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.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
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.’”
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.’”
Saturday, May 21, 2011
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.
”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.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Elegy for El Valle
It is presumptuous of me to write an elegy for El Valle, my home for the last 20 years, when my neighbors and their parents and grandparents have been here for hundreds. But within the temporal context of my tenure, and the relational nature of my complaint, I’ll go ahead anyway.
I’ve written before about Tomás, the man who was our neighbor for most of those 20 years (he died a year and a half ago). In the eulogy I delivered at his funeral I said: “There is an unspoken law between us that any favor asked will be granted. It is based on an understanding that the favor will not be unreasonable, that it is necessary and not frivolous. Sometimes, because of our cultural differences, there may be a certain shaking of the head, a muttered, “those crazy gringos” or “that loco,” but we accede to the other’s wishes, and we write it off as what you do for a friend, pure and simple. I loved Tomás unreservedly, despite all the judgments I brought to bear. I hope he loved me the same way.”
Tomas was the unofficial mayor of El Valle, the Alpha Male of the village, and when inevitably challenged by some of the younger men who aspired to that role, responded as any benevolent dictator would: he proceeded to try to crush them with every power at his command. But benevolent is the operative word here: he asserted an authority that arose from the surety of what he felt was best for the well being of the community.
Now, as we (I’m an acequia commissioner) begin another acequia spring without his authority it’s like we’re dealing with an assortment of dysfunctional family members who we somehow have to appease while at the same time circumvent the chaos they threaten to unleash at any given moment. The situation is exacerbated by the loss of Mark, who as a commissioner for fifteen years learned how to balance Tomas’ power with his acuity. I long for Tomas to say, “Ya basta!” and lay down the law about who gets the water, when they get the water, who has a legitimate gripe and when they just have to shut-up. As it is, two parciantes are fighting over who is responsible for the capacity of their lateral ditch, which is outside the purview of the acequia commission but has drawn us in anyway because we’re trying to promote cooperation; a debate over a water right that is generations old and now divided into percentages that no one knows the genesis of; and payment of contract work for cleaning the ditch, which is something alien to the tradition of each parciante cleaning, or hiring someone to clean, the ditch communally, which we abandoned a year ago because none of the parciantes showed up and neglected to make sure someone would be there to do the work for them. There are now so many divided water rights among absentee landowners and family transfers that I can barely keep track of who I bill for what amount of money.
I got the water yesterday for my orchard and upper field. The first irrigation of the season is brutal; the lateral ditches have filled in with dead grass and debris, the water inevitably flows over the side of the ditch, and you have to run around hoeing and shoveling it free while filling “sackos”, or burlap bags with dirt to line the sides of the eroded laterals to keep the water moving toward what it is you’re trying to irrigate. It took me all afternoon to guide the run-off orchard water onto my garlic patch, so far the only greenery besides grass that I have in cultivation. Without Tomas, who made sure the manure was neatly shoveled out of the corral and into piles ready for delivery, and Mark, who once the manure was spread could rototill the garden at a moment’s notice, I am at the mercy of the current crew who may or may not have the tractor fixed or who may be so overwhelmed with wage labor work they don’t have the time or ability to help me, So the rest of my garden waits.
Tomas’s son just called and told me that his nephew and wife had a new baby and named him Tomas. That baby has big boots to fill. But it’s kinda like the Middle East around here: the days of dictators are over (even the benevolent ones), which is probably a good thing, but the future of acequia democracy may also be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to take the water and as a commissioner try to channel Tomas as best I can: just irrigate when it’s your turn, close your compuerta when it’s not, and otherwise, callete!
I’ve written before about Tomás, the man who was our neighbor for most of those 20 years (he died a year and a half ago). In the eulogy I delivered at his funeral I said: “There is an unspoken law between us that any favor asked will be granted. It is based on an understanding that the favor will not be unreasonable, that it is necessary and not frivolous. Sometimes, because of our cultural differences, there may be a certain shaking of the head, a muttered, “those crazy gringos” or “that loco,” but we accede to the other’s wishes, and we write it off as what you do for a friend, pure and simple. I loved Tomás unreservedly, despite all the judgments I brought to bear. I hope he loved me the same way.”
Tomas was the unofficial mayor of El Valle, the Alpha Male of the village, and when inevitably challenged by some of the younger men who aspired to that role, responded as any benevolent dictator would: he proceeded to try to crush them with every power at his command. But benevolent is the operative word here: he asserted an authority that arose from the surety of what he felt was best for the well being of the community.
Now, as we (I’m an acequia commissioner) begin another acequia spring without his authority it’s like we’re dealing with an assortment of dysfunctional family members who we somehow have to appease while at the same time circumvent the chaos they threaten to unleash at any given moment. The situation is exacerbated by the loss of Mark, who as a commissioner for fifteen years learned how to balance Tomas’ power with his acuity. I long for Tomas to say, “Ya basta!” and lay down the law about who gets the water, when they get the water, who has a legitimate gripe and when they just have to shut-up. As it is, two parciantes are fighting over who is responsible for the capacity of their lateral ditch, which is outside the purview of the acequia commission but has drawn us in anyway because we’re trying to promote cooperation; a debate over a water right that is generations old and now divided into percentages that no one knows the genesis of; and payment of contract work for cleaning the ditch, which is something alien to the tradition of each parciante cleaning, or hiring someone to clean, the ditch communally, which we abandoned a year ago because none of the parciantes showed up and neglected to make sure someone would be there to do the work for them. There are now so many divided water rights among absentee landowners and family transfers that I can barely keep track of who I bill for what amount of money.
I got the water yesterday for my orchard and upper field. The first irrigation of the season is brutal; the lateral ditches have filled in with dead grass and debris, the water inevitably flows over the side of the ditch, and you have to run around hoeing and shoveling it free while filling “sackos”, or burlap bags with dirt to line the sides of the eroded laterals to keep the water moving toward what it is you’re trying to irrigate. It took me all afternoon to guide the run-off orchard water onto my garlic patch, so far the only greenery besides grass that I have in cultivation. Without Tomas, who made sure the manure was neatly shoveled out of the corral and into piles ready for delivery, and Mark, who once the manure was spread could rototill the garden at a moment’s notice, I am at the mercy of the current crew who may or may not have the tractor fixed or who may be so overwhelmed with wage labor work they don’t have the time or ability to help me, So the rest of my garden waits.
Tomas’s son just called and told me that his nephew and wife had a new baby and named him Tomas. That baby has big boots to fill. But it’s kinda like the Middle East around here: the days of dictators are over (even the benevolent ones), which is probably a good thing, but the future of acequia democracy may also be in trouble. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to take the water and as a commissioner try to channel Tomas as best I can: just irrigate when it’s your turn, close your compuerta when it’s not, and otherwise, callete!
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Who Are These People?
Whenever I’m in an upscale community (not a common occurrence), walking around looking at million dollar houses, I find myself asking, “Who are these people and where does all this money come from?” Right now I’m in Del Mar, California, in a house loaned to me by some homies from New Mexico who inherited it from their family. But who are all these other people, in their glass houses with ocean views, manicured landscapes, and shiny BMWs (I swear to God I haven’t seen one dirty car since I’ve been here)?
Who I actually see are the workers: gardeners, plumbers, plasterers, painters, general contractors, and dog walkers, busily keeping all this luxury afloat. The gardeners are all Mexicanos, pruning, planting, and watering all the lush vegetation that has turned these once barren hills (that’s when the homies’ family bought in) into paradise. In the mornings, as I walk along the windy streets in a circuitous path to the ocean I see some Anglo runners and dog walkers, most of them my age or older. Is this a community of retirees who bought in before the property taxes skyrocketed and who now benefit from Prop 13? Are they second home owners, so wealthy they can afford to hire all these people to maintain their houses for their two or three months’ winter stay?
Whoever they are, and whether their money is old money or nouveau riche money, I feel like an alien. Not only am I an alien in Del Mar particularly, but in California generally. Take today for example. I needed to put gas in my hosts’ car after driving it down the coast the other day to grocery shop. So I find out where the nearest gas station is and proceed apace. I make sure I know which side of the car the gas tank is on, and whether it has to be popped open from a release inside, and then I venture out. I pull into the gas station and there are all these instructions on the pumps about using your debit card or cash, which I intend to use instead of my credit card, but I’m already envisioning putting the money into the slot and seeing it disappear forever while I try to figure out how it actually connects to gas for the car. Fortunately, it also says I can pay inside, which I do. Then I go back to the car and pull the Regular Unleaded hose out and attempt to put it into my gas tank. But it has this weird accordion end on it, and try as I might I can’t get it to stay in the gas tank opening. Whenever I depress the delivery handle it just pops back up. I’m looking around in a panic thinking, maybe I’m trying to put the wrong gas in the tank because the pump says EC Regular Unleaded, whatever that is, but I see that all the pumps say that. So then I start looking around for someone to help me, embarrassing as that’s going to be, but remembering that I’ll never have to see this person again. But everyone who is working a pump is also working a cell phone and can’t hear me. Finally, I see a Mexicano worker put his phone away and I approach: “Habla Ingles?” I ask, and he answers, “ Poquito,” and I know I’m not going to be able to explain my predicament in Spanish. So then I find another guy, an Anglo this time, and I say, “I’m from New Mexico and I’ve never seen a pump hose like this and I can’t make it work in my gas tank.” Now I know I’m perpetuating a stereotype about New Mexicans, who already have enough trouble convincing everyone that we’re actually part of the U.S., but I’m desperate here. So he graciously comes over and shows me that you have to shove the hose into the tank until it locks and then dispense your gas. I keep apologizing and he keeps saying don’t worry about it but by then I’m completely frazzled and when I get back into my (their) car I pull out into the wrong lane and am forced onto I-5 going south when all I wanted to do was go to a gas station and fill the gas tank. I’m a perfectly competent driver under normal circumstances but now I’m a wailing banshee praying that there is am exit before San Diego where I can get off and find my way home without using up all the gas I just put back into the tank. And there is: Del Mar Heights, which brings me back to Camino Del Mar and the familiar streets leading up to the lovely bungalow that has been so graciously loaned to me by my New Mexico homies. As I’ve said before, maybe it’s best that I don’t leave home.
Who I actually see are the workers: gardeners, plumbers, plasterers, painters, general contractors, and dog walkers, busily keeping all this luxury afloat. The gardeners are all Mexicanos, pruning, planting, and watering all the lush vegetation that has turned these once barren hills (that’s when the homies’ family bought in) into paradise. In the mornings, as I walk along the windy streets in a circuitous path to the ocean I see some Anglo runners and dog walkers, most of them my age or older. Is this a community of retirees who bought in before the property taxes skyrocketed and who now benefit from Prop 13? Are they second home owners, so wealthy they can afford to hire all these people to maintain their houses for their two or three months’ winter stay?
Whoever they are, and whether their money is old money or nouveau riche money, I feel like an alien. Not only am I an alien in Del Mar particularly, but in California generally. Take today for example. I needed to put gas in my hosts’ car after driving it down the coast the other day to grocery shop. So I find out where the nearest gas station is and proceed apace. I make sure I know which side of the car the gas tank is on, and whether it has to be popped open from a release inside, and then I venture out. I pull into the gas station and there are all these instructions on the pumps about using your debit card or cash, which I intend to use instead of my credit card, but I’m already envisioning putting the money into the slot and seeing it disappear forever while I try to figure out how it actually connects to gas for the car. Fortunately, it also says I can pay inside, which I do. Then I go back to the car and pull the Regular Unleaded hose out and attempt to put it into my gas tank. But it has this weird accordion end on it, and try as I might I can’t get it to stay in the gas tank opening. Whenever I depress the delivery handle it just pops back up. I’m looking around in a panic thinking, maybe I’m trying to put the wrong gas in the tank because the pump says EC Regular Unleaded, whatever that is, but I see that all the pumps say that. So then I start looking around for someone to help me, embarrassing as that’s going to be, but remembering that I’ll never have to see this person again. But everyone who is working a pump is also working a cell phone and can’t hear me. Finally, I see a Mexicano worker put his phone away and I approach: “Habla Ingles?” I ask, and he answers, “ Poquito,” and I know I’m not going to be able to explain my predicament in Spanish. So then I find another guy, an Anglo this time, and I say, “I’m from New Mexico and I’ve never seen a pump hose like this and I can’t make it work in my gas tank.” Now I know I’m perpetuating a stereotype about New Mexicans, who already have enough trouble convincing everyone that we’re actually part of the U.S., but I’m desperate here. So he graciously comes over and shows me that you have to shove the hose into the tank until it locks and then dispense your gas. I keep apologizing and he keeps saying don’t worry about it but by then I’m completely frazzled and when I get back into my (their) car I pull out into the wrong lane and am forced onto I-5 going south when all I wanted to do was go to a gas station and fill the gas tank. I’m a perfectly competent driver under normal circumstances but now I’m a wailing banshee praying that there is am exit before San Diego where I can get off and find my way home without using up all the gas I just put back into the tank. And there is: Del Mar Heights, which brings me back to Camino Del Mar and the familiar streets leading up to the lovely bungalow that has been so graciously loaned to me by my New Mexico homies. As I’ve said before, maybe it’s best that I don’t leave home.
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