In New Mexico: A Family Lives in Its Own World

By JOAN ACKERMANN-BLOUNT

"Chicken power," says Ron Oest, exulting in his chicken house in northern New Mexico. "That's what keeps our winter water supply from freezing. See, they roost right under the tank." Up on the roost, two dozen hens ride out the winter, unwittingly warming a thousand gallons of mountain stream water stored in the black tank that bellies down from the ceiling. It is an efficient use of passive poultry energy, harnessed by a resourceful man who supports his family handsomely on $5,000 a year.

"We don't have any money in the bank," explains his wife Nora, who is part Spanish, part Chiricahua Apache. Shecan butcher a bear and cook up a steak in the Franklin stove so tender it softens a person's attitude toward grizzlies. "We don't have any credit. No life insurance," she says with a smile, the earthy enduring smile that heroines in South American novels bequeath to their daughters.

"People don't realize how much earning money costs," says Oest, 55. "Having a job is expensive. The clothes, the car, the house with the mortgage payments. If you spend all your time working for someone else, you don't have time to learn to do things yourself."

Unemployed for nearly 20 years since he was a high school speech coach and / creative-writing teacher, he has had time to learn, among other things, how to build his own house, overhaul VW engines in his living room, keep bees for honey and make his own bullets out of wheel weights. He grew up in Rutherford, N.J., disliking cities and laying a 75-trap line for muskrats down through what is now the Meadowlands. A wounded Korean War vet, he collects $333 a month veteran's compensation, and that, along with $1,200 he and Nora make each year selling their crafts, is enough to buy the various items -- gas, Postum, margarine -- that they can't grow in their garden, hunt, sew, fish for, trade for or find in the Taos County dump.

Married for 18 years, the Oests met when he was teaching in a high school in Albuquerque and she was a sophomore. "She walked by and I handed her a book, and I felt myself falling in love," says Ron. After she graduated, he wrote her a poem, they dated, went to Mexico, got married and lived for three years in a 1948 yellow school bus parked in a coconut grove.

For the past 15 years, the Oests have lived in the Valdez Valley on three acres of land that Nora inherited from her father, land he acquired by trading a La Salle automobile to his Uncle Pedro, who needed it to get to Wyoming.

"The way we live now isn't that different from how I lived here as a child," says Nora, 36, whose great-great-great-grandfather on her father's side settled in the valley in the early 1800s to work the local gold mine, and whose great-great-grandfather on her mother's side was shot in the back delivering mail for the Pony Express.

Nora's childhood house was made of adobe, but she and Ron built their two- story, five-room house for $6,000 out of logs and cement. It is a handsome, organically grown house with unpredictable flourishes: the door handle made out of a part from a lawn mower, the recesses in the stone walls for candles, the richly ornate wood carvings throughout. Although the Oests don't have plumbing, a telephone or a well, they do have electricity and a refrigerator they bought for $10 from a neighbor who later shot himself because his condominiums failed.

In their front yard, snow melts off six other refrigerators, piles of tires, three Maytag washing machines, a dozen bicycles, several bed frames and various orderly piles of useful treasures, all harvested from the dump. Their toaster, broiler, blender, coffeepot, clock, heaters and just about every other electrical item in the house are also from the dump, repaired by Ron, along with down jackets, chairs, front ends for cars, wood, French windows and jars for canning.

"We've given away lots of bicycles and wagons to people less fortunate than us," says Nora. She has joined Ron on the porch and sips a cup of Yerba Buena herb tea. Today even the witches, famous in this valley, must be yielding to the sun, loosening their joints in this welcome reprieve from the chill.

"Once I found a typewriter in the dump that had five rusty keys and didn't work," says Ron. "I fixed it and traded it with a guy for a pig. Well, the pig had eight piglets, and I traded five of them for three VW bugs, none of which ran. I overhauled one of them to get it going; cost me $40. The next litter I traded five more piglets for another VW. We named the pig Tubby Typewriter after the typewriter."

"She was a very mellow pig," says Nora, who makes wild-chokecherry wine and bakes all her breads and biscuits with homegrown wheat and rye. "When she had her first litter, we took a bottle of wine and some glasses into the pig house to help her through."

Indoors in the kitchen, the Oests' pretty daughter Laura, 8, entertains a school chum. "This is my survival knife," she says, deftly slipping a 14-in. knife from its canvas sheath.

"You aren't afraid to touch it?" asks her playmate, aghast and giggling, her hands stuffed into her open mouth.

"No," says Laura, who also has a pellet gun, two .22s, a .45-cal. muzzle- loading rifle and muzzle-loading pistol, a bow and arrows, a wild pony named Wild Rose and her own row of flowers and vegetables in the garden. "I use it to skin squirrels." She puts the knife back into its sheath as if she were tucking one of her Barbie dolls into bed. "Squirrels are good," she adds, reaching for one of her mother's hot homemade donuts, "but there's not much meat on them."

"Laura got her hunting license when she was seven," says Ron. "She was the youngest female in New Mexico ever to earn a hunting license."

The family often goes camping together, hunting and fishing, and Ron takes Laura to the Taos County dump to shoot bottles.

"When I was a kid in New Jersey," says Ron, "I used to go to the dump to hunt rats. There was this guy named Mike who lived there in a big refrigerator crate. I remember one day he was cooking up some potatoes he'd found, and he suddenly looked around and said to me, arms outstretched, 'This place is rich. Rich.' It really made an impression on me.

"I grew up in two devastating times: I was old enough as a kid to see people in the Depression, and then later I saw items rationed during the Second World War. There are times when there's nothing, and you can't get it anywhere. Why not have your own little world where you have everything you need so no one can ever say no to you?"

Although some aspects of their world seem idyllic, there are difficulties -- constant battles to protect the environment, to keep the water in the nearby Rio Hondo clean, jaunts down to Mexico for cheaper dental work, the three-hour drive to the veteran's hospital in Albuquerque, the hopes that Laura's teeth don't grow in crooked and that her A grades will earn her a scholarship later on.

"Some people think it's scary to live the way we do," says Ron. "No life insurance. No savings. But if I die, the house is all paid for. We have four years' worth of food -- canned, frozen and dried. We have three years' worth of firewood. No bills. We have stockpiles of clothes. Living like this you just don't ever suddenly need a lot of money."