I heard mention of the social ecologist Murray Bookchin today for the first time in a long time. Journalist George Monbiot mentioned him briefly in another of his doomsday articles in the Guardian, and journalist Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs (FYI, the Guardian fired Robinson, along with some other progressive journalists, but that’s another story) interviewed Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s former colleague and partner. She has a new book out called Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS about how the Kurds in Turkey and later Iraq and Syria tried to establish their autonomy based on some of Bookchin’s principles of decentralized control of a community. She also wrote Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.
I haven’t thought about Bookchin in a while, but my politics were influenced by his thinking as a “post-Marxist leftist,” organized around issues of democracy and ecology. Back in the 1980s he said things like “capitalism is barbarism” and embraced technology only so far as it would eliminate toil. He’s particularly germane to how I’m dealing with politics today: focusing all my energy on what I can accomplish locally in projects where I have a voice while turning off the outside noise of chaotic late stage capitalism.
Back in the day, though, I read Bookchin as an antidote to the deep ecology warriors like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! who were anti-immigrant, misogynist, and saw humans as a scourge upon the earth. Bookchin’s movement, social ecology, recognized that destruction of the earth was the result of social inequality and hierarchy of man over woman, white over black, rich over poor. He wrote we must think and act "not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life … not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination." He and Foreman eventually wrote a book together, Defending the Earth: A Dialog Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, after the mud slinging from the warriors became intolerable.
The book didn’t do much to resolve the conflict between the two movements, however. This is what Mark and I wrote in an editorial in the September 1997 issue of La Jicarita News, about the escalating conflict between urban environmentalists and the land based communities of northern New Mexico: :
“The battle lines being drawn in northern New Mexico mirror the internecine struggle within the national environmental movement. Those activists who come to the environmental movement with a background in social justice—labor organizing, civil rights, the New Left—are often called social ecologists: They see human beings as an integral part of the natural world that is being manipulated and exploited by the industrial, capitalistic economic system. Other activists, often called deep ecologists, come to the movement to save our wildlands as a moral statement apart from any value these lands may have to human culture. In the introduction to a book entitled Defending the Earth, in which social ecologist Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, come together to try to find common ground between these two philosophies, editor Steve Chase says: "While social ecologists . . . trace the roots of the ecological crisis to the rise of hierarchial and exploitative human societies, many deep ecology activists talk of the human species itself as a blight upon the planet . . . . Indeed, the deep ecology movement as a whole lacks a consistent or clear social analysis of the ecology crisis or even a consistent commitment to humane social ethics."
I actually knew Dave Foreman back in the early 1970s in Albuquerque—that’s where he’s from—when we both worked at the environmental center there that Terry Lamm (brother of former governor of Colorado Dick Lamm) founded. I was going to UNM part time after dropping out of Antioch. Dave had just come back from D.C. working as a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. He was a staunch Republican. He founded Earth First! in 1980 but quit in 1990 because he thought it had become too Marxist and anarchist (in the Dave Foreman Wikipedia post it says, “Many Earth First! members attribute Foreman's departure from the organization as having to do with his alleged sexism and racism.”) But don’t worry, Dave, wherever you are. I can attest that there are still plenty of deep ecology activists out there who are staunch misanthropes.
Sunday, July 31, 2022
Friday, July 15, 2022
No Boletes for Me
I saw my first wild mushroom of the year the other day on my hike with the dogs on the Borrego/Bear Wallow loop. Until the rains came—in torrents—in mid June, two weeks early in our monsoon season, I figured there would be no mushrooms at all. At my house in El Valle, while the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire roared on the other side of the mountains, the land was woefully barren except for where I’d irrigated: the orchard and hay field. I’d say it was the driest and brownest it’s ever been, even though we’ve lived through many previous drought years.
Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.
But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.
Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.
I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.
A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.
At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.
So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.
Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.
But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.
Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.
I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.
A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.
At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.
So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Why I’m Living in Santa Fe
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.
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.
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.
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