An Irish friend of mine bought a house last year on the mesa outside of Taos, New Mexico, and invited me to take a break from my mother’s house in Georgia to visit him for a week or so. So I set out.

I found that Greyhound buses are still running and still, barely, the cheapest if most gruelling mode of transport. Hour stops turned into 15 minute stops, so that the bus could keep its schedule. Days flowed into nights, nights into days, America is a big country.

However, you don’t get x-rayed and taken apart by Homeland Security, which I also experienced on this trip. In one airport I was singled out because I had a one-way ticket.

Evidently, no self respecting terrorist, planning to kill all on the plane, would bother to waste money on a return. I went through a machine that x-rayed me, shot hot air at my body (what is that about, anyway?) took off my shoes and got searched by hand. I protested mildly as they ransacked my bag.

But this was not the last indignity. The security person who checked my bag forgot to mark my ticket– so shortly before departure, I had to go through the whole routine again!

I refused to go back to the security section in case I got in a long queue and missed my plane– so they reluctantly but determinedly came out to the departure lounge and searched me again.

I had to stand with my right foot out, left foot out, arms at certain angles, bags searched again in front of all the other passengers. After declaring that they were wasting their time as I was a pacifist, (which made them take longer) I allowed that they had a very hard job, and they softened somewhat at the sympathy.

But New Mexico! I lived all my youth in Georgia, Florida and New York, all east coast, and moved to Ireland in 1972, where I have lived since. My friend’s “welcome home” to New Mexico was greeted by me with “this place is as foreign to me as it is to you!”

My friend lives in a house built by a Buddhist in ‘outlaw territory,’ off the grid on the mesas. What are we, 7,500 feet high? Above us, the Sangre de Cristos mountains rise higher still, snow on their tops.

The sunsets and sunrises over the desert are amazing. The ground is so dry that the cacti are crumbling like paper in your hand. The air is dry. Some people not used to the altitude suffer from dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, and other ailments.

But what really causes me to shudder is the animal and insect life and bacteria around here. In Ireland, you can poke around in your closet or in a box of books, without fear of putting your life in danger. Not so in New Mexico.

There is a breed of spider called the ‘brown recluse’ which is deadly if not treated immediately. It bites you, and you get a kind of anaesthesia effect. But then, it injects you with a flesh-eating enzyme which turns your tissue into a liquid which it then sucks out. Unfortunately, the enzyme can stay in your bloodstream years after treatment, emerging from time to time as blisters or other ailments.

One of my Irish friends was bitten by a brown recluse– on two occasions. The first time, on his toe and he had to fight to stop the doctor from amputating it. The treatment is to cut out as much tissue around the bite as quickly as possible, before the enzyme spreads.

There are also black widows, and something also deadly called white widows. Cycling through the desert, I have had to turn the wheels in gravel to avoid running over giant tarantulas crossing the road.

The routine here is: shake out your bedclothes before you get into bed each night. Shake out your clothes. Be extremely careful and don’t stick your hands into places you can’t see. Bang your shoes on the ground, in case one is clinging inside. I find this nerve-racking.

Then there are the snakes. Seven kinds of rattlesnakes live here (some don’t actually rattle). I am told there is no antidote in the Taos area hospital, so you have to be airlifted to Albequerque.

A mountainy fellow from Washington State who has lived here for nine years in the desert says not to fall asleep outside. Rattlesnakes won’t seek you out to attack you, but they may be drawn to nestle up to you for bodily warmth.

Heaven help you when you wake up and move. They won’t like it. I am thinking I will sleep sitting up in my chair.

As if that weren’t enough, the denizens of the local shop, Poco Loco in Carson, New Mexico, tell me that there is plague and hanta virus in the soil. Not to worry, it tends to affect only people with low immune systems, old people and children being most vulnerable.

A couple of years ago no one was allowed to go outside for two weeks, because of West Nile virus, carried by mosquitos. They had a few fatalities locally.

Well, I can’t wait to get back to the relative safety of Georgia– and then to Ireland, with no snakes or nasty death-carrying insects.