[lumberjim]

This was our home for 3 weeks. The simplest, happiest 3 weeks of my life. No job. No money. No bills. No pressure, no worries, no time. It felt so easy and natural.

I’m sure most of you have been camping before. Some just for a weekend here and there, some for a week, maybe, but if you have happened to do any long term camping in one spot, you may be able to relate. Ad to that the knowledge that we had no time limit on how long we stayed other than the season, and in New Mexico, the warm season is long. This was not a vacation. I spent a lot of time pondering that. It brought me down to a very basic level. Survive. Take away the expectations of society. The pressure and expected behavior of young people growing up. To go to college, find a career, a mate, have kids, grow old. This was just 4 of us living in 2 tents in a canyon. Our days consisted of excursions to Silver City for food, gathering and breaking of fire wood, trekking to the spring and lugging the big bottles of sloshing water back down the canyon. We took a couple of extended hikes down the canyon. It just kept getting prettier as the walls got closer together, and the river bent. We were just as alone as we could be, miles from the closest road and yet, with the noise from the river, the big horned sheep, and all of the other life crammed into this contained space, it felt like we were in a market, or shopping mall. The times that I camped in the mountains of Pa, and hiked up the mountain in Prescott, I felt very distant from everything, although I was actually much closer to civilization. This was wholly different.