(2 of 3)
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?"