Rock. West Diamond. Prairie. Mojave. Black-tailed. Massasauga.  Ridge-nose.

       Have you noticed that the rattlesnakes in westerns always look like the exact same snake? But in Mexico there are sevendifferent species of rattlesnake. I’m not particularly eager to meet any of them. I grew up in Ireland where our most fearsome wildlife is the hedgehog. But, in light of my upcoming move to the high desert plains of the southwest, I’ve been trawling through the literature on what to do if bitten. The various New Mexico state government circulars and information sheets advise:

1. Keep calm (Not likely);
2. Put a safe distance between you and the snake;
3. Do not attempt to suck out the venom. (No human mouth is capable of sucking out the poison quickly enough for it to be effective. I feel very misled by the movies on this one);
4. Avoid stimulants like coffee. (I marvel at the composure of the type of person whose instinct upon being bitten by a rattler is to reach for the kettle); and
5. Get anti-venom as soon as possible. All hospitals in New Mexico stock it.

       I feel somewhat prepared to strike out for my new temporary home in New Mexico, which I found courtesy of the British scientist, Alan Turing. Let me explain:

       My writing this year has been uncomfortable, at best. I kept jumping between projects, unable to commit. Everything I wrote sounded like I was trying too hard. Not only was I plagued with indecision about which book to write, I couldn’t figure where and how to write it. I had no clear vision; I had no vision. I was stuck. I knew that I needed a change of battery. But I can’t even change the batteries in the remote without reading the instructions. WHERE ARE MY INSTRUCTIONS?

       For me, writing a book is similar to solving a crossword puzzle. When I get stuck, I go back and read what I’ve already written. I always find clues telling me what happens next in the story. One cold night in Brooklyn, sitting cross-legged on my patent pending iBed, I decided to try the same process for determining what happens next in my story? On the back of the Metropolitan Public Pool swimming schedule, I scrawled a list of the writing projects I’ve been fiddling with over the last couple of months.

1. A comic-fantasy book for children about ghosts.
2. A rake of interviews and guest blogs and articles in connection with my YA thriller, The Exclusion Wars.
3. An-amusing-incident-with-a-kebab type article about a fall from a horse at Dingle Riding Stables in 2012.
4. Research for a non-fiction book about Sybille Bedford’s 1946 trip from New York City to Mexico City.
5. New Ideas.

       I stared long and hard at the list of the five clues trying to figure out the solution. Nope, the only flashing vision I had was of a beef tacos-for-dinner question mark sign. Like T.S. Eliot, I could connect Nothing with nothing.

This is hopeless, I thought. It’s like trying to crack the Nazi Enigma Code . . . except, hang on, they did break the code. Alan Turing built a computer to do it. My mac, a direct descendant of Turing’s machine, lay conveniently beside me. I typed the key words from the five projects into Google in one long stream and hit return. A cyber-ripple later, there it sat, shimmering at the very top of the search results, GHOST RANCH, Abiquiú, New Mexico.

       Ghost Ranch, Ghost Ranch, Ghost Ranch. I doubt if there’s a writer dead or alive who wouldn’t feel the magnetic pull of those words. It’s a direct hit on the soul. I read on.

       Ghost Ranch is a 21,000-acre estate sixty-five miles northwest of Santa Fe. It is famous for the beauty of its red, wind-carved mesas, for being the home of the artist, Georgia O’Keeffe and the site of Easy Rider and City Slickers and a host of other westerns, famous too for its dinosaur fossils and its horses and its education center. Browsing through Moving to New Mexicoforums, I noticed that visitors often asked, “Do I need a passport?” or “Do I have to be able to speak Spanish.” I certainly didn’t mock them. They wanted to learn. So did I. My own knowledge of the state of New Mexico was of the barely-scratching-the-surface kind.

       The next morning, I emptied my suitcase, dumping my summer clothes on the floor, and took a trip to my favorite institution, the mid-town Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library. I borrowed up to the library’s checkout limit, fifty books. One of the librarians helped me cram them into my suitcase. They wouldn’t all fit. The patient reader behind me in the queue, donated a Bloomingdale’s canvas shopping bag for the rest.

       Abandoning my Browsings reading list to the usual tragic fate of new years’ resolutions, I buried myself in Georgia O’Keeffe biographies, histories of the Southwest, Pueblo Indians, Desert Dinosaurs, the Spanish colonization of New Mexico, the Navajo Nation, D.H. Lawrence and New Mexico, kangaroo rats, the Benedictine Christ of the Desert monastery, the gypsum crystals of the White Sands National Monument . . .

       I searched for connections and I found them. And then I began my quest the way new expeditions have always begun—with hope, passion, and in writing, “Dear . . .”

       With great gratitude to the good people of Ghost Ranch, I will be free for four months to live and write in that raw, dry red, barren landscape, so far removed from the familiar green softness of an Irish drizzle. I have so much curiosity about the community and the visitors: the wranglers, the gardeners, the artists, the cooks, the paleontologists, the silversmiths, the basket weavers, the hikers, the bluegrass musicians, the film-makers, the pilgrims, the new agers and the old agers, the anthropologists, the tourists, the dreamers and the ghost-hunters. They are the searchers. Me too. I’m excited and a little scared.

       In the first week of May, in a divisive election year, I go west. Come visit if you can. And good luck with finding the back road to your own ghost ranch.