One week in my recent life that I very often return repeatedly to reflect upon is that week two years ago my dear friend Charlotte and I spent WWOOFing in New Mexico. I came back upon notes I took while still there (I have many bits and bobs written as reflections later on), so I guess this would be the closest I have (besides perhaps, photographs) to the experience itself.
First Night in Silver City/Pinos Altos-Indian Joe’s Place (Mar. 15, 2008)
We drove a few miles down winding dirt paths. The bushes and brushes on either side of the road rose up around our old minivan, swaying branches brittle and gray before the shine of headlights and desert dust. 4838 was Indian Joe’s address, but in the dark of night, number placards on their thin wooden posts became invisible. We pulled into a yard. This was 4838, was it? A wooden shack stood lifeless and half-dilapidated, no signs of inhabitation for the last decade perhaps. “But look there,” pointed Matt—and we saw further back, a juniper tree surrounded by two trailers and the orange glow of fires. The yapping of dogs greeted us as we pulled in. Star and Tilly raced around in a frenzy. “Cut it out!” Indian Joe yelled, “I’m gonna shoot you two if you don’ listen.” He was a short man with long gray hair held back with a bandana. No one really remembered his name; he was just Indian Joe—his father had come from Mexico and settled in the mining town of Santa Rita del Cobre. Indian Joe was a space cadet—“born in space” because Santa Rita no longer existed. When copper ore was discovered below the town itself in the late 1960s, the townspeople were evacuated and Santa Rita was no more—it was carved out from the earth and all that remained in its spot was a gaping hole, a whole lot of a space.
The party was already over and the guests were leaving. “Oh but you must stay! I love second waves of guests.” His wife Marie served us pulled pork and cole slaw. Indian Joe introduced us to roasted elephant garlic. We devoured a leftover platter of bread with spinach dip. Indian Joe poured us some wine and we had a few beers. He was sufficiently drunk already. “I drink only cognac and wine,” he told us, “when I’m done with the cognac, I move onto the wine.” We huddled around a warm stove fire in his yard—Indian Joe and Marie (him cooing over her the whole time, talking about how he had walked the world for so many years, but had never loved until he met her), his brother Greg, his visiting daughter Christine, three dogs: Star and Tilly, littermates, and Cedar, who had never been around other dogs until that evening, Emily, singer-songwriter from Quebec traveling through the southwest and Mexico to California with her boyfriend Matt, a 33 year old videographer in their cozy Westphalia, Haley and Shana, who had been WWOOFing at the llama refuge since November, but in a few days were to return to their life in New Hampshire. Emily had her guitar out, singing, and then we were all singing. Indian Joe stopped and pointed up at the moon fuzzy under a thin cloud of veil. “I want you to look up. Look there.” And began singing, “The moon is high and so am I…” Indian Joe went away to live in California for 21 years. But three years ago, had finally decided to come back and he and Marie settled down on the land his family owned in Pinos Altos. He worked in the mines there again. He told us a story of the time he sat his son down under a tree and said to him, “Do as I say, not as I do.” And his son took it to heart and turned out to be twice the man he was. Indian Joe beamed. He was proud of his son. We restoked the fires many times, but at last we let the embers run their course and stood to leave (after many other long discussions and engaging conversations too full to write all here). Indian Joe gave each of us warm hugs, “Aw, come back, you are so gorgeous. You are wonderful…” He gazed at all of us with a smile, his eyes a bit red from the liquor, but full of such joy, such sincere welcome.
Thoughts 3.15.08 on hike to Gomez Mountain:
We in our academic language, intellectual metanarratives, constant evaluations and analyses that have come to shape and define our worldview, live in the hyperreal. When we tell stories or experience things in our own lives, we constantly seek to find a place for that personal experience in the larger cultural narratives that exist. But these people here, living their own lives, their own experiences are in “reality” itself. They create that “reality” of life our writers, artists, and philosophers reflect upon. Their stories are the real substance of books and movies, which create an imagined sphere in which the rest of us then try to locate ourselves. We are on the fringes of something always looking in. But we also command the power, control discourse in society, uplifting our own values as the norm, so in the end, they too are marginalized in their own fringes in their own way. What is the core essence of life that still remains? It’s an onion, but here the peeling doesn’t matter. It is what it is and couldn’t shouldn’t be anything more.
Haley and Shana reading horoscopes without cynicism, incredulity, nor with purposeful attempts to believe the supernatural either. My Gemini horoscope telling me that I am someone who constantly thinks a lot about everything, perhaps too much. Now, it says, I need to give my mind some rest and take a different approach. (I don’t remember the exact words, unfortunately.)
Emilie going to Tuscon, Arizona—the last time she’d been there was six years ago under very different circumstances. Her best friend had gotten pregnant; they were just street kids then. It would be interesting to see how the city would seem this time around.
Sabine and Bina—her mysterious illness that determined so much of her life. She was born in Morocco to a Danish father and Italian mother, who raised her very strictly and sent her to an elementary school run by drug addicts-turned-evangelists, later shut down by the police for their whippings of children. When she was ten years old, the French government hospitalized her. She hadn’t returned home until just six years ago. Her life had been dictated by her illness, living here and there for treatments, even going to India for eight months seeking homeopathic cures. She called Spain her home and had been working there at SOS, a dog shelter where she found Bina. Now they are inseparable. “We are soul mates,” she says, “I was blessed with her.” She and Bina are traveling around Canada and the US WWOOFing. She finally decided to try to really experience life, to get out and do something. She is unaware of so many things, has no clue about many of the very basics of functioning normally in a society. She is eager to learn and asks many questions, but at the same time constantly apologizes for her idiocy. She is a mess—has no money, an old hatchback that keeps running into problems, she loses her teeth brace which is necessary for her to chew food, misplaces various important documents, can’t figure out how to use her cell phone… yet, when I watch her calling out to Bina in a mix of Spanish, French, Arabic, and Bina bounding over, and the two of them walking together down every dirt road winding through pine forests of sunset sunlight; or Bina prancing about, lying in the sun in the yellow grasses as Sabine shovels dirt or hauls hay, I envy them, that devotion to each other, that simple freedom of movement.
Reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House out here in southern New Mexico. Her story of Tom Outland describing his life out on the mesa—that time being a life in itself, happiness was not an unreachable concept, but the fact of each day out there among the high colors of sky and piñons. And when the professor reflects that the “realest of his lives” was his boyhood in Kansas, “little as there had been of it,” I wonder about myself. Will I think about my years alone (why is it that I feel now as if things are different, though they do not actually seem to be under careful scrutiny?) as my “realest of lives?” I am still dreaming of the freedom of the Tibetan steppes, but it feels different now, feels more concrete in a way. Will I think of my realest of lives as that time of dreams, amorphous sensations of vague fancies; of sunset shark valley grasses and European villas and trails?
Baxter’s yurt and music jam sessions; the man with the mule who disappeared into the forest one day: “We have many people like that around here. They are called forest children, except they aren’t children.”
Silver City has its own hippie population; it is a full mix of graying flower-children, twenty-something jammers, and their dred-locked wild-haired babies. They all showed at the rock concert at the Silco Theatre. In the colorful spins of rave lights, the whole lot of them beat out a dance to the music, with their bare feet, arms flailing, the old, young, toddling, and newborn all together. Brown-haired (dred-locked) grey-eyed Sammy asked me my name. “Grace,” I said. He paused as if recovering from a sudden blow. “Wow. Grace. That is such a perfect name for you.”
