Casa Otra Banda
El Rancho, New Mexico
End of Year 1998
Dear Friend,
As always, I am stunned that I am writing this letter once again. It’s been a year filled with some shocks and delights, like most years, and as part of getting older, I sometimes wonder if I am more accepting of the human condition or more disturbed about where we are heading (our world, our American society) – perhaps some of both at the same time. And getting older may be a process of maintaining contradictions and not going crazy from doing so. Well, without further ado.
By way of some news…The saddest event was losing our beloved cat, Mittens, who really was a joy, a member of the family with a heart and soul as kind and friendly as a cat soul ever gets. On the night of August 31, as he always did, he went out – often this involved waking us up from a sound sleep at 2 or 3 in the morning to be let out. And next day he simply did not show up. He’d been an outdoor cat from the time he got beyond kittenhood and we knew it was risky, but he was happy to be prowling in his mini-Serengeti, checking out the animal life, exploring everything new and different. We made a pact with ourselves that it was better for him to have a short but really happy life than to be miserable into old age. Sure enough, that was the scenario. It could have been a coyote, a skunk, or who knows what – but we really miss him tremendously. If one has to look for a little silver lining, perhaps the only one I’ve found so far is that we expanded from one to three bird feeders, with a lot of bird activity, and no worries about Mittens bouncing on the little creatures. We now have a black sunflower seed feeder, a suet feeder, and an upside down thistle feeder, and it is tremendous fun to watch all the winter activity through the kitchen window.
For me, one aspect of aging is that, though a long, drawn-out story, beginning last January, I learned that my spinal channel and vertebrae in the neck were pretty messed up. No accident or traumatic development. Just a matter of genetics and aging, and the only recourse, the neurosurgeon assured me, was a major operation. I got the usual second opinion, talked to my personal physician, and in the end decided to go ahead. I was being prohibited from backpacking, bicycle riding, carrying buckets of water to irrigate my trees, cross-country skiing – you name it – and if I had the surgery, I could return to all that. Plus, I was warned, I would be at tremendous risk if I had a bad fall, or were in a car accident (assuming it didn’t kill me!) and so I really needed to have this taken care of. September 15 was the date. Three neck vertebrae (out of only 7) were fused with metal plates, and bone spurs growing into the spinal channel were ground down. I was warned this would all result in a lot of pain, but by some miracle, the pain never arrived. The day after the surgery I was discharged from the hospital, and had what turned out to be a wonderful 4-week break from everything, recuperating at home during the finest season of the year in these parts.
For the first time since I’ve moved here, I couldn’t do much gardening, and so I had loads of time to just sit outside, all over the property, and enjoy it at different times of the day, under different conditions, and it was a treat I probably would never have granted myself, so fixated am I on always finding something to do around the house. The vegetable garden by that time was pretty much on auto-pilot, and David was a big help with watering our potted plants, that required carrying buckets. I had time to catch up on book reading for the first time in ages. I began serious planning of our upcoming 5-week trip to India (more below), and caught up on many other things I’d been putting off for ages. This really turned into a unique opportunity to just sit back and smell the roses, as the saying goes, and I became very attached to the tranquil retreat we’ve managed to create.
It was also a chance to actually read some books – an all too rare opportunity, but much welcomed. Although as with most years, I didn’t read nearly as much as I would have liked to, I did read some remarkable books. First off, and one that took up the early part of the year, was The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. A massive book, this has got to be one of the most remarkable studies of the degree to which power can be manipulated and abused within the setting of the American democracy. Robert Moses was the great builder of parks, highways, bridges, and much of the infrastructure of New York City and New York State for over half of this century. By some incredible probing through dusty records, Caro meticulously builds a fascinating story of power gone haywire. If there is one book I think ought to be used in the classroom to explain the tension between power and democracy, this would be it. Another powerful book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. I’d been meaning to read this ever since coming to Los Alamos, and finally did it. It is not just the story of the Manhattan Project, but of the entire quantum revolution in physics and of the personalities of the men and women involved that eventually led to the atomic bomb. It probes into the cultural and social milieu that was the setting for the great nuclear discoveries, as well as the political and economic issues of those troubled times. The final chapters on what the atomic bomb actually did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are absolutely unforgettable. Both of these books won the Pulitzer Prize, and deservedly so in my opinion. The smallest, least well-known volume of the three, but one which impressed me greatly, was A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm – it got rave reviews in both the New York Times and the New Yorker when it appeared. It is the very thoughtful text of a literature professor turned small farmer in a lovely town not too far from us, who, in growing garlic (which he sells during the season at Santa Fe’s farmer’s market) makes wise and profound observations on what it means to live a good life, especially in these times when false gods seem to have usurped many time-tested values.
A really remarkable development this year was that the University of California, which manages Los Alamos National Laboratory, made a decision in late 1997 that it would extended full health benefits to same-sex domestic partners of its employees. This meant that David could come under my health, dental, and vision plans, which have very reasonable premiums (the employee’s contribution that is) and quite good coverage by national standards. This all came about on July 1 and for us has been a real weight off our shoulders. The plan David was under, through the local Chamber of Commerce (he had become a member just to get the health insurance) appears to be going belly-up, since the insurer is backing out. So getting David in under my coverage came none too soon, and from my perspective of almost 25 years dealing with who I am, and where I fit in to our society, I have to feel really astounded that this could happen at all.
David has continued on his major project to professionally record, with a jazz trio, forgotten songs of Broadway and Hollywood, mostly dating from the 30’s through the 50’s. His latest set of tapes was just finished in November, and if this kind of music, a rare gem, is something you go in for, he’d be glad to supply you (for a price, of course!)
With a fair amount of unallocated time on his hands, this was a year when he went off to do some traveling on his own (I couldn’t get away from work, though I would have loved to have gone) – there was a trip to Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska in May, starting out with celebrating the retirement of a special friend of his who was a professor at the University of Illinois. He then continued with a rendezvous in Lincoln, Nebraska where he had lived some years as a boy, and where he had not since returned, and other explorations in that area. In late June he left for a 3-week singing trip with a Los Angeles-based chorale, to give concerts in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It was a wonderful experience, and the group was warmly greeted. David had not been to Prague in many years, and the changes were revolutionary, to use that overworked word. Finally, in mid-November, he headed for New York, to visit some friends in the area, and see some great art shows at the museums. I’ve insisted that we do a trip to New York together next spring – it’s been years since I’ve been there, and I’m ready for a heavy-duty culture injection.
The big trip we have been planning for, as previously mentioned, is to India – the south of India to be precise. On Christmas Day we fly from Albuquerque to San Francisco, where we pick up a Singapore Airlines flight to Singapore – we’ll stay a day and a half there, and then on to Madras (renamed Chennai, though no one seems to use that name). We don’t return until January 30, so we should have some time to explore. Madras is the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, which runs down the southernmost part of the east coast of India. We’ll work our way south more or less down the coast, to the very tip of the Indian subcontinent. Along the way should be some of the greatest temples and religious sites of south India. Then, at the tip, we cross over to the state of Kerala, which goes up the western coast from the tip.
Kerala is a rather interesting part of India. It has the highest literacy rate, has had a Communist state government for many years, and has less income disparity than anywhere else in India. It has been settled over the centuries by a strange mix of peoples – 25% of the population is Syriac Christian, it has the oldest Jewish community in India (almost completely exhausted, since most of the younger members moved to Israel), Moslems, Hindus, and others. It has its own language, and it is a matriarchal society, unlike the rest of India. Kerala is not terribly rich in religious sites or great architecture, but it is lushly tropical, with beautiful beaches, a network of backcountry canals that one can travel to get to remote villages, and quite a number of wildlife sanctuaries. The state is a narrow coastal strip backed up by a mountain range known as the Western Ghats (Ghat means “steps” though I cannot tell you what Indian language that is in), which rises, at its spine, up to 8,000 feet.
We are trying to work out some treks (overnight and one-day) into several of the wildlife sanctuaries, with a travel company in Cochin, the most historic city in Kerala. We are also trying to arrange a stay on Bangaram Island in the Lakshadweep chain, a northern extension of the Maldive Islands, approximately 200 miles west off the coast of Kerala. The Indian Government only lets foreigners go to Bangaram, which has a resort hotel (built in a very simple style) – there are no cars, radio, or TV on the island, but it is reputed to be a veritable paradise, so we think it will be a delightful part of the trip, and a much less expensive escape than a trip to the Maldives.
Needless to say, I spent much of my time recuperating from the surgery reading through the guidebooks we purchased, and this being the end of the 20th century, sending e-mail messages to the travel companies in Cochin to try to work out arrangements (they actually did respond!). David and I are both doing a lot of reading – novels, travelogues, and non-fiction on India, to get ourselves prepared, get a sense of what we will be stepping into. One of the most wonderful books we both read was by Octavio Paz, the great Mexican writer, called In Light of India. His book contained various perspectives, based on his Mexican heritage, that would have been inconceivable from an American, but were very enriching for us.
In short, as you can imagine, we are quite excited about this trip. I have been to India once before – in 1978-79, but it was in the north, which is very different. On that trip I found India the most other-dimensional place on the planet I had ever experienced, and I have wanted to return ever since. Not that it is an easy place to travel – it is clearly not to everyone’s taste. In fact, one book we purchased is titled something along the lines of India – Culture Shock!, written by an Indian - it attempts to prepare the Western traveler for what he will encounter upon being hit by the full force of India.
Saving up for this big vacation, we haven’t done a lot of out-of-town trips together. There was a return to Zion National Park over the President’s Day weekend last February, which turned out to be a marvelous experience. We had been to Zion the previous fall, but when El Nino promised a rainy several days in Death Valley, a place that almost never sees rain, we decided if it was going to be bad weather, a return to Zion would be preferable. Indeed, when we got there, it was raining and a bit dreary, but we got the last room at the Zion Lodge, which was warm and cozy. And over night, the rain changed to snow, which fell all the next day. During the last night, the sky cleared, and on our last morning, we were in for what must truly be one of the most stupendous sights in the world – brilliant blue sky, blazing sun, and snow, like silverpoint in an Old Master drawing, highlighting the immense red-rock cliffs rising vertically all around us. Except in the rain, we got out and did hikes, and had an experience that few visitors get. This was all tied in, by the way, with a work-related trip to Las Vegas that David came along with me on – since the meetings began the day after a 3-day weekend, we had decided to go out early and use the long weekend to have some fun. When Death Valley did not look promising, we went in the other direction, to Zion (only about 2.5 hours from Las Vegas).
The other memorable trip for me this year was to continue the 5-day canoe trip down Labyrinth Canyon of the Green River in southeastern Utah that I did with David and friends in 1995. This time, with good friends from Washington, DC, and a friend from Santa Fe (who was on the 1995 trip), we picked up where we left off the last time, and did another 5-day trip down the last part of Labyrinth Canyon, and then into Stillwater Canyon, until we got to the confluence of the Green River with the Colorado River. We were picked up by the outfitters we rented the canoes from one mile down on the Colorado River (just before it goes through the foaming and aptly named Cataract Canyon) and returned to Moab, Utah up the Colorado on a jetboat, which was a lot of fun. Weather was great, camping sites beautiful, floating down the canyon very spectacular, and as before, the whole experience of getting away from civilization in a magnificent place, and having to take care of yourself, was very restorative.
In between and beyond, there were other trips, into New Mexico, the high peaks of Colorado (though no backpacking this year!) and into southeastern Utah, and a few work trips to California, with a chance to enjoy some good dining in the San Francisco Bay area. The list only keeps growing of places we want to explore, of backpacking trips I dream about doing, so living in this part of the world has not lost its savor.
Thanksgiving saw me briefly in Florida to join in celebrating my folks 60th anniversary – an incredible milestone. While there, I took off one day on my own to explore a whole series of interpretive trails in Everglades National Park, an ecosystem fascinatingly different from what I am used to. Being the dry season, it was a first-rate opportunity to see some wildlife.
This was a very rough year on the garden front, as I had to face up to some tough realities. I’ve put in 6 years of very demanding effort to fix up the property. This is much more than simply growing a garden, doing some landscaping, and the like. It has really been a labor of love, to restore this little parcel of land to some semblance of its natural self, to some kind of health, to create my own little beautiful bit of New Mexico here. This is a very spiritual and at the same time, very physical kind of thing. It involves living with the land, getting to know it at every time of the day and night, especially those magical times, sunrise and sunset.
What happened this year was that while David was away in Europe, some of the longstanding problems seemed to reach a head. We had a ferociously hot late June (it hit 105o at the house and was over 100o on a number of other days); during this period, an arsonist set a forest fire in the Jemez Mountains to our west, and from the house, a very vision of hell dominated our sky – it even sent an eerie, unnatural orange glow, filtered through the sun, to illuminate the interior of the house. And to top it all off, the grasshoppers, always a plague at our house, reached an apogee, and were destroying everything I was growing, even shrubs and perennials that had fared reasonably well in previous years. Every new perennial I planted this spring or summer (and there were many) were destroyed. The place was beginning to look like a plant concentration camp – everything was deformed and dying. While the summer rains did come on time (unlike many recent years), we live in a weird meteorological zone in which even while neighbors close by (as close as ¼ of a mile away) get a good rain, it will miss us, repeatedly. This all reached a head in July, and I felt a despondency, a sense of failure, that I have rarely felt – it only comes when you have thrown yourself, body and soul, into something, and have to face the (seemingly) awful truth that it might all have been in vain, that there is no way to fulfill this great dream one has tried to live by.
Fortunately, by mid- or late August, the grasshopper intensity dropped off, and the plants, miraculously, put out new growth. We worked with our landscaper to do corrective surgery in some of the worst devastated areas, and to try to work only with plants that had held up to the onslaught. By the time of my surgery in mid-September, the place was looking fairly decent again, and my sense of inner crisis, turmoil, and overwhelming despondency had eased off enormously. I will have to find a way to accept the difficulties, that there are certain times of the year which should represent the fullness of growth, which for me will not, but that the rest of year, it really is tremendously rewarding.
In fact, we put up some beautiful natural, traditional-style fences on two sides which vastly improved the look of the property. For the first time, we were able to use the ditch irrigation water which we have rights to, to flood our north meadow, with astounding effect. Last winter we had a gardener who specializes in these things, create the cache basin and spur ditch that would permit us to draw our share of water from the main ditch (in northern New Mexico, called an acequia) – there is a schedule when each property-owner gets his turn to take water, and sometimes your turn comes at 2:00 a.m. We were part of all this, and it was an interesting experience, and tremendously beneficial for the area we were able to flood.
In these last weeks, recuperating and having time to really relax with the place, I’ve come to feel very good about what I’ve done, I continue to learn and experiment. Gardening really is a metaphor for a human life – growth, practice, experience, learning, and perhaps wisdom. For all the difficulties, as I look around me, I am very aware that the place is lovely, a special oasis, and I try to intensely feel it, every moment I am there. The brilliant star-studded sky on a dark night, the sliver floodlight of a full moon, the intense early morning light when the sun first hits the property, the quiet of evening as it slowly darkens – these and countless other times create incomparable moments to savor – and they keep repeating day after day, if you make yourself available to what it offers up to you. It has truly been an enriching experiencing. A book I read this year, Under the Tuscan Sun, while about a very different place with a very different look, gave me that “shock of recognition” of someone, through hard work and disappointments, ultimately coming out at the other side of the tunnel, to realize the care, the tears, the sweat and the worry all are part of what infects you with a sense of place and belonging.
My job, on the whole, has treated me well. It is demanding, with a host of bureaucratic frustrations always cropping up, but I know I’ve made a difference. I enjoy the challenge of always trying something new and challenging, to not stay mired in a rut, and I’ve had some opportunities to do that, despite an extremely limited budget with which to do much of anything. At the same time, I am beginning to do some computations, to figure out if it is remotely conceivable to be able to retire when I turn 60, four years from now. It just might be possible – I’d be ready to leave a large bureaucracy and explore some other interests while I still have the strength and wherewithal.
The other aspect of upcoming retirement that we are giving some thought to is where, ultimately, we wind up. The crisis in the early summer (heat, grasshoppers) when I began to wonder what all the hard work was for led us to begin talking – to consider all the factors that are important to us, all the downsides and upsides of where we now are, and think about alternatives – everything from continuing to live in our house after both of us are retired, to moving into Santa Fe to relocating to another part of the country. When I was down about the situation this past summer, I became a bit down about New Mexico – its lousy state and local government, its being at the bottom of virtually every index of social wellbeing in the U.S., etc. It’s been an interesting exercise to really get out into the open what is important to us. One thing we have promised ourselves to do is to make a foray next summer to Oregon – it looms up as a progressive state with a high quality of life, we want to make several trips there to see if it really might represent what we want out of retirement.
Many aspects of the political and social scene in the U.S. continue to trouble me. In fact, my dissatisfaction with much, though not all, of what I see going on, makes me wonder where we are heading as a country. There are so many pressing needs in this country that seem to go unaddressed year after year. I don’t feel my interests are represented. We as a nation often seem to be losing our connection with the real world. I frequently feel like some kind of freak, so unrepresentative do I sense I am in the company of mainstream countrymen and women. On the local scene, we seem unable to get a rein on the forces of uncontrolled growth that are spoiling what have been the unique aspects of living here. Every place is easily known to everyone, and so few places remain special and secret. Technology brings in its wake some real downsides. I could go on and on, but it seems difficult that any thinking person would not be troubled by what she sees around her. On the local front, the defining watershed moment came in November when the first Starbucks arrived in Santa Fe. Many of us feel it truly is all over now!
Despite all that, life has been treating me pretty well, and I am grateful. Living is an act of moment to moment, not waiting for the great far-off experiences, plodding through the daily gray while you wait. I try to always to remind myself to live in the moment – while I perhaps don’t always succeed, I think I am getting better at it, so experience more of those fleetingly brief but wonderful times when life brings simple rewards. I hope the same as been happening with you.
That kind of sums up the picture of 1998.
Love,