Snow on the ground and Three Sisters’ Kicking Horse coffee in the tank. OK, 2015, I’m ready. 
Snow on the ground and Three Sisters’ Kicking Horse coffee in the tank. OK, 2015, I’m ready.
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 I shouldn’t point fingers though; I probably have some hugely outdated component on my iPhone, like the Bluetooth button being switched to “Two tins cans linked by string.”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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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
I’m in trouble when it comes to writing a novel. Big trouble. And I’ve known for a long time.
In this moment of confession, I admit things haven’t gone much farther than that. And these weren’t deep thoughts to begin with. Murder mysteries don’t work well for me anyway: I’ve always questioned why you have to kill someone off to sell a story. I love the Inspector Lewis series on BBC and the Swedish version of “Wallander,” but you really have to wonder about the homicide rates in Oxford, England, and Ystad, Sweden.
I’ve thought of a couple of people for the ranch hand story, but my thinking about the main character — the ranch hand’s boss — has not progressed beyond a scene in San Francisco involving lunch at the Tadich Grill.
As a practical matter, the thinker-upper of this scenario, yours truly, is 65 now and still at the table at Tadich’s, savoring the atmosphere and drifting off into a bowl of crab cioppino instead of a coherent story line.
I think I have a touch for atmospherics, but atmospherics only get you so far. Things go poof beyond that. I know that I am chronically undisciplined and for decades have not been able to make my brain form a plot.
This obviously is a big literary shortcoming.
Occasionally, I rebel against my fears. I like the declaration, “The novel is dead.” It suggest to me that I can, with a clear conscience, give up trying to write one.
Once upon a time, I believed my life’s mission was writing “the great American novel.” But with the writing now on the wall on that score, I have been trying to assure myself that my future lies in other forms.
I can handle an essay, even if it is mostly because I like to hear myself talk. I have written short stories and, being an airhead anyway, like the fact that it seems okay in works published by others to require readers to fill in the blanks.
I’ve been trying to inspire myself by going back and reading humorists like Thurber, but I am still too aware of the the 1950s trend that short stories have to be about middle-aged wounds, dysfunction, alcoholism and financially scraping by.
I have a life-long affection for poetry but I am not educated in it and, although I wrote poems through my teens and early 20s, I really don’t want to start all over again. I am content to enjoy the mastery of others.
On the story-telling score, I did hear a great line once from an old horseman and trail guide. It was the real deal and lodged itself in my mind as a kind of punchline or hook. It’s still there.
I can still hear the old packer, suspicious and wondering aloud about a pack train of horses he’d seen leaving the neighboring ranch, heading up into the mountains, panniers draped over all.
“They went in empty and came back full,” he said.
The mystery is still with me, but I haven’t been able to solve it. The conundrum starts with the conventional wisdom that you ordinarily pack into the mountains with your pack boxes or panniers full and, after eating all the grub, return with them empty except for the camp gear you had to haul in.
Maybe the mysterious packers were just cleaning out a fall hunting camp, bringing gear left in the high country over the season back to the main ranch. If they were hunting and were bringing back meat, there would be exterior evidence.
I don’t know. My thoughts about the contents of the returning panniers have usually turned to drugs or cash. But then I lose interest.
And I am as bored with drug-running tales as I am with movies about snipers and good-guy assassins.
dream ranch 