Originally published in Colorado Central Magazine
We humans straddle two worlds, one foot in the chop wood, carry water, earthly realities, the other in the heavenly world of compassion, poetry, reverence for nature, and art. We’ve been around for some 300,000 years, a long time to live between earth and sky, but looking at the condition of the planet’s forests, farms, oceans, and war zones, you’d think we could have made more progress. We’ve done well in some things: flutes and drums were being played over 60,000 years ago, exquisite cave paintings and carved figures go back more than 50,000 years ago, and body decorations go back more than 100,000 years BP (Before Pizza). Apparently, all the human types indulged in art back then; there were about a dozen, instead of the solitary Homo Sapiens (“wise human”) we proudly name ourselves.
Prehistoric art depicts scenes from everyday life, like hunting scenes of prey and predators, as well as baffling images from trance states, indecipherable to those of us who live disconnected from the natural world. Still, connecting earth and sky is a powerful element of our lives and is a big part of why we choose to live in these alpine valleys. Last summer I met a concert cellist who also renovates adobe buildings. You can’t get more connected to earth and sky than making a mud house and celestial music with the same pair of hands. So a few weeks after the concert meeting, I drove over Poncha Pass, down between earth and sky through the San Luis Valley, to visit Mark Dudrow in the small town of Jaroso, a half mile north of the New Mexico border. Jaroso is a place where willows grow… like Alamosa is a place where cottonwoods grow. It has a post office open for twelve hours a week, and being the only storefront business in Jaroso, it serves as a community hub where more than willows grow.
Twenty-five years ago, Mark saw an ad for 16 acres with an adobe house and capilla (chapel), so he bought the place and moved there with his partner and baby daughter. He renovated and enlarged the adobe house (so small that the front and back door hung on the same hinge), and then renovated the church, where he holds concerts and recording sessions in its still-sacred space that echoes both music and memories. Now he rents out the house and lives in a more recently acquired two-story adobe house built in 1910; also renovated by Mark. No, not by a contractor hired by Mark: by Mark. He stacks and burns 6 cords of wood every winter to heat the place. It’s a cool residence: never gets above 710, even on a hot summer afternoon, and on a raw February morning? Cozy if you keep close to the stove.
My neophyte’s image of a concert cellist, (urbane, manicured fingers, polished shoes, living in an elegantly regentrified neighborhood) was pleasantly updated over the next few hours. Mark normally dresses in a T-shirt and jeans, and polish doesn’t stick to sandals and ditch boots.
We went through casual introductions that included Martha Shepp, a pianist Mark is working with to produce a series of concerts and recordings of Spanish and South American composers. Another stereotype went away: my idea of what goes into a project like this. When I arrived, they were finishing a three-hour practice session, one of (how many?) over the last three years. Three years of work for three or four concerts in a sparsely populated region next year. It makes me wonder how many hours (years?) of work it took to produce those cave paintings that no one looked at for thousands of years.
After Martha left, we shifted to the front porch. Mark’s weathered recliner is within easy reach of a guitar stand. Oh, to be a fly on the wall there on a summer evening! Given my background of complete inexperience with interviews, I didn’t attempt to steer the conversation, (much less the flow of this essay) so we spent the time chasing curiosity’s tail between vegetable plantings and dwindling creek flows, to the absence of rabbit damage (Rabbit was there trimming the lawn), to the hole up in a dead cottonwood that shelters Kestrel falcons during springtime child-rearing. Starlings destroy Kestrels’ eggs and hatchlings, but Mark told them to stay away, and they do. Perhaps the rabbit is under a similar caution. Talk wandered to the dried-up Costilla Creek for which the county is named, although willows no longer grow there, due to diversions, water table drawdown and rapidly increasing summer heat, all side-effects of industrial farming practices... locally and globally.
It occurred to me that the connectivity Mark’s life embodies was in high contrast to the separation our industrial economy is based on.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist and Potawami Nation citizen) talks about how her people’s language uses verbs to identify things we use nouns for. Indigenous cultures see all things as persons, not the inanimate objects we casually name and exploit. A few summers ago I watched an enormous house being built nearby, a plywood palace completely disconnected from the earth and sky it stood between. There will be no masterpieces painted, no music played there by the hands that built it. Disconnection shows up in the way we value land only by its ability to generate short-term profit. So agricultural land in the West turns into developments to house people who have no connection to the land, severing water and productivity to create a one-time profit for a few who live disconnected from earth and sky. Other disconnections show up in the woods outside town, where summer campsites pop up like sad toadstools, brief shelter for people severed from our society. Seeing them makes me want to head down to Jaroso.
If we would again take our place in connecting earth and sky, maybe all of us can find homes… and make some music together.