The Farm, 2023

1. Getting There

We left and drove from the Southland all the way to Gallup, NM:

We stayed at a fantastic hotel, a Hollywood hotel. Like, literally: it was founded by DW Griffith's broher, and many westerns were filmed in Gallup because of this Hollywood connection, as the cast and crew would stay at this hotel, the El Rancho:

It had an old-timey elevator, the kind without a solid door and that you had to manually open and close just to operate. Also, inside was a grand room with its own grand staircase, with Camille walking up one side below as Corrie snaps photos from the middle of the mezzanine:

There were autographed photos all over, and that was a nice Hollywood elemental touch.

We made the rest of the drive the next day:

Because we're us, and "us" are bonkers, we took Picasso with us on the trip:

Why not take a cat on a two week trip to a rural Texas farm?

2. Working

The Farm is a helluva place to have a vacation. Maybe that's "vacation", with the purposeful quotes. Sure, I'm not working at my regular J-O-B, but this is the Farm. Mostly every moment of every day is scripted. When we're there, it's my job to support Corrie in her job of running the construction projects by being on daddy-domestic-duty the entire time. The dance of food, laundry, and entertainment is an ongoing and perpetual deal.

Plus, it was relentlessly hot (as usual), with no AC, and one can only move so well.

Above, Cass helps his Uncle Pete and cousin Colton clean the milk trough so it can be filled with water for the annual swimming hole.

Below Cass and grandpa take a ride on the ATV. They even taught me how to drive it, and I took several rides:

Love the hair on these two

The sunsets out at this patch of panhandle Texas are usually spectacular, but I just wish they happened closer to 8pm rather than 9pm:

I figured out the deal with the cowboy hats, and wore the one assigned to me most times I went outside. They're both parasols and umbrellas you wear on your head, and they keep the sun off you neck, inner shoulders, and out of your eyes, in the event you don't have sunglasses (a rarity for cowboys in the 19th century, I imagine):

Many days are partitioned by the amounts of laundry. The laundry gets put through the wash, then you need to hang it up to dry, then you take it down and fold it. Sometimes it's so windy AND blistering hot that by the time you're done with the fight of hanging it up, it's dry and ready to come down:

How could a place be BOTH this hot and this windy? I'm not sure I'll ever get it.

The town the Farm's technically attached to is Clarendon, and while this year we didn't make it, we do have plans on getting to their renovated cinema at some point:

3. Fireworks

Everybody likes to hear my sad stories of how, as a Caliboy, when as a child my city banned sparklers and the best things we could buy were ground flowers and the showery deals. They laugh and laugh, and show pity.

Then they take me to the truck and buy some real shit. Like this, a Roman candle with 210 shots:

Or these, a nearly $200 box of five-inch mortars:

Those are the real deal, man. Once the wick is going and you've dropped it in the tube, you've got to backtrack with some urgency. They fire up with some noise and then explode directly overhead. Its spectacular, especially for city-bred Caliboy like me. After everything's burned out, you can hear the remnants rain down onto the metal roofs of the barn and farmhouse.

4. Driving Home

We stayed an extra day to get some extra work done, to best complete some projects, which had us leaving on the 3rd instead of the original plan, which would have been the 2nd.

With the cat with us, and with a party to get to the next day, on the 4th, we just ran it all the way back, leaving from the Farm at 10:35 am and returning at 1:55 am, bot local times, albeit two time zones apart. To get a sense of the turns we took, here's a breakdown:

1. Corrie: Farm to Santa Rosa, NM
2. Pat: Santa Rosa, NM to Continental Divide, NM
3. Corrie: Continental Divde to Flagstaff, AZ
4. Pat: Flagstaff to Kingman, AZ
5. Corrie: Kingman to Barstow, CA
6. Pat: Barstow to Long Beach and home

I used to be anxious about long drives...maybe anxious isn't the right word. But prepping myself for a drive from SLO to Sac, or the return from Sac to SLO was something I needed to engage in. That changes when you're "long drives" go from 5-8 hours to 16-20 hours. It's almost Zen, but you need to pay a very specific type of attention.

Anyway, on the way we got to see some phenomena like this: rain forming and falling but evaporating before it hits the ground:

As Corrie barreled on towards Barstow I snapped a picture of the Subaru's console, just west of Needles. I used the phone's mark-up feature to circle the salient points:

Conclusion

Some folks may think that a vacation wouldn't probably be spent at a place with relentless heat, no AC, and round-the-clock work. For us it's different.

For Corrie, it's her and her family's place, it's their birthright, and it's a living, breathing entity, and that entity needs constant upkeep.

For me, it's a place where I know what I'm supposed to be doing at all times. I'm not asked to make decisions, just get shit done. We can all play out this homesteading fantasy and live like it was a different time. It's our opportunity to do that, and it's glorious.

Plus, once you set eyes on the view of the prairie, all the stress from whatever sloughs off, dissolves away, and the peaceful Zen of perpetual labor sets in, and you fully start to get It. The magic kicks in. Once the kids are down and the sun finally sets (by 10:30 pm), and you hear the coyotes howling at the night sky, and then you hear how the howls morph into laughter...? That's when you know it must be magic.

The howls and yips of a coyote pack turning into laughter make all the native coyote stories make a whole lot more sense.