Chris Montes

I've never been a scholar, and I'm not going to start pretending now. What I've been, for as long as I can remember, is a person who needs to know how a thing is built and how it really works, someone who can't quite rest until I've taken something apart and seen for myself.

That curiosity has made for a wandering résumé. I've spent most of my working life with my hands on real systems: HVAC and building maintenance, mostly around Colorado; cell tower work that took me all over the country; boat engines and parasail rigs on the North Carolina coast. For almost three years I did videography around Denver, recording musicians in the city's various venues and clubs — including El Chapultepec, aka “the Pec,” a historic jazz dive with deep history. Once a magnet for jazz greats and celebrities, it was known worldwide during its heyday, but unfortunately it is now a jazz masterpiece that has since closed for good.

Different work in different places, but always the same job underneath: figure out how it works, find where it's failing, make it right. Some of that work was about people, not machines. I served as a volunteer firefighter with the Duck Fire Department on the Outer Banks, where I got my Firefighter and EMT experience. That's the kind of work that teaches you to read a situation fast and act on what's in front of you instead of on panic. I started fire science and music studies along the way and finished neither. My life moved faster than the coursework, but the training stuck.

I trained as a massage therapist in Denver, too, and then stepped away from it sooner than I'd planned. I assumed people wanted to actually get better; what I mostly met were folks looking for a quick fix, not a real change. That was a deal-breaker for me, I wanted to work with people who genuinely cared about their health. Naïve of me, maybe. I just figured everybody felt that way. I was wrong.

Since September of 2024 I've been the full-time caregiver for my father. It's the most important work I've ever done, and nearly everything before it turns out to have been preparation I didn't know I was getting, the steadiness, the patience, the habit of paying close attention.

When you've spent years learning how real things are built and how they fail, you start to look at the ancient world differently, at the weight of the stones, the precision of the joints, the alignments that are hard to square with the tools we assume people had. I don't claim to have the answers. What I have are honest questions, and a stubborn unwillingness to accept someone's confident explanation just because it's the familiar one. That's the whole reason Earthly Enigmas exists.

Personally, music is what keeps me level. I've played guitar, drums, and a few other instruments most of my life, and I think it gave me an ear for patterns, ratio, alignment, the way things line up. That quietly shaped how I see everything else. When I need to get my head right, I go for a ride on my motorcycle; I call it wind therapy, mental rejuvenation on wheels.

None of this makes me an expert in ancient history. It makes me curious, careful, and honest about the difference between what we can demonstrate and what we've only been told. That's what I bring to these pages, and to the questions they leave open. Like the saying goes, “The Truth is Out There.” Thanks for joining me on my journey to find some of those truths.