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Beside the Rio Hondo

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if the mountain doesn't want you, you can't stay." The hippies "started this legend" but in Phaedra Greenwood's case, the legend was true.

After the end of her marriage, she returned to the family cabin and found a way to stay. The cabin is located in Arroyo Hondo, 10 miles north of Taos, which she initially shared with her husband Aaron and in which they raised their two children. They left to pursue careers in Colorado, but Greenwood returned to the cabin after their divorce with very little money, very little homesteading skill, and an old car.

She tells a basically true story of her successful efforts to stay in the cabin, changing the names of her neighbors and collapsing the time sequences of events so that they fit into a framework of season by season.

Her writing is clear and spare:

"Leroy Marquez was out hoeing rows to plant pumpkins in his garden plot, and Roy Barela was driving his tractor up and down the field, making his first cut of alfalfa."

"The silver river sparkled through the cottonwood trees and dropped in noisy rills as it rushed over smooth stones on its way to meet the Rio Grande. Across the stream, white Arabians grazed in the pasture, swishing their tails."

"The tawny fields and ditches lined with vibrant willows, some vermilion and some like flame."

She tells her story well, and she overcomes many obstacles in staying in this place: "I have a great love of being here and wanting to be in this place."

I found her story moving and true, and very much enjoyed her successful efforts to the place where her "heart still expands."

Robert C. Ross 2009

If Henry David Thoreau had been a thoroughly self-reliant, hot-blooded woman with a taste for the Southwest instead of a chilly Yankee who went home to his mother's dinner table every night, he might have produced a book very much like this. Phaedra Greenwood's Walden is her beloved Rio Hondo in the mountains of New Mexico near Taos. Her hut is an old adobe built by descendants of the Spanish settlers who colonized Northern New Mexico starting in the 16th century.

The book traces a year in Greenwood's life after she returns to the mountains following the breakup of her marriage. With no man, no income to speak of, and not yet enough homesteading skills to provide much security, Greenwood attaches herself to the land like a smudge of moss on a mountainside, and hangs on with a tenacity that is nothing short of heroic. Her whole life is a cliffhanger. It makes for a wild adventure story.

But it is also a love story. Like Thoreau, Greenwood engages nature with a passion so embracing and intimate, the distance between the human and what she's observing sometimes disappears entirely. After tanning a deer hide, she writes, "I draped it over the trunk to dry; it stiffened to the rectangular shape and lay there all winter to remind me that I, too, am here to feed and nurture the land, to be consumed by it, invaded and conquered from within." The book is a work of high sensuality without having a single sex scene in it.

Stylistically, Greenwood is in the minimalist tradition of the best nature writers. She just tells her story, with heart, humor, and simple but ravishing imagery. The writing never gets in the way of our getting to know her and the world she loves. She treats the reader as her friend, not her audience.

"I can bear pain and loss," Greenwood writes. "What I can't bear is being imprisoned." Beside the Rio Hondo is the story of a journey toward freedom, a travelogue that takes you miles and miles without ever leaving the property. This poignant, unflinchingly honest, beautiful, and thoroughly absorbing book reminds us that if it's freedom you want, the only road that goes there is love.

For anyone living in rural New Mexico, this book is hard to put down. Especially if you're a single woman trying to make a go of it. Following a divorce, author Phaedra Greenwood (who also writes for enchantment) wanted to return to her beloved adobe house near Taos. It was a place with fond memories of raising her young family. It was a place that evoked a deep spiritual connection to the land. It was a place her ex-husband made her pay rent on while he tried to sell it after they split.

Greenwood returned to the house after 15 years and began restoring what various renters had destroyed. Locals entered her life and helped with splitting firewood and cleaning the acequia. She returned the favor where she could, often with re-plastering the little church in the village. She says much of the book comes from journals she kept. Throughout the book she needs to find work; her savings are running out. She has a year to raise enough money to buy the acres the house is on. Readers will root for her all the wa

Phaedra Greenwood's memoir of her life in northern New Mexico. Set in an idyllic setting high over a small, gurgling river surrounded by green pasture lands and blessed by the constant sunlight in her rural landscape, she writes a moving story of a life that grew and evolved through hardship and heartbreak. It is a tribute to nature and the pleasure and peace she found in her adobe house and the extraordinary beauty that surrounds her.

Beside The Rio Hondo is a taut, beautifully realized work. The insightful foreword by Alexander Blackburn is a rarity. It is essential reading because it sets the tone, the sense of place and introduces the unique voice of Phaedra Greenwood.

Beside The Rio Hondo is a powerful book. To try to put it in simple terms, it is the story of a woman who decided to accept her destiny, cast off the conventions of numbing social graces, to become a writer. But that is where the simplicity ends. This book is at once a biography, a historical review, a folklore guide, an environmental study and a profoundly touching text on how to survive without surrendering one's beliefs and sense of self-worth.

The locus of Beside The Rio Hondo is Northern New Mexico, primarily in Arroyo Hondo, northwest of Taos. Within its magical pages, people, families and the entire community come to life. There are struggles over something so basic as water. As Ms. Greenwood writes, "Sin agua, no hay vida. Without water, there is no life."

This book is rich with details about living in a rough-hewn landscape in the mountains, along side a river with cold winters, wild animals, and the comings and goings of friends and family. The darkest cloud for Phaedra Greenwood is something most people don't think about: SURVIVAL. Throughout the book she uses wit, intelligence and muscle to survive with little and at times no money.

This is a uniquely honest book. Beside The Rio Hondo is written so well, with great style and insight, I often felt I was there with Ms. Greenwood as would swing over the river, go hunting with bow and arrow, splitting wood or dressing up to make an occasion trip to town.

It is well worth a first read, and a second and third read, as well. It is a book you will want to keep with you for its history and its humanity.