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

14. Artifacts

125 14 Artifacts Years after I left New Mexico for good, I visited the site of the yurt on a summer vacation, from Vermont, with Linda and the boys. Naturally, I had to show my sons the place where the old man once lived a hermit’s life. It had been over twenty-five years since I built the yurt. The road from Santa Fe had changed, of course; now fancy haciendas (most of them, large wood-framed things, plastered and stained to approximate the look of a real adobe house) were scattered over the hillsides . Several miles before Madrid, dark low trees sheltered a house and a handful of buildings that could have been the site of the Cornucopia commune, but I couldn’t remember the location for certain. From there to Madrid the road was now littered with houses and dirt roads that disappeared over hills to more houses, all-terrain vehicle tracks, and mailboxes. Several little, boxy ranch-style homes were surrounded by ticky-tacky pole fences made to resemble the kind you might have found decades ago on a real ranch. Home after home, separated via some zoning foresight by an acre or two, appeared right up until we drove around the last curve to the town of Madrid. Madrid.What hadoncebeen nothingbutahandfulof ramshackle buildings, nearly blown away by time, was now a living community. 126 Artifacts Founded in 1869, Madrid started its first boom in the 1890s, when the world began to demand the coal buried beneath the town. The mine shaft went deeper and deeper, and the town’s population grew to at least three thousand. By 1906 Madrid was a company town. The town and the seams of coal beneath it were all owned by the Albuquerque and Cerillos Coal Company. For the dangerous job of mining coal, the company provided a tiny house to each miner and a store where they could get supplies on credit. The men worked long hours in extremely hazardous conditions and “bought” their groceries with company “money.” They often ended up owing all of each week’s wages to the company. Those conditions improved under the leadership of a more civilized superintendent who took over in the 1920s. Oscar Huber paved the streets and sidewalks of the town, built a school for the children, and even added a small hospital. Electricity was free and created via the town’s own generating station. In 1936 Huber gained controlling interest in the town and mine, but Madrid’s heyday had passed. When natural gas began to compete with coal in the early 1950s, people left the company and the company-owned houses, tavern, and store. The mining operation shut down. Soon the town was nothing but dusty, weed-choked streets and broken windows. By the late 1960s the town was under the ownership of Huber’s son. There was nothing left of Madrid but empty buildings and rows of small wooden houses slowly disappearing to time. Huber ’s son placed an ad in the Wall Street Journal, offering to sell the entire town—over one hundred houses, a dozen large buildings , and one large coal mine—for $250,000. When I first saw Madrid in the early 1970s, there were rumors the Walt Disney Company was interested in buying it for a movie set, but the town did not sell. Finally the owner decided to sell or rent individual buildings. The advent of an alternative lifestyle—back to 127 Artifacts the land, beautiful-loser types like me—fit precisely with this man’s desire to reap some benefit from his father’s investment. A person could buy a house, albeit a derelict, isolated, ghost-town house, for $50. The second boom to hit Madrid happened just as I left the yurt. Into the tiny clapboard and framed houses where the families of miners once tried to find happiness in a world full of toil and troubles, long-haired dreamers now moved. Although often destitute , they brought with them a hope against all evidence that they could make a better world. Instead of pickax and coal dust, these men and women labored with pottery wheel or water colors , with cantankerous ancient John Deere tractors or VW microbuses , with feeding the kids and trying to survive—in short, with the simple essentials of living. Slowly the town came back to life. Today, Madrid touts its unique history. In addition...