Butchie

In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (Eliot is a reference for many of my blog posts) the main protagonist Maggie Tulliver dies tragically, hounded by Rousseau’s “society”, which he believed makes man (or woman) a “tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Is the “evil-speaking” and “self-exaltation” of the society matrons who hound Maggie the only way we know to feel better about ourselves?

The bullies I encounter here in the hood, northern New Mexico, carry the weight of post colonialism, but with their “political shenanigans, bullying, abuse of power” (Orlando Romero, The Santa Fe New Mexican) they speak evilly about those who could actually be their partners in arms and exalt themselves by embracing patronage. This was recently played out at the county level, when a group of politicos came to trash the land use plan the county staff had worked hard for several years to write (starting with neighborhood associations and working up) with their usual complaints: “Nobody is going to tell me what to do with my land”; “How come I didn’t know about this?”; and “Are we going to let these newcomers tell us what to do?”

The meeting was the last straw for Butchie Denver, the Taoseña activist (she actually lived in Lama). As she reported to me on the phone when she got home (this is probably a mix of Butchie’s and my own sentiments, but seeing as how often they were the same, I’m not going to worry about it): “Well, to begin with, without a land use plan the developers are certainly going to have a say so in what happens as agricultural land gets bought up and water resources are transferred to urban use. Like hell they didn’t know about the plan, they just want an excuse to trash it because it wasn’t their idea and they don’t care about contributing to the common good. And these ‘newcomers’ they’re referring to are the staff that their all-Hispanic county commission hired to implement their vision of planning in the county. But trash it they did—the commissioners rolled right over, and now the county has no land use plan in place and a disconnected staff and commission.”

Butchie, aka one of Las Brujas (the other two being Trudy Valerio Healy and Fabi Romero), so dubbed by her longtime partner Tony Trujillo, was instrumental in wresting power out of the hands of the Democratic machine in Taos County through hard work, some intimidation, and knowing everything there was to know about everyone. Butchie also served for years on committees to revise the county land use plan, which is why she was so pissed off about the meeting that trashed it.

Yesterday Butchie died of cancer. She’d only been ill for a short time, and it was a shock to all of us. Tony took her out to the Bay Area two weeks ago for better medical care and to be with her daughter and granddaughter. While she was in hospice care Tony and I often talked on the phone and I heard a great many stories: her adventures at Woodstock; her husbands (there were more than one: Tony told me, “I never married her so she couldn’t divorce me”), her daughters, step-children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren; her move to Questa with a chimpanzee, a tiger, and a mountain lion (an explanation of this would take another blog post); and her career as an artist of retablos.

As an activist Butchie brooked no nonsense. She’d show up in anyone’s office—county commissioner, planner, attorney, town mayor—track them down at home, or confront them in public to express her displeasure when they failed to contribute to the common good. If she thought you were basically trying to do the right thing but got off track her approach was usually, “You know I love you but you’re really being an asshole.” She knew everything there was to know about water and how it was being used and abused, and was an invaluable resource for me in my position as chair of the Taos County Advisory Board on Public Welfare, which reviews all proposed water transfers within and from Taos County to ascertain if they’re in the best interest of the citizens of Taos County. She fought like hell alongside me to get the county to approve the advisory board after the regional water planning committee was hijacked by the powers that be. I don’t know what I’ll do without her.

But Tony told me not to worry, that Butchie will still be there watching my back, and the backs of all the others to whom she was a loyal and trusted compañera. Rest in peace, Butchie. You deserve some.

Acequia Stories: The Democracy of Dysfunction, or How Everyone is Equally Crazy

OK, I’ve heard enough about the romance of acequia democracy. As I wrote in my posting “Elegy for El Valle”, acequia meetings are often forums for long-standing feuds or a recent offense that’s easier to duke out in the acequia playing fields than court. Not that we’re not litigious: “Take him to court!” is the common command even before mediation is given a chance. While it’s often just bluster, I can’t count the number of times private lawyers, judges, district attorneys, and the State Engineer’s Office (a really bad idea) have gotten involved in acequia issues they should never have known about.

So instead of going to court I’m going to tell some stories about the Democracy of Dysfunction as I have seen them played out in my norteño lifetime. It may be dysfunction, but it’s still democracy—kind of.

Story Number One: How the Commission Tried to Give Us An Additional Water Right and We Refused

Mark and I got taken under the wing of Tomás soon after we moved to El Valle. He was the commissioner on one of the three acequias in the village and he was also the de facto mayor of the village, the one with the tallest woodpile, the most tractors, all the connections—basically, the Alpha Male benevolent dictator. What that meant to the guys in the village challenging his position was that whoever was friends with the enemy was their enemy as well. Tomas didn’t bother to attend the acequia meeting where these guys were commissioners, but Mark and I went because we had water rights on two ditches—the “dark” side and the Tomas side—and we figured someone needed to know what they were up to.

So we show up at the meeting. The only attendees are the three commissioners, one of their mothers, and two parciantes. When they get to the agenda item about whether there have been any transfers of water rights they inform us that instead of owning a half a water right we now own a full water right. Actually, they only present this information to me, although Mark is sitting there right next to me, because the land is in my name and we’re not married. I can’t really remember why we put the land in my name, but there it is. Tomás used to own the land and when he sold it to the young man we bought it from—a kid from Santa Fe who had big ambitions to be a farmer but then kind of burnt out—Tomás divided the water right and kept half for his house and field and half for the land he sold. So when we bought it from the kid we had half a water right, meaning we got to irrigate for 12 hours each rotation.

We bought the land in 1992. It is now 2000 and these guys are just now telling us we have one water right instead of half a water right. Or telling me, that is. I have a printout of the minutes of the meetings (which for some reason the commissioners actually tape recorded), which reveal much better than I ever could just how crazy these meetings get.

• David tells Kay that her property historically had one water right.

• Kay [jokingly] says that one right for her property was fine with her but that Tomas would raise hell over that.

• Mark asked why the Commission suddenly has a problem with the issue since in recent history the Commission had recognized that Kay’s property had ½ water right and Tomas had ½ water right. Mark said he had no problem with ½ a water right on Kay’s property.

• Ruben asked Kay if she had a problem with owning only ½ water right.

• Kay said she had no problem with it.

• Ruben told Kay that if she didn’t have a problem with the transfer Tomas should just get the permit at the State Engineer’s Office. We can’t just let individuals move water rights around without following procedure.

• David said as an individual he would have a problem with it.

• Mark said that he and Kay were objecting to the way the discussion had proceeded and would have to speak with a lawyer before continuing.

• Mark and Kay leave the building.

• Mark and Kay return to the building. (We didn’t have time to talk to a lawyer but we talked to Tomas and he said he was going to talk to a lawyer.)

• Kay said she felt the meeting was not legal because we were counting a quorum by majority of water rights and not on one-person-one vote majority. She said she wanted it on record that she was objecting to the meeting.

• Mark and Kay leave the meeting again.

Tomás ended up having to get a lawyer to write a letter stating it is perfectly legal for parciantes under community acequias to transfer a ditch right to other lands served by the same ditch, and that the State Engineer’s Office doesn’t want to hear about it, much less issue a permit for it.

So they backed off. For the time being. And only on this issue. There would be plenty more to come.

Pee Wee’s Story: The Deaf Leading the Blind

Albert, my neighbor, is “severely” deaf and his little terrier mix Pee Wee is “completely” blind: she has no eyes. Albert asked me to write a story about how this happened and suggested the title: “The Deaf Leading the Blind.”

Albert and Pee Wee are inseparable. They live together in an immaculate trailer in El Valle. Pee Wee has a solar doghouse but she prefers the trailer. And since she lost her eyes, Albert prefers having her with him inside: “She’s my partner.”

Albert got Pee Wee about a year ago from a friend in Chamisal. She was supposed to be a present for his granddaughter, who was living with him at the time, but the granddaughter moved to Albuquerque so Albert ended up with Pee Wee. She used to run out onto the village road when I went for walks with my dogs and occasionally accompanied us up the llano. Even then Albert often took her with him when he went to Peñasco to hang out with his friends, or on a quick trip to Taos when she wouldn’t have to stay in the car too long, waiting.

One day she was in the car with him when he got out to lock the gate. She must have jumped out the door when he wasn’t looking and when he got back in and started up his driveway he felt a bump and then heard her cries. He stopped immediately and found Pee Wee rolling around on the ground with blood pouring out of her face. He picked her up and ran to his mother Corina’s house, next door. They washed the blood off Pee Wee’s face and tried to insert her eye back into its socket.

This is when the Salazar Clinic vets in Taos and Jeannie Cornelius of the Dixon Animal Protection Society come into the story. Albert rushed Pee Wee to the clinic where they immediately took her in but were unable to save her eye. Albert doesn’t have much discretionary money, but he paid what he could and left Pee Wee with the vet for a couple of days. He then took her home and she seemed to be doing OK, but about 10 days later her other eye swelled up and Albert took her back to the vet. This time he had no money so the clinic contacted Jeannie, the compassionate dog lady who runs an animal rescue service in Dixon, who agreed to pay the bill. The vets kept Pee Wee over the weekend, but the eye got worse, and when they told Albert that they’d have to remove it he broke down and thought, how am I going to take care of a blind dog? He considered euthanizing Pee Wee, but the vets told him how spunky she was and offered to try to find a home for her. One of the vets took the dog home with her and considered keeping Pee Wee herself.

But Albert couldn’t let her go. He built a chain link fence around his yard and came back to the clinic and took her home. A week later, which was exactly a month after he accidently drove over her, he took Pee Wee back for a final exam. The vets’ report read: “Looks great—doing well. Eyes look good—pulled stitch from medial aspect of (L) eye. Everything else [they had also spayed her] looks good. Very happy.”

So that’s how the Deaf Ended Up Leading the Blind. Pee Wee remains “Very happy,” at least as far as we humans can tell. She sits on Albert’s lap in the car. He feeds her high protein dog food. She follows him everywhere around the yard and occasionally bumps into things but regains her equilibrium after he whistles or claps his hands to let her know where he is. She sleeps in his bed at night. When I went over to get the vet report from Albert for this story Pee Wee and my dog Paco played together in the yard for half an hour, rolling around, first one on top, then the other, nipping, yapping, then running in circles.

Albert also got some medical help recently, a new set of hearing aids. They are outrageously expensive, and he can’t afford them, either. There’s no deaf person rescue service that we know of, so he’ll have to make payments for a long time to come. But now he can better hear Pee Wee’s bark when she wants to alert him that she needs help or someone is coming. He wants to thank everyone who helped him, financially, physically, and emotionally, through his ordeal with Pee Wee—an ordeal that in the end became a blessing.

Death in the Afternoon—Or So I Thought

It was a blustery, overcast April day in El Valle and recovering from a sore back I decided to get in the hot tub early, before dark.

The hot tub, you may ask? Yes, I have an electric hot tub, which my orthopedically challenged body dearly loves. For many years we had a wood fired hot tub, a Snorkel (a second) that was shipped down to New Mexico from Seattle after a trip there to visit Mark’s brother. Every evening around dusk Mark went out and made a fire in the submersible stove, and every night we got in the often 110 degree water (it’s hard to regulate the temperature burning pine, piñon, and juniper) with the kids, neighbors, and friends, winter and summer, Orion and the Big Dipper overhead, new moons and full moons, owls hooting and cows lowing, freezing cold and snow, and mild summer evenings with enough chill to warrant a soak.

After many years the tub deteriorated, the stays warped, the firewood became more precious (meaning the cutting and splitting became more of a chore), and keeping the fires burning on sub-zero nights intimidating. So for a while we did without. Then, as these things happen, we decided it was OK to buy a used hot tub, nothing fancy, no push button settings, no fancy jets, no multi-colored lights, but yes, one that you plugged in and voila, the water got hot!

And that’s where I was yesterday afternoon when the wind whipped the cover, half opened, closed, with just enough room for me to scrunch down without being slapped upside the head and knocked out. At least that’s what passed through my mind as I reflexively lifted my arms to catch the impact of the cover, while the water splashed up over my face and hair with the aftertaste of chemicals (albeit a mild dosing, as I’m the only regular customer).

Other thoughts went through my mind as well. One, I was glad I hadn’t gotten around to adding water to raise the below-optimal water level, which is always a pain in the butt because I do it with buckets of hot water from the bathtub so I can use gas instead of electricity to make up the temperature difference. I’d somehow hurt my lower back in Albuquerque the weekend before with Jakob and Casey and their grad school friends where I exercised nothing but my brain and vocal cords at a secular seder that was both irreverent and relevant, which is why I hadn’t filled the tub and why I was in it before dark.

Two, I wondered how long I could have held the cover up with my arms. If it had been the cover I’d just replaced, I wouldn’t have been able to hold it up at all—water soaked, frozen foam is very heavy—so I would have been in there with a pocket of air to breathe between water and cover.

With this thought in mind I got out of the tub and found a rock to put on top of the open cover. I really wanted to be in the tub as the water felt so good on my sore back. But what if the wind blew the rock up off the cover and knocked it onto my head?

That lead to thought number three. I wondered how long it would have taken for someone to find me, dead or barely alive, and if Paco would be OK until that happened. He has a dog door, so he has access to food, and there is plenty of water in the acequia. Would he sit there patiently by the closed hot tub, knowing I was in there, or would he, like Lassie, somehow know enough to run around barking until someone heard him and stopped by?

That someone would be Tony, my neighbor, because he comes over most nights to get water from my outside pump, which is right by the hot tub. He has no water in his trailer—the water line from the pump at his father-in-law’s house is broken somewhere—and he would hear me call out “Tony, Tony, I’m stuck in the hot tub” or wonder why Paco was frantically barking. Luckily I had a bathing suit on because if I get in the tub during the day I take that precaution. But he might decide to get water at someone else’s house that night, and there I would be, in the hot tub, in the dark.

Well, the wind did indeed pick up the rock and throw it off the cover but it landed on the deck instead of my head and I decided that was enough and got my sorry ass out of the tub and locked down the cover. Then the rain started and it lasted most of the night and this morning everything is lush and green and the wind isn’t blowing so I’m now getting back in the hot tub. End of story.

Why I Live in Northern New Mexico

I’ve been working on a series called “Acequia Stories: The Democracy of Dysfunction, or How Everyone is Equally Crazy,” the first installment of which I was getting ready to post after Sunday’s typically contentious acequia meeting with all the usual suspects. But then on Monday and Tuesday I was reminded of why I live in this yes, crazy but benevolent, unique place and I decided to write about that instead.

On Monday morning my friend Peter, master woodworker from Chimayó, came up to replace my funky kitchen cabinets with the elegant doors and drawers he’d crafted. Mark and I always wanted new cabinets but never had the discretionary money. But Peter wanted the work and gave me a good deal. He’d already built me a beautiful tongue and groove cabinet for my bathroom in return for my help putting together a book of his oral histories of workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, an incredible accounting of what went on from the beginning of the Manhattan Project until the year 2000 (we’ll let you know when it’s ready for purchase).

On Tuesday I loaded up the truck with the old doors to my cabinets, along with the rest of my trash (which included a couple of bales of hay that had been sitting outside for a year or so, turning to mold) and went to the dump. Paco, my year old blue healer, went with me, of course. The cabinet doors were headed for the reuse building at the dump, a recycling project that came to fruition through the efforts of Jean, a local artist who was an original member of the Hog Farm commune. While waiting my turn behind a woman in a car tossing various things into the dumpster I discussed the upcoming Kit Carson Coop election with Jerry, a land grant activist who manages the dump, about which corrupt board members we would be voting against. The folks in the truck who pulled up alongside me when the car moved on were the sister and brother-in-law of my next door neighbor and whose kids went to school with my kids. When they saw the old cabinet doors in my truck they asked if I was going to dump them and when I told them they were headed for the reuse building they said, we’ll reuse them, and we transferred them to their truck.

Then Paco and I went to the post office in Chamisal, where Noami the postmistress asked me what I was doing that day. When I told her I planned to rototill my garden she told me about the time her dad was tilling his garden and he said, why don’t you give it a try, which she did, and proceeded to overturn the tiller and herself at the same time. Many years ago Noami and I hiked to the top of North Truchas Peak in a single day, which she periodically reminds me of when we’re complaining about our daily aches and pains.

When I came out of the post office the woman who I had seen at the dump called me over to her car and said, I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t me who drank all that beer you saw me throw into the dumpster. Now, I hadn’t even noticed that she’d thrown away a bunch of beer bottles, and even if I had I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, but she wanted me to know that she doesn’t drink the stuff she only picks up the bottles from the roadside between Chamisal and Las Trampas. This initiated a discussion about why we can’t ever seem to get a bottle bill through the legislature to provide a financial incentive to not throw beer bottles on the road. When I told her she was a good Samaritan she gave me a big smile and went off to collect more bottles.

While driving back to El Valle I ran into Albert and his dog Pee Wee, a little terrier mutt who goes everywhere with Albert. He had stopped me on the road a few weeks before and asked if I would write a story about Pee Wee, who he accidentally ran over with his car, popping out one of Pee Wee’s eyes. He rushed her to the vet, who couldn’t save the eye, and then the second eye developed an infection and the vet couldn’t save that one either, so Pee Wee is now blind. Albert takes Pee Wee with him to Peñasco, where he goes to hang out with his buddies, she follows him around the yard when he’s at home working, and he keeps her inside with him at night. I’m going to go over to Albert’s mother’s house later today to sit down and write the story of Pee Wee. Corina, Albert’s mother, who is a good friend of mine, will help me communicate with Albert, who is almost completely deaf.

And finally, while I was rototilling the garden my neighbor Nelson came over to bring me some eggs. I gave him the last of my chickens a week ago when I decided that after 34 years I was going to quit keeping them so Paco and I can have a little more mobility, meaning I can leave the house for a few days without having to ask Nelson to come over the feed the them, which he always willingly does. I now take him all my compost for the chickens and he gives me as many eggs as I want (he also keeps ducks, geese, and guineas). While he was here he offered to weed whack the rose hips along the ditch that I’ve been meaning to cut back for the last few years.

Tomorrow Peter will come and finish installing my new cabinets. I’m going to enjoy this aesthetic improvement to my house, work on my story about Pee Wee, start planting my garden, and bask in a good norteño feeling that sometimes slips away from me, especially after I attend an acequia meeting. I’ll get back to the Democracy of Dysfunction next week.

You Can’t Go Home Again

Last week I went to Placitas to see my old house. Or rather I went to see what was left of my old house. Actually, all I saw was the place of my old house. My neighbors had told me years ago that the folks who bought the house built onto and around it, kind of like folks who build onto or around a trailer to turn it into a more solid construction; but my house, an adobe for god’s sake, was nowhere to be found.

Neither were the fruit trees, the cottonwoods, the native grass, the rock gardens, the vegetable and flower gardens Mark and I spent fifteen years cultivating, carefully meting out the precious water that is pumped from hundreds of feet below ground. I guess when they took off the second story, added on rooms (including one at the west end with a turret) and then put on a different second story, the vegetation got in the way. This one now resembles a lot of the houses built over the twenty years I’ve been away: solar adobe style, boxy, oversized, characterless.

Our handmade houses were something different. In the 1960s, when the back to the land movement stumbled into Placitas, a land grant community at the north end of the Sandia Mountains, some folks emulated the traditional building style of the long time Hispano residents of the village. Others saw homebuilding as venues for their creativity, constrained only by the capacity of their pocket books. Ours was somewhere in between: a two story adobe with a gambrel roof (double pitch) built around second-hand doors and windows that we brought home from wherever we could find them: Coronado Lumber in Albuquerque, the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and Buffalo, New York, where Mark had friends in the antique business. It took five years of building before we moved in, ten years to “finish” (adding the greenhouse, putting in a bathroom upstairs, but you never really finish a handmade house), and one year to sell.

Many of our compadres’ creations are still there: Cathy’s Dome out on the mesa; Rumaldo’s ranchito on lower Las Huertas Creek; the crumbling adobe in the village where Mark and I lived while we built our new house; the triple dome and solar dome (where we fell in love) in Dome Valley, and Daisy’s carefully crafted compact house on a windswept hill (thank you for being my companion on this nostalgic trip). But what Placitas mostly is are the thousands of new homes that beginning in the 80s the developers aggressively marketed to attract Albuquerque commuters, retirees, and second homeowners. From I-25 east you pass La Mesa, Tierra Madre, Placitas Homesteads, Ranchos de Placitas, Placitas West, Puesta del Sol, and the Overlook, among others, until a sign on the road tells you you’re now entering the Historic Village of Placitas.

Placitas is not unique, of course. Things change (just ask the land grant community). People build houses. Developers build many houses. In El Valle, where I now live, we suddenly have second homes. But Placitas is emblematic of a consumer culture that is the basis of this country’s power and wealth. We became the “primary engine of capital accumulation” (David Harvey), which vastly increased the infrastructure necessary to support this kind of massive suburbanization. The housing boom in the 90s exacerbated the overbuilding and created the upper middle class culture that now dominates Placitas. Now, in the 2000s, there must be a slew of foreclosures and some nail-biting developers who won’t survive the housing bust, but the damage has been done: loss of the commons, validation of yuppie culture, and the mining of the already limited water resources of a semi-arid environment.

So we left, and it took me 20 years to go back (I’ve now lived in El Valle as long as I lived in Placitas). My friends who stayed say they drive up the road alongside the “Homesteads” and “Ranchos” with their eyes pointed straight ahead, following the route home without looking. When they take their morning walk up the hill and see another road bladed through the desert, they look away. They’re attached to their homes and their history in the crazy, mixed up place Placitas was and is. I prefer the was.

The Swim Team

This post is not really about swim teams, it’s about David Sedaris’s piece in the New Yorker called “Memory Laps”, which I read and immediately burst into tears. I already wrote about my lackluster career in competitive swimming in my Olympics blog post. This one is about fathers, in particular, his and mine. Unlike Sedaris’s father, who berated him after losing at swim meets, my father never went to my meets. His damage was done at home.

Now that I think about it, he probably never saw me race. Considering all our kids’ soccer meets and chess tournaments Mark and I attended over the years, that constitutes really egregious behavior. Not only didn’t he attend any “events” of mine, I don’t ever remember him stepping foot in any of my schools. My mother was the one who had to go up and bawl out my fifth grade teacher for not letting me retake a standardized test when it was discovered that I’d skipped a line in my answer sheet marking and therefore negated the entire test.

Speaking of test taking, my father claimed that he knew my sisters and my IQ test scores and bragged to his poker playing buddies down at the American Legion about what brainiacs his daughters were. First off, I don’t remember taking any IQ tests, and secondly, the only reason he was bragging was to validate his own intelligence through his offspring. He also went around the house quoting Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, who to this day I’ve never read because of my aversion to anything he valued.

OK, we’re headed for a discussion of victimhood here. Why did he need to validate his intelligence through his children? Because he was born in poverty in southern Illinois, coal-mining country just like its southern neighbor Kentucky? Because he never got to go to college, like my mother did, which he used against her in any number of ways, like belittling her looks, her character, her interests. Which he then repeated with my sisters and me when we reached puberty. In “Memory Laps” Sedaris says of his father’s constant harassment: “I’d never know if my father did this to hurt me or to spur me on,” and he doesn’t give us enough information for us to figure it out, either. But Sedaris’s focus is on how it made him feel: “My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. Now it seems cruel, abusive even, but this all happened before the invention of self-esteem, which, frankly, I think is a little overrated.”

Where is the line between victim and perpetrator? Why do some people transfer their disappointment in themselves to those around them through berating and never going to swim meets? Why are others able to rise above their disadvantage and in so doing bring everyone they love with them? Or, like David Sedaris, create an alternative universe where tragedy is comedy and the theater of the absurd.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. The nature/nurture dichotomy—which should be a synthesis, I think—is too complicated for me to jump into here. I only know that as a parent I have tried my absolute best to support, nurture, and educate my children despite my own feelings of inadequacy, my disappointments, my failings. My father was unable to do this, something I don’t really dwell on very often or have a need to forgive. I only think about it when I read about David Sedaris’s father, and then I feel an overwhelming sadness for the victims and the perpetrators, whoever they may be.