Feliz Navidad

December 26, 2021

Merry Christmas,

Sure enough, another week has come to pass and we finally reached Christmas. Ours was a very quiet one spent at home and out walking around with the dogs. We talked with family and reconnected with some old friends, as we just sent out a Christmas/We Moved/Guess What We Did? card now that we've been out here for a year and have been hearing back from some people. To all the people that knew us at our feed mill in Williamsport, PA, we just suddenly dropped off of the face of the earth at the end of June 2020 when we sold our business(and were no longer in that town but thirty miles away in my hometown). To all the people that knew us in my hometown in Lewisburg, PA, we were last seen pulling out in two overloaded vehicles with all of our animals and earthly possessions on a snowy night in late December 2020. And, sure enough, just to prove that there are always two sides to every story, the good people of San Jose, NM, suddenly noticed a couple of squirrelly Appalachian-Americans in the neighborhood, running around in German diesels with Pennsylvania Dutch accents, at just about the same time. Now, our lungs have adapted to a 6000' rise in elevation and our brains have adapted to seeing all the place names in Spanish and hearing it spoken all around us. Spanish is ubiquitous in the entire country, of course, but I mean everything is in Spanish out here where we are. We reside in an area that, since the Europeans first arrived in the Americas, has heard Spanish as the official language for the first 250 years of it, only to be followed by another 150 years of English as the official, but by no means most common, language. Instead of Christmas hams and lit-up trees, we have tamales in the oven and farolitos(little lighthouses) lining the path, among many other ancient traditions. While everything out here is uniquely American, it is also completely foreign and truly exhilarating. Borders are totally imaginary, and while they are forged out of great treaties, in the end they are only arbitrary lines on a map. That being said, I must say that this state has retained much more of its former nature than have other states that used to be part of Spain/Mexico that are nearby. Colorado quickly hitched itself up to the East Coast system of goods and capital as soon as the Civil War ended and has never looked back. Arizona seems to have never lost its frontier outpost mentality, yet in between is lonely and poor New Mexico, so often overlooked in our never-ending desire for development, but totally on another level when it comes to the natural and spiritual riches that are so easy to miss in the modern world. While we are now 2000 miles away from our former home, we are a million miles away from the modern world that so easily consumes people these days, harvesting their souls in exchange for their data and money.

As for this weekend in particular, far away from the soap box that I just about put myself up on there, Erin and I decided to take a few hours and explore the fence lines of the ranch. So, we set about mapping out the four corners of the horse pasture, which is one piece of the property, and the neighboring piece that the house is on that doesn't go back as far. The horse pasture is a mile in from the hardtop road along the front of the ranch and is about a third of a mile wide. We walked from our house straight north to another parcel that is just above us and has not been visited by its owners in some time now since the drive washed out and their financial situation changed. It has a cute, little shoebox of a cabin on it, with a bunk bed on the wall and a built-in table and literally nothing else. It is even more remote than where we are and we have had more than one crazy idea about contacting the owners some day to see if they would like us to take it off of their hands...so many possibilities! In any event, the cabin sits right at the property line and is a good marker to help work yourself to the back corner. I've been back to the back corner many times already but this was the first time that I got Erin to go along with me. The cabin sits really close to the horse pasture, so once we reached that point, we turned east about a hundred yards, ducked under the fence, and then proceeded to stake out the area. There was clear evidence that the horses use every square inch of the pasture, as there was manure and hoof prints everywhere, and, believe you me, every animal knows the complete extent of the domain that they're allowed to roam on. We found one spot where the old fence fell over the top of a cliff face and had to be rebuilt many years later at the base of it. We also found the only Gamble Oaks on the property that were tree-sized and not tiny, little shrubs. They were wedged at the bottom of a little ten-foot chasm that had a solid wall of rocks and boulders to its west to protect them from the wind. Finally, we looped back by an old campsite that looked out towards the plains to the east and then up to the top of the little knob that sits about 200' above the houses on the ranch. It is so absolutely amazing, to not only be able to hop in the car and drive anywhere from 30 minutes to a couple of hours away to hike in the Rockies or on the High Plains, but to also leave right from the front door and still be able to hike 3-5 miles without even trying. Luckily, we're wedged in the 'Lowlands' between the towering heights of the Sangre de Cristos of the Rockies and the final swell of the High Plains: part desert; part forest; part earth; part sky; part man; part spirit.

Now, for the batch of pictures from our Christmas hike. First up, three shots looking first northwest towards the Santa Fe peaks and then twice straight north towards Barillas Peak. Next, a shot of Erin doing the limbo under the barbed wire fence. Then, a shot looking north into the back corner of the horse pasture. Next, three shots from the back corner looking first west over cliffs and then twice to the south towards Rowe Mesa. Then, looking north right at the northeast corner of the pasture with Barillas looming. Next, Erin stopping to pose on her way down from the rocks. Then, a little blue-green evergreen that we saw sprouting out of the rocks, again on the leeward side of them. Next, the actual corner pin, where other properties converge to a point with ours...because of the old fence coming down and the reworking of the new one around the cliffs, this point is about fifty feet away from the actual corner of the pasture, but you can't drive posts into solid rock! Then, two shots of the stand of oak trees that we found. And, finally, two shots from the high knob on the ranch, first looking west towards Rowe Mesa and then east towards Starvation Peak.

Merry Christmas!