Dawn of Time

On a more cheerful note, we're in Truth or Consequences on the first day of a little touristing.

It's not much of a town, but we love it for its dusty little cluster of old auto courts huddled around several acres of hot mineral springs. The steamy water seeps up into concrete basins in faded bath houses where road-weary travelers refresh themselves as wanderers in this region have done for millennia.

During an earlier visit as I rectified my humors in the 107-degree water, it suddenly occurred to me that my bath had been warmed by heat that was absolutely primal, never cool since it got hot, however many billions of years ago that was.

My realization dazzled me and sent my mind reeling off into a series of even deeper thoughts about how vast the universe and how small a thing is man etc etc.

I was still wallowing in cosmic truths the next day when we visited the local museum and I browsed the gift shop for a book on geothermal heat. When I located one and found the page that described the phenomenon on which the town and its museum depend for their living, I drifted over to the counter to share my insights with the clerk.

"Doesn't it amaze you sometimes when you're sitting in the springs to realize that you're actually bathing in the original heat of The Big Bang," I asked him.

After a moment's reflection, he replied. "Um, yeah, are you gonna buy that?"

I was abashed and deflated, but I learned my lesson. On this trip I'm curbing my enthusiasm.

. . . But think of it, the original heat of The Big Bang!

Now What?

Well, isn't this sweet.

The trashed-out vehicle in the photo above used to be the armored Suburban of Puerto Vallarta's newly-appointed municipal police chief.

A couple of mornings ago at around 8 a.m., a pickup truck full of heavily armed barbarians tossed a grenade under it at the intersection of Basilio Badillo and Insurgentes, a place and time that might have found us at that very spot, strolling from breakfast at Freddy's Tucan toward the farmer's market where we get a lot of our produce. If we'd been in town.

The chief's SUV sailed flaming along Insurgentes for a couple of blocks before crashing into a taxi parked in front of a pharmacy where we often stop to buy a toothbrush, or nail clippers or diaper wipes.

The barbarians -- you all know the line of work they're in -- followed in their truck. They tossed another grenade or two and then peppered the chief's ride with military assault rifle rounds before fleeing. They abandoned their truck not far away, guns, grenades and all, and disappeared into the neighborhood.

Miraculously, the chief and his bodyguards walked away unhurt. But five bystanders, two of them children, were hurt by flying shrapnel.

We've always said we'd have to rethink our plans for making Vallarta our retirement home if the cartels started doing the kinds of things there that they've been doing for years in Acapulco, Michoacan, and along the border.

The loss of our south-facing view of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and our unexpectedly keen enjoyment of Ruidoso already had us wondering what we might decide for the future.

The future has sneaked up on us. We've reached out to a broker to find out what options we might have in the current market, which was starting to perk up before this, no telling now. We go down at the end of this month. Our plan was to spend the winter. We'll have to see.

Gettin' hitched

I'm so proud of my newly completed trailer hitch.

How could that be? I don't own a trailer, and I don't want to. It's been decades since I pulled one anywhere, let alone backed one into a tight spot like the narrow gravel pad specially prepared in our yard for me to do just that.

Yes, I have zero interest in trailers, yet I've paid for a truckload of high grade gravel for a trailer pad and gone to a lot of trouble to get a shiny chrome ball connected to the frame of my car. Makes no sense. You can guess who is actually driving, as usual. Starts with P.

For years Pam has admired and coveted Airstreams, those shiny aluminum travel trailers shaped like bread loaves, widely known as "silver bullets." Now that we've moved to the wide open spaces and at least theoretically have time for leisurely tours of scenic wonders, she's determined to have one.

Her pretext for really needing a silver bullet is that our new cabin is quite small, and its second bedroom is jammed with Elizabeth's toys, and of course her crib. We installed a clever bunk bed with a futon sofa below that folds out into a double and a twin mattress up top.

But the room would be a tight squeeze even for a single visitor. For a couple, well, they would need to be special. So Pam's argument is that a little trailer would not only help us answer the call of the open road, it would serve as guest quarters.

If this were litigation, I could produce expert witnesses who would demolish her case -- close friends who say if we put them in a trailer they'll either get a hotel or they won't come at all. It doesn't seem to matter to Pam, partly because I don't have a better idea.

The only reason that we didn't have the trailer on our property before the house was even built and live there on the job site all summer micro-managing the construction crew is that new Airstreams cost a small fortune.

Pam has reconciled herself to acquiring a used one by calling it "vintage." She tirelessly trolls the hundreds of websites devoted to the vigorous after-market for trailers, particularly the ones specializing in silver bullets.

Even here the prices are eye-opening. But she's located one we could stretch for with some gnashing of teeth, an 18-foot Caravel built in 1969, now living in Jefferson, Colorado. It cleaned up nice for its photo shoot, but it's "all original", i.e. unrestored, and you know what that could mean, though its current owners say it has lived its whole life clean and dry in the mountains and is good to go in every way. They call it "Streamie" and refer to it as "she."

Alas, we're going to go have a look at it in a couple of weeks. I have the hitch in case we decide to bring it -- okay, her -- home.

You're waiting to hear why I'm proud about the hitch and maybe wondering why I have any pride at all. But having told you this much, I'm too dispirited to go on right now, so that story will have to wait until next time.

Family Legend Wounded But Still Breathing

Pam's dad, John Mauldin, kept this gun in his nightstand throughout the last decades of his life. It was for security against random evildoers, he said, although when Pam retrieved the weapon after he died she found the cylinder empty and no cartridges anywhere in the house.

She held onto it because of the exciting family folklore surrounding it. She understood that the revolver, a Smith and Wesson .44, was once carried by John's father, Homer Gene Mauldin Sr., when he was sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.

The story I heard her tell more than once was that Sheriff Mauldin was wearing this sidearm when he got a panicky phone call from the next county informing him that Pretty Boy Floyd was at large in Arizona and heading his way. The sheriff hit the road in search of the notorious bank robber and cop killer, presumably intending to shoot him with his enormous pistol if he had to.

As luck would have it, he didn't. But if things had turned out differently, it now seems quite clear that he'd have done any necessary shooting with an entirely different weapon. The one now hanging handsomely box-framed on our wall wasn't ever his.

Going through an old carton of previously unexamined papers just a few weeks ago, Pam came across a torn and faded document in the form of an amateurish and probably jocular 100-year lease under which John took possession of the gun from his uncle El Roy Mauldin when the two of them were both living in San Antonio in the 1960s.

There certainly was law enforcement work in the pistol's pedigree. In the lease, El Roy affirms that he was a deputy sheriff in Beaumont when he acquired it.

But regardless of which Mauldin peace officer owned our pearl handled memento, it never posed any danger to Pretty Boy Floyd. The lease says El Roy bought it factory fresh from Smith and Wesson "in 1938 or 1939". Pretty Boy was shot dead by other lawmen in an apple orchard in Ohio in October of 1934.

As for the rest of the oral history, the part in which Homer Gene spent an edgy night in the desert hunting America's Public Enemy Number One, I've been unable to find any confirmation that the pudgy cheeked miscreant ever wandered as far west as Arizona.

On purpose, however, I did not look very hard.

Old Growth Furniture

This is the last major embellishment to our living room, a coffee table which is actually an 18-inch section from the trunk of an ancient juniper that lived and died a couple of miles from here.

A guy named Mike Free out on Highway 70 near the racetrack had the trunk in the yard next to his workshop. He'd recently sold a section to somebody else who put a glass top on it for a dining room table, so he was willing to give us a discount on what was left.

We were already good customers. Mike made our fireplace mantle, a polished quarter-cut pine log. And we also bought one of his heavy pine benches, which now sits outside the mountain-facing end of the house with one of those metal fire pits in front of it.

But the table is one of a kind. You can see where Mike sprinkled some turquoise pellets into a flaw on the top before he applied the half dozen or so coats of urethane to protect the finish and make the thing shine. It weighs at least 300 pounds.

I asked him how long the tree had lived, and he told me that judging from the rings he thought it could be 1,000 years old.

Mike is proudly cajun, a lifelong outdoorsman and hunter who has always made his living with his hands. Between his manly simplicity and his straightforward way of talking, it's hard to doubt anything he says about anything having to do with nature.

We asked him where we could go to hear elk bugling the way they do on the Internet sites. He guaranteed that if we drove up the mountain to mile marker 6 at sunset, we'd hear a lot of them. We went up there just where he said and didn't hear anything.

So maybe the juniper that made our coffee table didn't live 1,000 years. But it was definitely very very old.

Arriving West

This is the view from our new kitchen window in Ruidoso. Also from Elizabeth's bedroom.

But as it turns out, you can also see it while seated at our small dining table. Or in one of the upholstered chairs that faces the fireplace. Or from the sofa, if you turn your head.

Even more surprising, you can see it through the kitchen window while standing at the other end of the house, and also while relaxing at the table on the deck outside, because the small trapezoidal clerestory near the vaulted ceiling just happens to frame it nicely from that perspective.

I am so pleased with our tiny little house -- less than 700 square feet of living space -- that I almost don't want to write about it for fear of somehow jinxing the joy of sitting inside it and looking out.

But I don't think I'm tempting fate, because as hard as we worked to make it turn out nice, a lot of what makes it wonderful was almost entirely unexpected and not our doing, starting with the many sight lines to Sierra Blanca, which is what the handsome peak in the photo above is called.

We did point the house at the mountain, of course. But we had no idea there would be so many ways to look at it from our finished home. Nor did we anticipate how perfectly the windows facing in other directions would capture the woods and hillsides that surround our place while almost entirely masking the street, neighboring houses, and the bits of our property that aren't exactly ugly but fall short of scenic.

One major contributor to the serendipity was an interior designer Pam brought in to help squeeze our stuff into the limited space. We were expecting to square off the sofa and chairs in front of the fireplace, but she pivoted the whole arrangement 45 degrees. It not only made the room suddenly feel twice its size but pointed each upholstered seat at an interesting outside vista. And it created a square space next to the kitchen area exactly right for a small desk and a couple of file cabinets.

We're in a subdivision of the Village of Ruidoso. We have city water, sewer, natural gas, cable with wireless, and Walmart. But seated inside our house or outside on the deck, it feels like we're off the grid. On the way to the bathroom in the middle of last night, I glanced toward the window and saw an elk. (Okay, I was able to see it because it was standing under the streetlight, but still, it was an elk.)

I give Pam all the credit for the many features of the house itself that are making it a pleasure to live in, now that the dust and chaos of the move-in are settled. It is a tiny masterpiece, a much more interesting and gracious place than any of the others we've inhabited, larger or smaller. It took a lot of research, creativity and contractor spinning to put it all together. She did nearly all of it, sometimes with help from me but also sometimes over my short-sighted or pinchpenny objections.

But what I am appreciating most right now is how much greater the whole is than the sum of the many parts we labored and obsessed over together for the past year. I'm amazed and astonished.

It is so fine that our long-standing plan to spend most of our time at the condo in Mexico -- also pretty sweet -- and use this place as a summer refuge from the tropical humidity is now getting a fresh hard look.

Stay tuned.

Land Rush

This is the surveyor's medallion that marks the northwest corner of the smallish lot across the street from the even smaller lot where we're now watching the finishing touches being put on our little cabin in Ruidoso NM.

We oriented our place along an east-west axis that points the west end of our place directly at Sierra Blanca, the stately mountain that looms over the village and is the object most worth looking at for many miles around.

The vacant lot sits directly between us and an inspirational view across Brady Canyon, the terrain rising steadily over some 10 miles of pine forest to the tree line where alpine meadow takes over the rest of the vista and caps the 12,000-foot peak.

For years we never thought of it as a "lot" at all, because it was so steep it didn't seem reasonable that anybody would try to build on it. It looked more like a cliff.

But then somebody did build a house on a lot just as difficult right next door. Extending that roof line in our minds' eyes across the space facing ours, we realized that the days of our unobstructed view of the mountain could be numbered.

We told ourselves we'd enjoy it while we could.

Then last year in Puerto Vallarta, somebody bought the small brick structure on the south side of our condo. As I write this, two additional floors are rising there. Last January we watched preparation for that construction begin from our bedroom window, which looks out on the iconic bell tower of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, framed by the Bahia de Banderas and the palm-forested Cabo de Corrientes in the distance. Within weeks, that romantic view will be gone forever.

So when a "for sale" sign sprouted on that empty lot in Ruidoso not long ago, we called the number. This week we signed a purchase agreement.

When we were placing our cabin, local people who know informed us that our mountain view would add value to our home in an amount roughly $10,000 higher than what we paid for our new hillside property. But that's not why we now feel we've enriched ourselves and our children and grandchildren.

Thank you, Pam.