more like I’d taken a detour to Hell. I stayed about thirty minutes and left.

If you’ve never been to Chaco, you have no idea how remote that part of New Mexico is, and there I was heading out with less than an hour of a daylight. Boy, was I pissed. When I finally got back to a paved road, it was almost dark. I pulled over to look at my map and found a campground of some sort that looked to be about twenty miles away. The only problem was it was out of my way, up toward Bloomington, in the wrong direction if things didn’t work out and I had to drive back home in the dark. There needed to be a legitimate camping spot because of how lonesome it was, if you get my drift. I couldn’t have afforded a motel, even if there’d been one, so off I went.

It turned out to be something called the Angel Peak National Recreation Area, I learned when my headlights hit the sign. There was a rolling road that wound around on top of a mesa, and every few hundred feet was a little campsite, maybe twenty in all, and most of them were empty. I was saved! But oh my God, how isolated and remote. The wind blew cold that night and carried not a trace of my world with it.

In the morning I explored a bit and was fairly well impressed. If you wanted to stagger off into the rocks and die, it was as good a place as any. Maybe better, only what were those odd muffled noises? Imagine my surprise to find a building behind a fence and “KEEP OUT” signs—the oil and gas industry was just over the hill! I don’t remember what it was, the thing inside the building, but it groaned and hummed a while, then went still until you thought the show was over and groaned and hummed some more, like an old refrigerator. A pumping station perhaps, not that the answer matters. The spell was broken, and I hit the road for another campground way up in the mountains that was on my way back home.

That place was gorgeous and green and no one was there, but by now I was too good at quitting. Maybe four hours back to Taos, I figured, with a hot bath and a bed. After an hour, I broke camp and fled!

The question that arises at junctures like this, when you find an old photo that defines who you were and still mostly are, is what in God’s name did I do for ten years?! How is it that so much repeated itself? What did I do or not do that I still have that truck?

If I drop dead tomorrow, what do I say?

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I shot this picture of a collared dove through the living room window in the rain. My camera spent the night in the car and got chilled down, so as soon as I brought it indoors, the lens fogged up. That may or may not have anything to do with this photo. I just mention it because the notion of something “fogging up” in northern New Mexico is kind of exotic.

But the poor guy got there too late. The ground squirrel ate all the good stuff, leaving him with whatever crap the birdseed companies dump in for filler. He seems to be doing the late summer molt thing, too. Either that, or he has mites, and he doesn’t have a mate. Or she doesn’t. (I wish they’d wear name tags.) Either way, that’s kind of sad if you’re a dove. How can you get a date with a head like that?

The day after I saw this, we had a bird in the house. This represents my wife’s most primal fear. We were sitting in the living room with the door open, just a rickety screen door in place so we could listen to the rain, when I saw a rufous-sided towhee walk in through the three-inch gap at the bottom of the door. Most towhees are too stupid to live, and this one almost didn’t. At this point the bird was just sitting on the doormat wondering where the hell he was, and the cat hadn’t seen it yet. That’s because the beast was sitting on a towel in my wife’s lap.

“We have a bird in the house,” I said. “I’ll get it, don’t freak out!”

“Okay,” she said, as brave as I have ever seen her, yanking the towel out from under the cat and putting it over her head! The cat jumped to the floor, the towhee took off, and everybody got acquainted real quick. I propped the screen door wide open, but the idiot towhee took to ricochetting off the walls. It was me chasing the cat chasing the bird. She got a piece of him as he ducked under my guitar amp, but then I grabbed her and shut her in the bathroom. All this time my wife is sitting there motionless in her chair with a towel over her head. I was grateful for that. Meanwhile, the towhee was getting around. The avian genius ended up in the kitchen, where he bounced off the window and the fridge and landed on top of the washing machine to catch his breath. It was suprisingly easy to reach out and grab him—this is a towhee, remember—after which I tossed him out the front door and watched him fly away.

I’m a good bird grabber. I don’t know why. When we lived in San Cristobal, that crazy wild mountain village, there were no screens on any of the windows, and sometimes hummingbirds would fly into the kitchen. These were smart little bastards, though. Instead of trying to bust out, they’d just hover up against the ceiling and wait for me to stand on a chair. Capturing them was nothing, and they’d calm down immediately in my hand. (I’ve seen moths that would put up more of a fight.)

A hummingbird in your fist is such a wonder. It doesn’t weigh a thing. You can’t even tell it’s there.

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