Writing about his experiences in the places he's been clarifies and preserves them for Greg Holt, perhaps like marking signposts along a route, destination unknown.
Greg was born in Texas and grew up there as well as in other places including California, New Mexico, Alaska, Germany, Venezuela, and Norway. He started college in Barcelona, Spain and later quit college in Texas to work the oilfields of Iran and Egypt. His two daughters were born in California where their mother, a fellow traveler, was also born. He left there to work a construction project in Asia for two years and returned to Korea a couple years later after a failed business attempt in the US. He brought his young family to Venezuela in the early 1990's and realized three years later that he had lived in Caracas longer than he had any other place for a continuous length of time except for when he lived in New Mexico. He was a boy then and would visit the high country with his family, fishing, camping, or climbing.
Greg has traveled for work, but that wasn't the primary motivation for going. When he had the money, he traveled just for the joy of being somewhere he had not been before: taking photographs on the savanna of Masai Maru or along a river, brown with silt, in Samburu, East Africa; hiking among Incan ruins in the mountains of Peru with his daughter and spending Christmas in the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco; scuba diving in the clear waters of Caribbean islands and teaching his girls to snorkel among the corals in Bonaire and Bequia; sitting in temple gardens in Kyoto in the spring when his oldest was a baby and she held sprigs of sakura in her tiny fingers; driving through the terraced hills of Bali to Hindu temples guarded by hordes of tourist friendly monkeys; taking time to drink sugary chai with Bakhtiari nomads in their black tents outside Shiraz; or trekking the Annapurna massif in Nepal.
He writes for personal gratification. But he has occasionally been published internationally, for instance, as a columnist in The Korea Herald.
Greg's house is in Houston but he spends at least a few days away each week on business. He works for an international engineering and construction firm as an inspector for their projects. He speak passable Spanish and, as a result, often spends time in Latin America for his work. He spent much of last year in Mexico in the colonial silver mining area of Queretaro.
Greg owns a few acres in Southern New Mexico and dreams of building a house in the temperate heights of the Sacramento Mountains there someday.
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The lady at the Forest Service office in Ruidoso said I could take a tree up to ten feet tall, so that's what I was determined to do. Although tempted, I wasn't going to give up on removing this tree and taking it to the land I'd bought a couple of years ago. The land where I'll live someday.
After another fifteen minutes, the tree was laid on its side, and I dug underneath in slightly softer soil until I had about 18 inches of tap root. Finally, the tree was pulled from the hard spare ground. I carefully wrapped and tied the rootball in a cloth, packing clots of the dirt that had fallen away from the springy roots. Shouldering the tree, I carried it to the truck and laid it carefully inside with stiff arms and shaky hands. It was a good tiredness I felt, and I smiled while sipping a cold drink from the cooler and watching deep blue clouds crowd up over the high Sierra Blanca.
The air was cooling as indigo clouds rose in the West, crowding against and pushing over the mountain peaks 12,000 feet high. The massive thunderheads had crossed the burning desert of the Tularosa Basin with their promise of relief to meet the mountains and change to electric blue. I knew from the smell of the ground it was going to rain here high above the lava flows and white sands to the west and the scrub desert of the Pecos River valley to the east.
My future home is on land that is defined by its stark contrast from the surrounding deserts. It is a high altitude sanctuary for bear, elk, wild turkey, and mountain lions isolated in these mountains among stands of pine, aspen and juniper. It is a place where trout swim in shallow pools of clear running streams deepened by snowmelt in the spring. And a place where weary travelers like me might look towards their future in the thin air of this massive oasis, clean and quiet above empty flatlands.
Arriving on my land 20 minutes later, I carried the tree to a meadow near the road where there were juniper and piñon trees. I hoped someday to see a large ponderosa pine standing by a corral there. The rain came as expected as I dug away the yellow grass and excavated the place for the tree, which now lay living still near my feet. The upper two inches of the soil broke slowly to the shovel as I jumped with both feet onto the back of the blade. As the surface broke away to the softer soil beneath, I could see the hard brown ground streaked with white where the shovel cleaved it cleanly. I dug in a wide circle, struggling to get deeper. Large drops, hard and cool, smacked the back of my neck and my hat and, after a time, softened the ground slightly. It was a good time to plant.
I think a tree is like an investment in the future. In growth and permanence. This five acres is where I choose to live in my future. Where strong trees sink stiff roots into the hard ground at 7,000 feet. And the smell of juniper, piñon, and ponderosa pine scent the freshening air.
I thought my life had been like this. I'd been digging in hardscrabble dirt in ever widening circles, just like now. But I'd never invested much in one place. Never planted much. I'd just left much behind. Sometimes regretfully, and sometimes gladly. I grew up without a geographic connection to a place called home. My father traveled to find work. And I followed in his footsteps. A young life spent out on the road. Working in the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Traveling further still when I had the money to go. At 44, now I tell people I live in Houston, but I mostly live in hotels, running to catch the next plane to spend the weekend with my family there.
The circular hole was widening to accept my small, hard-gained tree, but it was not yet deep enough to hold the roots. I once equated the hard widening of my experiences with the purpose of my life. I believed wisdom is only gained by experience. But a wide excavation is not always a deep one. Not the kind where, given time, roots weave intricately into the earth, mining it for nourishment and growth. Finding illumination by standing still in the delicate certainty of being in the right place. I moved the shovel to the center and began to dig down.
There was a jagged double flash of lightning on the mountains above, electric white bolts against the dark blue of the storm. It was followed in a few seconds by a crack of thunder, then the spattering of the rain intensified. My wet shirt stuck to my back, the hole soaked up the water, and the moistened soil gave slightly, reluctantly to the shovel.
I paused for breath as the thunder rushed away down the valleys to the east where rolling hills lay expectantly. Behind the thunder there was stillness and a sense of waiting for the next wave of the storm to come down from the mountains above. But nothing came, just a lull in the air where I paused in my planting, a quiet spot under the sky on my land, and . . . expectation. A shaft of clear mountain light broke from the high clouds and illuminated the land where I stood in my tiny endeavor. I listened to the rain hitting the grass and the trees, and heard nothing else under the vast turbulent sky.
I looked uphill to where I will build my house someday, among large pines on a rocky outcropping. I hoped to see an elk or deer sheltering in the shadows, perhaps. But there was only the rain, quietly spattering the grass. I turned again to my digging.
Finally, I stood the tree in its new place, cut the wraps, and pushed the taproot into the ground of its new home. It will be fine to see the day when this ponderosa pine is tall enough to shelter me from the rain. I watched clear rain water beading and dripping from the light green needles on the branches, and silently wished my tree to grow well in its new place. I ran my hand softly along a stem of pine needles and felt their pliant response in my palm.