| Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam, Where the deer and the antelope play, Where seldom is heard a discouraging word And the skies are not cloudy all day. Chorus: How often at night, when the heavens are bright American Folk Song |
NOTE: These writings are based on experiences during the beginning of 2000.
Two years ago, when my husband first came to Rodeo, NM, he was only looking at a land investment--a 40-acre plot of land divided from some ranchland. Or so he told me. When he returned home to our Minneapolis suburb, his eyes glowed as he spoke of the wonderful opportunities a man could make for himself in this former ghost town, and the gorgeous mountain views on both sides of the valley. He declared that this was a place in which he could be truly happy, and he wanted us to look with an eye toward moving there someday.
The thought of moving to a town roughly the size of my senior class might appeal to some, but its charms were lost on me. I'd heard all those ugly rumors of "life in a small town," and I wondered if a person could ever have any privacy in an area where the arrival of the Schwan's man was an event. Then there was the issue of diapers and milk . . . True, there was a little grocery store in Rodeo, but the selection was very limited, and the prices very expensive. The nearest town with a decent supermarket was 45 minutes away and in the next state. And I worried, as mothers will, when I learned the nearest emergency room was also 45 minutes away.
For the next two years, I did everything I could to discourage my husband from packing our family up and moving to Rodeo. Once, we almost made it there, but the house we were supposed to rent turned out to need so much work to make it safe for our small children that I was saved at the last minute. Instead, we moved to a small house in Alamogordo, NM, a town large enough to have FOUR supermarkets, including a Super Wal-Mart--the largest in the state--and a brand-new hospital. Thirty minutes in one direction takes a traveller into beautiful pine-topped mountains, and thirty minutes the opposite direction leads to White Sands National Monument, with its sparkling dunes. But even this downsizing was not enough for my husband.
In a moment of premenstrual weakness, I agreed to go to Rodeo. I retracted it the next day and daily for weeks afterward, but it was too late. The ballistic missile which is my husband had already taken off for Rodeo and nothing could stop him.
We selected a manufactured home twice the size of our little house and ordered it. My husband was thrilled to hear he could save money by doing the site preparations himself and headed out to our 40-acre plot to get started. I packed up our household goods, arranged to have our house rented a few weeks after our manufactured home was due to arrive, and tried to ignore everything related to Rodeo as long as I could.
The week of Christmas, we were faced with a terrible situation. Our financing paperwork was dragging, due to miscommunications and the holiday season. The concrete upon which the home would sit had been completed (I smoothed some of it myself,) the electrical and telephone lines had been laid to the property, and a 12x20 shed had been delivered, which my husband had been working on finishing for a storeroom. But our house was stuck in Texas, awaiting the final go-ahead from the financial company, who was waiting on the appraisal they had forgotten to order and finally arranged for after New Years Day. Our tenants were due to arrive at the end of the month, and we had nowhere to go.
I considered taking a few days to visit my family and wait for the home to arrive, but it became apparent it would be at least three weeks before our home could be delivered. I could not, in good conscience, keep my eldest daughter out of school that long, and I couldn't bring myself to leave her with her local grandparents, who were living in their camper, while I took off to northern Utah. Finally, my husband and I arrived upon a workable temporary solution.
As I write this, I am sitting in that 12x20 shed, insulated and finished now, furnished with my computer desk, my couch, a TV/VCR, and several shelves and chests of drawers. Outside, my children are sleeping in a drop-in camper which has been removed from our truck. The camper also serves as our kitchen and toilet facilities. For a few days, while we rushed to finish the shed, the camper was all we had, aside from visits to my in-laws' larger camper. It's amazing how nice a 12x20 shed can seem after keeping a family of five in a small camper for a few days!
I still do not know when our home will arrive. The appraisers have come and gone, and things should be moving along. But in the mean time, I look out the window toward the northern plain and remember my Mormon pioneer ancestors, who came across plains, driving wagons or pulling handcarts. Any of them would have been delighted to have this little shed, especially with fiberglass insulation in the walls and ceiling. While I grumble about the frost which forms on the interior of my camper windows at night, even with an electric heater running, or wonder when my toes will fully thaw out from the effects of going back and forth between the shed and the camper, I am thankful that there were others before me who endured much greater physical hardships to leave me a legacy of faith and perseverance. And I am sure that sometime in the future, or maybe even tomorrow, I will find something to be thankful about this experience.
3/5/00 Update: My daughter ended up not adjusting well to the one-room schoolhouse here, so I pulled her out and began to homeschool her. After living in the dust for a month, with no hope of a speedy conclusion to the house problem, I decided it was time to go away for a while. When I returned from a month-long visit with my parents in northern Utah, I realized that I just couldn't see any sense to living down here. My husband's hopes of telecommuting were not coming to fruition, and he was doing more and more work in Denver. I think we'll probably end up in Denver, after we pay the debts we incrued preparing the lot for a manufactured home. (By the way, while we originally gave the woman who was working on our financing the benefit of the doubt and thought the problems we had encountered were due to miscommunications, we are now inclined to believe otherwise. It turns out that, in December, when she "miscommunicated" the idea that our loan was approved except for our signature to my husband, she "miscommunicated" the same idea to the manufactured home dealer, who proceeded to order the home for us. In February, we learned that she had just submitted the paperwork to the bank for the construction loan approval, which was denied.)
I haven't seen any deer or antelope in this area yet, but I know deer are out there. Living in such a remote area, on land which was pretty much left alone except for the roaming cattle, it's inevitable that some animals should coexist in this area. I've heard the howls of the coyote at night, and I've seen more than one freshly killed coyote on the highway, along with the ravens who take advantage of such situations. I've been told there are cougar and jaguars in the mountains to the east, the latter being a very rare find in the United States. But a local friend, who used to guide hunting parties tracking such animals, has pointed out to my husband cougar sign much farther down into the valley than I would have expected. (My husband has briefed me on "What to do in the unlikely event you meet a cougar." Such knowledge has hardly instilled confidence in me, making it very difficult sometimes to make that final nighttime journey from the shed to the camper . . . )
One local animal encounter has ended up being quite beneficial. A dog came wandering out of the desert and decided to adopt our family. A terrier mix, he earned the name "Scout," and fiercely watches out for the family, barking at any passing vehicle (there are few) and picking fights with any other dogs he finds (again--few.) We know he can hold his own with coyotes, so we don't worry about leaving him out at night, and he's a great deterrent for all those wild animals. I'm sure he's also a great deterrent for that other interesting "wild animal" breed which can occasionally be found here--drug runners. I'm not sure such illegal immigrants from Mexico would really want to make their presence known in this neighborhood, though, especially since the neighbor about a quarter mile away has been known to track them down and hold them at gunpoint in his house until the Border Patrol arrives.
Personally, I would just as soon avoid most wild animals, and I'm sure they would rather avoid me, as well. The good thing is that since all the plots in this area are 40 acres, there is still plenty of space for the wildlife to roam without having to bother me.
3/5/00 Update: Today I heard several women talking about the issue of the wolf. In recent years, Arizona has re-introduced the Mexican wolf to the White Mountains. Apparently, most of the tagged wolves have found their way across the border into New Mexico, which greatly disturbs many of the farmers and ranchers. These women were copying a poll to send in their opinions on the further release of wolves.
I understood that many of these women were farmers or ranchers and so had a greatly different point of view than I do. I believe each creature has a place in the natural system and that it is only when man intrudes on the habitat of these predators or forces the natural system to become unbalanced that there is a real problem. (Of course, there is the case in India, where they revere the wolf to the point where noone will harm one, and there seems to be a growing number of cases where the wolves take the children of mothers from their arms as they are sleeping. . . Personally, I think if they refuse to kill a wolf in self-defense, yet settle land once occupied by herbivores, they are upsetting the natural balance, but that's neither here nor there . . .) I was even surprised to hear from one woman's mouth the words I had heard were pure superstitious fear, "Wolves don't have to have a reason to kill. They just kill because they like it."
Now I've read books about wolves and seen documentaries about wolves, so I know perfectly well I'm not in a wolf's natural food chain. But none of this seemed to matter when I had the opportunity to hear the howl of one of these newly-wild wolves while camping at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. It is an eerie, echoing sound which makes your hackles stand on end. There must be something instinctual, primal, in each of us which alternately thrills to the danger and pushes us to the edge of hysterical terror. Having experienced this, I think I understand a little more how the wolf has been the villian--the victim of prejudice and wild stories--for so many centuries. I certainly wouldn't want to face one down.
Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word
When you've been here a little while, everyone knows your name, who you're related to, how many kids you've got, and what on earth brought you to Rodeo, of all places. The local grocery also hosts a cafe, in which much of the business here is transacted. Most people are friendly, to a point. They will smile, greet you, ask you if you know when your manufactured home will finally be delivered, and sympathize with you when you say you're living in a shed. (Which, by the way, is not all that uncommon, while people build their houses.) But it's a little more difficult to get beyond the pleasantries, and there are those who just look at you from across the cafe for a couple of minutes, then get back into conversation with their ranch buddies.
Last week, when I finally found the four-washer laundromat, I met a woman who had recently married into a family here. She had arrived about a week and a half before I had, from Alabama, and she was about as bored as I worried I would become. We chattered and gabbed all through the wash and dry cycles, covering everything from family planning to travels. She mentioned she was so glad to find someone who would really talk, as her experience with most of the other people she'd met was that they wouldn't really talk much to her. When she left with her clean laundry, I tried to talk to the other women who had arrived, but they seemed more intent on sorting their clothes and complaining about the foibles of the laundromat machines.
When my husband learned I had written this, he told me that I simply didn't have enough experience. He said he'd talked with many people about many complicated or deep topics, and they were all willing to share their ideas freely. Knowing my husband, who can talk with practically anybody about practically anything, that's probably true. Perhaps I just need a little more time.
On the evening we arrived in Rodeo, after finally clearing out our Alamogordo house, towing a flat trailer of household goods, it rained. My husband banged his fist against the dash, exclaiming he had never seen it rain in Rodeo, and why was it starting this the one time it really mattered? The next few days, it rained off and on, with the trailer covered by a tarp.
While there are frequently clouds of one kind or other in the sky, the skies really are not usually cloudy here. I attribute this to the wind. There is very little time the wind is not blowing, and at this time of year, it's usually blowing very hard. After all, there is a mountain range on either side of the valley from which to draw mountain or valley breeze effects, and to the north, there is a plain, for all the lovely winds possible from such a geographical feature (or lack of feature, as the view may be.)
Before we came here, my husband considered buying a wind generator. He looked at a map which purported to rate each area according to the average wind speed as to the suitability for wind generators and found this valley was rated as one of the worst areas for a wind generator due to the lack of wind. Whoever made that map had obviously never come here. Some people may argue that the winds will die down in other seasons, but the locals tell me that there are strong winds at least 50 percent of the time, adding that if a person really doesn't like wind, he/she had better not move to Rodeo.
My husband gave his father a home weather station for Christmas, which can be hooked up so the data feeds into a computer. His father is considering hooking everything up, then making the information available to meteorological services on the Internet or wherever the information might be beneficial. Perhaps then we'll end up with accurate forecasts, and maybe the wind generator companies will start to take a second look at this area.
3/5/00 Update: If there was ever a day to attest to the strong winds here, it was today! I wasn't sure my camper was going to remain upright, and I certainly didn't let my children go outside. Each time I went in or out of the camper, I had to battle the door to keep it from either slamming open or slamming on me. Of course, it should be expected, people tell me. Spring is the really windy season of the year.