su libro

Fields of green, New Mexico 24/7, a guide to home repair, serious bulbs, and Max Evans’ “Great Vacant.”
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Winter 05 Su Casa

The New Ecological Home: A Complete Guide to Green Building Options, by Daniel Chiras, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 336 pages, paperback, $35.

Whether driven by rising energy costs, a land-ethic sensibility for sustainable building, or personal chemical-sensitivity health issues, more and more people are investigating—and investing their mortgage dollars in—green building. From high-volume production builders to high-end custom builders, the construction industry is meeting the demand with a variety of approaches and a broad range of green-ness. And there’s no question that green is a matter of interpretation, degree, and debate.

Fortunately, The New Ecological Home will help you fact-check various claims in that debate and establish the degree of your green commitment. Not a how-to manual, The New Ecological Home is more of an encyclopedia, a comprehensive summary of green building techniques, strategies, materials, technologies, and products.

In the first section of the book, Chiras clearly, methodically, and inspirationally establishes the framework for green building, helping homeowners and builders figure out what it means and how to get started. He articulates five principles: conservation, recycling, using renewable resources, promoting environmental restoration and sustainable resource management, and creating homes that are good for people. Then he makes the case for the affordability of green building, which he claims adds just 0 to 3 percent more in construction cost.

Subsequent chapters cover everything from the healthy house through green building materials to energy-
efficient design and construction. He looks at options as diverse as steel frame and earth-sheltered architecture. He then covers passive solar heating, passive cooling, green electricity, and water and waste management.

Daunting as the field of green may be, this book is a good way to sort through options. As Chiras notes, “My advice is not to get bogged down in the imperfections of green building materials and the unavoidable tradeoffs at this early stage in the evolution of the field.” Just making one green choice makes a difference and stimulates the industry in that direction.

New Mexico 24/7, created by Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen, DK Publishing, Inc., New York, 144 pages, 590 images, hardcover, $24.95.

New Mexico 24/7 has a compelling sincerity and an unaffected authenticity. Perhaps that comes from the approach used to generate its raw material, which involved setting loose a legion of professional and amateur photographers armed with digital cameras across the state during the week of May 12–18, 2004.

Simultaneously, photographers fanned out across the other 49 states, as well, producing a book for each one. Quite a project, but let me assure you, an editor’s nightmare. These books are intended as sequels to the successful title, America 24/7.

Note that the New Mexico coordinator of these shooters was Mark Holm, director of photography at the Albuquerque Tribune. The intent, and therefore the book itself, was more journalistic than artistic, if such a distinction is even meaningful. Every one of these nearly 600 pictures has an unvarnished immediacy, a present-tense, grab-shot nowness that I found utterly engaging, despite a faint whiff of hucksterism to the packaging. When I sat down to read and view this book early one morning, I didn’t get up till I had studied every page and digested every caption.

That journalistic approach means that, despite a few landscapes, most of the pictures are about people doing something. Rarely posed, they are caught in the moment at home, whether home is a mobile home on Albuquerque’s West Mesa or a dune at White Sands. It’s a book of people playing, working, talking, trotting a horse past a country church, selling vegetables at a growers’ market, painting, biking, gesturing, laughing, napping, bouncing on a trampoline on the Navajo Nation, shooting pool, singing in church.

Though New Mexico 24/7 lacks a table of contents—did I miss something here?—it’s organized loosely into chapters around themes: Hearth and Home, Hard at Work, Reason to Believe, and Our Town. Photos run big, sometimes as full two-page spreads in this large format book, with some predictable loss of sharpness. A row of a dozen or so thumbnail images runs across the top of many pages; some of these are outtakes, some are images used full-size elsewhere. They provide an intriguing secondary dimension, a running commentary or expansion of the primary photos on the page. Cool.

New Mexico 24/7 makes no claims about being exhaustive, yet it is fairly representative of the people who live here. It avoids sentimentality and the trite Romanticism that dulls many “Land of Enchantment” photo books. That’s no simple trick in a state where the collective ego centers on Romantic imagery. So here we get working cowboys, Indians on trampolines, villagers wearing motorcycle t-shirts while stacking adobes with the abuelo and niño, gringo newcomers, gringo old-timers. . . .

Any description of this book seems quickly to devolve into a list. There’s just so much to cover. Despite the admirable breadth and generally clear-eyed view of most of these portraits-in-place, they are biased toward the photogenic, the exciting, the uniquely New Mexican or Western occupation and pastimes. I don’t see any Intel techs in bunny suits, for instance, or teachers in a kindergarten in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights, a soccer game in Bernalillo, skateboarders in Los Alamos, or even a scriptwriter working on a laptop at Flying Star.

Admittedly, you can’t even come close to covering everything, but a little more attention to the suburban workaday world that at least half of New Mexicans inhabit might be more honest. Sure, some jobs are tough to photograph dramatically, but that’s the creative challenge, right?

No big deal: I loved going through this book and it will get a workout on my coffee table when visitors come. I can even overlook some production flaws—where is that table of contents and proper folios on the middle pages?—and the disquieting sponsorship by underwriters with a stake in digital photography. What is this, an infomercial for digital photography?

The inherently democratic impulse of this project makes up for these problems. And at $24.95, it’s a can’t-miss gift for anyone on your list who loves New Mexico.

The Black & Decker Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair, Creative Publishing International, Chanhassen, Minn., 600 pages, 2,300 photographs, hardcover, $34.95.

Because I once served time in the slave galleys of technical writing, I honestly appreciate fine examples of the illustrative craft of how-to books. When it’s about construction or home repair, though, my interest transcends the vocationally sympathetic to enter the realm of avid reader. Like you, probably, I’m the “target audience.” No question about it: this Black & Decker mega-tome, The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair, was written for me, and for you, too, if you ever need to know how to do even one of the myriad tasks that face every homeowner.

Sometimes those tasks come along once in a decade, and we just can’t remember how we did it last time. Other times we succumb to insecurity and call in a professional because, for instance, we think the mysteries of sweating a copper pipe joint exceed the intuitive knowledge in our own handy hands.

Here’s the initiation course, with everything but the secret handshake. Brothers! Fear not the humiliation of being stumped by a question like, “how do toilets work?” Sisters! Fear not the terror of replacing a broken floor tile. Get some grout, get some adhesive, and get busy!

After some extensive thumbing-through, I figured I couldn’t vouch for The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair without a test-drive. I had some minor electrical work to do, a light switch to replace and one to install on a new line for a back porch light. I’ll admit, I was a little befuddled by the intersection of my 50-year-old home’s ungrounded wiring and the new Romex laid in by our unfailing home-improver for hire. Five minutes with this book, and I was good to go: black wire to black wire, both sets of black to the terminals on the switch, white to white in a wire nut, ground to a screw in the box. Done. Lights!

Sometimes it’s the little tricks that make a familiar job easier, like don’t mix your concrete patch so wet, or label those wires with tape, or hammer a rubber mallet against a 2 x 4 covered with carpet to set a new tile flush with its old neighbors.

For the neophyte do-it-yourself wannabe, basic instruction in this volume almost reaches the how-to-swing-a-hammer level—there is, in fact, a section on “Using the Paintbrush.” For the more experienced tool user, clear photos and captions provide either guidance or a refresher to get you unstuck and on your way.

This book works because the text is clear, simple, and direct. The photos are perfectly lit and brilliantly staged, with plenty of cutaways showing how-things-work overviews that are invaluable when you’re tackling unfamiliar systems.

Though I can just hear my one-time graduate advisor’s sarcastic retort, I firmly believe that home construction and repair books are a fascinating literary genre. Like classified ads and vintage Whole Earth Catalogs, they pull back the curtain to reveal unexpected, illuminating cross-
sections of culture. Better than that, a good construction or home-repair book gets you out of the chair, hammer in hand, to tackle a little homework.

Beautiful Bulbs: Simple Secrets for Glorious Gardens Indoors and Out, by Georgeanne Brennan and Mimi Luebbermann, photographs by Faith Echtermeyer, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 96 pages, paperback, $15.95.

My family and I were delighted when, several years and one residence ago, we moved in springtime into a house way back in the hills of Placitas, New Mexico, and discovered irises all around us blooming in the most unlikely places on our undeveloped, highly vertical two-plus acres. Someone had planted bulbs in arroyos, under juniper trees, along the rough driveway, down by the gate. They were a magnificent, time-capsule treasure buried by the original homeowner. In a season when the desert in central New Mexico is painted in gray, sage green, and variations on brown—spring is a subtle event without water—the irises flashed a modest dose of color against the still dormant grasses, cacti, and yuccas.

Color: at Su Casa, we’re asked about color more than any other subject related to home design—color for stucco, color for paint, color for furnishings. Planting flowers is one of the most exciting, lively ways to add color outdoors. After poring over Beautiful Bulbs, I was ready to dip my metaphoric brush into the horticultural paint pot myself and splash bulb-based blossoms all over my yard. No kidding.

Or I could just hang this book on the wall and stare at it. It’s that gorgeous. Then I wouldn’t have to run a new line of drip irrigation and till a few dozen square feet of the now weed-populated front yard.

Nah! Gardening, as all good planters know, is more than 50 percent process over product. It’s the smell of damp earth on a spring morning, the sun on your back, fingernails scratching away rocks from the flowerbed.

Beautiful Bulbs is just the book to inspire you to action—bulbs can be planted in nearly any season in the Southwest and you can take them inside to jump-start the life cycle. If you’re a bulbous novice, the book will guide you through the how-to. Besides being a lushly illustrated catalog of varieties, Beautiful Bulbs tells what you need, when to buy and plant, how deep to sink the bulbs, and when to expect blooms.

Tips on preparing the bedding soil should help you penetrate the horticultural mysteries of this type of gardening. Meanwhile, as you wait for the bulbs to grow, you can enjoy the truly amazing photos in the book. Garden photography doesn’t get any better than this!

Max Evans’ Hi Lo Country: Under the One-eyed Sky, by Max Evans, photography by Jan Haley, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 132 pages, 155 photographs, hardcover, $34.95.

While central New Mexico and the Rio Grande corridor continue to boom, spread, and sprawl, the counties in northeast New Mexico have actually lost population in successive censuses. Doesn’t that contradict the ideology of Sunbelt boosterism? Yet places like Clayton, Mosquero, and Miami might just as well be watering holes in the Australian outback for all the economic kinship they share with Albuquerque or Santa Fe.

I’ll bet that’s just fine with Max Evans. Probably his collaborator, photographer Jan Haley, is okay with it, too. All that big empty—the Great Vacant, Evans calls it—makes a mighty fine subject for Romantic contemplation, something like a geographic Grecian urn upon which to compose words and images of nostalgic longing, wistful recollecting, and poignant reminiscing.

Evans dubbed this area the Hi Lo Country. That’s also the title of one of his books and a movie based on it. He defines the region as the northeast quadrant of New Mexico, a circle roughly from the Oklahoma border through Raton to Taos, down to Santa Fe, around to Las Vegas, and over into West Texas.

In the center is mostly big-sky empty land where you’d be hard-pressed to find two consecutive traffic lights, a McDonald’s, or even a Wal-Mart. What you will find—what Haley’s photos so lovingly rescue from oblivion—are the weathered, sun-beaten, oxidized, tilted, abandoned, and barely recollected remains of a challenging, isolated life on one of America’s most recent frontiers. Evans lived that life, and probably no one evokes its reality or its memory better. He’s a Romantic, all right, a painter, writer, and Hollywood collaborator, but hombre, he’s got ranch cred.

That cowboy credibility counts when you come up against a central paradox of this kind of romanticized coffee table book: is the Hi Lo Country real? It’s a double-barreled question in this case, because you’ll never find Hi Lo, New Mexico, on the map. It’s a renamed Des Moines, New Mexico (be sure you pronounce both S’s, by the way), with a dash of Cimarron and a sprig of Springer thrown in for flavor.

So while this may be a vestigial remnant of the True West—whatever that is—it might be better to say it’s most true to the fictional landscape Evans created in his books. And, boy, has he earned the right to tell it, any way he wants to.

That works for me. So does this book. Although Evans’ narrative meanders like the contour lines on a topographical map of Union County, the style and tone fit the book like Wranglers on a bronc rider. In one sprawling chapter, Evans reminisces about his early years in the area with an engagingly self-effacing tone, tells vaguely self-promoting stories about Hollywood heavies encountering his Hi Lo Country, and recounts his coming-together with Haley for this project. He skates over the region’s history, waxes poetic about the landscape, then scoots back to a snippet from his own biography.

The photos progress in a tighter narrative chain: fences to roads to homesteads. Every human artifact has made great headway along the path of decay toward oblivion, while the grasslands, mesas, and mountains patiently host the seasons of both climate and humanity. Abandoned ranch houses, terminally parked cars, and a toppled outhouse—like all ghost towns and archaeological sites and overgrown highways—whisper a message into the wind like prayer flags on a Tibetan mountain pass. This beautiful, poignant book might ensure those prayers aren’t in vain.