Rio Grande baptism

Yesterday I was baptized in the Rio Grande, blessed by boisterous, unruly water. The morning's Race Course trip near Pilar, NM, sixteen miles south of Taos, marked my first commercial raft trip on this river in seven years. In between I guided several trips on the float section of the Snake, that iconic braided channel river that meanders along the Grand Tetons, near Jackson, Wyoming. Three excursions didn't add up to cool confidence in running this section with five male high school students. I had transformed into a rookie again, though the end result prevailed in a positive way. 

Canoeing the Orrilla Verde section of the Rio Grande.

Nerves jangled, I had to find a place in the willows that shielded the shore to offer liquid back to the river, and I ran the lines through in my head, recalling each rock, but I reveled in the fresh perspective and lessons of revisiting an occupation I have left behind. Despite numerous summers in a boat on that river - paddle guide or passenger, behind the oars, in an inflatable kayak and once only in a hard shell - this cameo appearance attuned my eyes to new ways to circumvent or charge through obstacles and rapids, deal with situations as they arose, interact with and take charge of other's lives, all the while focused on fun, safety and the moment.


When I ski a run I know by heart, the snow, weather conditions and even the me that I am at that moment determine how I address the actions I need to take to succeed in this dance down the mountain. Each turn, movement and even breath coordinated and there's no room for mundane worries, daydreams, or to answer that phone call, text or email. This is life, distilled into the details, as vivid as it will ever be, so all that signifies is now.

In the middle of the first major rapid, Albert Falls, our boat hit a hole, a place where recirculating current creates a pillow of water hidden on the downstream side of a half submerged boulder. As our momentum halted five of the six passengers, me included, slid over slick PVC tubes and into the drink. The hero of the hour, a short kid with a well developed upper body, caught my hand and dragged me in, and then I pulled in the closest two, and we collected the third from another raft in the eddy below.

None suffered more than the chill of spring snow melt, and we warmed up paddling hard through the next two rapids. Those almost men were thrilled, even though each one had expressed trepidation about falling in the river prior to it occurring. This didn't squash their desire to risk an intentional swim in the cool Rio, which they requested only ten minutes later and were allowed to do once we had passed beyond all rapids.

As we floated down the final mellow mile, they sang a call and response: "soy marinero," and "soy capitan!" No doubt they will remember that day for a long time to come, in particular the heart pumping adrenaline, their fears realized but overcome, an adventure unique amongst two busloads of juniors. Higher risk balanced by triumphant results makes for a better story to recount. I'm humbled whenever I take a swim in the river, and cleansed, too.

In it I am baptized, vision cleared, whole being enlivened and reset to a more neutral attitude. The water clarifies, washes away the day-to-day and connects me to the source of everything. I guided the rest of that eight mile stretch, freed from my apprehension and grateful for the transformation.

Rigging for a run on the Snake River in Wyoming.                                                                      Photo by Hannah Hardaway

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Earthship travels

Maybe this is true in your town, and maybe not, but in our little mountain town most of the adult transplants have some variation on a quirky story about how they arrived and then stayed, whether they intended to prior, or not. Down in the southern part of the state, we have Roswell, with space ship crash downs; here in Taos earthships have landed. They are the lure that brought me through northern New Mexico and inspired me to move here, and they were the foundation of the first part of my story here.

Earthship? Think off the grid housing, reused, reclaimed, recycled: tires, cans, bottles and dirt, tons of dirt. These were the DIY (do it yourself) solution to housing that architect Michael Reynolds dreamed up in the 1970s that have been built by the sweat equity of thousands of people laboring in dozens of countries around the world, in climates as varied as the high desert of Taos to the rainforest of Guatemala. His vision includes thick walls (think a mid size car's tire width bulging with the earth rammed inside), oriented toward the southern sun and bermed at the north to utilize passive solar most efficiently and the earth's constant temperature as a buffer to extremes of hot and cold, rain and snow collection off the roof, and use of grey water in planters where you can grow your own meal year round. They integrate with the landscape and function with minimal external input once complete, thus the earth ship, one with which to travel the mesa sea that encapsulates much of the terrain around their origin. These buildings have other features and modifications that allow them to function in varying climates, but to find out more visit the Earthship Biotecture website earthship.com or visit their visitor center in the Greater World community when you next find yourself a few miles west of the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.

I first heard about these innovative structures in 1998 from a roommate in a cooperative house in Seattle, and my exchange student boyfriend and I were intrigued from first mention. We decided that we would visit Greater World when we drove across the southwest that summer in my 1969 Volkswagen van, and we stayed there a week out of the month and half we were on the road. We met an architect who rented an earthship for the month's duration of an internship and he invited us to stay in the spare bedroom. We fell in love with curved walls and tranquil ambiance, with the beauty of subtle details: cupboards fronted in beaten copper, plaster embedded with mica sparkling in the light that poured through ceiling high windows and planters a profuse riot of blossoms and green leaves. I slept as well in that room as I have ever slept anywhere, and the desire to return and live in such a place rooted within even before we left.

The following summer I sat in the pub where that same former boyfriend tended bar, trying to figure out my next step after I left Edinburgh. I planned to either travel to India to learn massage or fly back to Seattle, pack the van and return to Taos to work for the earthship building crew and set myself up as a contractor and build these houses myself. He convinced me that NM held more prospects and that I might get lost in India.

By October of 2000 I extricated myself from my life in Washington and headed south. I managed to survive the drive to Taos, although the van's front end crumpled during a high speed collision with a deer in Colorado. A little over 30 years old, it still rolled over mountain passes with confidence. I lived in that van in the parking lot of the earthship community's visitor center for the first month, while I volunteered for the building crew, instead of working for them as I had assumed I'd arranged before I ever left Scotland.

Around the time my savings dwindled so did enthusiasm for doing thankless hard time. I found work at the local ski area, and I connected with an absentee earthship owner and arranged a work trade for rent-free living. I never really did much more than clean up the space, wage war on tumbleweeds with fire, and battle futilely against the dirt clods that fell from the unfinished walls on a regular basis. There's not much work in a finish-upper that can be done lacking funds, tools and supplies.

The best parts of living there were my two roommates, lovely, fun and eclectic women also in their early 20s. One made beautiful stained glass art and necklaces strung with dry animal dung, and the other had a dry, dark sense of humor and became my ski buddy after I learned how to do it. She switched from snowboarding, due to our resort's prohibition on one plank snow sliding. It was this latter gal's birthday yesterday, and I cheered this woman on from afar in a social media way. You know, well-meaning but vague. And not actually on time, because I realize in writing this that I just thought happy birthday wishes, and about that long ago friendship in an earthship, but never typed the words and sent them across the web. Until now.
Thank you, friend. I'm grateful for your companionship during those long ago quiet mornings drinking coffee, dancing under the stars, for the thrill of hurtling down the mountain with you. I'm grateful, too, for the ship that brought me to this town, for the possibilities I foresaw when I arrived, and even more for the detours that became a life I'm blessed to have created. You never know where the current will take you, particularly when you travel in an experimental craft.

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Little Wildhorse Canyon

Up until two weeks ago, I had never walked through a slot canyon, but the ancient and almost alien landscape of the San Rafael Swell in central Utah provided the perfect introduction to such a place as a solo adventurer. I do hesitate to explore the outdoors alone in certain circumstances, but embrace the opportunity in ones I deem safe 'enough.' Sometimes I get that gut thumping reaction, a visceral sense of danger, and I listen to these. Call it instinct - I am an animal first and foremost - it's intuition to me, and I've learned with fortunately few failures that I have to heed those warnings.

The friends who suggested the Little Wildhorse to Bell Canyon loop advised me that it was a friendly, low risk hike of 8 miles, lacking the deep-water crossings and gear assisted scrambles necessary to travel through many slot canyons. This would be a Canyoneering 101 sort of experience. So, while my male companions rode dirt bikes on single track a hundred plus miles from our camp near Green River, Utah, I drove west and south to an area near Goblin Valley. Sola, right.

The Swell is an anticline aged between 40 to 60 million years, which means that it's one long line of rock turned back over on itself, a fold with the oldest rocks at the core. Massive sandstone reefs rise in misshapen towers across the mesa that fronts it, and flash flood erosion over millions of years has ripped away sedimentary rock to form canyons, valleys and gorges. It was up one such canyon and down another that I walked through layers of time, event and a beauty rivaling that of any cathedral.

My being requires time spent alone in nature in the same way a Catholic goes to mass: to connect with the Divine, to breath in the ever renewing power of grace, and to find the peace of prayer. Yes, there are more risks in the wild, but the rewards of solitude for my spirit and the movement of my body, and my breath, far outweigh these. I take care to watch the weather - a flash flood in this narrow space could mean possible death - and my amygdala hums at the ready in case I need to scale the rock to higher ground. My steps are measured and the pack I carry is loaded with water and a few snacks. I temper wild with caution when I'm sola, just as I do when I ride my mountain bike alone.


The trail starts out as a superhighway, an open water-graded and graveled path, until its first choke a mile in. I scramble up a nearly vertical stack of boulders and soon reach the Little Wildhorse and  Bell Canyon juncture, where I choose right into Little Wildhorse. From there, the walls undulate wide apart to so narrow that I have to squeeze through sideways, and there are enough climbs to stay challenged. I trot past groups and couples, until I'm truly by myself.

The sheer walls are painted with 'desert varnish,' or oxidation from water, and I can almost believe the art has been formed with intention. When the wind quiets in the hush I hear the earth, still now but resonant with the floods that created the space where I stand, and this is a place where the Mother creatrix reigns unique.

I reach the Bell Canyon sign and walk along a road for a mile or so, until I reach the actual trailhead, and then I descend into Bell. Downstream as the water flows where it fills the gap in the rock, so I'm downclimbing instead of upwards. I reach standing water, and remove my shoes and socks as some boys and their grandma I meet instruct me to do. It's a foot deep and the most moisture I've seen that day, the only other evidence of water pools in pockmarks in the stone or moistens the lower layers of sand. The canyon residents I encounter - lizards, birds, bees, cacti and flowers in bloom, penstemon, Indian paintbrush and globe mallow - thrive, not troubled by the dry climate.

All too soon I arrive back at the juncture where I turned right, and I exit the canyon as a family meanders into it. I am calm, happy and just tired enough, and certain I will return to Utah, and navigate other canyons, alone or with company.

I have fallen in love with this desert, this remnant of inland seas in the driest land, where a diverse ecology thrives in its environs, and beauty is found in the margins.

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Restless moon

Just shy of 3 a.m. and I'm determined to make efficient use of a restless mind, instead of staying in bed in the vain hope I'll fall into sleep, while the wind blows, my man snores and the full moon shines bright through the cracks in the blinds.

Tonight I read the first five chapters of Dave Ramsey's book on making over ones' money - per the recommendation of my sensible youngest brother - and although I skim the 'praise the lord' parts, my brain crackles and sparks with the possibility of a different relationship to my financial circumstances. Ramsey emphasizes that debt is not a tool - though in regards to buying a home he concedes it can be a necessary reality - in 180 degree opposition to the attitude of the vast majority of the US population. Most of us were trained this way, through relentless marketing, 'need it now' impatience armed with plastic, or general ignorance. I know, I'm a frustrated and indebted citizen: college debt, credit card debt and car payments. Besides that, at present my husband and me are in seasonal unemployment, which adds to the excitement of juggling funds to pay all our bills. Sort of like tossing around knives when you haven't quite learned how to negotiate apples and oranges.

We've both been followers of a summer work/winter work pattern for more than a decade, because we both believe in the philosophy that you might not arrive alive in time for retirement (at least not in good enough a state of physical fitness that we can play as wild of games as we like: ski, bike, hike, raft, etc.); live it while you can. We appreciate its challenges more every year, in particular when our savings diminish quicker than the next cycle of work arrives. Recently, this way of being has become tempered by other desires, too, the ones that more forward thinking adults appear to take for granted. A home, one to call our own. Possibly a kiddo or two, if that's what fate and biology determines. A mattress stuffed with cash, wait, I mean a retirement savings. No debt, an anchor to slow us down and potentially pull us under.

No debt? A life without debt has become the promise land, but seems as far away in this bleary eyed and moonlit moment as Avalon. No matter, I believe it to be a worthy journey, and like all distant destinations it can be attained given persistence and patience.

Traveling on a budget is a skill I've already acquired, and since I lack others related to money, it's time to go back to school. And this round I'll "just say no" to student loans. Tomorrow, I sign myself up for remedial Adulthood 101, focus on financial responsibility and financial consciousness, and I'm going to master it, previously but no longer allowing my finances to be the boss of me. The moon, on the other hand, reigns supreme.

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