On Not Being Able to Get a Job

Mark and I used to read the jobs section of High Country News to see if there were any that had an element of environmental justice in the description. We would then narrow the list based on location: Helena, Montana sounded pretty good, despite the cold weather, or any place in northern California, but the Dakotas, Idaho (neo-Nazi country), and Arizona (too hot and too racist) were off-limits, which in itself limited the selection of possible jobs to almost none. But it didn’t matter, as it was all fantasy, an exercise in futility: Mark and I, and especially I, were essentially unemployable.

Lack of credentials certainly contributed to our dilemma. While Mark had at least earned a BA in English, it was a useless degree, of course, in the traditional job market. But he managed to parlay it into a job at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, maybe because the infamous owner, Gus Blaisdell, was impressed by his erudition and liked having people around with whom he could have a conversation, but probably because Mark was competent and willing to work for shit wages. His other job was working on other people’s houses in Placitas, where we were living at the time, to acquire the skills needed to build our own house, which we worked on for ten years during the 1980s.

I never even got a BA (when my younger son Max first realized that I didn’t have a college degree he said “Mom, what in the world were you thinking?”). My first real job was with the Forest Service as a fire lookout, no experience necessary. On my first day on the job on top of La Mosca Peak, after a few hours’ instructions on how to use the fire finder to locate a smoke and the radio to call it in, I reported the Grants dump. Working for the Forest Service was also my last real job (and not because I was a lousy fire lookout). But I managed to parlay my experience as a hiking patrol in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness into self-employment: I started a publishing company and wrote a guidebook to the Sandias, which was quite a success, and then went on to write guides to cross-country skiing in northern New Mexico, hikes in other wilderness areas, and hikes around Santa Fe and Taos. I also parlayed our “back to the land” life in Placitas—building a house, bartering for services rendered, participating in acequia culture—into a freelance writing career.

So you might say, not so bad, we both managed to find self-employment rather than wage labor jobs, but several things have to be factored into that evaluation. The first being that we made lousy money, had no health insurance, and no retirement. While we didn’t have a mortgage, we did have to pay for the birth of two babies born by caesarian section rather than at midwifery centers, as planned (we managed a trade with one of the obstetricians), for Mark’s hospital stay when he fell off the house while putting up the roof beams, and for a well that went dry before we’d even moved into our new house.

The other factor that contributed to our dependency on marginal self-employment was what I have to call our incorrigibility. It started in Placitas, when the developers came in with their subdivisions and their covenants (no chickens, no junked cars), and the Forest Service decided to pave roads and develop new ski areas, and we became, well, incorrigible. We demonstrated, connived, monkey-wrenched, wrote editorials and mockeries, and sued all of them. This continued, after giving up on Placitas and moving to El Valle, where threats to the community included not only the Forest Service and developers but lo and behold, environmentalists. This time we parlayed our activist experience, coupled with Mark’s degree in English and my book writing skills, into “that radical rag” La Jicarita News.

La Jicarita was the beginning of the end of any chance of regular employment. Over the course of 16 years we managed to piss off everyone: certainly the Forest Service; all kinds of other government officials from the county to federal levels; mainstream environmentalists who don’t know anything about community-based environmentalism; land grant activists who think only heirs should have a say in the management of land-based communities; many of our Anglo neighbors who worked at Sipapu Ski Area and supported its expansion; some of our Hispano neighbors who regard their water rights as private property and probably think we’re Communists; foundations that funded groups at cross purposes; and any number of other people, organizations, and bureaucracies that would never in a million years want either one of us to work for them.

So there you have it. In a couple of weeks I’ll be old enough to draw social security and I can jettison forever the fantasy of finding a job. I’m still self-employed as co-editor of La Jicarita with David Correia as it transitions to its new life in the American Studies Department at UNM, but as I threatened to do in my Productivity blog post, I’m going to start reading novels during the day to celebrate my new status: it’s not quite retirement, and it doesn’t mean better behavior, but it’s definitely a change, and at this point in my life, change is good.