The Yuppie

Listening to the yuppie’s rant about cows impelled me to write a blog in Unfucking Believable, which I haven’t visited since February of 2025, when my dog Paco died. I didn’t get into an argument with the yuppie, I just said, “I like cows,” which set him off even deeper into degradated cowdom. The answer that rose up but I repressed was, “So, you want to turn New Mexico into Colorado, do yah?

Maybe he does. He and his family moved to El Valle about five or six years ago, after spending a lot of money remodeling Jacobo and Lalo’s adobe. I will grant him a little leeway, as he missed the apex of El Valle life, when Tomás and Arsenio and Orlando were still alive and cow culture was well integrated into village life. Now, the only ones who have cows are Adam and Adrian, and neither belongs to a permittee association, so they keep their cows in the village, moving from pasture to pasture, and sometimes running wild.

But the yuppie’s main complaint is cows in the wilderness. He’s hiked most of the trails in the Pecos Wilderness, climbed its peaks, run long distance, biked hundreds of miles, and cross-country and downhill skied. He hates the cows in the watersheds, he hates them on the trails, and thinks they have more privileges than people: “It’s ridiculous that you have to fence the cow out of your field, instead of the owner fencing it in.” Part of my response to him would be, “Do you want to have to get a permit to hike in the Pecos Wilderness and then get a reservation to go to a certain area? Do you want to hike with hundreds of other hikers on the trails outside the wilderness? Do you want to drive in miles of traffic to ski Taos or Santa Fe and then pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket? Well, that’s what you do in Colorado and that’s what’s in store for New Mexico if you turn over everything to the recreationists.

Northern New Mexico has to preserve its rural funkiness or we’ll fall prey to what I just described. And cows are an important component of that funkiness. They’ve kept a land-based culture alive but, unfortunately, not so well, as demonstrated in El Valle with the loss of Tomás’s generation. We’re just on the cusp of being able to keep these lands in agricultural production, be they hay fields, orchards, organic gardens selling to the local restaurants, or grazing for horses and cows. There’s a paucity of young people to take over management of the acequias. The mayordomo in El Valle lives in Santa Fe! There’s only a couple of families in the village with young children—Tomás’s great-grandchildren—and the yuppie, with one young son who goes to day care in Santa Fe.

When the cows go so go our hay fields, our getting up at 6 am to irrigate them, our contentious acequia meetings where everyone in the village gets to vent at the commissioners or all their neighbors, our relationships with vecinos of land-based knowledge and contemporary contrariness, and our slower paced life than that of our urban based children. So I think the yuppie should move on down to Santa Fe to enjoy a cow-free life—I think there are fewer cows on that side of the Pecos Wilderness—and the fruits of that lovely, gentrified city. We may be slowly dying up here but we’d prefer to do it on our own terms.

Updates: Paco, my surgery, the chaos

Paco died in the backseat of the car at the vet’s office. She tranquilized him and then administered the lethal injection. It was short and peaceful. We buried him down by the hoop house, under the willows. He has a view of the Truchas Peaks. I’m very sad.

It’s been five months since my knee surgery and I still can’t walk up the road. I don’t have Paco to take with me, but it’s not my sorrow that prevents the walk. It’s the fact that my knee is so swollen that without taking anti-inflammatories, lyrica, and 10 milligrams of oxycodone twice a day I would be in constant pain. I can do squats, ride a stationary bike, and bend my knee backwards close to its before surgery position, but I’m atomized by pain. A trip to Santa Fe to do errands leaves me exhausted. I couldn’t attend any of the hearings on the Sitewide Environmental Impact Statement for LANL in person, to cover for La Jicarita (they had zoom). And filling in for my neighbor Nancy at the ReUse Center at the dump, on my feet for two hours, just about killed me. The surgeon doesn’t know what to do to help but he wants me coming back “until the scar on your knee is almost invisible.” I’m not quite sure what that will indicate, but either because of guilt or compassion or a combination of the two, he’s taken me on as entire being who suffers other chronic conditions that may be contributing to my failure to heal.

The chaos that is Trump/Musk (T/D) has hit home here in New Mexico with the halt in hiring of Forest Service workers, especially fire fighters. They were supposed to be part of some emergency exemption but they’re not. The so-called winter of 2024-5 has been one of, if not the, driest winters on record. We had one big snow storm at the end of November that had everyone slapping on their skis—Jakob climbed up the backside of the Sandias three days in a row—and then we had nothing. The rest of the winter? A couple of smaller storms in January and February, a week of below zero temperatures with no snow, and several weeks of 60 degree weather. The last I heard we’re at 40 percent of normal precipitation in the Sangre de Cristos.

What this means for our forests is extreme fire danger with no additional fire fighters on board. Crews are already stretched thin from years of not only forest megafires but fires burning down urban areas from Colorado to California. It also means that unless the money was already allocated under Biden’s massive public spending bills like Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the forest restoration and thinning projects that help prevent megafires are torpedoed.

What this means for our rivers is restricted irrigation seasons on the middle and lower Rio Grande and probably water sharing all summer long in El Valle. To add insult to injury, this was the year that I finally challenged the acequia commission on its lack of transparency and due process—see May 31 blog in Un*#!ing Believable —to meet and discuss parciante input and complaints. Now all we’re going to do is worry over water and due process will evaporate into thin, dry air.

The chaos that is disrupting the rest of the world is beyond the reach of this particular blog post, but unfortunately, there will be others. It looks like this time around no one will be unscathed.

A Horrible Year Redux

My January 1 post of 2024 was titled “A Horrible Year.” The Israeli army invaded Gaza and began its slaughter of the Palestinian people. Now there‘s a tentative cease fire in our second go-round of Trump presiding. God knows what will happen. I guess I have to title my January 2025 post the same: A Horrible Year. For many reasons, personal and political or personal is the political.

Paco is dying. Remember, the vet calls it Cognitive Dysfunctional Syndrome, or dog Alzheimer’s. It’s come back with vengeance. He’ll be lying on the floor when suddenly he jerks up as if a gun shot just went off. Unfortunately, the gun shot is in his head, some sinister signal that evokes trembling and panting, as he clings to me for comfort. This is mostly in the middle of the night, of course, as he pushes against the bed or scrapes his cone against my nightstand, endlessly, seeking something—me— to quell his anxiety.

That’s probably what’s killing him relatively slowly. The real culprit is more likely what we thought was a harmless lipoma on his front leg but is actually a tumor with an abscess that formed from his constant licking a slight abrasion into a bloody mess. We keep trying to medicate it into a scab but it keeps erupting with blood, so once again he’s wrapped up in bandages that he constantly tries to unravel. Removing the tumor is beyond our vet’s ability and presumably beyond our financial ability as well. So he wears a cone that thankfully, is flexible. We borrowed it from a neighbor who had searched for an alternative to the wide-brimmed, inflexible type you get at the vet.

Paco has been my boon companion for almost 14 years. I found him in La Junta Canyon, running up the forest road behind our caravan of parciantes and Picuris Pueblo tribal members inspecting one of the dams that takes water from our watershed, La Jicarita, over into the Mora watershed. But that’s another story. I guessed that this three-month old puppy who’s mostly blue heeler, probably jumped out of a rancher’s truck—they’re the dog of choice in el norte—or was dumped, into my reluctant arms. I already had two old dogs near the end of their lives who didn’t need a puppy yipping around. But Paco was an excellent puppy—no destroyed shoes or slippers, no pooping in the house, no barking at the sky—and an excellent adult who went everywhere with me.

I fervently hope that Paco will drop dead on my living room floor. Most pet owners probably wish this as well, when their dogs or cats reach the age when they can barely get up, when they are in pain from a chronic injury, when they have late-stage cancer, when they have any condition that makes their lives miserable (that’s our assessment of course), so we want them to drop dead before there’s a trip to the vet. Just a few minutes ago I thought I’d lost him after his wound poured blood, I re- bandaged his horrible mess, he briefly stood up, and then flopped over onto the floor. But he’s alive. For now. For not much longer.

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.

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!