Here's where we are now...

Two years and a bit. That’s how long I’ve been out here. I’ve no complaints, even for the bad stuff; I made my bed in full knowledge that I’d have to lie in it. It has worked out better than I had any right to hope, all in all, though sometimes the price has been high.

Here’s where we stand today. I got a call from my closest neighbor, a weekender, asking me to unlock his chain so the propane truck could get in. The dogs and I hiked the mile or so to his place, unlocked the chain and pulled it off the private road to his place, then hiked home again. A couple of hours later the dogs alerted me to the propane truck – right on time for once, which told me I probably knew the identity of the driver. I knew this fellow from when I still had a townie job, so I called the dogs and we hiked back up to my neighbor’s property to say hi. Sure enough it was the guy; we passed some howdies and he gave me the invoice for the propane. I let myself in the neighbor’s house and put it on his counter, bringing the dogs in with me so the propane guy could make his getaway without dogs nipping at his enormous tires. Then I locked up and left, securing the chain at the end of the driveway. Before going home we took a long detour through a wash the dogs like to hike through, and we got back home an energetic hour and a half or so after we left. It’s a cool, hazy day but I was sweating pretty good, so I stripped off my hoody and let the sweat dry before getting cold again and putting it back on. The dogs will be content to snooze for most of the rest of the day, which is good because I just feel like cocooning this cool day away indoors though I really should haul some rocks – and I really must remember to service the generator before evening because there’s no way the solar will fully charge the batteries today no matter what that lying meter says.

That’s pretty much the way it goes with my neighbors around here. If it seems strange that I – a scruffy-looking, bearded hermit with a .45 and a long knife on his belt – should have the keys to a neighbor’s mostly-built million-dollar house, then you don’t live around here. They know damned well their tools and building materials and goodies are safer with me around than not. I watch out for my friends, and they’d do the same for me. Mostly all I get to do for them is be there: I show up if somebody needs another set of arms, or just stand on the ridge and look unfriendly and dangerous when strangers come joyriding around. The sight of a half-naked cedar rat with a peg leg and a rifle always seems to change touristas’ plans in a hurry. I get a kick out of it.

They’ve been known to do far more for me. In fact, this new leg that lets me walk so often and so far without pain is proof of that. The leg I got here with was made almost fifteen years ago. It’s old-fashioned and worn out, and the only feet I could buy were plastic-keeled crap that broke and needed replacing a couple of times a year – just not made for this country. But the neighbors with the big house had a prosthetist friend in the city, and spun me a story about how he does a certain amount of pro bono work every year and could fix me up for free. I bought the story – got some other neighbors to watch the dogs for a few days while this first set of friends took me into the city. They put me up in their condo, and I found out they were lying about the “pro bono” part when the prosthetist wanted to know – in my presence, which was pretty clearly not supposed to happen – how my friend wanted to handle the payments. A more-real version of the story emerged – it seems a coalition of friends got together to finance my repairs. God damn – I wanted to cry.

So now the top half of my old leg is refurbished, and terminates with a titanium peg that’s got a high-tech carbon-fiber wafer foot that can climb hills better than I can. I feel twenty years younger.

When I lived in the city I had a career that made me lots of money and gave me no security or joy at all. I was a contractor, mostly; I designed technical training programs for courses that managers liked to show off and nobody wanted to pay for their tech people to actually take. Being a contractor means that when your courses win awards, your customers go to banquets to which you’re not invited. Being a contractor means always looking for work. Being a contractor sucks. But when you’re working, the money’s good. You give it to your wife, who sinks it into a big house that you lose when the marriage breaks up. When you’re not working, the wife glares at you for not making money. This contributes to the marriage breaking up. After my marriage broke up I didn’t get to live in the big house any more, but I was still privileged to pay for it. I think I finished the process of burning out right about then – work got harder and then almost impossible to find, and I was often broke and hungry. That didn’t change until I accepted that my cold wife of a career was over, and just took whatever work I could find. That new attitude didn’t make me the kind of money I’d made before, but it helped with the hunger problem a lot.

I really hated my life in the city, but prolonged it because the one good thing that came of the marriage was a daughter who was at the time the only person on the planet I was certain I’d have died by fire for. I needed to stay near her till she was grown and out on her own. Virtually the day she made that decision, I left the city forever.

Now I live in the desert. I own almost nothing, I make almost no money. About half of what I do make goes into the contents of a little OSB-clad building, which I check regularly for rat incursions. Sacks and jars and buckets filled with food: That’s the treasure I’m storing up. Probably this obsession with where my next meal’s coming from comes from the hungry years, but I don’t worry about it. If it’s a sign of mental illness, it could have taken a worse form. Nobody ever died from a full pantry.

But I think I’m digressing. What was I going to talk about? Ah, yes! The bad stuff. Well, there’s been some of that.

The reason I’m here, and not somewhere else, is that I made some really good friends a few years ago and they invited me to come stay with them when I was ready to leave the city. I took them up on it, and for over a year life was damned near idyllic. I had a job in town, making enough money. I wrote a novel that was pretty well received by the dozen or so people who read it. I hiked the hills, played with the dogs, helped my friend work on his property. I was as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.

Then one day I came home from work, and my friend was dead. Just like that. Dead. Oh, it wasn’t that big a surprise, really, because he was as unhealthy as any vertical person I ever met. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. But still – he was my best friend. And poof! Like that, he’s gone. I never got to say goodbye.

His dying also raised some practical problems, because his step-son discovered the body before I got home and called the cops. Cops were all over the property when I got there, and they … well, they acted like cops. And I acted like a guy who’d just learned that his best friend had fallen over dead, which is to say I didn’t handle the matter well at all. They demanded ID, which led to their very interested discovery that my license, registration and insurance were – well – pretty much non-existent. Always did have a problem keeping my papers in order. They got a nice old truck out of the deal, not to mention the fine which took me months to pay off, and I was on foot. Twelve miles from the nearest town. It complicated matters.

I borrowed rides to town for work, stayed in town sometimes, got a little motor for a bicycle, learned that the centrifugal clutches on those motors don’t deal with hills well at all. Life was becoming very complex, all over the matter of transportation. Then my ex-wife got upset with me over some personal things and decided to express her displeasure by suing me for back child support payments from those hungry months. And that tore it for me. Screw this.

It was right about then that serendipity took a hand. My friend’s wife had taken a good job in the city, but it just wasn’t working out with the dogs and the property. Somebody needed to watch her property for her, and the dogs – well, the dogs had never lived anywhere but the middle of the desert and couldn’t deal with life in a house. I, on the other hand, couldn’t deal with life anywhere but the middle of the desert. So I worked up my nerve and suggested that instead of my continuing to pay rent to her, she pay me a stipend to take care of the property and dogs for her. It turned out she had been trying to work up the nerve to make the same suggestion.

And that’s how it came to the way things are now. I live alone here, sometimes not seeing another two-legged soul for weeks. She comes up from the city every month or so, bringing me Costco goodies that I squirrel away in the pantry. Every other day or so I check for rats and cackle over my growing hoard. Another friend brings salvaged lumber sometimes, and I pull nails and plan my very own Secret Lair for the spring, in a meadow overlooking a beautiful bend in the big wash. In fact I’ve got to stop typing this, because another friend a few miles away has some windows he wants to sell me cheap and I need to go get them while I’ve got the cash.

With my newly-built leg I’m more suitably mobile than I’ve been in years, and the dogs think that’s fine. Just a couple of days ago, exploring a nearby canyon that’s been one of our favorite spots for longer hikes, I discovered that I could climb steeper grades than I could before. We climbed the sloping wall of the canyon together, up where the hawks nest (and get really pissed-off by trespassers), and discovered a sweet, deep hidey cave in a passage created by enormous tumbled rocks. I may clean that out and wall it off someday; you never know when it might come in handy.

I’m no prophet; I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Maybe this idyll will last for years, and maybe not. But I’m building my place right here. By next year there’ll be more I can call my own and no one else’s, and if I have to work out transport and get another townie job I can do that. But for now this is where I am, and I like it here.

So if you’re taking a Saturday drive out on some neglected desert paths, among the juniper and the jumbled rocks, look around. If you see a glowering guy on a ridge wearing a beard and a rifle – and maybe not a lot else, depending on the weather – don’t worry too much about it. It’s only me, trying to look mean. But I’m not all that bad.