I decided I was out of patience with the summer heat and the frantic pace of my days, and so I proposed an extended holiday weekend in Cloudcroft, a little resort town nestled in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains at 8500 feet. We rented a large house overlooking a beautiful mountain valley and settled in for four nights.

We were joined by our friend Louy. Louy has invited us on many occasions to spend time at her family’s cabin in Ruidoso, but the cabin burned down in the catastrophic Ruidoso fire last year, along with 1400 other structures. We decided to repay Louy’s hospitality by treating her to a vacation in Cloudcroft.

We ate the first night at an excellent restaurant in a lodge in town (built 1899), but the rest of the time we cooked our own meals and drank our own wine.

I didn’t do much else. The altitude knocked me out for a day, and my usual mountain trekking is limited by the fact I that at present I have only one functioning limb. But I was fine with relaxing for a few days, and the Sacramentos provided their own entertainment.

One afternoon a herd of wild horses trotted past. A bull elk, a cow elk, and two youngsters paused for an hour to crop the grass, as seen in the photos above.

Groups of whitetail deer were common. The birds were delightful. Kathy saw a skunk trotting down the road.

I even got in a couple nights of writing, and I wrote good.

Our Fourth of July was low-energy. It felt off-key to celebrate a republic that’s on life support, where the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have become a historical curiosity and literally anyone can be branded a foreign terrorist and sent to a torture camp in El Salvador. So for a few days I tried to forget all that and enjoy the wildlife.

It was good to cool off for a while. But now I’m back in the Hot Zone.