Taos Mountain, that is. Except you can’t. Go there, I mean, much less beat on a tamborine and scare the elk. But I can extend my vision across the valley with a telephoto shot and zoom in on the end result. This always blows my mind once I download the image onto the iMac and buff it up a wee in Photoshop: my God, it looks like that? Well yes, actually, and to think I only had to walk about 200 yards from home to aim the Pentax. As for the rest of you, if you have an iPad or any other Retina screen device, you can move in even closer on the sacred mountain. These posts are configured to serve your gadget double-sized images (@2x) that look sharp when you zoom in. Works better on a subject that’s not so far away, of course.
Still holding back after all these years
I can’t believe it. All these years without the right clothes on my body. My one and only body! But then, cheap and stupid is how I used to roll. “USED to?” Why yes, absolutely. Nothing in my way but habit. Not exactly like saying you’d be tall if you weren’t short, but close.
So what do I do when it snows like that? [above] For my entire life, I’ve relied on some variant of the Old Rubber Boots routine. Yes, they’re cheap. The ones I have now came from Canada by way of Walmart and were great for clomping through mud until the right boot sprang a leak. But in the snow, my feet freeze right up (no insulation). This isn’t supposed to bother me, because I’m semi-impervious to cold if there’s a game involved, like “let’s see if I can walk out to the wood pile barefoot.” Some people use hot coals, right? But I already dropped a blob of molten bronze down inside a laced-up boot once—the smell shocked way more than the pain—so this playing field is ice and snow.
And suddenly I win! You’re looking at one of my new Kamik “NationPlus” snow boots, about $80, if that matters. Used to in my case, but doesn’t so much now. I got the idea from my wife, who has some kind of pull-on boots for walking up the hill to get the paper in the snow and 0 °F chill. These Kamiks are lots tougher, but Jesus, warm feet… The way I grew up, you played outside in the snow until your feet (or ears) hurt so much, you had to go back home and get yelled at for being stupid. Maybe that’s why I never had the right stuff as a grownup. (Think about it.)
The thing is, though, with proper footgear, the outdoors is transformed. I wore these while I used a broom to knock six inches of fresh powder off the wood pile, and it felt like I could have stayed outside all day. Without the hurry-up from being cold, I was happy on a winter’s day. Everything around was still and quiet. The snow was beautiful and fascinating, rather than an aggravation. It was just a privilege to be there.
It’s hard to believe how long I’ve been here
Oh yes, this is what you get. The dead landlord rehabilitated this 110-year-old adobe over 40 years ago. I guess that makes it “old Taos” twice over. Probably the best thing he did was add a second roof that you can’t see, because at least the place is insulated in that way and doesn’t lose much heat through the ceiling. Thanks to the old Ashley wood stove fueled with magical piñon wood from lightning-killed mountaintop trees, we stay cozy inside even at -26 °F, the lowest temperature we’ve experienced here.
Video from UK animator Cyriak. Gruesome but perfect. Whatever you do, keep your small children away from this! I love it, of course.
Sangre de Cristos (Taos Mountain summit in clouds) on a recent late afternoon
Other than having to tuck the old Mexican rug curtains all the way into the deep adobe windowsills because it’s going to get goddamn cold—maybe down to zero, with snow!—we’re rolling right along here. I’m still kind of rattling around in the old container of my life, but this is just bad habits. To keep myself on the straight and narrow, I’ve begun figuring out a few rules.
One of the things every big writer must do is find the perfect avatar. (“What?”) You know, the little picture that goes with your tweets or comments. The thing we used to call a “headshot” until we made everything small enough to fit on a phone. I just love working on photos of my own face in Photoshop. The problem with avatars is that I want people to see what I look like, but it has to be cool. I bought a pair of khaki Levi 501s—they call the color “Timber Wolf”—and a neato pair of shoes online and told my wife I was developing a “look.” She was reading in bed and nearly spit out her cough drop. Be that as it may, here I am taking a picture of myself with my iPad:
(As big writer avatars go, the one I made out of this one is pretty stupid because of that shadow from my nose, but at least I don’t look so old. At any rate, I’ve almost got it down, and then I’ll be a lock for that Pulitzer. You get those through LinkedIn, right?)
Another thing every big writer must do is oil the tool handles. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. This morning I was full of purpose, though the object did escape me, until I spied the dry, cracked wooden handles on my dozen old garden tools. Poor remnants of my old life in the tall cotton when my wife made lots of money, the few shovels and rakes—augmented by strange tools from Tucson after my mother’s demise—were leaning against the side of the house in true New Mexico fashion, begging for help. So I broke out the linseed oil I stole from Uncle Dale the dead landlord, found an old hand towel in the cab of my truck, put on nylon gloves, and oiled them sumbitches all dark and slippery. Wait until I go to grab the pitchfork in the spring, though, and it squirts out of my hand and pins the cat to a tree. (“Honey???…)
You can’t be a big writer unless you’re in shape, either. That’s why I took off at 3:00 p.m. to go walk in the desert. This took a long time, right up to cocktail hour. The whole time I was expecting a phone call from a guy in Toronto who has an app or a service or a unicorn to sell me that will get my work into digital magazines you can buy for your iPad. (Did I mention I have an iPad? They’re really great for watching movies on, so you can think and get ideas.) Anyway, I was nervous over the call while I was out in the desert in the wind with the sun going down, and practicing how I’d get out of it by saying I was out in the desert, in the wind, with the sun going down and all, but my phone never rang. So two birds, or is it three?
Finally, big writers need really big websites. Maybe three or four of them. I’ve been working on all of mine and getting to know a lot about databases. Every five minutes I have to google to find out what the hell I’m doing, and afterwards I reward myself by getting another cup of coffee and maybe some Ritz crackers with peanut butter. Or a tuna sandwich. Possibly a spot of sweetened condensed milk from the can I didn’t make a pumpkin pie with. (Just use a spoon, cut out the middleman.) An old rule of my own is that I don’t do work when I’m eating, so then I have to catch up on Twitter instead. Did you know there are writers on Twitter? They’re probably all having snacks, too, or lying on the sofa—someone said that still counts for work if you’re a writer, but his wife didn’t understand.
I read that in a tweet, by the way.
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