NOT THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

You want it? You got it!

One thing this technology is really good for is communicating via digital imagery. And since doing this stuff on a Macintosh is outrageously easy, I'd like to promote the idea that there is life beyond your monitors by sharing some of my reality with you.

My time spent so far in the Land of Enchantment has been very instructive, to say the least. The first thing I would say to those of you who write to me expressing a long-suppressed love of the Southwest and a desire to join my wife and me in paradise is to look at the following pictures:

What, an old bumper? Yes. This is not a sculpture. This is not intended to be art or anything to brag about, it is simply a free fencepost that also bridges a gap. If this were my fence, I would find a piece of wood that matched the others or buy more wire, but that is my disease. I could show you many such scenes, but none would be as eloquent: this picture is northern New Mexico. . .

The next image could just as well be on a calendar entitled "The Romance of the Southwest," except that as beautiful as the photo is, there is really very little romantic about it. This old adobe dwelling does have a lot to say, however.

I don't know how old this is, being no student of these things and having no permission to poke around. But the fact that the rear structure is made of logs tends to place it rather far back, when it might have been easier to gather such material for free That could make it pre-U.S. Forest Service, or nearly a hundred years old. You see, before Teddy Roosevelt established the national forests, the nearby mountain pastures and forests were either part of someone's original Spanish land grant, communally owned, or both. The local people generally shared grazing rights and wood for building or fuel. You should know that there is still considerable resentment (and worse) here in El Norte over the expropriation of these lands. In the late 1960's a Forest Service building in the nearby town of Questa was dynamited and government vehicles were burned, but that is not the half of it! I urge you all to check into the story of the courthouse siege at Tierra Amarilla and the regional political developments that preceded it. The tale of this ongoing struggle for Hispanic land rights is dramatic, stirring, and will scare the pants off anyone who thinks all there is down here is skiing and Indian dances for tourists!

But there's more: adobe construction used to be the way everyone built their homes because the materials were cheap: mud, straw, and vigas (roof beams) hauled down from the mountains (all that was required was weeks and weeks of backbreaking labor). Nowadays labor costs mean that adobe buildings can be hideously expensive, which is why my neighbors generally favor modular homes or trailers for new residences. The humble building material of the common people is now ironically used mostly to build second homes for the wealthy, although there is at least one local builder who does a great job for $75-100 per square foot. You can forget about more than one bathroom at that price, though.

The next picture shows where we go to buy the county paper every week. You want a Seven-Eleven? Not a chance. This is the "Valley Store." Once we were out of sugar, so I stopped in and made my selection from three dusty 5-pound bags, all different brands. The lady who runs the place spends most of the day taking care of her granddaughter and selling an occasional pack of cigarettes or candy bars. This is also where I drop off a bundle of Horse Fly every month and pick up the yellowed stack of last month's issues. (Sometimes even a free paper is hard to give away!)

In case you're wondering, there are indeed a number of what you would call "nice homes" in the valley (we have been renting a small one) as well as fine new trailers, but these images are still representative. Most of the people here have never been rich in the conventional sense and have always gotten by the best way they could. A few decades back, the main road from here to Colorado (30 miles away) wasn't even paved. For those of you who read only the guide books or visit the Web sites, my intention is to show you that what you might reasonably expect to find by way of "infrastructure" just isn't here! For example, you could buy several acres of land (if you can find them) for around $150K-175, build yourself a modest home for another $100K or so, and maybe discover you weren't able to get a telephone. ANY telephone. . . (cell phone coverage is very limited). Even in town, if you want to add a second line, you have to put your name on a list! Some people have been waiting for years, and no, this is not a joke.

These are all places I walk past on my way to the post office (below). The people who work there have probably the best jobs in the valley and for sure the shortest commute: they live in the house on the right!

I struggled to come up with a computer angle for this column, but all I can muster is that I couldn't have shared these scenes with you any other way. The pictures were taken with my Nikon CoolPix 950 in automatic mode at the "normal" quality setting, resized and drop-shadowed using WWWArt (the best damn $20 image-editing app in the world, much easier to use than Photoshop), and dragged onto this page composed with what my brother Bob calls "that old hound dog of a program," Claris HomePage 2.0. The images have not been altered in any way, which just shows how good digital cameras are today. The shots were transferred from the 32MB Compact Flash card with a fabulous little gadget, the SanDisk USB card reader. Each JPEG took about 2 seconds. And glory halleluja, the SanDisk reader gets its power from the USB port, in this case an XLR8 USB card I installed in the PowerMac 8600 this past December (no external power supply needed). Just imagine how useful this setup will be on the road with the iBook!

If there's a Macintosh play, it's that doing all this is so easy! Getting the card reader software installed and the widget powered up took maybe 30 seconds, I swear (not counting the necessary restart). In fact, the best thing I could say about the technology is that it almost isn't there. What I mean is, it's never in the way. It works so well it makes itself irrelevant to the process, and that puts me out in the world where I want to be.

For now, the part of the world I want to know is rural northern New Mexico, and I think these pictures make it abundantly clear that we couldn't live here without my Internet work. Is it worth it? So far the jury is still out on that question: this is simultaneously the poorest and the most expensive place I've ever seen. Also the emptiest! I'll leave you with another picture taken on my daily walk to the post office and let you make up your own minds. Clean air, clean water, and relative solitude come at a price most people can't afford or fear to pay. So far we're keepin' dry and gettin' fed.

Bueno-bye! :-)

John H. Farr edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. His Zoo Zone is guaranteed to be unlike anything you've ever seen and is the only place in the world where you can (theoretically) buy cat hammers.

Woo-hoo!!! Special BONUS LINK! (Me gusta la vaca!)

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March 16, 2010