dreamranch

I finish my afternoon reading with “The Half-Skinned Steer” by Annie Proulx and I want to walk with Cowboy before the wind comes up but I decide on the flicker of the moment to re-read the very short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff and I thumb on the TV to see what Anderson Cooper does with Trump calling into Fox & Friends for a half-hour rant earlier in the day.

I have been having pleasant flashes about avoiding news and sticking to my quiet efforts at a literary life in the mountain foothills above the Middle Rio Grande. I give up a search of my bookshelves for “Bullet in the Brain” and Cowboy lands in my lap with a toy just as I find the Wolff story on the internet, thanks to The New Yorker. I finish the story just as AC360 leads with Trump.

The Fox & Friends clip is hilarious — or scary — because the Ken and Barbie crew can’t get the president of the United States to shut up. AC360 then breaks in — for real — with live coverage from Korea because Kim Jong-un and President Moon Jae-in are right now shaking hands and Kim Jong-un becomes the first North Korean leader to cross the DMZ and set foot in South Korea — a standoff that has persisted since at least 1950, the year after I was born. Far out. I am watching it on TV. It also occurs to me that the 34-year-old Kim Jong-un is maybe scooping Trump on the peacemaking front. In other news, Bill Cosby is convicted of sexual assault.

I get up to walk around and my one and only acid trip trickles into my mind from March 31, 1968, just over 50 years ago — a night that the anti-war movement seemed to triumph and LBJ blew our minds by admitting there was “division in the American house” and announcing he would not run for a second term.

My painter friend and acid-trip guide Jim and I watch LBJ on the TV in his rented room somewhere in Marin County. This doesn’t end the war or the draft, but we celebrate the night’s developments by dropping my first-ever LSD and hitchhiking across the Golden Gate to the city and then back, sparks still flying, to wander over Mt. Tam. The acid hits just as we enter what is now known as the Robin Williams Tunnel above Sausalito.

Once was enough with the LSD silliness, and all other mind-altering substances are history, too. No more TV tonight either or I’ll I be dreaming of Fox news mannequins lined up on couch listening to a whacked-out president. I take my days and nights straight now. I think of friends who served in Vietnam; war resisters and the anti-war movement; my brother and friends who served in Korea. I think of turning points in time, sitting in the dark, tripping on the wind.

Winter company

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February 23, 2018

This winter-coated young coyote, who along with a mate or sibling has been a familiar sight in the neighborhood, seemed to question MY presence the other morning

A great horned owl perched on a fence post just before dark, with snow starting to blow, and hooted for a mate.

Antennae warming.

Nuthatch and ice crystals.

Watch out.

Flicker in residence.

Downjacket junco.

Ineffectively camouflaged shoe thief.

A junco, second from left, shared a juniper Feb. 22 with mountain bluebirds, all soaking up some sun after a morning snow.

Mountain bluebird, cedar waxwings and briefly snowy Redondo Peak across the river.

Fourteen cedar waxwings on Feb. 22. I’ve read they don’t nest here and suspect they were looking for juniper berries while passing through. Trouble is, few berries to be had around here this drought-stricken winter.

Cowboy studies shod hoof prints — somewhat rare in “wild horse” country — amid pipeline inspector ATV tracks.

New house going up on the edge of public land, overlooking it all. Wonder what my neighbors down the hill thought when my house was the first to go up above theirs, just to the north of the public land, 26 years ago.

Loving Quasimodo: A newspaper story (from 2018)

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February 18, 2018

Daily newspapers are the Quasimodos of public discourse — imperfect outcasts in smudged clothes, big-hearted bell ringers heaved in the dust, whipped in the town plaza but missed when not heard.

Maybe they should survive just because they are so goofy. They search the horizon for new business models while really knowing no other way of living than to publish each day — still armed with 15th Century technology while dragged deeper into the digital revolution.

Newspaper people do not call their product a “daily miracle” for nothing.

Exhausted but awed, they lurch off to modest homes after big steel rollers have pressed ink, sweat and tears onto pulpy paper, after Rube Goldbergish machines, like roller coasters with clothes pins, race still damp editions through hangar-like buildings to gas-guzzling trucks outside — and all of this after the production and circulation people have demanded laggardly newsroom types give them 12 hours lead time to get the “news” to driveways, doorsteps and easily pilfered racks, standing bare-chested on the corner.

There’s always plenty of kicking and screaming in the process: Editors and reporters are as opinionated as anyone else but mostly set out to do a fair job; newsroom managers wonder how to keep their engines running on rationed fuel; wealthy owners employ bleeding-hearts to report on what’s wrong with the world. They are ragtag outfits full of civic purpose and fear of lagging sales.

When they’re really in trouble, these Quasimodos of current events ring the bell of constitutional protection. The daily reality is — as anyone would know if they’d been near newsroom phones on a day when a comic strip, the crossword or Dear Abby was dropped — accountability is just a typo away. This is to say nothing of a missing sports score or an offensive editorial cartoon.

I am not here to defend errors, bad judgments or political bents, but there usually are at least two sides to any Quasimodo beating story. Newspaper readers, it seems, often are as imperfect as the people who put the papers out.

Old-time editors used to bark, “Whadda they want for a nickel” and “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Professionally, and in the movies, things have gotten a lot more high-minded: “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight” and “The Post” have replaced “The Front Page” and “Ace in the Hole.”

But it’s still a business where headlines trigger shots from the hip and last paragraphs are a reporter’s vanity. The rules are largely unwritten — kind of a sacred trust among those inside — but readers who took a journalism course in college, or had a bad cup of coffee in the morning, take it upon themselves daily to call in and explain how things should be done.

Come on, do we really not know this? Do rich people buy newspapers to exert influence or just to enjoy the unruly people they hire to put them together?

These days, the political biases of newspaper hierarchies are at least equaled by reader demands for conformity with their own views. But even moldering and bruised, newspapers are still the best apples in the bin.

Young reporters are warned, “You can’t eat a byline,” but they do. They stay up at night, reveling in the heroics of public-minded but thankless life, going out for stories again the next day, heedless of commercial interests and their employer’s editorial bent, telling those college-educated journalism experts, who call to complain every day, who’s lying, cheating and stealing them blind.

Angry readers cancel their subscriptions, then wonder what the city council did last night.

Halfpipe journalism

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February 13, 2018

I try to keep up, but I am struggling with the lingo in snowboarding and journalism.

I am not going to gripe that my first skis were solid wood, that “bumps” used to be moguls or that “halfpipe” makes me think of “Don’t Bogart that joint.”

But I am having trouble this Winter Olympics with excited snowboarding announcers using terms such as “off-axis backside rodeo,” “method air,” “front side Alley Oop” and “air-to-fakie.” I think I get “verticality,” but am still stumped by “heavy widers.”

Nor will I dwell on my newspaper career starting when “journalism” was a word more often associated with “school” than putting out a daily paper. I was still tending bar when my crusty first editor finally softened on my periodic employment requests and asked, “You still interested in the newspaper business?”

Practitioners in my early days smoked, cursed and criticized co-workers and competition alike. The wilder ones showed their regard for readers and co-workers by throwing telephone receivers into trash cans, sticking them in their crotches during particularly annoying calls and heaving an occasional typewriter. I’ve heard tell of newsmen in Santa Fe setting a self-important “colleague’s” copy on fire while still in his teletype. But all this is nothing compared to autocratic editors impaling your polished prose on a treacherous device known as a “spike.” Spike was both a noun and a verb, but it meant DOA in either form.

A story was a story and a brief was a brief. With deadlines looming and backshops waiting, you were told to write in numbers of words or “takes” to the length of the “hole.” There were “brights,” “features,” “Sunday stories.” I was assigned in my second year as a young reporter to do a “writing job” on a Bicentennial event without further instruction. With time and space often at issue, the appropriate form might be determined by an unsentimental editors wielding a thick pencils, giant scissors and sloppy glue pots.

I am not particularly proud of this history, but I still do a double take when I hear newspaper people utter words such as “colleague,” “longform” and “nuance.”

And I will tune in to the Olympics again tonight to see if Shaun White can pull off another “giant backside double McTwist.”

Strange times

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February 1, 2018

People I used to work with will get a kick out of this: I dreamed I lost my voice in the newsroom.

Mid-sentence. Looking down a row of desks at younger reporters and editors before my retirement, questioning without being asked a crowd-count methodology at a political event. Despite some darting of the eyes, they were kind enough that they did not argue with the aging pedant, but they probably had to restrain their glee when his ponderous observations were cut short.

I woke with a start. Not a nightmare, but disturbing.

I got up to take pictures of the dawn, the morning after the great super blue blood moon, or whatever it was. I was glad to see the beginning of a new day, but somehow it seemed almost as strange as watching a fake-reality show host with elaborately combed hair applaud himself throughout a State of the Union address two nights before. Like the top of the president’s head, all sunrises and sunsets seem more wildly colored now. And I get the willies when I see Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan all together, scary members of a weird club.

My state of my mind had been uneasy since a lovely woman visitor, who I probably wanted to impress with my outdoor vigor, observed that I had been “wheezing” on a short walk in the hills. I started to imagine myself as a wheezer and it made me also think geezer.

I already had been feeling guilty about firing off email notes to people I used to work with about careless online headlines, often on Twitter. I try to be supportive of former co-workers, although an editor friend about my age laughed at me the only time I used the word “collegial” out loud in the newsroom. I now I read the papers online and I admit to short-tempered thoughts when I see a headline written by someone I imagine being oblivious to the rules and logic barked at me by the snarling copy editors who reluctantly helped instruct me — people who called themselves “rim dogs” at the last place I worked.

Then, there’s been this climate change business. I remember whiz kids in the newsroom dismissing my anecdotal evidence about snakes coming out earlier and staying later and heavy coats left in the closet. I was often an annoying example of what-I-saw-on-my-way-to-work syndrome, my mundane, short-term observations maybe delaying serious reporting. Even so, in retirement now, I feel guilty about enjoying sunshine and warmth on mid-winter walks through grassless hills.

I’m just saying this aging business is all a little confusing.

I have had two recent epiphanies, however.

I realized after the last two mornings why my young dog, Cowboy, stayed in bed while I marched outdoors with my iPhone: He waits until the sun comes up to warm him: otherwise, this drugstore heeler, stays put on the Ralph Lauren blanket on the bed.

I also realized something about my struggle with reading and writing fiction. I don’t know whether it’s the digital revolution, personal evolution or just my exasperation with Devin Nunes, but I am impatient for facts.

I am getting used to being dismissed and ignored. But thoughts of a famous Joe Friday parody — “Just the facts, ma’am” — global warming and Donald Trump are complicating my progression to age 69.

Stable genius

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January 6, 2018

The day began normally enough, with my blue heeler Cowboy hauling a chunk of firewood through the aluminum dog door for reasons only he would know, clattering as he came. A woodpecker or jay, hungry or angry or both, attacked the roof above my bed and ensured my awakening. My awareness cranked up when nine wild horses, looking for breakfast, clomped by my window as I sat down at my desk with my first cup of coffee. But when the president of the United States called himself “a very stable genius” on Twitter, I started to get nervous.

Seeing a giant horse’s ass in your window first thing in the morning can be disconcerting, especially if it has a crazy paint job. And, for me, it led to a daytime nightmare of being trapped at Camp David for a weekend presidential retreat.

First, I imagined a bunch of Cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders, leery of meeting privately at a remote location with a very stable genius, urgently waving to Ubers called to the Camp David gates. Then I remembered they all have limos and toned down the image to frightened VIPs throwing off bathrobes with huge presidential logos, penning fake excuses to avoid the scheduled meetings with the commander in chief and slipping out quietly to their hastily summoned cars.

The escapees were slowed since the president doesn’t trust anyone around him to have access to personal cell phones. He had his own phone, of course, since he is “like really smart” and “went to the best colleges, or college.” The sparsely attended first session at Camp David was delayed in part by the president remaining alone in his cabin in the morning, consuming McDonald’s and Fake News while tweeting about haters, Hillary and like his really huge IQ. The phoneless Cabinet-types, seeing reports of the tweets on satellite TV in their own cabins (which, unlike the president’s, had been spared the addition of gilded Corinthian columns), had to ask staffers to slip handwritten getaway notes to security teams and chauffeurs.

The Guardian reported this morning that, “The president will strive to steady the ship when he holds talks with the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, at the rustic Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain this weekend.”

After the morning’s presidential tweeting, I am guessing that members of the Cabinet and Congress were thinking about lifeboats, despite being landlocked in the Maryland high country.

I really don’t have much faith in the Cabinet or the GOP-led Congress to do the right thing.

But in Robert Mueller, I trust.

Cowboy says, “30.”

Every day

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January 1, 2018

Making a surprised leap halfway to the indoor plumbing in the pre-dawn darkness of 2018 was not the thoughtful way I planned to begin the new year.

Who knew that Cowboy’s new Christmas squeaky toy — thanks to his 15-year-old friend, Sophia — lay in wait? Who could see that buck-toothed squirrel, or beaver, or whatever it is, grinning up at me from the bedroom floor?

Fortunately, stepping on the beaver-squirrel in the dark was not my only experience this morning, although my wakening epiphany — involving dubious dietary choices — was just as mundane.

I have not been able to say “merry” this holiday season after learning of tragedies befalling others.

But I awoke yesterday grateful for my own health, realizing as I stirred in bed that I was breathing easy, despite cancer treatment at the start of 2015 and a damaged left lung.

Today, a shakier start. What was the bubbling, acidic feeling down my throat? I speculated about heart disease but righted myself quickly, realizing it was almost certainly successive meals involving tomatoes — consumed, I thought, as a smart alternative to a week of homemade posole.

Driving home last week with good news about my latest CT scan, but remembering that I more than once have heard the erratic mutations of cells called a crapshoot, my mind settled on a new resolve for the coming year: Keep a firm grip on every day.

I did not anticipate the ramifications of tomatoes, nor the lurkings of beaver-squirrels.

But as I lay in bed this morning, trying to think down the tomatoes and seeing the sun lighten the trees, I remembered to focus on what’s at hand.

Then, with a squeak and a leap, I soared into the new year.

Happy holidays from your odd uncle

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December 22, 2017

I decided this Christmas 2017 to send the distant young ones cash instead of the gifts that first come to mind: slingshots, knives and warm clothing — clothing that despite my best intentions probably would instill childhood nightmares.

I will dole out the money in sustainable amounts since I hope to live to be a possibly nutty but certainly benign uncle at age 92. I am done wracking my brain for what inevitably are dumb gift ideas for people nearly 60 years younger.

I enjoyed choosing books for a while, partly because I loved studying and sharing the illustrations. Of course, my young friends are growing, too, and I’m afraid my book selections might have gotten a little ho-hum.

I still study the New York Times best-children’s-books-of-the-year list. I have fond memories of the year I selected “city dog, country frog,” giving it a thorough going-over before sending it on to the kids. I have since bought a copy for myself.

But does anyone read “Black Beauty” or Homer Price anymore? Nephew Will was deep into Harry Potter the last time he was here. I think niece Nancy may already reading in French. I’m sure nephew Tom has long outgrown my recollections of his toy-train interests.

These are the dilemmas of holiday shopping for me. I think first of slingshots and knives and practical winter wear because they are gifts that stand out in my own memories of Christmases past.

I remember my parents’ big outlay years in the mid-1950s: two first bicycles and a tricycle for three young brothers; our first television set, awaiting us Christmas morning with a flickering Dave Garroway on the black-and-white screen.

I remember the shared Erector Set and Lincoln Logs. There was the handsome but crude practicality of the red flannel-lined jean jacket with sleeves four inches too long for growing room.

I always think first of the more exciting and possibly mischievous grandfather-gifts of dandy pocket knives and frighteningly sturdy Wham-O slingshots with BB ammunition.

It is true that I remember my life as a new kid in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1956 as a series of rock fights. I do not know if my grandfather provided the Wham-O as an item of self-defense. But I loved the thing, and still can remember the feel of its thick oak stock, although I thank God that I never aimed it anything on two or four legs, at least successfully.

I know my 11-year-old nephew, Will, took his first deer with a rifle and his dad, Matt, just a couple of months ago. And, since they are a respectful hunting and food-growing family, I am proud that he accomplished this at such a young age.

But, when it comes to my own Christmas list, I’m second-guessing my tendencies toward corny books, dangerous implements and dorky outerwear.

Billy the Kid: Tennis, anyone?

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November 22, 2017

Okay, so even the New York Times published a story about another possible photo of New Mexico’s most over-appreciated celebrity, Billy the Kid, but I’m still waiting for the shot of him and other Lincoln County gunmen in tennis whites.

The value of the latest tintype may go sky-high because experts say the photo includes Pat Garrett, the Kid’s eventual killer. Billy has been identified in part by the size of his Adam’s apple.

Provided to The Associated Press and New York Times by owner.

As for my continuing research on 19th Century New Mexico outlaws and lawn sports, you will recall that the last famous Kid photo is said to show Billy and the Regulators playing croquet in Lincoln County in 1878. This might not be surprising given that the gang had recently been employed by Englishman John Tunstall, a rancher and merchant who was the first of many to die that year as the result of Lincoln County commerce.

Meanwhile, lawn sports were in a kind of ruthless transition.

In the croquet photo, Billy was dressed in a natty sweater, one that might have gotten him into the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club had it not been for his dusty boots, scroungy pants and cockeyed hat. To say nothing of the extra balls apparently stuffed in the sweater pockets and a firearm possibly concealed behind his back. And in the new photo, likely taken after the outlaws-playing-croquet exclusive was shot in 1878, Billy, second row and second from the right, has changed hats and is wearing what might be construed as a precursor to the tennis sombrero.

From Kagin’s, Inc., as shown in numerous publications.

Billy and his territorial New Mexico buddies obviously were keen on style and trends of the fast-changing world of the 1800s, as evidenced by their early embrace of croquet. But as Wikipedia notes about tastes in England: “By the late 1870s … croquet had been eclipsed by another fashionable game, tennis … ”

One can only assume that New Mexico noses soon would be sniffing at croquet, too. And so I await a tennis-era portrait of the Lincoln County Bushwhacking and Lawn Sports Club.

As for the faded photo of the lone cowboy below, it is mine and I have begun to wonder if it might be among those exceedingly rare and valuable photos of Billy the Kid. I cannot, however, see the size of the suspect’s Adam’s apple.

More in Blundering History on dreamranch: Did Billy the Kid cheat at croquet?, Billy the Kid and croquet in New Mexico. Part II, Silly hats, Billy the Kid at the Desert Inn

Essays

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October 20, 2017

from 2017

I was about to let loose with my latest personal essay when I encountered this buzzkill in The New Yorker: “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.”

My literary muse Cooper, deep in thought, or maybe not.

I know I shouldn’t let my New Yorker reading pile up. I had heard rumblings of the essay crisis even before the May 2017 New Yorker piece by Jia Tolentino. And Tolentino’s piece led me to another personal essay critique, titled “First-Person Industrial Complex” by Laura Bennett in 2015. Bennett’s piece in turn led me to an essay written in 1905 by Virginia Woolf, “The Decay of Essay Writing.”

But I don’t want to think about my reading life without E.B. White and Calvin Trillin. Lately I’ve been enjoying Charles D’Ambrosio and his collection called “Loitering.” These are a few of my favorites. Many of their efforts you could call personal essays.

I discovered D’Ambrosio because he wrote an essay about Richard Hugo’s great poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” which I learned of through my sister, Hope, who lives in Montana. E.B. White always seemed to be around the house when I was growing up and he has remained in mine. Calvin Trillin is a byline I discovered in the New Yorker decades ago and is an essayist I return to often, especially when I’m hungry or taking Santa Fe too seriously.

I admit that I was vaguely aware of the essay epidemic while nicked by the fever myself. The form seems to come to me naturally. It’s partly the easy path of the first person “I.”

As E.B. White explained:

“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new ‘attempt,’ differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”