My Dog Paco

My dog Paco, aka Buddy Guy, is 13 years old going on 14. Before I had knee surgery—see my previous post, The Emotional Cost of My New Bionic Knee, I walked him every morning through the village up the llano so we both got a little cardiac workout. As the date of my surgery got closer it got harder and harder to make the climb, but I persisted. Paco lives for his walk.

When I came home from the hospital I was sleeping downstairs in a bed I’d borrowed and walking with a walker. Paco couldn’t figure out either change: why we weren’t upstairs, me in my bed and he on his pillow, and why he couldn’t get next to me with this metal thing around my legs. My caregivers all did their best to give him short walks while attending to me, but I could see the confusion mounting as these impingements on his routine increased. And why were so many people coming in and out of the house at all times of the day bringing stuff or sitting around talking to me while I lay on this strange bed in the living room.

After about 12 days my caregiver friend left. I’d moved back upstairs and was going to physical therapy two days a week and seemingly progressing from the surgery. Then three weeks into the rehab, the bottom part of my leg caught fire. From my knee to my ankle the nerves erupted to the point where anything touching the skin—hand, clothing, bedding—turned on the electricity. What the fuck? My physical therapist didn’t know what to do about it, just that it had to be a nerve reaction to the surgery. It hurt so much at therapy that I couldn’t do my exercises and one of the other therapists told her to just massage it. Which hurt like hell.

Paco’s confusion turned into anxiety attacks, or at least that’s how I interpreted them. All of a sudden he would jerk his head and look straight out, as if there’d been a loud noise somewhere that grabbed his attention. Then came the panting and trembling and the pawing—on anything near him, including me. At night while I struggled to sleep with my leg hanging out from the bed covers Paco would have an attack and start pawing me or the dresser next to the bed, endlessly. We spent many sleepless nights as I struggled to calm him down by petting him, talking to him, or in despair, tying him up on the leash where he couldn’t do any damage. The dresser is scarred with his paw marks. I made an appointment with the vet.

I called my son Max and he came home to help me. The nice vet at the office where I’ve gone for years in Taos listened to our description of Paco’s behavior, asked a few questions, and said, well, what I think Paco is experiencing is cognitive dysfunction syndrome, which is essentially dog Alzheimer’s. The attacks that we were witnessing were signals in his brain setting off the anxiety and confusion. We went home with $67 worth of gabapentin, the go to drug for just about anything, and the advice that if he continued to decline he’d write a prescription for Prozac.

We didn’t have to get a prescription. When one of our neighbors heard the diagnosis she came over with what looked like a year’s supply of it. I didn’t ask why she had so many, just thanked her.

In the meantime, I saw the surgeon who told me the peroneal nerve in my leg must have been damaged during the nerve block (a nerve block, which if you recall from my previous blog post, didn’t block the pain in my knee post surgery) and that considering my orthopedic history—it took me a year to recover from surgery for a bone spur in my wrist that froze my shoulder—I was an “at risk” patient. He finally put me on lyrica, the drug everyone goes to when gabapentin doesn’t work. We gave the rest of my gabapentin to Paco.

Paco’s drugs worked. He’s much calmer, with only an occasional episode. Max walks him and his dog Anka twice a day. My drugs, on the other hand, haven’t worked. One of my La Jicarita readers sent me St. John’s Wort tincture and oil to try to settle my damaged nerves. Another friend told me to take a much higher dosage of lyrica than what the surgeon prescribed. So that means an appointment with my primary doc.

It's endless. Now I have to bake cranberry bread for Christmas gifts for neighbors and get through Hanukkah—I gave up Christmas years ago—with the grandkids. But the question remains. Will I ever walk again without pain and resume a life limited by age but undergirded by years of physical activity. That post is for next year. Happy New Year everybody.

The Emotional Cost of my New Bionic Knee

I filed a formal complaint against the Presbyterian Española Hospital last week. A surgeon there gave me a bionic knee that will allow me to irrigate, hike, cross-country ski, and maybe downhill for a few more years. For that I’m truly grateful. But in order to get that new knee I had to participate in the medical industrial complex that is, as so many of us have experienced, diving deeper and deeper into disfunction and chaos that leaves the patient confused, ill-treated, and feeling abandoned. My story is illustrative of this defenestration, but may also provide some insight on how better to prevent that fall from happening to others.

There is no exact time at a hospital; there’s only “waiting.” Arriving at 8 am I waited until 3 pm for surgery. First, the anesthesiologist gave me a nerve block, which is an injection that targets a nerve or group of nerves to provide pain relief. Secondly, she gave me a spinal anesthesia block, which numbs the lower half of the body. I don’t remember anything after that (they also give you versed, a great drug that induces sleepiness, decreases anxiety, and provides amnesia about what just happened to your body) and she also gave me general anesthesia, meaning you’re not conscious during surgery. The actual surgery lasts only an hour or so but then you wait in recovery for someone to come get you and take you to your room in the hospital. A one-night stay is normal for my kind of surgery.

The first indication that the nerve block hadn’t worked came around eight o’clock that night when all the other meds in my body dissipated and I started writhing around on the bed at level 9 on the pain scale (10 is torture). First the nurse administered Tylenol (yes, this is the first drug they give you post-surgery); then oxycodone; then two doses of morphine; then a call to the doctor for permission to use tramadol (I’d never even heard of that one), until three hours later the pain abated and I dropped off into something I called the night’s wrestle: intermittent pain mixed with exhausted sleep.

I’ve had two previous orthopedic surgeries: a meniscus repair and a rotator cuff repair, in which I distinctly remember two days of nerve block pain relief at home before it became obvious it was time to take the oral oxycodone. I wasn’t in need of validation that the nerve block hadn’t worked but I got it anyway the next morning when the doctor came in for a brief visit: “Have you forgiven me?” The good news was that the surgery was successful. Then I waited a few hours and the physical therapy people came in and that‘s when I noticed I couldn’t bend my foot at the ankle. As I pointed this out, there was a brief silence and then someone said “foot drop,” and someone else said, it’ll probably come back, but by then I was imaging walking down the street with my foot dragging along the ground like Ratso Rizzo. When I got home I looked up “foot drop, caused by an injured nerve during hip or knee replacement surgery.”

So there I was: a nerve block that didn’t work on my knee but froze my ankle (it may have been two different blocks). After waiting another couple of hours I found out another alarming fact: Mountain Home Health, a company that provides home health care and physical therapy to Taos County residents, no longer serves El Valle (they were bought out). I’d based my decision to do my rehab at home because of these services. Because I live alone, now I have to find someone to take me to physical therapy, an hour away. It was too late to change plans, so home I went with a friend caregiver and others lined up for the first 10 days.

Around 10 o’clock that first night home the pain arrived again at level 9 and I woke up my friend with my moans and cries. She didn’t know how much oxycodone I could safely take. The good news was that I’d made sure I had some pills on hand left over from a previous prescription so that we didn’t have to stop and fill a prescription in Española on our way home from the hospital. My son would pick it up at my regular pharmacy in Santa Fe the next day on his way up from Albuquerque.

I’d already taken 10 milligrams in hourly succession and the pain wasn’t touched. My care giver called the hospital. Someone actually answered but when she identified who I was they told her because I wasn’t covered under their Presbyterian insurance (secondary insurance, as Medicare was primary) I needed to call my insurer to speak to a medical professional. No one answered the phone, of course. No nurse ever answered a nurse hot line number,either. In desperation we called 911, saying “I don’t know if this is an emergency or not but . . .” They sent out the EMTs from Peñasco, who were very kind but unable to administer pain medication (only paramedics can). They did get a doctor on the phone, however, who said we could safely increase the dose of oxycodone to a certain level. Just as we were trying to decide whether to have the EMTs take me to the emergency room, the pain started to abate and we sent them on their way.

The next day, Friday, I called the hospital to try to get some advice on pain relief. When you call the hospital you only get through to a main switchboard. There is no direct number to a clinic, a nurse, a physician’s assistant, or a doctor. You leave a message with whomever answers the phone and request that it gets delivered to the right person. The person who answered my call said she would send it to the clinic with an “asap” note on it. No one ever called me back. Then my son called to say that the pharmacy was “out of oxycodone” and because it was Friday night there was no one to call to ask for a prescription to a different pharmacy.

I had enough leftover oxycodone to make it through the weekend. I called the hospital on Monday and told them to get a new prescription sent to a pharmacy in Española that I could get when I went down for my first PT appointment on Tuesday. There was no Rx at that pharmacy on Tuesday. I called the hospital again and a nurse called me back saying the prescription had been sent to my primary pharmacy in Santa Fe. I told the nurse, “No, I requested that it be sent to the pharmacy near the hospital.” She said she’d ask them to send it to the correct pharmacy. Finally, on Thursday, when I went down for another PT appointment, the Rx was at the local pharmacy: six days after my surgery.

If I review what happened, step by step, each one becomes an indicator of the systemic problems that need to be addressed in not only the specific facility where I experienced them but in the larger medical industrial complex. Let’s break them down into bullet points:

• Pain management is crucial. If a nerve block doesn’t work or isn’t sufficient to help reduce post-surgical pain patients should remain at the hospital until a pain protocol is established.

• Communication between health care providers and patients is crucial, particularly for pain management. A hotline for post-surgery advice could provide the information needed to manage medications at home.

• Communication between health care providers and patients is crucial at all times, not just for pain management. With no direct access to the orthopedic clinic, a nurse, a PA, or a doctor a patient has to hope that messages are delivered in a timely fashion—or even at all!

• If it’s after business hours or the weekend a patient has no way to request a transfer from the prescribing physician. Pharmacies should be allowed to transfer opioid prescriptions to sister stores if they are out of stock.

• Case managers need to be assigned at the outset. She or he could help the patient navigate all the issues raised above: pain management (delayed hospital release); communication with medical staff; and prescription oversight.

I don’t have the qualifications to assess why these remedies aren’t enacted: I’m just aware of the anecdotal evidence supplied by those who’ve suffered in similar situations: insurance bullying; lack of staffing, from doctors down to MA’s (medial assistants); bureaucratic “efficiency” that makes things less efficient (never getting to speak t a person); opioid restrictions that increase patient pain; or there are just too many of us old people getting new knees and hips and shoulders. Think New Mexico’s latest publication, "How to Solve New Mexico’s Health care Worker Shortage” attributes the problems to the high cost of malpractice insurance that discourages doctors from practicing in New Mexico.

At a follow-up appointment at the orthopedic clinic when I told this story to the attending medic, he told me this was not the first time he’d heard these complaints (and he had a record of all the phone calls I’d made to the hospital), especially the one about not being able to speak directly to a medical professional when questions and situations arise that need immediate attention. So I walked down the hall to the administration office and filed my complaint. It will be sent to the Presbyterian headquarters in Albuquerque and then someone will “give me a call.” I’m not holding my breath.

My Last Acequia Meeting Ever, I Swear

This month’s acequia meeting was the second worst I’ve attended in my 30 plus year tenure in El Valle. The first was 23 years ago when the commission, same as the one this month, tried to take Tomás’s water right away. I’m probably repressing the untold number of other horrible acequia meetings I’ve been to, but I’ll continue with the deconstruction of this one that probably just replicates those ones I’ve repressed.

You’re probably wondering, the commission for this month’s horrible meeting was the same commission for the meeting 23 years ago? Yes, my friends, the commission, really just two guys who are the commission—the third is just someone they can find as a figurehead—has ruled our little El Valle village for almost the entire time I’ve lived here. For the first 15 years they only governed one of the acequias until Tomás, my beloved vecino, and Mark, my partner, died a year apart and they took over our acequia. The third acequia was governed by a mixture of bad and good until they finally took over that one as well.

You may also ask, who are these guys and why have they been jockeying for control of acequias in the tiny little village of El Valle? If I were being politically correct, I would say they want to assert their authority as a stake of enfranchisement, after years of colonial disenfranchisement. The problem with that theory is that they started the acequia wars against Tomás, the unofficial mayordomo of the village when Mark and I moved here, in 1992. He served as a commissioner on both the Arriba and Abajo acequias and as mayordomo on the Abajo and was the man around whom most village activity revolved, born and raised and having lived here all his life. Both warring commissioners were born in El Valle but left for various jobs or the military and didn’t like the way things were when they came back. I loved the way things were when we moved here: Tomás took us under his wing, taught us how to be parciantes, shared his tools and machinery, cut our hay, gave us steaks from his butchered cows, and treated us like the buen vecinos we were trying to be.

Once the two guys took over, we never had a community limpia, or cleaning of the ditches every spring. They hired a crew of peones and later bought machinery—like the $80,000 mini excavator that’s been broken for a year—to periodically clean whatever section they thought needed it. Other sections never got cleaned in the spring so when the presa, or dams were opened, parciantes had to go out and clean all the accumulated debris before it all got stuck in our compuertas, or gates. They changed the bylaw of the Acequia Abajo from one parciante one vote to voting by ownership of water rights. One of the guys has about eight water rights that he either owns or manages and the other one also has a bunch (he gave a water right to his daughter and one to his son-in-law who don’t live here to increase his number). They changed the bylaws to disallow pumping when it’s your turn in the rotation if you want to water something above the ditch (we had a raspberry patch right next to the Abajo that we could never get enough water to from the Arriba).

Enough background. What exactly happened at the meeting? They torpedoed every agenda item we’d submitted (we is me and a couple of other disgruntled parciantes) by voting it down or delaying a vote on it until a year from now. So no vote on my request to change the voting back to one parciante one vote (that will never happen because they have the majority of votes). No vote on whether the commissioners have the authority to define beneficial use, i.e., whether they can deny a parciante’s turn in the rotation because they don’t approve of what the parciante is watering (too many rosehips, only flowers). A no vote on my motion to schedule an annual meeting among the three acequias to share information and concerns with all El Valle parciantes. The only one of our agenda items that was addressed at the meeting was our objection that one guy has been functioning as both commissioner and mayordomo for many years, which may be an abrogation of the bylaws. His son was chosen as the mayordomo, which seemed to be a better scenario until I found out that he lives in Santa Fe! That’s really the lynchpin of our acequia absurdity: our mayordomo lives in Santa Fe, an hour away.

But wait, there’s more. Hovering over the acequia absurdity was the specter of our acequia future: the same guy’s daughter, who has conveniently been given water rights on the Arriba and the upper ditch. While the parciantes sat in chairs in front of the commission table, she hovered around behind our backs, correcting, calling point of order, essentially running the meeting as an attorney, which is what she is. How fortuitous. The guy’s daughter is a lawyer.

So there you have it. I’m never going to an acequia meeting again. Fortunately, I’m old and there aren’t going to be that many more before one of us keels over: me, or the guys. The son and daughter can then have it all.

The YouTube Rabbit Hole

Yesterday I went down deep into the YouTube rabbit hole starting and ending with the Everly Brothers. Trying to distract myself from endlessly scrolling through Instagram to see who the Israel IOF was currently killing in Gaza, I decided to make a pineapple upside down cake. It’s the only sweet thing I could find the ingredients for in my kitchen besides oatmeal cookies, which I was sick of (I always make a batch to take skiing with the grandkids). I figured some good old 50s and 60s rock ‘n roll on Pandora would be a good fit.

A few songs into the Everly Brothers station, “All I Have to do Is Dream” came on. I’ll never forget the first time I heard this song. My family in Colorado Springs was visiting another family and us kids were outside playing around, I guess with a radio on, and when I heard those voices in beautiful harmony sing “Whenever I want you in the night, whenever I want you to hold me tight, all I have to do is dream, dream, dream” (with some long, drawn out phrasing of the word dream). I was gobsmacked. I must have been around 11 or 12, in 5th or 6th grade, before the Beatles arrived and took me along on their ride.

The Pandora playlist then segued into all those early bands that had mostly corny or stupid lyrics but wonderful rhythm and beats: Buddy Holly with Maybe Baby; Elvis Presley with Hound Dog; Ricky Nelson with Traveling Man (misogynistic but we all loved him on the Ozzie and Harriet show); Sam Cooke with You Send Me, Patsy Cline with I Fall to Pieces (such a wonderful singer); The Fleetwoods with Come Softly (darling); Conway Twitty with Make Believe (so soulful); Roy Orbison with Only the Lonely, and Bobby Darin with Dream Lover.

It was Bobby Darin who sent me to YouTube once the cake was in the oven. I’ve always loved Bobby Darin and I wanted to see him in person singing Dream Lover because his subtle little body sways are so very sexy. The first video that came up was his appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Oh my, what a show that was and there’s nothing like it today. He always had a musical guest on and he had them all: Elvis, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, the BeeGees, the Byrds, and, of course, the Beatles. We always ate dinner on trays in the living room so we could watch Ed every Sunday night.

Anyway, I got my fix of Bobby Darin and then had to go ahead and stay with Ed for a while to watch Elvis sing Love Me Tender, another heart breaker, the BeeGees (who didn’t do well on Ed’s stage because they’re singers and song writers, not a band), and the Animals do House of the Rising Sun.

Then something called “Top Twenty Songs with Harmonies that give us chills” popped up and of course I had to listen to it. By this time the cake was out and I was drinking a martini. There was too much talking by the voice over host, a few groups I’d never heard of, and not necessarily my rated order, but for the most part it gave credit where credit was due. So of course, there were the Righteous Brothers doing “Unchained Melody,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the Beatles on any number of songs, the Carpenters (!), Abba (!) whose only song I know is Dancing Queen, the Eagles, who did a five part harmony, the Seekers’ “I’ll Never Find Another You,” Queen, and finally, through process of elimination, the Everly Brothers!

So, I made it through another day with “a little help from my friends,” as the Beatles put it. I also have to put in a plug for the Cox Family, in terms of beautiful harmonies. They’re basically a country band, but they do a great version of Runaway, by Dell Shannon, who’s also on that Pandora Everly Brothers station. What comes around goes around.

Welcome to Spring

It’s been a completely crazy few days, weather wise. On Saturday (March 23) we welcomed a warm day as our final ski with the grandkids at Sipapu. We’d had too many cold, windy, blizzardy days during their lessons at the Santa Fe Ski Basin so we liked the slushy snow and unzipped jackets. For most of the day we skied together: Jakob in the lead on his teles; Lulu next with her parallel turns; Marcos, who for the first time all year managed some parallel turns; Susu, who’s still in a wedge but can navigate almost anything in it; Yusuf, who’s only in Kindergarten, in his enormous wedge barreling down the slope in total abandonment; and finally me, ostensibly at the tail end to round us safely up but in reality so I can slowly wind down the mountain without a fall (I have a hard time getting up).

Then the snow came—for days. By Monday we’d had eight inches in El Valle—three feet at Taos and Santa Fe ski areas—but I fought my way out to see the orthopedic doc in Española about my knee. Been skiing and walking with a fucked-up knee all winter and finally decided to see what’s going on. I’m scheduled for an MRI and he suspects it’s the knee cap that can maybe be treated with a special lubricating fluid to soften the pressure. If not, surgery.

But I digress. The roads were clear as the temperatures were above freezing. But it kept snowing, off and on, all Monday night into Tuesday, when it snowed for 15 minutes, the sun came out, it snowed again for a half hour, the sun came out again, it snowed again, a pattern that kept up all day. When the sun came out my house was warm: I have six huge, passive solar windows downstairs and six more upstairs. When it snowed, I poked the fire to take off the chill. This went on and on and on, making a fire, letting it go out, taking off my sweater, putting it back on, such a conundrum.

Same situation the next day except without the snow, just clouds. Fire going, fire out, over heated, chilled. As April approaches, my solar gain vanishes as the sun rises in the sky so I’ll just be in the chill phase, which means I’ll keep a low fire burning. Every year I say I’m going to go somewhere warm and protected during April to escape New Mexico’s ever present springtime wind and every year I end up in El Valle, pruning my trees, planting seedlings, thinking about summer. Now with my knee issue, I’m obviously going nowhere this April. But at least we had a good winter and we’ll have irrigation water and maybe I’ll have fruit (see “Springtime in New Mexico” —2013—in the first iteration of Unf*#!ing Believable to see what a winter spring was like with no winter snow and no spring fruit).

I’d fantasized about a camping trip down to the Gila, which in most years is warm enough in April for such an excursion. I’d take my camper down to the hot springs, where years ago we backpacked in with the kids. This time I’d stay in the campground and enjoy the developed springs. Then I’d drive around to the west side of the wilderness and camp by the catwalk that takes you over falling water and steep canyons. I’d drive back north via Pie Town and Datil and see the grandkids in Burque before heading home. Even if I didn’t have a fucked-up knee this will remain a fantasy because more than an hour in the car is excruciatingly painful. I have this condition called pudendal nerve entrapment that makes sitting for any length of time a problem. As far as I’ve been able to figure out there’s no cure (after many trips to the university hospital for treatments that didn’t work).

So that’s the story this spring. I’d just as soon it was May.

To Go or Not to Go, Not Really a Question Anymore

Of the “52 Places To Go In 2024” chosen by the New York Times Sunday edition, I’ve been to exactly four: Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota because an old Antioch friend lives in Minneapolis (fabulous); Kansas City, Missouri because my cousins lived there when we were kids; the Yucatan Peninsula and Costa Rica, which I actually traveled to on real tourist trips via airplanes. I came close to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve on trips to Mexico City and environs, and the Baaj NWAAVJO I’Tah Kukveni, Arizona when I hiked down the Grand Canyon, but I guess that doesn’t count.

I read through the entire list of places to go knowing full well I’d never go to any more of them. Not that I particularly want to go to some of them: Baltimore, Maryland; Almaty, Kazakhstan; El Salvador; Montgomery, Alabama; or Craters of the Moon, Idaho. I’m too old to go to New Zealand or Ireland or Iceland even if I’d still like to.

But reading through the descriptions several themes emerged. One, these were promoted as locations that provide a less “traveled” and “crowded” visit for tourists, and two, will bring much needed “jobs” and “investment” to the locals. These are the Catch-22s of vacation spreads like this one in the NYT: turn these less traveled places into more traveled places and make more local places dependent on tourism for economic development.

When I was young and poor, the only places Mark and I traveled to were ones where we knew someone and had a place to stay or could take a bus or train instead of a plane. This meant a lot of trips to Mexico: 24 hours on a bus to Mexico City; 24 hours on a bus to Guadalajara; train trips to Mazatlan; car trips to Guaymas; and trips to Puerto Vallarta, Acapulco, and Oaxaca because Mark’s parents were already there and paid for our hotels. When I was older and had a little more discretionary money—and after Mark died—I went twice to Tulum and once to Costa Rica. After the second visit to Tulum I decided I couldn’t be a tourist anymore, even though it was wonderful to swim in the ocean and eat tacos on the street and drink margaritas every night. The cartels were already in Cancun, the developers were already pushing Tulum residents into slums so they could build hotels and expensive houses, and the sea turtle preserve had to be closed down before tourist pollution killed them all.

While I was reading through this NYT “bucket” list, friends of mine were on a month’s long trip to Southeast Asia bagging another of their longtime bucket lists (they travel all over the world). I have to admit I skipped over all their Facebook posts of Hanoi and Laos and Phnom Penh, not because of envy–the thought of all those airplanes and hotels and restaurants and speaking foreign languages made me very tired—but because I found the privilege of it, just like I felt about Tulum, so appalling. When I’m spending all my writing time and online time bearing witness to the genocide in Gaza, I can’t understand why everyone else isn’t. This is probably not fair to my friends, but it’s fair to demand the world’s attention (right after I read the NYT article I read another essay a man about my age wrote talking about his anti-bucket list of staying home and enjoying ordinary life).

The International Court of Justice just issued a ruling ordering Israel to do everything in its power to prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians. However, they stopped short of mandating a ceasefire while ordering Israel to take actions including punishing those who incite violence against civilians and allowing more aid into the Gaza Strip. If enforced, which is unlikely (the U.S. will veto in the UN Security Council) this would result in a ceasefire. As I’ve quoted Vonnegut previously: And so it goes.

The John Nichols I know and love

My friend John Nichols died at age 83 on November 27, 2023. This is what I wrote about him in La Jicarita.

Many people were friends with John Nichols. His Hispano neighbors who shared the acequias that served the Lower Ranchitos area where he first lived in Taos taught him the ins and outs of getting the water from the ditches to his fields, how to fix his roof or plaster the house, and argued with him about whose responsibility it was to keep the horses or sheep or dogs out of his garden and chicken coop. When the bureaucrats came to town to persuade Taoseños that a conservancy district to impound irrigation water was a good idea, John teamed up with his wonderful compadres to let the state engineer know that the people of Taos thought it was a bad idea, and in the battle over the Indian Camp Dam he made life-long friends of the farmers and acequia parciantes who valued his courage and writing skills.

Those writing skills, which had already produced two novels published in New York before he left for Taos, took the New Mexico Review, based in Santa Fe, to new levels of muckraking, as he exposed the travesties of the Vietnam War, the plight of the miners fired at the Questa molybdenum mine, LANL and nuclear warfare, and the battle against the Dam. As he wrote in I Got Mine: confessions of a midlist writer, “[I] absorbed more information about my town—its history, politics, poverty and personalities—and Southwest water wars, water law, and government chicanery that I could have ingested at a top-ranked university over thirty year of scholarly research.”

His love was fiction, however, and while his political activism never took a back seat, he wrote 13 novels over the course of his life. His first novel published after moving to Taos, The Milagro Beanfield War, never made it to the best seller list (John would say that was an over statement at best), it did become a local favorite, and he became a New Mexico celebrity. His fans became his friends. He faithfully answered mail from people he’d never met, often maintaining correspondence with them for decades. He knew everyone at the post office where he stopped every day to get his hundreds of letters that always arrived snail mail (he never had an internet account although late in life he got a tablet so he could go online and do research and read La Jicarita!).

When people came up to him on the street, he’s stop and chat for however long they wanted to talk. People called him on the phone, even if he didn’t know who they were, and he’d always have a conversation. When people showed up at his modest house on Valverde Street he’d let them in and they’d visit for hours. He supported the literary organization SOMOS with numerous readings and introductions to many other authors’ readings.

He maintained relationships with all his New York friends, both political and literary. They came to Taos to visit and go fishing, grouse hunting, climb mountains or sit around and smooze while playing music. For years, every Monday night, he played music with a group of friends (Rick from Brodsky’s Bookshop and others) complaining that they played too much Val Morrison instead of fifties rock ‘n roll like Rock Around the Clock.

John was my friend, too. We had a long history before we even met in person. When I was living in Albuquerque I wrote for the alternative newspaper Seer’s Catalog. John sent down political cartoons from Taos for the same radical rag.

While he was writing for the New Mexico Review I was writing for another alternative paper Coatamundi and freelance articles for magazines (by then I’d moved to Placitas and written an expose on what the real estate developers were doing to this tiny land grant community). When we’d finally had enough of Placitas gentrification, my family and I moved to El Valle, in 1992 and in 1996 started La Jicarita News, a journal of environmental politics. John became one of our biggest fans. We caught him at a meeting and took this picture.

When my co-editor and life partner, Mark Schiller, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010, John sent me a photo triptych of his beloved mountains surrounding the Williams Peak Valley, where we used to run into him hiking or snowshoeing (Mark and I cross country skied). We both loved our outdoor adventures, but John had skills way beyond our skiing and hiking ones: fly fishing the Rio Grande, grouse hunting in the Rio Chiquito watershed, photographing the amazing wildlife at the ponds on Taos Mesa (he published several books of his photos).

When I published my first book, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in the New Mexico Forest Communities, John sent me a wonderful letter of congratulations. From then much of our work efforts were conjoined. When he read my next book, Unf*#!ing Believable, a collections of my blog posts, he wrote me a 65 page letter telling me he loved the book but more importantly that ““much of what touched me so deeply is that you and I have shared many similar experiences in life, and your recounting of these experiences really struck home and triggered so many similarities in my own life.” I read and critiqued his manuscript of I Got Mine; he went over every chapter of my ¡No Se Vend! Water as a Right of the Commons.” I published the memoir, Goodbye, Monique, of his parents’ short marriage and his birth before his mother died of endocarditis in 1940, the same disease John suffered from for years (Acequia Madre Press). He read my novel and returned it with dozens of yellow stickies that said either “I like this” or “this is terrible.” I never published it. He wrote me hundreds of other letters, supporting my political battles with the powers that be, sharing information about our families, celebrating the good and commiserating the bad.

During Covid we often spoke on the phone and if the weather was nice we’d meet at Baca Park and walk around the grounds or through the new riparian area to look for birds. On a last hike part way up the Williams Lake Trail John took this selfie of us.

It was a very difficult time for John, whose health issues kept him separated from almost everyone except his family. But he persevered and finished up organizing and labeling the rest of his files headed for the UNM Center for Southwest Research (all told, hundreds of boxes). I suppose I should give my letters from him to the archive but for now, I’ll keep them as as my friend.

Many of John’s friends know that he was a master at writing obituaries, or memorials. The combination of his warm heart, comic sensibility, and impeccable timing made them unforgettable. He delivered them when neighbors and Hispano friends died, in Spanish. He delivered them for friends and family back East. I got to hear them when he read them for our mutual friends Ron Gardner and Bill Whaley. We joked about him writing his own obituary because no one else could ever do it as well. I’ll end this tribute to John with the story of the one he wrote for Bill but failed to deliver, in November of 2021.

We were gathered at the Farm House Cafe. John had written “A Few Words About My Friend, Bill Whaley,” but when the time came for everyone to get up and deliver their reminiscences, John started feeling unwell, handed the pages he’d written to me, and went home. As I waited to stand in place for him, my stomach started to rumble and I knew what was about to happen. I’d previously eaten some bolete mushrooms a friend had included in a stew, even though the last time I’d eaten bolete mushrooms I’d vomited them up three hours later. It was now three hours from the mushroom stew so I ran to the bathroom, threw up everything, and went back out and read John’s memorial:

“I loved and admired Bill for his chutzpah, his arrogance, his intelligence, his lack of fear, his gentle and compassionate sides, his stupidity and his screw-ups, his angels and his devils, and his ability to recover and try again during his complicated, often hilarious, often self-destructive, yet also courageous and humane existence.”

With a little revision, John might well have written this for himself. We’ve all lost someone we considered one of our best friends, because that’s what he tried to be to everyone he knew.

A Horrible Year

Twenty twenty-three has been a horrible year. Other than during the Vietnam War or the invasion of Iraq I don’t remember feeling this much grief and anger at the United States and all who are complicit in our disastrous foreign policy. In the 70s, as the Vietnam War raged on, I was young and living with a college cohort who felt exactly as I did and who went with me—along with 500,000 others—to the 1969 Washington D.C. anti-war march. In the 1990s, I had Mark and another cohort of activists who raged with me at George Bush and organized into grassroots coalitions like Occupy Wallstreet.

Today, older, more infirm—which I will delve into a little later—and more constrained, I’m overwhelmed with outrage and helplessness at the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. Mark isn’t here so I’ve had to transfer my angst to Jakob, who’s actually been to Israel and seen the apartheid state. Mark and I interviewed him in La Jicarita just before Mark died in 2010 and I reran the interview a few weeks ago. Jakob turned me on to all the Instagram sites covering the genocide—middleeasteye, Shaun King (who was just blocked by Meta), jewishvoiceforpeace—while I turned him onto podcasts—Useful Idiots, Jewish Currents On the Nose. Reading and listening to voices like Gideon Levy, the Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, Ilan Papé, Israeli historian, and Masha Gessen, Russian journalist, help keep me sane by validating the insanity of those perpetuating and defending Israel’s massacre of Gaza civilians and escalating murders in the West Bank.

Most of my friends and political allies also provide validation but there are those whose attention remains so focused on Trump when all I want to do is prosecute Biden for war crimes that I can’t really have a conversation with them. This fixation with Trump has led us down many rabbit holes—Russiagate and Hunter Biden—and diverted our attention from the depravities of the Democratic Party, but none compares to what Biden is doing now in the Middle East (and on the Mexican border). Independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who just died, had this to say about the failures of the left: “The obsession with Trump the man—not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system—beckons great danger for all of us.”

I was reminded today when reading Mary Gaitskill’s “Out of It” column on Substack about how “people of her generation” grew up as defenders of Israel—she’s only a few years younger than me—that I’ve always lived in a Jewish cultural and secular bubble where Israel wasn’t even on the radar. My parents sent us to the Unitarian Church where all the kids in LRY—liberal religious youth—were also Jewish and provided my political, musical, and sexual awakening. My mother-in-law, who lost her extended family in the Holocaust, referred to Israeli prime ministers as Nazis. The only deviation I recall was reading Leon Uris’s Exodus, which was published in 1958; I I was around 12 when I read it. I was completely enthralled and had to ask my mother to hide the book until I finished my homework (geez, what a studious little kid I was). But at least that wasn’t as bad as Gaitskill’s admission that she was enraptured of the Six Day War at 13.

To end this year’s tale of horror I’ll try to be brief about my infirmities. After a four-year remission my interstitial cystitis returned, which required more trips to the urogynecology center at UNM Hospital for treatments that didn’t work. While there, I was diagnosed with pudendal nerve entrapment, which is a condition that makes sitting a problem. An hour in the car is painful; anything more than that is tortuous. I had to drive two hours to the hospital in Albuquerque for treatments that also didn’t work. I’m waiting for the treatment of last resort: botox, which I learned is used for all kinds of conditions, including migraine headaches. Then six months ago my right foot began to hurt and after numerous trips to a foot doctor, six weeks in an orthopedic boot, physical therapy, and a cortisone shot it’s even worse now. That’s what it took to get to an MRI, coming up in a week. And last but not least, my right knee, which has been deteriorating for a while, took a decided turn for the worse and walking Paco every morning is challenging. Will this be another descent into the medical industrial complex of getting from the primary doc to the MRI that takes at least six months?

On our walk this morning Paco and I ran into neighbors taking a day trip to escape a year similar to mine. We commiserated that yes, it had been a horrible year. They expressed hope for 2024. I’m afraid that I, along with the world, am on a declining path where my own descent won’t make much of a difference but that of the world will bring a greater amount of suffering to a greater amount of people. That’s a tough bargain for hope.