Diary of a Bad Year: Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which

I write down ideas, sometimes as titles, as they occur to me in preparation for this blog. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “Death or Philip Roth, I Can’t Decide Which?” Try as I might, I can’t remember. So I’m going to wing it and start writing free association about Philip and maybe my original thought will find its way to my frontal lobe and I’ll end up writing what I originally intended.

A few years ago Mark and I started a Philip Roth book club with Mark Rudd. He lives in Albuquerque and we live two hours away in El Valle so we conducted our conversation via e-mail. I can’t really remember (this is a recurring theme, obviously) what precipitated the formation of our club, but it didn’t last very long. We encouraged Mark R. to read the Zuckerman trilogy, Roth’s alter ego at his funniest, but before Mark got there he was turned off by the newer novels, like Exit Ghost, and then didn’t much like Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson either, so our club fizzled. Mark and I had trouble, too, with Exit Ghost, but I thought Roth’s struggle about telling the “truth” in one's fiction, which no longer has much meaning in the postmodern world of relativity, salvaged the book. He apologizes for railing about cell phones and about his audacity to still feel there is a right and wrong way to be in the world, which is certainly something I sympathize with. I guess his alter egos, who constantly struggle to get through all the bullshit to what is “real” (and the way he becomes the women who call him on his own bullshit), allow him to make the attempt while acknowledging that we all come to our analyses with our neuroses, prejudices, and unalterable histories. I went on and reread not only the Zuckerman books but Goodbye Columbus, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but the Monkey bit was too much for me. Roth’s obsession with young women is his recurring theme; in the novels when he’s preadolescent or a young man himself, or even a middle-aged man who also appreciates middle-aged women, it’s OK. But when he’s an old man, as in the later novels, it becomes, as Mark R. put it, “embarrassing.”

But wait. I just made the obvious connection with death and Philip, whose mortality is staring him in the face (although I still don’t know why I said “I can’t decide which” in the title of my blog). He must be in his late seventies now (I just googled him; he’s 78). Olympia Dukakis goes around asking all the men she meets in Moonstuck for an explanation of why her husband, Vincent Gardenia, chases women. Finally she gets her answer from Danny Aiello: “Because he fears death?”

Mark died at 62, much too young, at least for those of us in the western world whose life expectancy is somewhere in the late 70s or 80s, to have to face one’s mortality. I now think a lot about my own. Even though I’m on life’s downhill side, the end of that slide wouldn’t be so much on my mind if it weren’t for Mark’s death and knowing so many others my age who also have cancer and other illnesses. As James Woods points out in his New Yorker article “Is That All There Is?”, even those who believe in immortality aren’t immune to fear and dread of death. He quotes Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher: “If your life is directed toward nurturing others who need your protection and guidance, and if, unluckily, you die before they are ready to cope without you, the fact that you will be restored—and maybe restored to them in some entirely different state—is immaterial. Your project, on which you have centered your existence, has still been compromised by premature death.” I don’t think I’m particularly fearful, but I dread leaving my kids behind.

If Mark had lived we would still be publishing La Jicarita News, working on books, traveling, gardening, cutting firewood, pretty much everything we’ve always done, but my life has changed irrevocably. While I don’t go around chasing young men, I’m less attached to my work and what my contribution to society has been. I feel that maybe I should be doing some things I haven’t been doing seeing as how I, too, could be gone tomorrow. I’m not sure what those things are, but I’m thinking about it.

Unplugged

Even in El Valle, at 8,000 feet, it’s been hot. So I planned to do some big-time weeding in my garden in the early morning when the hoop house throws some shade over my mess of bind weed, mallow, and grass. Instead, I spent that time trying to transfer information from my old laptop to my new used laptop (thank you, Jake Kosek) for all the editing jobs I’m doing, track down a UPS package that I thought was being shipped by the post office (see Marginalization blog), change the bank account on my electronic billing (my community bank got taken over by a multi-national), and answer a bunch of e-mails that needed answering. As I’m doing all this I’m keeping up a steady stream of complaint: I don’t want to be doing this, why am I doing this, computers are making my life more complicated (see The Scourge of Computers blog), not less, I can’t believe I’m talking to myself like this, I want to go back to my life before I had a computer.

I often think of my pre-computer life. I certainly was just as busy as I am today, but I was busy doing other things like building a house, raising children, fighting the Forest Service (a life’s work), gardening, knitting (I actually knit the kids and Mark sweaters and hats), writing stories (on the typewriter), fighting the developers (also a life’s work), and taking trips to Mexico and the mountains (see Productivity blog). I was younger, and had more energy, but it was also easier to generate that energy because my efforts produced something other than the busyness required to keep up with the bureaucratic bullshit that has taken over our lives.

Let’s take a closer look at the things I was doing that morning. Why in the world do I need two laptop computers? I have a hard drive back-up for all my important papers (two novels, a book of short stories, a memoir of my political activity in northern New Mexico, all unpublished) and other files, but you know how it goes: my old laptop is slow, it won’t run any of the constantly upgraded applications that Apple is constantly turning out so people have to spend more money to buy new computers, which means you have to buy one too or you can’t communicate and everyone tells you you’re a Luddite. After two sessions with my computer guru, Robin Collier, there is still stuff that hasn’t been transferred off the old to the new, and glitches that I’m still discovering on the new that make me run back to the old (or up to the old, as it’s upstairs and the new one is downstairs), cursing all the way.

Then I happen to look at my e-mail and realize that a package that I thought was mailed to me on July 27 and expected to arrive in three to five days was actually UPS’d to me and of course I’d provided the postal mailing address, not the UPS address. So I call the UPS center in Santa Fe (fortunately, the last time I managed to find the number, which is not listed in the phone book because they make you call a centralized number in anywhere U.S.A. that can only help you if you have a tracking number, I had the presence of mind to write it down) and give them the correct physical address (my mailing address is a physical address as well, but neither deliverer will recognize the other’s).

Moving on to the next distraction, I find myself once more on the computer trying to pay my credit card bill only to see that my old bank, the one I specifically chose because it was local, is still listed as the payer when it’s been taken over by some multi-national bank I’ve never even heard of because of the mortgage crisis. The new bank sends me about five letters a week explaining how this takeover is being handled and what I have to do and what I don’t have to do, which is change any electronic payment information because the new bank is going to take care of that. But of course it hasn’t and I’m worried that my payment won’t be correctly processed and the credit card company will charge me interest, which is usury, so I decide to make the change myself, which I can’t figure out how to do online, of course, so I have to call the credit card company and have someone walk me through it and then that’s done.

Lastly are the e-mails. Normally I don’t complain about e-mails. I know that some people get hundreds of them every day and end up throwing most of them in the trash. Of all the technological innovations associated with the computer I appreciate e-mail the most because it means I can impart information or ask a question or have a short chat without getting bogged down on the phone with certain friends who will remain nameless who think that anytime you call it’s an excuse to talk for an hour about much more than the purpose of the call. But you still have that nagging feeling that you need to read all those e-mails pertaining to your work or your political awareness and then like everyone else you throw them in the trash.

This posting is full of a lot of “see other blogs,” which may indicate that it’s redundant, but I think it’s more a reaffirmation of the need to chafe and complain and yes, even rant, about the bullshit we, the few and the privileged (see Some Things Are Relative blog) put up with, and really, promote, in this short time we have on earth. I remember a backpack trip long ago, walking the crest trail in the Manzano Mountains, thinking, I wish I could walk this trail forever and never go back. Sometimes it’s just all too much.

The Million Dollar Bone Mill

In an issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican last week there was an insert published by the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which is an affiliate of the larger AFSCME/AFL-CIO. The nurses and technicians at Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe have been involved in protracted negotiations with hospital management over wages and conditions—safe staffing and experience—and as I write this union members are voting on the proposed contract.

The insert, as part of the union’s message to the public regarding the struggles of the nurses and technicians, includes a list of the salaries of “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” of Christus. The CEO, Alex Valdez, makes a whopping $457,064 (and $148,122 estimated fringe benefits). But lo and behold, the highest compensation by far on the list belongs to my old friend Dr. Samuel Chun, an orthopedic surgeon, whose makes $935,275. He’s not really my friend, but I did see him as often as I see many of my friends when I was referred to him for treatment of a bone spur on the lower part of my thumb. After shooting me up with cortisone a couple of times, which did nothing to alleviate the pain, he proceeded to remove the bone spur, which he did quite well, as he appears to be an excellent surgeon (although he forgot to take a look at a mass on my palm while he was doing the cutting). But then the trouble began, which should have been included in my Diary of a Bad Year, except that it would have made it the Diary of My Two and a Half Bad Years and I wouldn’t have been able to use J.M. Coetzee’s title.

I wasn’t blogging back then but I've always done my best venting by pen so I sent him a letter. He never answered, of course, but now that I’m blogging I’m going repeat some of what I said in the letter. You never know, maybe someone who is considering orthopedic surgery will read this posting and decide NOT to choose Chun and NOT to contribute to his $935,275 compensation package.

After my cast was removed Chun’s office sent me to a physical therapist who specializes in hands and arms. I didn’t get any better: my thumb hurt horribly and my shoulder froze. I was treated by the actual physical therapist only once; subsequently it was by her aides, and nothing helped. I figured it was time to go back to Chun with my troubles, but each time you go see him you have to wait at least at hour for a 10-minute visit, so I procrastinated. When I finally told him my tale of woe he asked me if I wanted him to cast my thumb again. I told him no, I wanted him to figure out why it was taking me so long to heal. He offered to shoot up my shoulder with more cortisone, and I told him no on that one, too.

He told me to come back in another month, which I did, still miserable. This time he said, I want to consult with my partner who specializes in shoulders. So I made an appointment with this other orthopod (I waited for an appointment and then I once again waited in the waiting room). This doc asked me some questions, checked out the lack of mobility in my arm and hand and said to me, I want to go consult with Chun. I’d been there for all of 10 minutes. He came back into the room and said, I just talked with Dr. Chun and I think you have RSD. I asked, what’s that, and he said, it’s a syndrome that can be treated at the pain clinic with a “sympathetic nerve block”, meaning a shot of anesthesia in the neck. I didn’t like the idea of a shot in my neck but I was pretty desperate for a diagnosis, so I took him at his word. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had the presence of mind to ask the technician to spell out the name of this diagnosis, which was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.

When I got home I did what anyone with a computer does these days: I went on the internet and looked up RSD. It was then I burst into tears. Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition or “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury.” It can start in your hand and spread to include the entire arm. There is no cure, and no definitive drug or treatment procedure, i.e., the sympathetic nerve block that Chun’s buddy was prepared to order. On one of the internet sites the words “some people can have unremitting pain and crippling and irreversible changes in spite of treatment” especially stood out.

That was the end of my relationship with Chun and his partner, who I suspect makes a six figure compensation as well. I found another orthopedic doc in Española who looked at my medical records and the RSD diagnosis and said to me, let’s not go there. So I didn’t, and with the help of a good physical therapist and many hours of evaluation by the new doc I eventually healed. In my letter to Chun I suggested that he spend some of the money he was making (at the time I had no idea how much that actually was) on a patient navigator who could follow the progress of everyone who makes his or her way through the maze of his assembly line practice. But that kind of practice works efficiently only when patients are in and out the door. Once it was obvious that I was a malingerer, he wasn’t interested.

So that’s the story. The solution is simple: Christus St. Vincent can pay Dr. Chun and his cohort a salary just like it pays the nurses and techs who work their butts off to take care of all of us before and after the surgeons stroll in with the scalpels. If they can do it at the Mayo Clinic, they can do it in Fanta Se.

Diary of a Bad Year: Invasion of the Bats

I thought maybe the noise from the air monitoring station that the New Mexico Environment Department put outside my house two days after the Las Conchas fire broke out would scare away the bats, but no such luck. El Valle is one of the LANL downwind communities where the ED has been monitoring the air, soil, and water—largely due to the efforts of Sheri Kotowski of the Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring Group, which came into existence after the Cerro Grande fire, the first time smoke and ash polluted our agricultural communities.

I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.

Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).

I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.

I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.

Diary of a Bad Year, Ad infinitum

I’m here in El Valle and it’s 90 degrees outside but I’ve closed all my doors and windows and have every fan I own running full blast (I only have two) so that I can breathe without coughing. The smoke from the Las Conchas fire above Los Alamos has settled over our valley for two days now, so thick it’s almost impossible to differentiate between smoke and cloud, except for the orange striations that spread across the plumes along the entire southern horizon. Ash particles so minute that sometimes the only way they are visible is when they are caught in cobwebs (or as my neighbor told me, on her white skirt), rain upon our downwind communities. So here we are, eleven years after the Cerro Grande Fire that burned 47,000 acres in two weeks throughout the Los Alamos area, watching and breathing a fire that has burned 61,000 acres in 36 hours.

The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated as the fire approaches from the south and west towards the mesa canyons full of legacy waste and the active Los Alamos National Laboratory technical areas that store nuclear weapons and waste. I’ve made an arbitrary decision that if the fire reaches Tech Area G, where waste containers sit in nylon tents waiting shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southern New Mexico, I will load up my dogs and leave for Albuquerque to move in with Jakob and Casey. But really it’s just an excuse to stay here in El Valle as long as possible (I pity the poor Los Alamos residents who had to leave their homes as I curse those complicit in this nuclear madness) because I know I’ve already been contaminated by the radionuclides, PCBs, and other toxins that reside in the ponderosa pine, piñon pine, and mixed conifer forests that are now exploding fire balls, desiccated by years of drought and federal agency mismanagement.

I say “load up my dogs,” but this means somehow getting a seventy pound, 14 year old dog who can barely walk and a 10 year old cocker spaniel who is deaf and almost blind into my car and transporting them in 100 degree heat to Albuquerque. I already asked my neighbor, a former Los Alamos construction manager, if he will take my chickens and put them in with his brood. But why should he stick around to take care of my chickens when he should be getting the hell out of Dodge with his parents, of whom he is the caretaker (his dad, Orlando, figures prominently in my blog post “Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up.”) The only place they might go is Española, where his brother lives, but as we saw in the Cerro Grande Fire, that town will no doubt be a smoke-filled hell hole as well.

When I venture out in the smoke to feed the chickens I see that a little water is coming down the acequia into my orchard, which I’m struggling to keep alive between a long rotation of 22 parciantes in a summer of drought the likes of which I’ve never before seen. I’d asked the mayordomo to let a little water come down from an irrigator up the valley, and his response was, “Go ask them.” I didn’t, but for some reason the water is there, so with a wet bandana across my face I manage to at least wet down my trees before the water disappears several hours later. As my former vecino Jacobo Romero said (in William deBuys book, River of Traps), “never give holiday to the water,” even if the fires are raging and this Diary of a Bad Year has become the Diary of the Bad Year That Never Seems to End.

Post-Marxist Humanist Pragmatic

My younger son Max’s major in college first was economics, which he now declares a pseudo science, that segued to history, moved on to Spanish, and then reverted back to history only because it was too late to change to continental philosophy, which he discovered in his junior year. Whenever he’s home from school for a visit we have these long, complex discussions about how my thinking and being fit into the scheme of all things explored from Aristotle to Jurgen Habermas. While I wish he would sometimes leave the continent and travel to the subaltern, I like being prodded to go back and read a lot of people I either failed to read or didn’t read very well, to validate or challenge his assessment of me, which currently is a post-Marxist humanist pragmatic (but subject to change at any moment).

Mark and I, along with some friends, were going to participate in a Marx study group of Capital with David Correia, our friend and American Studies professor at UNM, but that fell by the wayside when Mark got sick. So I reread Part I of Capital, and then I took up David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. As Harvey emphasizes in his book, Marx was not at all a static thinker, as some would pigeonhole him as pertinent only to a time long eclipsed by global capitalism. Marx’s structural analysis of capitalism is conceptual, one that recognizes the transformative nature of its
process.

The “post” part of Marxism remains in step with his conceptual thinking as it expands beyond labor power and value in economic terms to the power structures that affect all facets of society: the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, gender studies, and the environmental movement. I entered Antioch College in 1969. The black scholarship students moved into a “black” dorm where whites weren’t allowed, turning the racial power structure upside down. The second wave of the women’s movement was soon to be in full swing, as writers like Susan Brownmiller and Shulamith Firestone moved beyond the call for equal pay for equal work to challenging the very nature of sexuality and patriarchy. Environmental politics was not some nice middle class recycling center but a head-on confrontation with corporate and global exploitation of resources and populations for profit and gain.

One of George Eliot’s biographers, Frederick R. Karl, refers to her as a secular humanist, which allowed her to abandon Christianity while retaining its “morality and ethics.” While she wasn’t very politically involved, per se, her life was a political statement for women’s emancipation and a challenge to societal norms. She lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes, for more than 20 years while she wrote her great novels (I’ve read Middlemarch at least three times over the years). I can’t come close to her erudition and sophistication, in a life of the drawing room company of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, but I like to think my humanism resembles hers: a belief that we, subjectively, as individuals, can strive for both a reflective, and exemplary life, and objectively, as a society, can create the conditions for everyone to flourish. While the stark realities of our unjust and undemocratic world challenge our ability to hold on to personal will, or to refrain from seeing it in nihilistic terms, we can, as Antonio Gramsci put it, maintain a “pessimism of the intellect” and “optimism of the will.”

The final component of my label—pragmatist—was the philosophical theory with which I was the least conversant. I read some John Dewey and analyses of other pragmatists, neo pragmatists, or neo-classical pragmatists (jeez, it really gets esoteric), but came to the conclusion that I take a little something from a lot of them: an ethics that accepts the notion there are “good” values that can be reasoned out; “informed practice,” or recognition that the means are the end; and that there is no disconnect between body and mind, just as there is no disconnect between intellect and environment. As a community organizer around issues of environmental justice, and caretaker of a garden, orchard, and hay fields, over the years I found the only way to keep going was to stay connected and to value what I learned and who I came to love in the process of cultivating, irrigating, organizing, advocating, and resisting authority. When Ike DeVargas and I sometimes fall into a lament over what “could have, would have, should have been,” he reminds me that how we worked together was the most important part of what we did— the means, not the end. In the obituary that Jurgen Habermas wrote for the philosopher Richard Rorty, (labeled a neopragmatist), who, like Mark, died of pancreatic cancer, he said: “Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the ‘holy’, the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: ‘My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.’”

Will the Real Mayordomo Please Stand Up

Fred called late one afternoon and quickly dispensed with the social chit chat.

”Orlando’s been taking all the water and says he’s not going to send a peon to clean the ditch because he’s the mayordomo.”

“He’s not the mayordomo, you are,” Mark said. “He knows we just made him mayordomo on paper because you don’t own any land and can’t officially be the mayordomo even if you really are because you do the job.”

“Then you tell him that. He won’t listen to me.”

Orlando is Fred’s uncle and he knows that Fred is the mayordomo, the one who directs the rotation of water among the irrigators in the village. Orlando was the mayordomo for twenty years until Tomás, Fred’s father, took over the responsibility. Then Tomás lost his leg to diabetes and it says in the bylaws of the acequia association that the mayordomo can’t be someone who has a disability and Fred was the only one left to do the job. But Tomás hadn’t put any of the land in Fred’s name and neither can you be a mayordomo if you aren’t a landowner. Mark and I were already the commissioners, the treasurer and secretary of the acequia, so we really needed Fred (Tomas could then be the third commissioner, as that didn’t require having two legs). The rest of the village irrigators, or parciantes, never came to the meetings and were happy to leave the administration of the acequia to those of us who had governed it for years, even if two of us were gringos, Tomás had only one leg, and Fred didn’t own any land.

“I’m quitting if Orlando doesn’t agree to send a peon to clean the ditch and pay him the $64 just like everyone else has to,” Fred said. From the tone of his voice Mark could tell he was offended that his uncle wasn’t acknowledging his status as mayordomo.

“OK, Kay and I will go talk to him. If he gives us any trouble we’ll just tell him that the commissioners have decided he’s not going to be the mayordomo, even if it’s only on paper. We’ll use someone else’s name to make it legal and you’ll continue to be the mayordomo.”

“He’s loco,” Fred said. “And he’s my uncle!”

That’s never made any difference in this crazy place we live. So Mark and I walked down the road to Orlando’s house the next morning to try and get things straightened. There was no answer at his place so we went down to his son Nelson’s house and there he was, sitting outside in the sun watching Nelson work on one of his cars. Nelson had a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a construction foreman and never worked the land. Orlando irrigated it all and ran a small herd of cows, like he always had, although the only way he could get around anymore was on an ATV that he called his caballo.

“Hola, vecino,” I said. “Como esta?”

“Bien, bien,” Orlando said, giving each of us one of those gentle handshakes that are typical of the viejitos of the villages of northern New Mexico.

We sat down on the bench next to him, out of the wind, and made chit chat for a few minutes until I thought it was time to talk about why we were there.

“So, Fred called us yesterday and says that you told him you weren’t going to send a peon to clean the ditch. He says you told him you’re still the mayordomo. You remember at the meeting we just put your name down as mayordomo for the record because Fred doesn’t own any land, but that he’s going to do the job, right?”

Orlando threw back his head and laughed and laughed.
“I really got him good, didn’t I?” he said.

“You mean you were just joking with him?” Mark asked. “I think Fred believed everything you said.”

“He don’t know shit about being mayordomo, pero if you say he’s the mayordomo then I guess I have to send a peon to clean the ditch. I already asked someone anyway.”

Mark and I grinned at each other. Apparently these guys joked with each other as much as they joked with us, to the point we never knew when they were telling the truth or not. But asking Orlando about taking all the water was trickier. He had a reputation for hogging the water when he was mayordomo and we didn’t doubt for one minute that Fred was right in that regard. But we did our best to stay on good terms with everyone and didn’t want to be the ones to call him on it.

“So, who has the water?” Mark asked diplomatically. “We’d like to get it soon so we can water the orchard.”

“It’s coming down, it’s coming down, what’s your hurry. Everyone’s always asking, where’s the water when they know it’s got to go all the way up before it comes down.”

Orlando was referring to the water rotation that started at the lower end of the valley, where each parciante took his or her turn watering according to how much land he or she owned. If you had a few acres then you had one water right and you got the water for 24 hours, in a good year of sufficient water, and if you had a bunch of land you had several water rights and got the water 24 hours for each right. So in order to calculate when you were due to get the water you had to know how many water rights each parciante had and how long it would take the water to move up the village until everyone had had his or her turn and then the rotation started all over again. Most of us, even Mark and I as commissioners, just let the mayordomo work it out and let us know when it was our turn. But when the mayordomo was taking the water out of turn it was a problem.

“Are you irrigating your fields up above?” I asked. “I didn’t see any water coming through your compuerta at the house.”

“Si, si, I have the water until tonight at six and then I let it go. That’s the way we do it, and Fred should just quit bitching about it and wait his turn.”

“He says that somehow things have gotten out of rotation and it should already be coming down,” I say.

Orlando laughed again. “He’ll get his water tonight, no problem.”

We decided to leave it at that, a fairly satisfactory resolution of the problem. Which was highly unusual. When it came to dealing with the acequia, solutions were few and far between. When someone wasn’t complaining about the water being taken out of turn they were complaining about someone taking too much. Or someone not closing his or her compuerta, the gate that allowed the water to flow from the acequia madre into the landowner’s field. Or not leaving enough water in the ditch so animals downstream could drink. Or not paying ditch fees. Or letting the water run down the road instead of in the field. And the ones they usually complained to were the commissioners, meaning Mark, Tomás, and me.

When we called Fred to tell him what Orlando had said, he answered, “He didn’t sound like he was joking to me. A ver, we’ll see if someone shows up to dig for him on Saturday.”

Orlando’s grandson showed up to dig for Orlando on Saturday, and Orlando showed up as well, to keep an eye on things. It took us half an hour to figure out who was digging whose derecho, or water right, as most of the landowners in the village hired local men and women to clean the ditch for them. They were either too busy to do it themselves, too old, didn’t live in the village anymore, or uninterested in having anything to do with the acequia. If you had more than one water right your worker had to clean a longer section than the worker digging one right. Fred was the man who laid out the sections, approved the work, and moved us up the ditch, all day long, with an hour off for lunch. By the time we reached the presa, or dam, at the river, the ditch had been cleaned of weeds, roots, garbage, and mud. When the water was released from the presa at the end of the day, it hurried down the ditch on its long journey back to the river, and ultimately, the Rio Grande.

Orlando met us at the presa at five o’clock on his caballo.

“How do you like the new mayordomo?” he asked Mark and me, as we lay on the ditchbank, resting.

“Fred did a good job, and he’s not as mean as you,” Mark teased.

“You got to be mean to get these cabrones to do any work. I bet there’s still jaras all along the ditch that you guys didn’t cut,” Orlando said.

“We cut all the willows,” I said. “And they were a real mess, believe me.”

“That’s cuz you got to cut them every year and not let them get too big and suck up all the water.”

“Well, vecino, we cut them every year when Tomás was the mayordomo, just like we cut them every year when you were the mayordomo. So what do you think about that?” Mark laughed.

“I think you’re all loco, that’s what I think, and I’m glad I’m not the mayordomo anymore,” Orlando said.

Just then Fred opened the presa so the water could flow down the newly cleaned acequia.

Orlando got back on his caballo and took off down the road.

“I bet that old son of a gun is going to go open his compuerta and take the water before anyone else, to hell with the rotation,” Fred said disgustedly.

“Oh well,” Mark said. “For now, there’s enough water for everyone. Just go close his compuerta at six tonight and start the regular rotation. If he complains tell him to talk to us about it.”

Fred shrugged his shoulders and went off to pay the peones who had worked all day on the ditch.

I looked at Mark and laughed. “Since when are we the arbiters of what is reasonable?”
“Until someone accuses us of doing something stupid and then someone else will have to straighten things out. Let’s at least rest on our laurels for awhile. It won’t last long.”

So we did.