su libro

who’s afraid? Strawbale, timber frame, and adobe might sound like competing home designs submitted by the three little pigs, but our summer reading list howls with diversity. Plus, William deBuys’ latest rumination on life in northern New Mexico finds solace in knowing one place well.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Summer 07 Su Casa

The Walk, by William deBuys, Trinity University Press, San Antonio, Texas, 155 pages, hardback, $22.95.
In a tucked-away valley off the High Road to Taos, William deBuys has found paradise, “or something near it.” By paradise he means the place he has chosen to know so well, so intimately, so enduringly that self-delusion becomes impossible. The place speaks Truth and demands honesty in return. The reward for such an open-hearted relationship is healing.

And true to the form of American nature writing, deBuys earns his belonging here through keen observation and a nearly devout participation in the rituals native to the local landscape and culture. As the title suggests, it all centers on the walk, a route with variations he has rambled along for 30 years from his cabin in El Valle. It goes across pastures, into the arroyo, through woods, along the Rio de las Trampas, across the acequia, sometimes up the knob where he put down his mare Geranium, other times detouring across the river to the marvelously metaphoric pasture he calls the otro lado—the other side, which he reaches at book’s end. Sometimes he walks, sometimes he saunters, sometimes he’s out irrigating, sometimes he’s riding a horse. The journey is populated at various times in various seasons by traces and signs and sightings of elk, turkeys, bears, coyotes; trees peeled by Apaches in the unrecorded past; bones, skeletons, remains; neighbors, friends, his children, his wife; and now, always by memories. It snows, enthrallingly; it rains, devastatingly; it fails to rain, devastatingly.

But the book is not about drought, nor the history or historiography of Hispanic settlement, nor the natural history of the southern Rockies. Nor is it about how it hurts to lose a good horse, nor painful divorce, nor the death of dear friends, although all these latter emotional themes—particularly the dissolution of his marriage—lurk like specters haunting the path, obliquely glimpsed but rarely confronted head-on. This approach to writing, of leaving out one thing, the most important thing, recalls Hemingway’s early stories. The elided detail, actually the subject of the story, propels the narrative by providing an implied crisis that requires resolution. Though not as cryptic as Hemingway, deBuys’ writing too skids off the emotional trail while finding solace and peace in the natural world. Ultimately, The Walk is about finding the way from despair to hope. The path is a place of healing.

Deliberately structured, The Walk proceeds in three movements. Each independent essay knits to the other. The first, “The Walk,” lays out the physical and psychological landscape. In a journalist’s detached prose, “Geranium” tells the heartbreaking story of the decline and death of deBuys’ mare of that name. At the end, we find deBuys hoping for the courage to someday welcome memories of loss, to find in the soul the lesson of the woods, that nothing is truly lost.

“Paradiso” traverses equally tough territory, moving through the death of bien vecino (good neighbor) Lalo Romero and the despairing desiccation of drought to arrive at the life-affirming lessons of irrigation and the spontaneous spirit of horses. In a finely told scene about a cantankerous mare becoming acquainted with the new geldings in the next pasture under a spattering rain, deBuys discovers the “perfection of disorder and desire”—a paradise never lost but often misplaced.

DeBuys, a master of place-centered prose, keeps tight control over tone and spins out one terrific sentence after another. His acclaimed earlier book, River of Traps, belongs on even the shortest list of must-read books about New Mexico. The Walk further solidifies his reputation as one of New Mexico’s leading contemporary literary figures.

Strawbale Home Plans, by Wayne J. Bingham and Colleen F. Smith, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 192 pages, paperback, $24.95.
Natural Timber Frame Homes: Building with Wood, Stone, Clay, and Straw, by Wayne J. Bingham and Jerod Pfeffer, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Layton, Utah, 176 pages, hardback, $29.95.
Taken as companion pieces, two fresh, simultaneously released titles coauthored by Wayne J. Bingham immerse the reader into one particular segment of the green-building world, natural building. As green building grows and spreads, inevitably it will splinter along fault lines of ideology and allegiance, even culture and politics. With his coauthors, Bingham has aligned himself to the strawbale and timber frame wing of the party, a zealous and particularized faction that was advocating for sustainable construction long before you could Google “green building”—long before Google, really.

Whether it’s smart marketing or a big-tent commitment to inclusiveness, both Strawbale Home Plans and Natural Timber Frame Homes: Building with Wood, Stone, Clay, and Straw reach out beyond the straw-and-clay owner-built cult—and their often wacky, idiosyncratic aesthetics—to embrace a wider spectrum of home styles. None here would be called mass-market or even middle-of-the-road, but that’s a compliment, not a complaint. Original architecture by definition deviates from the norm, the best by defining a new leading edge. So if you’re considering building a home in this genre, flipping these pages might direct your imagination or your architect down a fruitful path.
Strawbale Home Plans covers a couple dozen homes, additions, and studios plus a handful of larger public buildings, all built with straw walls. For each, the authors include a floor plan, a data sheet with design and construction details, and at least a few pages of photos. Maybe best of all, though, they let the homeowners tell their stories in their own words. Surprisingly and quite enlighteningly, these folks don’t shrink from discussing what went wrong or what they would do differently, given the chance. One regrets putting the shower against the bale wall because water soaked through the lime plaster and wetted the straw. Another lost the unfinished house to a fire, then started all over again. (I had a neighbor once whose strawbale house blew over in the spring winds before she’d had a chance to snug everything down—oh, the anguish!) More than one owner-builder comments on how draining the process was. At the end, emotions often dip lower than the homeowners’ bank accounts. However, now that more professional builders are addressing the demand for natural homes, you no longer have to build it yourself to build it naturally.

The range of homes in Strawbale Home Plans runs from a super-sweet, 700-square-foot, split-level mountain hideaway outside Santa Fe (you know who you are!) to luxury homes approaching 4,000 square feet. Appearance runs from Pueblo to French Country Cottage style to sharp-edged Modernism. More than one home proves that the posthippie log-and-straw aesthetic, when thoughtfully designed and carefully crafted, attains the level of credible American vernacular architecture: when it’s bad, it’s awful, but when it’s good, it’s entrancing. The book testifies how strawbale construction has matured into viability.

Natural Timber Frame Homes, by Bingham and Jerod Pfeffer, takes a more philosophical approach. The authors make an urgent case for using locally produced natural materials: “If you desire a beautiful, healthy, affordable house . . . that respects ecological limits, build with local materials.” Such an approach engages you in the immediate world, and with that engagement will come an ethic based on responsibility toward the environment. Overall, Bingham and Pfeffer argue, that’s healthier for the planet than hauling goods and materials from far away—especially if they were manufactured at high energy cost with the associated pollution. To back up their position, they also provide guidance on doing that in your own locale.

If you agree with that philosophy, Natural Timber Frame Homes will help you establish your own ground rules for designing and building. Chapters cover the problems of conventional building, the rationale for timber frame construction, advice on “getting to know your bioregion” as the source of sustainable building materials, an overview of working with wood, clay, straw, and stone (but not adobe!), and a few simple floor plans.

Timber frame in most of New Mexico seems a questionable proposition: between drought and urbanization, plus the limitations imposed by endangered species legislation, the forests don’t yield the timber they once did. In fact, for load-bearing walls, the choice in New Mexico for hundreds of years has been mud, most often formed into bricks: adobe. The absence from this book of this time-tested, still-viable material is unaccountable. Oh, well, maybe it’s like fresh-roasted green chile: New Mexico’s secret resource.

That gripe aside, Strawbale Home Plans and Natural Timber Frame Homes: Building with Wood, Stone, Clay, and Straw add a fresh, polished sheen to the reputation of natural building, circa 2007. The value of these books accrues from their mainstreaming of a once fringy building philosophy. “Going green” often hinges on a choice between high- or low-tech solutions and mass-market versus artisanal materials for solving the problems of structure, insulation, toxicity, and energy. These two titles will help you find your own answers, while aggressively recruiting you into their camp.

Adobe Conservation: A Preservation Handbook, compiled by Cornerstones Community Partnerships, Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, 222 pages, paperback, $34.95.
If living in a vintage adobe is the definitive New Mexico residential experience, then renovating (or at least repairing) it authenticates that experience. Nothing bonds a house to its place like dried-mud bricks formed from the earth below its footings. By extension, nothing bonds a homeowner to both like sinking fingers into that most grounded building material. If you’re so inclined, here’s a book you’ll want to keep in arm’s reach from start to finish of your adobe tenure. And even if you’re not predisposed toward wheelbarrows, screeds, and trowels, Adobe Conservation: A Preservation Handbook offers an intriguing glimpse into the pragmatic past, a way of probing the history of common New Mexicans by deconstructing then reconstructing their handiwork.

Adobe Conservation rings with the voice of authority. It distills 20 years of collective wisdom gleaned by Cornerstones Community Partnerships, an innovative nonprofit group based in Santa Fe. Dedicated to the revival of nearly extinct adobe building techniques, the group formed in 1986 to preserve the architectural heritage and community traditions of the rural Southwest and northern Mexico border areas. To date, the group has worked with more than 300 rural Hispanic and Native American communities to preserve and restore earthen buildings, most of them churches. Along the way, Cornerstones and those communities have shared information and joined in labor together, one result being this detailed how-to book full of low-tech, time-tested, even innately (and non-programmatically) green techniques for renovating an adobe fixer-upper, whatever its size.

Given the—dare I say it?—concrete guidance contained in Adobe Conservation, I suspect most of its readers will be builders, either professional contractors or the owner-builder variety, plus architects and designers. It would be a pity to limit the audience to them, because on one level, this book should appeal to anyone interested in the folk origins of Southwestern, particularly New Mexican, architecture.

Early chapters, to wit, summarize the ancient origins of earthen construction, its historical development, and the resurgence of interest in preserving the vernacular architecture of traditional communities. The “Architectural Styles and Materials” chapter moves from AD 350 to 1986, describing developments in building, period by period and charmingly illustrated by Francisco Uviña Contreras’ drawings. In fact, his pages of sketches of architectural features make a delightful visual glossary, culminating in the annotated overviews with exploded details of a typical colonial church.

Adobe Conservation then proceeds into the nitty-gritty of restoration work, from moisture testing in adobe walls (water is the enemy!) to resetting a wood shingled roof. Each section lists the tools (shown as quick-recognition icon sketches) required for the tasks, then gives step-by-step instructions. Abundant illustrations by Uviña Contreras and photographs carry much of the explanatory load. While the scale and experience of Cornerstones might skew toward church restoration, probably every technique here applies equally well to residential work. Crack monitoring, shoring up a crumbling wall, splicing or replacing a rotten viga, pouring an earthen floor, plastering with mud—it’s all here.

Many of the fixes that might be dubbed heritage skills involve a kind of poetic inventiveness—call it Hispanic ingenuity—the materials and tools of which are not likely found on a contractor’s license exam. One of my favorites, because it’s so rich in rootsy resourcefulness, is the barbed wire saw, which is used for making a long cut down an adobe wall: first you drill a hole through the wall, chip away the plaster along your imminent cut, then insert several feet of twisted barbed wire to your buddy on the other side. Tugging on the wooden handles at each end in alternating rhythm, you drag the barbed wire across the mud bricks and the durn thing chews its way down the wall. I can tell you, it works. Try that in an insulated-concrete-form house.

Speaking of concrete. . . . Let’s just say that anything with cement is materia non grata around Cornerstones. Calling it incompatible with adobe because it doesn’t breathe, traps moisture, and expands at a different rate than earthen material, Cornerstones repeatedly and strenuously warns of disastrous results when adobe problems are “remedied” with concrete. Only earthen plasters and mortar (including lime) should be used, according to Adobe Conservation, though cactus juice does improve adhesion and water repellency. A cup of prickly pear mucilage, anyone?

With so much practical and well-intentioned information gathered in such a useable and appealing book, Adobe Conservation has earned a top-of-the-dashboard spot in every adobero’s pickup and a slot in every armchair builder’s or New Mexico history buff’s bookshelf.

Towns of the Sandia Mountains, Images of America series, by Mike Smith, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina, 128 pages, paperback, $19.99.
Bought on impulse at a buyers’ club store, Towns of the Sandia Mountains came to me as an unexpected treasure, like a shoe box crammed with old photos, maps, and mementos from my grandparents’ time that suddenly appeared in a neglected closet. Essentially a photo album divided into chapters for every community of note flanking the Sandias, with summative paragraphs on the history of each place, the photos and captions drill deep into the quotidian details of life from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.

Make no mistake, this is no meticulously footnoted history book. Rather, it’s an extended series of stroboscopic flashes from the past: someone caught riding a burro, shopping at a Cedar Crest mercantile, tying her shoe after dismounting from the horse-drawn school bus, poised on skis above a snowy Madera Canyon slope, performing the matachines dance, sitting on the porch recovering from tuberculosis. . . . This is folk history, gleaned from hand-me-down photos and the recollections of ordinary people who just happened to inhabit this region during a particular span of time. Haphazard, compelling, real, free of drama but rich in texture and dense with lived experience, Towns of the Sandia Mountains offers the kind of unpredictable immersion experience you’d get from visiting cousins in an exotic but hospitable land—the past.

Nowadays, the entire constellation of towns encircling the Sandias really orbits Albuquerque, economically, culturally, educationally. What were once autonomous communities based on farming, wood cutting, and even health resorts have evolved into bedroom communities, second-home havens for wealthy newcomers, and golf-course exurbia. Like so much of New Mexico within a 45-minute commute from lucrative employment, though, the contemporary veneer obscures but hasn’t erased the old way of life. It pops out of the slick new surface: a decaying adobe here, a swimming pond there, a still-consecrated church up the road. The old families remain, too, sometimes as place names or road names and often, apparently, hoarding photos from 1910!

One aspect of community is continuity. Unbroken relationships, the exchange of stories, shared experiences, even the perseverance of landmarks all help us feel connected to the world. The value of Towns of the Sandia Mountains derives from its unforced, extroverted, nonjudgmental, doors-wide-open introduction to the particularities defining this handful of places. If you take the invitation, you might still slip through those doors into a unique haunt of enduring rural Americana.

Greetings from Albuquerque, by Mary L. Martin and Nathaniel Wolfgang-Price, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, Pennsylvania, 128 pages, paperback, $24.95.
The reproductions of vintage postcards in Greetings from Albuquerque offer a fascinating rear-view glimpse into the town’s formative years of modernizing. While you might enjoy this book simply for the quality of many of the images themselves and the nostalgia they kindle, it goes beyond the disposable kitsch inherent in the postcard medium to make a statement about how the self-proclaimed Duke City created a persona—personas, really—for projection to the world. A city, as a culture expressed by its residents, just might reveal the most about itself by how it pretends to be, regardless of the daily, lived experiences of its residents. If so, and if these postcards are representative of the imagery pouring forth from here throughout the early- to mid-20th century, then Albuquerque (and by extension, New Mexico) had a split personality teetering between exotic backwater and All-American boosterism. (Maybe that’s still true.)

Here’s what I mean: many of the drawings and colorized photographs on these postcards show impressive façades of monumental buildings, from the Veterans Hospital and Lovelace Clinic (a stunning John Gaw Meem design from mid-century) to the First Baptist Church to the Hilton Hotel (now called La Posada) to the Albuquerque High School built in 1914 (now a prime residential address near downtown). One image from about 1910—is it a photograph?—takes in the sprawling Alvarado Hotel and Albuquerque depot, with the railroad tracks occupying the foreground and nearly half the picture. Another depicts the famous Super Chief locomotive pulling into the Albuquerque station. Later aerial shots show a burgeoning “metropolis.” But wait, there’s one better: two traditionally garbed Native Americans stand on the runway below a TWA airliner outside the Pueblo style Albuquerque Municipal Airport. Talk about progress! The Southwest was becoming “civilized” with modern transportation, modern buildings, grassy lawns, churches of every (Christian) persuasion.

About halfway through the book, in the “Visiting Albuquerque” chapter, the mood shifts. This is Indian Country: trading posts, pueblo people in picturesque poses, the iconic Taos Pueblo (“a typical Southwestern pueblo”), scenes from Isleta Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo, cute Native American children, mission churches, an ox cart at Laguna Pueblo, ceremonial dances. . . . Perhaps my favorite card in the whole book is a rendering of the church at Sandia Pueblo in the evening under a star-splattered sky—I’d hang that picture on the wall.

A series of charming landscapes rounds out the back of the book. Here’s the Rio Grande, the Sandia Mountains (with great shots of the early days at the ski area), highway scenes (“get your kicks . . .”), cowboy scenes. Then comes an assortment of flowers and pretty cactuses blooming. The card showing sand verbena growing on beach dunes begs explanation, but that’s a minor sin compared to the classic blunder committed on the last page: a lovely, lurid sunset over long-armed saguaro cactuses.

Do I have to say it? Saguaros don’t grow in New Mexico!

In a sense, that error is strictly in keeping with the kitschy atmosphere swirling around this collection of postcards. On balance, Greetings from Albuquerque gauzily recalls a time when the city was excited both about its tricultural past and its nothing-but-blue-skies future, when new buildings were designed like old pueblos, when New Mexico felt like a land apart from the rest of the states, and when “sprawl” meant stretching out your legs on a bench while waiting for a train.