We came to this place thrown from side to side in Nancy's big old truck, the dark night huge and wild and unknown beyond the feeble headlights, and the track so rough we more climbed than drove it. It took us five hours from Pie Town, scratch of a spot itself, couple of pie shops always closed it seems, along dirt road to find a safe haven for Granny White Dragon, then shifting great heaps of stuff from her magical guts, lobbing them into the Dodge, as the dark came, and the wind brought the first taste of snow. Then the track, 2 rough hours maybe, Becs and I glancing at each other wondering where on earth we'd ended up after all the dramas of December. If we hadn't got in that night we wouldn't have, because later, feeling our way along the now-so-in-our-bones homeward path to the one-room perch of a cabin on the bluff, sorting matresses, Mike helping puff the stove to life, the snow came thick. And at 8,500' it stays a while.
This place has become our home. Just for a while. Tail end of Feb, and there's fresher snow scattered in the corners, beneath the juniper shadows, but the path has turned to mud, the southerly wind is warm, and light is carving out the edges relentless. Freya unravels from her sleeping bag long before the sun has risen, the east a precious line of purple fire - fine as a heartbeat - and is dressed, out the door and shooting down toward the dairy and 'the chores' before you could say 'please pass me the jar of green chile cheese'. The days have become patterns and I'm not sure we'll ever be the same. 
Nancy and Andy (dairy-partner, x-husband) have carved out a life in the most remote corner of New Mexico over 30 years. A life with goats! Now a herd of about 70, and creamy soft cheese we've been stuffing into pots the past few days, flavoured with a pinch here and there, 'southwestern', 'chile chipolate', curried, herbed, sealed and shipped out in heaps of boxes in the back of the truck to land on lucky tables across the south-west. But it began with just a passion for goats, 6 years living in an old school bus (now Mike's spot) figuring out how on earth to scrape life and living out of a desert, only 13'' in a good year and the ancient juniper and pinnion so dry and elemental that they stand stooped for ever even when they're dead. Running water is blue moon here. Day after night after day of empty sky, stretched to the jagged mountains, as if at sea. When it comes, apparently, it creates massive torrents, the dry earth just can't hold it, and the deep scars of the arroyos are all about us. But there's not a scrap running now, and every drop we drink here, and wash in, and re-wash in, is gathered treasure drawn from every possible inch of roof. We lug it from the tanks into the kitchen in great old pepsi vats, and tip it into the cauldron that chugs away on the stove. And here at the cabin the kids revel in their occasional bath-in-a-blue-bucket in front of the fire, good fresh snow-melt off the tin roof.
The cabin's our haven, warm and welcome at the end of the path. Right now the kids are asleep on either side of me, each on their matress in their little sleeping bags and the warm Navajo liners that Becs made them for Christmas. Their step into sleep each night is a miracle of ease, the day full up even above the brim. Along one wall Becs has begun to gather the oil paintings she's been grabbing moments for, almost daily, they're becoming like a trail. There's a sink with a hole that leads to a bucket. Not the poo-bucket, that's outside, beside the ash bucket. Lots of buckets in this place, and vast amounts of old wire - wire for holding together the goats feeders, wire for hitching open doors, wire for closing tight the fencing we used to catch the wild hog - off and away after too much heat - before moving him like a canon ball back into his pen. And lots of hooks ... to hang pig hams on, or popcorn pans, or butchered goats, or sacks of cheese.
So our cabin, facing the shimmering expanse of dawn, is tiny and quite cluttered, our bed up on a woodern platform above Kai's matress, Freya and Kai each with their narrow shelf for books and snow leopards and bundles of twigs and treasures, our stashes of food for hikes and pails for water. But it's silent save for the rattle of the stove when the resin bursts and the breath of the kids. And sometimes it feels like the other end of the path is very far away, and that when we step through the battered kitchen door - one of three, all open and shut and banging back and forth - with the rough plastic stapled across it, into the bunkered down cave of a kitchen, tomorrow morning, we'll be going some other world.
What tales the cobwebs in that big room would tell. I swept away a great mass of them a while back as, dripping black with years of risen grease, they were a fire hazard. But there are still plenty in the darkest corners and behind the long stretch of haphazard jars, bottles, ancient dictionaries, goat tracking antenae, puzzling boxes and old nori packets that covers one entire wall. Nancy will use some to heal goat wounds. But the others need to keep watch and listen to the music and somehow keep hold of all the accumulated wonder, fury and living disorder that spills from that room. Below it's black floor (mopped for the first time last week, mud-ridden again in moments) is the the root cellar dug into the earth, hung with hams, and above is Nancy's bedroom, piles of paper, clothes, wood tilting from every available spot not occupied by a cat. Sandwiched in between, that kitchen room was home three weeks ago, in temperatures so brutal you couldn't break the ice, to ... Nancy, Mike (here since July, mid-50s, used to be a college professor now can't get a job, guitar his passion, grows his beard so long that in Russia he was mistaken for an Orthodox priest), 4 piglets (2 died, lungs seared by the cold so they couldn't grow), a dozen buckets, two vats of smouldering pig mash, us four, a ripe pig skull, Kocoa the old guardian dog now so creaky she's half rug under the table, the stove piled high with wood churning to keep the heat, Julie and Derek (young WWOOFers, an inspiration, caring, passionate, open, absolutely adored by the kids), strings of chiles, a dead chicken (the cold), three or four other chickens half-dead, Nancy holding one out above the fire, two guitars, the fiddle, carpets and old covers hung over the windows, bits of butchered goat, gallon jugs of fresh milk, hundreds of jars.
Sometimes it's all a bit much! But once again these travels have shown us that the heart of places lies just beneath all that is alien, and here that heart is bursting - it's Nancy, the way she senses with her fingers, her halting loving determination as she leads one of the wethers across the ice to put a bullet in its head, her bare desire for a good world. It's the gut-wrenching beauty of the goats as they move up and out into the wilderness, scattered yet together moving with a single will, like a flock of starlings, Freya way out in front with her favourite of the day, dipping under branches, Kai in the midst of the flow like a child of the Old Testament, the crunch of hooves on iced snow and the space of the silence. It's the essences of water, the slap of milk in the bottom of the pail, meat, space, fire, shit, juniper, the shifting weight of warm bodies about you in a barn at night, a note from a string. It's the love that's gathered round the kids. And it's the freedom to think again about what life might be about.
Crossing the Yard
It could have been another
went that way. He is proud
chuffed and buckish, young enough,
his back-bones liquid as a wisp
of will. Fortune bends low
to his ear. It need only
whisper,
'Amoro'. You, friend, are different. Your spine
swings only when I brush it. Head-
first you chisel even these steps, across
the silent milk-room, hooves
skittles on ice. The sun has yet
to find your corner. Still,
there are shadows passing, threads
of breath scuttle low
to the open door. They leave
only rattles, a murmur.
I have wetted my finger
and run it down the bursting
lattice of your days.
