Letter to the Vestigial Reptile

We share this home, you and I,
Though you come and go like a fever
While I crawl around our dwelling
Like a lizard in a fish tank.
How did you ever become the outward wandering, more
Adaptable one, and I the one poised
To jump from the scale? There are moments
When my hands feel like huge fossils
Before I move them and they turn
Into birds. The urge to fly comes then like a storm—
But I stay here because you are gone.
I know there were times of terror
For you too, when you heard thunder and were lost
In smoke, and you didn't have a home.
How did you find me at the end
Of all your epic searching?
I would ask you for that story
If you weren't off wintering on a southern rock.
I hope you aren't late in arriving this year;
Come even if your blood is still cold.

Mayflower

I spent ten days in May at a natural building school outside of San Miguel de Allende called Karacadir. Karacadir is the name for a nomadic tent found all over Asia. The one I stayed in was sewn together from Tibetan yak wool. At night, gusting winds presaging the thunderstorms of the coming rainy season whip the black plastic that covers the karacadir; it sounds like you're sleeping on the deck of a galleon in violent seas. (In this way, the karacadir makes anyone into a nomad.) The wind slackened the tent, so early in the morning I would go outside and readjust the rigging attached to poles that kept the tent's corners taut. Every time I did this, the geckos that lived in the upper shadows of the karacadir skittered down its side to the ground.

The center is located a half-hour´s ride from town in a white 1971 VW kombi named the Albatross. The road that leads to these eighteen acres of thorn forest is rutted and winding. Andy and Dorothy, who live and teach here, steer the Albatross over the bumpy course every morning before sunrise so that Dorothy can catch the bus to her job in Queretaro. I imagine that in the pre-dawn darkness, while I was sailing around the world in the karacadir, they were jostled in their seats like explorers riding a giant white bird on Antarctic swells.

I worked at cobbling the patio outside their yurt with basalt rocks we gathered from the property. One day I found myself walking along a trail looking for rocks when it occurred to me that I wasn't really looking for rocks--I was wandering. And really enjoying it. There is a cord that connects us to something greater and I felt it pulling at me, inviting me to intermingle with the heat of the day. Maybe I was dehydrated, or maybe I was having a numinous experience. For no reason at all the dry yellow grass seemed buttery and the breeze felt like a woman running her hands through my hair. I thought of Thoreau and Edward Abbey and especially of Annie Dillard and I imagined that for one afternoon I had found my own Tinker Creek. I walked with a leaf-in-the-breeze trajectory along the intersecting trails and took notice of the vermillion flycatchers and jackrabbits and all the flor de mayo that sprouted up after the last rain. No one else was there, if you don't count the hydra-headed garambullo cacti or the nopal with its hundred pads like open hands.

Andy and Dorothy teach earthbag building, but they do this intermittently in one-week workshops. I was at Karacadir as a wwoof volunteer when no workshop was happening, so I had few responsibilities and lots of freedom. After breakfast, I would take water to the donkeys and tell them how sweet and beautiful they were. In response, they would bray like rusty train whistles and try to eat my socks. Then I did some cobbling. Then I read. Later in my stay I learned how to make natural cob and apply it as a plaster. I cobbed and cobbled and read and wrote and ate and slept. Then I did the dishes from the previous three meals using the precious little water at karacadir, which is stored in fifty liter plastic jugs. Last year, a nearby broccoli farm owned by Birdseye Farms dug a well deeper than anyone else's in the area, essentially cutting off three hundred families from running water. So when taking a shower at Karacadir you're limited to as much water as you can fit in a small stew pot. It's best to do this at the end of the day when the air is starting to cool off, and the water that's been sitting in the jug outside is still warm from the day's radiation.

At night, when the wind was starting to blow, we would go outside and listen to an old cassette deck Andy rigged to the Albatross's speakers. "Sketches of Spain" has never sounded so right spread out over a thorny desert. "Let it Bleed" was garbled but bloody nonetheless.

I was told early on in my visit that there are roadrunners in the thorn forest. By the end, I was starting to doubt whether I'd ever see one. On the last morning, as I set off on new wanderings, I finally did see a roadrunner. It was running on the road.