Talking

We are off the power grid here, but we do have access to telephone service. Buried cable crisscrosses the ground in a silent network. The phone lines were installed in this sparsely inhabited area of Costilla County under a federal grant, in hopes that all of this open space would be developed and settled.

I don't know that any of our two or three neighbors takes advantage of the phone lines. People out here don't seem to talk very much.

Here, the wind does most of the talking. Howling, whispering, sighing, singing to itself. I think the wind's overbearing voice -- the wind that blasted tons of sand across the plains to create the Great Sand Dunes -- is one reason why the area will never be successfully settled.