Mountain Man Mockery

Hunkering down at the desk. Hat pulled tight on my head so I look like a mushroom with facial features. Shoulders hunched and tight. Upper abdominals tensed along with the glutes. Knees together. Nose cold enough to shock the back of my hand when I run it across to check for runnings. A little bit, yes, a little bit. I have thinly sliced yams in the oven turning to my new favorite snack chips (with a peppering of garlic salt). My toes are marble on a chilly Miami morning, tucked too tightly into my Sorels, which have trudged through too much snow to gather the firewood for tonight. Unfortunately, the fire is about 50 steps away at the exact opposite end of this house. Bucking the rustic, I've given in to placing an electric space heater next to my right leg. It isn't doing much - I have it on a low setting - but I don't want to use too much energy and I know heating requires more amperage than most other appliances. So, I'm tensing and squeezing and letting my nose run. It's not like this is Minnesota or anything. Yes, the snow is pouring down, and it's around 20 degrees, but it's not below zero with howling winds. My inner mountain man demands a lot more from me than this radiator-shaped space heater filled with oil (the only satisfying aspect is hearing the oil roil and pop as it heats up). I just checked and the wood stove is quaking with a cedar log blaze. It's gotta be 10 degrees warmer in the great room with that stove fire and the oven at 350. Whatever...it's winter, right? And the weird thing is that I'm excited that the snow is coming straight down, an abundance of small flakes steadily, steadily. That's accumulating snow. That's the sign of a dump. I'm going to wake up like a 7 year old on Christmas, before dawn, convinced I've heard Rudolf and Donner and Blitzen (always those three, no others) prancing on the roof, and wondering what gifts lay under the tree (I don't have one, but...we're dreaming here). But, really, I'll be waking up with a snow globe of dancing fairies in my stomach anticipating a snow so deep and creamy that it undulates halfway up my bedroom window so that it reaches my chin as I kneel on the bed and squint into the heavy, humming gray density. And I'll say to myself, "holy shit, holy shit, it's that fucking high. It is that fucking high!" And the greenlit digital alarm clock will say 5:26, and I'll turn on the radio to see if the NPR lady in Alamosa is talking in quiet tones about the record blizzard currently buffeting north central New Mexico and that the town of Taos and its outlying areas (me!) are getting the brunt of it. "Steve at the El Pueblito church called in a few minutes ago and said he measured 43" a mile and change north of the Taos Plaza. And he says it's coming down so hard he can't see the Chevron station across the road. Well, I hope everyone in Taos has his Christmas shopping done because folks, the highway department is urging everybody to stay put. We'll keep you posted on road closures." And with that I would loosen, knowing my work is done, and that I can sleep another couple of hours with the sweet thought of being snowed in, and that I'll have to don my snowshoes (ooops, meant to buy them at the Taos Mountain Outfitter Christmas party at 40% off) to bring milk (Silk) and juice (Superfood) to my neighbors who live on the top of a sage swell about 1,000 yards east of me.

That's the dream. I have a enough food for several days. I have my 'net, my radio, my phone. I have hundreds of books and, for now, electricity. There is running water from a good, deep well. I have two space heaters and 2/3 a cord of wood. My mountain man laughs at me. It's 8pm and I can already feel sleep in my legs. I'm giving in, that's what I've been doing lately. I've dragged this body over so many hills, and, in the last bunch of weeks, through protozoa and bone-splitting infections. I did not stop, but now I can. Weariness in the points of the hip bones, in the coccyx, in my right temporal lobe, just above the knees, in the Aquaman pit of my solar plexus, in my big toes, in my still healing left ankle, in the middle part of my spine, and in my eyes, the bottoms of the sockets.

There are more notes in me, but they will have to keep and play in the astral. The TV is in my bedroom and I will watch a movie and, if that is not enough, I will dig deeper into Reyes Wind in Robert Mirabal's book. That's that. It's 8:11, snowing hard, and I'm off to put a few more logs on the fire.