HOW TO BARTER FOR EVERYTHING

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BARTER

A determined New Mexican family frees itself from today's market economy.

By kay Matthews

Over the past 20 years, my husband Mark and I have bartered everything from a two-week vacation in a mountain cabin to a hernia operation for Mark. Trading our time, labor, and skills seems so much more intimate and humane then selling ourselves on the free market for money (worth much less, I must admit). So that's why we moved here, to northern New Mexico, where people still maintain a diverse enough lifestyle to keep bartering alive.

Back in the early '70s, when we started out in Placitas, New Mexico, a small Hispanic village at the north end of the Sandia Mountains, we didn't have many skills to offer in trade. What we did have was a desire to live a simpler life in a community more in touch with its environment—the antidote to our lives as suburban children of the '50s. Placitas provided a community with 200-year ties to the land, where people tended their gardens and orchards, raised chickens and goats, and took care of their own needs as best they could. Surviving on part-time jobs in Albuquerque, the state's largest city 25 miles away, we rented a 100-yearold house in the village, turned over a garden plot, and began our apprenticeship in subsistence living.

When our roof started leaking like a sieve, our landlord traded us a month's rent to fix it. To figure out how to fix it in the future, we took care of our friend Tom's kids in exchange for his expertise. When the leech lines blocked up, we bartered another month's rent. I'll never forget those days in the middle of January, digging through the frozen ground to replace old tar-paper pipe with PVC. We even had Mark's 20-year-old cousin, Marian (who was visiting from New York), out there with us, picking and shoveling away.

While learning the joys of house repair, Mark and I were initiated into the rites of the acequia, or irrigation system. A mayordomo controlled the water rights, determining how much and on which days you could irrigate your garden and orchard. On the day you needed to irrigate, you had to track him down in order to request the water. Then you had to make sure that your neighbor, after seeing the water come down the ditch, didn't decide to irrigate his own garden as well. Finally, you had to direct the water once it got to the garden so that it didn't run straight through the lettuce and drown it, missing the corn altogether.

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