The weather technicians say it is the start of the monsoon, but I still balk at the New Mexico use of the term. It works when I’m reading Joseph Conrad, but it seems out of place as I gaze at the Pajarito Plateau. Against the grain of my newspaper training, reluctantly using two words instead …
Dad used to joke about what he was reading in the waiting room when we were born. Titles I remember are Nausea and As I Lay Dying. This did no justice to his first wife and mother of his three sons, but it is a funny reflection on an earnest, hard-working Depression-era guy who came …
(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 …
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 …
— Above the Ute creeks confluence, Weminuche Wilderness, 1992. Your 64th birthday trip. Typical smart-ass son, I made you walk to some place I had only been to on horseback. No fish, but reading weather good. And it was good to share a tent on your last mountain trip.
I was inserting this below but wanted it to stand alone. I choke up every time I read it, thinking of the civil rights movement and my late father. And maybe newspapers, too. San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 1965 25,000 Cry ‘Freedom’” By Bob Robertson, Chronicle Correspondent, Montgomery, Ala. — More than 25,000 American Negroes …
dreamranch 