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"  I have a friend who lives way up high on the bluffs of a canyon in New Mexico, where she collects acorns and chokecherries and wild grape leaves for food. She rarely wears shoes, stashes her clothes in an old school bus, and is impossible to reach by phone. Her name is Loba, which in Spanish means &amp;quot;she-wolf.&amp;quot; On clear nights in her canyon, she climbs up on a tall rock and howls at the moon.  When she was born, Loba&amp;#039;s parents named her Gretchen, and for the first 24 years, it stuck. But then she decided it was all wrong. For one thing, &amp;quot;Loba&amp;quot; was a better match for &amp;quot;Wolf,&amp;quot; and Wolf was the name of the man she&amp;#039;d fallen in love with. But we&amp;#039;ll come back to that.  Gretchen was one of my closest friends in high school, both of us day students at a Massachusetts boarding school, both of us relatively uncool and, in the manner of all hopeful young women, full of plans. We finished high school and went to college in different states. We finished college and went off into the world, keeping in touch only sporadically.  I was in my early twenties and living in Chicago when my mother forwarded me an envelope with a PO box in New Mexico as the return address. It was from Gretchen, only she was not Gretchen anymore. She was Loba. In a two-page handwritten letter, she explained that she was living in a canyon in southwestern New Mexico, sleeping in a shallow cave seven river crossings from the nearest road. With her was a new age musician and writer called Wolf. She was happy\u2014&amp;quot;finally happy,&amp;quot; I believe were the words.  I answered right away. &amp;quot;Dear Loba,&amp;quot; I wrote. I told her that I loved and respected her and that the canyon sounded like a nice place. This was about 66 percent of the truth; if I&amp;#039;d expressed the rest, the letter would have gone on to say, &amp;quot;This entire thing sounds whacked, but I do hope you&amp;#039;re happy with this Wolf fellow, and I&amp;#039;m sure that in a year or two this little experiment will pass, and then you&amp;#039;ll go back to being more normal, more like Gretchen.&amp;quot;  Here&amp;#039;s the thing. She did not go back. Loba settled deeper into the canyon. She blew off high school reunions; she stopped coming home to visit her parents. She married Wolf, at a sacred spot beneath some red rock cliffs. They moved out of the cave and eventually built a few cabins. From time to time, she sent me a letter describing the way the elk meandered through the valley at dusk or how she was harvesting wild greens and drying them for the winter ahead. Four, five, ten years went by. A sort of permanence seeped into each of our lives. I got a dog, got married, bought a house in Maine. Sometimes, for entertainment, I told people I had a she-wolf friend named Loba who watched elks in New Mexico. Depending on my mood, I made it sound either blissful or completely bizarre.  What does &amp;quot;finally happy&amp;quot; mean, anyway?   A few years ago, Loba sent me a letter mentioning that she and Wolf had made some concessions to modernity, getting themselves a satellite Internet connection and a couple of laptops they ran off solar panels perched on the bluffs in the canyon. They had started a website and a blog that described the benefits of &amp;quot;going feral&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cultivating presence.&amp;quot; They also had two more people living with them\u2014an herbalist named Kiva Rose and her daughter, Rhiannon. As a group, they had formally opened the Anim\u00E1 Wilderness Retreat Center and Women&amp;#039;s Sanctuary, a kind of hand-to-mouth, donation-based outfit that, according to the website, offered vision quests and courses for budding shamans and medicine women, plus an indistinct service called re-wilding.  Keep in mind that I had three children, a dog, and two gerbils at this point\u2014all loving, wonderful, and thoroughly, as we say on the tax return, dependent. I had tendinitis in one arm from the key-board. I had lines grooving their way into my forehead and an addiction to reality television that I wasn&amp;#039;t even ashamed of.  Whatever re-wilding was, it sounded pretty good to me.  Last fall, I invited myself to Loba&amp;#039;s canyon\u2014signing up for a wilderness retreat/mini high school reunion, with re-wilding. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m excited to have you here,&amp;quot; she replied to my e-mail, &amp;quot;in my humble but magical home.&amp;quot; To reach it, she instructed, I was to pilot my rental car across a 250-mile pancake of rangeland south of Albuquerque, pass through the ranching town of Reserve\u2014population: 353\u2014head another eight miles out of town, and then finally bump down an unmarked dirt road, past a horse corral, until I came upon a cattle gate. Then it was time to park and start hiking.  It was quiet\u2014an exhilarating, unnerving kind of quiet. There were no airplanes humming overhead, no sounds of cars, no signs of people, and beyond the cattle gate, no signs of cows, either. A sandy path led to a shallow river\u2014the San Francisco River\u2014and beyond that, in the distance, dense hills of juniper and oak.  Hugging me goodbye at the airport at home, my husband had said, rather pointedly, &amp;quot;Please be safe out there.&amp;quot; Perhaps he was worried I&amp;#039;d cut my foot on a low-lying saguaro, or maybe have a run-in with a pack of angry javelinas. But really what he meant by &amp;quot;be safe&amp;quot; was: Don&amp;#039;t get brainwashed into joining the human wolf pack. Please come back as someone I recognize.  I had one primary worry that for the moment trumped any of the others, and that was getting lost. I had no map and no GPS, and I&amp;#039;d lost cell phone reception about 100 miles back. Loba had told me just to use my instincts, head into the canyon and cross the river seven times. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t miss us,&amp;quot; is what she&amp;#039;d said. I stared at the tangle of river grasses and low-hanging trees that seemed to stretch for miles with no sign of human life. Wasn&amp;#039;t this how wilderness horror stories began, before the helicopters and dogs swooped in to recover the body?  Thirty or 40 minutes later, I felt my first triumph as a person officially unhitched from her regular life. Having followed the river across the canyon floor, having waded through it again and again, I took a path up a steep hill and caught sight of Loba. She was loping barefoot through the woods, dressed in a flowy skirt, a brown crocheted bikini top, and wooden beads. Her skin was deeply tanned; her hair ran in mostly ungroomed rivulets down her back. In high school, Gretchen had been a long-limbed, fluffy-haired girl with somnolent blue eyes and a gawky sort of charm. Now, as Loba, she looked strong and sure-footed, and a little bit woolly\u2014not somebody you would ever find standing in line at Dunkin&amp;#039; Donuts, but rather like a person sprouted directly from the earth.  We hugged. &amp;quot;You look exactly the same,&amp;quot; Loba said.  &amp;quot;You do too,&amp;quot; I said, before adding, &amp;quot;except that you also look totally different.&amp;quot;   Loba laughed. She then showed me around her encampment, a handful of modest little pine cabins perched in the juniper trees on a sunny patch of the canyon bluff. There was a medicine lodge where Kiva, who&amp;#039;d arrived a few years earlier, dried herbs and made healing tinctures. There was a small office, a couple of cozy spaces for sleeping, and a little tree house stuffed with pillows and blankets, which served as the de facto bedroom for Rhiannon, Kiva&amp;#039;s freckled eight-year-old. They had an old high-wheeled Jeep that could plow through the river when they needed to bring in supplies. There was an outhouse and a small toolshed.   &amp;quot;Check out our bathtub,&amp;quot; Loba said, pointing to an old clawfooted beauty that sat, unfettered by plumbing, in a clearing with a wide-open view of the green mountains beyond the canyon. They&amp;#039;d surrounded the tub with homemade adobe and rock walls close to a small fire pit. Loba explained that the fire heated the rocks and the rocks heated the tub, which they filled bucket by bucket with rainwater, ideally at sunset or beneath a full moon.  If, in order to get in touch with some primitive, wild version of myself, it was necessary for me to first buy into Loba&amp;#039;s lifestyle, here was step one: a smidge of bath envy.  She took me next to the original dwelling\u2014an old brown school bus, which Wolf had paid to have dragged up to the bluff when he first bought the 80 acres of land here in 1981, having sold the engine to make a down payment. Back then, Loba said, the canyon had been denuded and desertlike, trampled by grazing cattle, but Wolf\u2014 and then she and Wolf, and now she and Wolf and Kiva and Rhiannon\u2014 had worked carefully to restore it. They&amp;#039;d chased off the cattle and gotten conservation grants to build fences, plant native trees, and create a sanctuary for the wildlife.  Nowadays, the bus was filled with clothes, supplies, and carefully organized rows of foods that Loba had canned for the winter ahead\u2014 mulberry jam, prickly pear syrup, jars of apple butter and pickled zucchini. Attached to the back of the bus was a low-slung, shakeroofed kitchen anchored by an antique cast-iron, wood-fired stove\u2014 the only source of wintertime heat for all of them and upon which Loba did most of the cooking.  &amp;quot;Turns out I really like to eat,&amp;quot; Loba said, handing me a mug of ginger tea. This was not a small statement, coming from someone who had once been a penurious eater, whip-thin and obsessed with exercise. It was, in fact, something of a manifesto, and Loba&amp;#039;s new body, which was comparatively soft and unmilitant, reflected this. It would take me some time to understand it fully, but this crowded little frontier-style kitchen, with its potato bins and its jugs of rainwater and its compost barrel, was the locus of Loba&amp;#039;s power.  She put on an apron and chopped up a cabbage. She scooped a handful of pine nuts out of a bin and threw them into a bowl with the cabbage. Sitting near her, with my moisturized skin and painted toenails, I felt like someone who&amp;#039;d dropped by from another planet\u2014a lit-up Vegas of a planet, where we climb on treadmills for exercise and spray on our sunshine, where eating local food is so unnatural it&amp;#039;s trendy, and boy, come to think of it, was I missing my iPhone. I wanted to check the weather in four or five cities, run through the headlines, then take a few pictures and send them out with comments to the small legion of people with whom I played daily, sometimes hourly, informational ping-pong.  Loba was rummaging around now in her collection of mason jars, looking for some salt and some peach chutney. This was, I imagined, something of a Norman Rockwell moment for her: Wolf, who had kind eyes, round spectacles, and a full-on Rumpelstiltskin beard, was barefoot and writing an environmental essay on the computer in the office. Outside, Kiva, a porcelain-skinned, redheaded 28-yearold wearing a peasant dress, was playing her wooden Kokopelli flute, while Rhiannon spun on a swing beneath her tree house, singing quietly to herself\u2014all of them, all of us, pocketed inside this bursting wilderness of tall ponderosa pine and squatty cholla cactus, of deer and fox and elk and beaver and river turtles and osprey and kingfishers and twittering wrens.   I asked Loba how often she left. &amp;quot;Almost never. I belong here,&amp;quot; she answered. &amp;quot;When I leave, I feel like an uprooted tree.&amp;quot;  Was it all a little strange? Yes, it was. Loba acknowledged it: &amp;quot;Our armpit hair alone tends to scare people off,&amp;quot; she said, giggling a little. Did she seem brainwashed? No, not at all. But still, it was as if someone had taken my wiry, buzzing adolescent friend Gretchen and dialed her down to a lower frequency. She spoke quietly, gazed at me openly, and allowed long beats of silence to pass. I filled those gaps with questions, in my accustomed-to-competing-with-street-noiseand- small-children voice: When did they get their solar panels? How long did it take to cook nettles? What kind of bird was that singing outside the window?  Loba, who was standing at the counter, rolling up grape leaves and stuffing them with the pine nut and cabbage mixture for dinner, started to seem rattled. &amp;quot;Before you ask another question,&amp;quot; she said, with a sweet kind of firmness, &amp;quot;I want you to think about whether it is truly important for you to have the answer.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; I said, chastened, shutting up.  Stirring a pot on her stove, Loba began to hum contentedly.  Confession: I had some worries about how Loba planned to rewild me. I imagined that we&amp;#039;d have to talk about menstruation as a gift from Mother Earth, for example. I&amp;#039;d been afraid that she would refuse to acknowledge that she had ever been a churchgoing New Englander named Gretchen, that she and I used to swill rum and Cokes before dances and compete against each other on the ski team, that we&amp;#039;d once been half in love with the same boy. I thought maybe she would make me howl or give myself an animal name or try to push some peyote on me.  This was not the case. Loba offered no doctrine on wildness. She did, however, do some yipping as we sat down to eat dinner, letting out a playful series of barks by way, she said, of showing thanks for her food. And then we ate. We ate the stuffed grape leaves. We ate steaming bowls of lentil soup and a thick slice of rye bread she&amp;#039;d made on the skillet. We had warm cups of brewed dandelion root topped off with capfuls of Kahl\u00FAa. Every once in a while I would blurt out some bit of small talk and Loba would silence it with one uttered word\u2014&amp;quot;Yum!&amp;quot;\u2014meant, I realized finally, to redirect us all to the simple, undistracted pleasure of tasting our food.  Then she took me down to my cabin, a charming and tidy little two-story pine shack near the riverbanks far below their encampment, one of two places they keep for guests. Loba lit a fire for me in the woodstove. She showed me how to work the propane burners to make myself tea using my jug of rainwater. She handed me a solarpowered lantern that would guide me to the outhouse. Upstairs there was a king-size bed with a thick, fluffy duvet. I was tired and well fed and giddy at the prospect of having my own private rustic haven, but there was one last thing Loba wanted to do. She had me follow her\u2014 her gliding, me stumbling\u2014through the dark and up to a rocky outcropping over the river, where the moon pounded down uninterrupted by trees. We sat there a few minutes in silence\u2014I was still trying not to talk unnecessarily, which I&amp;#039;ll say for the record is a very, very hard thing to do\u2014and then finally, Loba lifted her head to the sky and, without warning, began to sing. Her song had no words. It was more like a pitched call, a series of long, powerful notes, plaintive and peaceful, echoing out into the darkness like some sort of good-night offering.  Next to her, I started to squirm inexplicably. In my mind, I was already telling this story to my husband\u2014&amp;quot;and then she began to howl...&amp;quot;\u2014but I was also beginning to rewrite it based on my hours in the canyon so far, stirring in the realization that my she-wolf friend Loba was both human and happy\u2014finally happy, as it were\u2014and therefore above easy ridicule.  What happened to my high school buddy Gretchen? Maybe the answer was as simple as the one she&amp;#039;d been offering all along: She&amp;#039;d just found her place.   Wielding her extra-large cast-iron skillets, Loba fed me for several more days. She made me polenta topped with kale that had been saut\u00E9ed with onions, parsnips, and fresh rosemary. She fed me bee-balm pesto mixed with wild rice and spinach, dried cranberries, and a fried egg. She baked parsnip muffins and dense millet bread and corn bread she slathered in butter. She fed me handfuls of cashews, a chocolate brownie topped with sour cream and ground acorn. She fed me a bit of tangy beaver meat stewed with eggplant. In between meals, we went walking. We plucked bits of wild watercress from the riverbed for a stir-fry. We climbed a big boulder that, according to Loba, was once a lookout for the prehistoric Mogollon people, whose rough pottery shards and weathered stone metates were scattered throughout the canyon. Every once in a while, Loba would stop and hug a tree. Why? Because it made her feel good. To be clear, Loba&amp;#039;s life isn&amp;#039;t just a walk in the woods. Living close to the land requires vigilance. Wood needs chopping; the outhouse compost has to be turned and spread. Without a refrigerator, Loba was constantly watching over her supply of perishables. Money was short. In winter, Loba&amp;#039;s life became an exercise in finding enough firewood to feed into her stove. Sometimes, when the spring runoff flooded the river, the only way out of the valley involved an icy swim.  &amp;quot;Do you ever get stressed?&amp;quot; I asked her. We were meandering through the canyon, gathering wood. &amp;quot;Even just a little?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;If I do, I just take myself down to the river,&amp;quot; she said.  What took place next happened too quickly for me to shriek or run or do anything but feel a wave of heart-thudding shock: Loba bent down to pull a fallen tree branch out from beneath a bush, and a long brown rattlesnake whooshed out from underneath it, pumping its way right past her head before disappearing again into the sage.  In stunned silence, I watched it go. Loba, meanwhile, gave a merry wave. &amp;quot;Sorry to disturb you, little snake!&amp;quot; she called and then continued her uphill tramp, motioning for me to follow.  Until this point, I&amp;#039;d been doing much better at being quiet, at being &amp;quot;alive in the moment,&amp;quot; as Loba put it. I really had. But now my mind revved. I was making an on-the-spot decision to avoid all the bushes in Loba&amp;#039;s bush-stuffed canyon. I wondered whether I should start toting around some sort of ax or club\u2014or whether it was time, in fact, to stop fooling myself that I could be like Loba, whether this was the moment to hike back to my subcompact from Avis and hightail it home, back to my friends who were tamer and more Gretchen-like.   But Loba was halfway up the hill by now, firewood tucked beneath her arm, looking serene and capable, and, it occurred to me then, like a woman worth following. Only a little grudgingly, I adjusted my own bundle of wood and resumed my march through the sage, unable to hold back one announcement. &amp;quot;By the way,&amp;quot; I called up to her, &amp;quot;that snake was not at all little.&amp;quot;  Wildness, like happiness, is perhaps a matter of perspective\u2014something that has less to do with where you live or even how you live, but above all, how you feel about it. Every day, I watched Loba fire up her stove, haul jugs of water, yip with gratitude for her food, and hum softly to herself as she faced down a massive pile of dishes in the sink. It wasn&amp;#039;t that I needed, or wanted, Loba&amp;#039;s life. What made Loba wild was not her perch in the canyon, her tangle of hair, her solar power, or her husband named Wolf\u2014no more than, much as I sometimes viewed it this way, my car and kids and household full of belongings lassoed me to something that was domestic and therefore cumbersome. It came down to our perspectives on things\u2014how we looked at rattlesnakes, at our tasks, at ourselves. Loba didn&amp;#039;t resent her life&amp;#039;s chores the way I did. No, she relished them. And her relish was starting to work a kind of magic on me. There is nothing more radical, I have decided, than a she-wolf in an apron.  One day, Loba arrived at my cabin with a beaming smile and said something I&amp;#039;m quite certain that nobody else, as long as I live, will ever say to me again. &amp;quot;I had so much fun making a cake for you earlier today,&amp;quot; she said. This didn&amp;#039;t mean she&amp;#039;d pulled out a box of Duncan Hines and her electric mixer, but rather that she&amp;#039;d gotten up at 5\u202Fa.m. to build the fire to heat the antique oven for my cake, and then she&amp;#039;d stood in her wild little kitchen as the sun came up, intently sifting flour, shaving delicate vanilla beans, and grinding nutmeg to get the flavor just so. That cake was, in every sense of the word, divine.  A few days later, I flew home. And even as I remained mediocre on an ecological front\u2014showering too long, driving when I might have walked\u2014I did start, in some small way, thinking more like Loba. I chopped up beets and parsnips and tossed them in a pan with nuts and eggs and wild rice. I made millet bread that was as dense as an anvil and served it to my family. &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t we just have macaroni?&amp;quot; my son asked.  &amp;quot;Put more butter on it,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;ll soften up.&amp;quot;  Am I wild? Maybe a little more so. I pay attention to the birds on my street. I notice the stars. I try to talk a little less and to heap more love on the people around me. But really I feel more wild just knowing that Loba is out there\u2014answering my e-mails only after pondering them for a week or so\u2014in her own impermeable Eden.  There was a warm afternoon when Loba and I left her kitchen and made our way down the bluffs, through a thicket of young willow trees, to the riverbank. She shucked off all her clothes, splashed some water on her body to adjust to the temperature, and then, lying down in about a foot of ice-cold water, her head pointed downstream, belly and breasts lofted toward the sky, she set herself adrift in the current.  This is the memory that has replaced all the other ones from our time together as thin and uncertain high school girls. It&amp;#039;s what I think of when, back in my life, I am feeling worried or lost or trapped. I picture that hour when Loba&amp;#039;s cake was cooling by the window and her canyon was coming to life with the sounds of evening crickets and jumping fish. I remember, with gratitude, myself standing at that rocky bend in the river as Loba, her eyes closed, arms and legs starfished, allowed herself to float away. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/advice/a9931/friendship-advice-la-vida-loba-318612/>