Difference in Waters

This morning, as I wash my silver tea spoon, I notice the difference between waters. I filled one plastic jug at my friend’s house in Glorieta. Their well-water is full of minerals. I rinse and rinse and still think the item, skin or spoons, is soapy. It is odd to drink this water straight-up; it feels beautiful and silky as it goes down, but filling, and after a while its minerals have a medicinal effect. Once boiled this goes away, so I use it for tea and washing.

Yesterday I filled five gallon jugs from my neighbor rancher’s well which reaches six hundred fifty feet down through rock to the mesa’s aquifer. This water is sweet, clean, fresh. I could drink and drink and drink…It washes over my fingers with ease and clarity. Both of these wells reach into the deep rock, both are in high terrain in an arid climate, neither are polluted or processed or altered, but the water lets me taste the different rocks.

The Road

The way up to my cabin is a steep switchback climb up a gravel-paved road to the mesa top, leading into seven miles of relatively level ground over a dirt and lime shelf road to my property, then along a rutted dirt drive that eventually leads to a windy, tight way through trees over immovable rocks and at last a walk down the rim rock ‘stairs’ to the cabin door. It is a journey in itself. The eight miles total takes me thirty minutes to traverse if nothing comes up, like rain that would turn parts of the road to sticky guacamole, or neighbors temporarily blocking the access as they do repairs or move livestock. That is where I start and end my time for the present.