Begoso Cabin: A Pecos Country Retreat

by Mari Graña

Mari Gra a begins her account of an adventure that grew out of her desire to withdraw to the wild and that ends with a sense of homecoming and community: "I saw over a rise in a meadow a little stone cabin far in the distance. The landscape of the canyon--the rocky pine-covered ridges, the long wide meadow with the escarpment of Rowe Mesa rising in the background--suddenly became the place I had dreamed about."

Once she had purchased the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826320988
• ISBN13: 9780826320988
• Release Date: August 1999
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 167 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

rats, snakes and a puppy.

Widowed, and with two sons old enough to live on their own, Mari Grana set about fulfilling her dream of owning a small homestead in a remote area of New Mexico. This she found in Begoso Canyon. It was an old stone cabin, long deserted, with mud-plastered walls, and full of rat droppings & broken furniture. It lacked running water and electricity. Her only companion would be a Labrador puppy. And her pickup truck. This is a beautifully written book. It goes far beyond documenting the struggles involved in fixing up of a cabin or adjusting to rural life. It waxes poetic on the beauty and isolation of the area. It educates (and at times, stuns) us with it's often tragic history. It introduces us to her neighbors and greater community and the strong bonds they have with the land. This book should appeal to anyone with enough "hermit" DNA in them to think of escaping the rat race. And also to anyone interested in slice of NM history. A quiet, overlooked gem of a book.

Begoso Cabin warms the heart & piques the adventurous spirit

Begoso Cabin is the account of a woman's experiences living in a remote canyon in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The author has described the land, the animals, the people in vivid detail. The book is replete with pleasing morsels of historical research beginning with the Pecos Indians who once hunted the area, the region's importance as the entry into Mexican territory on the Santa Fe Trail, the takeover of the Southwest by the United States, the legal hassles over the old Spanish land grant on which the Begoso cabin is located, to today's village customs and economy. Begoso Cabin partakes of a genre of women's writing that is characterized by such authors as Annie Dillard, Dorothy Gilman, Gretel Ehrlach and others who have retreated to the wilds to write their stories. Begoso Cabin is a good read, full of historical, and often humorous, anecdotes, sensitve landscape description, and sociological commentary on village life rendered in a vibrant and poetic prose.