The Desert is an Ocean of Air
People often ask Heathar and me about what it’s like to live in the country, in rural America, in a place where they feel isolation might swallow them or even worse, define them. Living rurally is a great way to catch the projections of city dwellers. They cast their fears out onto me, onto us, to see if they land. Often I let their fears fall at my feet, like baseballs that were not thrown far enough to a willing receiver. In order to catch them, I would have to bend forward and break the stance I am in. I don’t bend. I don’t break my stance. They ask if we feel lonely, if we feel removed from the world. They ask where we buy groceries. They ask if the roads are safe to drive at night. They ask if the acequias flow in spring like they are supposed to. They ask if we are scared of the fires that are coming. They ask if we feel safe, if we have a gun, if we lock our doors, if we lock our truck, if we lock our gate. They are very concerned about how the locks work.
We do lock our water spigot, with a small metal lock that has a piece of paper reading, “OJO CALIENTE” taped on the front of it in my mother’s handwriting. Blocky cursive. At one point, we used this lock to keep our clothes safe when we soaked in the lithium hot springs at Ojo Caliente. Light blue crocs piled underneath folded cable knit sweaters reaching to the very top of the locker. Cable knit sweaters are very thick. Now we use this lock to keep our cow from turning on the spigot with her nose and draining our well. This is the lock we use.
I can’t answer all their questions. Mostly because the feeling of safety is relative. Do you feel safe in an airplane? Do you feel safe riding bareback on a horse? Do you feel safe when you swim in the ocean? Do you think of sharks and how if you rub their skin in the wrong direction, your hand will bleed. I do. I think about shark skin when I’m in the ocean. Do you feel safe when you’re sitting in the wooden pew of a church? In your grandmother’s basement? Do you feel safe if you can walk to Whole Foods? Do you feel safe when you’re watching 90’s television shows? Just to be clear, I don’t care what makes you feel safe. I support what makes you feel safe in this world.
I mostly answer the questions about isolation and loneliness that people ask. I answer these questions because I adore and care about human attachment, maybe most of all. Here is how I like to answer the questions about isolation and loneliness…
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On Tuesday mornings, Benito stops by. He parks his dark blue Taco (which I have learned is a small version of a Toyota Tacoma truck) down by the gate that leads into our cow pasture. There is a small amount of green grass starting to grow outside the gate where the cows don’t walk. Where the cows do walk, it is completely brown. The top of his truck is losing its paint, giving way to the slate, grey metal underneath. His cloth seats are ripped and there are pieces of straw where the foam stuffing should be. His windshield is broken and chipped, creating a mosaic of glass. I imagine it’s impossible to see out of when he is driving east into the sun. Maybe he pulls his sun visor down, the one that is broken at the left hinge. He has tried to tape it back together but it hasn’t held — the promise of duct tape fails again.
Benito comes by on Tuesday mornings mostly because he’s just bailed some alfalfa down in his field and maybe, we might want to buy some. His nails are long and carry the stickiness of tobacco and nicotine underneath them as well as on top of them. They are dark brown with yellow and have a thick, curved bend to them — like a tortoise shell that has formed from a diet of fiber or bugs or whatever it is that a tortoise eats. He lights a cigarette as he walks up to us, catching us mid-stream chores. I have a pitchfork in my bare hands — forgetting my gloves again — and Heathar has her hands on Laura’s warm, turgid (there is no other word for it) udder.
We look up from the chores and smile because we are women who learned to smile at men walking toward us. I don’t want to be interrupted from the routine of my chores but Benito is not a man who understands the demands of time, at least not in the way I learned to understand those demands. I have to unclench the white ways I learned and let them fall to the ground. I let all kinds of things fall. Things like saying, “I have somewhere to be” or “I’ve got to get to work.” These are things that I urge myself not to say because they are phrases that alienate me and push others away from me. These phrases mark me as “other”.
When I first moved up here, I sent a woman a message on Instagram who I thought would become a friend. I asked if she wanted to meet up for tea and her response was, “I’m sure we’ll run into one another at some point.” Up here, friends are made through spontaneous meetings, when you are both volunteer to plant corn in a friend’s field or when you run into one another buying asparagus at the Dixon Coop. Friendship comes in strange ways around here. My friends are nothing like they used to be. Benito is now my friend — Benito, the fourth generation cattle farmer from Cordova who is waiting for six or seven more calves to come this April.
On Friday mornings, my friend is Cowboy Tim. Cowboy Tim is a middle-aged white dude from somewhere in Texas. I get the feeling he isn’t allowed to go back to Texas for some reason but I don’t ask why. He walks by our barn on the road, always on foot, every Friday morning. A braided lasso over his left shoulder and a mason jar full of a clear liquid in the other. When we’ve spoken to Cowboy Tim before — we’ve been close enough to smell vodka, gin and sometimes whisky on his hot breath. His life seems to revolve around the rhythm of the cows, much like ours does. This gives us an immediate kinship to one another and maybe even grows something like respect. The cows form us into human metronomes — we never stray far from the weight of the udder. Tick, tock. Tick tock. Back and forth. Cowboy Tim tips his straw hat to us as he walks by, keeping his eyes straight ahead. I call out to him, “Morning!” Trying to drop my “g” but it’s hard because I’m not from Texas.
On Wednesday afternoons, my friend is our neighbor Funny. You know Funny. Most people do. When we tell people that we live down the road from Funny, they always know right where we live. The sign reading, Whetnall Studios hangs in front of her house — a large metal, circular sign with a rendering of the Eiffel Tower on it. Funny’s husband was French, of course. He passed away right as we were moving in. We heard about people who held his hands as he died. Those who offered flowers on his grave. I always felt we missed something important in never meeting him. Like arriving just moments after a rainbow made its glorious way through the sky.
Funny walks over with her dog Fondu on Wednesday afternoons. We give her a quart of milk and a dozen eggs that she carries home with her in an earth-colored sack thrown over her shoulder. Sometimes she brings her granddaughters with her who run around and try and catch our kittens by the tail. We kiss Funny on both cheeks because that’s the French way — her wild white hair pinned back with a few barrettes showing off her bright green glasses, some days bright pink. Funny apologizes for just stopping by without calling but that’s the way of it here. I let my city ways fall, my white ways fall. Big skyscrapers and clocks fall out of my pockets. I run over appointment books with my truck on accident but then I smile because that’s how it is here. Everything happens without it being planned. Everything happens while you’re planting corn.
And on Sundays, my friends are Jen and Michael. They ride up on their ATV, gluten-free beers in hand. It’s Sunday. Work stops early. Maybe work never starts. They moved out here from LA, also understanding what it means to be from a city and what it means to have to acquire permits for building chicken coops — things we don’t even remember exist now. Jen says, “My avocado trees are going crazy inside my house.” She has brought a little bit of California with her out here to the desert. She gives us a tiny avocado seedling and we place it in our living room with the big, floor to ceiling windows. Jen and Michael stand on our red cedar porch with us — Jen in her pajama pants, her long blonde hair pulled back in a loose pony tail. Michael has a baseball hat over his white hair that is almost down to his shoulders and he has opted to not wear his front teeth on this Sunday. That makes me feel excited because maybe not wearing your teeth means we’re close enough to be good friends.
Jen asks me as she always does, “Do you ever think we’re crazy for living out here?”
I do think we’re kind of crazy for living out here. It’s not an easy place to live. It’s windy in the spring, very cold in the winter, the growing season is short (May — October if you’re lucky), there are years of high drought (like this one), fires threaten the forests all around us, rattlesnakes live under the porch, the racial tensions are real, as is the disparity between poverty and wealth. Last week, when it was really windy, our neighbor’s large trampoline broke apart and blew into a nearby tree. It’s still there, suspended by the branches, waiting to be rescued. Heathar and I tried to pull it down but we weren’t quite strong enough to wield its enormous power. We find McDonald’s bags and empty plastic bottles of FABULOSO thrown out onto the side of our road when we walk at night. The electrical boxes are coming apart at the seams as if they have eaten too much cake and there is that one red car always parked on the side of the road, down by the pasture for sale. Someone sleeps in it although I never seem them. And the dogs — they run wild. They run into the road. They are not leashed or contained, least of all trained. They lunge in front of our truck, they run behind our truck, under the wheels of our truck. Sometimes they are tied to a chain in front of a leaning house.
When I left New Mexico (and I have left her twice) I cried for one year. I cried for two years. I drove my car down the Pacific Coast Highway back to New Mexico all in one swoop, like a feather brushing over the sand and erasing all my history that wasn’t this high desert. Hush now, hush now. You are only desert. You have always been desert. Says the great white crane. I forgot everything else. I let it all fall away.
When I heard the loons calling, when I heard the coyotes yipping, when I heard the elk bugling, I let my breath out. The only way to describe the choice to live here — in this complex place — is that it is not a choice at all. It is simply a place I have to live in order to be able to sleep at night, in order to be able to move through my days without weeping.
A lot of people have said to me, “Home is wherever you are.” Mostly people have said this who were trying to help me feel better when I lived away from New Mexico and cried for her every night for years. But I knew this wasn’t true. I knew that home was a very specific and tangible place for me. I knew that home smelled like water, especially early in the morning, and that smell of water helped me imagine a time when the ocean ran through the arroyos instead of sand. And then, today when my friend said, “The desert is an ocean of air.” I knew it was especially true. I took their phrase and planted it here, in New Mexico. I planted it deep down in the soil so I would always know what kind of ocean I was rooted in.
