This loft is accessed through the outside door behind me, via a stainless steel stair and porch, used for moving furniture in and out and sniping coyotes in the pasture.

This large room contains a couch, a king size bed, a queen size bed, and this 10 foot long laminate table. Normally the lady of the house does puzzles, crafts embroidery, at this table. This week, a tramp taps here. Behind him is a 1940s singer sewing machine that The Major has just fixed. Oriental rugs cover part of the plywood floor. Overhead light is provided by two lampheads set against the western wall. The eastern and western walls are slanted. One must be judicious leaving bed along the wall. The beds are piled high with blankets and pillows, the near freezing nights in October good for sleeping.

The middle room, is not so large, contains a working desk before a covered east window, a book shelf, a rowing machine and a number of open book totes. The middle room has a terrible chandelier, blaring eye-searing light that hurts this troglodyte, but warms the Lady’s heart. Lamps and night lights are, as ever, an ocular hazard in a woman’s house. The steep L-shaped staircase cuts downstairs along the wall to the master bedroom. What this contains, is, other than the Lady reading her bible and The Major reading Sophocles, known not. The three windows on this floor, one to a room are north, south, and east, the southern window in the outside door behind the writer.

The ground floor greets the morning guest with a draft of warm gas heat, provided for free by the operators of the oil well on the ranch. One gas stove sits at the northeast corner, in a nice, hardwood floored room, walled 18 inch in thick adobe brick. A small room has been refurbished, the adobe repaired, the floors refinished and reset, a window looking west along the pasture towards the massive sheet metal shed that holds a truck, a camper and two railroad containers. The beams supporting the second story are stained ponderosa logs set in white lime adobe.

The living room is dominated by the stairway bulkhead, next to which is an outer door to the covered concrete way, where a grill, a dutch oven used for canning, buckets of produce picked from the garden, and a circular saw are stationed. To the west this leaves to the sheet metal parking space, containing the car and two ATVs. The working pickup is in the eastern lot, beyond the gate. Back inside, a couch, an easy chair and rocking chair face the large screen TV, where Tucker Carlson is viewed after dinner. Two windows bracket the TV on the west wall, blinding the viewer at sunset. Between the TV and the doorway to the open pantry-way, is a mighty wood stove, well maintained and perfectly piped.

In the pantry way, one looks straight ahead out the south facing kitchen window in the distance. To the right are wire storage racks. To the left is the bathroom, with shower and a recessed niche for rolled towels. The water is hard with iron, hard on the appliances. Drinking water is drawn from a better well up the road and then filtered. Beyond the bathroom door is a low cabinet.

To the right, as one enters the open dining room, is a desk, with bills and such, before a window facing west. Behind the desk chair is a small four person table with four chairs, of dark wood, well maintained. In the southwest corner is a second gas heater. To the left is the washroom hallway that leads to the other exit door to the covered way. On the left side is the refrigerator, washer and drier. To the right is the kitchen counter with stool, before which are stacked two coolers with a half dozen gallons of water each. The kitchen is a small affair, with stainless steel counter facing the washing laundry machines. The sink is large, the counter tops and cabinets are of hardwood with lazy susan spinning racks within, of hard wood. The stove is gas, of course. On the wide window sill facing south is the collection of ancient pottery shards, rattle snake heads and stone age tools found in the boulder outcroppings that rise ten feet to the north.

Two boulders, each half the size as the house, make a gate to the driveway. Steel pipe cattle pens, an old barn built up against a boulder the size of the house, a hundred year old log cabin still standing, and a state route that is but a clay pan driveway, line the north side of the property. Beyond is higher outcroppings forming box canyon pastures, in the distance a repeater tower and an ancient Anisazi cliff ruin.

From the shade of the covered way, its solid awning supported by ponderosa pillars, one looks across a mile of pasture to an ominous stack of rocks, tier upon tier of cliff faces, each topped by the evergreen forest of ponderosa, pinion and juniper. There is no surface water, with many aroyos attesting to a once lush climate. The soil is clay and sand. On the south side of the house is a stone rimmed fire pit. And a fence to the pasture beyond, which is in fact a prairie dog town. The little critters are curious and rightfully paranoid. The ranch owner wants cattle back. But the ankle breaking tunnel mounds pose a threat to bovine legs. Just shy of two years here, the major and his confederates have slain 2,300 dogs. The writer spots 21 on this Wednesday morning. He is told that swarms of them trundled across the pastures and road before the Major came to this roost, and that they taste like rabbit.

The yard, within the pasture and the spacious parking lot, is but 20 feet deep. On the southeast corner of the yard is a well, with a windmill squeaking above, pumping water into a well head with a hose, to the house, and into a steel pool the size of an urban backyard swimming pool. Next to that iconic western fixture, is the only aspen in these parts. It is a strange tree of its type that was wounded at about six feet. Its lower trunk is black, instead of a straight white trunk it has split into four white branches, making for the only round looking aspen tree the major, a native of the Rockies, has ever seen. He surmises this tree was transplanted from Colorado, two hours to the north.

At about sundown, the steady breeze calms, the night falls still, and the stars, two hours from the nearest urban lights, affront the dark with their many lights, the belt of the Milkyway clear as a stardust way.

Lucky is the writer that muses here, wondering at the southern horizon, dominated by evergreens and massive boulders, beyond which the seasonal lake the Laguna Seca, awaits a rain-filled time. Walking these 600 odd acres today, revealed an excellent setting for the novel that has yet to take off from Mars for Earth: MRE or Footfall Pyreon, has a physical home, a land so strewn with hardware, well heads, corral piping, pipes, valves and fencing, backhoes, wheel hubs, gears and even pot shards of a thousand years, that it would take more than mere years to erase the residue of our scarcity fears.

The next day, after an ATV drive, I sit here proofing this piece, thunder rumbling in the north and east, sky clearing in the west and south, country music playing downstairs.