Who Are These People?

In these heightened times of political turmoil—local, national, and global—two issues are painfully revelatory of how broken our political systems are: abortion and Israel/Palestine. The first, the anti-abortion movement, the front runner in the culture wars, and the second, the real war of killing Palestinians, are imposed by an American government that rules that reflects the will of institutional systems supported by the bottom line: money.

Who are these people sitting on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, the right to abortion? Who are these six people who voted to deny a woman the right to have purchase over her own body? The descriptions that come quickly to mind are: • They’re rich. They belong to the 1 percent. The have a guaranteed income for life. They use their positions on the court to accumulate more money from other rich people and corporations. • They’re mostly white. The only one who isn’t wants to be white. • They’re mostly men. • They’re mostly Catholic.

Who are these people sitting in Congress who want to send $14 billion more dollars to Israel to buy weapons to kill Palestinians? Other than the 18 U.S. Representatives, mostly women of color, who signed a Ceasefire Resolution for Gaza, these descriptions come quickly to mind: • They’re mostly rich. You have to be rich to run for Congress unless you have some secret PAC money that makes you rich by proxy. • They’re mostly white. • They’re mostly men. • There are way too many evangelical Christians for comfort, especially the guy the Republicans just elected as Speaker of the House.

So why do these people rule and legislate against women and Palestinians when more than half the country is comprised of women and over half the country supports a Ceasefire in Palestine? The Supreme Court six are just figureheads, doing the will of the minority who are desperate to opt out of modernity (equal rights, reproductive rights, economic equality, secularism, multiculturalism). The only way for them to do that is make sure the court recognizes corporations are people—Citizens United—so corporate money can rule against all these things that terrify them. With a totally dysfunctional Congress that fails to pass needed legislation to protect our rights, the Court is able to take them away.

The people in Congress responsible for this dysfunction represent the lobbyists of the military industrial complex and the Jewish right. Why would they vote for a Ceasefire and jeopardize all those campaign funds from Lockheed Martin and AIPAC? As Ali Abunimah says in his book, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse: “Today, Israel remains a taboo subject and any politician who wishes to see his or her career flourish knows better than to speak out against its policies. Hilary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way. Castigated as first lady for expressing sentiments in favor of a Palestinian state, she has become one of the leading pro-Israeli hawks as a U.S. senator from New York.” Abunimah’s book was published in 2006. Just go on Instagram or X to see Clinton’s support of Israel’s massacre in Gaza in 2023.

It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House in terms of the power of these systems. Someone like Trump may do more short-term damage than someone like Biden, but women are still second-class citizens and the blood on their hands from immigrant children or babies in Palestine is the same color.

Not in my name but on my conscience

The Ceasefire Now movement is urging everyone to write their congressional representatives and ask them to either sign on to House Resolution 786 calling for an immediate cease fire in Palestine or draft a similar resolution in the Senate.

I wrote Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from Las Vegas who thinks of herself as a progressive, asking her to sign the house resolution. She (her office) wrote me back a letter full of pablum about how horrible war is, that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that President Biden is doing everything he can to provide needed supplies to the Palestinians at the Rafah crossing.

This is what I wrote back: “Your response to my letter is quite pathetic. As an American Jew and a Mexican American, you and I share the heritage of being both a victim and a perpetrator. By not agreeing to sign the House Resolution 786 you’ve chosen the perpetrator side with your unequivocal support of Israel. As a Jew, I stand against Israel as the perpetrator of apartheid and genocide. Without any acknowledgment of the history of how the Zionist movement began and turned Israel into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalistic state it is now, your position is based on propaganda and lies. I’m enclosing this letter that was written to the magazine Consortium News, one of the few American publications that tries to tell the truth in a distorted corporate media world that regurgitates the American government’s position on Israeli.”

The letter I sent her was by two people named Ace Thelin and Forest Knolls. I have no idea who they are but the reason their letter in Consortium News impressed me is that they focused on the fact that Israel is the creation of western imperialism and settler colonialism, just like our own country, the good old USA. The same Manifest Destiny that white Europeans imposed on Indigenous and Mexican peoples to “bring civilization” to them is exactly what the Zionists brought to Palestine, to the people the Israeli government has lately been referring to as “human animals.”

It didn’t have to be this way. I recently read Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, about his upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel (his fiction book, Judas, also explores these themes). Oz’s family had emigrated to Palestine to escape Russian oppression and was living in close quarters with its neighboring Arabs. Many of the emigrant Jews were not Zionists: they were socialists, secularists, intellectuals, working poor, and a-political refugees who just wanted to live a quiet life. Although Zionism was actually founded by both secular and religious Jews, under the political machinations of Britain and the western powers, once the State of Israel became a reality, Zionism became an ideology, a national homeland with a national identity that to no one’s surprise is becoming a fundamentalist theocracy. And we know what happens when religious fundamentalism defines who is worthy and who isn’t: ethnic cleansing. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now the Israeli Security Minister was “convicted of incitement to racism, interfering with a police officer performing his duty, and support for a terrorist organization, Meir Kahane’s Kach Movement (he has also successfully sued the state for hundreds of thousands of shekels in compensation for wrongful accusations). Due to these convictions, the IDF thought it too dangerous to draft him when he was eighteen.”

And so the slaughter continues and the dangers of a full blown regional war increase daily. As a ground invasion impends, more terrorists will rise from the ashes. Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden will share that legacy. And bear (remember the hug?) blood on their hands. Not in my name but on my conscience.

The El Valle Fire

This is what I wrote in my June 4, 2022 blog post: “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 a (small “d” this time) 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 that got away 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.”

On Friday, September 8, 2023 it was us, although everyone was saying we again “dodged a bullet” because our houses didn’t burn, just the surrounding forest. In an ironic twist of fate someone set ablaze the large thinning project above El Valle on the ridge that separates us from Las Trampas. The slash piles were still on the ground. After the smoke cleared and I could see the thinned acres up on the ridge it looked like it had snowed: the piles were white ash. The next day, when the rains came, the piles were black.

It was a crazy three days. First, the fire erupted midday on Friday with huge billows of black smoke scaring the shit out of everyone. I was in Taos when my neighbor Marty called telling me El Valle was on fire. She was on her way home from Española. Whoever got there first would get Paco, my dog. Forty-five minutes later, in Peñasco, the state cops at the road block told me no one was allowed on SH 76, the highway you have to travel to access the forest road into El Valle. I yelled and argued that I had to get my dog. I called 911: “Obey the cops.”

No one got through this road block from Peñasco but somehow Marty got through from the other direction, got her animals, and stopped for Paco. He wasn’t there. Meanwhile, I was at the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco using their Wi-Fi to talk to Marty and my other neighbors the Buechleys, who were in El Valle and got to Paco first. They took him to Ojo Sarco where they would shelter.

Along with other locked out El Valle neighbors, also using Sugar Nymphs Wi-Fi, we were constantly on our phones, talking to other neighbors, finding out who was in and who was out, telling our families that El Valle was burning, and fielding calls from other friends offering houses and help. I slept at the Sugar Nymphs house where Kai offered me some pot to try to sleep (no Xanax in my purse, my only possession). Instead of sleep I hallucinated for two hours on only two tokes. Marijuana has never been my drug of choice.

Early Saturday morning I got two texts: “We got into El Valle.” I threw on my clothes, left a note for Kai and Ki, and raced home. No one was manning the Road Closed signs. The helicopters and slurry planes were in full force: hundreds of water drops over burning trees with slurry laid across wide swaths of smoke. Those of us who made it back in packed up all the stuff we weren’t able to pack on Friday and waited to see if they (the county sheriff or state police) were going to try to throw us out. Once again they closed the El Valle Road but they didn't make us leave.

Then the rains came. It hadn’t rained all of July and August, our monsoon season. Several drenching rains put out all but the most resistant, deeply embedded embers that kept roots and rocks hot as hell. Dozens of fire fighters combed the acres, squelching the smokes, strengthening the natural boundaries that corralled the fire between the two villages.

It’s now a week later. The crews are still here, remediating the bulldozer lines that had to be laid at each end of the village, chipping all the trees they cut to create the fuel breaks, fixing fences, once more passing through the burned acres, just in case. We finally got our mail, a week after the road closure sign went up; we have to have a talk with the mailman, who unlike the UPS and Express drivers who barreled through, obeyed the admonition. I’m walking through all the detritus of the fire, measuring where it burned hottest, where it skipped over, where it validated other thinned acres accomplished by home owners with agency help. Once the survivor euphoria wears off there will no doubt be lambasting from thinning deniers—"let nature take its course”—or the village crank whose private lands across the river burned. Compared with what happened a year ago not so far away, I say, let’s rejoice and give everyone a pat on the back before we descend into dissecting what happened and why.

Life in the Lookout

My son Jakob gave me a copy of Phillip Connors book about being a fire lookout in a remote tower in the Gila Wilderness. I’d heard about the book before but had never gotten around to reading it. As a former fire lookout myself—and writer— you’d think I’d have sought it out, but better late than never. Now it can be gist for a blog.

Connors and I share many of the same lookout qualifications: familiarity with Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac’s adventures in North Cascades lookouts; a love of solitude (dogs don’t count); time to write; and hiking and backpacking in the wilds of New Mexico. We also share a deep understanding that being a fire lookout is a contradiction in terms. The job, which no longer exists, required one to report fires seen from the lookout to the Forest Service dispatcher who would then send fire crews—hot shot crews, helicopter crews, tanker crews, spotter planes, retardant planes—to stomp out the fire. I was a lookout in the 1970s, Connors in the 2000s. During my time there was only the hint of aknowledgment that perhaps the decades of suppressing all fires in our national forests had created an unhealthy and overstocked forest that made them more susceptible to extreme, uncontrollable fire. By the time Connors got to his lookout in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness—sister to the Gila Wilderness—the FS was gauging each non-manmade fire for its “let burn” potential to improve forest conditions by managing low impact ground fires.

But that’s about where our shared interests end. He’s married, hates cows, worships Aldo Leopold, and ends up with a book of “deep reflection.” I had a love fest in the lookout, being single and in my early 20s, was being schooled in the concept of inhabited wilderness, would end up living next door to cows for most of my life, and only got an article for New Mexico Magazine out of it.

I found out about fire lookouts at my first FS job ever on the Lincoln National Forest in Cloudcroft after I dropped out of Antioch. I was a campground patrol who drove around visiting with all the Texans who came to the mountain air for heat relief and moved from camp site to site camp every two weeks—the limit at each site—in their campers and RVs. I soon began an affair with one of the fire crew, a local boy who taught me how to two-step and took me camping on horseback. When one day we visited the district fire tower I knew being a fire lookout instead of a campground patrol was the job for me.

Luckily enough, I got that job the next season in the La Mosa Peak fire lookout, sister peak to the majestic Mount Taylor, near Grants. They took me up in a helicopter with all my gear as there was too much snow on the ground for the fire trucks to reach the tower. I had to come back down to get my dogs, Chani and Judge, and the fire truck dropped me off at snow line and I hiked up for my initial two-week stay. Unlike Connors, who lived in a cabin below and climbed the tower every day for work, I lived in the tower, already high enough on the peak to provide the necessary vista. My dogs lived in the tower with me and whenever company came they’d stand as sentinels on the catwalk and bark their heads off.

My visitors included my first lover, a young geology student doing an internship at one of the uranium mines on the forest boundary. In the 1970s the uranium industry was ubiquitous around Grants: drilling rigs combing the forest for potential mining sites (I had to learn to differentiate their diesel smoke from a forest fire); the open pit Jackpile mine at Laguna Pueblo; and milling processing plants near Milan. Gino was a fun-loving guy who had no intention of being a uranium miner so we had a lot of fun at night in the tower and hiking and camping in the canyons below the peak.

After he went back to school I had a brief fling with the helicopter pilot stationed on our district, then a longer affair with Danny, one of a group of friends who ended up buying land on the other side of my FS district, out in the Zuni Mountains. Then, in my second season as lookout, I met Mark, a poet who was schooled on Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and thought nothing could be better than having an affair with a fire lookout. That was the end of the love affairs: we were together for 34 years until he died of pancreatic cancer. After La Mosca, we took turns working the Cedro Peak fire lookout in the Manzano Mountains, closer to the house we were building in Placitas and where I took baby Jakob to work with me.

Conners and my environmental politics diverged most profoundly when Mark and I moved to El Valle, a land grant village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Here, as members of a land based community that maintained the traditions of grazing cattle, cutting firewood, and irrigating fields and gardens from rivers on public lands that their ancestors previously owned, I relied more on my neighbors than the environmental heroes like Leopold, John Muir, or Ed Abbey as guides to what was ecologically sustainable for both the land and its inhabitants. Instead of writing a paeon to the wonderful luck of being a fire lookout, which Connors does admirably, Mark and I ended up publishing a newspaper that examines the conflicts that inevitably arise from perspectives, like Connors and mine, that tend to diverge based on lived experience.

That’s not to say I didn’t share the quotidian joys that Connors and all the lucky lookouts who’ve graced these peaks experience in one form or another: golden eagles flying every night, black bears with whom I competed for raspberries, bombing nighthawks, fire crews who stopped by for a visit, the view of volcanic plugs from my outhouse, lightning storms that had me hovering on the floor with Jakob, and walking my beloved dogs. I don't particularly treasure the times the two came back to the tower with porcupine quills in their snouts (and in Judge’s case, in his mouth) but they’re all my memories, good and bad. I’m sorry Connors’ generation was the last one to be there, on top of the peaks, beneath the clouds, looking out at the world.

Building a House

I find it hard to believe that I built a house from scratch back in the 1970s, especially after today’s three-hour bout with my dilapidated hoop house door. It’s hard for one person to screw boards together without another person applying the needed buttress and even harder to hang the dang thing once you’ve managed to get the boards in place. But the door is fixed and rehung to protect the in-house seedlings in case the temperature drops below 32 degrees, which alarmingly enough, on this 22nd day of May, has been happening on a regular basis.

Actually, Mark and I and numerous friends and neighbors built that house in Placitas, where Mark and I lived until the early 1990s with our two children. Neither of us had any building experience. Mark was a man of the mind—a steel trap one at that: poet, keeper of rare books, jazz aficionado, fledgling artist, and master of Trivial Pursuit. I was a college drop out who had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. We both ended up in Placitas because of the time and place: the freedom of the early 70s, the search for a different kind of life, and the draw of that hackneyed New Mexican “enchantment.”

I somehow got it in my head that I was going to build a house before I met Mark. With money from my mother I managed the down payment on five acres of land outside the village in an area where other twenty something’s were also building houses from scratch. I considered several design options, all adobe of course, and finally settled on two stories with a gambrel roof so one could stand up straight in any room of the upstairs. I drew up blueprints. How I managed to do this I have no idea. There was no YouTube to see how to design and draw up plans for a house because there was no Internet (at least for us plebeians). I hired a man with a backhoe to dig the foundation. I must have gone to the library for adobe building books because I had him dig the footing wide enough to lay the adobes length wise, not side wise, for better insulation.

Then I met Mark, which was quite fortuitous because although he didn’t know anything about building, his landlord and friend Tom did. We hired him to teach us how to prepare a footing for the cement truck, lay cement block for the stem wall, and stack adobes. We mixed all the cement and adobe mud for this in wheel barrels and laid all of it ourselves. Of course before we did all this I had to persuade Mark that building a house was a good idea when he thought spending his time working at a bookstore or library—he was working at the famous Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque when I met him—and writing poems and reading books for fun was a better idea.

But he got into the rhythm of things until we got to the second story and he fell through the staircase opening and the piece of plywood that had been laid over that opening fell on his head. The cut ran from just above an eyebrow, up his forehead, and then halfway across the top. They stitched him up at UNM Hospital—hundreds of stitches in two layers—and then put sandbags around his neck until they could determine if it was broken. It wasn't. But his enthusiasm was quite broken and he lay in bed for a good long while recovering. In the meantime I was back at the house building the rafters from two by twelve rough lumber. All I had was a skill saw. All I’ve ever had is a skill saw. When I needed new boards cut for the hoop house door I went to my neighbor’s house and he cut them with his table saw. When I had to replace the molding on my windows I went to my other neighbor, who’s a woodworker, and he cut them with a table saw. Or maybe it was some other kind of saw, as he and his wife have every woodworking tool ever invented. Mark had a jigsaw for a while but I don’t know what happened to it. And yes, of course, we had and have a chainsaw, but that’s a requirement to live here.

Anyway, I had to wait for Mark to recover before we could lift the rafters into place—along with any other bodies we could round up. There were many more adventures along the way, like Tom hanging on a rope over the dormers attaching the tin and me, pregnant, carrying Mark buckets of plaster up two tiers of scaffolding. And here I am now in a house in El Valle that’s almost three stories high with lofts above the second floor. We had to buy a really big ladder to paint the window trim and plug the hole under the rafter where the bats were getting in, but I hired a crew to stucco the house twenty years after we moved in. They were on three tiers of scaffolding. I don’t even go up the ladder anymore.

So I do what I can these days like fix hoop house doors and replace molding and paint first floor trim and then I have to call in the troops. It’s hard doing it by myself but it’s also good there’s no one around to witness how badly my house building skills, which were never really that great, have deteriorated. We only built a house through sheer will; sadly, a house that is no more. Here’s the blog I wrote about going back to Placitas after twenty years to look at it. But hey, we know we did it even if it’s not there.

Regina Ratner

My name is really Regina Ratner. Instead, I’m known by the prosaic, yet complicated nomenclature, Kay Matthews.

First, let’s look at the Matthews part of the name. It’s my father’s name, of course, as the patriarchal practice of the progeny inheriting the male name (the means of establishing economic ownership) was de rigueur in the 1950s, the decade of my birth (and still largely true in the aughts, a word I’ve always recoiled from without even knowing its archaic meaning is “nonentity”). Except that it really wasn’t my father’s name, which was D’Urphy, from the Scots-Irish settlers who inhabited the southeast portion of North America that eventually became Appalachia. His mother divorced—very unusual in those days—the D’Urphy and married the Matthews—Bosque, as we knew him—but he never officially adopted my father. While D’Urphy/Matthews managed to physically leave southern Illinois behind he never managed to escape the hillbilly heritage that impugned his autodidactic generated self image.

My mother’s name was Ratner. Why oh why didn’t they let me have Ratner instead of Matthews, which wasn’t my legal name anyway. What a wonderful Jewish name that evokes the kosher deli on the Lower East Side of New York City where they served (it’s gone) cheese blintzes, onion rolls, and borsht. I could have been a cousin to Katz’s, the other deli on Bleecker Street where they serve pastrami sandwiches (my mother-in-law’s name was Katz). My mother’s family didn’t do so bad, either. Her father owned a couple of department stores in Denver and one in Phoenix where she learned the retail business. We could have been the Katz/Ratner/Schiller (my father-in-law) family.

The Kay part of the name is indicative of my father's imagined self image. He (apparently my mother was complicit) named me Regina Kay. Regina means queen in Latin. They named their middle daughter queen? But guess what they named their eldest daughter? Claudia. If she had been a he would they have named him Claude, Jr.? I shudder at the thought. But it gets worse. My younger sister’s name was Lana Riquelle. Lana after Lana Turner and Riquelle made up. Of course she never went by either name and was always Riki.

How does one live in northern New Mexico with the first name Kay. Hello, my name is Kay. “Que? Your name is what?” So all the old time Hispanos call me Kate. Which is way better than Kay but not as good as Regina, which in Spanish is pronounced Ray-hina. Ray-hina Ratner sounds pretty good to me. I know plenty of other people who’ve changed their given names, like Susan—to Tanya—and Brian—to Bari, but let’s be real, I’m Kay Matthews to everyone I know and Kay Matthews on Google search and Kay Matthews on the hundreds of La Jicarita articles, magazine articles, blog posts, and books I’ve written. So be it. But maybe Regina could have been a real contender. I’ll never know.

The Dog Park

In El Valle I have a dog door and Paco goes outside to run free whenever he feels like it. In Santa Fe, I go to the dog park. It’s not your typical dog park, where dogs run around in a fenced in space while their humans kibbutz and break up any fights. The Frank Ortiz Dog Park is 138 acres (I think) of piñon/juniper rolling hills with trails and arroyos and big open spaces where humans can hike along with their dogs or stand around with other humans while their dogs play.

While I’m a relative newcomer to the park, having arrived in May of 2022 and preparing to depart in April of 2023, I’m definitely one of the regulars who knows the names of the dogs that are also regulars and the names of the humans whose dogs play with Anka, my son Max’s two-year old German Shepherd. Paco is 12 now and doesn’t play with any dogs except Anka, who sometimes forces him to play.

There are summer regulars and winter regulars, however. After meeting all the dogs and their humans last summer—Rupert and Maria, Beau and Paul—they disappeared as soon as it was 20 degrees at 8:30 am and the winter regulars arrived. Now Anka plays with Buddy, a doodle dog, Juna (not sure of the spelling) another German Shepherd, and Riley, her best buddy. Rily and Anka can find each other anywhere in the park and take off running around the bushes, rolling on top of each other, biting each other’s fir, nipping each other’s legs, just rollicking around until Riley’s human—don’t know his name—has to go to work or I have to go home.

There’s another winter regular named Amelia, whose dog Santo also likes to play with Anka but Santo is trained like one of those dogs who go to the Westminster Dog Show. Also a German Shepherd, on command Santo sits beside Amelia, looks up at Amelia, walks backward with Amelia, and only goes to play when she says “go.” We all offer to pay the beautiful, young Amelia hundreds of dollars to train our dogs but alas, she’s too busy being a goldsmith and making her way in Santa Fe (her landlord left her without heat for three days).

Rarely do the summer and winter cohorts intersect, but the other day I was there in the afternoon substituting for Max who takes the afternoon shift when up bounces Beau, the big, black Labrador who loves to run between your legs and lean up against your body to profess his love. If you recall, my blog post “In Search of Lost Memories Instead of Time” revealed my accident with Anka that landed me in the ER with a concussion and a bruised rib, so I try to stay out of the way of bounding dogs. But I was so happy to see Beau I wouldn’t have cared if he’d knocked me over. I hadn’t seen him since summer and it was obvious he’d missed me, too. I asked Paul where he’d been and he said he only comes out when the temperature is above 40. Maybe that’s what happened to all the summer people—they’re afternoon people now.

I wonder if people meet each other at the dog park and become fast friends or even lovers. My conversation with them is usually limited to dog talk, but maybe other people start talking about human things rather than dog things and relationships evolve. When I was younger and unloved I fantasized about meeting someone at the Laundromat. I think this must have been triggered by some movie I saw or short story I read, but alas, I never did meet anyone there and I haven’t been to a Laundromat in 40 years. I didn’t have to remain unloved, though, and even better than the fantasy of a Laundromat I fell in love with Mark at the much more romantic setting of the La Mosca fire lookout. Now I’m too old for romance but I wish others the best of luck if their fantasy is meeting a lover at the dog park.

On Watching Football: Why Now?

I’ve written before in this blog about watching sports, particularly basketball (“On Watching Basketball” in the first Unf*#!ing Believable) and baseball (“Just Trying to Watch the Game” in Unf*#!ing Believable Redux, yet to be published), but the only time I wrote about football was to dis Beyoncé and Madonna while discussing the Super Bowl halftime show (also in the first Unf*#!ing Believable).

Actually, in the “On Watching Basketball” blog post I also wrote about football but only to reference the Buffalo Bills, Mark’s hometown team—that managed to lose the Super Bowl four times in a row—while questioning his ability to disassociate sports from his criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: “class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed , media misinformation, etc.” I also recognized that he “just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run.”

This blog post is about the “gut wrenching physicality of football,” which I’ve found myself watching much more of lately. Maybe it’s because Jakob and Marcos, my grandson, remain Bills fans. Or maybe it’s because a couple of Super Bowls back I became aware of how hot the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes is. After Mark died my friends Kai and Ki and I started the tradition of watching the Super Bowl at their house so we could evaluate the quality of the millions-of-dollars commercials that paid for the spectacle. Kai and Ki are the owners and chefs of the Sugar Nymphs Bistro in Peñasco who also fed me delicious food while we were watching the commercials.

This year I’m going to be watching much more than the commercials, however, because Patrick Mahomes is there once again. I actually watched two Sundays of football when the Chiefs worked their way through the playoffs. I even watched two football games last Sunday—the first time in my life—because I had to wait until 4:30 to watch the Chiefs and what was I going to do with the rest of this day I’d set aside for TV.

But I have to admit, the “gut wrenching” display of players landing on top of each other and either slowly getting up or failing to get up often too much. Max and I were trying to watch the Bills/Cincinnati Bengals game— the streaming channel was on the blink—when the Bills player Damar Hamlin actually died on the field of cardiac arrest but was brought back to life. I saw many reruns of that wrenching moment and I’ve seen plenty of other violent, wrenching moments and ask myself, “Why is it that a game so physically brutal is the most popular sport in this country?” On the phone the other night John Nichols told me why he loves to watch football: “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s so interesting because you never know what’s going to happen.” I’m not sure that’s what millions of other fans would say if you asked them the same question, but we’ll leave it at that.

Then when we were skiing yesterday, Jakob and I chatted about the impending Super Bowl and he told me that at the last game they showed the owner’s wife dressed from head to toe in fur. I Googled the owner and saw that his grandfather, H.L. Hunt, was an oil tycoon and the inspiration for the character J.R. Ewing from the long-running TV series “Dallas.” OK, what NFL owner isn’t a capitalist pig (the Green Bay Packers are the only publicly owned team with a president, not an owner)? So, like Mark, I’ll put aside the notion of corporate greed and just enjoy the Super Bowl this year. Go Chiefs!

Death

Zadie Smith wrote a review in The New York Review of Books of Tár, the new movie starring Cate Blanchett as a world famous, narcissistic conductor. While Smith mentions that some movie reviewers asked, “Why do female ambition and desire have to be monstrous?,” the part of the review that interested me was Smith’s discussion of death. In this ambitious woman’s life, it’s her reputation that dies—“ego death”—not her corporeal being, but in Smith’s telling the two are inseparable. For someone like Lydia Tár, Blanchett’s character, the loss of prestige is death.

This makes me think about the many deaths I’ve already experienced and the ones that impend. I’m 73 (happy birthday to me), so there are going to be quite a few of the latter. Of the ones who are gone, there are those who leave behind something that makes it into the cultural zeitgeist: a book, a movie, a painting, a philosophy, or the fictitious Lydia Tár. Those who don’t make it in leave a memory of themselves to only a few others, and even then, that memory fades rapidly as the others’ lives proceed. When I think about those few whose memory I hold, it’s hard to reconcile who they were then, when they were with me daily or close by, with the fact that they aren’t anywhere any more.

This, of course, makes me think about my own death. Where do I fall into the scheme of things? A little fish in a little pond is probably about where I lie. In my 27-year old “Journal of Environmental Politics,” La Jicarita, I’ll be leaving behind a written record of an eventful time in in northern New Mexico but La Jicarita will die with me. It’s archive will live on in the Center for Southwest Research at UNM’s Zimmerman Library, but except for those who knew me personally there won’t be much memory of its editor. I always remember what Owen Lopez, former executive director of the McCune Foundation, which funded La Jicarita for many years, said to me at a party celebrating its fundees: “Well, you may not have accomplished much or won too many battles but at least you have a record of it.”

But I have some very important people with me in that little pond who I would classify as middle-to large sized fish and they’re not doing too well. One of them just called me on the phone to tell me he had a heart attack last week and spent three days in the hospital. “Why didn’t you call me from the hospital?” I asked, upset. “Verizon cut off my cell phone service for some unknown reason. I paid the fuckers.” He survived this time but the possibility of a next time is now much more likely. My other friend is in his 80s and barely hanging on. A beloved writer of novels and nonfiction, he’s hoping to make it through another winter, alone in his house crammed full of life’s detritus.

When they die there will be many people and family members who’ll attend their funerals and reminisce about their places in the world. When my partner of 34 years and co-editor of La Jicarita, Mark Schiller, died prematurely at age 62, we had a wake in El Valle that was crammed full of family, neighbors, co-conspirators, and friends from all walks of life. But the only ones who ever talk about him are the kids and me. That’s where I’m headed as well, and probably without a wake, as everyone who was at Mark’s will either be dead or been gone too long.

But that’s OK. My life is more circumscribed now and less fun, so thinking about death doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is how I’m going to die. Mark died of pancreatic cancer. He lived for 18 months with chemotherapy, some hospital visits, and in the end, he decided to quit eating. My mother died of an intentional overdose of drugs after she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that made her susceptible to infection. That’s the route I plan to take when I decide I’ve had enough. A serious illness or an inkling of dementia will probably be the tipping point, but you never know. I’ll just have to wait and see and make sure I have the right stuff at the right time. Until then, I’m afraid I’ll have quite a bit of mourning to do and that may be worse than death.

El Valle Writer Wars

Thirty some years ago I landed in El Valle because I knew Bill deBuys, New Mexican writer of great esteem, whose second book, River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life, was a celebration of the village, its people, its culture, its beauty. It was the story of Jacobo and Eliza Romero, of Tomás Montoya, of the Hispano community that kept the acequias, hay fields, and traditional practices intact during a period of transition that would profoundly change the demographics of the village once this generation was gone.

I arrived at the apex of their rule. Tomás, my closest neighbor, was the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle: Jacobo, the main character in Bill’s elegy, had died, but Eliza was still there along with the extended Montoya, Lucero, Romero, and Aguilar clans. Bill had left for Santa Fe but kept a studio he’d built next to Alex Harris’s house, the photographer of River of Traps, who’d high tailed it to North Carolina to teach at Duke.

Only one other full-time Anglo family lived in the village, Nancy and Larry Buechley, who’d been there since the 1970s. My family became the second full-time Anglo family out of pure luck: I knew Bill because we were both writers and he knew about a house for sale. But that’s pretty much all we shared and 30 years later I’m pissed: he’s been criticizing my forest restoration project for not being ecologically sound and for making it easier for poachers to go in and cut the big trees we’re trying to save by cutting down the smaller trees. In a sense, he’s right, at least on the latter point: anyone can drive by the access road that leads to our thinning project near El Valle and say to themselves, hey, I think I’ll just come back tonight and drive down this road and cut down a few trees.

If you’ve already noticed, I interplay “my” and “our” because I feel very proprietary about this restoration project. Over the past 20 years Mark and I thinned five or more acres near El Valle and Chamisal as part of a contract stewardship program run by the Forest Service. Villagers were allotted an acre of forest where they cut all the trees except the “leave” trees, mostly larger ponderosa pines, to replicate a more savannah like environment with an understory of grasses—and keep all the wood. The poachers Bill complained about cut the trees on one of the acres Mark and I thinned that bordered our current restoration project. I’m pissed about that, too.

“Ours” is a board of directors comprised of local people from El Valle and Las Trampas, a Santa Fe non-profit that did the NEPA work (environmental assessment) and wrote the grant for the project, and the Forest Service, that wrote the prescription. But I use “I” quit a bit because of my history in the stewardship program and my presence at the table developing the new one. So when Bill wrote the Regional Forester, behind our backs, that our project was enticing the poachers, we wrote back “ . . . we do not believe that thinning to remove ladder fuels from around large old trees is causing poaching. That line of thinking places the blame on the victims, which are in this case, the forest, the trees, and the leñeros [wood cutters] who are working hard to do things the right way.” That was way back in February of 2022. Then the poachers came in early this winter and cut down some more trees, in the same general area but closer to the village. This time Bill wrote the Forest Service and the project board that we ought to terminate our relationship with the Forest Service until they stop the poaching. We wrote him back again asking him to refrain from the blame game and I wrote an article in La Jicarita asking the same.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wrangled with Bill. During the bitter 1990s and early 2000s’ wars between the environmentalists and community loggers, e.g., Forest Guardians and La Companía Ocho, Bill was the statesman-like conservationist, unwilling to get down and dirty to advocate for his fellow norteños against the lawsuits that greatly contributed to the death of community based logging companies. La Jicarita got plenty muddy and didn’t shy away from critiquing his “above the fray” positions that often failed to hold the absolutist enviros to account. So there you have it. Neighbors who don’t much like each other and don’t see eye to eye. Nothing new there (see Unf*#!ing Believable “It Takes a Village . . . or it Should Take a Village”) just another tiresome El Valle story dispelling romantic notions.