So far during this stay-at-home month, I have had a Zoomed water board meeting and a long-scheduled but ultimately Zoomed medical appointment. Cowboy attended both.
So far during this stay-at-home month, I have had a Zoomed water board meeting and a long-scheduled but ultimately Zoomed medical appointment. Cowboy attended both.
Cowboy and I haven’t been able to see Sara for a couple of days. You know, all that stay-at-home and social distancing stuff. But we’ve gotten postcards.
Here she is watching a sea lion on Animal Planet, a favorite TV show, with Rescue Dad Mike.
And here she is all bundled up by Rescue Mom Lori for the surprise Placitas snow Monday.
We love you, Sara. See you soon. Postcards, by the way, by Lori.
I woke with a gutful of what felt like fear, not sure whether it was triggered by too many beans, too much CNN or the onset of coronavirus.
No, I don’t think I have the virus, but even those lucky enough to avoid it might be feeling the effects, too: Going to bed with a head full of online stories and CNN, trapped at home with no break from your own cooking, unable to invite anyone in for coffee or food, worrying about family and friends, grocery shopping and the IRA. And that’s if you don’t have a loved one or friend who is sick, an elder stuck in a nursing home, know medical staff trying to save people in the hospital or test them in the field, grocery workers trying to keep shelves filled and panicky customers checked out — all of the rest suddenly struggling or desperate in this misery.
I am 70 and a regular worrier about my own health. I am experienced in social distancing. I am also good at fooling myself. It took a minute this morning to realize that my throbbing pulse and shallow breath were not the insidious virus itself, just too much news.
I never thought I’d see a pandemic. I never thought I would have to talk to neighbors from six-feet away, be afraid of ordinary errands. I rarely watch daytime TV and I never thought I would tune in every morning to see that 700 or 800 people died the day before in New York. I still struggle to understand that it is happening worldwide.
I get emails daily from friends about newspapers collapsing after losing last vestiges of advertising support. My last trip to The Range in Bernalillo, for takeout in mid-March, was the day that owner and managers had to lay off hundreds of employees from it and its eight other food businesses.
And I am still incredulous. I am, after all, a white male who got his polio shot in the 50s, didn’t have to go to war in the 60s and managed to end up with a newspaper pension in 2015 despite being one of the last people through the door without a college degree. Thanks to Obamacare, I was able to buy good health insurance after I retired. Several weeks ago, my health care provider REACHED OUT TO ME, checking on me at home because I am “high risk.”
I also live in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. My risk can’t be as high as someone living in an apartment building in Queens. Each day now, as I walk out under blue sky, wildflower-covered public land stretching before me, I remind myself that social isolation is another privilege.
I took in mixed messages this morning as I tried to push down my fears and get my head lined out.
I watched New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on CNN.: “Tribal nations could be wiped out by COVID-19,” the underline as she spoke.
I listened to Andrea Bocelli sing “Music for Hope” on YouTube, the tenor walking without sight to an outdoor microphone in a seemingly vacant Milan, finishing his free concert in English with “Amazing Grace.”
Cowboy looked out the window, eager to get out and about. I watched a band of Placitas free-roaming horses blow one of the few stop signs in our always quiet, but now even quieter, neck of the woods.
I rewatched an Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor, saying the world is much smaller now, airplanes able to carry contagion from one continent to another in hours. He said he hoped COVID-19 will lead us to new and helpful understandings, that maybe will we grasp globally the damage we inflict on the environment, the economic and social disparities we conveniently overlook.
Bocelli said he believes the recovery of Milan and Italy from COVID-19 could be the “engine of a renaissance that we all hope for.”
After all this sickness and death, I hope for it socially, economically, environmentally and politically. It would be pretty dumb to deny we are all in it together.
I have to believe in something beyond coronavirus.
After making a coronavirus-related shopping note on my calendar for March 31, I looked down again at what I had entered a month earlier.
“Hope arrives,” March 30. “Matt and Will arrive,” April 1.
This was going to be a fun time, with a sister, brother-in-law and nephew coming from Montana for a spring break. There would be two arrival times due to Montana horse and calf feeding needs, chicken-coop protection and school schedules. They would first stop in Utah for a visit with another sister and family and stop off for another visit in Colorado .
Then came coronavirus concerns. We called off the trip on March 12. Now, we are isolated in our respective beautiful places, frustrating ourselves with one-finger typing as we try to stay in touch, the Montanans teaching and studying online.
Here, I was glad to hear that a 97-year-old friend and neighbor here is being looked after by her daughters, although one of them is having her own troubles with cancer treatments.
I have COPD and got messed up the other day by March wind and dust and pollen. A neighbor came by to take Cowboy for a run while I stayed inside on another gusty day. It was an off-day from her job as a nurse. We used to walk our dogs together several times a week. Last time we met, we approached opposite directions on our public lands trail and chatted only briefly, from six feet away, almost a half-mile from anyone else.
I stood six-feet away from my stepsister yesterday when I dropped by her nearby home to deliver a book and an old laptop for her and pick up the bunch of celery she had bought for me. She had been busy with her sewing machine, stitching face masks for health-care workers. She gave one to me. As a handy, ranch-raised kid, she was proud of the piece of pipe cleaner she stitched into the fabric to go over the nose. It works.
A dentist who lives up the hill volunteered to run errands and shop for groceries for me and other neighbors. When I did my last shopping at the small, local grocery on March 18, a older woman moved slowly and alone in in the aisles. When she checked out, the register clerk hurried to carry out her bags. The manager told me the woman had just lost her assistance dog.
Three days ago, March 25, was the fifth anniversary since the end of my radiation and chemotherapy treatments for lung cancer. Another neighbor, a scientist with cancer problems of her own, has reminded me that the five-year mark is just a statistic relative to a chronic disease. I’m still chuckling because I know scientists mean the presentation of facts to be helpful, not unkind.
The anniversary got lost in the shuffle, anyway. The specter looming larger and closer now is COVID – 19.
I am watching CNN many hours a day, watching a worldwide experience that faster thinkers than I have said could be a generational milestone and marks, at least for now, radical changes in human behavior. To say nothing of the many now sick and dying. I am still half-incredulous, despite the news soaking in for several weeks. I wonder whether the experience will be the biggest one in the lives of younger relatives, or whether there will be even more, the pace of cataclysms accelerating. I think Cowboy keeps sensing I’m spooked and gets spooky himself.
It is indeed a big story. I notice my friend Larry, a retired wire-service newsman, has taken to posting local COVID -19 bulletins on his Crestone Conglomerate website up in Colorado.
A coffee klatch of retired newspaper people attempted a socially-distanced gathering online yesterday. The klatch leader, well-meaning although maybe not so technologically proficient, suggested using email. With a dozen or so participants, it turned out to be pretty hard to follow. One beloved member finally got through after the fact, resorting to emailing us individually while pleading that his computer, in addition to other oddities, lacked a “reply all” button. I thought later it was all worth it, if only because it reminded me of the newsroom cacophony that I got so used to during 40 years in the business.
I am a veteran of social distancing for non-epidemiological reasons and even in the current mess, so hard on so many, especially in the big cities, I feel fortunate. I am a little banged up after 70 years of life, some of the damage surely self-inflicted, but I think my constitution is still strong. I just hope this finds my friends and family feeling well, too.
So, cheers, all. And keep your distance.
Five days now since the first three cases of coronavirus were confirmed in New Mexico, but it seems longer.
It’s been several months since the initial outbreak in China and weeks since the pandemic overtook Italy. Spain and France are locking down. Restrictions on movement are tightening in the U.S.
Even CNN pundits said Trump turned a corner today, acknowledging the severity of the problems advanced by COVID-19 and saying they might last until August or longer.
Total cases nationally as of this date, 3,487; deaths, 68. New Mexico cases: 21; no deaths.
Idris Elba, who’s here shooting a movie, was among those saying on this date that he’d tested positive. We fans of The Range cafe in Bernalillo got a sad note on Facebook from the owner, telling us only three tables filled at lunch today and he had not felt so threatened since his first location burned down in 1992. A nurse neighbor is on the front lines, working in a hazmat suit and face shield. I’ve tried to share state government tweets about testing and grocery delivery with fellow 70 and 80-something neighbors, thinking they might not be as active media watchers as I. My stepsister over the ridge and I might have had our last face-to-face visit for a while on Sunday. Meawhile, she’s staying in touch with an older friend, who’s being helped at home by a daughter who’s in the midst of cancer treatments.
The March 16 map:
Like everyone else, I have been worried about family and friends. I’ve also felt the food hoarding instinct, especially for the grain-free Canadian kibble Cowboy has been on since he was sick pup, although he’s out in the dark barking at coyotes at the moment, testing my soft heart.
One of my first thoughts when all this started was of my paternal grandparents, both born in the late 1890s. They made it through World War 1, the Great Depression and World War 11, all while caring for two daughters with severe disabilities at home. The daughters, who needed 24-hour care, lived into their mid-60s. Both grandparents lived into their early 90s. I don’t think I ever heard them complain. They passed quietly.
They were experts in frugality and staying home, by necessity, became their way of life. Despite the hardships they faced, they they also had some good fortune: a 40-year oil refinery job for my grandfather; company housing during the Depression; and then help from the federal government. A portrait of FDR hung in their bedroom, opposite the foot of the bed, the first thing you saw waking in the morning. Social Security programs enabled them to care for both daughters at home. 
I called to check in with my brother in Puget Sound today. I tried to grill him about his health and ended up learning as much about myself.
He had bought a new laptop and did not seem to have picked up much computer savvy since I helped him buy his first one at a custom shop in Bellingham 23 years ago. Or so I thought.
I, of course, am an expert, 14 months older and having bumbled my way into regular computer use after the largest newspaper in New Mexico converted to them in 1984. Despite my continued use of words like “thingy” and inability to remember the term browser, I tried to lead him through a two-hour exercise in installing Firefox.
We gave up during my attempt to explain the use of tabs. Always gentle, he interjected near hour No. 2 that he really needed to go shopping. And then he let it slip that he’s been doing the New York Times crossword puzzle online for years, something this computer whiz has been afraid to try. Apparently, he has even toyed with puzzle construction online.
I realized that maybe the biggest obstacle we’d been dealing with was not his technical frailty but my overbearing voice. I thought I was being patient but I am sure I have fooled myself about my sibling demeanor for all of his 69 years.
Poor Cowboy had to wait through the pedantry. Finally, we hit the trail. My thoughts returned to coronavirus and hard times. But I felt lucky, despite underlying respiratory issues. We lined out toward the mountain under clear, blue New Mexico sky, feeling the UVs burning in and thinking it won’t be long before the snakes are out.
Cheers, Kirk. I doubt I’ll watch the Oscars tonight and I gave up beer-drinking 35 years ago, but I still watch your movies and I’ll bet your Hollywood mates will be toasting you on TV. I’m toasting you here.
My favorite Kirk Douglas movies are “Lonely Are the Brave” and “Ace in the Hole,” both great ones, I submit, and both filmed in New Mexico.
The actual “Lonely Are the Brave” Movie Trail — where Walter Matthau, the almost-sympathetic sheriff tracking the jail-breaking cowboy Jack Burns uttered the words, “I haven’t got enough spit left to wet a stick of gum”– is just over the Rincon from my home in Placitas.
I still remember walking up to the El Paseo movie theater on West San Francisco Street in Santa Fe in 1962, when the movie came out. I remember the the marquee looming large — “Lonely Are the Brave.” — and the posters at eye level.
It was much later, during my newspaper career, that I saw the earlier made-in -New Mexico movie, “Ace in the Hole,” released in 1951.
I won’t review the movies here, except to say I would never attempt to take a horse up the west face of the Sandias. Someone should have told Jack Burns about Las Huertas Canyon, although I guess he still would have run into State Road 14. Meanwhile, this photo of Burns and Whiskey on what I think might be Second Street in the North Valley says a lot about how I feel driving through the newish roundabout at the north end of Fourth Street.
And I’ll just say I can no longer watch the ending of “Lonely Are the Brave.” My favorite scenes are Kirk, aka Jack Burns, breaking camp near the beginning and Sheriff Morey Johnson, Walter Matthau, staring up the craggy face of the mountain and telling his deputy to toss him a canteen.
It might be forgotten that the reason Jack Burns got himself thrown in jail in the first place was trying to rescue an old friend, who had been arrested for trying to help “illegal immigrants.” And let us not forget that the movie is a Dalton Trumbo script from the novel “The Brave Cowboy” by the late University of New Mexico bachelor’s and master’s degree student Edward Abbey
For all of the good parts, I forgive the movie-makers for dyeing Whiskey’s coat and mane: It’s almost worse than the president’s tan.
“Ace in the Hole” is too complicated a subject to tackle here, partly because I’m a 40-year veteran of the newspaper business, most of them in Albuquerque. I think a lot more of the real-life Albuquerque Journal and the late Albuquerque Tribune than the movie’s takes on the corrupt, underbelly of journalism, but I am fond of this exchange between the cynical Kirk Douglas character and the earnest editor of the fictional Albuquerque paper:
Charles Tatum: Mr. Boot, I was passing through Albuquerque; had breakfast here. I read your paper and thought you might be interested in my reaction.
Jacob Q. Boot: Indeed, I am.
Charles Tatum: Well, to be honest, it made me throw up. I don’t mean to tell you I was expecting the New York Times, but even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque.
Jacob Q. Boot: Alright, here’s your nickel back.
Editor Boot’s response always reminds me of my first editor in New Mexico, John Bott of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Before arriving on East Marcy Street, he was city editor of the New York Post and had worked there for several decades, when the price of the paper was a nickel.
Years later in the Santa Fe newsroom, when frustrated by bewildering reader complaints, he occasionally would mutter, still chewing on his cigar, “Whadda they want for 25 cents?”
Bott, one of my mythical cowboys, like Kirk, was a good guy, too.
John Bott in the Santa Fe New Mexican newsroom, 1974.
Moonrise over the Cuchilla de San Francisco, near Placitas, New Mexico.
Friday night.
Saturday night.
I know their conduct was outside the lines. You know, cutting fences and tearing up speeches. But these are heroic images lodged in my mind at the end of the week.
Patrick Semansky / AP
Rest in peace, Kirk Douglas, whose directors I forgive for dyeing Whiskey’s coat and mane. And long live Nancy Pelosi, who did what many of us probably wanted to do.
(Footnote on the movie “Lonely Are the Brave:” It was filmed in Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains with a Dalton Trumbo script from the Edward Abbey novel, The Brave Cowboy).
Reading Twitter while waiting for Lisa Murkowski to say on CNN how she’ll vote on Trump impeachment trial witnesses. See familiar 60’s poster from San Francisco and New York Times obituary for its creator, Wes Wilson. See latest New York Times scoop on drama queen John Bolton’s book, another bombshell hours before crucial Senate vote. Start tripping.
I remembered a small version of the 1966-1967 poster pasted — I think to cover a stain — on the back of an old Starr’s Guide to the John Muir Trail, published in 1964 and now resting on my bookshelf here in my Placitas office.
Wes Wilson, Psychedelic Poster Pioneer, Dies at 82
His work announced concerts by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and more — to those who could read them.
I say 1966-1967 because the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service concert at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco was billed as a “New Year Bash.”
I did not attend. I would have been living overseas at the time, reading a few months later about a cataclysm in New Mexico, where I had lived even earlier — Tijerina and the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid, in the thin-paper international edition of Time — but I lived in Marin County, across the Bay from San Francisco, before an after. The only Fillmore concert I remember attending was later in the summer or fall of 1967, after I returned to the U.S. It was Cream with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. I’m not sure who else was on the bill. And the truth was, those days, that one or more of the locals often played in a park somewhere for free.
At age 70 now, I still have to look twice at the dates on the Fillmore “New Year Bash” poster. Maybe I wouldn’t have then. I smoked pot whenever I could get it — $10 a lid was a fortune’s worth in my canned-soup, college-days budget. (Tomato soup was 11-cents a can at the Berkeley food coop). But the one and only time I dropped acid was on March 31, 1968, after seeing LBJ announce on a friend’s black-and-white TV that he would not seek re-election. This led to a hitch-hiking trip from Marin to “the city” and back to Mt. Tamalpais and, then, a walk, much of the way, to Bolinas. I still believe the LSD was mixed with speed. The acid hit me as we entered this tunnel above Sausalito on Highway 101, years later painted with rainbow colors and then renamed for Robin Williams after his death in 2014. My 1967 LSD-trip guide was an easy-going Canadian art student named Jim.
I’m sure I freaked out the guy driving the car by announcing from the back seat, as we entered the tunnel, “The funny thing is that we’re driving this car.” They are the last words I remembering saying for the next 24 hours.
My head has been aching recently with a contemporary TV commercial for ocean cruises featuring Jefferson Airplane lyrics, “Remember what the doormouse said: Feed your head, feed your head.” Still trippy but mostly dippy, it seems to me now.
I left the Starr’s Guide with a friend when I moved oversees during high school. She returned it many years later, out of the blue. I don’t know whether she or I pasted the Wes Wilson Fillmore handbill on the back. Thank you anyway, Dolores, for keeping me in the loop.
And rest in peace, Wes Wilson. I’ve always enjoyed your work, even if I had to look twice.
I remain a fan of Eric Clapton — shaken by his racist comments in 1976 but accepting his later apologies. https://www.thedailybeast.com/eric-clapton-apologizes-for-racist-past-i-sabotaged-everything.
I never was much of a fan of the Dead, but I’ve always admired this lyric from Truckin’.
“Lately, it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Then, again, these are just sparks flying from my fingertips.
dreamranch 