YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE

Ah, wilderness!

I took a hike yesterday, quite on the spur of the moment. Normally such things require more preparation, but this time I didn't even take any water or a walking stick. I just jumped up, grabbed my camera, and announced, "I think I'll head up the arroyo, ought to be back by six."

"When should I worry?" asked my wife.

"After dark!" I said.

One advantage of living next to a national forest is that your choice of places to hike is virtually unlimited: I chose a meandering arroyo that was said to lead to a "neat little canyon" farther up the mountain. (The disadvantages of living in such a spot aren't as immediately evident, but more on that later.)

Never have I lived in such a wild, empty place. As I walked and clambered up the steep-walled gully, slipping and crunching my way over a dense layer of pine needles and cones covering the rocks, the only other sound was the wind in the ponderosas. Feeling mildly vulnerable, I kept glancing up, half-expecting to see something peering down at me. A deaf mountain lion, perhaps, or any other beast not spooked well in advance by my shamefully noisy progress.

From time to time I climbed up the bank and walked among the giant ponderosa pines above the arroyo. The wind was sharper here: snow was predicted for later, and the sky was an almost-never observed overcast gray. There were no bushes or young trees, just a broad, open, park-like expanse of brown needles and millions of cones. The mature trees stood far enough apart that driving along in a car would have been easy! I saw one old tree that must have been five feet thick at the base, and another with all the branches stripped off one side, a casualty of a lightning strike that somehow hadn't burned down the whole forest. (those same branches lay in a charred heap I had to detour around). How could this not have started a conflagration, I wondered?

My instincts told me I should stick to the arroyo, despite the harder going. That was where any wondrous artifact or mineral treasure would have been washed or fallen, I told myself. Besides, the Hansel-and-Gretel wilderness was a little too inviting, and I had no bread crumbs to leave to mark my trail. Anyone can get lost! At least on the return trip the arroyo would eventually wind its way down to where it passed in sight of our adobe, and so I generally stuck to it. I did find a surprising number of bones -- thigh bones, mostly, from elk or cows. I also found a deer pelvis, an unidentifiable pile of skull fragments and rotting teeth, and one distinct prize I judged to be a skunk's skull. Several of the thick thigh bones were broken in the middle, as if a bear had bitten through to get at the marrow. I don't know if bears are given to such behavior, but the evidence seemed convincing enough. A mental image of me trying to slide and hop all the way home with a broken ankle as it got dark and started to snow caused me to watch more carefully just where I was stepping. The fear was small but real, and I realized I liked it. ( Uh-oh. . .)

A little farther up the mountain, I climbed once more up the bank to make faster progress among the trees. Just ahead (or so it seemed), there was sky peeking through. If I could just hurry up the hill, I might be able to see into a hidden valley on the other side, I theorized. To save even more time, I cut south briefly along a barely-distinguishable trail, then turned east again, but all I could see ahead were more and more trees. My valley had either moved, or -- oops, BIG fear this time! No time to savor the adrenaline rush, either, as the sky was now considerably cloudier and darker than I would have liked. ("Abooout, FACE!") Cutting diagonally across the woods now, I aimed for the arroyo. Oho, there it was! Or was it? Damn. All you arroyos look alike, I smirked inwardly, but clambered down to work my way back. . .

To make a long story short, it turned out to be the same one I had climbed up and I made it home with time to spare. I was even a wee bit disappointed when I realized I wasn't lost any more. Well, shoot. At least I had the bones.

An hour or so later, sitting in front of the 8600 waiting for this column to materialize, I wondered how I could ever leave this place. The thought has been increasingly on my mind, however. It was wilderness that attracted me here, but I am human, and ever since the Garden of Eden (a most instructive myth), humans have been destroyers of wilderness. This presents a most vicious paradox, that of our inevitable destruction of what we instinctively love the most. Moreover, I easily see it in myself and the things that I would change here if I could. One of those is the fact that I seem to have landed in a telecommunications dead zone!

Qwest, formerly U.S. West (the telephone company we love to hate), has just announced a 36 percent cut in capital expenditures for next year and is laying off thousands of experienced personnel. For telecommunications infrastructure-starved northern New Mexico, this has to be a killing blow. My reaction to this obvious manuever on the part of management to increase the attractiveness of the newly-merged company's stock is a blunt "capitalism sucks," at least the unregulated variety.

As things stand now, many people have no telephone lines at all, and with the budget cuts, Qwest will surely be even less inclined to service the area. As for Internet access, the local electrical cooperative, Kit Carson Electric, has just brought the Internet to many rural communities for the first time! Kit Carson has plans to push fiber-optic cable into the hinterlands as well, but they will be hampered by the lack of fatter pipes and their ongoing fight with Qwest, which is trying to deny Kit Carson the use of their existing lines. Some progress has been made, but overall, this is not good.

Without the Internet, the very modest living I make now would not be possible. The other night I sat here updating the news for Applelinks and was startled to hear the bugling of an elk just outside! The primeval bellow, one I've described as sounding like a horse being strangled and punched hard in the stomach at the same time, gave me a chill -- and momentarily distracted me from my irritation over an agonizingly slow connection I was experiencing at the time. Meanwhile back in Maryland, the one-ISP town we left now has several, and the state has agreed to install high-speed Internet access points in every rural county. These POPs will serve as hubs for broadband fiber-optic or wireless networks currently not available to my old neighbors, and who knows where that will lead?

So follow in my footsteps if you will (you may even be able to rent this adobe cottage on the edge of the wilderness). But by coming here, you will create pressure for change. I am teetering on the brink of deciding that the best thing I can do for this beautiful place is to leave it -- and make the most of my productive years by getting in on the action back home.

It isn't just the Internet, of course.

A friend told me over coffee the other day that he's been sorely tempted to sneak out to the Taos city limits in the middle of the night and erect a big sign that says "DEAD END!" I've been here long enough to understand his meaning, too: the town is barely larger than the one I left, yet driving through takes thiry minutes instead of five.

The spirit of this place is strong and still alive, but for how long? Maybe if I tuck the wilderness away in my heart and take my body elsewhere, someone's kid can hike up the arroyo and get lost for a while. And now that I think of it, maybe capitalism doesn't suck after all. Maybe, in fact, it's divinely inspired: is God in the boardroom at Qwest?

(Now there's a thought!)

John H. Farr edits the 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 a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM and has some JPEG-laden weirdness going on at an fun project called Zoozone News (if you're lucky you'll find a different photo of New Mexico there every day).

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