Travel/Adventure

Fire, Snakes, and Locusts

A summer in Madrid, New Mexico

There are several mountain ranges in northern New Mexico and I have been to all of them and lived on a couple of them. Everyone knows about the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains that begin southeast of Santa Fe and extend all the way into central Colorado. To the south/southwest of the Sangre de Cristos are the Sandia Mountains. Albuquerque sits on the western slope of the Sandias.

Sandia, by the way, is the Spanish word for watermelon. Once Paul Simon’s Graceland album came out I stopped referring to these mountains as the Sandia Mountains. From then on I called them the Watermelon Mountains. I am not going to explain that but I have a feeling there may be a few people who understand.

Very few people are familiar with the Ortiz Mountains (named after some guy named Ortiz). These small (tiny by northern New Mexico standards) mountains are located between the Sangre de Cristos to the north and the Watermelon Mountains to the south. All the local native people knew about these mountains, however, because that is where they had been mining turquoise for thousands of years.

If you are in Santa Fe and want to drive south to Albuquerque there is a 99% chance that you will take the Interstate highway.

Boring! There is a much, much slower way to get to Albuquerque; a small two-lane country road that is about 500 times more picturesque than the Interstate. It is called the Turquoise Trail because it traverses the Ortiz Mountains where turquoise had been mined for thousands of years. It is a twisty turny undulating backcountry road favored by bikers and adventurous folk who prefer the road less traveled. When taking this route one’s jaw is constantly dropped by the overwhelming beauty of the land.

While the natives lived in the area for many thousands of years and the Spanish had been around for a few hundred years, the white man was the last to arrive. As usual he arrived with lust in his eyes. He immediately coveted the Ortiz Mountains. It was not because of the turquoise — Whitey did not care for nor appreciate turquoise. It was because the Ortiz Mountains also had coal! Located halfway between two growing cities that were being electrified, coal was needed for the power plants that would provide that electrification.

So coal mining commenced and when that happens small towns spring up to house all the coal miners and their families. And so the little village of Madrid was born. As white folk tend to do, the Spanish pronunciation of the town’s name was bastardized into MAD-rid instead of muh-drid. And that is how it has been pronounced ever since.

In the early part of the twentieth century Madrid was a flourishing little town with well over a thousand people. For a while it even had its own minor league baseball team. (The Madrid baseball field was the first lighted baseball field west of the Mississippi.) Due to a lack of local carpenters and builders, pre-fab cabins were imported from Kansas to meet the housing demands. The cabins were small, square, completely made of wood, and they were rather ugly. And none of them had indoor bathrooms so Madrid had hundreds of outhouses. A lot of those cabins were eventually destroyed by fires.

And then the town died.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the power plants of northern New Mexico switched from coal to cheaper natural gas. The coal mine closed and everyone left Madrid. By the early 1960s Madrid had become a completely deserted ghost town.

But then in the early 1970s Madrid was rediscovered by hippies who moved in and made themselves at home. Then in the 1980s a lot of starving artists moved there and the town began its journey of becoming an artist’s colony.

In 1987 the population of Madrid had soared all the way back up to 104. Then Yours Truly, my wife, and our seven-month-old baby girl moved there and the population jumped to 107.

At the very beginning of the most fabulous year of 1987 I had a corporate job that I was very good at. I wore a tie to work every day. I dealt with hundreds of people every day. I made scores of decisions every day and I made a lot of people happy. But suddenly there was something that I wanted to do with every fiber of my being. I had developed an extreme unrelenting passion.

I wanted to be a mommy.

I had become a daddy in late 1986 and that was an incredibly joyous event but I did not want a supporting role. I wanted the lead role. I wanted to be our new baby’s mommy.

I am not entirely sure why I wanted to be a mother so badly. No intensive psychoanalysis was ever carried out on the matter. I just had to do it. It is the number one ultimate job any human could have. Yes, it is the worst paying job of all (even worse than being a writer), but I did not care about that. It seemed like the most spiritually fulfilling job ever. To nurture a tiny new Earthling! I wanted to experience that.

Maybe it was because of my own dysfunctional mother. Perhaps I unconsciously wanted to show her up and do a much better job of it. Maybe it was because John Lennon did it. If John Lennon could do it so could I, right? Whatever the case I had a new love in my life and I wanted to devote myself fully to that baby girl. I could not stand to be away from her for more than thirty seconds.

(An astrologer once tried to explain to me that because of my Cancer Ascendant I had a latent mothering instinct. It is true. I’ve always had a mothering instinct but it is not so latent.)

But there was a problem. Being of the male persuasion my breasts do not produce milk no matter how hard I squeeze them. So the mommy job fell to my better half — at least for the opening act.

So there I was, an extreme introvert, going out into the world each day and interacting with hundreds of people. My wife, an extreme extrovert, was stuck at home all alone with a baby sucking her dry. When I suggested to her that we switch roles she did not hesitate to agree. She was dying to get back out into the world. While she had a Cancer sun sign her Ascendant was obviously somewhere else because she had little mothering inclinations. She gave birth to the kid and that was traumatic enough. She was happy to turn the mothering chores over to me — once the baby was weaned from her breasts.

I was ecstatic. Not only was I soon to get my two favorite breasts back but I was about to start the most exciting adventure of my life!

But there was a problem.

Isn’t there always a problem? Being a corporate drone, I had a significantly larger earning potential than my young wife. We took an income hit when she quit working the week before she gave birth. Giving up my income for whatever she might make would be another major drop in income.

Santa Fe, where we lived and where our baby was born, is my very favorite city in all of the Western Hemisphere. Joy comes spewing out of me just being there. But it is most definitely not a cheap place to live — not even back then in the Eighties (now one needs to be a millionaire to afford to live there).

So we had to make some serious adjustments to our living expenses for the role switching to take place. To this end we began taking some day trips to some of the towns outside of but still near Santa Fe. The farther outside the city limits of Santa Fe, the more that rental prices drop.

After visiting numerous towns we finally found the cheapest rents anywhere 28 miles south of Santa Fe in a little ghost town called Madrid.

I signed a six-month lease on an old miner’s shack. The rent was $125 a month (electricity included). It is the cheapest rent I have ever paid in my life!

Of course the cabin was quite tiny. It had three rooms; a tiny bedroom, a tiny living room, and a tiny kitchen. There was no bathroom but there was a tiny spider infested outhouse about fifteen yards from the cabin.

The next day I gave my two-week notice at my job. This gave our seven-month-old little angel two more weeks to adjust to solid food and also gave us time to pack and clean. I was boiling over with excitement.

Coming home from work on my last day of the job, I simply had to celebrate. So I built a small bonfire in the yard of our Santa Fe home. Once the fire was raging I slowly and ritualistically fed all my ties into the fire one by one. As the toxic smoke rose into the night sky I made a vow to never wear a tie again.

In all the many years since then I have only broken that vow one time and that was to wear a tie to my daughter’s wedding.

One of the first orders of business upon moving into the shack was to empty an entire small jar of cayenne pepper all over the outhouse. While cayenne pepper is one of my favorite spices apparently spiders are not fond of it. Most all of the spiders quickly relocated. Of course I ended up having to do that about once a month. (And no, I did not learn that by googling. Google did not yet exist back then.)

My wife was not exactly thrilled by having to use an outhouse but once the spiders were gone she slowly became accustomed to it. As for me, I only used the outhouse for number 2. For peeing I went behind a certain juniper tree and peed out in nature as God intended all men to do.

Since the cabin had no bathroom and no tub or shower, bathing was also an out-of-doors activity. Behind the cabin was a water spigot with garden hose attached. The water was extraordinarily cold. For six months we took nothing but very cold out-of-doors garden hose showers.

The area behind the shack was rather secluded so no one could see us back there although I did notice my wife peeking out the kitchen window a few times at me as I showered. I did the same thing when she showered. Sadly, because of the baby we could never take a cold garden hose shower together. Now that would have been fun.

The lucky baby got to take warm baths indoors in the kitchen sink. Of course we had to heat the water on the stove since there was no water heater in the cabin.

Although the electricity was free there were only three electrical outlets in the shack; one in each room. One thing I liked about the cabin was that there was a fairly sizable picture window in the living room with a beautiful view of the desert to the south. Just below this window was the one electrical outlet in the living room. It was the perfect place to set up my writing desk. I could plug in one lamp and my electric typewriter.

While I was utterly consumed with being a mommy I still suffered from the malady of being a writer. And there was a novel rolling around in the back of my noggin. Even as a full-time mommy surely there would be at least a little time to write.

That is how stupid I was!

During the six months I was a Madrid mommy I got very, very little writing done. I only got three chapters done of that novel — which was never completed. But there is an interesting side story to this…

I did not find this out until many years later but it turned out that at the very same time I was living in Madrid being a mommy and getting very little writing done there was another author also living in Madrid at the time writing his first novel. I never found out exactly where he lived but he could have been one of my neighbors. Heck, in a tiny town of 107 people everyone is a neighbor.

His name was Daniel Quinn and that novel he was writing at the very same time I was there was entitled, Ishmael. His first novel, it went on to become a huge bestseller and cult classic and even won awards, including the Turner Tomorrow Award which came with a prize of $500,000.

I never earned so much as a penny on the writing I did probably just down the street from Daniel Quinn. (I probably met him and had no idea we were both unpublished writers.)

But that is okay. He may have gotten published and struck it rich but I had a baby and I was a mommy!

The land on which the former ghost town of Madrid sits is pure hardcore desert. There was plenty of cacti, sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and there were scattered shrubby juniper and pinon trees. And there were rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, coyotes, roadrunners, and bald eagles. In the summers it was extremely hot and extremely dry. Very dry. So dry you could start a fire just be sneezing hard.

One evening after dinner I was pacing around the cabin holding my little angelic Earthling and patting her on the back to induce burping when I noticed that the light was suddenly different. I went to look out the picture window above my desk and saw that the cabin next door to us was on fire!

And the breeze was blowing in our direction.

We quickly scrambled. I put the baby in her front pack and my wife grabbed the all-important diaper bag and we quickly exited the cabin. Just as I was about to leave I looked at my desk then picked up the manuscript I was barely working on and brought that with me.

This is ironic because several times I had ceremoniously fed my writing into bonfires and now suddenly I was trying to save my writing from a fire.

My wife got in the car and backed it down off the hill out of line of the fire. I walked down and with diaper bag and manuscript in the car we turned to look at the cabin that was now fully engulfed in flames. Luckily, no one was living there.

Suddenly, over half of the population of Madrid showed up with their shovels and rakes and buckets of water. There were no firemen, no firetrucks. It was the townspeople who came to put out the fire. They knew that any fire had to be put out quickly because the entire tinder dry wooden town of Madrid could go up in flames in a heartbeat.

I felt compelled to help but at the time I didn’t even own a shovel or rake. But I transferred the little princess to her mother and ran up to cabin. I went behind the cabin and turned on the garden hose and proceeded to douse our outhouse with water. It would have been a shame to lose that and it was a lot closer to the fire than our cabin.

The townsfolk then came over to fill their buckets from my garden hose. To my amazement they had the fire put out in less than half an hour and the fire had not spread far from the cabin. It is amazing what sixty or seventy people can do when working together.

Needless to say, we did not sleep very peacefully that night.

My little girl and I bonded each day through bird watching. There was a small box elder tree growing right next to the cabin by the kitchen window. The trunk of the tree was literally no more than a foot from the side of the cabin. Since birds, like me, love trees and since there weren’t many trees around, this box elder tree was always full of birds that we could watch up close.

Madrid happens to be directly on the flight path of numerous migratory birds. I was astounded by the diversity of birds we saw that summer.

I would hold my darling baby in my arms and I would stand right up to the window so we could watch all the birdies flying in and out of the tree. They always made her giggle.

Then one day there weren’t many birds in the tree at all. I wondered why.

Then I saw why. We were standing just a few inches on the inside of the glass and just a few inches on the outside of the glass was the head of a big fat snake! It was motionless except for its tongue which flicked rapidly in and out of its mouth. It was staring directly at my precious baby!

Abruptly, I stepped back away from the window and covered my baby with my arm. Remembering that there was a pane of glass protecting us, I slowly inched back toward the window to inspect the snake. I don’t think my daughter even saw it because it was so well camouflaged. It’s body was wrapped around a tree branch and I guessed it was about six feet long. Thankfully, there was no rattler at the end of its tail. It was just a big fat bull snake.

After a moment the snake turned and slithered across its own body down the tree. I stepped closer to the window and looked down toward the ground to see the snake disappear under the cabin!

Was I nuts?

Was I crazy raising a baby in such stark, wild, dangerous, and rustic conditions? Was I a bad mommy for raising a baby out in the desert in an old ramshackle miner’s shack with no bathroom, no hot running water, no air conditioning, constant fire danger, and a six-foot bull snake living under the floorboards?

Maybe I was. But I would do it all over again. It was the most exciting and adventurous summer of my life. Every day brought something new and different. Sadly, my daughter does not remember any of it. Well, I sure as hell do!

I never saw that snake again although I was constantly looking for it. At least it was outside. It was a few weeks later that I had an inside encounter with a beast.

I went into the tiny bedroom to lay the baby down for her afternoon nap during which I hoped to get in twenty or thirty minutes of writing. Yeah, right.

As I entered the room I immediately spotted the beast crawling with its many legs across the wall near the baby’s crib. It was a gigantic, humongous, colossal centipede that was about fifteen to eighteen inches long! I didn’t even know that centipedes came in that size. I set the baby down on her parent’s bed and, like any protective mommy would do, I sprang into action.

Normally I am a bit of a pacifist. I try to never kill animals or even bugs. I prefer to relocate them. But I had no idea how I would relocate this very scary looking beast. I had no choice but to murder it. I am not proud of it but I did not want that freaky thing anywhere near my angel.

The giant centipede did not want to die. I had to beat it with my flip-flop about twenty-five times before it finally gave up the ghost.

Yeah, maybe I was crazy.

In the middle of August of that magic summer in Madrid we took a three-day trip to Chaco Canyon to attend the Harmonic Convergence. That is a whole different story that I won’t tell now. But when we got back home my honey and I had a talk. It was getting obvious that we had to move.

Winter was coming and there was no way we were going to live in an old miner’s shack without any heat. And there certainly was no way in hell we were going to take naked outdoor garden hose showers in the middle of winter. And my wife really, really wanted an indoor toilet.

So once again we began taking little trips around northern New Mexico looking for the perfect place to move to.

Then one day in September my wife had a dream. She said that we were driving around looking for a new home in the dream when she heard a voice which said, “Go to a place called Dixon and turn right.”

“Yeah? And then what?”

“That’s it. That was the whole dream.”

I quickly got out my map of New Mexico and, sure enough, I found a town named Dixon. It was located in the Rio Grande Canyon on the low road to Taos. And, sure enough, there was a road that branched off from the canyon road leading to the right (east) up into the mountains.

The next available day when we could go driving we headed north to Dixon. It turned out Dixon was not much bigger than Madrid. It was right on the river surrounded by steep canyon walls. We turned right onto the road that led east into the mountains.

The little country road kept going up and up and up. Our car began huffing and puffing. In less than half an hour we gained several thousand feet in altitude and soon we were in beautiful tall pine forest. We rolled the car windows down to let in the cool pine-scented mountain air.

After cresting a rise in the road we came down into the most incredibly beautiful little green mountain valley that was surrounded by huge snow-capped 14,000 foot mountains. It took our breath away.

As we entered the little farming community situated in the valley we saw a cute little house on the right side of the road. There was a man in front of the house hammering a for rent sign into the ground. I hit the brakes and pulled off the road.

We asked the man if we could take a look at the house. It turned out the house had a fully functional bathroom with hot and cold running water and a tub/shower. The house also had heating and a fairly large kitchen. Most importantly, the house had three large windows on the east side with an incredible view of snow-capped 14,000 foot mountains! And it was affordable!

As I handed the man the necessary cash he said, “Well, I guess I better go take down that sign.”

The lesson here, of course, is…

Always listen to your dreams!

We were so excited and so ready to move in but we were not quite finished with Madrid yet. On the way back home we stopped at a grocery store to pick up some empty cardboard boxes. Back in Madrid my wife promptly gave her two-week notice at her job and the baby and I started packing.

A couple of days later it happened. It was an unimaginable experience.

I was indoors playing with the girl when I heard thumping on the big picture window. I thought, Oh no, a hail storm. When I went to the window I realized that it was not hail pounding the window but rather bugs!

It was a locust swarm!

A giant cloud of millions upon millions of locusts had descended on Madrid. Most people have seen video of the locust swarms in Africa but I was actually witnessing one before my very eyes. It was downright apocalyptic.

The locusts were so thick they actually blocked out the sun a bit. I stood there and watched in utter disbelief. I had never seen anything like it.

It lasted for almost half an hour until the spectacle changed. Suddenly the air was now also filled with thousands upon thousands of birds. They arrived en masse to feast on the locusts. The sky grew even darker. And all those birds were screaming at the top of their lungs. It was thunderous. I soon felt like I was in the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Things eventually calmed down. The locusts moved on and the birds followed them. The little Earthling and I went outside to survey the damage. The flowers in the flower pots I had on the porch were completely stripped of their leaves with only stalks left poking out of the pots. Everywhere I looked all the trees and plants and grass were stripped of vegetation — except for a few of the cacti. It was mind-blowing. It was like taking a walk after a hurricane or tornado. It is a memory that still makes me shudder.

Perhaps it was a fitting end to our summer in Madrid. It had been a summer when Mother Nature showed us things we would never forget.

But soon we found ourselves in a radically different environment after moving way, way, way up into the mountains. As it turned out Mother Nature lives up there, too, and she would have plenty more to show us over the next three years of intense exciting adventure.

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And here is a story about that town way, way, way up in the mountains…