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It's almost midnight now, and the wind is blowing hard.

I can tell because my desk lamp throws just enough light outside for me to see a ghostly chamisa waving in the wind outside the window. In an adobe house like this, you never actually hear the wind or much of anything else. I love adobe for the quiet. Foot-thick walls of solid mud make for a great sound barrier, and the roof is heavily insulated too. It's hard for me to believe, but this 100-year-old structure holds the heat (or cold!) like nobody's business: with overnight lows in the 30s just now and no fire, the temperature in the living room falls off maybe two or three degrees overnight, max. It'll be interesting to see what happens when January rolls around (eek). This place is like a cave with windows. I even have mud floors, you know. There isn't any crawl space at all. I'm surrounded by solidity and I really like that.

One thing I don't like is my awful Internet connection, which has me constantly juggling modem scripts to chase away the drop-outs. Sometimes the damn thing disconnects five times in two minutes, then it'll be fine for hours. No, there's nothing wrong with my Mac, thank you very much. I think it's the fault of the line in from the little gray box on the outside wall, and I'm either going to run my own new wire inside or pay Qwest to come poke around. If I do put in a new line, I'll need to find a really long drill, because the only way in is through the concrete stucco and 12 inches of century-old adobe. That's right, no gaps anywhere.

That means no mice, either, only spiders . (Where do they come from?) I don't know what I saw coming out from under the kitchen stove last night, but it had plenty of legs and made me think twice about going barefoot in there. This isn't a spider essay, however. It's all about refuge and hope. No gaps? Can't hear the wind blow? Excellent! My mailbox unit is #9, by the way (numerology freaks, take note). There's a "rightness" about this I can't put my finger on, but it's there. Circle. Unity. Calm. Considering how far out of whack everything else is these days, that's pretty remarkable. The thing under the stove has stayed put since I threatened to go chemical, too. Good sense all around.

I'm even thinking about upgrading to Panther. (Profoundest thanks to the benefactor who saved me the 10.2.8 upgrade download, by the way.) What got me interested was reading about how the faster Finder means that even owners of older Macs like this 500MHz TiBook will notice a big difference. If that's really the case, I might turn this laptop into my primary system, run it with an external monitor and turn the 8600 into a file server. I only just now found out how that works, and you should too if have an "obsolete" box that won't run OS X without a hack party. The point is, if Panther is as good as I hope, this could work. Heck, I could work. On a reasonably contemporary Mac. Mo' better still.

Earlier this evening, I took a little hike. What I did was walk up the sloping llano to where I could pick a "mountain" to climb. The closest thing to an actual peak was a steep wooded rocky knob about a mile away in a direction I'd never gone, so that was it. Along the way I walked across a grassy field and found a conch shell, I swear to God. I picked it up to knock the dirt off, and out from the spiraled inside fell a handful of those little tiny bivalve shells you find at the beach where the waves roll up on the sand. Um ... I trust it hasn't escaped your notice that I don't live anywhere near a tropical beach. But what was it doing there? Waiting for me, obviously. Sure, it's a little beat-up: you would be too if you'd just humped 2.000 miles over the Sierra Madres from Mazatlan on one foot, nyuck-nyuck.

But on to the hill, or knob, or montaña pequeña, whatever. Sure, there were a couple of fences, but this being New Mexico, I only had to worry about being shot, not getting arrested for trespassing. It's important in these situations not to be mistaken for something good to eat when it's dead, so I stayed out in plain sight as best I could. After crossing a couple of arroyos big enough to swallow a small train, I scrambled up a long rocky slope and there I was, wherever I was.

It was wonderful up there. Besides the great views, there were big red westernesque rocks all around, the kind Hopalong Cassidy used to huddle next to while he reloaded his six-shooter. It was also utterly quiet, and I saw no trash or footprints anywhere. The tops of hills like these in this part of the country often seem like temples or secret ceremonial sites to me. So empty, so far removed from the hustle and bustle. I walked to the south end of the place, where a jumble of boulders led all the way down, and there it was: a large wooded valley, something like a "secret" valley perhaps, stretched out before my eyes, sloping gradually up to a distant ridgeline at the foot of much taller mountains beyond.

I was fascinated. The scene was so still and peaceful. From where I stood, I saw no roads, no houses, not even the usual ATV trails. Nothing but thick piñon and juniper as far as I could see. And there were birds ... swallows and flycatchers swooping in wide arcs across the openness, magpies heading for their evening roosts, a couple of ravens grack-grack-gronking way above the rest. And there must have been others. The sight of them moving peacefully through the blue-green bowl of space -- above, in front, and below me -- had a primeval quality to it that was genuinely soothing. There had to be the odd beer bottle and hunters' tracks below, but I couldn't see them. To me it was completely natural, unified, together, and I loved it.

On the east side of the summit, I discovered an easy way down, and all at once the focus shifted: at the bottom of this side of the hill was apparently where old refrigerators went to die! What's more, I'd barely started down when I encountered an old car battery. This was almost as mysterious as the conch shell, because batteries are heavy. I could only imagine some sort of backwoods contest with local yahoos seeing who could gun their ATVs up the slope to dump their trash the highest. Odd, that, but it never really broke the spell.

As I neared the house on my return, I realized I had walked roughly in a circle. Don't ask me what this means, but I feel better, for some reason.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr does too have a life, and don't you forget it.

Brillliant new e-mag for sale!

Alternative eBook source:

Lots of pictures of el Norte:

Salon Weblog: yackety-yak!

(Beautiful land for sale here: "What It Is About El Rito,")

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