Sumbitch

I have to become an enllightened sumbitch. There’s no other way.

We heard about 1,000 coyotes in what had to be the backyard. That would be an acre of steep hillside of sagebrush, chamisa, and cacti ending at an old acequia lined with big aspens, Russian olives, elms, cottonwoods, wild cherries, and willows. Piñon and juniper too, on the outside. There’s tall green grass down there as well, and the acequia is still flowing. If you were a coyote, you could do worse, and these did even better. What sounded like maybe 50 or 60 of them were jumping up and down on the patio. You probably think I’m kidding, but the ground shook.

My wife said, “There’s a whole herd of ‘em. What IS it with all these coyotes?”

I replied, “It’s Friday night. COYOTE STOMP!”

We had just gotten back from a dinner with about a dozen people in a 200-year-old adobe on the edge of a cliff. It wasn’t far away, about a mile. We stepped out of our rented 100+ year-old adobe and drove my wife’s deceased mother’s ’89 Dodge Spirit most of the way there before parking at the Head Start school. The host lives next to an old adobe church whose wall comes right up to the asphalt. No place to park, in other words, so we walked the last few hundred yards and back.

I met a man there, older than I am by I don’t know how much, tall, broad-shouldered and just a little bent, really tan, with a short thin beard. Genuine, approachable, modest sort of fellow. Grew up in Louisiana, lived most of his life in Houston. I have no idea what he did for a living, but like I said, he looks permanently tanned and pretty strong, so I’ll bet it was outdoors. A few years back, his wife died. He met a recently-widowed symphony violist on the Internet (!). Her daughter needed special care at a school in southern Colorado. A year and a half ago they moved to the top of an 8,000-foot mesa two hours north of here.

I know the place. “Mesa” doesn’t mean a big lump of bare rock like in the cowboy movies either. Around here it means a mountain with an open, hilly top, in this case one with lots of trees and stretches of grass, rocks, dirt, or sagebrush. You can see for almost 100 miles. There are tall snow-capped mountains right up close. These people live off-grid with solar power and satellite Internet and chop all their own wood. They need a lot of it. Up there it snows two feet at a time. The nearest neighbor is over a mile away and hardly ever there. It must take them 30 minutes just to drive down to the highway, where the ribbon of road flung out to the horizon in both directions is no more than a thread floating in a vast sea of sky and mountains. No matter where you go from there, you’d better have plenty of gas and something to drink. Oh yeah, that reminds me: there’s a 1,200-gallon cistern. They have to truck in all their water.

“Everybody up there seems pretty healthy,” my new friend said. “Y’keep active, you know.”

I thought of how much wood it takes to stay comfy at minus 10 degrees. “No kidding,” I responded.

“No pollution,” he continued. “We get covered with snow and ice, but the sun shines.”

Oh, it does. Sometimes it shines while the snow is falling. And in the summer, the sun is brutal but the air is cool, and you sleep under blankets in July.

It fascinated me that they’d made such a radical change at this stage in life. But have you ever been to Houston?

I saw two pickups in a ramming duel at 90 mph on the Katy Freeway once. This was serious bashing, chrome and glass bits on the highway, swerving and weaving. I was rolling along at 70 or so when the two of them went careening by three lanes to my left…

And that was in 1965!

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