dreamranch

A hundred decisions during my 65 years led to me stay in New Mexico. But it started with blue sky, red earth and the brush of the wind through the piñons.

I first lived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, after a Norman Rockwell start in central Ohio. Then it was a brief stay in stolid Midwest suburbia before I ended up in Santa Fe.

I remember the drive up La Bajada. I was about 10. I saw the red dirt as we climbed toward Santa Fe. Out of the car, I saw the blue sky, heard the waft of the wind in the short trees. We topped the hill and I saw the mountains with that aspen-covered burn scar on the southwest face. I felt home.

I left again and came back. I stayed because of the sky. Those Taos and Santa Fe painters knew something when they talked about the light. I decided time and time again against going to a bigger city for a bigger career. The experience of a friend being interviewed for a job at the New York Times — “Why did you spend so much time in New Mexico?” the interviewer reportedly asked — burned in my brain. But I also recalled the parting words of a New York Post reporter as he left our New Mexican newsroom after a Los Alamos-threatening fire in the Jemez Mountains in 1977. He had borrowed a typewriter and a phone to file. He looked back over his shoulder as he walked out of the newsroom to return to New York.

“You guys don’t know how good you’ve got it,” he said.

I also have discovered that you could search worldwide for companions but that they would not surpass those right where you are. I have always been a slow learner. And I am glad I have finally learned that I am a very fortunate man for those who surround me now.

Still kicking

no comments

January 1, 2015

Snow on the ground and Three Sisters’ Kicking Horse coffee in the tank. OK, 2015, I’m ready.

Editing from home, 2015

no comments

January 1, 2015

Rang in the new year with maddening work computer problems at home on a midnight governor swearing-in story that needed to go online.

Fortunately, Journalistos Steve Williams and Rob Browman were on the ball and pitched in to bail me out on the posting of a story our bosses really wanted to get on the web as close to midnight as possible.

Actually, I had fallen asleep in my living room two hours before Capitol reporter Dan Boyd was to post the midnight story to the web. His cell phone call had not awakened me. Departing politics reporter Jim Monteleone had been trying at the office earlier to get Willie Nelson’s “Blue Skies” set as my ringtone, but somehow I ended up with a blackout on all alerts. I shouldn’t point fingers though; I probably have some hugely outdated component on my iPhone, like the Bluetooth button being switched to “Two tins cans linked by string.”

We had planned elaborately for the coverage of inaugural events and the posting of the midnight sweaking in. But as the late Gov. Bruce King once contorted: “The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go aft.”

Heard the comedian Robert Klein say on Letterman recently that, “Life is work.” I think he meant your career is your life, especially for a bachelor like me, even though I continue to dream of retirement and writing freedom.

At any rate, worrying about my aging body and brain, I took the anchovy cure after getting home at about 9 p.m., loading tinned anchovies on three pieces of forbidden, reheated pizza purchased at the Bernalillo Pizza Hut the night before. (Coronado once ate there). The immediate effect was to knock me out in my chair until the old newspaper person’s “I screwed up something” alarm went off in my head at 12:34 a.m., 34 minutes after the swearing in began.

By the way, congratulations on a new term, Governor Susana Martinez. Fortunately already on the job as I scrambled to catch up were Boyd, Browman and the hard-working but eternally unthanked Journal design and copy desks, down to just a few people on New Year’s Eve. (Thanks Leah, Ruth and Robin).

So, I’m slightly hopped up on computer-problem adrenaline, anchovies and the half a cup of black coffee I treated myself to with a piece of peach pie left over from Christmas.

And Cooper, who’s only had his usual — hold the anchovies — is wondering what the hell we’re doing up at 3 in the morning.

Two weeks later, I would get a lung cancer diagnosis.

Breakfast is served

no comments

December 28, 2014

I don’t ring a bell or shout at morning mealtime around here. I just say, “Breakfast is served.”

The only other diner in the place, other than I, is the animal shelter refugee Cooper, who took up residence here almost nine years ago. He apparently has decided I am a pretty good butler.

He trots promptly to his dog dish in my office as soon as I make the announcement, but often not before I have had to endure the pleading look that asks, “You aren’t going to feed me this morning?” I provide his meals at regular intervals — and, by my count, I have served him breakfast several thousand times — but if I am minutes off the clock, his clock, I get the look.

He maybe understands the rule that we have to wait for my pot of coffee to finish brewing before he gets his morning meal. But he still can’t avoid the panicked look if I dawdle.

All is well this morning. As always, I carried his silver dish and my red cup to the office at the same time. He, as usual, wolfed down his his food before I had savored my second sip of French roast. But we are off to a good start once again.

Susan

no comments

December 26, 2014

Gotta find another picture of my friend Susan, one where she isn’t recuperating from a bunch of broken bones after a rare rock climbing fall or hidden under whitewater in Souse Hole on the Rio Grande, although this one with her sister Cathy, right, is pretty cute. Susan, of course, has her Home Depot tool apron strapped to her walker — just to get a few things done around the house while waiting for broken pelvis and ribs to heal — even if Cathy had come to help.

Susan is a professional outdoorswoman and she tackles obstacles as they come, including walking miles under her own power to the trailhead after the rock climbing accident.

“Wild women don’t get the blues,” says the bumper sticker taped to the stove in the home she built herself, long before mine was built a couple of ridges away.

Looking healthier than ever, Susan came over for breakfast Christmas morning and I had a fine time visiting with her in front of the fire. I just hope she survived the cinnamon roll after the huevos rancheros.

Actually, we are related, in a way. We are the same age and her father and my mother married — second time for each — sometime in the 1960s. But she and I never met until my mother died in Montana in 1979. Odd start to becoming friends, but that’s the turn our parents took: unconventional all the way.

Snow king

no comments

December 26, 2014

I’m a little under the weather but feel worse because I can’t stay out in the snow today as long as Cooper would like. Next to food, there may be nothing he likes better. We’ve only got an inch on the ground, but that’s still enough to roll in. This photo is from our last big snow, way back in 2006. Cooper had a little trouble getting around in it, but it was still swell.

Sadie and Molly

no comments

December 26, 2014

Sadie, above, was the last of a litter from a St. Bernard mother to be taken from the East Side Animal Shelter. She was too scared to leave the cage and I had to crawl in to get her. She quickly adjusted to life in Placitas, however, soon becoming the most fun-loving pup I’ve ever had.

Molly, right, was full grown when she came to us from Animal Humane. She needed a little surgery but it went well and confirmed that she was made entirely of brown sugar.

Brother Rob

no comments

December 26, 2014

My golly, brother, you have been gone almost 25 years, way too long and way too early at the same time. Believe me, man, I miss you. I always remember your birthday on Dec. 22, although I am four days late writing about it now.

You would have been 61 this year.

This photo of you at home near Quincy, in the Sierra Nevada, seemed to catch you at a happiest moment: Sharp ax, plenty of firewood, warm shirt, coffee, cigarette. I know you were still missing some crucial stuff, but these things seemed to keep you going.

Happy days. Rob, Pat and John, from left. The year we got bicycles and a television set. Trooped down the stairs Christmas morning to find Dave Garroway in the living room.We had just moved to suburban Upper Arlington, Ohio, from Las Vegas, New Mexico. Always the conformist, I was trying to look like an Ohio guy. Pat and Rob still looked like Las Vegas kids, minus lumps in the head from flying rocks — rock fights seeming to be one of the favorite pastimes of Las Vegas youth in the early 1950s. Don’t know what sign old sneaky Pat was flashing there over Rob’s shoulder. And not sure this if this is before or after Rob ran his arm through the washing machine wringer. I believe the wardrobes, except for boots, were provided by older cousins Tom and Bill. Dad was still giving us those darn crew cuts.

Soul dog

no comments

December 20, 2014

This is Mus, short for Mustafa, drying off many years ago after a bath in the Mora River. He was a loving dog but he also enjoyed rolling in cow pies. On mountain trips, he got thrown in the creek a lot but seemed to like that, too.

He was my father and stepmother’s dog and they called him an Agua Fria breed because he was a stray found in the south of Santa Fe. He often accompanied me on hiking and camping trips.

He was my Christmas-time pal on a circumnavigation of Bandelier National Monument in 1972 or so. He slipped and thunked his chest on an icy log on Upper Frijoles Creek, slept with me in the tent in Capulin Canyon on a very cold Christmas Eve and chased a wild burro at me down a narrow trail in Alamo Canyon on a snowy Christmas Day. To the best of my knowledge, this was all before the dog restrictions in the Bandelier backcountry. I think I might even have had a backcountry permit. At any rate, we saw no one else but the feral burros for several days.

Mus was a great and loyal companion. We pretty much enjoyed the same things, except for the cow pies.

Dear old Dad

no comments

December 18, 2014

Happy birthday, Dad. You would have been 86 today. Scanned this happy photograph of you and Pat and Mus walking down what I suspect is the Rito Valdez on the east side of Hamilton Mesa in 1970. As far as I know, you seldom were happier than when walking around the Pecos. And surely you loved Pat and Mus. By the way, you and Pat are near here, together in that favorite place, as promised. Phelps and Andrew and I made sure. John