I've Known a Lot of People!

Lately I’ve been going through all my CDs playing ones I haven’t listened to in a long time or completely forgotten I have. Yesterday I stumbled on “Get Out” by Larry Freedman, a longtime Albuquerque based keyboard player who’s performed with various local bands over the years. He’s a phenomenal musician whose blues piano covers and originals on this CD are a delight. This led me to his other CD, “It Is What It Is” with Joanie Griffin and Combo Special. Joanie was the lead singer with Cadillac Bob, a great Albuquerque band and the Thunderbird Bar’s house band (in Placitas).

It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.

I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.

Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.

Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.

Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.

My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.

“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.

Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.

Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.

This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.