It’s very simple, really. Dust and cactus at your feet—watch out for that broken bottle, geez that wind is cold—and then you raise your eyes. (“AwRIIIGHT!”) You are also broke or will be soon, and the toilet doesn’t work. The official state insect is a fucking wasp. Natives have been here for thousands of years and we also have a spaceport. There’s a highway named after a yogi, what the hell.
Bare roofs in the background, extra tires. Feel the tension!
This phase of our lives is over.* Funny how everything still looks the same and yet you know and that feels good.
It ended some time ago, actually, but here as nowhere else I’ve been, the seasons dominate. 20 below zero? Okay, throw some more piñon in the wood stove and leave the dust bunnies in the shadows. Hide that box intended for the storage unit in the truck. Everyone’s forgiven not fulfilling best intentions. There’s just little one can do except get through it.
Sometimes one thing has to wait until another something happens. Never mind my alleged age, I can do things now I never did before or even knew existed. Tricks inside my head—and there are changes in the matrix. I feel different, too, which proves the universe is altered. This seems to have transpired on its own and in its own good time.
The other day I was crazy mad with all I had to do and fearful of the consequences. Staggering from one thing to the next, I didn’t realize I’d already won… My wife was in the kitchen with me, warily adjusting, keeping on her course. All at once she looked at me and said, “It’s exciting, all the things that are happening right now!”
I don’t know how she does that, but she did.
* DISCLAIMER: No, I’m not leaving Taos or New Mexico. There are plenty of other things that constitute “this phase of our lives…” Just stop projecting! 🙂 Thank you. – JHF
Temperature near freezing, spring snow showers passing over Pueblo land
“Take a good long look, son. Let it burn down deep and find a home inside. In a few days you’ll be staring out the window at a wall of green. Maybe even the ocean, too.” Wait, what?! Who said that? Oh no. It’s true! I have to go to Maine.
I’ve known for years that this would happen when she died. I’ve inherited all the “tangible property” that isn’t spoken for. That means anything you can touch that isn’t land or buildings. Whatever you can move, at least in theory. Everything in the house, garage, and barn, if there is a barn. (She had 40 acres of woods, how could there not be a barn? We’ve been there, I just can’t remember.) But my aunt had name tags stuck to furniture, jewelry, and who knows what. There are lists of things a score of folks will finally receive. I might have gotten a car out of this, but that goes to a friend who’s probably too old to drive. No way to beat those crazy Mainers living in the dark wet woods.
Since we still reside in pinche rustic quarters and the storage unit’s full, plus the fact of flying in the giant flammable sardine can, it isn’t likely I’ll be bringing more than trinkets back. What I will get to do is prowl around and hunt, though.
The house is well over 200 years old. She tried to get me to take the old wooden skis and rotten snowshoes in the attic a long time ago when I was pissed and left them. Not that I have any practical use for vintage backwoods gear, but now you’d have to knock me down to keep me from hanging it on my wall. (If I had a wall.) There have to be at least a few great tools that haven’t “vanished” over the years; her husband Tom was a chief engineer in the merchant marine. And what about the John Deere tractor I remember or invented? World War II souvenirs from Australia, Uncle Tom’s booty from the Seven Seas?? (I don’t think he had any booty, actually. Just some humongous lathes the handyman got away with.) Good thing I’m not going up there with a semi.
And so it happens again. I camp out in a dead lady’s home in a wildly different place and look through drawers. (This time there’ll be lobstah and an hour to the sea.) Family, family, known or not. Creaking floorboards, funny smells. Once more in a strange bed in a den of ghosts.
My bed, oddly, if only until it’s sold.
Fully manifested perfect cat
Oh never mind. Just look at this! That’s Callie the Wonder Cat, by the way. Quite the unusual beast, in my experience. Reaches out with her paw to rattle the door knob, has her own bedtime routine. I’m uh, involved with that.
It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it
You can hike up to the top of this thing at 12,115 ft. In fact, there’s a trail up there that follows the ridgeline to high above the Taos Ski Valley. If you start in San Cristobal, you can hike in the wilderness for days. This is obviously something I need to do before I fall over dead. The reddish-brown color at bottom right is a big patch of scrub oak: actual oak trees, but tiny, maybe eight or ten feet high, in a thicket. The less saturated golden brown area nearby is—gasp!—grass… There’s nothing quite like these high-altitude meadows. I’ve been in some where you could lose an aircraft carrier. You’ll find they’re full of elk poop, too.
Unless you’ve actually been to places like this, you’ll never grasp that everywhere was like this once. That this, in fact, is what the living Earth is meant to be. That we have done a goddamn shitty job of stewardship. That cutting slits and digging holes and blowing things up is just a stupid thing to do. You might as well cut your own tattoos with a hunting knife, for all the sense it makes. I realize that Xian ideology pretends the planet is here for us to use up on our way to heaven, but that’s another reason why I never go to church, aside from the essential uselessness of it all. I get my soul battery charged from Source. That’s why the wilderness is so important. This IS the Source, not some abstraction in a metaphor your preacher thought up for his sermon. (You can experience “God” directly!) When the wilderness is gone, our species will have achieved peak ignorance of what it means to be a human being, and then we’ll know what hell is all about.
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