Lifescapes

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Back at the ranch, Bill is eating lettuce. Three kinds of gourmet lettuce, interplanted with garlic,plus spinach and carrots. He says it's tasty. Right now, he adds, it's snowing on the lettuce. Yep, snowing again in Texas. Sleeting, too. That's an El Nino winter for you. No lettuce for me here in New Mexico (unless I want to buy it at the supermarket in Las Vegas), but I brought some Texas tomatoes with me--green when I picked them, beautifully ripe now.

Here in New Mexico, there's still plenty of snow on the ground and maybe some more on the way, part of the same system that's bringing snow to Texas. We've had a couple of power outages, and I've learned where the oil lamps, candles, matches, and flashlights are. I've finished the copyedited manuscript of The Tale of Oat Cake Crag (the copyeditor did a wonderful job), and emailed it back to New York. Now, I'm back at work on Mourning Gloria, plus some work for Story Circle, lots of reading, and some knitting. Okay, lots of knitting. On my third pair of socks already.

Reading note. Everybody tells me that they would love to knit but they don't have time. I look at people's lives and I can see opportunity and time for knitting all over the place. The time spent riding the bus each day? That's a pair of socks over a month. Waiting in line? Mittens. Watching TV?  Buckets of wasted time that could be an exquisite lace shawl.--Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

Valley in snow

 

This is the view from the deck of our cabin, looking down toward the little Rio Manuelitas and across to the mountains, the Sangre de Cristos, that embrace the broad valley. Sometimes we can hear the bugle of elk in the forest across the valley, and this morning, walking the dogs, I heard the coyotes’ dawn song filling the air. In the fall, the valley is golden; in the rainy season--June and July--it’s a sea of yellow-spangled green. Now, in the dead of winter, the grass is covered with snow and the rancher feeds his herd of black Angus cattle with hay tossed from his pickup truck, the cattle following in long, snaking black lines across the snow.
 
This valley has a long and vivid history. It was part of the Apache and Ute migratory range, then claimed by Spain when it conquered Mexico in the 1520s. It was a Spanish possession until Mexico declared its independence in 1821, then became part of the United States with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848. New Mexico became a state in 1912. Three small villages were settled here: Rociada (just out of  this photo, at the far left); tiny Upper Rociada, a few miles higher in the mountains; and even tinier Gascon, another mile farther, still higher.
 
In the 1870s, Jean Pendaries and wife Maria left their native Gascony and came to what is now New Mexico, making part of the long trek by wagon along the Santa Fe Trail. Pendaries helped to build the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas (you can still see it on the north side of Old Town Plaza), then moved his family to this valley and established a ranch along the river. The original ranch house was located near the tip of the wooded ridge, just below Rociada. After Pendaries’ death, the ranch passed to one of his daughters, Marguerite Baca, who (with her husband Don José) built a much larger, two-story adobe ranch house. That house burned in 1962 and was rebuilt by the then-owner of the ranch, the same Texan who developed the village where our house is located, above the valley.
 
I love to watch the shadows of the mountains moving across the valley, and the grazing cows, and the crows and ravens cartwheeling in the clear air. But mostly, I watch the always-changing mountains, glowing red in the dawn, waiting to catch the setting moon in their embrace.
 
Reading note, from Behind the Mountains, stories about this valley written in 1955 by Oliver La Farge, whose wife Consuelo was the granddaughter of Jean and Marie Pendaries and who often visited here: Down the middle of the valley runs a clear, fast, noisy stream in which one may take trout. In the lowland along the stream and its tributaries are the farmlands; beyond them are the pastures reaching to the high-wooded knees of the mountains. Behind the crests of the first rugged walls, shaggy with spruce and fir and pine, are the main peaks, with the brown, domed, pure rock of El Ermitano, snow-powdered until midsummer, as a monument and guardian notching the western sky.
 

Snow scene

The view from my writing loft, in last week's blizzard. The big snowfall came on Tuesday, maybe 18", but it was the wind that did the work, whipping down across the Sangres from the northwest, sculpting the powder into three- and four-foot drifts. By Wednesday, all the roads in our village (Pendaries) were closed, and the main road across the valley and out to the county highway. Here on Goat Mountain, the roads weren't plowed until Thursday afternoon late, and it wasn't until Friday that Bill got the driveway shoveled. We had plenty of food and the power stayed on. The power is a big issue here, in storms, because some of the lines/transformers are remote. When the power goes down, it can stay down for 4-5 days. Brrrr....

The three young Ponderosa pines you see in the photo are our "bird trees"--where we've hung several feeders and scatter seed for the birds. For me, part of the delight of learning this landscape has been learning to recognize the birds that live here. Looking out the window on this sunny Sunday morning, I count three ravens, a quartet of crows, an assortment of juncos, and a pair of Steller’s jays, eagerly cleaning up whatever the redwing blackbirds and nuthatches and smaller birds have flung out of the feeders. Last summer’s abundant crop of grasses and tall forbs—mullein, thistles, fleabane, sunflowers—have all been stripped, and the snow cover is making forage difficult. I especially love to watch the ravens as they ride the winds that rise along the sloping mountain, spiraling high, plunging down, black bobsleds on an invisible, twisting sluice. Raven is sociable, usually hanging out with a gang of buddies, strutting, swaggering, dickering, debating. He's a talker, too: I love his rough cough, his sarcastic croak, the ringing tok! that spreads the news of danger or fresh food: insects, small animals, roadkill, promising kitchen trash. And a new supply of seeds under the bird trees.

This week, making progress on MOURNING GLORIA, into Chapter Four. In this book, I'm developing a couple of characters from previous books: Hark Hibler, the newspaper editor; and Caitlin, China's niece, now a permanent member of the family. Also did some research on psychoactive herbs (found a couple of exciting sources and am following up on them) and pushed the mystery (the crime and China's involvement with it) a little further. That's always the challenge in amateur sleuth mysteries: setting it up so that the involvement of the protagonist/amateur detective in the crime is motivated. This isn't as easy as it is in a P.I. novel, where the client walks into the P.I.'s office and lays out the case. It's also why the China books always get off to what seems like a slow start. I want to make sure China's involvement feels natural--feels as if she just has to start digging into the situation, whatever it is.

Also this week, worked with Peggy to set up Story Circle's online classes for the Winter term--our best term yet, seems to me. Strong teachers, interesting classes, and students already registering. Enrollments are strictly limited, so if you've been wanting to take an online writing class, check the site out now. Peggy also set up a new Facebook page for our book review site and I worked on it. Oh, and China's Facebook fan page is now up, and I'm trying to post something new there every day. I have an idea for a series of postings there after the first of the year. Drop in and see what's going on.

Currently reading: U IS FOR UNDERTOW, Sue Grafton's latest and a wonderful, wonderful book called LIFE IS LIKE A TORTILLA, by Carole Counihan--reviewing this for Story Circle. Last night on DVD, watched JULIE AND JULIA, a must-see film. Looking forward to watching Nora Ephram's director's commentary on it tonight. Knitting socks, keeping warm, enjoying the winter break. Bill goes back to Texas tomorrow (weather permitting). The dogs and I will have another three or four weeks here. Quiet, lovely solitude in a lovely place.

Reading note: I read the landscape to help me through, to know what’s come before me there, to find my footing in time. The land can speak us back to ourselves, a kind of autobiography. To see it as mere scenery is like looking at the closed cover of a book.—Deborah Tall, From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

Cabin in the snow

 
This is where I am for the next month or so. A small log house perched on a mountain slope at 7500 feet, thirty miles northeast of Santa Fe (over the mountains, as the crows fly, much farther by car). Twenty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, forty miles south of Taos, on the eastern flank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at the southern end of the Rockies.

Through the windows at the front of the house, we look north and west across the valley to a snow-covered ridge that rises to nearly ten thousand feet. We can look down-valley, east and south, to Cerro Pelón, bald, burly, white-caped. Distances are deceptive. This extinct volcano--once an inferno of fiery, liquid rock, now cold, solid stone, immovable--may look close, but it’s thirty miles away and millions of years old. I feel some astonishment at this: at what seems to be an unchangeable landscape, but is constantly changing and being changed. In the life of the earth, it’s fire one day, rock the next.

Nearer by is a famous mountain. Earlier people in this region called it El Cerro del Tecolote, Owl Mountain; now it’s called Hermit’s Peak, in honor of an Italian recluse named Giovanni Maria Agostiani, who came there to live in 1863, in a shallow cave below the bristlecone pines that rim the eastern, dawn-facing cliff, incandescent in the morning sun. I often try to imagine the solitude of that cave in the cool blessedness of the summers, the frigid, ice-clad fury of the winters. I can’t.

My view of Agostiani’s mountain--Hermit's Peak--is blocked by that ridge behind our house. When I look out the window of my writing loft at the back, all I can see are the snow-laden pines rises against the blue oh so blue New Mexico sky. But whether I can see it or not, Hermit’s Peak is still there, far beyond what is safe and imaginable. Who was the hermit, really, beyond the tales that are told about him?  Whatever his story, Agostiani took it with him when he left the mountain in 1867. Two years later, his body was found beyond another mountain to the south of here, near Las Cruces. There was a dagger in his back.

Sadly (at least for all the wishful thinkers), there was almost no snow in our part of Texas last week. Cold, though, below freezing, so I imagine there isn't much left of the garden but the kale and maybe some chard. Here, we had one bitterly cold morning, but it's been warm in my loft and the writing is coming along well. Moving along fairly steadily on Mourning Gloria and am into the third chapter (about 11,000 words). I worked out a back story but it's already been turned upside-down. I like it when the characters have minds of their own and want to go off on their own directions. Makes my work a lot easier. If they're making it up as they go along, I don't have to. This book has morning glories as the "signature" herb, but I'm more broadly interested in the many psychoactive plants used for ritual purposes in the Southwest, Mexico, and Central America. I haven't written about them before, and the research is fascinating. 

Nothing much happening here besides the writing. Dinner one night with friends, a bachelor neighbor over for supper, another couple for drinks. Community potluck coming up at the end of the week. Walks with the dogs, knitting, reading: right now, John Opie's book on the Ogallala aquifer, just finished Heller's biography of Ayn Rand and the new bio of Molly Ivins. Watched a couple of old movies, Anatomy of a Murder and Advice and Consent. Lovely quiet time.

Reading note: We humans have fallen far from the grace we once had, when we could look on every mountain with fear and reverence, but we have also crept slowly back from the depths, when we needed to have our names carved on every mountain top and a passenger pigeon in every pot. We seem mostly to be moving in some kind of right direction, if only we aren't too late.--Barbara Kingsolver

Afterword: I'm having a devil of a time with replies to your comments. I've been reporting the problem since summer. Sometimes the Typepad techs come up with a fix (new browser, upgraded browser, change the reply settings, etc). I even deleted my blogrolls, thinking that the stuff in the sidebars might be interacting with the reply function. I try to reply to every comment, but most of the time I'm frustrated by a problem Typepad can't seem to fix. Sorry.

Snow in the mountains

We woke up this morning to eigh inches of fresh powder snow, a skier's dream--and still snowing. Ten degrees, so we bundled up in our heavy coats and ski masks and mittens to take the dog for their morning walk. They were were in a fury of playfulness, tussling and tumbling in the snow, burrowing under it for imagined voles (or perhaps real--what do I know?). I can't see the mountains, but I know they're there, behind the snow curtain.

The forecast is for more snow through the day, so I'm glad we got the shopping done yesterday. We drove down to Las Vegas (NM, not NV, population about 16,000) under an overcast sky. Hermit's Peak was cloud-shrouded, and there were antelope grazing with the cattle in the valley. A little further along, there's a tiny huddle of houses called Manualitas, and another five miles further, where the valley road intersects the highway to Taos: that's Sapello: a gas station, a post office, a small church. Still further, Storrie Lake, ice crinkling around the edges, flocks of ducks and Canada geese on the water. This area is a migration flyway, and there's an 8600-acre wildlife refuge nearby, with ponds, marshes, wetlands. In the fall and spring, it's a busy place, huge flocks of migratory birds coming and going. I've seen eagles there, and sandhill cranes, and many geese.

But no driving today. I've fed the birds and shoveled some of the snow off the deck so the dogs can get out a little. My writing loft is cozy and warm and there's breakfast at my elbow--a cup of hot spiced tea and a toasted bagel with cream cheese. Settling down to work on Mourning Gloria today: about 6600 words so far, the first chapter drafted, the second begun, and a rich stew of ideas in my head. This evening, we're walking up the mountain to have dinner with neighbors. Our community (Pendaries) is good about plowing the roads, but our friends live on a steep slope, so it'll be easier to walk than drive. 

When we bought this house, the previous owner left a handpainted slate plaque in the kitchen: a log house, trees with snow, and this legend: When you live in the mountains, you're lucky enough.

Lucky, lucky. Lucky enough.

Reading note: There are outer mountains and inner mountains. Their very presence beckons to us, calls us to ascend. Perhaps the full teaching of a mountain is that you carry the whole mountain inside yourself, the outer one as well as the inner.—John Kabat-Zinn