Today is my birthday, and I can’t imagine giving myself a better birthday present than that of purchasing a home in the Land of Enchantment. But why Silver City, New Mexico? The reasons are many, and many are experiencing a global migration crisis. My husband, Chuck, and I felt pushed and pulled from Asheville to the desert Southwest just north of the Mexican border.
One of the reasons is financial. We could afford to buy a house in Silver City, and we couldn’t in Asheville. We had planned to build a home on a lot purchased in the Isis Cove Community near Cherokee when the economy crashed in 2008. During that time, the mortgage on the home we planned to sell to finance the building of our new house went upside down. We lost significant equity as the economy plummeted, sold at a loss, and walked away with dashed dreams and tax liability for the short sale. So we sold the lot to gain more ground and moved to Asheville. Renting was our only option as we struggled to recover financially and hoped to buy another home one day before we grew too old. But the housing market in Asheville did not cooperate with that plan, and we watched prices double within a few short years.
When a letter came in late 2022 from the manager of our expensive but very nice apartment complex announcing that rent for our unit was being raised by $750 per month, we went into shock. No one I know of got a $750-a-month raise, including us. Elders living on fixed incomes were displaced. Families who could no longer afford to buy a home flooded into the apartment complex, additionally moving in their siblings, nieces, and nephews so as to be able to afford the rent. Like many others, I had to take another job to make ends meet. Our days in Asheville were numbered.
If man cuts the branch upon which he sits, then where is the man to sit? — Prem Rawat
Nothing short of a miracle, an artist and gardener friend in Silver City introduced us to her artist friend, Jo, a woman in her late seventies who was preparing to sell her house. The seller, location, price, and timing lined up for us. So, we flew into Albuquerque in late May, rented a car, and headed south to meet Jo and see her house. Crossing the Rio Grande, we drove through Hatch, the “Chili Capital of the World,” turning north at Deming until we saw the much-anticipated sign, “Welcome to Silver City.”
Chuck had never been to Silver City, at 6,000 feet on the Continental Divide. We had formerly lived at 3,600 feet on the Blue Ridge Divide. Three of our kids have been to Silver and love the Southwest. Chuck’s daughter, Laura, flew to Phoenix and met up with us in Silver to see the house and be of support. I could only hope that Chuck would feel the same way that everyone else felt, and by the grace of the gods, he did.
The house, built in 1931, exceeded our expectations, and we put it under contract in early June. It has solid oak wood floors — worn golden with age, high ceilings with fans, insulating thickly textured plaster walls, and aluminum siding that blocks EMFs. Mexican-built rock walls grace the front and rear of the house, and Jo placed colorful tiles from Mexico throughout. Important to me was that Jo had grown an herb, vegetable, and flower garden in a yard with peach, pear, and mulberry trees. Important to her, too, was that someone received her home who could appreciate all that she had done to it. Being the artist she is and having formerly lived in Mexico, she brightly painted the house inside and out. There are extensive yard art metal sculptures, driftwood sculptures, colorful rocks, and stones, including ones with turquoise running through them from a nearby mine, a tree trunk bench cut from a Ponderosa pine in the Gila Wilderness, and Saguaro ribs hauled from Arizona. I fell in love.
And if all that wasn’t enough, the house sits on “the hill” only minutes from town on sacred land. The Mimbres, a prehistoric North American people who produced black-on-white pottery beginning around A.D. 200, lived here in pit houses before transitioning to pueblos. Jo tells me that Mimbres pottery washes out of the soil in the garden. Behind the house to the west is an archeological site with a walking trail and magnificent sunset views over the Piños Altos Mountains.
So, we flew back to Asheville, gave our apartment manager notice, packed up our entire lives, rented and loaded a 20-foot U-Haul, and drove four long days back across the country towing an auto transport. We closed on the house five days after arriving in Silver City, 30 days after putting it under contract. The move took every penny we had. We took a risk assuming the mortgage would go through but felt reassured by our mortgage originator, who became more like a therapist to me through the nerve-wracking process. I have never jumped through so many hoops in my life.
Buying a home is not as easy as it used to be. Our originator half-joked that after 30 years of helping people buy homes, she might need a second job. Too many houses are bought for cash, eliminating the mortgage broker. Many sell for more than the asking price, with investment firms, like BlackRock, owning 25% of all single-family homes and private equity (house flipping) operations as high as 44%. Mortgage rates are too high for entry buyers to afford the monthly payment at the selling price as comps get jacked up, and they get “priced out.” To be able to buy the home that we did was nothing short of a miracle. We made a great slide to steal home using a baseball analogy. Chuck loves baseball analogies! We got in just under the wire. But the signs were clear, and we received incredible support and guidance.
While Chuck may have been unfamiliar with Silver City, I have frequented the area since the mid 1980s, camping in the Gila, playing at the Buckhorn saloon, hanging out with friends, including Jammin’ Jeff, and soaking at various hot springs in the Mimbres and along the San Francisco River. Living in North Carolina, I missed the drier climate, the smell of piñon, cedar, and sage, and mostly the light. But I never thought I would want to live in Silver City because of the open pit mines, which flank the area to the east and southwest. The up close sight of the open-pit Chino copper mine to the east sickens me like witnessing a rape over which I have no control. Even the name for the rich copper deposits in the heart of Apache country, is disturbing. Chino is Spanish for the “Chinese.” According to Trip Advisor, it is a “Sight Worth Seeing.”
The Chino mine, known to the Spanish as Santa Rita del Cobre, is a sight I now see off in the distance from my new home’s east-facing front porch. The mine is located fifteen miles to the east in the ghost town of Santa Rita. A few miles further in the Santa Rita Mountains is one of the most famous natural landmarks in the American Southwest, a 500-foot monolith uncannily reminiscent of a clad, kneeling human figure that we know today as the Kneeling Nun who I imagine prays for redemption over the rich copper deposits below her. Raised Catholic, Chuck jokes about our new address being on Pope Street, with a view of the Kneeling Nun. As a whole, the mountains, mine, and monolith make for an awe-inspiring vista.
There is more to discover about why we are here, perched above Silver City with a view of the mine in the distance. What I can tell you is it is a power spot. The mine is where copper, a good conductor of electricity and heat, is extracted for use in electrical equipment. Copper is an essential material that makes our world work. From the smallest electronic device to our most complex systems and equipment, our dependency on them makes us incredibly vulnerable.
Copper is one of the Elementals I write about in my book, Wisdom of the Plant Devas. And it is no accident that Chuck and I formerly owned an electronics store (StarPony Electronics) and now find ourselves humbled, like the Kneeling Nun, overlooking the third oldest active open pit copper mine.
Another reason for our move was to get to a drier climate for health reasons. Chuck and I had both been exposed to toxic mold in Western North Carolina, both in the workplace and at home, and it has taken a toll on our health. About a week before we were to pick up the U-Haul, Chuck got sick, which left more of the packing to me. And we both worked at our jobs up until the move. I do not know what I would have done if our kids and stepson had not stepped in to help with the packing and loading. My daughter and a dear friend brought medicinal soups. Another friend brought a green chili casserole. I felt as though I were having a baby and was in transition. Chuck improved enough to pack the U-Haul and make the trip. But once we arrived in the desert, it kicked his ass. He had a terrible time adjusting to the dryness, record-breaking heat, and altitude and became disoriented. Chuck had lived in the Appalachians his entire life.
We would have settled into the house and this post published sooner had it not been that Chuck landed in the hospital on July 11, eleven days after arriving in Silver City. We have been through the hospital routine before, only this time we were in a new place, a long way from immediate family and Chuck’s pulmonologist who saved his life in 2019, pulling him through COVID pneumonia in 2022. After days of struggling with no energy and low blood oxygen, he became hypoxic. We first went to a local clinic that referred him to the hospital.
We arrived at the Gila Regional emergency room at 4:30 in the afternoon. Five hours later and a battery of tests, including a CT scan with contrast to rule out a pulmonary embolism, they threw up their hands, called it Community-Acquired Pneumonia (from fungi), and sent him home with steroids and antibiotics. The frustration we felt over having moved for health reasons, fleeing the damp, moldy East for the dry Southwest, only to have Chuck end up in the hospital in respiratory distress, disheartened us.
Chuck and I know that most medical doctors do not consider that he has CIRS, Chronic Inflammatory Respiratory Syndrome, known as Mold Illness from toxic mold exposure in the workplace. He reported it to OSHA, but North Carolina has no mold exposure standards and we got hung out to dry. The environmental testing at his worksite revealed four types of toxic mold, one of them being Aspergillus. When Chuck could receive no help from his employer, he quit his job and sought help from a Functional Medicine doctor who also ran some tests. Chuck’s urine test returned positive for two types of toxic mold, including the pathogenic mold, Aspergillus fumigatus.
In a study published in Science Daily, researchers at Montana State University’s Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases showed a strong link between hypoxia and Aspergillus. The shortage of oxygen results from inflammation and invasive mold growth, the most lethal of those infections is invasive aspergillosis. Aspergillus mold is part of the earth and may be found outdoors in decaying leaves, compost, and on plants, trees, and grain crops.
As Chuck lay struggling for breath even after returning from the hospital and two steroidal breathing treatments later, I began to pray for help.
In the coolness of the falling night and facing west, the direction of the Mimbres site, I prayed for him and was given a vision. Ancient Indian spirits appeared to me on the hill, wrapped in what appeared to be textured woven cloth. I felt a great sense of community. Then I heard their message:
We are of the Earth. Do not fear the Earth. We live in and on the Earth. It cools us when it is hot and warms us when it is cold. Be of the Earth.
Their simple message took away my fear, and I knew that Chuck, an astrological earth sign, was going through a death and rebirth process, a transformation, and an initiation. We had moved just in time from one Great Divide to another. We followed the lei lines, many of them laid down by friends: a large crystal from the Gila Wilderness given to me by Mirren McConnell (Spirit of Women Network, moderator), who previously lived in the area and longed to return; hawk feathers from brother Jeff; herbs on my shelf wildcrafted from the Gila by Michael Cottingham (Voyage Botanica); the books of the late Stephen Harrod Buhner who lived in Silver and loved the Gila Wilderness, and the books of Michael Moore who started the Southwest School of Botanical Medicine in Silver City, can be found on my bookshelf.
And then there is the lei line that took the form of two art prints I collected and hung on my walls over the years. Apache Spring by Paul Rossi came to me shortly before I left Tucson and moved to Highlands, NC. Sculptor Mark Rossi, is his son and my friend. Mark’s love of the Southwest was deeply affected by his mother’s Apache, Pueblo, and Spanish-New Mexican heritage. At ten, he began observing his father, a prominent Western artist and former Gilcrease Museum Art director, as he worked in his studio and foundry. Apache Spring is a painting Paul did for his son Mark when he was a boy.
The Apache Woman came to me after I moved to Highlands. The artist, Gladys Fugati, was the aunt of an artist friend, David, a totem pole carver. After Gladys passed away, David found her paintings hidden in a closet where she didn’t want anyone to see them because she did not believe they were any good. Astounded by her talent, David matted prints that he had made of her work. One one of them made its way to me as Chuck and I have now made our way, guided by their warrior spirits, to the heart of Apache country.
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