Same Subwoofer, Same Morning Super Shake, Only Danced To And Blended (Respectively) Via The Sun
With the flip of a two-foot metal arm on a control box outside my house – something out of Frankenstein’s laboratory (from which the Silver City, New Mexico electric supply store still apparantly stocks some of the parts) – the Funky Butte Ranch went solar yesterday.
This eight-panel installation, (for solar geeks this was the second involving silicon photovoltaic panels on the FBR), was smooth almost to the point of anti-climactic. At some point I’ll reveal the literally shocking details of my first attempts at homemade solar power, and probably in the next dispatch I’ll explain why 70 gallons of mucky water emptied on to my new bed during my solar hot water installation a couple of weeks earlier. But this one was like butter, except that the sun was so piercingly bright as CW’s crew and I bolted the panels on the ranch house roof, that I became a literal redneck. (There’s more on my angelic solar electrician in the Feb. 1 Dispatch.) Nothing like mirror-esque metal roofing to brush up the old tan. Luckily it’d been a cool early May day, so temperatures remained in the low three digits.
Solar power actually has several off switches (among them clouds and nighttime), but I only have control over one of them, going inside. Which wasn’t an option this May afternoon. My job was to try not to fall off the aggressively pitched roof while holding the panel rack as CW’s crew bolted it to my aged roof. Each rack, with four panels attached to it, weighed about as much as Bolivia. And the roof top surface was slippery in the way that only smooth, rain-worn metal can be.
Then a freak and violent rain and hail storm moved in overnight, which really tested the system. Both I and Sadie the Hound kept waking up expecting the panels to somehow implode and melt through the ceiling and on to my laptop or tomato plants. But in what I consider a “flag was still there” moment, the panel installation only caused the roof to leak in two places, so I considered the installation a success. This is why one should use professionals. Fewer than three leaks in your roof when the job is “complete.” Seriously, it wasn’t CW or her crew’s fault. You have to wait and see on this stuff, and take care of it if you notice porosity. Anyway, they were small leaks and easily caulked with icky fossil-fuel based toxins.
The solar system works great (it’s an inverted 24-volt set-up, for the experts in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) — I can even use my blender and washing machine at will, all powered by the sun. Bass-drenched music at admittedly excessive volume as well. And it should pay for itself in less than 71 years.
Sayonara Subaru, Hello Veggie Oil Ford: Greasing the Path Toward Letting Go
When you’ve driven (and at times lived in) a maintenance-free Japanese vehicle for all of its 204,000 miles over 12 years, it’s an action almost like trying to counter gravity, a motion like trying not to breathe, to ditch it in favor of a (brrr) American vehicle.
And not just any vehicle: one of those three-quarter-ton trucks that transformed me instantly from the lowest rig on the road to the highest. I had to get a diesel truck because only these can be converted to straight veggie oil, or SVO, the next step beyond bio-diesel. This is, as it sounds, simple filtered waste oil. No processing necessary. And I needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle because the last dirt mile leading to the Funky Butte Ranch is maintained with the frequency of the highway system in Somalia.
So unless I planned on importing a smaller truck from one of the wrong-side-steering wheel countries that offers more options, my truck would come in one of two sizes: XXXL or XXXXL. I went with XXXL.
The experience of buying a used truck in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2007 is a quaint throwback to every cliché about used truck sales. At one point I heard the manager, from behind the half-open “private” door, yelling at my salesman that he would never budge on the price for such a “cherry” vehicle as the six-year-old one I was considering. Frankly, I’m impressed that I left that day unsure if I was snow-jobbed or not. I was the one with the Stanford degree. They were the ones with my money. Over Blue Book.
I named my used Ford F-250 the ROAT (The Ridiculously Over-Sized American Truck). Suddenly people in tiny Suburbans and Silverados were bowing deferentially to me as I edged into their lanes on New Mexico’s Interstate 25, which Southbound at sunset is one of the most beautifully expansive drives on the planet.
When I had to nudge my ol’ reliable LOVEsubee, whose engine probably has another 300,000 miles of easy start life in it but which is struggling in the transmission realm, down to nearby Mexico to return my Mexican driving permit after driving the ROAT for a month, the effect was that of go-carting. I couldn’t believe they let such small vehicles on the public roads. I slid unseen under giant Suburbans and Silverados. They couldn’t even see me. I felt like a field mouse darting between the real vehicles.
The ROAT is a V-8, which is twice as many V’s as I’m used to, whatever that means. All I know is suddenly I can accelerate up hills. Even when carrying four bales of goat hay, eight solar panels and a peripatetic puppy named Sadie.
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On Facing Down Rattlesnakes With a Machete
My task was to prepare and mount three 125 watt solar panels in advance of converting my water supply to solar power. I had to move: in a typical manifestation of a fascinating cultural Type B Phenomenon I call New Mexico Standard Time (NMST), it took literally six months to get the widely-recognized honest well digger Jimmy O to the Funky Butte Ranch. I had a window of one day. It was like planning a Bar Mitzvah.
The panels were heavy, to say the least, and buried under a deep layer of tools and goat alfalfa hay in the FBR barn. I had to haul them about 300 yards to the windmill, where they’d be mounted about 20 feet above the well itself, right on the decommissioned windmill.
As with anything in life, attitude is everything. Instead of whining about the long-term effects of the weight on my skeletal system now that I was essentially a self-employed Porter, it occurred to me in a moment of self-reliant bliss that hauling and positioning a solar panel is an absolutely totemic experience — I was carrying my power, my philosophy, my politics and in many ways the manifestation of my spirituality.
It was all causing me to write a lot of poetry. When I was supposed to be writing my book.
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It was Lonely Planet’s Fault
The important piece of background for this entry is that my two baby Goatlets had taken over my life, ever since I had to sleep outside with them the night they arrived via Craigslist, when coyotes were yipping too close for any of our comfort. (See August Dispatch.)
The plan was to raise them then breed them, then enjoy their healthy, local, growth-hormone free milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream.
The essential dichotomy with Natalie and Melissa is that they are at the same time heart-breakingly cute and genetically mischievous. With their long floppy ears and horizontal slits of pupils, they laugh at me when they, for instance, get into the house and chill on the sofa via the cat door. This results in the kind of love that a father gives a favorite wayward daughter.
We have been engaged in a struggle to keep them out of my rose bushes since their first week here. Well, not so much a struggle, since they always get in. They have 41 acres in which to forage, but they know I don’t want them in the roses. So that’s where their genes tell them to go. It’s no use fighting a Goat’s mischievousness: it’s precisely the trait that makes them such great survivors. And I want them to survive.
So fast forward to a trip to Mexico I took with my friend Lupy in early January. My hiking campanion was being amazingly tolerant of the fact that as we hiked across the incomparably beautiful Copper Canyon, I was bonding with everyone we met on the subject of goats.
“I have goats, too!” I’d exclaim. Or at least that’s what I thought I was saying.
One day about a week into the trip we were deep in the Copper Canyon speaking with two precious ethnic Rarumari girls. This culture is sometimes called the Tarahumara, and they are the world’s most famous distance runners. The two girls were maybe age 6 and 4 and their parents were off distance running somewhere when we arrived at the clean spring water oasis that was their home (they even had a solar panel). They were used to sweaty strangers staggering in to drink at their spring. I was thinking we had an area of obvious bonding on what my Lonely Planet Latin America phrase book clearly called “cabras.”
You know, goats.
Who doesn’t love goats?
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I have just come back inside the main FBR ranch house, armed with (and bloodied by) a dangerous clipper weapon, from the monthly goat trimming. I love seeing these words on the screen, because they represent more TINIWES. Things I Never Imagined I Would Ever Say.
Not in non-fiction.
I can never tell which of the Goatlets will be an angel, and which will be a mischievous incarnation of Pan when I head down to the corral with the hedge-trimmer-like clippers. All I know is they’ve never both been angels at the same trimming.
This time, a chilly December evening featuring Sergio Leone winds, Natalie held out her hooves daintily like she was at the manicurist. But it was all part of a greater caprine plan. Melissa used this time to pilfer my unguarded daypack where I had the post-trimming reward grain waiting. Thus, sated as a goat can be by the time it was her turn, Melissa had no incentive to behave herself. So I had to sit on her for the trimming. Soon she’ll be too big for even that Draconian maneuver. I have no idea what she offered Natalie to be the, well, sacrificial goat for the grain theft.
Melissa, week by week, is showing me why goats are such impressive survivors. They’re not just smart, cute Houdinis. They think of their feet with split second timing. Our battle of the minds to keep her either in (from her viewpoint) or out (my preference) from my rose bushes has now cost the Funky Butte Ranch economy something like 100 hours of productivity. Every time I have a system down (the latest plan is for a multi-layered, five foot tall, penitentiary-style maze chicken wire that gives my patio hang-out area the look of a prison yard) she figures a way in.
What impresses me is the diversity of Melissa’s methods, usually while Natalie forages innocently on the live oak nearby: sometimes digging under, sometimes wiggling in between layers of fencing, sometimes using determined, repeated brute force to break the bailing wire at the fence posts I’ve knocked in at the cost of considerable sweat and blood.
This is the mantra I drone each time I yank the sated Melissa from the amazingly still-alive roses: it’ll all be worth it when I’m providing the valley with milk, yogurt, cheese and bread. And my neighbor Amanda wants to use goat milk as base for her natural paint. More on that later.
How To Trespass In the American West (The Land of the Sharp and Painful)
It’s a sad reality out of a Shel Silverstein fable: the West has been cordoned off. The great Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are the Brave, based on an Edward Abbey novel, tackles this subject admirably. But the fact as I’m living it is, if I don’t want to hike up the Funky Butte Ranch’s Western Ridge to the tune of an extra mile, then accessing friends in the valley, the outside world, or even my morning run route means a steeplechase of barbed wire-hurdling and Limbo-ing. At least two fences, usually much more, are in my way every day.
Traversing barbed wire is thus a necessary part of trespassing in the 21st Century. And for me it’s always a very dangerous game of Twister. You have to decide on a fence-by-fence basis if you want to go over (stepping on bendy, rusty wires), under (I admire the way my puppy Sadie effortlessly Limbos underneath as if those Tatanus-filled spikes aren’t millimeters from her spine), or, as I usually wind up attempting, a wiggle-worm, shirt-gripping effort through the widest gap in the middle. Plenty of animals get fatally hung up in these nasty traps, and I see no reason why I’ll continue to be exempt simply due to my species’ Latin classification. That I’m usually lugging a laptop or dripping leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of alfalfa hay crumbs (or both), and engaged in criminal trespass at the time of said Twister game, just compounds the pressure factor. I’m wearing a few scars already from this practice and I’ve ripped pretty much all my pants and shirts. But as yet I have not become an inextricable scarecrow.
I’ve prevailed because the ramifications of failure would be severe. In fact, that’d be an embarrassing cell phone call to make to my pistol-toting and less-than-friendly septuagenarian Southern neighbor Pedro Ortiz, a gazillionth generation farmer in this Valley.
“Hello, senor, yes, your new neighbor here, Doug. Yes. Yes. The Gringo from Alaska with the low-riding Subaru. Listen. Could you swing by your North fence with some shears? I’m a bit hung up.”
Senor Ortiz has apparently not yet acquiesced to Spain granting independence to Mexico.
Fortunately, most New Mexico fences are about 50 years into the decay process. Compounded, though, the restrictions imposed by God and Spanish Royal property law on my leaving my property turn my morning runs into something out of 70s movie chase scenes.
But the tail end of the Barbed Wire Age is really just more proof that a consciousness can get used to anything. I remember the day that I stopped even noticing that I was serpentining through barbed wire several times a day. Some consider this to be the day I became a Westerner.
Giant Sunflowers and Drunk Hummingbirds
I knew if I didn’t bring my camera on my evening walk tonight, the light would be perfect. I figured better to see it and not record it (at least visually), than not to see it at all. The Heaven that is Earth right now is not difficult to explain: the wettest springtime (August and September) since the last Ice Age provided October lushness that reflects light beyond diffuse.
The whole atypical greenness radiates a soft, almost ethereal mountain and farmland dreamscape closer to a Swiss Alps idyll than the stereotype of a high desert as I roll up my Carhartts and cross the still substantial Mimbres River.
Two hummingbirds buzz around me like drunk propeller planes late for something. September is our second spring in the high desert (here, the kids are taught, “July showers bring August peaches and weird neighborhood behavior”). This year, even October hasn’t brought even the beginning of the end to the lushness. I mean, imagine living in a place that has a monsoon. I don’t know about most folks, but for me, monsoon conveys the Serengeti, with all the associated amatory effects on the local fauna. Every animal except the human-on-a-9-to-5-schedule is frolicking in bliss at this time of year. Rabbits, coyotes, deer, red-tailed hawks, owls, my goats…
For some reason I remember at this moment that the beautiful Lupy is on her way from town.
I can’t help but emanate crunchy thoughts like, “I am so lucky to be alive, to be here, now.” I’m sorry. I know happiness is annoying to those in a different part of the emotional cycle. The near constant thunder of the previous three months is winding down, which is good, as it scares the Goatlets a little. But even they, judging but their own good attitude, know it was all worth it: so much new stuff to nosh. And despite the barrage of precipitation that’s now (I think) almost over for a few months, even during the brunt of the Legendary Flood Of ‘06 we had hours of sunlight every day. It was just that during monsoon season, I had to time the clothes-drying. Miss the window, and they hung on the line long enough to become art.
It was on this hike tonight that I remembered that working on one’s own life is the biggest blessing — it’s not about hours logged (sure it’s a lot of work, between trying to live the Green life and write about it), it’s about loving and appreciating life and where one is. Radiating love of the Moment. I am appreciative this time around. May I stay so, I prayed — and not get used to living bliss.
On the last leg of this dream hike, I brought home some stop sign-sized sunflowers for the kitchen table vase from a dewey meadow two farms away. Eugenio Zanetti, the production designer for the gorgeous film What Dreams May Come might have gotten his inspiration from this endless field of 12 foot tall stalks, about halfway into their Van Gogh decay. It’s one of those fields with columns extending as far as the eye can see, the traversing of which turns me into a Hobbit. And a ten-year-old one at that.
Flooded In Paradise For Two and a Half Months
I am acutely, embarrassingly aware that the conventionally sane might consider it questionable real estate timing to buy a remote 41-acre ranch which requires two ephemeral water crossings a week before a historic flood begins, making the property inaccessible to any but experienced swift water rescuers. But the operative word here is “before.”
I didn’t know that the worst drought in local recorded history would suddenly end, stranding me in my new home and allowing me about 67 days (longer, one might notice, than even Noah had to endure) to contemplate how I wanted to Green what I was starting to call The Funky Butte Ranch, or the FBR.
The name came from the rather Funky Butte above the noisy Great Horned Owl’s nest on the East Side of the property. Right from the night I moved in, I liked to climb the Butte at sunset, overlooking as it did the Former Mimbres Kingdom and the creek flood plain of my first ever property. I was home, and had a mortgage to prove it.
Legs dangling over the top of the Funky Butte, I’d sit amongst deer pellets and survey the drought-stricken landscape, hoping the cottonwood and live oak below could survive a couple of thousand years of climate change. I’d come from an Alaskan rainforest, and after nine months in New Mexico, I couldn’t remember what rain felt like. Being a sun guy, I didn’t miss it.
Amazed every morning on my run, if I saw anyone I’d say genuinely, “What a beautiful day!”
And the person would like at me with an expression that said, “Um, it’s a beautiful day every day here.”
But I did wonder if I’d ever see rain again.
That was the end of July.
By the beginning of this month, I found myself, my terrified new puppy Sadie, and the LOVESubee, my fossil fuel-powered vehicle for 12 years and 203,000 miles, trapped between two channels of the usually tame Mimbres river, which was rising visibly on both sides of me by the minute.
Shopping For Livestock On Craigslist
Coyotes were yipping far too close for any of our comfort. My two infant Goatets, Natalie and Melissa, trembled at all the unacceptable newness. Goats like routines, I had read soon after I bought the Funky Butte Ranch, the first place I have ever “owned.” Pretty much all I read now was Goat Husbandry literature, much of it contradictory. I was keeping the confused Silver City Librarian busy, and leaking alfalfa hay and manure pellets on the reference desk.
I scanned the horizon of my new, soon to be Green-powered spread, but evidently these wild dogs have learned how to hide from former Suburbanites cum Alaskans cum Cowboys. Their party was picking up, with the feral barks from perhaps a quarter mile away sounding like 500 children being tickled.
I sighed. I thought raising dairy goats would be easy – let ‘em eat, let ‘em breed, then milk ‘em and make tons of delicious, healthy, local cheese, yogurt and goat chocolate ice cream (society crumbling or not, I am not giving up my ice cream addiction). But a historic drought had the land so bone dry that predators were getting thirstier and bolder by the day, following prey wherever it could be found. Goats are not generally considered house-trainable, so there was nothing to do but sleep outside with the kids under the full moon. I was attached to the little Pans already, and I could not face coming outside for the morning feeding to find two carcasses and a pile of coyote scat.
I laid out my sleeping bag below the eaves of their dung-filled corral cabana down the hill from my adobe/concrete ranch house in an essentially inaccessible, if National Park-beautiful part of the American Southwest. I tried to let the coyote symphony waltz me to sleep. “Sleep” being a euphemism for “continually wake from restless dreams of finger amputation to find a goat nursing my hand.”
The first bottle I’d fed Natalie (the pure white princess) and Melissa (her brown speckled bodyguard) convinced them I was Dad, or at least Herd Leader, and they didn’t like it when I left their sight. They let me know this loudly.
“Mmbah?” they they’d ask in a heart-melting, vibrato-filled soprano whenever I tried to do something unacceptable like write, attempt to sleep inside, weed the garden or otherwise not hang out with them for ten minutes.
“Mmbah!” I’d confirm in more of a baritone from somewhere on the 41-acre Funky Butte Ranch, thankful that no other neighbors lived in this part of the canyon. My occasional human visitors, I couldn’t help noticing, seemed to be making mental notes for later “you won’t believe this crazy guy” stories back in Silver City.
No matter, I was already practicing a self-righteously serene “you’re welcome” when I was thanked for providing these doubters with organic dairy products. In fact, I derived a lot of my initial momentum for the local food part of this book from the first line of Jim Corbett’s beautiful if obsessive book, Goatwalking, wherein the author declares: Two milk goats can provide all the nutrients a human being needs, with the exception of Vitamin C and a few common trace elements. And it’s true, in the course of journalism I’ve done from Uganda to Tajikistan to Guatemala: everywhere there’s a goat, there’s survival, even wealth. So part of me felt it was nearly Mission Accomplished the moment Natalie and Melissa survived that first coyote onslaught, and all it cost me was sleep and some range of finger motion.
I awoke sore and smelly that dawn, and still somehow with a “thank you” of my own on my lips. It being August, the temperature had mercifully dipped back into the high two digits. Still casting moon shadows at first light I built the Goatlets a jungle gym out of regionally-unnecessary studded car tires, ladders and hay. I had learned from a majority of “experts” that goats like to climb and be as high as possible. Who doesn’t?
I did a couple of sun salutations to shake off the stiffness. My busy Yogic Empty-mind told me I was sort of on-plan. You know, on getting rid of as much fossil fuel from my life as possible during my first year on my ranch.
Understanding where becoming essentially a full-time goat herder fit into these plans involves a key leap that I made thanks to the embarrassing absurdity of eating Wal-Mart roasted chicken after sleeping outside with the Goatlets. I grasped, viscerally, that not all fossil fuels go into your truck’s gas tank or your home’s furnace. To get an organic banana from Honduras to Silver City’s crunchy co-op involves troughs of jet fuel and diesel truck hauling. I think about this when I watch the rufus hummingbirds outside my front window do it on a few sips of sugar water.
So I was trying to eat as locally as possible as a crucial part of my quest to reduce my personal dependence on oil. As Equinox approached, I had chickens running around defecating all over the place, a puppy I was training to protect them instead of chasing them while defecating all over the place herself, and herbs and sprouts growing inside. I had plans to clear a planting area which I would irrigate via an efficient drip system.
As for the Goatlets, they can breed at 9 months (though I’m gonna give them a 15 month childhood) and give super healthy, gasoline-free milk, cheese and yogurt five months later. I’d even gotten a breed, the Nubian, that was known for its fatty milk, so I actually had some legitimate hope keeping the ice cream flowing with local ingredients. Please understand how important this is in my life. Ice cream is a Food Group for me. And thus the Goatlets even more precious. I already had a “Beware of Goats” sign posted at the entrance of the property to scare potential kidnappers away.
They are fundamentally giddily happy, fun-loving and affectionate. They were trying to figure out how to climb their new rickety toy before I was done with it. As soon as I approach their pen, which I do so often I’m thinking of just moving my desk out there, they run up to snuggle and mind meld with me with their nubby horns.
Yeesh, am I really writing this? Do I own GOATS? Do I really have eight stomachs to feed (four in Natalie, four in Melissa)?
When you grew up on Long Island, New York, where there wasn’t even a country music station, let alone the Willie Nelson cult that I’ve discovered is a key component of any healthy demographic, and suddenly your shopping list for the weekly town trek reads:
you know you’re undergoing some kind of lifestyle change. Perhaps a bit of information about my pre-Alaska background might help explain why this effort was so new, strange and difficult for me. Picture the exact inverse of the bushman conked by a Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Growing up in the American suburbs in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s meant that I was raised in the most literally gas-guzzling demographic in the history of human Earth habitation. Gasoline was often cheaper than milk, and in fact was used in the production of milk and almost everything else I ate. So much oil had been pulled from the Earth’s crust during my grandmother’s lifetime that I was amazed the planet didn’t shrivel up, like a sun-dried tomato.
Basically the whole premise of this experiment starts with the belief that local food is better for me and kinder to the Earth than even crunchy Honduran bananas.
I’ll be trying to live locally and power the Ranch with fossil fuel-free power, while documenting the joys, pitfalls and contradictions inherent in the endeavor in these Dispatches, and eventually in a book entitled, Farewell, My Subaru,
Here are my new family members. Natalie (white) and Melissa (brown and white). Their ears are practically half the size of their two-month-old bodies.
In other typically goofy Funky Butte Ranch news, the LOVEsubee ran away down a hill backwards and nearly collided with the lower Dance Studio last week. Luckily an ancient live oak helped stop it…
It all worked out in the end. The lesson: when you have a year to do all the things you want to do, don’t try to do it all in a day. Relax, enjoy living this and writing about it. And also remember to fully engage the parking brake.
I have named the resulting cleared area the From the Carnage Herb Garden. I plant tomorrow. Today I’m tilling and fertilizing (with goat dung!) the area. I also have to figure out how to keep this safe from the goats — they’re incredibly mischievous (you see why Pan has caprine hoofs). They badly wanted inside the house today – after the got in through the cat door twice, I had to carry them away, literally kicking and screaming. My basil and cilantro and lettuce will last about a week unless I fence it somehow.
And I’ve already harvested my first crop on the Ranch – 5 cups of sprouts I grew on the windowsill. My basil and cilantro – key ingredients for the Asian and Mexican food I live on – have just sprouted.