I need an intervention. My wife is living with a crazy man.
Everything was fine until we came home from the grocery store. There on the steep, narrow curve leading to the top of the hill by the little adobe church whose wall comes right out to the pavement was a freaking combine! (A hay-mowing machine, whatever.) The last thing I’d ever expect to see on that road, much less blocking traffic in both directions and apparently out of gas, as you will see.
There was no way for me to back down the hill without the likelihood of an accident, and within the next 30 seconds, traffic started backing up behind us. I could see that someone with a pickup truck and a tow chain was trying to pull the disabled machine farther up the road where there was more room, but the chain kept slipping off or breaking. Finally I noticed a short, rough driveway (?) on the left side of the road: if I could pull into that and execute a three-point turn, I’d be able to get us out of there and on the way home via an alternate route. So I tried my damnedest.
The problem was that as soon as I pulled part-way into said driveway, the drivers behind me immediately assumed I lived there and closed the gap where we’d been sitting, preventing me from backing out and completing my turn. While my wife was trying to get them to pull forward so I had room, a big Ford pickup driven by a hysterical vaquero came roaring up the hill right at us:
“GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY!!!” he shouted, revving his engine and honking. “GET THE FUCK OFF THE ROAD, THAT’S MY MACHINE UP THERE!!!”
That’s exactly what I was trying to do, of course, but he kept on shouting and was actually preventing me from getting out of the way. I tried to pull farther in, but the front wheels spun uselessly in the heavy gravel. Just then, one of the cars that had pulled up behind me moved up and over to the right to make more room, and the asshole in the Ford screeched past us. He leaped out of the cab, grabbed two jerry cans, and hustled over to whatever the hell it was. So that was it, he’d let the thing run out of gas. Must have been a pleasant customer at the triple-murder Mustang, I thought to myself, finally able to escape.
Later that afternoon before the forest fire smoke rolled in, we were sitting outside our front door having a drink when my wife said, “There’s a guy coming down the driveway…” I got up to see what he wanted. It was the neighbor who lives in the single-wide with the tires on the roof two houses down, looking for two of his PIT BULLS that had escaped. Just then one of them came running right past me, headed for my wife and cat. The beast was, how shall I put it, all jaw. I, um, raised my voice:
“GET THAT ANIMAL OFF THIS PROPERTY!” (A pit bull attacked my wife in Iowa a few years ago, so I’m sensitive on the issue.) “You can’t have dogs running loose in Taos County,” I told him, “especially THESE! They have to be chained or penned up!” All true, of course, but the county is two-thirds the size of Connecticut with only a single animal control officer, so the ordinance is never enforced.
“No, it’s okay if you have insurance on them,” he blustered. “I have insurance on these dogs!” Yeah, right. At least the plural was accurate, because a second one appeared out of nowhere, running circles around me where I stood.
“THAT’S BULLSHIT!” I patiently explained.
No way in hell does a guy living in a single-wide with tires on the roof have liability insurance on his dogs, anyway, never mind that there would never be a payout for damages if he were breaking the law. He persisted. Insurance, blah-blah-blah. At exactly that moment, our next-door neighbor drove up, saw the dogs, and heard the fellow repeat the insurance lie. Flinging open her car door, she jumped out and yelled, “THAT’S BULLSHIT!” And things went downhill from there. I repeated the usual stupid fiction about calling the cops if the goddamn beasts showed up again, and the owner went away mad. Oh joy, peace in the valley.
Meanwhile, my wife was ready to flee to parts unknown, and I can’t blame her.
On the way to the grocery store, we’d looked at a nasty rental suitable for a troop of meth addicts. On the way home, we’d gotten yelled at by a maniac who nearly ran into us. And while sitting peacefully in our own front “yard,” we’d not only had pit bulls running loose but their idiot owner pushing me over the edge. All this just ONE DAY after escaping from Tucson. (And then the smoke rolled in from the 100,000 acre fire near Los Alamos…)
I don’t know how much more of this a body can take. The tension is unbearable. I hate this neighborhood now. No more photos, no more hikes, we need to get OUT of here.
But why is all this going down now, exactly? What the hell is going on?
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When I make important decisions I usually begin by vacillating because I’m not sure I really want to do what I sort of halfway think I want to do. That sort of thing. Then something outside myself comes along and makes it clear, takes it out of my hands it almost seems. Suddenly I’m resolved. That’s a sobering and healing moment. Hamlet must have felt it when at last he started littering the stage with dead bodies. Or as W.B. Yeats put it:
“When a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.”
I think that’s where you’ve got to in this business of moving house and home. Maybe you should be grateful to the mutt-owner, the combine-operator and the assorted other maddening folks and elemental forces which have driven you to the inescapable resolution that “we need to get out of here.” Execution is often the simple part. Knowing what you’re meant to do is the hard part. Now you know.
Well, I already knew, or at least I thought I did.
But now it’s so much worse. I can’t go hiking, for instance, for all the ATVs buzzing up and down the trails on the mesa. And no one going up there is up to any good. It’s like everything is collapsing all at once, and the anger, geez.
Oh that crazy unpredictable New Mexico!
It’s awful right now. The smoke yesterday evening was horrible, too. I feel physically beaten up.
hope you find your new dream rental immediately! you gotta get outta this place!
I don’t need a” dream” rental, just one without loose pit bulls and screaming lunatics nearby. But thank you!
Ugh! The joys of Taos. For all its beauty and promise it can be hell to live there. I miss the people (some of them) but I don’t really miss the town. The scenery is nice…
I hear ya. Boy, do I ever.
I need the scenery, though. And more than that, the EXPERIENCE of wild Nature on those upper canyon trails that lead to mountain meadows and on above the timberline… I’ve never encountered anything like that before. More to the point, having access to places like that has always been my main reason for living: not job, friends, money, or anything else. That one desire has always ruled everything for me.
Wouldn’t have to be Taos, of course. May NOT be, if this shit continues.
But I don’t know why finding housing is such a terrible chore. Some friends of ours just found a place in Upper Colonias that even has GRASS and TREES. I’d kill for their new digs.
It’s like the universe just came along and said,’NOW I’m going to remind you that you need to make the next change’ and it slammed everything at you that it could. Nowhere is perfect, but may your next place to lay your head – and for your beloved to lay her head – be closer to your dream than this. That place will come. Hang in and I’ll hang with you, John.
Thank you.
We’re looking at everything. Gotta happen this summer.
I think we are all in desperate need of rain!
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