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NEW SOFTWARE SKILLS AND MY IPHONE 14 PRO MAX have helped me create hundreds of new images. The one above titled “Frozen in Time” is part of the FLAMING GOLDEN JESUS collection at OpenSea, for example. If that matters to you, fine. If physical art’s your thing, I’m setting up a special gallery at SmugMug in case anyone wants to buy a print of any photographs I post from here on out. All I want now is just for you to see these! The photo of Kathy napping 13 years ago above is a perfect one to start with. I miss her more than ever and discovering it was a shock. Before I fixed it, it was almost entirely black. I almost tossed it! Can you imagine? The NFT description reads:

“I see you there asleep right now as if alive…

The original image from my archives was so badly underexposed I couldn’t make out anything. Before I deleted it, I tried processing with the latest Photoshop and was completely stunned.

Ranchos de Taos, NM, August 14, 2009. 4188 x 2848, 300 ppi.

“Morning Elk,” another one from my archives that you may have seen before but much improved. From now on, whenever any photos here are also NFTs, there’ll be a link like this, and I’ll also use the description from the listing page like you see below. For now I only want to share.

My wife came home from a Curves workout around 7:00 a.m. and said, “There’s something in the road…” There sure was.

This is very close to where we lived. I grabbed my camera and went to take a look. For so many reasons this says “Taos” to me loud and clear. I don’t know what it is about animal heads in northern NM. We once looked at a house for rent that had a fresh deer head securely wired inside a tree by the front door. Another time I found a dog’s head in a juniper on the nearby mesa—again, wired in place—and not long after that I found a steer skull with magnificent horns upside down in the branches of a piñon tree. My neighbor just around the corner from this shot currently (2022) has two elk skulls on posts in each corner of the yard and also some kind of small black birds (dead) stapled by the skulls!

Llano Quemado, Ranchos de Taos, NM. November 20, 2013. 4000 x 3000, 300 ppi.

I’m very pleased with this one. “New Mexico Soul” is what it’s called because that’s what it shows. I live beside the vacant house shown here which keeps things private, though I’d like to find another place to live. There is nothing like New Mexico. It just feels better than anywhere I’ve been. After my sister died in Austin, I drove home from the memorial get-together on a different route to lay my eyes on Palo Duro Canyon, second largest in the United States. Everyone should see it. Amarillo is a different matter, sadly. I spent the night there in a Quality Inn that was anything but and left before free breakfast, so you know the boy ain’t lyin’. Interstate 40 took me quickly to New Mexico. The landscape of the Texas portion of the route was chopped and broken with oil wells and ugly signs. As soon as I crossed the state line, it was like the land itself was happier… Less developed for sure. Hawks and bluebirds on the fences, much less advertising, peaceful. Starving to death from not standing in line for waffles and cold scrambled eggs in Amarillo, I hit the the New Mexico Welcome Center a few miles in to wolf down free cookies and hot coffee. Glory hallelujah I was saved.

“Man, it sure feels good to be back in New Mexico!” I told the lady at the counter.

“We get a lot of that around here…” she replied.

As I wrote in the introduction for another NFT collection, “New Mexico belongs to God. We just pass on through.” In New Mexico, the sky is an enormous living presence. The clarity of the air means visitors are blessed by every detail. Quintessential New Mexico, all the way. Photographed at 7,000 feet.

Llano Quemado, Ranchos de Taos, NM. October 6, 2022. 4032 x 3024, 300 ppi.

Believe it or not, “Selfie Saint” has more views than my other work at OpenSea. I like it for the color and the clarity. The picture is a reflection in an antique mirror we brought from Maryland, if you’re wondering where the spots come from. I painted the frame in yellow and red long ago, never realizing those were the colors of the New Mexico state flag! Everything that happens is connected and it takes my breath away.

Still here, baby. Missing you so much.

Shot looking into a dirty mirror over the kitchen sink in the old rented adobe in Llano Quemado. “Old school” to the max. The house was built in the 1890s. The walls are 18″ thick. It’s like living in a cave of mud. The last 20 years went by so fast… They always do in hindsight, don’t they. I like the dignity and strength here. I’m wearing my favorite worn-to-pieces shirt from the Harley dealer in Santa Fe where I took the motorcycle training course . Never did buy a bike but I’m still licensed. The big adventure is still on.

Llano Quemado, Ranchos de Taos, NM. June18, 2022. 4032 x 3024, 300 ppi.

Now we’re in new territory. “Saturday Night” will be an NFT, I just haven’t decided where to list it. Maybe with the photo at the top. I shot this just the other night as an experiment and love the way it came out. That’s a reflection of the saloon and living room behind me. The flowers are the last survivors from a hanging basket I left outside two years ago because I thought it was dead. The plant revived after I bought it inside last year (which blew my mind!) but now is running out of steam. The little light above runs off a solar cell and used to live inside a hanging fabric lantern. When the lantern fell apart, I hung the light in the kitchen window where it flickers now and then. As you can see, it decided to come on when I was ready to take the shot. No explanation for the blue light but I like it.

Also new and officially nameless, “Short Cut” or “Snow Over Picuris” is still in limbo like the one above. I shot this through the windshield on extended Salazar Road, an honest-to-God shortcut I take to drive to town and only recently discovered. Hardly anyone else has either. It only has two stop lights and avoids eternal repaving on the main drag with a blinking red light in heavy traffic near the courthouse, God help us all. The snow squalls in the process of spilling over Picuris Peak are just about to hit my neighborhood in this image. A 48 MP ProRAW shot originally, by the way. Blows up nicely, I could crop and zoom in closer.

I name ‘em as they come to me and what I heard was “Sacrifice.” The yellow t-shirt from the Santa Fe Harley dealer where I took the motorcycle safety course and got my (unused) license is basically my pajamas. You know how nice and cool on bare skin threadbare cotton feels, I hope. This one is quite tattered and won’t last long much longer. The scarf is one of Kathy’s, obviously, that I pulled out of a drawer in the cherry dresser on the left her grandmother gave us years ago. We hauled it back from Keota, Iowa—the same place I buried her ashes—to Maryland in a wonderful old VW bus I used to have that we could also sleep in. The “heater” was no match for Iowa so I rigged a single-burner propane camp thing hanging from the metal dash with a coffee can for a safety shield. Kathy’s retro raccoon coat still burned a little for a couple seconds. I won’t say “never do this” because it really worked and saved our lives though driving around deserted Farmer City, Illinois at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday morning at 0°F to find another propane cylinder was a homey kind of hell. Be careful, that’s all, and God bless old VWs.

I’ll leave the interpretation of the name to you. Making the bed has been hard for me for a long time but it’s getting easier. Someday I’ll have a new one.

I must have a thousand shots like “Backyard Taos Mountain” but this is recent and will show up as an NFT before long. A fitting place to stop, I think. The view is through the window from the desk where I am sitting now. Yes, I am a lucky man and know it. May you have a great day or night wherever you are, and thanks for stopping by!

THE SHOES CAME FIRST, before the Colorado thing.

They’d been staring at me for over a year. There were piles of Kathy clothing in the bedroom I’d been sorting to help her manage after the 21-day stroke “rehab” that flew right past her. My baby never had a chance. After she died the piles turned into background lumps but oh those shoes. With a double Pisces, there will be shoes. Is anything we wear more adapted to our bodies than a pair of shoes? They bear our weight. Our bones and muscles make an imprint, stretch the sides, and cause the soles to wear a certain way. I’d lined them up a while ago to see just what was there and then abandoned them. Now they were dusty, full of cobwebs, scary. Some were caked with mud awaiting happy husband shoe revival like an awful dream. I thought about the ancients with their combs and mummy cats. There in case she needed them I guess, or bait.

But I knew she wouldn’t be coming back. Not the way it was. Not for the fleece-lined snow boots or the waterproof black leather “London boots” she’d bought forever ago to spend a week in the U.K with her niece and sister. Primo boots from a fancy store in Taos that’s no longer here.

She had so many shoes. Dress shoes, performance shoes, organ shoes, running shoes, snow boots, sandals, clogs, slippers, and flats. I’d already culled the ones you’d only wear because they’re yours. Most of the rest looked nearly new. It took me over a year to call the biggest place that sold donated goods to find out if they even took shoes. “Yes, we do, if they’re clean and in good shape.” I was disappointed, frankly, because that meant I’d have to clean them (especially the boots) but I googled how and set to work. And then I realized her DNA was in the shoes… All those years of skin on leather. Her own perfume. Suddenly I was angry to be cleaning them the way I had when she was here and now she wasn’t and I thought about the way the fleece was worn down by her heel and toes and how I knew each one. The truth was, I didn’t want anyone else to wear them. The whole thing was just silly. Even her pristine dress heels showed “footprints” if I squinted. Screw this.

It was the morning of the weekly garbage pickup.

I pushed them all down into the kitchen trash and tied it up.

An hour later they were gone. It still reverberates and makes me sad. Kind of brutal, but the world has many shoes. She wasn’t tied to anything except her music. I have her first piano tucked away in storage. It would fit well in a ranch house like we wanted.

And then came Colorado.

One of the first big vistas on the Million Dollar Highway north of Durango

After almost three years of COVID worries and my honey growing angel wings, I’d gotten way too good at holing up. Then a friend talked up the “Million Dollar Highway” to the point where I felt stupid that I hadn’t ever gone. Not until I gave in and tried it a couple weeks ago—having thrown away the shoes—did I remember that Kathy and I had been on that route (U.S. 550) some 40 years ago! I now recall the view down Silverton’s main street, lunch at a cafe in Ouray, and the night we camped outside Durango. In my mind the drive there from Pagosa Springs on U.S. 160 was a rural romp back in the ’80s, not the bumper-to-bumper traffic, strip malls, gun shops, and subdivisions of today. Memories conform to prejudice, of course. But it did take me half an hour to drive through Durango at noon, 10 minutes of which I spent trying to go around the block to reach a gas pump I’d gone past while tourists clogged the crosswalks hunting lunch and squinted in the sun.

Thankfully it was beautiful heading north to Silverton and I forgave Durango. I could stop at pull-offs and take photos, step behind a tree to pee. The Million Dollar Highway lived up to its reputation and I had to watch the road to keep from falling out of sight. When I got to Silverton I walked around downtown and marveled at the quiet. The two cannabis stores I saw were closed as if the town had changed its mind, but at a third one on the outskirts the owner explained, “It’s winter…” Oh.

Silverton, CO. Not as claustrophobic as Ouray (second image below).

Self-explanatory. Nice bench.

This is Ouray. Don’t get confused.

[Remember, all these photos are HUGE here.]

After arranging a reservation at yet another oddball local establishment like I’d said I’d never do again, I made to Montrose by late afternoon. Driving into Montrose was like arriving at any other ruined burg with every franchise in the world and forty red lights for the strip malls. Sidewalks with no one on them stretched for miles along the parking lots. And then I found the motel on the very edge of town.

The first thing I saw when I pulled into the parking lot was the torn curtain in the window of the nearest room. It was literally hanging there in shreds. I remember standing there in shock, holding the door open to reach in and grab a couple things as I watched the sun sink closer to the horizon and the air began to cool. All I had to do was close the car door, walk inside, talk my way out of the non-refundable room fee, and keep on going. Where, I wondered. There were only three other cars in the lot. The two sandwiches in my cooler—tuna and peanut butter and jelly—were talking to me. You could just treat it like an adventure, said the voice inside my head, and eat while you go doom-scrolling if you only give up now… So of course I caved, and there was nothing else to eat or drink on the entire premises. At check-in I’d even had to sign a document that gave them all my money if I snuck a pet inside or tried to open the window. Oh sure. The window had a perfectly good screen behind it and a screw-on lock to keep it closed. I didn’t have a wrench that fit but it popped off when I banged it with the screwdriver handle and I aired out all the COVID. Checked for bed bugs, slept on the top sheet, woke up early, ready to roll.

Climbing to Slumgullion Pass above Lake City. About 11,1150 ft (3400m) here.

U.S. 50 east climbed quickly after leaving the motel. I’d never seen terrain like this: huge hills, steep grades, swooping curves, and hardly any vegetation. It was like a different planet. By the time I got to the long construction zone I’d seen on Google maps I knew it was. There was only one lane with alternating streams of traffic. The road went deep into a vertical canyon with enormous cliffs and the pavement disappeared. I was creeping along in clouds of dust shot through with morning light shafts in the clefts like a scene from medieval hell. No place for my stupid one-hand iPhone trick while underway. Bulldozers and giant trucks hugged the rock face while traffic barely cleared and rattled over boulders.

At last the landscape opened up and I was driving along Blue Mesa Reservoir. All this time there’d been no towns or gas stations. I’d also been so anxious to get away from my motel, I never doubled back into Montrose to fuel up. The road I needed from U.S. 50 led to Slumgullion Pass and Creede. Aside from a smudge called Powderhorn and a dot named Lake City on the map, there was nothing else by way of civilization this side of the San Juans. I told myself, hey 35 miles per gallon, relax, turned south on CO 149 and then I really climbed… I could hardly believe it. New Mexico mountains are much older and worn down. These were monstrous, raw, intimidating. No traffic whatsoever. If anybody did live here, they’d still need gas, I reasoned, hoping Lake City would save me.

After descending into a long green valley, I drove past gorgeous ranches and came to what I’d call a village with tall trees on a winding road: “Lake City.” I was driving very slowly, looking for a gas station, when I came around a curve and found a snowmobile dealership with two battered pumps standing in a patch of muddy gravel. No cars or trucks or any sign of life as I tried each pump in turn. None of my credit cards would work. A message flashed to see the cashier, so I climbed a steep set of concrete steps to reach the office door. To my amazement I saw a woman inside behind a counter. The door was unlocked. “We’re closed for the winter!” she said (October 13!), but she was friendly, took my card, and let me fill my tank. After that I had to pee of course and walked back up the steps.

“Is there a restroom?”

She was now seated at a desk but smiled and pointed to another room stacked full of gear. “Around the corner,” she replied.

I have never seen a cleaner one.

Leaving Windy Point. Slumgullion Pass is left and up, up, up.

The ascent from Lake City was simply stunning (see two photos up). After stopping at Windy Point, I climbed the rest of the way to Slumgullion Pass at 11,530 feet (3,514 m) up a nine percent grade in second gear. The sun was out, the weather cold and perfect on the empty road. The calmness of pure Nature without people, even in such a rugged spot, was glorious. I didn’t want to leave but the bare trees told me that I had to.

Beyond the pass the landscape opened wide at the top of the world. From here I knew I’d go to Creede, then South Fork, Del Norte, Monte Vista, and Alamosa before heading on to Taos. What I didn’t know was that I wouldn’t be alone. I’d always read the Rio Grande started somewhere in these mountains but I swear I didn’t realize that was just a little farther down the road.

Behold the headwaters of the Rio Grande, third longest river in America.

Holy Mother of God

The mountains are the San Juans. The Weminuche Wilderness is on the left. The high peak in the background is the Rio Grande Pyramid at 13, 821 feet. (Silverton is due west on the other side.) Five foot snowfalls here are common. The temperature drops to 30 below. I stood there stunned in reverence and wonder knowing I was looking at a giant womb where the living Earth gives birth to a river running almost 1,900 miles. It’s absolutely perfect. A holy miracle. The mountains trap the snow, the water rolls down from the valleys, and it’s been flowing for three million years. Read that again: THREE MILLION YEARS. We lived together near the rio almost 20 here in Taos. It’s only a few miles away, at the bottom of an 800 foot deep gorge carved through ancient basalt in an active rift valley where impossible forces pull tectonic plates in different directions through a high desert landscape of volcanoes, lava flows, and sagebrush. The route I chose to get back home follows the Rio Grande the entire way…

When I started this trip, I had no idea. So look at what just happened. Eighteen months ago I lost the love of my life who lived with me for over 40 years. Losing Kathy broke my heart and tore me open top to bottom. It was massive, crushing, horrible. Who cares about the shoes. I don’t know who or what I am but whatever made this place sent me here to ground me. Lose love, find a bigger love that she was part of.

DO YOU READ ME. DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME.

WE ARE LOVED.

My humblest apologies for the lack of updating and posting here. Never fear, JHFARR.COM will always be the permanent archive for all my online writing, and don’t forget you can contact me directly from my About page if you ever need or want to. I usually see and reply to your comments on the posts as well. It’s just been difficult here. I’m still coming out of grieving although feeling much better now and getting out into the world. Plus as you can see directly below this post, I always publish first at Substack because the interface is much easier than the one I’m using now.

At my Substack the posts are easier to read and the photographs totally different: larger on the page and higher resolution. In my opinion it’s easier on the eyes as well as quite spectacular compared to what you see here. A free subscription at Substack sends everything to your email address as well as being available at Substack. Entirely your choice! If you have a subscription to this site, that will never change. If you like BIG PHOTOS though, sign up below. (Substack signup does not appear on front page of JHFARR.COM, just click on photo above.) There are paid options to show your support for my work, but at present the free subscription choice gives you the same content. You can also always just visit the website.

I’m two posts behind here at JHFARR.COM but will be caught up in the next couple of hours. Have a great day! – John

It’s certainly been a while but I am back and gathering up the threads. Some I’ve tied together, others I’ve let blow away. Still living in the old adobe on the hillside dealing with Her Things—it does go slowly—and then the storage units. Lost at sea though better being in the moment. Sometimes I feel the warm sun on my back and want to sing, I swear, as if the space between me and another life is down to microns.

In some ways what I have to do now is prepare for death. It’ll happen that I let go and move on. But imagine life without a thousand chores, all clean and ready for the trip. Like my sister Teresa was when she was dying of her liver cancer, looking forward to the next adventure. She even told her husband she hoped he’d find another woman who appreciated how meticulous he was. Answering William’s “Would you like some coffee?” with a yes meant waiting while he selected, washed, and dried the cups, cleaned the counter, counted out the beans and ground them, got the water going, and decided a side snack would be nice (and thank you), all the while following the conversation, laughing like he did all bright-eyed hard and loud that made me feel my jokes were helping save the world. By the time he asked me if I wanted cream I sometimes went with black, though. (There may have been a cow outside, who knew?) He did meet someone fairly soon. I don’t know the details but I trust him and I never wondered, really. Played it out myself I did, the Black Hole of Forgotten where surviving brothers-in-law go. Natural compression of the aftermath, I think. Clears the way for love again.

What I have now is a massive opportunity if I can only do it. This little dish, that picture frame. The mirror in the shape of a cat. The piles of family history that isn’t mine and former in-laws never want to see again. So it’ll be me who throws away her father’s baby clothes sewn up by happy aunts because you couldn’t go to Walmart, photos of his father shoeing horses on a rich man’s farm until one kicked him in the head. Pictures of England and Montana. Her great-grandfather’s broken concertina. You think it’s easy until you do it. I have a standard which is basically how long it takes for me to cry.

Her basket of gloves last weekend, for example. I knew every pair. She had smallish hands but then was tiny all around and energetic to the max. How she mastered the piano was a wonder to me, fingers flying up and down, joy bouncing off the walls. Such an astonishing skill. I started going through them, making a pile of throwaways and another of donations. Then I picked up her favorite red leather gloves, the ones she always chose despite the holes, and thought about her hands and fingers once again. Graceful, tapered, elegant in that special way. And then I lost it.

I see you there asleep right now as if alive. 8-14-2009

This is all to be expected. Sometimes it’s like I’m in a river and the only thing I have control of is my breathing. Whether my head’s out of the water or I struggle, splash around, and drown. A week ago was almost a year and a half since I stayed up for 34 hours to watch her go. I took a walk because I needed to and sometimes think I hear her then. As I walked I thought about how twisted but essential all my time alone had been, how hard it was to act right coming out of isolation, hurt that all I’d ever wanted was to let our lives play out together and she’s gone. And then it hit me that they had…

I thought about her once again and felt a little happy. Altered and protected, too. Like I was wearing soft, expensive clothes that made me look good if I stood up straight. And then I realized I was still in love with Kathy. All that worrying and overthinking just for nothing. Live my life and wake up happy, that was it, and all she ever wanted. My “girl next door” is buried on the prairie thanks to me (try tearing yourself away from that!) but there’s a more expansive presence now. I felt I’d passed a test. As if the river left the canyon and the rapids and I wasn’t sinking and the angels on the banks could tell where I had been and see where I would go.