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.

On Not Being Able to Get a Job

Mark and I used to read the jobs section of High Country News to see if there were any that had an element of environmental justice in the description. We would then narrow the list based on location: Helena, Montana sounded pretty good, despite the cold weather, or any place in northern California, but the Dakotas, Idaho (neo-Nazi country), and Arizona (too hot and too racist) were off-limits, which in itself limited the selection of possible jobs to almost none. But it didn’t matter, as it was all fantasy, an exercise in futility: Mark and I, and especially I, were essentially unemployable.

Lack of credentials certainly contributed to our dilemma. While Mark had at least earned a BA in English, it was a useless degree, of course, in the traditional job market. But he managed to parlay it into a job at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, maybe because the infamous owner, Gus Blaisdell, was impressed by his erudition and liked having people around with whom he could have a conversation, but probably because Mark was competent and willing to work for shit wages. His other job was working on other people’s houses in Placitas, where we were living at the time, to acquire the skills needed to build our own house, which we worked on for ten years during the 1980s.

I never even got a BA (when my younger son Max first realized that I didn’t have a college degree he said “Mom, what in the world were you thinking?”). My first real job was with the Forest Service as a fire lookout, no experience necessary. On my first day on the job on top of La Mosca Peak, after a few hours’ instructions on how to use the fire finder to locate a smoke and the radio to call it in, I reported the Grants dump. Working for the Forest Service was also my last real job (and not because I was a lousy fire lookout). But I managed to parlay my experience as a hiking patrol in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness into self-employment: I started a publishing company and wrote a guidebook to the Sandias, which was quite a success, and then went on to write guides to cross-country skiing in northern New Mexico, hikes in other wilderness areas, and hikes around Santa Fe and Taos. I also parlayed our “back to the land” life in Placitas—building a house, bartering for services rendered, participating in acequia culture—into a freelance writing career.

So you might say, not so bad, we both managed to find self-employment rather than wage labor jobs, but several things have to be factored into that evaluation. The first being that we made lousy money, had no health insurance, and no retirement. While we didn’t have a mortgage, we did have to pay for the birth of two babies born by caesarian section rather than at midwifery centers, as planned (we managed a trade with one of the obstetricians), for Mark’s hospital stay when he fell off the house while putting up the roof beams, and for a well that went dry before we’d even moved into our new house.

The other factor that contributed to our dependency on marginal self-employment was what I have to call our incorrigibility. It started in Placitas, when the developers came in with their subdivisions and their covenants (no chickens, no junked cars), and the Forest Service decided to pave roads and develop new ski areas, and we became, well, incorrigible. We demonstrated, connived, monkey-wrenched, wrote editorials and mockeries, and sued all of them. This continued, after giving up on Placitas and moving to El Valle, where threats to the community included not only the Forest Service and developers but lo and behold, environmentalists. This time we parlayed our activist experience, coupled with Mark’s degree in English and my book writing skills, into “that radical rag” La Jicarita News.

La Jicarita was the beginning of the end of any chance of regular employment. Over the course of 16 years we managed to piss off everyone: certainly the Forest Service; all kinds of other government officials from the county to federal levels; mainstream environmentalists who don’t know anything about community-based environmentalism; land grant activists who think only heirs should have a say in the management of land-based communities; many of our Anglo neighbors who worked at Sipapu Ski Area and supported its expansion; some of our Hispano neighbors who regard their water rights as private property and probably think we’re Communists; foundations that funded groups at cross purposes; and any number of other people, organizations, and bureaucracies that would never in a million years want either one of us to work for them.

So there you have it. In a couple of weeks I’ll be old enough to draw social security and I can jettison forever the fantasy of finding a job. I’m still self-employed as co-editor of La Jicarita with David Correia as it transitions to its new life in the American Studies Department at UNM, but as I threatened to do in my Productivity blog post, I’m going to start reading novels during the day to celebrate my new status: it’s not quite retirement, and it doesn’t mean better behavior, but it’s definitely a change, and at this point in my life, change is good.

On Not Watching Basketball

It looked like nobody was going to be watching basketball this year until the players and management struck a 50-50 deal (meaning the players and owners will share the billions), and we had a five game bonanza on Christmas Day.

I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.

I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.

You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.

Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.

The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.

But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.

Letter to Elizabeth, Number Two

I haven’t had time to blog much lately, but when I read your piece “On Breaking Two Taboos, Sharing, Playing Games, and Not” (elizabethtannen.com/blog), about a month ago I started composing this letter to you in my head. Now it’s in writing.

When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.

I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.

You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.

When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.


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