"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.