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.