Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

16. Visitors

141 16 Visitors One early evening at the yurt, I had just gathered firewood for my cooking fire when I stood dead still, listening. At first, there was nothing but the high, lonely whine of the desert insects, but then I heard it again. From far off on the highway the faint sound of a car horn honked with the pattern of our predetermined sign: SHAVE-AND-A-HAIRCUT . . . SHAM-POO. “Wilson!” I shouted aloud, dropping my cooking pot to the ground. I grabbed the dog, threw her inside the yurt so she could not chase after me, and began running for the road. “Wilson!” I cried again. Six weeks earlier my best friend from college, Jim Wilson, had written to tell me he was coming to New Mexico for a visit. He had an approximate idea of when he would come, and I gave him approximate directions on how to find me. I told him how to get to a certain point on the state highway that came nearest the yurt. Once he got there, he was to lay on the horn and wait until I came out to the road to direct him in. For days, I had been listening for the sound of his horn. I started for the windmill at a run, but then I heard him honk again, fainter this time. He had driven farther away and was going too far down the highway. I started to sprint, picking my way 142 Visitors around rocks and trees, too anxious about him and ignoring the time of day. Politely the rattlesnake chose to slither away from me before it coiled and rattled. In that half instant, I had just enough time to stumble back and stop. The snake had been using the cool shadows of the early evening to hunt for food. It was a big one; the dust-colored pattern of diamonds on its back slowly undulated as it studied me. The string of pale-gray buttons on its tail rattled like dry bones shaken by some devil’s hand. I backed away and went around it in a wide circle. On any other evening, I would not have been running; on any other evening, I would have been on a keen lookout for snakes; on any other evening , I would likely have been carrying a walking stick or my shovel, using it to alert rattlers to my approach. But the thought of seeing my friend had distracted me. I needn’t have worried about Jim. Just as I reached the windmill , I saw the lights of his car bouncing toward me on the dusty path from the highway. The car wheezed to a stop. My old friend jumped out of the car. With his neat Vandyke beard and furrowed brow, he looked like a benevolent cross between Mark Twain and Charlie Manson. Jim was about the best companion I could have. Like me, he had been an English major, and he could talk forever about books and ideas. In our final years at college our friendship had deepened during smoky barroom conversations and coffee-house debates over Faulkner and Hemmingway and whether someone would be able to stop Nixon’s easy ride to a second term as president. That night, sitting outside at the yurt, we talked for hours. We sat by the crackling fire, tossing our words into the rising smoke of its flames. We drank whiskey and listened to the coyotes’ call. Soon enough the conversation came around to literature. I mentioned that the writer Jack Schaefer lived just up the road. 143 Jim nearly jumped up. “You’re kidding me,” he said. “Jack Schaefer lives near here?” Jack Schaefer’s small novel Shane came out in 1949 but did not become widely known until the mid-1950s when a revised edition established the book as a classic in American literature. In the ice-cold cadence of simple declarative sentences, Schaefer tells the story of a lone drifter who appears at a homesteaders’ house. “He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89,” the book begins, “a slim man, dressed in black.” “Call me Shane” is all the man would ever say about himself. The emotional and psychological solitude of the stranger is so vivid that the reader chills at his isolation. Often mistaken as a kid’s book about the Old West, Shane is instead a remarkable portrait...