Why I’m Living in Santa Fe

So why am I living in Santa Fe? Life is complicated in general and made even more so when you’re a parent. Now that I’m in the thick of it with my younger son Max I can think of many more parents who have also been in the thick of it with one or more of their children. Like the one who became involved in a cult and refused to see his parents (he recovered). Or the alcoholic/depressive who gave up booze but is still depressed. Or the one who had a child with someone she now hates but has to share custody. Or the one who’s a functioning alcoholic but still causes his mother tremendous anxiety.

Speaking of anxiety, that’s why I’m living with Max who suffers from it. He had a major break down about six years ago when he called me on the phone in his car saying he thought he was having a heart attack, which is often how anxiety manifests. I told him if he thought he could drive, go to the emergency room or if he couldn’t drive, call 911. He made it to the hospital where he found out he wasn’t having a heart attack but anxiety was causing him so much dysfunction he couldn’t be alone. I spent almost three months with him going back and forth between El Valle and Albuquerque, where he was living. He spent a couple of weeks in a local hospital’s mental health facility where you can only get in if you say you’re suicidal. He was put on anti-anxiety medication. We went to therapy where the therapist told me, as I sat there crying, that with time he would recover.

He did recover enough to be on his own, even have a short-term relationship, moving around the country playing poker at casinos—California, Arizona, Nevada, as well as New Mexico—and online, which is what he does for a living but doesn't do much to keep anxiety at bay. He was of the generation who learned how to play online as teenagers, aided by a brain wired by chess, which he also played in high school and won the state championship.

Then COVID hit. He was in Santa Fe then, with a cohort of friends with whom he lost touch. The casinos closed. The gyms closed (he’s a weight lifter but not the kind who develops bulgy muscles). The nightlife disappeared. The online dating scene vanished (he’s gay). He became angrier and angrier that his life was ruined by COVID mandates and the politicians who were responsible for implementing them. All of them, but especially the liberal elites (he’s basically a Marxist whose anger has fomented nihilistic cynicism, though he would challenge that assessment). He spent the winter in Texas to avoid having to wear a mask. He came back in bad shape, isolated, anxious, and depressed, and moved into my house in El Valle.

There’s not much for him in El Valle except walking his German Shepard dog, Anka, who I helped him get from my friend Ike, who raises them. So I had no choice, really. I offered to rent a house with him in Santa Fe for one year so he could be in a safe environment and slowly integrate back into some kind of social life. I haven’t lived in an urban environment for 50 years. I basically don’t want to be here. The only way I can afford it is because I sold my lower field to my friend who’s been pasturing his mules there for years and pestering me to buy it for years. I gave the down payment to my other son for a down payment on a house he wants to buy (in the coveted school district) and am using the monthly payments for my Santa Fe rent.

This is what parents do but it doesn’t mean I like it. I miss my house and gardens and fields in El Valle, although I don’t miss the gentrification that’s happening there. A Santa Fe friend who also abandoned his rural home for the city said to me the other day, we’re “adrift.” I’m pissed at what’s happening to El Valle but Santa Fe is a million times worse: more development, more mansions, more traffic, less water. And the dogs can’t just run out the dog door and play in the wild. We have to take them to the dog park every morning and some other park in the afternoon where there’s some shade and let them run around without some Karen yelling at us to “put your dog on a leash!”

I’m trying to take advantage of the things I can do in Santa Fe that I like or that Max likes to help him be here. We go swimming at the big community center where he also plays basketball and lifts at the gym. I haven’t really swum, other than helping my grandkids learn, since Mark and I occasionally went to the Pojoaque Pueblo gym more than a decade ago. I find that I can still do it, all of it (or almost all of it): freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, elementary backstroke, but I think I’ll skip the butterfly. My right arm hurts when it goes straight up. A couple of days ago we went ice skating. I could have broken a hip or fractured my skull when I ventured out around the rink before I got my skating legs (I fell straight back onto my butt and head), which hadn’t been used since my kids were little. I got them back—sort of. Enough to invite my grandkids to go skating with me sometime when they finally make it up to visit this new place in Santa Fe (if their father were reading this he’d say cut the Jewish guilt crap).

I’m supposed to be here for a year. I can’t think about that or I’ll go crazy. Marlys, my good friend and soon to be El Valle housesitter, already told me that anytime I want to come home for a visit or forever, it’s OK with her. She’ll just do something else. Nice to have a friend like that, no? We’ve known each other since our older kids were born. Various scenarios play in my head all the time: maybe Max will find the right combination of medications that help his chemistry sort itself out; maybe he’ll find a friend or a lover who would like to move in; maybe he’ll realize that living with his mother may not be the best way to heal once he feels safe. I want him to find his way in the world without me so I can go home.

It Could Have Been Us

El Valle spent two days on the Ready list for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The evacuation protocol goes like this; Ready, think about what you want to get out of your house if you have to leave; Set, put your papers, electronics, photo albums, and animal kennels if you have them by the door or in the car and be ready to Go, which means, get the hell out of Dodge. Then a cold front moved in, it snowed on the mountain peaks, and a few drops of rain fell in the valleys. The Taos County Sheriff took us off the Ready list and put the neighboring villages closer to the fire on Set instead of Go (through the grapevine I heard that not many of them had heeded “Go” and left).

We dodged (small “d” this time) the bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.

I’m living in a tinderbox. New Mexicans have a habit of saying, “Well, we’re pretty lucky here in the Land of Enchantment. We don’t get hurricanes or tornados (maybe a couple of small ones), we don’t have volcanoes that erupt or heat waves that kill or sub-zero temperatures that freeze us to death (only occasionally). Now we have to admit that we live in a drought plagued-water bereft environment that could go up in smoke at any minute. It just did for thousands of people who lost their homes, vehicles, animals (lots of cows and horses on all those Mora Valley ranches), garages, sheds, and forests.

They’re my forests, too. The fire barely crossed the east/west divide and got close to Serpent Lake, one of the most beautiful places in the Pecos Wilderness. I’ve hiked and backpacked there many times, the quickest access to the divide between the Rio Pueblo and Pecos River watersheds and Jicarita Peak, that big bowl shaped mountain that sits above Peñasco. Mark and I hiked to the divide via the Serpent Lake Trail many times—the lake lies in a bowl just below the trail—when the kids were young with other families with young kids. We hiked there without kids when we were older and climbed the peak. We hiked there with Sammy, our deaf dog who couldn’t hear us call him to come back when the wind was blowing like a motherfucker and we wanted to turn back. I took my hiking class from UNM Continuing Education on a backpack trip to the lake where we camped and later bushwhacked our way straight up the ridge to the peak because there was too much snow on the trail. I backpacked there with Terri and Emma and a friend from Philly on their first backpack trip anywhere.From what’s been reported, the fire burned just to the east of Serpent Lake in the Angostura and Alamitos watersheds. I’ve hiked and skied there, too. Those forests are probably gone, although miraculously, the cabins tucked away alongside the Angostura Trail survived, from what I’ve heard. Every time we passed by on our way up the trail I’d think, “Well, I hope a fire never goes through here cuz these cabins will be toast.”

I’m waiting awhile to drive up to see for myself the tragic consequences. Fire fighters are still everywhere, although most of the roads into the Mora Valley are open once again. The south end of the fire also reached into the Pecos Wilderness, near Elk Mountain and remains active. So when most of the crews are released I’ll leave Santa Fe—my next post is why I’m suddenly living in Santa Fe after 30 years in El Valle—and follow I-25 north to Las Vegas where I’ll pick up SH 518, which leads to Mora. At Sapello, I’ll turn off onto 94 that travels through many of the little villages that were devastated by the fire. Maybe I’ll go all the way to Rociada and Pendaries, the villages closest to that east side of the Pecos Wilderness that I’m less familiar with. Then I’ll return to 518 through Mora and Holman and Cleveland to Chacon, a village tucked away at the base of the mountains that were completely burned (miraculously, much of Chacon was saved). Returning to 518 I’ll climb Holman Hill, which divides the Rio Pueblo from the Rio Mora and leads to Angostura and Alamitos. Maybe I’ll drive up Forest Road 161 to the Serpent Lake trailhead, if it’s open (the Carson and Santa Fe forests are in Stage 3 restrictions, meaning completely closed to the public).

Do I really want to do this? Maybe not, but I feel compelled to see what happened. I’m too old to climb Jicarita anymore but I’m not too old to bear witness, even if it’s from a car. As I said before, it could have been us.