God, the artist.

How easy to go off the trail, following a dog, missing the snow-blanketed swithcback, being lost in your mind.

The red needles of pine on the white, patchy snow and glowing earth.

There are plenty of holes and small caves under the monumental granite boulders, all smooth and muscled.  Greats holes for bears to sleep, but the dog would alert to scent.

When there are no tracks and all you can do is forge ahead until hit with the wall of bush or a steep ravening slope.  Forge ahead and backtrack when necessary.

The cold late January wind on the neck above your sweater and below your thinning hair.

A giant ponderosa pine fallen in some gale lies split around a lichen covered granite Boulder.  The sun streaks the snow on top and filters down trough those still standing.

Ghost Ranch

Ghost Ranch

A blue highway cuts through orange sandstone and desert scrub as it takes us into the early New Mexican summer.  The sun’s glare is stuck in the band of tinted glass at the top of the Chevy’s windshield, casting a blue shadow across our legs.  With no air conditioning, and a handle that only rotates so far, the hot, high desert wind comes through the window right at eye-level and wicks the sweat from my forehead while bringing water to my eyes.  The temperature in the cab is baking, and my mom, my sister, and my sister’s friends lay about in various stages of melt.  My mom keeps fiddling with the radio that spreads static over a mixture of mariachi music.  The voices fading in and out do not match those of any of the transplanted kids in the truck, linguistically or socially, and my hippy-dippy mother’s only Spanish comes from working as a waitress in a Mexican food restaurant.  Me, I’ve been studying French for some reason.

The heat makes my ear throb where a newly pinned stud puts a defiant hole in my left lobe.  Neither the bed of the truck nor the trailer behind it contain any of my possessions, but everything my mom and sister own is back there.  I’ve been trying to get a hold of a friend to bring me my stuff from Amarillo, but until we are settled in our new place, I can’t even tell him where to meet us.  I can only think of one guy with a car that is brave enough to face my redneck dad and his aggression.  The sudden loss of my life back there is a constantly running story in my head.

Conversations and mind movies play out over the vibration of the road traveling up from the hot floor of the truck.  When my dad put me on a bus bound for Colorado, with nothing but the clothes on my back, I thought I’d be back in Manitou, the little mountain town where my mom has lived since I was 5 years old.  True to character, Linda switched things up and has decided to move us to Albuquerque.  She wants to begin a graduate study at the University of New Mexico and says that we all need a change of scenery.  I think the real reason has to do with some of my recently acquired hobbies.

From her side of the front bench seat, mom asks “Are you hungry?” and begins to dig through a grocery bag at her feet.

“No.” I say.  I put a piece of gum in my mouth as a way to focus on not talking and to fight the nausea that driving in the heat gives me.

I don’t intentionally speak to her only in single words, but talking leads to arguing.  In the mirror, my sister and her friends are glassy-eyed and listless.  Madeline feels me looking at her and swivels her head to meet my eyes in the glass.  She doesn’t smile.  The two years since I left to live with my dad have broken what we used to be to one another.  The other two girls, Kelly is Maddie’s age and Kim is her big sister, have inexplicably been allowed to come along for this adventure into the unknown.  The fact that their parents have agreed to these shenanigans makes me wonder what dim, smoke-dank bar they hang out in when they should be parenting their kids.  My mom is past that stage in her development, but I can’t otherwise understand why responsible parents would give over their daughters’ keeping to a woman with few resources and no certain destination.

We are headed to a little village called Medanales.  Mom has rented a house in the hills outside of Espanola, up the highway from Santa Fe.  We are going to spend a few months there before moving on to Albuquerque in time for the fall semester.  She hasn’t seen the place yet.  She picked it out of a months-old copy of the Thrifty Nickel that had made its way north somehow.  She called the rental agency after reading the description:

3 bedroom adobe on half a wooded acre next to the Rio Chama river.  Just off state highway 285, this updated home is move-in ready.

and then a phone number.  She called, not hoping that the same place would be available, but looking for a lead.  Instead, she found that the house from the ad was still empty, and that we could rent it with no deposit if she could be there by the first of June.  Such a bargain.

After that I’d had a crash course in driving a stick shift.  She traded her used hatch-back for an even more used pickup truck with an extra bench seat.  I don’t know who they are fooling calling it a “king cab” because it just feels tight and hot in here, no royal anything.

There’s a wide place coming up in the road, and I have to stretch my legs.  As I pull over, a commotion starts up in the seats behind me.  Puppy, the great shaggy mutt, tumbles the girls as he digs up from the floor.  The wet towels my mom has been laying over him don’t do much to cool him off, and he wants out.  Now.  Surprisingly, no one gets clawed as he pushes through the too-small space between the seat and the door before I can get the back levered up.   I grab his leash as it sails by my feet kicking up dust.  He jerks to a stop, and panting, looks at me from under the white and black hair hanging in his eyes.  I let him walk me toward the back of the truck and hook him in the shade of the hitch while I get an old plastic bowl and jug of warm water from its jigsawed spot in the bed.

As Puppy licks at the water, I stretch my back and look at the hills lining both sides of the dusty road.  Orange and red at their tops, the hills slope down to the highway and the river, turning dusty yellow with a growing level of brush.  Near the banks, there are towering cottonwoods and scrub oaks that have grown as tall as regular trees in the presence of water running through the high desert.  The oaks are gnarled and knotted as though stretching from their normal bushy height has been a long and painful process.  I can smell the water across the road.  Its muddy color is green-tinged, and it looks like it would be cool on the toes.

The long moment of quiet is broken as mom says, “I think we’re close now.”

In reply to my doubtful look, she says “I know Abiquiu is only a few miles farther, and then we are almost at the house.  Another 15 minutes maybe.”

Abiquiu.  Mom’s mecca.  It’s why we are staying the summer here.  She feels like hanging out where artists have lived will make something rub off, and Georgia O’Keefe is THE artist as far as my mom is concerned.  She has told me about looking at O’Keefe’s sketches as a young girl, when her father, a long-dead saint, took her to the college in Amarillo where the artist worked as a young woman, before she was known.  Though I never got to see them when I lived in that cow town with my dad, who is definitely no saint, I did drive out to the canyons beyond town when I first got my license and that old Oldsmobile.

Palo Duro canyon was the material for much of O’Keefe’s early landscape work, and its washing light and rugged ridges began the love of lonely vistas that O’Keefe later followed into Northern New Mexico.  She had thought she could leave the haunted places of the southwest and return to New York and Stieglitz, but she had been wrong.  She came back and died here, possessed by Taos and all this color.  It feels like we are chasing the same ghosts now.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” She asks me.  There is a note of pleading in her voice.  Asking me to be on her side, to make it so that she isn’t so alone in all of this.  I turn away.  I’ve been her other person most of my life, but I must have forgotten how to be a part of easing the loneliness while I was away.  Maybe the need to reject the weight of that responsibility is why I left.

Beyond her, the girls stretch long legs in the thin sunlight.  It is beautiful, but I don’t tell her so.  Silence is the best way I have of sharing my voice in the now-finished argument leading up to this adventure, and I’m not over it.  I’m sure that parents pay different amounts for the privilege, but my guilt at my own behavior doesn’t keep me from exacting every toll I can.

I take the leash and walk him across the road to the weedy bank of the river.  He immediately lays down in the muck and smiles.  Mom yells, “Don’t’ let him get muddy!”

“Too late!” I holler back at her.  At least he will keep cool awhile when we head out again.

Dirt tracks swing out on each side of the road and lead through ragged fences made of pinon branches and old wire.  Some are overgrown and almost gone.  Some lead to shacks built of faded, gapped boards or they pass crumbling walls of adobe.  A sign points off the road to Abiquiu and announces that Medanales is another 15 miles south.  I can tell my mom wants to take the turn, to see the artist’s ranch now, but she says, “I think the house is this side of the turnoff for town.  It’s supposed to be across a wooden bridge on the left side of the road.”

“Ok.” I’m ready to get out of the car.  “Are we meeting someone there with keys?”

“No,” she says, “but I want to see the house before we meet the agent.  We have to drive into Medanales to pick up the keys.  The realtor left them at the post office.  His sister works there and is going to call him when we get in.  Then he’ll meet us at the house.”  She looks wilted and her voice has an edge to it.  She fans herself with a map and watches the cottonwoods pass us.  I’m amazed that she is sitting in the front beside me.  She began the trip in the back seat, sandwiched between the two youngest girls, with oldest one, Kim, belted in up front.  

The phobia of driving on highways is something that has grown in my mom over the past decade.  I don’t know why, yet, but it has something to do with driving my sister and I to Colorado from Amarillo when Madeline was just a baby.  I don’t remember that particular exodus, but as we set out on this current one, she began to drink to deal with her panic, cheap white wine and Sprite in a plastic water bottle.  For a long time, she laughed and sang with the girls while I drove in silence.  Now, after 8 hours on the road, she has moved to the front but tries to read magazines rather than looking out the window.  The earlier buzz has left her, and she looks old and tired.

I see a bridge up ahead and slow.  I was imagining something shaky, but it doesn’t make a sound as we cross.

“Turn left.” she says, and I swing sharply into a set of sandy ruts.

The road curves through cottonwoods and other tall, thin trees.  There are dark pines mixed in like watchmen.  In clearings, the sun streaks down to the litter of the woods. To the left, the river runs in a curtain of sunlight that deepens the dim forest, where we are. The house is hidden by a bank of tamarisk until you are right on it.  

A large arc of a parking area fronts the long, low adobe.  There are no other cars.  When we are all out and standing, the dog straining to explore, I take in the house that will show up in my dreams for the next 20 years.  It is a dark red-brown, rich in color but not natural.  A cracked flagstone patio leads through to a small inner-courtyard, blossoms from a pair of flowering trees turning the ground grey and faded pink. There is an oversized wooden door hidden in the deep shadow of the overhanging roof.  The doorway is outlined with an arch of painted tiles.  Part of the repeating pattern shows small angels flying over desert buttes and mountains.  The enclosed space is dry and dusty but was once important to someone.  A square of crushed gravel surrounded by a stone walk, there are red and green yucca flowering in a corner.  The pale, waxy heads, ghostly succulent, are determined to live in the neglected space.

I pace the windows which are spaced evenly along the walls.  The windows are set deeply and some have a kind of shutter made of painted sections of tree branch crossed in front of the glass. Around the side of the house, I can see the river we just came over and, stretching back behind the house, a stand of trash trees, second growth and skinny, stretched into a gray blur. The sound of water drew me out of the shadow of the house and trees and into a bright dash of sun falling into tamarisks along the river. Their smell was sweet and green. I found a trail leading through the brush and followed it down to the water's edge. There was a small muddy beach where it looked like someone had cut and pulled the vegetation until there was a shelf carved by the river. Mud continued to be deposited and had built a crescent of cleared space to sit and watch the river. It was a pretty spot, but the trail was full of debris and sticks, so they wouldn't be able to walk down here in their bare feet.  I crunched down to the river's edge and looked into the amber-tinted water at the rounded, skull-sized rocks all along the bottom.

I decided that I would build a lined and cleaned path as soon as we had all of the stuff in the house.

I walked back to the low house and stopped as I rounded the corner and got a look at what was going on in the drive way. The girl's were chasing each other and laughing and the dog was barking while he stood in the middle of them. My mom was looking through the front seat of the car. She stood up and looked at me, shaking the keys in her outstretched hand.
"You open it; I'll grab the little cooler and the birds," she said.
I knew she was creeped out by something, but she always seemed jittery these days, so I didn't worry about it much. She went to get the pair of caged finches out of the back seat.

I stepped up to the painted wooden door. It was bright blue, but had a weathered look. There were places where the wood had been gouged in narrow cuts. A few splinters stuck out white against the paint. The key turned easily in the lock and the door swung inward into a darkened room. The floor was

her laughter is a lune’s call, musical and lilting.  

As we

Bruja’s picture stuck in rafter.

Saturday morning

Okay, clearly it was wrong, but she was so pretty that he couldn’t look away.  It wasn’t more than two beats, but looking at the girl standing in the window with her back to him, the moment seemed very long and full of his own breathing.  It was the panties.  At 13, he had only seen his mom and sister’s panties in the laundry - kind of gross each time.  

This was way different and unexpected.  He had gotten up early to see if Ray wanted to go hiking.  Sticking around the house on Saturday meant chores, so he had left his mom a note and booked it before she woke up.  Ray lived in a shitty hotel across the valley.  They both had single mom’s and little sisters, but Ray’s family ate at the Baptist church on Sundays.  Ray said it wasn’t because they were so into God but because it was free.  Beacuse they lived in the hotel, Jack didn’t stay over at Ray’s house much.  There wasn’t room or extra food.  Ray, on the other hand, stayed over at his place a lot.  Jack’s mom was cool with it.  They didn’t have a lot extra and had to move from one cheap rental house to another every 6 months because they always fell behind, but Jack thought it was probably okay as long as there was mac and cheese with a glass of milk for him and Amy.  There was always food, and the electricity only got shut off for a few hours every once in awhile.

This morning, no one was answering the door at Ray’s.  They might be gone, which would be weird, or they might be in bed and ignoring him.  Ray’s mom had a new boyfriend that Jack and Ray were pretty sure was a BHS.  A Big Hippie Stoner.  There were lots of them in town.  The bearded guys and girls in long skirt seemed to come from all over to hang out in Manitou.  When spring came late in May, and the monsoons made the willows leaf out over the swollen creeks that met in Soda Springs park, the hippies hung out getting stoned, playing music, and generally goofing around.  They were a source of endless entertainment for Jack and Ray  and the hotel where Ray lived was full of them.  Jack was pretty sure that the girl he was looking at was one of them.  Her golden brown hair was tied back into a ponytail with a bit of cloth.  She was gesturing to someone else like they were talking, but Jack couldn’t hear them through the closed window.  

Jack backed up slowly and slid behind a convenient shed.  He looked around to see if anyone was watching him, and, with

Time travel story

Outline

Manitou is a thin place - like an elevator shaft - that allows travel between different layers of time.  Time exists in layers side by side and the springs in Mantiou act as tunnels that pierce the layers.  Just like there are places that can be used to travel, there are places where “event spikes” pierce these layers and cause similar patterns or events to emerge again and again as time and people move around these points (think of the visual of Einsteins theory of time bending and flexing like a sheet stretched tight with a bowling ball in the middle).  A particularly horrible occurrence can cause these spikes which reverberate into the past and the future, changing things as they go (remember, all times exist simultaneously). past life loop?  deja vu experience

Some people have been chosen to travel between these layers in order to prevent Black Dates, the occurrences at the heart of these spikes.  The event that causes the spike can’t always be prevented, but a butter-fly effect can take place to mitigate the length and intensity of the spike, so that the events influenced in the past or future can be diminished or overcome.  These people cannot travel to the black date directly, and if they are present during the horrible occurrence that causes the spike, they are often drawn in, like a moth, and annihilated.  Instead, they can travel to times around the black date and try to figure out how to influence or direct events to create the mitigation.

These people are chosen, or born, out of black dates.  They are people who have been influenced by something, such as a school shooting, and lived, so they are now open to this innate ability to travel between the layers of time.  Everyone has something of this ability, some have a more powerful gift than others.  Many who have these gifts never know, but travel between the layers of time, in varying degrees of substance or matter, during dreaming.  When a person with a powerful gift is in the vicinity of a black date when it occurs, there ability is magnified to the point where they can or do begin jumping between times.  These people are drawn, through seemingly fateful circumstances and coincidences, to places that are thin and allow for easier travel.  Like a vortex.  They are drawn to each other in these places and either are lucky enough to figure out what is happening to them, or they lose their minds, or they become religious zealots who follow the “angels”.

This is the heart of the conflict.  The time climbers (need better name) have always tried to prevent the effect of these black dates in order to protect humanity.  Religion, and the religious drive, grow from a group of beings that seek to preserve the effects of black dates.  They see these occurrences as the will of God.  It is God’s plan that certain destruction must occur as punishment or retribution.  Those who seek to thwart the time climbers are a timeless race.  They don’t climb through time, but they exist across the layers with a shared memory.  What one knows, they all know, so that events in one time are known, and can be used for strategy to all of these “Angels”  The climbers don’t have this gift.  They must find each other, plan and communicate, form bonds, etc. in order to impact the events surrounding black dates.

The main character is brought to Manitou by her father.  Her mother lives in California and is a “light worker” which is a new religion, very new-agey.  It has a different spin and preaches openness to shift and change, but is really only about giving over control and individuality.  Her father is distraught and alienated by her mother’s new beliefs.  Her mother came beliefs after her daughter was involved in a school shooting scenario, died, and was brought back to life medically.

Her father is a carpenter that restores old Victorian houses.  Has been hired to restore Emma Crawford’s house.

Story of Crawford, her sister, the castle, TB sanatorium, crazy people in Manitou, springs, Native American wars, etc.  Come from those who are drawn to the thin places and do not survive the process, or lose their minds, etc.  

Darcy knew Emma.  They succeeded in preventing a mass die-off/black date in Emma’s time.  Emma and her sister have been time climbing, fighting one another.  Now that Emma is gone, Darcy realizes that the main character has appeared, and is coming into her gifts, in order to help him.  The new religious fervor that grips the community is directly related to the wife of an evangelist, who is Emma’s sister also.  She is a turned climber who has given in to the will of the angels.  The evangelist serves the angels - literally.