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Only 37 °F (3 °C), but it feels like spring, sort of. Hah. Tell that to the dirty solid ice outside the front door. It’s been there for over a month!

“Well, why don’t you get rid of it?”

I’m sure there’s a way. Have the washer woman and the scrub lady build a big fire, put on a heavy kettle like you’d boil your blankets in, and keep ladling hot water over it until it’s gone. Except outside the front door are a bunch of large stones set into the clay, and beyond that, a patio of swept earth that’s hard as concrete when it’s dry. “Old Taos,” like the kitchen window up above.

Of course, most old adobes don’t have such wide windows. For this we have to thank our dead landlord, who renovated this place in the early ’60s. Some of the main highways in this area weren’t even paved then. (A great many roads and Taos streets still aren’t and never will be.) Physical distance and isolation. Just like today, only we have less dust now. Supposedly. But this Old Taos thing has been around for over 400 years. They’ve got it down, or had it. Sigh. Just add electricity and indoor plumbing—which not everyone enjoys here—and you get where we live now.

The floor is hand-smoothed solid adobe mud on on top of the ground. My 6 Mbps internet comes in through a hole at my feet drilled through 18 inches of 110-year-old mud bricks. There’s a wood stove and a bathtub. No ceiling lights or wall switches, just a handful of old wall plugs. The oldest washing machine I’ve ever used empties into the sink, unless you forget to hook up the hose. Black widows live in warm corners, and I once found a baby scorpion on the kitchen counter.

None of this (except the bandwidth) is anything I feel content with in the broader sense, and yet it works. The massive walls and solid floor are deeply reassuring. We’re comfy at 20 below. I can take hot baths and dick around on the Internet. All of New Mexico is out there for me to hike in, four miles at a time. (I’ve lost 17 pounds since July.) On a day-to-day basis when there is no crisis, I am happy in long bursts and fear no evil. Out of this can come amazing things! Hell, I’m damn near staggered as it is. And what if the ice melts eventually, all by itself?

Wouldn’t that be cool?

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After nearly two straight weeks of below-zero lows—minus 17 °F the other night—I thought I needed to post a photo of actual liquid water. This is the Rio Grande at Pilar, NM on Dec. 23, 2012. (Downstream is to the left.) You hardly ever see bridges like this any more, either. The roadbed is built of wooden planks with a little tar and gravel on top. In other words, when you drive across, it goes CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK…

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Yes, another mountain. What the hell can I do, the things are everywhere. By the way, that’s half of Taos Mountain on the right. This is of course another telephoto shot from Taos Valley Overlook, taken about three days ago.

I was due to go hike yesterday, but it was snowing, and I had to get ready for a firewood delivery—high essential drama in these parts, especially with a snow-packed driveway on a hill. That was pretty hairy, actually. My wood guy had his ’94 Mazda 4X4 truck’s front wheels cranked full lock, but the whole shebang just slid straight down with all that weight atop the ice. Happily this ended at the wood pile anyway, as if the piñon knew exactly where to go.

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A view most of my readers have seen before, but just a few days old. You’re looking roughly west-northwest from the trail I took at Taos Valley Overlook in the preceding post, as if you were standing in the same place but turned 180° around. This is a telephoto shot, of course, with the top of the Rio Grande gorge in the foreground. Oh, and that’s another volcano to the right, just a little one. Almost every peak or hill you see out there originated with an eruption or a lava flow. Deadly, loud, inexorable. Alien and true, natural all the way.

As I’ve pointed out before, the tectonic plates are pulling apart right here in front of us. This is the valley of the Rio Grande Rift. Most of what you see is “trending north” with half of Colorado just 10 minutes from our house!

[HT to @voidmster for the title of this post: I tweeted a similar photo, and that was his reply. – JHF]

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