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My Page: Carol Mell

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

As a minister’s wife I can’t help but have sympathy for Hillary Clinton. Having a position by marriage that subjects your house, your parenting skills, your hairdo and your dog to scrutiny is what we pastors’ wives, or PWs, call “life in a fishbowl.”

My life could be Hillary’s except for no cameras, no state dinners, no trips around the world, no book contracts and no speaking fees. Oh, and my husband doesn’t cheat.

So, here are ten tips for pastor's and president's wives. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

I missed a doozy of a meeting as Albuquerque architect Don May justified two variances before Taos Planning and Zoning Commission. The first variance is from the town’s architectural style code because of the “functionally driven” nature of the building and the second is a request to double the 6-foot wall height limit. That’s right, they want a 12-foot wall.

What the town hadn’t told us before was that the new command center, around the corner from my house, was also a homeland security center and would have to be built, according to May, to withstand TNT and bullets.

I went around my neighborhood with copies of the plan. Most laughed. “Homeland security,” one questioned, “why can’t we get some help with graffiti?” [more]

Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

It's just an empty lot, a couple of acres across the street from my house. If I walk out my front door to the faraway end, I can watch the sun set behind the Pedernal near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Georgia O'Keeffe believed that by painting the flat-topped Pedernal, she could own it.

"It's my private mountain," O'Keeffe said. "It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it."

By Ms. O'Keeffe's lights, I've walked, talked, sung and prayed in that empty lot enough that it should be mine. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Two years ago, the Rev. Chris Lieberman was awakened in the night by a voice. It was the kind of voice, he said, that you didn't have to ask who it was.

A little while after, Lieberman dreamed of prison, seeing himself in an orange jumpsuit, righting another's tray of food before it could fall to the floor.

Lieberman is the epitome of "mild-mannered," soft spoken if not silent.

"I'm not afraid," said Lieberman. "It continues to be the right thing to do."

Lieberman will turn himself in at the Federal Corrections Institute on April 6 in Anthony, Texas. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

"I'm so jealous Lester Holt is coming to your house," my grown daughter said. "Of course, I'd be more jealous if it were Matt Lauer."

In one of those strange, almost surreal things that can happen around Taos, Lester Holt, host of the weekend NBC "Today" show, was coming to our house to investigate the Taos Hum and to talk to my husband, a Hum hearer.

What a regular guy and he even likes dogs. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

This year I’m breaking my silence to say why I didn’t vote for Hillary though I wanted to vote for a woman.

“I’m doing it for my daughters,” I told myself but they made it loud and clear they wanted no part of the female version of a Clinton White House.

One of the twins is no doubt remembering how she learned about "oral sex" from the first President Clinton.

Nowadays, we hear Barack Obama’s supporters chanting, “Yes we can.”

To hear Obama chanting the English version of, “Sí Se Puede,” the famous rallying cry of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers has a strong resonance with Spanish speakers. I admit that at first it sounded strange but there is honesty in the way Obama is using it. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

I don’t get the Super Bowl. As far as I can tell it’s all about odd balls, bouncing female anatomy, beer, Roman Numerals and a few cars thrown in.

I do understand the game.

In fact, I was a football player myself with a bunch of boys in the neighborhood. Granted, they weren’t the most athletic types. One was fat and one had a withered hand but I was a girl so we were all making do.

The only event I can imagine that would put so many women in front of the television would be Oprah’s wedding but that would only work once, leading me to conclude that guys are simpler. They’ve found a formula that puts them together, front and center for a day. Is it their fault if women suffer from Super Bowl envy? [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

We lost some interesting people last year. It was the death of Evel Knievel, the bunged up daredevil in the confederate-flag suit that hit closest to home.

I was home from college after Evel’s famous jump over the Snake River in Twin Falls, Idaho, not far away. I thought he was cheating by claiming to jump the “Snake River Canyon.” He knew darned well that we’d all imagine Hell’s Canyon, a huge chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon but then, Evel was always one for exaggeration.

“I hear Evel’s got a brother, Awful Knawful, who’s even better than he is,” Bud said confidentially.

“There is no such person, Bud.”

“I’d still like to see him.”

There never was much point in arguing with Bud. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Here in Taos Valley, where fresh batches of starving artists collect as fast as beer bottles tossed into my driveway, folks are fond of saying that if the mountain calls, you will stay. If not, you’ll be turned away, forced to search for your muse (or cheaper rent) at lower altitudes. In Taos, quite a few are called but very few are chosen.

My husband was the one to get a call to move to Taos but then he’s in the call business, being a minister. Payment is optional in his line of work but a call is required. Still, about one month after moving here from the Arizona desert, it was my husband who started getting up and walking around the house at night complaining about an infernal noise, a hum that he said sounded like the low rumbling of trucks in the distance. It was driving him crazy.

The Albuquerque Journal North, the newspaper that runs my column, revisited the Taos Hum issue again recently. My former editor, Polly Summar, contacted me about finding hum hearers. She remembered the column I wrote about Wayne's unfortunate ability to hear the hum. In the end he was the only hearer she could find. [more]

Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

It’s an old Taos story. Artists come to town to bask in the light, the land and the history but this is the version with a musical twist. It concerns Daniel Pretends Eagle and his band, “Bone Orchard.” His other half, Carol Morgan-Eagle, not only performs vocals with the band; she’s the organizer, stylist and taskmaster in their lives and on their newest CD, “A Romance of Ghosts.”

Dan is a thoughtful, learned and still-looking-for-answers kind of man who works out his questions on the guitar, banjo, percussion and most of all in his songwriting. He is an imposing but not menacing 6 foot 2.

“My father was Lakota Sioux, raised in a boarding school,” Dan said. “He had a lot of issues and left when I was a baby. They say I’m not that tall for a Pretends Eagle. We were tall and good horsemen.”

That’s the kind of story with which Pretends Eagle had to settle while his Anglo mother raised him in an Illinois suburb.

His musical influences were underground dissonant rock and roll bands like “Velvet Underground” and “Joy Division.” He started his first band in seventh grade. [more]