So why am I living in Santa Fe? Life is complicated in general and made even more so when you’re a parent. Now that I’m in the thick of it with my younger son Max I can think of many more parents who have also been in the thick of it with one or more of their children. Like the one who became involved in a cult and refused to see his parents (he recovered). Or the alcoholic/depressive who gave up booze but is still depressed. Or the one who had a child with someone she now hates but has to share custody. Or the one who’s a functioning alcoholic but still causes his mother tremendous anxiety.
Speaking of anxiety, that’s why I’m living with Max who suffers from it. He had a major break down about six years ago when he called me on the phone in his car saying he thought he was having a heart attack, which is often how anxiety manifests. I told him if he thought he could drive, go to the emergency room or if he couldn’t drive, call 911. He made it to the hospital where he found out he wasn’t having a heart attack but anxiety was causing him so much dysfunction he couldn’t be alone. I spent almost three months with him going back and forth between El Valle and Albuquerque, where he was living. He spent a couple of weeks in a local hospital’s mental health facility where you can only get in if you say you’re suicidal. He was put on anti-anxiety medication. We went to therapy where the therapist told me, as I sat there crying, that with time he would recover.
He did recover enough to be on his own, even have a short-term relationship, moving around the country playing poker at casinos—California, Arizona, Nevada, as well as New Mexico—and online, which is what he does for a living but doesn't do much to keep anxiety at bay. He was of the generation who learned how to play online as teenagers, aided by a brain wired by chess, which he also played in high school and won the state championship.
Then COVID hit. He was in Santa Fe then, with a cohort of friends with whom he lost touch. The casinos closed. The gyms closed (he’s a weight lifter but not the kind who develops bulgy muscles). The nightlife disappeared. The online dating scene vanished (he’s gay). He became angrier and angrier that his life was ruined by COVID mandates and the politicians who were responsible for implementing them. All of them, but especially the liberal elites (he’s basically a Marxist whose anger has fomented nihilistic cynicism, though he would challenge that assessment). He spent the winter in Texas to avoid having to wear a mask. He came back in bad shape, isolated, anxious, and depressed, and moved into my house in El Valle.
There’s not much for him in El Valle except walking his German Shepard dog, Anka, who I helped him get from my friend Ike, who raises them. So I had no choice, really. I offered to rent a house with him in Santa Fe for one year so he could be in a safe environment and slowly integrate back into some kind of social life. I haven’t lived in an urban environment for 50 years. I basically don’t want to be here. The only way I can afford it is because I sold my lower field to my friend who’s been pasturing his mules there for years and pestering me to buy it for years. I gave the down payment to my other son for a down payment on a house he wants to buy (in the coveted school district) and am using the monthly payments for my Santa Fe rent.
This is what parents do but it doesn’t mean I like it. I miss my house and gardens and fields in El Valle, although I don’t miss the gentrification that’s happening there. A Santa Fe friend who also abandoned his rural home for the city said to me the other day, we’re “adrift.” I’m pissed at what’s happening to El Valle but Santa Fe is a million times worse: more development, more mansions, more traffic, less water. And the dogs can’t just run out the dog door and play in the wild. We have to take them to the dog park every morning and some other park in the afternoon where there’s some shade and let them run around without some Karen yelling at us to “put your dog on a leash!”
I’m trying to take advantage of the things I can do in Santa Fe that I like or that Max likes to help him be here. We go swimming at the big community center where he also plays basketball and lifts at the gym. I haven’t really swum, other than helping my grandkids learn, since Mark and I occasionally went to the Pojoaque Pueblo gym more than a decade ago. I find that I can still do it, all of it (or almost all of it): freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, elementary backstroke, but I think I’ll skip the butterfly. My right arm hurts when it goes straight up. A couple of days ago we went ice skating. I could have broken a hip or fractured my skull when I ventured out around the rink before I got my skating legs (I fell straight back onto my butt and head), which hadn’t been used since my kids were little. I got them back—sort of. Enough to invite my grandkids to go skating with me sometime when they finally make it up to visit this new place in Santa Fe (if their father were reading this he’d say cut the Jewish guilt crap).
I’m supposed to be here for a year. I can’t think about that or I’ll go crazy. Marlys, my good friend and soon to be El Valle housesitter, already told me that anytime I want to come home for a visit or forever, it’s OK with her. She’ll just do something else. Nice to have a friend like that, no? We’ve known each other since our older kids were born. Various scenarios play in my head all the time: maybe Max will find the right combination of medications that help his chemistry sort itself out; maybe he’ll find a friend or a lover who would like to move in; maybe he’ll realize that living with his mother may not be the best way to heal once he feels safe. I want him to find his way in the world without me so I can go home.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Saturday, June 4, 2022
It Could Have Been Us
El Valle spent two days on the Ready list for the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The evacuation protocol goes like this; Ready, think about what you want to get out of your house if you have to leave; Set, put your papers, electronics, photo albums, and animal kennels if you have them by the door or in the car and be ready to Go, which means, get the hell out of Dodge. Then a cold front moved in, it snowed on the mountain peaks, and a few drops of rain fell in the valleys. The Taos County Sheriff took us off the Ready list and put the neighboring villages closer to the fire on Set instead of Go (through the grapevine I heard that not many of them had heeded “Go” and left).
We dodged (small “d” this time) the bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.
I’m living in a tinderbox. New Mexicans have a habit of saying, “Well, we’re pretty lucky here in the Land of Enchantment. We don’t get hurricanes or tornados (maybe a couple of small ones), we don’t have volcanoes that erupt or heat waves that kill or sub-zero temperatures that freeze us to death (only occasionally). Now we have to admit that we live in a drought plagued-water bereft environment that could go up in smoke at any minute. It just did for thousands of people who lost their homes, vehicles, animals (lots of cows and horses on all those Mora Valley ranches), garages, sheds, and forests.
They’re my forests, too. The fire barely crossed the east/west divide and got close to Serpent Lake, one of the most beautiful places in the Pecos Wilderness. I’ve hiked and backpacked there many times, the quickest access to the divide between the Rio Pueblo and Pecos River watersheds and Jicarita Peak, that big bowl shaped mountain that sits above Peñasco. Mark and I hiked to the divide via the Serpent Lake Trail many times—the lake lies in a bowl just below the trail—when the kids were young with other families with young kids. We hiked there without kids when we were older and climbed the peak. We hiked there with Sammy, our deaf dog who couldn’t hear us call him to come back when the wind was blowing like a motherfucker and we wanted to turn back. I took my hiking class from UNM Continuing Education on a backpack trip to the lake where we camped and later bushwhacked our way straight up the ridge to the peak because there was too much snow on the trail. I backpacked there with Terri and Emma and a friend from Philly on their first backpack trip anywhere.From what’s been reported, the fire burned just to the east of Serpent Lake in the Angostura and Alamitos watersheds. I’ve hiked and skied there, too. Those forests are probably gone, although miraculously, the cabins tucked away alongside the Angostura Trail survived, from what I’ve heard. Every time we passed by on our way up the trail I’d think, “Well, I hope a fire never goes through here cuz these cabins will be toast.”
I’m waiting awhile to drive up to see for myself the tragic consequences. Fire fighters are still everywhere, although most of the roads into the Mora Valley are open once again. The south end of the fire also reached into the Pecos Wilderness, near Elk Mountain and remains active. So when most of the crews are released I’ll leave Santa Fe—my next post is why I’m suddenly living in Santa Fe after 30 years in El Valle—and follow I-25 north to Las Vegas where I’ll pick up SH 518, which leads to Mora. At Sapello, I’ll turn off onto 94 that travels through many of the little villages that were devastated by the fire. Maybe I’ll go all the way to Rociada and Pendaries, the villages closest to that east side of the Pecos Wilderness that I’m less familiar with. Then I’ll return to 518 through Mora and Holman and Cleveland to Chacon, a village tucked away at the base of the mountains that were completely burned (miraculously, much of Chacon was saved). Returning to 518 I’ll climb Holman Hill, which divides the Rio Pueblo from the Rio Mora and leads to Angostura and Alamitos. Maybe I’ll drive up Forest Road 161 to the Serpent Lake trailhead, if it’s open (the Carson and Santa Fe forests are in Stage 3 restrictions, meaning completely closed to the public).
Do I really want to do this? Maybe not, but I feel compelled to see what happened. I’m too old to climb Jicarita anymore but I’m not too old to bear witness, even if it’s from a car. As I said before, it could have been us.
We dodged (small “d” this time) the bullet this time but it could just as easily been us, on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos instead of the east side in Mora and Guadalupita and Rociada and Chacon. Our ranger district could have lit a prescribed burn in the very forest restoration project I’ve been working on for three years. Someone could have let a campfire get out of hand up in Las Trampas or Santa Barbara Canyon. Someone else could have thrown a cigarette out the window onto dry roadside grass.
I’m living in a tinderbox. New Mexicans have a habit of saying, “Well, we’re pretty lucky here in the Land of Enchantment. We don’t get hurricanes or tornados (maybe a couple of small ones), we don’t have volcanoes that erupt or heat waves that kill or sub-zero temperatures that freeze us to death (only occasionally). Now we have to admit that we live in a drought plagued-water bereft environment that could go up in smoke at any minute. It just did for thousands of people who lost their homes, vehicles, animals (lots of cows and horses on all those Mora Valley ranches), garages, sheds, and forests.
They’re my forests, too. The fire barely crossed the east/west divide and got close to Serpent Lake, one of the most beautiful places in the Pecos Wilderness. I’ve hiked and backpacked there many times, the quickest access to the divide between the Rio Pueblo and Pecos River watersheds and Jicarita Peak, that big bowl shaped mountain that sits above Peñasco. Mark and I hiked to the divide via the Serpent Lake Trail many times—the lake lies in a bowl just below the trail—when the kids were young with other families with young kids. We hiked there without kids when we were older and climbed the peak. We hiked there with Sammy, our deaf dog who couldn’t hear us call him to come back when the wind was blowing like a motherfucker and we wanted to turn back. I took my hiking class from UNM Continuing Education on a backpack trip to the lake where we camped and later bushwhacked our way straight up the ridge to the peak because there was too much snow on the trail. I backpacked there with Terri and Emma and a friend from Philly on their first backpack trip anywhere.From what’s been reported, the fire burned just to the east of Serpent Lake in the Angostura and Alamitos watersheds. I’ve hiked and skied there, too. Those forests are probably gone, although miraculously, the cabins tucked away alongside the Angostura Trail survived, from what I’ve heard. Every time we passed by on our way up the trail I’d think, “Well, I hope a fire never goes through here cuz these cabins will be toast.”
Do I really want to do this? Maybe not, but I feel compelled to see what happened. I’m too old to climb Jicarita anymore but I’m not too old to bear witness, even if it’s from a car. As I said before, it could have been us.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Our Messy Struggle Towards Freedom
Michel Foucault: “Liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.”
This is one of the main tenants in Maggie Nelson’s amazing book On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” [or of course televised]. That’s the title of a book review in the NYT of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman.
Both writers are talking about how historical “acts of freedom” or “radical ideas” have played out so differently depending upon the time and players but that collectively they engage in redefining power instead of “waiting for the ‘big night’ of liberation.” As Nelson quotes anthropologist David Graeber, “Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Nelson’s book tells the stories of those who try to act this way in four arenas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas focuses on the “quiet ones” whose rebellions under the establishment radar often ended in defeat but ultimately moved towards freedom.
Reading Nelson’s book and the review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas made me think about a conversation I’ve had more than once with a fellow player in contemporary radicalism, Ike DeVargas, with whom I’ve worked to empower rural communities in their battles over access to resources, expose corrupt politicians and corporate incompetence, and stop mass incarceration. Whenever I begin to bemoan the losses we’ve witnessed in any number of these battles and threaten to quit, he stops me with, “But you never know what positive effects you’ve had on everyone who’s been working alongside you and what those effects might have that you’ll never even know about.”
Nelson puts it another way, addressing the many more realms she takes on: “Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to “stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!”
There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s pretty damn hard to “act as if one is already free.” I’m also reading The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of American’s Secret Government. While we understandably focus our outrage today on how the “war on terror” unleashed the secret deep state surveillance, this book reminds us how the “fear of Communism” created the king of surveillance, the CIA, that not only used that “intelligence” to initiate coups around the world—Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, etc.—but to stoke the nuclear arms race. And just as it remains today, it was all founded on the corporatization of America to expand our empire, making a mockery of democracy. We’re not going to establish new “power relationships” that lead to liberation by electing a Democrat instead of a Republican to the presidency—or appointing a CIA director who vows there will be no more assassinations. Power brokers like Allen Dulles and Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld’s stink have infected a system that no vaccination can cure.
It’s up to us to figure out, and good luck with that. As Nelson points out: “No doubt there is much to feel powerless about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this fact to a much greater extent than others. But locating authentic radicalism in the purity of powerlessness does not necessarily lead to our empowerment, or to more just, responsible exercises of it. A deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us insensitive to the power that we do have, even as we demand such an accounting from others.” I’m afraid it’s back to Foucault: a constant reassessment of the power that we do have in our struggles towards freedom.
This is one of the main tenants in Maggie Nelson’s amazing book On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint.
“The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” [or of course televised]. That’s the title of a book review in the NYT of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman.
Both writers are talking about how historical “acts of freedom” or “radical ideas” have played out so differently depending upon the time and players but that collectively they engage in redefining power instead of “waiting for the ‘big night’ of liberation.” As Nelson quotes anthropologist David Graeber, “Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” Nelson’s book tells the stories of those who try to act this way in four arenas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas focuses on the “quiet ones” whose rebellions under the establishment radar often ended in defeat but ultimately moved towards freedom.
Reading Nelson’s book and the review of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas made me think about a conversation I’ve had more than once with a fellow player in contemporary radicalism, Ike DeVargas, with whom I’ve worked to empower rural communities in their battles over access to resources, expose corrupt politicians and corporate incompetence, and stop mass incarceration. Whenever I begin to bemoan the losses we’ve witnessed in any number of these battles and threaten to quit, he stops me with, “But you never know what positive effects you’ve had on everyone who’s been working alongside you and what those effects might have that you’ll never even know about.”
Nelson puts it another way, addressing the many more realms she takes on: “Learning to follow one’s intuitions doggedly without killing them with prejudgment; to hold at bay catastrophizing projections about reception; to have the fortitude to continue on in the face of indifference, discouragement, or intense criticism; to access or sustain the ambition to try things considered unwise, impossible, taboo, or out of step with one’s times; to “stand up for your work! Open it up! Don’t shut it down, man!”
There’s so much wrong in the world that it’s pretty damn hard to “act as if one is already free.” I’m also reading The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of American’s Secret Government. While we understandably focus our outrage today on how the “war on terror” unleashed the secret deep state surveillance, this book reminds us how the “fear of Communism” created the king of surveillance, the CIA, that not only used that “intelligence” to initiate coups around the world—Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, etc.—but to stoke the nuclear arms race. And just as it remains today, it was all founded on the corporatization of America to expand our empire, making a mockery of democracy. We’re not going to establish new “power relationships” that lead to liberation by electing a Democrat instead of a Republican to the presidency—or appointing a CIA director who vows there will be no more assassinations. Power brokers like Allen Dulles and Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld’s stink have infected a system that no vaccination can cure.
It’s up to us to figure out, and good luck with that. As Nelson points out: “No doubt there is much to feel powerless about these days, and no doubt certain bodies bear the brunt of this fact to a much greater extent than others. But locating authentic radicalism in the purity of powerlessness does not necessarily lead to our empowerment, or to more just, responsible exercises of it. A deepening conviction of our powerlessness can at times make us insensitive to the power that we do have, even as we demand such an accounting from others.” I’m afraid it’s back to Foucault: a constant reassessment of the power that we do have in our struggles towards freedom.
Friday, February 18, 2022
I've Known a Lot of People!
Lately I’ve been going through all my CDs playing ones I haven’t listened to in a long time or completely forgotten I have. Yesterday I stumbled on “Get Out” by Larry Freedman, a longtime Albuquerque based keyboard player who’s performed with various local bands over the years. He’s a phenomenal musician whose blues piano covers and originals on this CD are a delight. This led me to his other CD, “It Is What It Is” with Joanie Griffin and Combo Special. Joanie was the lead singer with Cadillac Bob, a great Albuquerque band and the Thunderbird Bar’s house band (in Placitas).
It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.
I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.
Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.
Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.
Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.
My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.
“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.
Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.
Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.
This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.
It got me thinking about all the interesting people I’ve met over the years who may or may not be well known but whose company has enriched my life. Unfortunately, so many of them have disappeared from my orbit, either because of geography—my relative isolation in El Valle—my age—I’m getting old—or just the natural ebb and flow of people over the course of a lifetime.
I think I met Larry at the REI in Albuquerque when I was doing a book signing for my Hiking Guide to the Sandia and Manzano Mountains. He’s a big hiker and skier and his then girlfriend was working at the store. He brought me his CDs one day on his way through El Valle to go hiking in the Pecos Wilderness. The last time I saw him he was playing keyboards with remnants of the Combo at a wedding in Placitas.
Ah, Placitas, so many old friends and kooks from there who I haven’t seen in 30 years, like Larry Goodell, whose parties showcased his poetry performances or his boogie woogie piano playing. John Kennedy, with whom Mark and I collaborated on a spoof called the Placitas Unreal Estate Newsletter to protest against the developers, wrote pornography for a living. Artist Roger Evans, who lived up in the hills below Tunnel Springs, constructed his house and swimming pool out of ferrocement.
Jackie Boaz was the curmudgeon who I worked with in the Forest Service while building a house in Placitas. She helped us cut the vigas for the house and we helped her tear down a cabin in the woods so we both could have the oak flooring. She lived down in the Manzano Mountains with her partner Sandra and let me stay there once a week with baby Jakob when I was on duty in the fire lookout. I don’t think anyone in the local Forest Service office ever discussed her sexuality because they were too afraid of her temper.
Speaking of the Forest Service reminds me of Pete Totemoff. I skied Santa Fe the other day with my grandkids and there was music and beer flowing at the Totemoff midway restaurant, named for the eponymous Aleut Indian. He helped Bob Nordhaus build the Sandia Peak Ski Area and Ernie Blake the Santa Fe and Taos ski areas, but I knew Pete when I worked the fire lookout. I think he was working with the fire crews but I’d see him when he’d visit the tower or at the ranger station, flirting with anyone and everyone—as long as they were female—including me. A notorious womanizer, he was also funny, kind, and a whizz on skis.
My Forest Service seasonal employment days were long over by the time we moved to El Valle from Placitas. So instead of working with some Forest Service kooks I went into battle with them over policy issues like clearcuts and ski area expansions. That meant forging a relationship with my local district ranger, Crockett Dumas. Crocket was a tall, lanky cowboy who wore blue jeans, snap shirts, knee-high laced boots, a handlebar mustache, and a ten-gallon hat. He raised and rode long distance, cross-country racehorses for fun but surprisingly enough, given his background, he was perhaps the best district ranger I ever met in my long history of district rangers. He actually initiated policies that reflected his commitment to the local communities he served rather than his DC bosses that ended up getting him transferred out of the district for being too chummy with us.
“Us” was a real mishmash of people, of course: Hispano land grant heirs, Picuris Pueblo Indians, hippies who came out with Wavy Gravy to establish the Hog Farm, alt generation back to the landers, professionals, traditional farmers, organic farmers, you name it. And then there was Tomás, my next-door neighbor. A big bulk of a man born and raised in El Valle who’d done just about everything to stay there—or have something to come back to when he couldn’t stay there: herding sheep in Wyoming, canning tomatoes in California, running a little store and gas station in the village, driving the school bus, driving the fire bus, serving as sheriff (I don’t think that lasted too long), and raising cattle. He took us, the gabachos, under his wing to teach us how to be buen vecinos and we did things for him that only privileged gabachos knew how to do, like navigate the Office of the State Engineer for money to rebuild our presa, or acequia dam, and go online to register him as a fire bus driver when that became mandatory.
Tomás died in 2009, a year before my partner Mark died of pancreatic cancer. Cancer also got Tomás, along with diabetes. In 2012 my friend Butchie Denver died, also of cancer. Butchie got the name “Denver” from Bob Denver, aka Maynard G. Krebs from the TV show The Many Loves of Dobey Gillis. How she ended up in New Mexico is a long story, but I met her as an artist/activist from Llama, north of Taos who had my back as we fought the powers that be over development, land use, and water rights. She was a power to be reckoned with, and like Jackie Boaz, often got things done because everyone was afraid of her.
Now, at 72, one of my closest friends is John Nichols of Milagro Beanfield War fame, although he’d much rather be known for any of his other books, of which there are 23, both fiction and non-fiction. He lives in a dilapidated adobe in Taos, having lost his former homestead to an ex-wife. But he’s never asked for much, just the energy to fly fish his beloved Rio Grande or hike and snowshoe to his favorite Lake Peak. At 81, however, and in ill health (he’s been plagued with heart disease since he was young) John can’t do those things anymore. But he can still write! His latest book will be published in a few months’ time. We sometimes walk in the park if the weather’s nice, during these frustrating days of COVID-19, and I call once a week to make sure he’s still alive. I suspect he’s going to be the next of my friends to go, but you never know, it could be me.
This list was not planned, I just wrote about someone and someone else came to mind. There are hundreds more. We all have lists like this, but sometimes we forget how incredibly interesting they are. It’s been fun remembering.
Friday, December 31, 2021
Happy New Year
Forty-four years ago Mark and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our crumbling adobe in Placitas. To get everyone to leave at 2 or 3 in the morning we had to let the fire go out so it was too cold to snort cocaine in the bathroom anymore.
Who were these folks enjoying themselves in the bathroom? Among many disparate Anglo communities in the village—in the sixties and seventies there wasn’t much mingling between the gringos and the Hispano land grant heirs—we were the so-called “intellectual” ones, made up of artists, writers, and academics. There was crossover between our cohort and the Dome Valley crowd, who considered themselves the hipsters of the day, and the hippies with a New Age mindset who didn’t vaccinate their children. But the New Year’s Eve Party was pretty much confined to the group we partied with, went to literary readings at the Living Batch Bookstore, and if we had the discretionary money, snorted coke with.
That night, most of the music was Motown and other R & B records of the day: Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers, the Temptations. But we also had a pretty good collection of New Orleans mardi gras music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint, courtesy of our friends from down in the bayou (then a professor at UNM). I wrote a short story in my book Stories From Life’s Other Side called “Our Heart and Soul” that described a dance party at their house where we were told to leave our kids at the babysitter so we could smoke dope and get drunk with total impunity.
The house where the New Year’s Eve party took place was a four-room adobe with only three functional rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The bathroom was just a walled off room inside the living room, hardly large enough for more than a few coke snorters at a time. The year after the New Year’s Eve party the septic drainage pipes, made out of tarpaper, completely fell apart in the middle of winter and we had to dig up the leach field and replace them with PVC (we paid a $50 a month rent that didn’t include landlord maintenance). We started building a house on land I’d bought outside the village before I got together with Mark, but that took five years to be ready enough to move in. When I got pregnant with Jakob and my mother heard that we wouldn’t move into the new house before he was born, she burst into tears thinking about him crawling around on the mud floors of the rental.
Those were the days, my friend, but I only wish they’d never ended when I remember the fun we had that New Year’s Eve. Years later, after we moved to El Valle, we did get to go to a club on New Year’s Eve in Santa Fe to hear and dance to Joe King Carrasco play one of the best concerts ever, and we celebrated a few more at the casinos of el norte dancing to the Darren Córdova Band or Los Blue Ventures. Now, at the end of this 2021 year, full of much hardship and angst for all of us, I wish there was a great band playing in a great venue where I could go dance with Mark and all my friends once again. But at the ripe old age of going on 72 I have to find my joy in the fact that it’s finally snowing, with a major storm predicted, and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m going to strap on my cross-country skis for the first time this year and head up the canyon. Happy New Year.
Who were these folks enjoying themselves in the bathroom? Among many disparate Anglo communities in the village—in the sixties and seventies there wasn’t much mingling between the gringos and the Hispano land grant heirs—we were the so-called “intellectual” ones, made up of artists, writers, and academics. There was crossover between our cohort and the Dome Valley crowd, who considered themselves the hipsters of the day, and the hippies with a New Age mindset who didn’t vaccinate their children. But the New Year’s Eve Party was pretty much confined to the group we partied with, went to literary readings at the Living Batch Bookstore, and if we had the discretionary money, snorted coke with.
That night, most of the music was Motown and other R & B records of the day: Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers, the Temptations. But we also had a pretty good collection of New Orleans mardi gras music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint, courtesy of our friends from down in the bayou (then a professor at UNM). I wrote a short story in my book Stories From Life’s Other Side called “Our Heart and Soul” that described a dance party at their house where we were told to leave our kids at the babysitter so we could smoke dope and get drunk with total impunity.
The house where the New Year’s Eve party took place was a four-room adobe with only three functional rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The bathroom was just a walled off room inside the living room, hardly large enough for more than a few coke snorters at a time. The year after the New Year’s Eve party the septic drainage pipes, made out of tarpaper, completely fell apart in the middle of winter and we had to dig up the leach field and replace them with PVC (we paid a $50 a month rent that didn’t include landlord maintenance). We started building a house on land I’d bought outside the village before I got together with Mark, but that took five years to be ready enough to move in. When I got pregnant with Jakob and my mother heard that we wouldn’t move into the new house before he was born, she burst into tears thinking about him crawling around on the mud floors of the rental.
Those were the days, my friend, but I only wish they’d never ended when I remember the fun we had that New Year’s Eve. Years later, after we moved to El Valle, we did get to go to a club on New Year’s Eve in Santa Fe to hear and dance to Joe King Carrasco play one of the best concerts ever, and we celebrated a few more at the casinos of el norte dancing to the Darren Córdova Band or Los Blue Ventures. Now, at the end of this 2021 year, full of much hardship and angst for all of us, I wish there was a great band playing in a great venue where I could go dance with Mark and all my friends once again. But at the ripe old age of going on 72 I have to find my joy in the fact that it’s finally snowing, with a major storm predicted, and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m going to strap on my cross-country skis for the first time this year and head up the canyon. Happy New Year.
Thursday, December 30, 2021
Revisiting the Vinyl
Mark and I gave away our turntable after the CD collection took over and everything got uploaded onto the iPod. The vinyl—everything from gospel and jazz to rock 'n roll and blues—remained in boxes in the loft. But once I told the boys they had to clean out all their stuff by the time they were 30, I decided it was time to clean out all the vinyl, or at least what I could manage to sell and give away.
Jakob went through the jazz to start his collection. I think I let David Correia take what he wanted. Then I found a collector in Santa Fe who went through not only the rest of the jazz but the rock ‘n roll, blues, and country. I can’t remember what he paid me—maybe $100 for the lot—but it was a relief to see it find a home other than the garbage bin.
I figured I’d never sell the classical, but after I put a notice in the Town Crier, our local newsletter, a man from Taos called to say he’d take all of it. I spent a nice afternoon with him at his sign making business and when I left he handed me fifty bucks.
I kept one box of records, which sat in the loft for another couple of years until I decided it was time to get another turntable and listen to them so I could figure out why these were the ones I’d kept. I found a used turntable at a thrift store, replaced the needle by ordering online, and was ready to go.
So here’s what’s in the box. Two records that Mark and I, respectively, brought to the relationship: The Loading Zone and Joy of Cooking. Both bands were from Berkeley and survived only a couple of years in the late sixties and early seventies. But they had some remarkable women in them: Linda Tillery of The Loading Zone, and Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown, who led Joy of Cooking as guitarist (Terry) and pianist (Toni) as well as lead vocals (Terry’s voice is amazing). Tillery went on to a solo career, as did Toni and Terry, who in 1980 joined up with Rosalie Sorrels, another great vocalist, and monologuist Bobbie Louise Hawkins (former wife of poet Robert Creeley) to release Live at the Great American Music Hall. These albums represented a time and place for Mark and me as individuals and as a couple.
What else is in the box? I’m not sure why, as I prefer R & B, but the blues are well represented: the white guys who discovered black blues, like East/West, the Butterfield Blues Band (the first record I bought at Antioch); Blues Breaker, John Mayall with Eric Clapton; English Rose, the early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green (Black Magic Woman); and the black guys they emulated, like I Need You, Elmore James; Trouble in Mind, King Curtis; Night Life, Luther Allison, and the really old time blues singers Billie and Dede Pierce and Jimmy & Mama Yancy.
The R & B I prefer isn’t as well represented, I guess because I have so much of it in iTunes and CDs. Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take a Miracle with LaBelle is a stunning revelation of the depths of her versatility as soul singer as well song writer (on her other albums). The other favorite is Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron. What could be better than The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? I gave a brand new copy of the record to Jakob for Christmas.
The only Grateful Dead music I’ve ever owned are the two albums in the box: American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. Box of Rain and Uncle John’s Band are pretty catchy tunes, although Jerry Garcia’s vocal range is about as good as my baseball pitch, and I’ve never understood Deadheads. Some Dylan and Joplin rounded out the Rock ‘n Roll until I found The Best of the Everly Brothers at the thrift store the other day. Then Jakob gave me the Stones Let It Bleed for Christmas, with the best album cover ever produced and one of the greatest songs recorded: Gimme Shelter.
My other favorites represent the best of other genres: Black Snake Blues, Clifton Chanier of Zydeco fame; A Little More Faith, the Reverend Gary Davis of gospel fame; the Gypsy Kings of flamenco and salsa; and my all time favorite folk singer, Barbara Dane, who sings It Isn’t Nice with the Chambers Brothers. In fact, I’m going to put it on the turntable right now.
And finally, the most unusual album in the box has to be Grace Paley reading from her story collections “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” in her nasal Bronx accent. My literary and musical worlds conjoin there.
So that’s the story of what’s in the box, which isn’t in a box anymore but is lined up below the many shelves of my CDs, which I’ve been wondering what to do about as I start downsizing. But Jakob just informed me that he’s starting a CD collection—I didn’t know CDs were the latest retro thing—so I gave him the start of his jazz collection: John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders Archie Shepp, etc. There are still hundreds left. There’s also a box of barely audible 45s that Mark and I collected as teenagers. I also found them up in the loft, cleaned them up, organized them by genre—Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, R & B, and played them one more time. Remember You’re My World, Go Now!, I Go to Pieces, Laugh Laugh, and The Lion Sleeps Tonight? RIP.
Jakob went through the jazz to start his collection. I think I let David Correia take what he wanted. Then I found a collector in Santa Fe who went through not only the rest of the jazz but the rock ‘n roll, blues, and country. I can’t remember what he paid me—maybe $100 for the lot—but it was a relief to see it find a home other than the garbage bin.
I figured I’d never sell the classical, but after I put a notice in the Town Crier, our local newsletter, a man from Taos called to say he’d take all of it. I spent a nice afternoon with him at his sign making business and when I left he handed me fifty bucks.
I kept one box of records, which sat in the loft for another couple of years until I decided it was time to get another turntable and listen to them so I could figure out why these were the ones I’d kept. I found a used turntable at a thrift store, replaced the needle by ordering online, and was ready to go.
So here’s what’s in the box. Two records that Mark and I, respectively, brought to the relationship: The Loading Zone and Joy of Cooking. Both bands were from Berkeley and survived only a couple of years in the late sixties and early seventies. But they had some remarkable women in them: Linda Tillery of The Loading Zone, and Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown, who led Joy of Cooking as guitarist (Terry) and pianist (Toni) as well as lead vocals (Terry’s voice is amazing). Tillery went on to a solo career, as did Toni and Terry, who in 1980 joined up with Rosalie Sorrels, another great vocalist, and monologuist Bobbie Louise Hawkins (former wife of poet Robert Creeley) to release Live at the Great American Music Hall. These albums represented a time and place for Mark and me as individuals and as a couple.
What else is in the box? I’m not sure why, as I prefer R & B, but the blues are well represented: the white guys who discovered black blues, like East/West, the Butterfield Blues Band (the first record I bought at Antioch); Blues Breaker, John Mayall with Eric Clapton; English Rose, the early Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green (Black Magic Woman); and the black guys they emulated, like I Need You, Elmore James; Trouble in Mind, King Curtis; Night Life, Luther Allison, and the really old time blues singers Billie and Dede Pierce and Jimmy & Mama Yancy.
The R & B I prefer isn’t as well represented, I guess because I have so much of it in iTunes and CDs. Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take a Miracle with LaBelle is a stunning revelation of the depths of her versatility as soul singer as well song writer (on her other albums). The other favorite is Pieces of a Man, Gil Scott-Heron. What could be better than The Revolution Will Not Be Televised? I gave a brand new copy of the record to Jakob for Christmas.
The only Grateful Dead music I’ve ever owned are the two albums in the box: American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. Box of Rain and Uncle John’s Band are pretty catchy tunes, although Jerry Garcia’s vocal range is about as good as my baseball pitch, and I’ve never understood Deadheads. Some Dylan and Joplin rounded out the Rock ‘n Roll until I found The Best of the Everly Brothers at the thrift store the other day. Then Jakob gave me the Stones Let It Bleed for Christmas, with the best album cover ever produced and one of the greatest songs recorded: Gimme Shelter.
My other favorites represent the best of other genres: Black Snake Blues, Clifton Chanier of Zydeco fame; A Little More Faith, the Reverend Gary Davis of gospel fame; the Gypsy Kings of flamenco and salsa; and my all time favorite folk singer, Barbara Dane, who sings It Isn’t Nice with the Chambers Brothers. In fact, I’m going to put it on the turntable right now.
And finally, the most unusual album in the box has to be Grace Paley reading from her story collections “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” in her nasal Bronx accent. My literary and musical worlds conjoin there.
So that’s the story of what’s in the box, which isn’t in a box anymore but is lined up below the many shelves of my CDs, which I’ve been wondering what to do about as I start downsizing. But Jakob just informed me that he’s starting a CD collection—I didn’t know CDs were the latest retro thing—so I gave him the start of his jazz collection: John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders Archie Shepp, etc. There are still hundreds left. There’s also a box of barely audible 45s that Mark and I collected as teenagers. I also found them up in the loft, cleaned them up, organized them by genre—Rock ‘n Roll, Rockabilly, R & B, and played them one more time. Remember You’re My World, Go Now!, I Go to Pieces, Laugh Laugh, and The Lion Sleeps Tonight? RIP.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
David Gilbert Released, at Last
David Gilbert was released from jail this month after serving 40 years and 15 days for driving the get away vehicle in the 1981 Brinks Armory botched robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed. The Black Liberation Army stole $1.6 million in cash from an armored car outside the Nanuet Mall near the Hudson River community of Nyack. Gilbert, a former member of the Weather Underground, was unarmed but charged with murder, along with his partner, Kathy Boudin, who was in the car with him. Boudin pleaded guilty and was paroled in 2003. She’s now a professor at Columbia University.
Friends of David Gilbert emailed this photo after he was released. That’s his son, Chesa Boudin, on the left, who is currently the District Attorney in San Francisco, and Kathy Boudin, in the middle. Chesa was fourteen months old when his parents were arrested and was raised by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two other well-known former Weather Underground members.
Much has been written about Gilbert’s time in jail, by his son and by other reporters who documented the work he did on AIDs education and prevention. Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced Gilbert’s 75 years to life sentence so that he would be eligible for parole, which was granted in October. This is what Cuomo tweeted about Gilbert: “He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer.”
Gilbert’s sentence was an obviously politically motivated one. He refused to plead guilty and was disruptive in court. And what he participated in was, like much of the Weather Underground and other radical groups’ activities of the 1960s, strategically stupid and ultimately a failure. But Gilbert represents far more than an unjust political sentencing. We are the only Western developed country in the world that keeps people in jail for 40, 50, 60 years, for life. According to a New York Times article “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences of 50 years or more. In Germany, fewer than 100 people have prison terms longer than 15 years. In the Netherlands, they seldom serve more than four years.
But that doesn’t stop people calling for more blood. In the ABC online report of Gilbert’s release, they quote Rockland County Executive Ed Day: “Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Parole Board should be ashamed for allowing this domestic terrorist to walk free on our streets. There’s no reason that David Gilbert should not have to face the full consequences of his heinous crimes, no matter how much time has passed.”
So once “a domestic terrorist” always a domestic terrorist. Once an 18-year old gang member at the scene of a murder, always an 18-year old gang member despite the fact that you’re now 60 years old. In the NYT’s article, one of the authors was a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council report that “recommends a return to a principle of parsimony, the sensible idea that a punishment should be only as severe as is required to prevent future offending.”
Mark Rudd, another former Weather Underground member who has repeatedly abjured his participation in the group, wrote a memoir some years ago that talked about meeting David Gilbert at Columbia University when he enrolled there as a freshman. Gilbert was several years older, already heavily involved in political organizing, who Mark described as one of the smartest and gentlest men he’d ever met. So, ironically enough, maybe the twenty-something David Gilbert, who made a tragic mistake when he was 36, is essentially the same David Gilbert who’s now 76 years old, free to walk down the streets of New York for the first time in 40 years.
Friends of David Gilbert emailed this photo after he was released. That’s his son, Chesa Boudin, on the left, who is currently the District Attorney in San Francisco, and Kathy Boudin, in the middle. Chesa was fourteen months old when his parents were arrested and was raised by Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, two other well-known former Weather Underground members.
Much has been written about Gilbert’s time in jail, by his son and by other reporters who documented the work he did on AIDs education and prevention. Disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reduced Gilbert’s 75 years to life sentence so that he would be eligible for parole, which was granted in October. This is what Cuomo tweeted about Gilbert: “He has served 40 years of a 75-year sentence, related to an incident in which he was the driver, not the murderer.”
Gilbert’s sentence was an obviously politically motivated one. He refused to plead guilty and was disruptive in court. And what he participated in was, like much of the Weather Underground and other radical groups’ activities of the 1960s, strategically stupid and ultimately a failure. But Gilbert represents far more than an unjust political sentencing. We are the only Western developed country in the world that keeps people in jail for 40, 50, 60 years, for life. According to a New York Times article “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences of 50 years or more. In Germany, fewer than 100 people have prison terms longer than 15 years. In the Netherlands, they seldom serve more than four years.
But that doesn’t stop people calling for more blood. In the ABC online report of Gilbert’s release, they quote Rockland County Executive Ed Day: “Former Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Parole Board should be ashamed for allowing this domestic terrorist to walk free on our streets. There’s no reason that David Gilbert should not have to face the full consequences of his heinous crimes, no matter how much time has passed.”
So once “a domestic terrorist” always a domestic terrorist. Once an 18-year old gang member at the scene of a murder, always an 18-year old gang member despite the fact that you’re now 60 years old. In the NYT’s article, one of the authors was a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council report that “recommends a return to a principle of parsimony, the sensible idea that a punishment should be only as severe as is required to prevent future offending.”
Mark Rudd, another former Weather Underground member who has repeatedly abjured his participation in the group, wrote a memoir some years ago that talked about meeting David Gilbert at Columbia University when he enrolled there as a freshman. Gilbert was several years older, already heavily involved in political organizing, who Mark described as one of the smartest and gentlest men he’d ever met. So, ironically enough, maybe the twenty-something David Gilbert, who made a tragic mistake when he was 36, is essentially the same David Gilbert who’s now 76 years old, free to walk down the streets of New York for the first time in 40 years.
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