You know the drill: don’t try this at home! (I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what that is.) This FotoFeed image shows where I was.
What we have here is a cool video I just created of footage shot while descending from the west side of the Rio Grande gorge to the Taos Junction Bridge. That’s NM 567, if I’m not mistaken, a rocky dirt road in fairly horrible condition that plunges hundreds of feet down to the river, mostly without guard rails. I did some creative editing and added my own sound track which some of you will recognize.
This one really does need to be viewed full-screen if you can manage it. The video is 1080 x 720 HD and plenty loud once it gets rolling. At first I regretted the rare cloudy day, but then realized the gloom produced the perfect atmosphere. At one point there’s a yelp that sounds like a dog in the cab of my ’87 Ford F-150, except that I don’t have a dog, so it might have been me. (?)
Behold the room that makes life here possible! (I shot the image below in the late afternoon while testing the Pentax K-x’s in-camera high dynamic range processing and then tweaked it a bit more.) I hope your home has a space like this that’s warm, where you can eat, sit, have a drink, or dry your clothes in the winter. My wife isn’t into the latter capability at the moment and would probably trade my bones or this house for a gas dryer—nonetheless, if the deal goes down, we know how to do the laundry.
Most importantly though, the walls are solid, the roof doesn’t leak (except for the infrequent downpour or a heavy snow melt), and with the wood stove cranking away just out of the picture to the left, the room we call the “saloon” is always warm and cozy—sometimes even too hot, like this evening! (Achieving “too hot” while the outside temperature drops to single digits is accomplishing something, all right, and I had to open a window for an hour or so.) That’s an actual bar—no plumbing—in the gloom on the left. There’s a nice light with a big glass shade hanging over it, and during the cold months, we usually eat sitting at the bar with the stove blazing less than 10 feet away.
The 18-inch thick solid adobe interior walls soak up a lot of heat while the stove is going. In the morning when my wife gets up before dawn, the saloon is still a pleasant place to sit and read the paper with the cat on her lap. When I finally stumble out of bed, I reload the Ashley, and the 24-hour cycle begins anew. As I write this, I realize that I’m the heating system. She can handle a wood stove, but this is an antique ASHLEY with half a dozen serious quirks, a manly countercultural icon from the Whole Earth Catalog back-to-the-land days, and I work with nuclear pitchwood much of the time. In my firemaking zeal, I have dug my own grave! It’s almost worse than having a cow.
But did you notice the rest?
The doorway into the kitchen, for example, was originally a window. Our late landlord simply scraped away enough adobe below the window frame to make an arty doorway and then plastered the lot. Beyond that is a shoebox kitchen with a concrete floor that was added on later. The gray rug in front looks lumpy because it is: underneath that is a solid, hand-smoothed mud floor laid down right on top of the ground. There’s nothing under that but God’s own very solid dirt, with nary a creak or bounce. There’s a skylight you can’t see above the coffee table, and a comfy chair you can’t see, either, off to the right. The red sofa’s okay and goes with the place (more I dare not say).
You don’t need much to get along in this world, really. A fire, good walls, and a roof will cover most of it. Sometimes I feel like a beetle under a rock, but unless someone kicks it away, the boy is safe and sound.
Hah! Now we’ve got a video. Here’s the background: In 1981 after Reagan was inaugurated, I wrote a song called “2011” [pronounced twenty-eleven] about a dystopian future I was sure would follow. Riffing on a film based on a Harlan Ellison novel called “A Boy and His Dog,” the idea was, I’d be 65 years old 30 years after this unimaginable disaster, and what would the world be like? As it turns out, I described it perfectly!—the low points, at least: oil, bombs, Iran, financial collapse, losing your home, the works. Pretty spooky, eh?
The demo I used for a soundtrack in this video is the result of several sessions in David Eske’s basement with me on rhythm guitar and lead vocal, John D’Aquino on lead guitar and vocals, and Dale Trusheim on drums, sometime in the early 1980s. (I have another mix on cassette with Mike McBride on bass.) And be sure to listen through the final seconds—that drummer can count. Lyrics and other notes below, in case you’re interested.
All the video clips are mine, as are most of the photos. The few that aren’t are easily recognized, although they only appear for a second or two: two by now iconic oil spill images (heavily processed) and a shot from Iraq—all three of which I must give credit for—a satellite view of the Persian gulf, the atomic cloud at Nagasaki, and a bizarre image from Czarist Russia I found at EnglishRussia.com. (I’ll be swapping all these out in version 2.0, anyway.)
2011
2011, and I’m on my own, 2011…
2011, haven’t got a home, 2011…
2011, got no dog, no bone, 2011…
they said it wouldn’t hurt us
if we spent it all on oil and bombs
they said it wouldn’t matter
if we used a few to nuke Iran…
2011, and I’m on my own, 2011…
2011, haven’t got a home, 2011…
2011, got no dog, no bone, 2011…
they said it wouldn’t matter
if the forests and the mountains came down
and you really couldn’t see ‘em
for the waving of red, white, and brown…
2011, and I’m on my own, 2011…
2011, haven’t got a home, 2011…
2011, got no dog, no bone, 2011…
When we landed in New Mexico, our first home was in San Cristobal.
Hardly anyone can imagine, even in New Mexico, how pristine those mountains are and what a holy joy it was to live there. The upper end of the valley backs up to wilderness. You can follow a trail all the way to the source of San Cristobal Creek, so they tell me, although I never did.
In San Cristobal, we could hear elk bugling in the fall. Sometimes they grazed within sight of our house. Once we took a walk and found a fawn curled up in the grass. A bear destroyed the compost bin and broke a window in our landlady’s car. Hummingbirds flew in through the unscreened windows—I had to stand on a chair to catch them and let them out! There was a mountain lion in the neighborhood, and coyotes were everywhere. I saw a golden eagle dive down out of the sky and snatch a prairie dog. And almost every day when there were clouds, they tore themselves apart colliding with the peaks. Forests and mountains, the unending spectacle of sun and sky, and air so clean and cool, your lungs broke down and cried.
This is where we started, mind you.
At the time, I wasn’t ready to take care of us like I had promised. Driven mad by extraordinary guilt and fear, I saw demons everywhere. Regardless of the unearthly wonderment of living in such a place, our days were often filled with pain and crisis. Locked into a confrontation with myself, I couldn’t even trust the one I love. It was like skating on thin ice while carrying a hungry bear.
I’ve been reminded of all this while going through a decade’s worth of photographs as I revise my BUFFALO LIGHTS book: so many places, people, vistas, and adventures. So many journeys, struggles, and discoveries. More history and new horizons in 11 years than most people experience in a lifetime. Way beyond merely staggering. Insanely glorious, in fact, despite the rolling shitstorm of guilt I’d brought with me from my old life, the horror of no money, the doubt, confusion, and despair.
In other words, I DID IT.
Just getting away from the East Coast and landing in San Cristobal for the first 18 months was a major lifetime coup. Eleven years later, we’re still here in northern New Mexico. Without inherited wealth, dividends, or sugar daddies, just our wits and talents and my poor old Visa card, we’ve survived and grown in this incredible, beautiful, difficult part of the world. After all this time, it appears I’m a goddamn intrinsic success, and the astonishing thing to me is that I did all this while I was crazy.
Imagine what I could have done if I hadn’t been afraid!
Some of the plums had already fallen, so I knew the others were ready to pick. As I stood there pulling them into the colander one by two, I heard the steady, whispered “whoop, whoop, whoop” of raven wings. At beat four he flew overhead and whoop-whooped out of sight. There were a lot of plums.
On the way back to the kitchen, I passed by the carved stone fish my wife bought from a roadside vendor in Michoacán in ’78. Yesterday I spontaneously hosed it down for no particular reason, and it was like something popped inside. The instinctive ritual blew more than a few circuits, connecting me with something normally obscured (meaning that the symbolism worked). It’s just the thing to do, so this morning I set up the camera and watered the fish again. You have no idea how good that feels, but maybe this video will help.
The soundtrack is from an early instrumental version of “Thank You Jesus for the Nails,” a work of dark vigor and questionable taste fortunately still very much in progress, as the part where I play the keyboard with my knuckles will attest.
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