The Sunday Family Hike

Current News:

Today is Sunday. The frost burned off quickly but maybe that was an illusion brought only by the time change. At noon, the skies were still sunny with only a light mackerel scaling brushed across the horizon. What would we accomplish today? Pwah! After all these years of working, it is hard to consider ourselves as semi-retired and have to force the issue.

The cats were annoyed and restless since I had kept them in most of the day. With an impressively sized raptor and its mate circling the canyon all day, I wasn't about to let them out unchaperoned. I had been getting the resentful look from Beautiful Dave the Cat which we know so well to mean "You suck!!! You suck!!!" You have to say this in a voice slightly lower than a cartoon chipmunk since he is still a fairly young fellow. So perhaps a family hike was in order and not just a hike over to the barn but a genuine up-the-side-of-the-mesa adventure. The party would include Mark and I, Brou the pup, Ming the Merciless and Beautiful Dave. The photo above (above because I don't know how to stick it anywhere else in the blog) shows one adult male, one dog taking a pant break and two cats at the summit. Can you find both cats?

The nice thing about our isolation is that no one can see a strange procession resembling a trailer from some Disney animal adventure movie. Believe it or not, the cats are excellent hiking partners, never wandering more than 50 feet away and, in fact, become quite perturbed and vocal when they think they are being left behind. Brou, as usual, made his 30 steps for every one of ours. At the top, we stopped to take a panorama set of photos of the view and then followed a random set of muledeer tracks for a while as a vague excuse for adventure. "The boys" would side track only occasionally to pose as mountain lions atop exceptionally good and stately rock formations. You could feel the Walter Mitty thoughts radiating from their smug and sublime countenances - they were in feline ecstasy.

After a few trial and error route attempts, we found our original path and, surprisingly, the boys led the way down enthusiastically once I identified the beginning of the tricky path. Mark had to lower Brou down to the path. Other than that one instance, Brou flew back and forth between all of us with the élan of a mountain goat. Thanks to gravity, the descent was far more treacherous but we all made it down without any rodeo rides on the loose shale. Curiously, it was our four-leggers who made the immediate beeline to their favorite crash spots as soon as we got back to the rat trailer. Mark and I just sat quietly, awake and vaguely aware of mild aches setting in. It was a glorious day and trek indeed.

Next entry: In 2 or 3 days

The First Week - Well Drilling

Retrospect: November 2005

The next big step in civilizing our new life here would be a source of potable water and Willy the well driller showed up as promised that first week. He was one of those distinct characters not soon forgotten, a wiry fellow in his 70s with a face that hinted of a very hard living and working past and a million adventures. The sparkle in his eyes not only warned of a dry and mischievous sense of humor but a heart as big across as this canyon. He occasionally flashed two rows of castellated gums which proclaimed that there were priorities beyond selfish vanity ... or else an extreme phobia to dentists but I like to consider the former possibility first. The age of his drilling rig equally mirrored a hard life in the desert sun, sporting a DIY crackle paint job that would make Ralph Lauren envious. The crackle effect was unintentional but added another 20 years of patina to the beast, reminding me of the '50s vintage Mad Max-looking rig of a handyman we had met a decade before. To our amazement, Willy's rig was more than 20 years newer.

Willy enjoyed talking to himself and we tried to follow his comments and nimble movements as he trotted through the bush to find some particularly special sort of wood. "Aha - he must be dowsing ... cool!" we thought. After a number of attempts at twiggery, he mumbled some more, tossed the branch aside and just set the rig as close as he could comfortably get to the rat trailer, about 7 feet out. He slipped coveralls over his dapper western attire and set to work immediately, his assistant keeping up with his pace for the most part. As the afternoon temperatures dropped, Willy stopped to unload an old 55 gallon steel drum and freehand cut an almost perfectly symmetrical ring of 2" holes a few inches up from the barrel's bottom with his cutting torch. The assistant was right on top of that operation and they soon had a warming fire to retreat to when gloves and clothing became saturated with the cold and damp. I soon realized that guarding my sparse supply of loose vintage barn board would now become a priority occupation. The drilling head slammed away into the sand and clay for a few more hours until even the barrel could no longer fend off the deep evening chills and they headed out of the canyon well after sunset.

They resumed drilling the next day around lunchtime. We would eventually figure out that Willy had little interest in getting to a work location early in the day. Age-wise, he should have been able to retire long ago but was at least exercising some benefits of it by starting the day when he was darn well ready. The late afternoon burn barrel socializing became the highlight of our following days, especially when his grown son and friends came out to see dad's latest project. The son had come home from a round the clock gas drilling job in Utah. He was making the big bucks but the long hours had taken their toll on him. He coughed and shivered over the burn barrel continuously and ended up hospitalized with pneumonia a week later. We didn't catch the bug from him but Willy's assistant would later add it to the many other 'blessings' he would leave us with.

After 3 or 4 days of steady pounding, the rig hit water at 42 feet and worked its way down another 20 feet before Willy was content. He continually examined samples expunged from the long bailing tube which took turns in the well hole with the drilling head. He was very pleased with the quality and quantity of water which he found there. The next day, when there was actually light to see by again, would see the installation of the pump.

Somewhere in all this, the assistant had been nonstop regaling us with his "10 years experience" in reworking mobile homes. It sounded as though he could skirt the trailer in for the winter, reconnect all the gas AND water plumbing in about one week - had done it a zillion times and he could do the same for us. Given the encroaching winter weather, we gave him the go ahead although his quoted per hour wage made us a little weak in the knees. What the heck, that times one week was still worth it. I will devote another whole page to that affair later however.

When Willy showed up in daylight for the pump installation, we were excited. He wired up the new pump, dropped it down the hole, fired up our new generator and ... sigh ... nothing happened.

Next entry: 2 or 3 days - seems to be a pattern developing here, doesn't it?

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Fun link of the day: (courtesty of Eric, the mad dragon-boat Viking)

http://www.hurtwood.demon.co.uk/Fun/copter.swf

Can you fly a helicopter? This will drive you nuts!

The First Week - Let there be light!

Retrospect: November 2005

The next big advance of the week so far was securing a generator. We had already contracted an electrician to convert the trailer's main electric panel feed from standard line feed to a plug-in. With the help of our ABQ friend, we chose a Honda EU3000 generator. This generator uses inverter technology which produces a pure sine wave ideally suited for powering sensitive electronics such as our computers and features a variable speed throttle that allows it to run for up to twenty hours on a single tank of gas. Not cheap at about $2000 but being able to flick a wall switch and have real light at night was beyond thrilling after life with that single Coleman butane lantern. We bought a good supply of compact fluorescent bulbs and ran through the trailer replacing the old incandescents with them. Every watt would count from now on and these bulbs used about 25% of the power demanded by the standard style bulbs. Now that we are familiar with them, we would continue to use them even if we ever found ourselves back on the grid.

The generator ran extremely well for a couple of weeks and then left me suddenly without light one night. Of course, it had to be that one rare night when Mark retired early so I found myself groping around and cursing at furniture which jumped out and bit me repeatedly before finding my flashlight in the front room. Given the bitter cold outside, I had no intentions of troubleshooting that night and simply resigned earlier than usual.

What we discovered the next day was a sooty and fouled plug with a bridge of carbon in the spark gap. A good cleaning would possibly get us through until the next town trip but a rich plug is nothing to live with long term or the excess, unburnt gas will wash the lubing oil off the cylinder . Sure enough, it fired back up again but we now knew that the unit was jetted for a much lower altitude, a matter which the dealer had not thought to question us about. It's not something that jumps out at you but we are about three hundred feet higher than our nearest neighbor and probably one thousand feet higher than the town where we bought the unit.

Mark soon brought home a spare spark plug and a smaller main jet from the dealer and both were reasonably easy to replace. Now we were ready for anything, including the ability to pump well water when that day came. You know the deal by now ... "Or so we thought".

Next post: 2 or 3 days (but they are predicting MORE rain!)

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Humor of the Day: (courtesy of the Tomato Man)

Last night, my wife and I were sitting in the living room talking about many things. The idea of a living will came up and I said to her, "I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If I ever come to that just pull the plug."

She got up, unplugged the TV and then threw out my beer.

Most beautiful vehicle in the world

Current news:

Now you might be inclined to debate the aesthetics of the machine shown above but you probably wouldn't if you had been shut-in for a couple or three weeks, desperately needing to make a toilet paper run. Especially if your morning started off like ours did.

It was Thursday morning and simply time to make a supply run. We had heard reports that the roads were tricky but mostly passable. Mark loaded up the truck with empty gas cans and propane tanks and we hoped that everything needed was down on the list. He warmed up the new truck a little and disappeared down the road.

About 45 minutes later, he showed up again. No truck, just him with muddy feet. ??? It would appear that the first real road mire from here, about a mile away, had grabbed hold of the truck and refused to let go. Why dogs are better than mud is because you can usually convince a dog to let go of something without resorting to the big stick. But you can talk all you want to some mud and it isn't going to listen to reason until you get out the stick. With my smaller Dakota's transmission doing strange things lately, we didn't have that bigger stick on hand. What to do now? With the ongoing rains ripping up the roads, there had been less than two vehicles go by in the last week. So while we weren't going to be holding up a lot of traffic, potential truck rescuers were also going to be scarce. We called our gas field friend (he hasn't entered into the retrospect journal yet but, without him, this story probably wouldn't be possible). He would inspect his wells up this way and tug the truck out on the way by. As usual, I paced restlessly in the interim, working up a great palpitating case of anxiety. When the rendezvous call came in, we piled into my truck and headed back to the truck-eating bog.

We shoveled furiously in the few minutes before Virgil arrived since parts of the truck body were no longer visible. It became apparent that the truck had panned itself on the harder packed material like a turtle on a matchbox. The pull-out work went very well with the truck liberated on the second tug. The problem was that the truck could only be pulled out from the far side. Now he would have to cross back through it to come home again. While they disappeared up the road to a turn around, I shoveled madly again, this time trying to cut down the mud pack between the ruts where the truck had bottomed out initially. When I heard the trucks returning, I grabbed Brou and cleared out of the way. They passed through the muddy run throwing plumes of chocolaty gumbo high into the air. People sometimes pay good money to watch such displays but Brou and I were watching for free today. With his very good deed of the day accomplished, Virgil went to finish his well checks and we returned home to rethink the supply run strategy.

Within an hour, we could hear heavy equipment moving around in the canyon. The noise grew incrementally louder over the next hour before I saw a manned yellow box pop up from the low spot on the road. It slowly morphed into a big yellow cat, that road grader of our prayers answered. The sloughs and ruts that held us captive for so long were healed over as he rolled by. We couldn't help but smile and wave vigorously as he passed by on his return run. The possibility of life outside the canyon existed once more in his wake. Friday could now guarantee a town run for supplies and mail. The challenge and resolution often involved in these ordinarily mundane events have been a satisfying part of life for us here. Perhaps eradication of such simple daily challenges in our Western culture will not prove such a blessing in the long run.

Next entry: 2 or 3 days from now (if the creek don't rise again)

Rain, mud and a dead cow

Current news: (written Sunday night)

Warning: Long, descriptive narrative to follow. If you don't have the time to read it all, go directly to synopsis at bottom of this journal entry.

When I finally poked my head out the door this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see less rain damage than expected. The rain gauge registered 1.1 inches, a destructive quantity for this barren landscape to handle at one sitting.

The sun had regained its hold and it was a very nice 48 degrees by 9AM. Perhaps the rains would finally relent their tenure here. I would celebrate by taking the puppy for a walk down to the creek to check its running status. This was not a light undertaking since the half mile trek was spiked with deep cut ravines and slick mud pockets. I put on my rubber boots, the first serious pair I have ever owned, and headed gingerly across the road. Brou was now geared far higher than his normal overdrive and took twenty leaps in a joyous and widely rebounding zigzag pattern for every step I managed. After this outing, perhaps he would rest quietly upon the floor when we returned - at least I could hope so.

Brou knew the mission and offered to show me the way to the creek bank, first this way and then that way and then four or more additional options. They all involved mud, always a treacherous mix of potter's clay and something akin to hypoid gear oil. I deemed him the anti-guide as usual and carefully planned my own path through the sage brush to the next more forgiving patch of light-colored sand. My old kick-starting right hip complained bitterly as did my back and neck but this was better than sitting in a chair, surrounded by the chant of the hurty harpies. You could become deeply lost in your other thoughts out here with the challenge of every careful step drowning out those usual voices of pain. And so I walked on, my eyes busily analyzing every next step, the unavoidable mud flats suckling at my big black rubber boots, still vaguely aware of the ever criss-crossing Brou. The sun's heat and the marching movements were adding ease to every new step now. If I were to walk another ten miles in this fashion, could I perhaps then take flight effortlessly and soar far above these ever-nagging carnal miseries? Get real. But the brief fantasy was a beautiful respite.

My pleasant reveries were interrupted by a set of deep cloven tracks crossing my path. My mission to survey the state of the creek was now usurped by a new mission; to find this unknown cow eating up our range which was supposed to be in a state of seasonal rest. I turned west and followed the trail. Despite my stopping to point out the prints to Brou, he would stop to sniff and then dash off in a random direction. The path of the tracks was laborious to follow and I found myself finally at the high edge of the creek bank, some 30 feet above the creek itself. Like the phantom owner of the tracks, I turned back and then followed its many half-loop checks for a way down into the creek bed below. I did stop to notice that the creek had pulled in its skirts and was now content within an eight to ten foot channel. Still not safely crossable but an encouraging sign.

Finally the terrain sloped down hill at a more reasonable angle and I followed the tracks downward, noting their occasional long skid marks as a caution to my own next steps. I had no intention of mudboarding in my boots down the entire slope. There was no clear shot and the path was continually punctuated by jagged plants. This thought brought a grin to my face as I remembered my first walk with Mark down to the creek. He lost his footing and rode down the mud on his buttocks until he came to an abrupt stop by straddling a yucca plant like a bull rider. All I can say is that the yucca is not a pleasant plant for a gentlemen to be doing the hoochy coochy with. After a lot of knee jerk expletives, he made the rest of the descent in a slower and much more dignified manner, albeit now in a slightly bow-legged stride.

Brou and I scoured the flood plain but never caught site of any cow in the distance. Now, you need to realize here that I am no blood hound, no hunter-gatherer type either. My absent-minded revelations and steps were interrupted by a pile of what looked curiously like semi-ripe black olives. The "Doh" light came on when I connected the dots between that pile and the others I had already stepped around. This was no bovine ghost at all but a VERY large elk. He must have slipped across the canyon to evade the mesa full of soggy hunters. Looks like the old boy will survive the harvest one more year.

With that mission coming to a sudden end, Brou and I followed the bull elk tracks up another shallow embankment and headed for home. The mile between us and home went by fast with Brou continually flushing birds out of the taller brush and me still watching my every step. A starkly white spot popped into view and turned into a very large and sun-bleached mammal hip of some sort. It wasn't long before we found a nearly complete cow carcass on the other side of a rain water puddle. It was no longer pungent enough to command a roll in it from Brou or he would have spent the night howling outside of the rat villa. I was deeply thankful. Cattle sometimes die from predation, other times from mundane to utterly mysterious causes out here on the range. The unexpected death of this animal undoubtedly represented a troubling thinner margin to some cattleman somewhere.

As I was writing down today's events, the clouds knotted together in another dark charcoal ensemble and began wailing again. The lightning and thunder were even closer and more vocal than last night's show and the creek's vigor has just been renewed. These desert banshees have finally played themselves out and the deep quiet we love has returned ... but for how long? I do not know.

Synopsis: It rained. I went for a walk. I came home. It rained.

Next likely post: in a couple of days

The Creek is running high and wide!

Current news: written Saturday night

If Saturday wasn't the day of the heaviest rains since we arrived, it will certainly win the red ribbon. It will be interesting to see what the rain gauge declares tomorrow. Neither of us cares to risk falling on our faces in the mud tonight. Inches of rain received or not received is a mainstay of conversation out here so you better know what fell on you recently. We began this rain log back in July when the rainy season, called 'the monsoons', started. When I think of monsoons, I think of natives ducking for shelter in swaying thatch-roofed huts. Wrong image, at least for the last decade from what we've been told. But this year has been different and in just four months we have logged in more rainfall than is usually expected for the entire year.

I prefer the light, gentle rains which slowly soak into the ground. That's not it today, kitty. Dumping, splatting rains combined with a little hail and plenty of lightning and thunder. When these real bad boys hit, the dry ground shuns the water and it rolls downwards to join the other spurned waters. They bring sand, pebbles, pinecones and the odd cow pie along for a hairy ride down the mesa steps until they cascade in the color of chocolate milk into the canyons below. In our case, they sweep past our encampment at the mesa foot, either digging away at anything standing in the way or piling fresh debris around it. I don't doubt that our shovel-wide diversion ditch behind the trailer was overwhelmed tonight and that the morning will bring retrenching and numerous repairs. When you have a trailer sitting up on little more than cement blocks, you really don't want Mother Nature washing them away like shoreline flotsam.

We can hear the normally dry creek roaring now in rapids and ripping away tall banks as it heads to the main canyon. The roads had barely healed themselves of mud sloughs from last weekend's lighter rains and we may regret that we had cancelled our last two weekly supply runs. This latest offering may have us sequestered for another two weeks. The good news is that Mark built a small mouse-proof walk-in pantry very early on in the game and it is reasonably well stocked with edibles. But one item allowed to dwindle to nothing was toilet paper. Paper towels are also getting scarce and newspaper is NO substitute, just trust me on that one. Aside from a few dripping windows however, we are warm and dry compared to the hunters who are encamped in the neighboring areas. They began arriving on Friday and one truck dusted by barely before dusk with two adults and several young children aboard. They had no trailer in tow or camper so I imagine that this has been a glum dad and lad tenting experience for them. Hopefully they took Friday night's rains as a warning and left today. If not, they will encounter deeply muddy roads, which are partially washed out, and likely a few impassable washes. Reporting in to work on Monday morning may not be an option for them. This is a hostile and brutal land if you are caught unprepared by the unexpected. Yep, you know that there plenty of those stories coming up in the weeks ahead.

First week - Real Heat! (sort of)

Retrospect
November 17th, 2005

No trip to town necessary for another week now. We had made it home with the supplies the day before but in a way which could become a tauntingly repetitive theme for every trip to come thereafter - we didn't beat the setting sun. Luckily, the pitch black didn't fall on us until we were closer to the more recognizable last 10 miles. We now also remembered that the sun took any hint of comfortable heat with it and we unpacked the truck with record efficiency. The first objective was to unpack the small propane blast furnace which we found at the big box DIY store. It cautionned "Not for residential use" but we were desperate. We had a choice of freezing to death or breathing a bit of CO. We chose the latter since living in the rat trailer was roughly equivalent to standing in a wind tunnel. The air exchange rate must have been impressive. We would not leave it on during the night but use it to pump up the temperature just before bedtime and just have to hope that the heat would keep us above freezing level until morning. Maybe not ideal but a great improvement over the night before.

We had dragged home three of their 10 pound tanks to fuel it, too - the small barbeque kind that they lock up in cages outside the store. The unit fired up and radiated a joyous heat. I slumped down into a hard chair and gazed into the center of the heater housing, beyond the roaring flame, to the other side. The embossed warning there sent the comforting dyslectic message "!toH" Yes! toH, toH, toH and those Hot waves were beginning to reach my shivering torso. The cats were soon rolling around and grinning like laughing Buddhas. This might have been their first real indulgent pleasure since we curtailed their old roaming 'at large' habits over a month ago. They had become grim and joyless in the interim. We had been amply warned that coyotes would snatch up an errant cat in short order so we were now constantly guarding the door lest they slip out. I knew that I could not handle another loss of a beloved pet friend during this trying adaptation period. As much as the loss of a small friend, it was dealing with Mark's quiet but grinding, sigh-filled suffering and knowing that I could do nothing to ease his sorrow.

The reverie in this new heat was interrupted abruptly. I noticed Mark making my same bunny nose twitches just as I said "Gee, do you smell something? Kinda like a burning smell or something?" I forget which one of us was first to dive towards the heater's off switch but I remember shoving the heater back with my foot. Beneath the heater lay a still sizzling patch of kitchen floor tile that used to imitate marble. Nowhere in the instructions did we notice a warning that this unit would sear the snot out of anything less stalwart than the deck of the Queen Mary. Oh joy. After a few moments of brain storming, we dragged in 4 solid core concrete blocks and stacked them pedestal style over the newly brindled faux marble. This quick fix would see us through the winter without further melt downs. The incident also molded our direction in terms of how to eventually update the rat trailer flooring in practical and much safer ways. More on that to follow as the rat rehab begins.

First week - To Town and Back

Retrospect
November 16^th, 2005

There would be so many firsts in the coming months. This would be our first drive out of the canyon from our permanent home. That idea was almost impossible to absorb after all the trials of getting here. But here we were, finally, the morning bright and electric, the air clear and brisk as the truck scuffed along the gritty tan roads. "Wow! Look over here, look over there! I don't remember seeing that before now!." That comment would continue to emerge on every drive to follow and, according to our nearest neighbor, this is how it has been for her over the last 50 years - always seeing something new in the million year old faces of tall rock. The roads wound through the canyon bottoms, sometimes climbing up and tightly arching around the knees of the mesas to escape the normally dry riverbed's deep serpentine path. No idiot-friendly guard rails to obstruct the views below, no gaudy parade of warning signs to clutter the views of immensely raw beauty ahead.

Occasionally a sand-colored rising plume of dust miles away would herald the oncoming of a vehicle. They were almost always gas field trucks, some small, some huge. It didn't take long to notice a curious pattern; the closer to our place in the boonies, the more likely that the drivers would return a jovial wave but the closer to town, the more likely they were to stare intently ahead without acknowledgement. We haven't quite figured out an explanation for that. Perhaps heading deeper into the canyon fosters camaraderie, i.e. "If I break down out here in the middle of nowhere, maybe you will remember my friendly wave and stop to help."

After an hour of rumbling through the dust, we hit pavement and the town came into view shortly thereafter. We stopped in for breakfast at a non-chain diner on the outskirts. At that hour, a little past the breakfast rush, the diner was populated by a variety of ranchers, retired folks, the odd trucker and Navajos, usually with small round-faced children in tow. The pervasive aroma of coffee, clattering dishes and friendly chatter surrounded our booth with a comforting din as we dragged out the list of stops to be made. We would have to make the rounds as efficiently as possible lest we take the unfamiliar route back home in darkness. The other joy of stopping here was to use their real porcelain thrones. You just can't appreciate such things until you find yourself without and likely so for a long time to come. I will address that matter further down the line. If you plan on going boonie, you need to consider this seemingly minor detail very carefully.

There was mail waiting for us but nothing at the shipping terminal yet. The composting toilet didn't seem like a priority then but I was disappointed that the propane refrigerator was still out in transit somewhere. I would now have to drastically alter the grocery shopping list and stick to camp-out food for another week. I could probably tolerate the nasty kitchen as long as I had some sanitary place to store perishables. If not this week, this would become a reality next week. Or so I thought. You will see a lot of that last phrase in the coming months.

Next post? The rains have the creek threatening to rise again and disrupting the regular flow of life here so maybe give me an extra day or two, just in case. Then again, I might surprise you with something sooner. That's just the way life is out here.

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Humor of the day: (A little senior teasing from buddy John in AZ)

Maxine took her car to her mechanic. She told him "Every time I take any of my friends out in my car there is this terrible odor after a while. It never happens when I am on my own."

This intrigued the mechanic so he said, "OK, lets go for a spin and see what the problem is." Off they went. She drove down a one-way street in the wrong direction at 70 MPH, swerving, hitting the curb on both sides of the street, narrowly missed three people in pedestrian crossings, ran several red lights and just missed a policeman on traffic duty.

They returned to the shop and she said, "There ... there it is now, isn't that terrible? Can you smell it?"

"Are you kidding?!! Smell it? Lady, I'm sittin' in it!!"

The end of that first, long cold night

After supper and reflections, we realized that the cold had been doggedly prying its way into the trailer with leg ups from the wind. There would be no relief from the dropping temperatures except for a huddle in bed, a bed which didn't exist yet. We fumbled through the mound of retailer bags and found the new blow-up mattress and linens. The mattress pump had a charge and an inflated form soon emerged which would lightly separate us from the uninsulated floor. The linens seemed inadequate so the old arctic sleeping bags were added to the growing heap. Every 'man' and cat to himself now. Our bodies were the only heat source in bed for the first shuddering ten minutes but sleep would graciously end the torment for both of us in time.

Funny thing about those cats; they never were very social at bedtime ... until that night. Within an hour, they became purring, tunneling, heat-sinking long lost best friends. Don't let anyone ever tell you that two cats make up for a two dog night but we still appreciated the extra heat contributions. All four of us ended up with noses barely peeking out of the covers, all emitting steady plumes of condensate into the frigid night air.

No window shades came with the rat trailer so the cats were up as usual at the very first dull stripes of light to climb up over the mesas. As cats do, they were then compelled to awake us, their miserable palace eunuchs. Only half-awake, I tried to drag each of them back under the covers but they bested me. Mark, as always, was the first to concede to their demands and performed a frenetic gig as he slipped back into his icy clothes. The cats glared accusingly back and forth between him and their water dish which was now frozen solidly right to the bottom. Determined soul that he is, he set up the new camping stove on the scaggy kitchen counter and touched off the butane. He had to have coffee this morning, period - some rituals must not be neglected for any reason. The side benefit would be real liquid water for the cats. I remained in bed, awake but not willing to come out until my breath ceased to form clouds. Eventually the solar gain through the windows and the pathetic heat coming off the camp stove made that wish almost reality and I joined the trio.

Pen and pad were found to inventory the list of needed items which the night had explained to us in very clear terms. It was obvious that a long run into town was necessary before we dealt with one more night. While the high desert will usually offer above freezing temps during the day, it will bring well below freezing temps at night in the winter.

Items scrawled down: a better heat source, small propane tanks to supply it, panel nails and caulking to nail down the wind-friendly paneling, my favorite mylar bubble sheeting to cover the single glazed windows and blank off the unused parts of the rat trailer. Check if the new composting toilet and propane refrigerator had arrived at the shipping terminal. Hardy foods that may not object to light freezing every night, forget the greens for now. Water, yes, water would be nice to have on hand, too.

A new and dependable water source was certainly a priority. The natural spring which we had hoped would sustain us proved to be a floating mausoleum of long dead critters now. We would have to find another more sanitary permanent source of water. That new-fangled cell phone did not have a signal this far out but, once in town, Mark placed a call to the well-driller who had repaired our grazing well up on top of the mesa the Fall before. He would be out at week's end with the rig. Awesome luck, an immediate touch of civilized dignity so soon!

Or so we thought.

Next likely post: 2 or 3 days from now

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Humor of the day (courtesy of 'the tomato man') :

During these serious times, people of all faiths should remember these four religious truths:

1. Muslims do not recognize Jews as God's chosen people.

2. Jews do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

3. Protestants do not recognize the Pope as the leader of the Christian world.

4. Baptists do not recognize each other at Hooters.

La Raison D'être

So exactly why did we choose to relocate to a shelterless patch of belligerent land in a rough clime so unlike that which we had ever known?

Unfortunately, the answer might not be primo neurotic fodder for tabloids. Sorry to disappoint if you were waiting for any real knock down and drag 'em out juicy stuff. But it does involve an addiction so read on.

When Mark and I got together years ago, we each continued on in our usual ways but now in a coincidental lock step. We worked incessantly during daylight hours with few diversions. But we enjoyed it. Then came the oft-repeated invitation from our old Albuquerque friends and, for some reason still unfathomable to us, it just hit at the right time. It seemed almost surreal to find ourselves hopping off a plane into a rental car and heading out to explore the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado over the following two weeks. A genuine vacation ... us? What about the projects left on the back burner, the pets, the lawn ... oh, how ... how totally irresponsible!

But these brilliant new surroundings soon blew off that residual haze of guilt and we consumed the southwest with an outrageous and uncharacteristic gluttony. We could now feel the real Old West originally brought to us by the era of black and white TV with the test pattern graced by that beautiful Indian chief. Forget the pot metal cap guns with embossed plastic holsters, the turkey feathers in cardboard headbands ... this was the real thing! As the miles and ever changing terrain passed by, I glanced out the window and could nearly see the Indians of a few hundred years ago as they came and went in everyday life - nothing particularly exciting, just a simpler life without the excessive constraints of modern society and government.

When we arrived home, our abandoned world had not collapsed fully in our absence. What a stunning revelation! But we carried home a viral-natured creature which would not go away. We would later rehash the impact of the adventure and come to the conclusion that we both most appreciated the times when we were completely alone with the land, its resident animals, plants and ever vocal winds. Departing left a haunting void and longing within both of us. There was a strong stoic beauty within the region and its tenacious inhabitants that could not be shaken by either of us. We needed to return.

It would be a very trying experience over the next couple of years to find that home where our hearts now belonged. Our first inclination was to find a place within a short distance of our old friends, for obvious reasons. After several failed attempts to buy property in an appealing funky artist community nearby, we started to look farther afield. We would spend almost three years trying to find a place in which the deal was not plagued by unusual circumstance. That interval was not without extreme angst and utter discouragement either. There was a point when we became so discouraged that we stopped looking altogether lest the blood pressure spikes and screeching frustration resurface. As my nephew said "If it is not meant to be, it will not happen. If it is meant to be, it will happen flawlessly."

One day, after an undetermined span of painful withdrawal, I had a sudden and insistent inspiration to go look at sites with available properties once more. One stood out with invisible asterisks and we found ourselves southwest bound again. The young and endearing agent showed us several properties that day but this one remained the forerunner in our intuition. We were driven to take the leap without pause. It still took a year or more to wrap up our many commitments to that previous life but the brief encounter with this remote setting had left its searing brand on our every breath thereafter. We were simply meant to be here, even if only for a time line whose length has yet to be revealed.

Next likely post - in a couple of days (and as always, if the creek don't rise)

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Link of the day:

Next time you find yourself in an American Graffiti kind of mood, click on this link. This man has gathered together some great hits from 1956 to 1960. Just click on the jukebox titles and get ready to rock. This great 'heads up' courtesy of the KatLady.

http://www.bobforrest.com/JukeBox.htm

That first long, cold night continues

Current news update:
Home from the trip to the big city

As usual, our venture out of the canyon was too short to complete the errand list. No alternative energy store visits and the big Bobcat dealer was closed on Saturdays! But it was great to see our old friends again and be filled with their great comfort foods (read as serious 'fart food' however) and catch up on nearly a year's worth of news. Stalwart souls that they are, they readily threw open the doors to our short notice arrival despite the same day news that their septic system had literally gone to crap and that septic system contractors had threatened to cut down more of the trees that had survived last year's conifer devastation. We took the vehicle update tour, the grounds update tour and related some of our homestead tales to date. I managed to hit one resale shop and experience that now rare treasure find rush before we had to load up the 500 gallon water tank which they had donated to the cause before heading home.

Also as usual, we missed our departure envelope to be able to drive all the way back home in daylight. In fact, the sun set just as we entered the tricky dirt roads. The rains had left them about as smooth as railroad tracks. Mark drove and I leaned well forward (like that would really help), peering out the window and giving warnings when I saw really deep water-cut cross ruts and other hazards. The few hazards that I missed sent us and everything else in the truck leaping upward and slamming back down. After a few of those surprise whoopty-kitties, we noticed that the huge tank was now a loose cannon and threatening the new truck's paint job. After a session of grunting and tugging at the loose tie-down straps, we were able to resume the drive. A deer caused a sharp inhalation moment as it dashed out in front of us. Three of its companions hung close to the road, contemplating the same tactic. Even at these crawling speeds, the miles went by mercifully fast and we stopped by the kindly neighbors to relieve them of the puppy. Relieve is probably the most accurate word to use, too. Apparently this furry dynamo spent the greater part of the first day barking at anything unfamiliar - which was EVERYTHING - and running incessant circles around the house. He shimmied and piddled gratefully when he realized that we hadn't abandoned him and we all stuffed back into the cab to make the last leg of the homebound trip. The big wash and the creek bed were firm and not too deeply rutted and the rat trailer came into view before long. The cats had obviously enjoyed the puppy-free vacation and we were very content to finally return to our quiet valley below the star-heavy skies. The photo above shows a small sampling of the views we encountered on the way home.

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Retrospect
November 15^th, 2005

That first long, cold night - part 3

With the function of ‘dining’ taken care of, we now considered what to do for the remainder of what was obviously going to be the longest evening of the year for us. Barely one month prior, we would have been finishing up a very full and pleasant meal and conversation. Then Mark would retire to his library to read. It was a real library, the sort with wall-encompassing oak bookcases, an oak roll-top desk, burgundy leather wing chairs, heavy drapes festooned around a massive bay window, sedate and restful teal walls and an oak floor. It expressed a scholarly and dignified domain which many lawyers try to capture in their office suites – and usually fail. Peripherally, I could now see Mark rifling through his attaché for something - anything - to read and I could feel his mounting sense of sanctuary loss. I emitted a quiet chuckle as I recalled the reaction of a U.K. cousin when we announced our relocation plans. He, too, had spent many enjoyable hours with us in that library. After a pause, he replied “Well, I hope this doesn’t sound too indelicate but …are you absolutely out of your bloody minds?!!”

With at least eight more hours before the return of natural light and the vague promise of a little solar heat, this was as good a time to reflect on his observation as any. There are many people who live for an occasional retreat into the wilderness. Most are satisfied with the break but appreciate a return to civilized conveniences. Some will retain a longing for that solitude and daydream of making it permanent. Few, however, will actually make it happen. What was it that made us take that perilous path less traveled? Those who cared for us certainly wanted to know. Perhaps there were silent questions like “Was there some way in which we failed you?”

To be continued in a day or two (if the creek don't rise).

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Quote of the day:

Jay Leno: There've been huge protests in the Muslim world over anti-Muslim comments made by Pope Benedict. Today the pope apologized, saying he never should have gone drinking with Mel Gibson.