“If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution.”

That’s Emma Goldman speaking. I came of age at the time in history, the 60s and 70s, when we thought we were going to make our revolution and that dancing was going to be a very big part of it. We didn’t make the revolution but we did achieve the democratization of dancing, freeing everyone to dance any way they wanted or with (or without) any one they wanted. When you’re out on the dance floor jumping around to “Respect” who can tell who’s dancing with whom? We danced in cavernous halls to local garage bands, in dorm common rooms, at keg parties out in the woods, and in our bedrooms, in front of the mirror, practicing the moves.

Dancing is my life’s signifier. I experienced my first real kiss while dancing with a juvenile delinquent in the hall of the Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs, where I grew up. Our youth group, Liberal Religious Youth (LRY), which provided me with entrance into the world of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, was sponsoring a dance for “disadvantaged” kids who had ended up at the youth detention center in town. I remember going home that night and lying in bed savoring the taste and texture of that incredibly sensuous thing that had happened to me. I never saw the bestower of that gift again.

LRY groups sponsored “conferences,” a euphemism for all that sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, at all the churches on the Colorado Front Range—Boulder to Pueblo. I got to dance with—and kiss as well— Denver bluesman Otis Taylor (excuse my name dropping) at one of these affairs. This was before he was actually known as a bluesman, as he must have been about 17 at the time. We danced up a storm, but I refrained from any further activity, being only 15 myself and intimidated by this tall, handsome man who was a lot more worldly than I. I never saw him again, either, until Mark and I went to his concert many years later in Albuquerque. I didn’t go up to remind him who I was; I’m sure it was a memory on my part, not his.

After high school, at Antioch, we danced all the time in the C shop, the late night café where you could eat burgers and fries to the sounds of the Stones (Let It Bleed came out in the fall of my second year; I’ll never forget following the sound of “Gimme Shelter” down the hall to the common room wondering, what is that song?), Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Janis Joplin, and all that great Detroit, Philly, and Memphis R&B. When I was 20, during Christmas vacation, my mother, sisters, and I took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. On New Year’s Eve we found ourselves in a discothèque across the street from the beach that was crammed full of Anglo and Mexican tourists as well as locals of all ages, from grandmothers to babies. My sisters and I soon hooked up with some vacationing students from Guadalajara and danced the night away. A grandmother came up and asked my mother to dance, so she got some action as well. We ended up reconnecting with the students after we took the train to Guadalajara, and we danced another night away on the shore of Lake Chapala drinking sangria with tequila shots.

I dropped out of Antioch after a couple of years and in my subsequent drifting I ended up in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, where I went to work for the Forest Service for a summer. There were a lot of cowboys in Cloudcroft, and I met one named Emory who taught me to how two-step and play pool at the Lodge, the famous hotel on the hill. This cowboy taught me how to ride a horse as well, so I acquired two skills highly valued in northern New Mexico where I eventually ended up.

The trip from Cloudcroft to Santa Fe was a long one, in more than just miles. At the Central Clearing House I found myself working with all the twenty-something activists fighting the coal mines in the four corners region and the subdivisions surrounding Santa Fe and Albuquerque. We threw a fund raising dance party at the Mine Shaft bar in Madrid where the Family Lotus, Liza Gilkyson’s first band, played for all the Santa Fe elite, hippie entrepreneurs, and assorted desert misfits that comprised that heady town in the 1970s.  

From Santa Fe I moseyed down to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico, where the dance scene revolved around Okie Joe’s, the student bar on the corner of University and Central. There, every Tuesday and Friday nights during happy hour (ten cent beer, dollar shots) the backroom blared “Brown Sugar” on the sound system or Cadillac Bob performed live. Everyone I knew went there, and Mark and I made it there as well on our first date. I discovered that he loved to dance, too, which was a prerequisite for any serious relationship between the two of us.

We lived for 20 years in Placitas, the former land grant community just north of Albuquerque that morphed into yuppiedom (see “You Can’t Go Home Again”) before our very eyes. Before that happened, though, there was plenty of dancing. A couple from New Orleans had regular dance parties where they turned us on to that city’s R&B/funk of the Meters, Allen Toussaint, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, and the Subdudes. At our house one New Year’s Eve we danced until two in the morning and finally had to let the fire go out to get everyone to leave. There were dancehalls everywhere: Placitas’s own Thunderbird Bar, where Tracey Nelson and Mother Earth, Cadillac Bob, and Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee played; Rosa’s Cantina in Algodones; the Golden Inn, where I heard Toots and the Maytals (it was so crowded you couldn’t dance but just moved as part of the group pulse); and the Line Camp up north where Buddy Guy and Junior Wells tore it up.

Once we made the move to El Valle we had to incorporate Ranchera dancing into our repertoire, which wasn’t very hard as it’s basically a polka move with a little salsa thrown in. And Mark learned how to two-step. We went to dances at the Indian gaming casinos, weddings, graduations, and Santa Fe concerts (the best was when Joe King Carrasco came up from Puerta Vallarta and played the Santa Fe Brewing Company to a crowd of dancing fools). What made it even more fun, though, was the fact that our neighbor and village patrón, Tomás, loved to dance, so when it was his turn to be mayordomo of the church he celebrated the village feast day with a dance in his barn and took us on Sunday afternoons to Las Vegas where we danced at the local bar.

Then there was El Grupo, our radical compadres who were fighting both the Forest Service and urban environmentalists over community access to forest resources: the environmentalists were promoting Zero Logging on public lands, regardless of who was doing the logging and to what extent, while the Forest Service was imploding from ineptitude and institutional paralysis. El Grupo—activist community loggers, grazers, acequia parciantes, journalists, lawyers, and academics both brown and white—used to go dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española to let off steam and enjoy each others’ company amidst the lowriders, ex-convicts, and regular working class blokes who patronized the bar.

Mark had an extensive 45 record collection—rock, R&B, blues, Motown, pop— and when we still had a turntable that could play them, and before they warped, we’d put them on and dance around the house. Later we danced to albums, then tapes, then CDs. He died before I got Wifi and began playing Pandora on my iPod. I have a favorite dance station, “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” that plays all the great R&B and Motown hits that we loved to dance to. I miss Mark the most when I find myself dancing around the house to “It’s Too Late To Turn Back Now” or “Be My Baby.”  They say that couples who are together for many years start to look like each other. Mark and I, together for 34 years, only looked like each other when we danced, a synchronized dance team that will never be replicated. On this second anniversary of his death I can still dance by myself, to all the music that evokes these memories, and while it is soothing to my soul, it also breaks my heart.

A Dog's Life

I was in Albuquerque the other day with my two dogs, Paco and Star, who know nothing about being in town, so I took them to the dog park as a facsimile of country life. You’ll notice that I use the pronoun “who” when referring to them: considering how often the word “that” is used instead of “who” when referring to people, I think it’s OK to extend the little used “who” to pets “that” we treat as humans.

While I was at the dog park I met up with this lovely Mexicana, a volunteer at the local animal shelter, who was there with six little dogs, all damaged goods. Four of them were hers, the ones she had rehabilitated at the shelter and adopted, and two were “unadoptables:” one who bit other dogs (she had trained him to keep a ball in his mouth so if he opened it to bite he’d lose his pacifier) and the other whose cast had recently been removed but he continued act as if it hadn’t (no one wanted to adopt a cripple who was actually mental).

She told me in vivid detail each dog’s abuse history. I won’t go into it here, but suffice it to say it illustrated the Hobbesian interpretation of human nature. It also elicited a conversation of how the cultural differences in both Mexico, her home, and northern New Mexico, my home, are revealed in the way humans relate to animals. She didn’t accede to political correctness when discussing a dog’s life in Mexico, but I tried to explain it in more utilitarian terms: a dog is supposed to protect the property or round up the cows while a cat catches mice and “rattas” (gophers).

I cop to the bourgeoisfication of owning animals. Sometimes I go so far as to think there must be something wrong with anyone (of my class) who doesn’t own at least one: Mark brought home more strays than I did; both my sons are smitten; my mother adored the two kittens I dumped on her in college; and my two closest friends have four dogs each. My father, who I’ve already written about (see The Swim Team), claimed he was allergic to animal hair, so we had to make do with a parakeet.

After I dumped the kittens on my mother I also dumped college and acquired my first dog, Chani, who I dragged across the country several times, including a trip on the subway from the East Village to the Bronx (the subway police made me get off at Times Square and find a box to put her in; today they would have just kicked us off). I found Judge, a huge Husky-type mix, in the woods of eastern Oregon where I was working as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service. It took me many tries to get near him, but when I finally got him in the car he collapsed and had to be carried in and out of my cabin for a week because his paws were rubbed raw. I brought him back to New Mexico and had him until the infamous dog poisoning in Placitas, in 1981, when some deranged person set out meat laced with poison and killed hundred of dogs over the course of a couple of days.

Waldo, who looked like the movie personality Benji, also succumbed to the poisoning, but he wasn’t strictly my dog. He lived with three families in the village and took turns gracing us with his presence. We tried to tame him—let him sleep inside, took him in the car to go for hikes—but he bought into the philosophy that “it takes a village.”

We also rescued Dutch, an Australian shepherd, from somebody’s bathroom in a trailer park (they left him there all day while they were at work), and adopted a dog named Pooper, from friends with too many other dogs, and renamed him Scooter. Our El Valle dogs were all rescued, too: Luther, after being hit by a car in Taos, and Django, who someone dumped in a culvert on our road. Mark picked up Sammy, a cocker spaniel, running down the streets of Chimayó after folks at one of the stores near the Santuario told him, “You better take him before the dog lady gets him,” the implication being that while the dog lady meant to be kind by rescuing dogs, when you end up with 20 of them all living in the same yard, it’s still a dog’s life.  

The summer after Mark died I had to put Django down, as she couldn’t walk anymore, and Sammy went in December, blind, deaf, and incontinent. Before Django and Sammy died I vowed that I would wait awhile before I got another dog. I gave away my chickens, too, thinking that for the first time in 40 years I could go away on a trip without having to get a housesitter or persuade someone to babysit my dogs or cats (there were 15 cats through the years, but I’ll save that for another story). And this time I was going to choose the dog, not have it choose me.

Or have them choose me, which they of course did. I rescued Paco up in La Junta Canyon when I was there with a bunch of folks looking at the diversion dams that carry water from the Rio Pueblo watershed to the Rio Mora watershed (this is another story as well). He looked like a blue heeler puppy (maybe he jumped out of a rancher’s pickup; heelers are definitely the dog of choice in northern New Mexico) but he turned out tall and lean and has no interest in cows. Star, who, like Waldo, isn’t strictly my dog, is also a heeler mix. She actually belongs to my across-the-road neighbor who got her to keep his other dog company, but she prefers Paco’s company and basically lives here. The deal was sealed when I started letting her sleep in the house (she’d already made herself at home in the house via the dog door, which I close at night). And while I sometimes take her to Albuquerque and the dog park, she really prefers El Valle, so I don’t take offense when she decides to stay home and check in with the neighbor.

So there you have it. I figure animal pets are like children: you take what you get and love them all.

Existential Thrill—or Fear and Loathing—on the LA Freeways

My son Max picked me up at LAX around 5:30 in the afternoon. He’d warned me that it was the worst time of day for traffic, but the 4:00 flight from Albuquerque was the only nonstop flight of the day and I really did not want to change planes on such a short flight. Little did I know that the car trip from LAX, to Pasadena, where Max was staying, would take longer than the plane trip from Albuquerque to LA—and with more existential angst and near death experience than any number of take off and landings on a mode of transportation with which I have never come to terms.

Max already had an hour’s worth of bumper to bumper traffic under his belt when I got in the car so we decided to take an hour off and have dinner near the airport. He asked his smart phone where the nearest Thai restaurant was and then the GPS app showed us how to get there. While the GPS map was correct this time, it was only seducing us (or Max; I’ll never trust a GPS device even if I could figure out how to use it) into a much more sinister relationship as the night progressed.

I have an aside here. The first time I visited Max in California was on my trip to Del Mar (see “Who Are These People” blog post). He picked me up at the Ontario Airport and we headed south. I innocently asked him, “So where are we now,” and he answered, “I have no idea,” and I said, “Well then how do you know how to get where we’re going?” and he answered, “I just go where the GPS tells me.” And he meant it literally: she told us which highways to follow, which exit to take, and what streets led to the house. Her voice was very confident and directive: do what I say or you are lost forever on the LA freeways (as opposed to “beneath the streets of Boston”).

I have another aside. In California when people discuss freeways they are always prefaced by the word “the”: the 10, the 405, the 110, the 5. Nobody had ever been able to explain this to me until Max suggested it’s because everyone spends so much time in their cars on the freeways that they develop a very close relationship and “the” expresses that intimacy. They are not just some amorphous highways but something they share, “the” highways that get them home. And speaking of getting home; on the LA freeways between 5 and 7:30 p.m., in the thousands of cars that are trying to get there is one person, by him or her self, spending that hour or two every day in the car by him or her self. I suppose this only increases the intimacy: you, your car, your highway.

Back to the story.  After dinner we got in the car and headed to Pasadena, this time following the car GPS map that led us right into downtown LA because you have to go there to get to Pasadena. First, the guy in the pickup didn’t want to let Max into the right lane where the GPS was telling him he needed to be to get on another freeway, so after Max nudged in anyway the guy pulled up beside us on the left and gave us the finger. We made it onto the freeway only to discover it was the wrong freeway (Max sometimes actually knows where he’s supposed to be going). So we had to get off and drive around a few blocks to get back on the freeway going the other direction. We were trying to turn left at a light; the turn light was red but there was nowhere for the oncoming cars to go as traffic was blocked up on the other side of the intersection. The two cars in front of us turned left, traffic still hadn’t moved, so we started to turn as well when one of the oncoming drivers decided he didn’t really like the situation and decided to drive right into the side of our car—almost. I didn’t actually see what happened as my head was in my hands, but obviously he stopped. Max was more than a little rattled at this point, but we got back on the freeway and suddenly the exit onto the correct freeway was on the opposite side than what the GPS indicated and he crossed five lanes of traffic at the last minute to make the turn.

By this time I was saying my mea culpas—I’ll never fly into LA during rush hour again—and my hail Mary’s—please god get us to Pasadena, Max is too young to die. I was aghast thinking about how he had been doing this while I was at home in New Mexico where I see maybe five cars driving down the hill from Truchas to Chimayo on any given day. But he’s not doing it anymore; we drove to Scottsdale, a sanitized component of a sprawling megalopolis, but one with few freeways, many wide streets, retirees who don’t go anywhere, and yes, many of whom belong to the Tea Party ((don’t ask me why Max is living there, even temporarily). I just know that if it’s your kid in a car on freeways sometimes sanitation is good.

Good Samaritans

How many times did I break down over the years without a cell phone and AAA insurance (and usually no money, either). Let me count the ways. Pud hauled Mark and me into Blue Springs, Missouri, where he worked on our car all day at his house while we whittled away our time in a 1950s motel room before paying him about what he probably had to pay for the parts. The eighteen wheel truck driver with track marks up and down his arms, hauling lumber from Mendocino to LA, picked Jordan and me up after our VW bug died on Highway 1 and drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness Avenue to Mission, and down Mission to nineteenth street, where our friends lived. “Wouldn’t want you girls to get picked up by just anyone, you know.” I was parked on the side of I-25 one night trying to figure out why my rear wheel was loose, when this nice man pulled over behind me and tried to figure it out with me. The next thing we knew we were both lying in the ditch and our cars were down the road ahead of us, totaled. Another man, drunk, had plowed into both our cars, the force of which knocked us head over heels. After the cop drove the helpful man and me to his trailer in Bernalillo—he kept saying, “I never liked that car anyway”— he got his wife’s car—she kept saying, “You’re so lucky, you both could have been killed”—and drove me home to Placitas. Good Samaritans all, no?

So it’s thirty years later and Paco, my dog and I are driving down to Albuquerque, via the Jemez Mountains after covering the protest at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Nagasaki Day, and my trusty Subaru (the nicest car I’ve ever owned) suddenly tells me it’s overheated, via the temperature gauge and a written exclamation on the dashboard where the odometer reading usually is. This time I have both a cell phone and AAA. Except that when I dial my son Jakob’s number to tell him I’m broken down and won’t make it to dinner, a voice comes on my phone and tells me my service has been “deactivated.” I have over 1,000 unused minutes on this phone because there is no cell phone reception where I live, in El Valle, so the only time I use my phone is when I’m in my car, like now, and I need to call someone and tell them why I’m in my car instead of where I’m supposed to be.

After the voice tells me that my phone has been “deactivated” it gives me some options, one of which is to “reactivate” it. So I press that number, and after a few false starts I actually get someone from India on the line. I explain that even though I have all these minutes on my phone it’s been deactivated and I need to reactivate it so I can call AAA and get rescued. He tells me that he will gladly reactivate my phone but he can only do that if I call him from a different phone than the one I need to reactivate. It’s only a matter of seconds before I’m yelling, How in the hell am I supposed to call you from a different phone when I’m stuck out in the middle of nowhere (actually, I’m about 22 miles from Bernalillo) with an overheated car and no phone? And he’s calmly answering, I’m sorry ma’am, but you have to call me from a different phone before I can reactivate your account.

But I have one more option. After I hang up on the man from India my service informs me that if this is an emergency I can call 911. I decide that the situation now qualifies as an emergency—my hood is up and I’m obviously stranded, but no one has stopped—and I reach the 911 operator. I explain what the situation is, describe where I am, and she says she’ll send someone out within 45 minutes.

So I wait. And wait. I decide to get out of the car, even if it means standing in the hot sun. Thank god the backseat is in the shade so Paco has some protection. I wait some more. Then, after dozens of cars have passed by, one stops. It has a missing backseat window covered by a flapping shade, and a young girl gets out and asks if I need help. I ask her if she has a cell phone, and she does, but it doesn’t have a signal here by the side of the road. Then the driver gets out, and I know right away he’s a Mexican national. He speaks no English, but the young girl translates, and I tell him, you can’t check the radiator, it’s too hot, and thanks, but if you don’t have a cell phone there’s not much you can do.

Later, when I’m telling my son Max about what happened I tell him to guess, by category, who was the first person to stop and help me, and without hesitation he says, a Mexican. That’s because years ago when he broke down coming up La Bajada hill in his funky Subaru the only ones who stopped to help were Mexican nationals who put him in their van, gave him something to eat, and took him to his grandmother’s house in Santa Fe.

But there’s another category to come. I wait another half hour (no sign of whoever the 911 operator supposedly called to come help me) and a Mercedes Benz passes me, pulls a U-turn, and comes up behind me. A black man and woman both get out of the car and she immediately says, honey, do you need help? Don’t worry, we’re pastors, this is what we do. She has a Bluetooth in her ear, he has an iPhone, so soon I’m on the line with AAA and after a lot of explaining through a garbled connection, the operator tells me she’s sending a tow truck (but it’s up to the driver whether Paco will be allowed to ride in the truck with me and the driver). When I tell the woman pastor that it’s been about an hour since I called 911, she says, this is unacceptable, how can they leave a single woman out here on the road by herself, you need to call them up and give them a piece of your mind.

Meantime, the man has retrieved a jug of water and a partially filled container of antifreeze from his car and says, I’m going to fill up your overflow and maybe it will flow back into your radiator reservoir, maybe it’s low and that’s why you overheated. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that there can be a reverse flow back into the radiator, but what do I know? Then we wait a little while and he tells me to turn on the car and let’s see what happens. The temperature gauge is where it’s supposed to be, so he says, we’re going to follow you into Bernalillo. Keep the windows open and if the temperature gauge starts to go up stick your arm out the window and raise it with your hand up. Then we’ll all pull over.

So they follow me most of the way into Bernalillo. My car does not overheat. Just on the outskirts of town they pass me and pull over in front. He sticks his arm straight out the window for a minute or so, then turns it up, then lowers it back to straight. I stick my arm straight out the window, they gaily wave at me out their windows, he turns onto the Albuquerque bypass, and they’re off to do some more pastoring.

Max, and the others I query, are a little slower to guess my second Samaritans were black; it’s not a large profile in New Mexico. But like the “others” (as Hank Williams sang it, “just a picture from life’s other side”), those who stop to render aid are the ones who have been stranded themselves: the poor, marginalized, or discriminated against. Someone driving a Mercedes Benz may give you pause for thought, but like the Okie who once picked me up in a Cadillac, the car or where it’s going doesn’t much matter: it’s where they’ve been.

"A sense of liberation"

In her book Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, Susan Gubar says than when she found out she had this cancer in her early 60s she felt almost “euphoric” because it meant that instead of a prolonged death enduring pain or dementia—what she envisioned—she was going to leave this world at a time in her life when she was still successful in her career, was in a good marriage, and her daughters were grown and on their own.

I’m the same age as the author and I’ve been around a lot of death lately. Mark, my partner of 34 years, died of cancer in his early 60s (described in my Diary of a Bad Year series of blog posts). Butchie, eulogized in my previous blog, died less than a month ago of cancer. Last Sunday I went to a wake for Sebia Hawkins, a longtime anti-nuclear activist who also died of cancer having just survived an aneurism that set her back for more than a year. Ed Quillen, publisher and editor of Colorado Central and longtime columnist for the Denver Post, dropped dead of a heart attack in early June. So it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about “the right time to die.” Susan Gubar described her situation as a time between a life cut short—certainly how I felt about Mark’s death—and debilitating age, which I’ve seen far too often in my parents’ generation.

While my kids are also grown and on their own they just experienced the death of their father and they’re still quite young; one just out of college and the other starting a family. We’ve been lucky enough—and privileged enough—to make it this far together, so I’d like to see them through a few more years.

The critical component to this “through” is that “I” see “them” through a few more years. I distinctly remember the day I realized that my own mother and I were reversing roles: I needed to be the one upon whom she could always depend instead of the other way around. It was a gradual process, but my feelings that day were stark: I felt the loss of the person she had always been in my life, and I wasn’t ready for it, although I was already a mother myself.

Now I’m that person in my kids’ lives, and I don’t want to be the one who will depend on them. I want to keep editing their papers and articles; keep counseling them on life choices; discuss Habermas and the “Orientalist” gaze; and spend money on them. Neither do I want to be the person who can’t weed whack the grass in the orchard; irrigate the hay fields; fix the lose pipe under the sink or replace the gasket in the faucet; split my kindling, or any of the other daily tasks I’m confronted with in my house and on my ten acres.

What these things contribute to, of course, is my sense of who I am, which is constructed from what I do in the world, how I am related to others, and how I take care of myself. On NPR the other day I heard an interview with a woman from Japan who was discussing the cultural impacts of growing old in her country. Historically, when one got older than one’s usefulness, grandpa or grandma was thrown off a cliff or left out on the mountain to starve—literally. Now, with 21 percent of the population 65 or older, that’s not going to happen, but the idea of usefulness continues to resonate, and several of the people interviewed on the program expressed their terror at becoming a burden on their families and society and vowed to end their lives before that occurred.

Nora Ephron died last week at 71. She had no illusions about what it meant to get old, even in the good old USA. As Susan Gubar hopes for herself, Ephron left this world still writing the articles, books, and screenplays she’d been producing for most of her adult life, despite her complaints about loss of short term memory and the elasticity of her neck (she also left two grown kids, oddly enough named the same as mine: Jac[k]ob and Max). I doubt if she felt Gubar’s initial “euphoria”— Ephron had the same illness my mother had, a form of leukemia that makes one susceptible to infection, hers being pneumonia—but it seems she left at a time when she felt she was still who she had been for most of her life: a successful writer, a mother, a wife, a warm and funny person.

When I read back through this piece I realize I give rather short shrift to the “what I do in the world”, or the “legacy” part of the equation. That’s a function of the ephemeral nature of the effect one has in a dynamic world, the disappointment that elicits, and the fact that I was so often implicated—happily so—by the day-by-day demands of the life I chose. I had the luxury of making choices about how to live, but choosing “the right time to die,” if it’s allowed at all, is going to be a daunting task.

Butchie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Kay said she had no problem with it.

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

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

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

• Mark and Kay leave the building.

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

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

• Mark and Kay leave the meeting again.

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

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