The wall

File name: The wall Time created:09:53:06 AM & Date: 08/24/09

My name is Marx. The wind is howling, I am hiding behind an old adobe wall that makes an L shape. It slows enough of the wind that I decide to make some hot cocoa out of canned milk, with canned heat--- alcohol in a tuna sized can. There is a small almost invisible flame. It does not stay lit until I pile all my belonging around it. Finally the fuel runs out and I drink my cocoa it has formed ice on top. That was my dinner and it was great. The rest of the night I waited for the storm to come but it never did. The morning is crisp, cold and quit. The sun is bright. The sky very blue. The mountains in the distance are a dark bluish purple. All around is the short brownish yellow grass. There is one cotton wood tree about 35 feet high by the long narrow shallow empty pond. There are several other trees around. The smallest is just an old stick that just barely manages to have a few leaves on it in the summer; yet planted over seventy five years ago by the homesteaders. All the leaves and shoots on every tree have been eaten by cows as high as they can reach.

My thermometer says that it is 16 degrees Fahrenheit. But the sun is so bright it is almost blinding. There is no moisture in the air and no clouds in the sky.

Since there is no wind I figure it will be safe to start a fire to cook a meal. There is very little wood but there are many dried old and bleached cow pies spread out over the landscape. It takes hours to cook a pot of beans at this elevation, so I will have to collect a wheel barrow load of cow pies by hand. After a lot of walking there is finally a large enough pile of the partially digested dried grass for fuel. I collect a pile of dried grass and form it into a pointy shape and stack cow pies around it. Then another layer of cow pies across the top. Cow pies burn differently than wood it does not leave red hot cinders. It also burns cooler and slower. Much of the day will be spent tending the fire around the beans. As the day progresses the temperature raises rapidly. You have to live in layers of clothes that you shed as the day progresses. The temperature finally rises to 75 degrees and you are only wearing a t-shirt. Then it just as fast starts cooling down. By dark it is freezing again. The sun sets a little after five o'clock. There will be fourteen hours of darkness. Your entertainment is looking into the stars from horizon to horizon. There is nothing to block the view of the stars. They are bright and beautiful and produce enough light that you do not have a hard time seeing the area around you.

The quietness is deafening. There is no sounds. There is no signs of life. The only sound is the sound of you moving under the blankets. The aloneness is beautiful. There is only time to think, and try to keep the cold air from going down your neck.

I am a riparian desert kind of guy. It is very hot and dry where I am originally from, but there is a lot of water from the damed up river used for irrigation to keep very large trees growing on every one's lot and green grass growing year round. But here at the old homestead, there is no green only brownish yellow grass for 10 and a half months of the years. I am told that this is Arizonan's finest ranch land. But it has been over grazed for years and is actually a desert grassland which mean that most of the time it is desert and every few years it can be called a grassland because if you get good rains of the summer it can make the hills emerald green.

The wall is what is left of an old homestead house in southeastern Arizona. On the hill are graves of the children that did not make it past a few years old before they were overcome with disease. Part of the land was plowed for crops that never produced.

When the air is warm enough to hold a book, I read a book that a friend gave me called called "Walden's Pond". He is supposed to have done what I am doing; "ruffing it". The ironic thing is that if he would have been successful with his political endeavors I would not have been here now.