Peak experience, Part 2

A couple of months earlier, almost 50,000 acres of forest had burned in the Jemez range to the west, right down to the Rio Grande. Talk of Los Alamos, radioactivity, and the choking smoke had made the Taos valley dismal. Ashes drifted in the air and covered cars, roads, anything left outside.

Lobo Peak is 12,115 feet above sea level, one of the highest points in the Sangre de Cristos. The trail steadily rose higher and higher. It took us deep into the cool shade under the pines, then led us out into green meadows sprinkled with purple, white, and yellow flowers. Hiking there was such a contrast to hiking in the front range in Colorado. Quieter. You hardly ever passed any other people.

The trail paralleled a meandering stream for awhile. We hiked uphill for four hours. My coffee buzz had long since worn off and my stomach was growling.

Finally we stopped, ate our avocado sandwiches and sat under a tree at the edge of a meadow. Secretly, I hoped that we'd all decide to turn around and head back to the Pizza Outback in town. But I seemed to be the only one who didn't have an insatiable need to reach the top of Lobo Peak. Tim pointed out three different directions in which we could resume the hike, all leading to the top.

Several times as we ascended, I had to sit down right in the middle of the trail, just to catch my breath. I wondered, how narcissitic am I? I might just casually die up here, right in front of everyone. How embarrassing. But damned if I was going to let on. My inherent stubbornness kept me going. One foot in front of the other.

A couple of hours later when we reached our summit, I practically fell to my knees. It felt like we were literally on top of the world. Bella set her camera up on a rock and ran back to join us for a group portrait. Far below us was the desert where we all lived. The whole scene looked brown and barren. Ants were crawling all over us but I was so grateful to be both sitting down and breathing that it didn't matter.

Tim pointed to an arid-looking spot in the distance. "There's the gravel pit," he said with his characteristic matter-of-factness. "That little space down there."

I squinted in the direction he indicated. In order to orient myself from this height, I had to locate the Rio Grande Gorge, which appeared like a long, straight line from north to south, an ancient crack in the Taos Plateau. There it was. Our little community, smaller than a postage stamp. A brown thumbprint in the vast desert.

We're on CNN

The thing about building is that you don't have much time to do anything else. I guess it's a little like raising a kid in some ways. It's intense, completely involving, and you keep swearing that you'll remember this funny, cute, weird, totally delightful detail when you get a chance to, someday, write it down.

And you lose track.

E and I were not against being interviewed, for just this reason. We wanted to document our work, but we'd lose track of photographing every process, due to full-on preoccupation with the building process, which included, but was not limited to: muddy hands, frustration that something didn't go right, exhaustion, bad hair days, and a host of other reasons.

So when Michael's office called to ask if they could send over a team of Japanese journalists from CNN-Tokoyo, we said, of course, yes.

Neighbors in the gravel pit

Two doors down, a woman named Millie moved in two doors down. She had a fluffy white dog (present) and a military husband (absent). Although he was stationed in Iraq, Millie talked about him as if he were in town on an errand and would be coming home any minute.

"I told him, 'Honey, just imagine a gingerbread house on acid and you'll know what it looks like.'"

He never showed up.

Between us lived Carolyn and her daughter, Laurey. Our three houses were built close together, which was part of the designer's grand vision for the houses inside the gravel pit. The idea was that with our roofs all designed to catch water, the overflow during the monsoon season would run off into our front yards (I use the term loosely) and foster green things to grow.

Even though we lived near each other, the earth walls of our houses were thick enough to prevent sounds from leaking out. And the severity of the design called for no windows on the sides of the houses, so we never even saw each other unless we walked out in front.

The ten-year-old next door

In the desert there are four seasons: Summer, fall, winter and wind. I pull on my leather gloves and shove my hair up into my hat because I'm on a deadline. Gotta go out there and sift some more. Sifting sand. The little tune floats through my head. Down by the seashore with Marianne. But nothing could be further than the tropics.

Laurey comes running around the large Cottonwood tree that stands between our two houses. She's holding her long skirt up with one hand. In the other, she has a miniature hoe.

Laurey's got on a typical Laurey outfit. She looks like she just stepped off the pages of Little Women. Cute, but I am not in the mood for a kid. I'm mudding the living room walls. She spots me through the glass door, smiles and knocks as she lets herself in.

"Can I help mix?" she asks.

"We're sort of trying to go fast here. We don't have another hoe. Another big hoe."

"I can use my own hoe," she says, "I'm a fast mixer, ask my mom."

"Alright," I give. She's right. She is a hard worker. "Would you watch the cats?"

She guards the open front door from the kittens, wielding her Barbie hoe. I guide the blue wheelbarrow outside, across the gravel to the far side of the lot where the sifter is set up next to the sand pile. I park the wheelbarrow and pick up the shovel, just as the wind picks up.

It's April, and the wind out here on the mesa is angry that it's still cold enough to be winter. It whips at everything it can reach. It sands the skin on my cold face. Our sand pile has been reduced from its former pyramid into a playground crater that has to be scraped at in order to get a shovel-full.

Leap of faith

"Watch us turn this pile of junk into a beautiful house," I wrote across the bottom of a page of pictures I sent to my family.

The marriage had gone pretty well, I mused, but the divorce was going even smoother. I climbed up into the window to call my mom in California. The cell signal was strongest there, but so was the heat. Talking on the phone always made me sweat.

My mother is a believer in positive thinking. She knew I was determined to make this leap. It wasn't in her mental vocabulary to wonder if I'd lost my mind. It was my friend Kathy who was worried that I'd lost my mind. I had taken up with a younger man, moved to a remote region, and now I was spending every last cent on a slice of desert land, a pile of old tires and some cockamamie plan to build a house out of dirt.

Maybe she had a point.

Tepid welcome

There were six earthships in the gravel pit. Ours would be number seven. We were excited. We drove down into the area to have a look at our land.

The woman who lived in one of the single-level earth houses across the pit from our land emerged from behind a brown slope of tall dried sunflowers. She was cradling a steaming mug with both hands and scowling. She leaned toward my window. "Can I help you?"

"Hi Carly, it's just us. We met last week."

Her expression went blank.

"We're the ones who just bought lot number 7," I gestured across the way, toward the heap of old tires and rubbish. Our slice of paradise, a little under one acre in size, extended from the north wall of the pit across its wide floor. Fluffs of pale desert blooms dotted the dry landscape.

Carly stood back, still studying our faces. "Oh. It's you guys. Okay," she said, nodding.

We drove slowly to the end of the short dirt road and turned around. Carly's two dogs barked and chased us, just as they would each time our car passed for the next three years.

Peak experience, Part 1

One July 4th, Ian and I decided spontaneously at breakfast to join Tim and Bella on a hike up to Lobo Peak. The 4th of July didn't mean much to us, but it was a day off work, and that did. Surrounded by the neighbors' pleasant chatter, everybody sprawled casually around Lil's small living room, I was psyched to not be working.

Lobo Peak sits in a subrange of the Rockies, the Sangre de Cristo mountains, atop a ridge bordered by steep canyons that create a steeply rising trail to the top. The trail gains nearly 4,000 feet in 4.5 miles. Tim and Bella had been hikers all their lives. They were twenty years younger than me. They had the right shoes. Neither of them had drank an entire bottle of wine the previous night. None of this occurred to me that morning.

Ian and I were craving to get away. We'd been working constantly for almost two years on the house. With the construction loan and bank deadlines hanging over our heads, we seldom felt free enough to take time to explore the region. Over those two years, we had created a ritual of two modest escapes. One was to soak in the nearby hot springs, Ojo Caliente. The other was to drive an hour and a half south along the Rio Grande to Santa Fe. We'd bury our noses in magazines and books at Borders' until it was time to return to the mesa.

We got ourselves sufficiently amped on Lil's black coffee, walked across the gravel pit to our house, pulled on our Georgia boots and climbed into the back of Tim's Subaru with Stan, their dog.

I was ready to lay my burden down. I was so content to be doing something other than mudding the walls that even Stan's persistent leaning and his friendly-but-drooly panting on the drive up toward Taos Mountain didn't bug me at all.