The House:
We had to return, Red, the dog that was staying with me, to his original owners. However, there’s a new dog in the house now. Cyrus is the name we gave him and he’s from the Pueblo. The Taos Pueblo is the Native American reservation for the Puebloan people. It is very poor and a terrible area for strays to live. Dogs there actually have formed packs and have eaten people alive, so most of the time the dogs are too feral to try to domesticate.
This dog, however, might just be the calmest dog I’ve met. He’s got the scars that prove he’s a “pueblo dog”, yet he won’t hurt a fly. He’s just a puppy and he fits in quite well with the other dogs in the house. Because of that, he might be staying here full-time.
I’ve never quite seen a house like the one my hosts live in. It is futuristic-looking and strong. Strong enough to survive a nearby atomic blast. Ultra-thin concrete and basalt rope keep the thickness of the walls to 3 inches. Basalt rope is used instead of steel because steel would require two inches of concrete on either side to protect the steel from rusting. There are 14 inches of pumice to help insulate. The entire house was made by Daniel.
The house itself is completely carbon neutral, relying heavily on solar power. Actually, all of Questa is 100% powered by solar energy during the day. Passive solar (ex. light from the window) heats the house and active solar heats the water during the day. When the house needs to be heated at night, there is a wood stove.
**On a side note: That house in the background of the solar panel picture actually has a full-size school bus in it. The guy wanted to live on a school bus, but it got cold here, so he built a house around a school bus. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but it’s his life.**
On the topic of buses, Daniel, who also runs the Sangre de Criste summer camp here, has an old Blue Bus that he transports the kids around in.
Water and water rights are huge here. Having surface water rights here is quite a luxury. Many people rely on a community well for water or ditches that run along the roadside carrying water from the closest watershed.
The Lama community well was created because people’s only other source prior was surface water. Also, the costs of digging a well are insanely expensive and water isn’t guaranteed. The 1200-foot-deep well here in Lama (Lama is a small community outside of Questa) is only producing 2.5 gallons a minute. Which is nothing.
People have an account that is tied to a number that they punch in at the distribution center that is fed from the well up on the mountain. If you don’t have a direct tap into the well, you get your water here at the distribution center. Daniel takes two 200-gallon tanks and fills them at the distribution center. He then takes it and holds it in his cistern.
Of course, the people of Lama are much more water-starved than other nearby communities. They have a Mutual-Domestic Water Association which is basically a non-profit that runs the water rights in Lama. Other towns only have to dig down 250 feet to have more than enough water.
I stay in a camper with no heat, no plumbing, and no water. Which is totally fine with me. I just bundle up every night after looking up at the stars for an hour or two. I’m surrounded by stars here and the thoughts of aliens.
The Farm:
Big Wheel Farm is about 25 minutes away depending on what car we take. It’s a wheat farm with 60 acres. Buckwheat, quinoa, beans, oats, and lentils are also grown for crop rotation. Daniel owns a nearby mill that cleans and grinds the wheat into flour, which can then be sold to artisan bakers around northern New Mexico.
Daniel has devised an intricate, yet quite simple, way of distributing the water over the land. Since if he were to release his water from one single point over his field, the water wouldn’t have enough pressure to reach the far end of the field, so he has a series of levees, or pond berms, made by him, that contain the water to build up the pressure, then it is released into the next section. The flow reaches a million gallons per hour with this design.
Taos:
Taos is home to many art galleries and a beautiful downtown. I’ve been there the past two weekends having hitchhiked my way into town and I still am ducking down alleys that open up into a crowded eating area or a small market. I will say, it is pretty geared towards tourists. The prices are at least. I’d say Taos is Lake Geneva and Questa is Delavan or Elkhorn.
They have their weekend farmers market and this is not your average farmers market. They had fortune tellers, energy healers, poets with typewriters who would write short poems for you, live bands, and well, of course, beautiful produce.
People have a unique way of dressing there. It’s very individualized as people wear really what they want to. It’s a style crossed between bohemian-hippy-western-punk-hiker. People usually go into one of those styles, but I like seeing when people combine them. I need to go into town and take some candid photos of some unique people.
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