Tales from a Contented Sloth: Summer at Ghost Ranch

I joined the Ghost Ranch community on April 30, and stopped journaling and writing to the Gang of Four.  It seemed that, since I was no longer traveling and being a nomad, the daily missives were less necessary, at least from a safety point of view.  I had housemates and workmates, and I was staying put.  Still, I rather missed the focus of a daily message to friends, even though the letters I did write were remarkably lacking in news.  Every day could be an adventure, with enough variety to make me feel like I was traveling inwardly, if not outwardly, but for the most part I was a contented sloth.  

1.  Settling in
There’s a huge windstorm blowing the dust around. I am unpacking my boxes and it looks like I’ll be able to bring most of what’s in storage because this is a very large three bedroom farmhouse. I’m alone at the moment so I got to pick the best room with the best view (of Pedernal.)
I was lodged in the old farmhouse. It has three bedrooms and living area and a long enclosed portico/conservatory outside the bath and two bedrooms. The only fly in the ointment was the mouse that I saw in the bathroom, and the fact that the clawfoot tub wobbled when I stood in it. It felt like I was going to topple out.  The next day I put in a work order, but I ran into an acquaintance from Taos, and he told me to put a quarter under one of the feet to shim things up.  Worked like a charm. Later, we discovered ants, camel spiders and the occasional scorpion, but my housemate handled those for most of the summer, as did the lovely whiptail lizards.

2.  More housesitting
In late June I house-sat for my boss’s friend, S.  She’s a retired nurse practitioner, on a kayak trip off Quadra Island.  It's a small world: I have fond memories of a trip to April Point, watching birds drying their wings, fishing (V displaying her catch with a grimace), and eating salmon with a huckleberry compote.  Also playing with phosphorescent water off the dock...but that was the place en route.  Memory fails me.

So, while S was enjoying the waters of the Pacific Northwest, I was watching smoke from the Sardinas Canyon forest fire, feeding the horse, donkey, and chickens and enjoying a pretty awesome house and garden.  It’s a half hour drive to Ghost Ranch, but it’s a beautiful drive so I was fine with that.  The $50 she gave me didn't  even cover gas, but it’s more than I got on my travels!  And I expanded my skill set.  I remained cautious around Ruby, the semi-skittish horse, but on a later visit she came up to me and rubbed her head against my shoulder, so I counted that as a personal triumph.

3.  The Library and other projects
The Library is open 24/7, so I can justify any schedule I choose to work, which is nice.  Because it's always open, the checkout system is manual and depends on an honor system. With the help of intern college staff, I started barcoding most of the library and discovered a bunch of titles that never made it into the online catalog.  So I guess I’ll have to be less snarky about the guests who insist on using the old card catalog (which I’m not allowed to move, along with the unused newspaper poles.)

I don’t know why I started this big project...I could have just sat back with the status quo instead of trying to get circulation and inventory into the 20th century (forget about the 21st).  And there are plenty of peripheral things that I could have been doing:  hikes and tours are actually encouraged for work time, because the more I know about the Ranch offerings, the better I can share them with guests.  However, the national forests surrounded the Ranch were closed during June and much of July, because of the severe drought and fire danger.  Even before the closures, the heat kept me from even considering much hiking:  I wandered down Box Canyon one morning and tried Matrimonial Mesa another morning:  both hikes were abandoned before I reached the end.  I only planned to take an hour for Matrimonial:  it goes along a ridge looking down into the Chinle formation and across to Orphan Mesa, and it gives a nice birds' eye view of the Ranch.  My plan was to start at the trailhead near my house and come out by the Staff House and Dining Hall,  but I kept getting lost trying to find the proper end of the trail. I retraced my path twice, drank up all the water, and spent 2 hours acquiring a sunburn before I gave up.  Still, it was a beautiful hike and I found a piece of petrified wood while I was exploring an arroyo.  I also startled a pronghorn antelope and numerous lizards.  No rattlers thank god.

In general, even without hiking, it’s a great place for wildlife. A voracious horde of hummingbirds drained the feeder daily throughout the summer, and my fearless paleontologist housemate set up a bat box to serve as home for a bat that got trapped in a museum bathroom. Coyotes howl outside our windows and apparently bears and cougars come out of the hills, searching for water.  I haven't seen or heard evidence of them, but the bears apparently killed the pigs before I arrived.

Anyway, instead of hiking, I started up a night sky tour, along with two of the Museum staff.  Many years ago a guest donated a large Meade telescope with many lenses.  It had not been used since the gent in charge retired 8 years ago, and pack rats had chewed through some key wires.  So JustJ cleaned up the shed and contacted Meade about a manual,  we got some training on the mechanics, and Telescope Tuesdays was up and running.  I was able to find and photograph Jupiter and its Gallilean moons, Saturn and its rings, and the pretty amber star, Antares.  Sadly, around the time that Mars appeared, the focus knob got torqued, the monsoons clouded up the night sky, and the telescope is now off limits while the powers that be come up with a plan for maintaining and sharing the equipment.  It was a nice run while it lasted.  I'd work until half an hour before sundown and then climb the mesa behind the Library to the pack-rat infested telescope shed.  While I fussed with the lens, the wind would come up and blow my skirts around, the sun would set, and the Milky Way would brighten into its pearly path across the sky.  Or, the gibbous moon would rise and the mica in the cliffs would shimmer in its light.

4.  Wedding crash
Security is not the best here.  We are very isolated, but we are also only a mile or so from Hwy 84.  One hot June night around 11 pm, JB and I heard a woman screaming, full-throated.  It took awhile to realize what the sound was...almost sounded like a rooster or some other creature.  Eventually we heard words:  "Don't let me go home!" JB was concerned there were drugs involved, so we turned off lights and locked doors and I called 911 at 11:15.  They said they'd try to contact Ghost Ranch security.  At 11:30 I called back, because the person seemed to be outside our house.  15 minutes after that, JB called and gave them our location and asked them to come by and check on us.  They never did, but about 15 minutes later we saw a car approaching down the dirt road from the highway (we can see cars from our living room window.)  It stopped for several minutes, near the climbing area I think, and we heard the screaming again.  The car then continued on and turned towards the welcome center.  We saw several other cars coming and going during this time frame, mostly from the road to the staff house to the welcome center area and back again. By 12:30, all was still, although I saw headlights until I finally got to sleep at 2 am.  Not sure when and if JB got to sleep.  We found out the next day that the woman was a guest at a Ranch-held wedding.  The incident sparked a discussion about night security and security for the many weddings that we have scheduled here, but it never got much better.

5. Tsankawi
I tagged along with a class field trip to Tsankawi. It's an Ancestral Puebloan site at Bandelier National Monument (located on the road to White Rock.) We had it mostly to ourselves, as the majority of tourists visit the the main site; but this one was replete with petroglyphs, pot shards, chert and obsidian flakes, cave dwellings, carved-out foot holds, and breathtaking views of ash-flow. The trail followed paths that cut deeply into the tuff, providing run-off from the reservoirs on top of the mesa to the now sage-filled fields below. It was a very hot day, and we stopped often for water breaks, but most of us suffered some form of heat exhaustion. After 3 hours in the sun, we cooled off at the Los Alamos Bradley Science Museum and thought deeply about radiation and atomic bombs. Then we took a dash to see snakes at the Nature Center before it closed. A long day, but full of wonder.

6.  Musical adventures

My friend C in Taos hooked me up with some of her musician friends.  (She is the Taos Community Chorus accompanist and plays violin duets with me.  She hurt her wrist and just had surgery, so she can't play anything for awhile.) They were in the Taos area for the month of August and wanted to play quartets.

The first jam session was rather a fiasco:  I turned the wrong way out of El Rito (a little town on a scenic route towards Taos) and thought, well, this road is going the right way, it'll just hook up with 64 eventually.  It didn't:  it turned into a dirt road and I had to turn around.  Because of the mountain road, I was unable to call the others until I reached the Rio Grande Bridge, by which time I was an hour and a half late.  I got there at 1 pm, just as they were finishing up trios, and they graciously stuck around another 45 minutes.  We played some Mozart and Mendelssohn and they sent me home to practise Op 44, #1.  We played that the next Thursday and the 2nd violin has a lovely moving part in the third movement.  I'm not a big fan of Mendelssohn (which is weird because I love Brahms and they are both emo treacly composers), but I loved this quartet.

We had a final session following week and then the cellist and violinist went back to their respective homes in Berkeley and Austin.  Fortunately, APO starts up in Sept, so I'll keep my chops up.

7.  Coffee house
The college staff ran weekly coffee houses on Thursday nights.  My friend DH read poems for most of them, and I contributed the following  (courtesy of Museum staff comments) for the last one:

Overheard at lunch:

“I have to go and flip the

Phytosaurus skull.”

Barefoot, she sweeps and

Steps on a beetle. Eyes closed,

She says “Don’t throw up.”

#itsgutsareonmyfoot

The monsoon rains pass,

Pitter Patter on the fringe.

We want a deluge.

One of the college staff interpreted them, physically, while he read.

The coffee houses in general were great fun:  instructors, guests (including kids), and staff all participated, and there is some amazing talent coming through.  I performed at 3 of them. At one I recited Jabberwalky, at another sang The Mouse and played a violin duet with one of the wranglers.  At the last coffee house I played a flute/violin duet with one of the college staff and sang "Cry me a River," accompanied by a VERY sweet and talented college staffer, whose career I plan to watch.  I flung a boa over my shoulder, leaned on the piano, and let out my inner torch singer. I wowed them, if the later comments are any indication.

8.  Hemorrhaging staff

Ghost Ranch got a little depressing after college staff  left in early August.  Museum volunteers DH and JustJ left too, and JB (my sweet paleontologist housemate) followed soon after.  LM (the best boss ever) gave her 3 week notice and I miss her terribly. Housekeeping and Dining Hall were understaffed, as they were in the summer, but with no college students to abuse, guess who they wanted to fill in?  I refused (because I did not contract for that, and, anyway my asthma kicks in when I dust and vacuum), so I was given extra Welcome desks and museum volunteers became the new janitors.  In addition to the staffing woes, the Ranch was at 20% capacity, and I started worrying about its future.  And the mosquitoes arrived in the wake of the monsoons and I got TOTALLY covered in bites.  The fires from CA and OR affected the views negatively and the sunsets positively, and other volunteers became friends.

So, I tried to focus on that.  But it's difficult, when volunteers leave every 10 weeks, and 8 key staff have left (without replacement) in the 4 months I've been here.

One of those volunteers, PS, is still around, but leaves at 5 am on Sept 14.  He is planning to drive for 12 hours, arriving in Kansas City in time to watch the Minnesota Twins and add that stadium to his list.  He can be such a geek!  MC (the remaining Outdoor Adventures staff) borrowed my cheapo bike for a ride to the base of Orphan Mesa:  he and PS climbed it last Thursday, but PS didn't make the last bit.  He sat clinging to a boulder while MC continued on, chanting "I'll cut off my arm, I'll cut off my arm!"  Apparently that is his mantra for doing what it takes to get back alive from a dangerous activity.  I would have found it quite disconcerting, myself, to wait at the saddle between two gulfs, listening to that.

The next night the three of us were playing Settlers of Catan when SL appeared at the kitchen door, seeking guidance and support:  apparently a sheep had been bleating frantically for some time, and SL was worried it was caught on the fence.  We gathered up flashlights and followed her to the pen, where we discovered all the sheep gathered around a white ewe and a shaky tiny black lamb.  They glared at us and we retreated hastily back to the kitchen, where SC watched the game for a bit. I won.

So, life continues into the fall.  I've started driving the tour bus, I've done some sunset and sunrise kayaking, one of the wranglers has started up campfire parties by his trailer (there was a ban on burning for the summer), and I'll have no excuse to avoid the hiking trails.  4 months down, 5 to go.