Dixon, NM

Dixon, New Mexico, population, who the hell knows.  I certainly don't.  A rough estimate: about nineteen.  There's Josh and Taylor, Stan and Rose Mary, a couple ladies, and the dude who walks along the road with the scar on his forehead.  I think his name is Donald Trump.  I could be wrong.  I'm a little pooped out from hoeing.  

   
This is where I live now.  Practically dead center of the shot is "the tower," a guest house plunk in the middle of the fields that Stan and Rose Mary rent to vacationers.  That is to say, the tower is for rent, not the fields.  When I arrived at 7:30 PM last Friday, the fields looked smaller than I'd imagined.  I thought, "this is 'A Garlic Testament'?"  It was sort of like when I went to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and found her encased behind panes of bullet glass and mobbed by Japanese tourists.  Some things loom much larger in the imagination.  That is, until you get down on your hands and knees with a bucket and a hand hoe, and start hoeing down the row.  Perhaps if I'd been able to groom Mona Lisa's moustache, I'd have had a greater appreciation for her largesse.

 
When the mountainsides look like this, when this is what you see from the road, it's difficult to imagine that the bottom lands in the valleys could be all that productive, but we'll leave that to another post.  On Saturday, while Stan and Rose Mary peddled their wares at the Santa Fe farmers market, I climbed the slope behind the farm to familiarize myself with the wild flora.  About a decade ago I saved up $2000 so that I could travel to the south-west to photograph wild plants, but then Christmas came and my parents sprung a plane ticket to England on me.  I ended up blowing most of that money on pints of ale and, I am not ashamed to admit, a healthy sum in a Soho (London) strip joint in which I tangled with the management for refusing to pay 85 pounds for sitting in a booth with a fully clad dancer.  Make sure you read the fine print on those strip club menus, kids.  Anyhoo...

In these hills there are piñon trees, the source of pine nuts.  Or were.  Apparently a few years back the double whammy of a beetle and some drought(?) wiped most of them out.  What you're looking at might be a juniper, but like the population of Dixon, I really have no idea. (Stan later informed me that the population is not 19.)  I guess I'm not much of a botanist after all.  One thing I do know, however, is that, very nearby, there are some Pueblo ruins, so who knows...maybe I'll blog about an old school, Indian molar.  Until then, here's the tarantula that I've been extensively emailing about.  According to Stan, if you spot a tarantula in the hills, fall is coming.