(First posted March 12, 2015. This year’s Father’s Day post — “Rain in the Pecos for Father’s Day” — is just below this Canyon Road story).
My father and I were photographed in Percy’s Field, a brushy couple of acres running down from Canyon Road down to the Santa Fe River. The day was bright and hopeful. It was about 1960.
It’s hard for me to realize that I would be a problem drinker only six or seven years later, barely graduating from high school. Thirty-five years later, I would nod to a hospital nurse to unplug my hard-drinking father from life support. I think I was 11 when the 1960 photo was taken. My father, Bob Robertson, was 32. He was 66 when he died.
With the support of my stepmother, Pat, my father brought my two brothers, Pat and Rob, and I back together after separations that started about 1959. I had been miserable without my father, who left home and my mother when I was 10. My brothers went off, temporarily as it turned out, with my mother and a partner, just as I started at Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, Ca. I refused to join them, wanting to stay with my father.
Not long before he died, my father I weathered a treacherous sailing capsize, treading water face to face in the middle of a lake before resolving to right the boat and sail to shore. We went backpacking near the Rio Grande headwaters for his 64th birthday. I set a course too far and steep but he didn’t complain. We sat by a fire at night and slept side-by-side in a two-man tent. He didn’t tell me about his failing liver.
The Canyon Road photo above was taken by Mike James, brother of Claude James, owner of Claude’s bar, a famous hangout a few doors up from Percy’s Field on the other side of Canyon Road. I think James had been taking photos for the Santa Fe New Mexican. My father was working there temporarily, on a schools coverage project, between the Grand Junction Sentinel and the San Francisco Chronicle.
My father took me to artist Hal West’s studio at the corner of Canyon Road and Escondido that morning of the Percy’s Field photograph. I had a bowl of pinto beans from the pot on Hal’s wood-burning stove. I think it was Sunday.
Divide, Rio Grande Pyramid in view to the south, Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado, June 1989.
–30–
dream ranch 
John, thank you for sharing about your dad and about your growing up; I found it unbelievably interesting. At our Bishop gathering you spoke of some of this but not nearly in so much detail. The love and admiration that pours out of you about your dad reminds me of my feelings for my dad now eight years gone. The bond between a father and son can be so powerful. What also comes to mind is how similar your growing up and your relationship with your father is to Houghton’s. I don’t know if you ever spoke to Patrick about that, but it would have been a remarkable dialogue! I’ll leave you with this thought, John : You’re a special person and the more I learn, the more I’m impressed. See you in August and/or September.