HOW TO BARTER FOR EVERYTHING

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Lacking an orchard, we soon worked out a deal with our neighbor down the road to irrigate her orchard in return for as much fruit as we could pick. Anne's orchard was substantial: peaches, sweet and sour cherries, three kinds of plums, four kinds of apples, apricots, and pears. With one-and-a-half water rights, she was entitled to a lot of water, and it took us an entire day each week to manage it (or attempt to manage it, I should say). Every Monday was a battle with the gophers. We would open up the first compuerta (head gate), and then watch the water disappear down a gopher hole before it ever touched a tree. No sooner did we plug that hole than the water disappeared down a second, thwarting us again. After spending all morning chasing the water around in order to find and fill gopher holes, we'd sit back and rest, only to find a whole row of pears completely bereft of water. Then we would begin again. It was still a good trade, however, judging by the amount of fruit we ate—dried, canned, and frozen.

All of our bartering skills lead to the granddaddy of all trades—the birth of our son
Jakob.

We also used bartering to build a new house. After a few years, our 100-year-old rented adobe began to lose its initial charm. Three major roof repairs, a blocked septic tank, and constant dirt drifting down from the ceiling (flat-roofed adobe houses are often covered with two feet of dirt between the ceiling and the tarred roof, acting as insulation) convinced us it was time to build our own house and put to use all the building skills we had acquired. Placitas is an original Spanish land grant, and most of the land in the village is part of the San Antonio de Las Huertas grant, not for sale. Although our landlord, an Anglo from Albuquerque, owned a beautiful piece of land adjacent to the house, he refused to sell it. We finally settled on five acres, a mile from the village, located off a forest access road leading into the Sandia Mountains. A few other families had already built there, and water and electricity were available if you could pay the price to sink a well and extend the underground wire. (Unfortunately, electric companies and well diggers aren't all that interested in barter.)

Once we found the money to pay them, though, it was time for some real trading, which meant working on all our friends' houses while they helped us on ours. This included filing cement block, laying adobes, installing window frames, running wire, fitting pipes, cutting vigas (wooden beams that support the ceiling), pouring bond beams, plastering, laying brick floors, and installing wood stoves. Our friend Tom proved invaluable. He and his family lived in a valley above the village where they worked constantly on their dome, a dwelling built of colorful junked car-tops, always in need of repair. I think we actually paid Tom wages for a while, but for the most part we traded labor, adobe for adobe (he was building an adobe addition to the dome), nail for nail. When we got to the bond beam, the layer of cement that sits on top of the adobe walls to hold the roof beams, we recruited several other home builders to haul the buckets of cement up our walls, as we would theirs.

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