House Gods

Sustainable Buildings and Renegade Builders

Jim Kristofic

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780826363664
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Sostenibilità in architettura

Our buildings are making us sick. Our homes, offices, factories, and dormitories are, in some sense, fresh parasites on the sacred Earth, Nahasdzáán. In search of a better way, author Jim Kristofic journeys across the Southwest to apprentice with architects and builders who know how to make buildings that will take care of us. This is where he meets the House Gods who are building to the sun so that we can live on Earth. Forever. In House Gods, Kristofic pursues the techniques of sustainable building and the philosophies of its practitioners. What emerges is a strange and haunting quest through adobe mud and mayhem, encounters with shamans and stray dogs, solar panels, tragedy, and true believers. It is a story about doing something meaningful, and about the kinds of things that grow out of deep pain. One of these things is compassion—from which may come solace. We build our buildings, we make our lives—we are the House Gods.

KEEPING CHINGÓN IN LOS HUEROS

The officers who wear the uniforms have turned their backs on material wealth in an era when the nation has turned its back on everything except money. They find in the deserts and grass and mountains the only Americans who actually share their values, men dedicated to an idea of combat and valor. And so they join together in a mutual death dance where they jointly destroy the last sanctuary for human beings who do not worship Mammon. This joint suicide is never discussed. Instead the talk is of settlements, pioneers, civilization, missions, Christianity, farms, railroads, factories, cities rising on the plain, golden fields of grain, purple mountain majesties, and that fruited plain. Everything the warriors on both sides have fled.

—CHARLES BOWDEN, TRINITY

The aspens lose their gold and the pines shine dark green as autumn moves toward winter. I have split the last spruce and aspen, and I tarp my wood pile next to the gravel driveway. Frost spans the glass of the greenhouse when I walk Rainey in the morning. The adobe walls of the cabin take in the light of the winter sun. I press my hand to the smooth plastered wall and feel its heat after the sun has set.

The homes in the valleys of Taos begin to show their mists of woodsmoke in the mornings. It has drifted in blue shadows as I drive Route 518 across to the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristos Mountains to Mora County. Mora is a place where pretensions fall away. Rich people live in large plastered houses. Poor people stoke their wood stoves and vent smoke from the small chimneys of their trailers. Nobody is what they are not. At the edges of the fields, mountains rise beautiful as myth. You might expect a mountain lion or black bear to poke its head from any edge of the pine or aspen, and if you saw that you might become the kind of person you can tell stories about.

You will see road signs raised by the local people. Cows and sheep painted in black and white graze next to large red letters that read, “RANCHING NOT FRACKING.” Mora County has become the place where Jeffersonian democracy collides with the shadows of corporations who have taken the reins of the Washington stud.

The corporations have the money, the lawyers, the federal cabinet positions, and the drill heads to bore through ancient aquifers to reach the gases trapped between pastry layers of shale rock. With their concrete casings they can force gallon upon gallon, ton upon ton, of pressurized benzene, toluene, paint thinner, and diesel fuel into that shale rock and send the gasses fizzing skyward. With the shale fractured (or fracked), these petrochemicals drift into the voids and find where water flows. From there, it’s a matter of time before it finds peoples’ wells. This is all underground and complex. Many things in Mora are complex. Men in Mora cheat on their wives. They drink too much. They beat their children. But no man in Mora would tolerate another man walking into their trailer and dumping even a teaspoon of paint thinner into their child’s bathtub. This is simple.

The corporations have their systems. The people in Mora have their land. They have their Jeffersonian democracy of local laws and county commissioners. And they have nowhere to go.

The Americans around Mora need ways to cook food, run the lights at night, power the hospitals, and drive the industry. It’s not that the fangs of civilization are ready to chew Mora up. It’s that this is really part of a greater system. And some Americans really don’t mind if a mountain valley like Mora (population 4,500) is crushed on the anvil. Some don’t ask the question of what place might be next.

Other Americans think this system might be failing. Some Americans think we can cook the food, run the lights and hospital rooms, and build new industries with the power from the sun and wind.

I drive through all this as I travel to Ocate to meet Willy Groffman and learn about how to build to the sun.

I drive past the Pelón, a volcanic mound blond with autumn grass where buffalo once dotted the horizon by the tens of thousands. This was Comanche country, and they made it their own. There is a story that Spanish soldiers wrote of a band of Apaches who made camp in this country and used it to stage raids into what is now northern New Mexico. Then, one summer, those Apaches never showed up. They were gone. The Comanche put them all under the earth and ended that people.

Let us hope that Mora is not a place where people come to die. Let us hope it is a place where House God still walks in the morning.

I drive down past Willy’s turnoff. Blue sky opens to the blond horizon of sloping plains and autumn grass. The East stretches forever into what will become Texas.

I call for directions when I get lost and Willy redirects me. I drive past Duran’s Outfitters, where two elk salute each other with locked antlers from a custom iron gate, past the Montoya Ranch. I drive up the dirt road, pass the white car with red stripes. Wave. Two fingers. The Norté wave. Eyee-bro. Drive past the fields of sandstone weathered by showers of rain descending from the eight-thousand-foot rimrock ahead.

A wild turkey flies out, and his striped tail fans across the road. Western flickers tap their orange-fire wings into the air and drop to the scrub oaks. These rolling plains of grass once fed the buffalo herds that Kiowa and Comanche hunters drove into the black basalt canyons snaking back into the ponderosa pines. They hunted the buffalo and took their robes over the mountains to trade for maize and beans at Taos Pueblo.

Drive past the adobe house with pitches and valleys in its roof. Drive through cattle guards. Past the white church and the abandoned adobe houses giving themselves back to the ground.

This village once survived on sheep, with the skilled, self-reliant ranchers keeping their flocks roaming over the grass. They sold their wool to one of the several wool mills in Mora. Those mills are now gone. The wool fabric was replaced with synthetics. The train came into northern New Mexico, and the automobile brought with it the money-based economy that we now call The Economy. The barter-based, land-grant system with its network of families and kinship trading was asked to die, but it has done so only slowly.

The village below Willy was a place where many French trappers had decided to settle and take up the life of sheep and cattle ranchers. Their children were often born with blond hair. The village became a place where you found these blondies, these hueros in abundance. And so it became Los Hueros. The houses in Los Hueros still fight gravity. The roofs still take the snow load. The cattle still roam and graze, but the sheep are scarce. Those sheep scored the ground of grass back before the witchcraft of nuclear war emerged from the cauldron of Los Alamos on the other side of the mountains.

But Los Hueros will stay small. It is a place that cannot exist with money.

Drive past the blue-roofed house with cement stucco scratch-coated on the outside. Pass by and drive through the willows. Drive the Prius uphill through curving rocky road choked with boulders. Small turnouts have been cleverly dug to flow the water off the road. This is a four-wheel-drive road. I steer the Prius and hover its tires between foot-deep ruts. Ponderosa pines die brown into the air from drought.

A high-speed internet box lies torn and smashed alongside the road where a bear got curious and ripped it apart.

Go around the curve and see the window shining in the late-morning light. Willy Groffman walks out to meet me near the greenhouse. He adjusts his Santa Fe Indian Market T-shirt with red and turquoise kachina dancers. His white goatee is fringed with gray hair. His tan skin stretches tight over his thin, muscular neck.

He has a shifting, mercurial face. Sometimes you’ll think you’re looking at a Roman general emerged from a wax death mask, talking the truth from the fields of Elysium while the intelligence shines out from the brown rims of his green eyes. Other times his grin will pull back his tight, wrinkled face and you’ll hear his thick Norté accent and swear you’re talking to an old cabrón whose roots go back into the land. Other times he’ll doff his Carhartt baseball cap, tilt his face, and wink a dopey smile that reminds you that you’re also talking to a wise-ass Jewish kid who grew up on the south side of Chicago and then did the best he could to get the hell out.

Along the way, he taught himself to juggle and practiced until he became a semiprofessional.

After enough time talking with him, you realize Wilbur Groffman—Willy G—is all these things.

He points to the large greenhouse facing south. Its massive east and north walls reveal the adobe mud and cordwood. Adobe mud-building is one of the oldest methods humans have used to create their shelters. That clever compression of sand, clay, and water mixed with some kind of fiber, whether straw, grass, or small sticks, has been keeping the rain off babies and nursing women and focused craftsmen for over three thousand years. In England, this method is called cob, and the shaping of the mud wall is called cobbing. The houses where William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton grew up were cob houses. Paul Revere’s house in Boston—which still stands—was built with the same method. In northern Europe, many people build houses by adding logs from their wood pile. Take a log as long as your arm. Lay it in the mud like you’re laying a brick in mortar as you build up the wall. The ends of the logs expose to the outside and give the wall a beauty that resembles the matrix of a honeycomb.

In Willy’s greenhouse wall, the logs come from the pine forests around his home, and they don’t rot in the mud because their ends poke out and dispel any moisture into the air. The wall is fourteen inches thick. The wooden logs set into the brown mud seem like something that shouldn’t work. But they do. They have for over a thousand years.

The greenhouse is a post-and-beam construction, with the cordwood and adobe filling the voids. He and his wife, Steffie, and his friend Jody Armijo built it on the slope in a hundred days.

“Come on into my church,” Willy says. “This is where I come to worship the sun. I come in here to get religion. I don’t follow any religion. But this here is where I get the truth. The real truth. This is where I get inspired. I build to the sun.”

We walk into the twenty-by-forty-foot greenhouse. The twelve-foot ceiling at the east end and the twenty-foot ceiling at the west end rise to catch the sun’s energy under the polycarbonate panels. The panels prevent heat loss and keep rain out. The plastic is also lightweight and easily replaced after hailstorms.

Willy keeps large water barrels along the south wall to catch the energy of the photons flashing through the windows. Their heat energy is stored in the water inside the barrels. This is called solar gain. Materials like water and concrete gain heat and release it slowly. Materials like wood and stone do not.

Willy has also painted the inside of the wall in white plaster to bounce the photons into the room and spread them among the plants. Two workbenches covered in tools sit beside a patch of dirt where tomato plants staked to oak staves grow seven feet tall. Green tomatoes bulge on the limbs. A large metal firebox extends in the middle of the greenhouse with its center bowed inward to receive a large tank.

“This firebox is nice and long. Big mouth,” Willy says. “You can put a six-foot log that you cut from a standing dead tree straight into there.”

The still is for making alcohol.

“You can distill anything, really. You can make fuel and alcohol with anything that has a starch or a sugar. Corn companies are trying to get people to do it out of stockfeed. But that’s one of the worst things you can do it with. The alcohol yield is just really very low. Why not do it with weeds? Whatever you can walk out and weed whack should also be able to run your car. You know, there used to be distilleries all over this country. The original Model-T that Ford built would run on anything. You could make that alcohol down at the distillery. John D. Rockefeller, he was the one who gave money to the women who ran the Prohibition Movement. And they had their reasons, since they didn’t want their husbands going out and getting drunk and coming back and beating them up.

“But he was giving them money because that way he could shut down the distilleries. He wanted to sell everyone this gasoline that he had. People didn’t like it. It stank. But once the government closed the distilleries, gas was all there was, man. And people were trapped. People weren’t free. I want people to be free. This would close one of the last loops. That’s what this greenhouse is for. What if? What if every community, instead of building a community center, built a community greenhouse? They all worked it. Everyone used it. And they could heat it with the lumber they had around, feed it into the still. And the still could make their alcohol. Their fuel. And fuel is freedom. But the plants would be good for people, too.”

House God, Calling God, would stand in the doorway of this place.

We walk to a set of long, steel water tanks. They will hold tilapia or some kind of fish to work aquaculture in the greenhouse. He can use the fish poop to fertilize the tomato plants. His tomatoes will be growing strong through December. Last spring he grew and sold over a hundred hanging baskets of flowers and gave away dozens of tomato plants.

“Great turnover. Little communities could have little projects like that, you know. It wouldn’t be hard. People just have to want to do it. But it doesn’t seem like people want to do it, you know?”

Willy spots a place where plastic has blown out during a storm. “All that blew out from where I replaced it last. I’ll fix that.”

He takes a piece of plastic, tears it, and stuffs it into the three-inch gap.

“There. That’ll be enough to stop the bleeding until we can find a permanent solution.”

Willy reaches into a nearby planter and hands me a sprig of mint. “Crush it. Smell it.”

Willy pulls back his hand from where he stuffed the plastic. I point to where his hand is bleeding.

He stares at the cut and sucks the blood away.

“I leave a little blood on every job. Today you came along the Sangre de Cristos. Here is the Sangre de Willy!”

He laughs and sucks the blood from his leathery hand.

I walk to the Prius and let Rainey out of the car. She gets into a staring match with Willy’s female shepherd, Pinky. Pinky’s an ...