Green!

As I flew from Albuquerque to Chicago yesterday, I looked down from the airplane and saw green. Green fields. Green grass. Fully leafed-out trees.

Water is miracle.

I noticed how close together the towns are, how close the farms are compared to ranches out West. People here have bonafide neighbors, not like the isolated West where towns are scattered like old rusted parts across the dusty desert, where ranches are isolated. Westerners are more independent and self-reliant as a result.

It is very flat. There are no hills, no mountains, nothing on the horizon here, so the land is a bit player on life’s stage.  Out West, it’s the star. The prima dona.

And we had a thunderstorm last night!! Out West it seldom rains, and when it does, it doesn’t amount to much more than a hunk of spit.

Indy or bust!

We interrupt this Western sojourn for Mary Jane to return to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for her 37th Indy 500!

Yes, I fly out tomorrow from Albuquerque for Indianapolis. I fly thru Chicago. I hope the plane is on time because I have a 50-minute connection.

I can’t wait to see my family again!!! I took a long walk this evening back to the red cliffs and the canyon and wondered how it will be to be among trees and grass and picket fences and humidity again.

The moon is nearly full. It is my third full moon since I arrived here at Ghost Ranch.

I pray for sunshine on Race Day! Go Helio!

Mary Jane’s neighborhood

I took a walk a few nights ago after dinner, when the setting sun turns the orange mesas to gold and copper and salmon. I walked around the alfalfa field, headed out to the road and took a trail into Matrimonial Mesa.

On the way I passed Miles and Melissa, two other workers who live on the ranch. They were enjoying the evening from Miles’ trailer.

Living here is like living in a small town, I decided. There are about 30 of us who live on the ranch in little houses scattered around the alfalfa field. Think of it as a big village green half a mile long and maybe one-tenth of a mile wide. I know everyone who lives here. we are a close-knit neighborhood.

There is a farm at the south end, and corrals behind the museum and my digs on the west end; Lady, the 42-year-old mare, grazes in the field, and in the morning cars come and park in the Ghost Ranch office. People going to work.

We have a library and a chapel and a museum and a hotel – i.e., rooms for guests. At night often I sit out on my front porch and watch the world go by. I see a few cars come and go. I hear them on the gravel road. I see guests and residents strolling in the morning. Melissa and Annie and Mark ride past on bicycles.

I hear the chickens at the farm at dawn. I smell the horse corrals. And last week, in the early morning, I heard coyotes in the distant canyons. They began calling to each other.

I love living here among people I know. I know all their names, like in small towns of long ago.

Sunday scramble

Today I went places that no self-respecting grandmother has any right to go -scrambling up a steep trail to  El Chorro Falls. The water pours over the top of the Brazos Cliffs only once a year, in May.  like the Indy 500!!

Susan Rench, Patricia Putnam and I went, led by willie Picaro, the resident Yankee fan who came out here 33 years ago from New Jersey and never left; he knows every canyon, every mesa, every trickle of water in northern New Mexico, and he knew how to get us up to the falls. The hour long ride up there was worth the price of admission; Willie told us about this farm and that clifff, and oh, there’s a trail back there – amazing.

We went north; we could see the snow-capped San Juan Mountains in Colorado, then turned toward the Brazos Mountains ("brazos" means "arms" in Spanish; these mountains wrap their arms around the little towns below.) We got on a dirt road and went past log cabins and two small lodges, climbing higher and higher under towering ponderosa pines. There was a great little restaurant back there too.  It was beautiful but I would worry about a forest fire, esp. with that one dirt road your only way out. All the roofs are metal in case of fire.

When the road got impassable for Willie’s battered old Honda, we got out and began to climb up the road, then the trail. It was steep, and by now we were close to 10,000 feet and I was huffing and puffing. But oh, we could see that waterfall from time to time, and we kept getting closer; until finally we were there, on big rocks at the bubbling creek at the base of the fall.

I was climbing over boulders and shimmying over downed trees, going places no self-respecting grandmother ought to go; I did not go as high as Willie, who scrambled like a mountain goat in his old Converse high-top tennis shoes. I found a great rock in the middle of the creek and ate my turkey sandwich and my apple as the water gurgled all around me.

Who needed to go higher? I could see the waterfall. The sky was cloudless blue, I could see the white fir and chokeberries and box elder trees, I could smell the fir and the pine,  I could hear the soft wind, I was in the mountains….it doesn’t get much better than this.

Java gem

I stumbled onto a gem of a place this morning in the crumbling little Hispanic town of Tierra Amarilla, 30 miles north of here. It is a coffee shop called the Three Ravens. Ted and I headed up after breakfast, before I had to be at work in the registration office at 11 a.m.

The town is a shambles, with  old once-proud  adobes sagging and neglected, closed stores and the like. There’s nothing there but a town hall and a few houses and horses and chickens – and the Three Ravens. Ted had heard about it so we drove up to check it out.

What a gem. It was like finding a nugget of gold in a pot of mud.

Here amidst rundown buildings is this culinary  oasis offering lattes and paninis and muffins and carrot cake. It is a story waiting to be written – and I told the owner, who just opened last July, that I was going to write about this.

He is Asian-American in this little Hispanic hamlet; he used to live in LA, moved back here 12 years ago, and he has invested in this town. He said he’s doing better than expected and "word is getting out." He told us he had the "Best coffee in New Mexico," maybe beyond; and I asked him why and he proceeded to tell me. All about his beans  and his machines, etc. He had on a green apron with a circle that said "Starbucks" and a red line through it.

Ted and I  sat down at one of three tables and ended up talking to the other patrons, all Anglos, all from somewhere else  (every Anglo here is from somewhere else. The native are all Hispanic.

The patrons were  a man from Burlington, Vt., who is here breaking up the house of a friend who died, and who is falling in love with the West;  and a 60-ish couple from Seattle on a month-long journey in their RV to the flat plains of southwest Texas. She is a writer and she may write about Apache-Comanche history of  that area. They love the plains. They do not see "nothing" there. They see beauty, history, and the human spirit.

It was a delightful morning, and the sun shone on the cliffs and the mountains and the sky was achingly blue as we drove.  Ted and I kept saying, "Isn’t it beautiful!" He is a Ghost Ranch volunteer from Washington, D.C.

We kept speculating on what it would be like to return home after living in this geographical paradise.

It’s been open since last July in a renovated building, and the owner deserves a medal for investing in $11,000 coffee machines and selling lattes and paninis in man – I why anyone would seek out lattes and paninis in a townat aThere is rurcffrne

Runaway horses!

My alarm went off this morning at 6:15. I laid there groggily when suddenly outside my window I heard a horse gallop past and lively whinnying. I sat up in time to see Lady, our 42-year-old mare, running past my window. Lady is too old to do much but munch grass, and there she was running!

Somehow the horses had gotten out of the corral.

About 10 minutes later, a parade of horses went by, led byLady, walking obediently, so well-behaved; behind Lady was a mahoghany-colored mare and then Ebony, a black stallion. I was outside on my patio, sipping coffee and watching.

A parade. what a nice way to start the day!

We have no idea why they went so obediently back to the corral or even why they headed back there, except it was time for breakfast. No human was leading them.

Presbyterian horses?

Making do

Now I understand why the pioneers never threw anything out and why they learned to repair and improvise.

That’s what you do when no stores are nearby.

A reader here asked why I didn’t take my camera to the Colorado jaunt Saturday? My camera broke, and it’s 45 minutes to Wal-Mart to buy a new one.

 I hate Wal-Mart and I can’t justify wsting 90 precious minutes of my life, and then some, to wander around in the crummy little town of Espanola looking for a camera which will be locked behind glass and having to deal with a clerk who knows more about "Desperate Housewives" than cameras.

Ditto my watch.  Today my watch strap broke for the thrird time in a month. I bought the dumb thing at Target in February and I would take it back but I haven’t a clue where the nearest Target is. I have glued it back together with Elmer’s – that’s what you do when you are not 10 minutes from the nearest big box store. You make do.

I will continue to make do.  It still tells time,  so I will keep it in my pocket and use it like an old-fashioned pocket watch and dig it out when I need to know the time.

You just make do. When  I am in Indianapolis for the 500 next week, though, I will stock up.

As I said Sturday, there’s not a bottle of cleaner for gas permeable lenses between Santa Fe and the Colorado border.

Colorado!

Saturday afternoon I took off and went to Colorado! I realized it’s just 50 miles away, and I came to  New Mexico because it is close to the Western places I love. So I got in my car and headed north.

Getting there was half the fun.

First, I stopped at Tierra Wools store in the hamlet of Los Ojos. It is a cooperative store for the sheep farmers in this area. The store is in an old wooden building on the tiny main street through this Spanish town. It smelled of old wood and wool. They had beautiful hats, shawls and scarves in stunning rich colors and expert craftsmanship at prices I could not afford. The back roo, had about 10 looms,  with weaving in progress.

Then I went on to Chama, a village with the nation’s highest narrow gauge railroad, the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad. The season starts Saturday. The station and tracks were on Main Street and I wandered through the train yard, smelled the creosote and saw old refurbished cars and the steam engine waiting for the hiss of steam and a conductor to drive it.

Across the street were a few shabby shops – I browsed, got a latte, and then went into one store of train pictures. It was  owned by a very old man wearing a seersucker overalls and train hat and red kerchief. I wished all the train fans in the Day family were with me!

From there it was just 10 miles to Colorado, and off I went Just as I crossed the border (and honked my horn, a family custom!) there were real live cowboys on horses rounding up a herd of cattle to be branded, castrated and moved to their higher summer pasture. By now I was in the foothills of the Rockies. I wish I’d had my camera.

I drove to the summit of Cumbres Pass at 10,022 feet. It was still winter up there, with dirty snow on the ground and leafless aspens among the Ponderosa pines. It was very cold. I got out of my car to feel how cold it was. I wanted to pull into a campground and sit and soak up the mountain air, but it was closed due to snow..  It may not open until early June.

I was struck by how the change in elevation – it is 3,500 feet higher than Ghost Ranch – affects the weather. Our cottonwoods have leafed out and the Indian paintbrush is blooming in the desert, tiny red spurts of color. In the mountains, spring has yet to awaken.

 It was beautiful up there, and to be in the middle of forested mountains just an hour from here was refreshing. I was very close to Durango and Pagosa Springs and destinations that were always half a continent away. Now they are just a few hours from me.

 The road was good, a gentle winding mountain road, and the narrow gauge tracks paralleled the road.  The train goes to the Colorado town of Antonito.  That was another 40 miles away.  I turned around and meandered back to Abiquiu.

projects going on at each one/ Iaplac

Yo hablo espanol

My cousin Joseph has been on my case for not practicing my Spanish with the kitchen help at Ghost Ranch. Well, today I practiced it on a real live person over the phone.

I had to return a call from a woman  about registering for a class. I got a man who did not speak English – at least, that is what he said in Spanish. I’ve been told that’s a trick; they think callers are all telemarketers, and by speaking only Spanish, they get rid of them.

Aha. I knew Spanish. Darlene Rodriguez, the registrar who is fluent in Spanish, stared in shock, listening. I asked if Sandra was there, told the man I spoke Spanish a little bit, etc. He still blew me off, but still.

It was a brief call, but the words were there when I needed them! Ole!

Bingo for dummies

From Hispanic culture to Hopi culture, living here is a rich cultural stew.

Last wednesday, about 10 of us from Ghost Ranch drove up to the hamlet of Los Ojos to play bingo at the Catholic church (the only church in town, with a steeple sticking up as you rounded the hill down into town.) It was to benefit the Ghost Ranch team for Relay for Life, which will be held at the high school in Los Ojos June 26-27.

Los Ojos is about 30 miles north of Thost Ranch on Highway 84 – just 20 miles south of Colorado. I drove three other people. We climbed and cilimbed,  and then suddenly, boom, there were the thunderous majestic soaring snow-capped Rockies across the valley  in front of us – they took my breath away! I keep forgetting we are so close to Colorado.

The town was a sagging little town best know for its  wonderful wool/weaving shop; sheep grazed in the valley below the church. We heard them and went out and saw them during the break. It was pastoral, quiet, and beautiful.

Bingo was something else. It was held in the quonset hut next to the church that served as the church hall. There were three long rows of folding tables and folding chairs, and a wooden crucifix at one end. We were the only Anglos there, and most of us are  from east of the Mississippi – Ohio, Kentucky, St. Louis, Maryland, etc.  I’m learning that all the whites here are from somewhere else.

 Everyone was Hispanic except us. I sat across from Louise, the head housekeeper at Ghost Ranch (Hispanic) and her 84-year-old mother, who’s a whiz at bingo.

Bingo is held monthly here, and  all ages, from tots to grandmothers, were there. In our society we’d have separate games for the kids or brag that this was "intergenerational," but here, all ages came and  nobody minded the cute little 2-year-old who kept wandering up to the bingo caller. Our culture is far too stratified.

Bingo is expensive. It  cost $20 for the full game sheet; Ipaid $15 for the next level down. Plus, you had to buy your marker for $1. It was a tall, plump Magic Marker.  (Will I ever use it again?)

We had supper too; for $5 I got a cheeseburger, chips and root beer. They had taquitos (small tacos) and guacamole too, and they sold pie and popcorn and cake for $2 more. It was all paper plates, of course. Low-budget bingo.

Bingo started at 7. The caller had a mike, and a big electronic board that displayed the called numbers. I didn’t know there were so many ways to play – make an X on your card, a T on your card, or  "postage stamp" (all four corners filled in.)  At the end, they called 55 numbers and if your card got filled, you’d win $300. Nobody did.

I didn’t come close to winning, and it went on too long – well over 2.5 hours. We didn’t get home till past 10:30. But it was an enjoyable evening in a gorgeous, humble little town,  a slice of  New Mexico that tourists do not see.