The Santa Fe Review

Last Sunday, a couple of friends and I drove up Hyde Park Road and, just before the Aspen Vista lookout, turned onto Forest Road 102. We were headed for Aspen Ranch, the trailhead for what I remembered as one of the most beautiful hikes in the Santa Fe mountains. The 13-mile loop leads to La Junta, “the junction,” a mountain meadow where the Rio Nambe and the Rio Capulin meet. Judging from the maps of the Pacheco Fire, the meadow is now toast, but I hoped to get close enough to see what had been spared by the flames.

Long ago Aspen Ranch was the site of a boys school. In his book, An Anthropology of Everyday Life, the late Ned Hall (better known to the world as Edward T. Hall) described a year he spent there. The land is now owned by Tesuque Pueblo, and when I used to go there, maybe a decade ago, there was a sign informing hikers of a $10 parking fee. Since there was never anyone monitoring the trailhead and no visible means of making payment, I would leave a check made out to the pueblo on my windshield. It was always there when I returned, so I would keep it in the glove compartment for a future visit.

This time it was not an issue. The entire ranch was cordoned off with barbed wire and locked gates marked with “No Trespassing” signs. During my long absence, the Forest Service had built a new trailhead on the public side of the gate and cut a detour around Tesuque’s land.

In Rio en Medio Canyon. Photo by Kerry Sherck

The trail is called the Borrego because sheepherders once used it to herd their flocks from Chimayo to Santa Fe for market. We followed it a short distance and then turned onto another trail that descends along the Rio en Medio all the way down the mountain. Most people know this trail from the bottom end — where it starts outside the village of Rio en Medio and climbs past several waterfalls. The canyon looked as lush and shady as ever — green meadows filled with wildflowers and an astonishing number of butterflies flocking to feed on the nectar of Black Eyed Susans. It was hard to believe that just over the ridge so much devastation lay.

I returned to the same area yesterday, staying this time on the Borrego Trail. More idyllic meadows, talls stands of pine and aspen — and suddenly the smell of 10,000 acres of burnt forest. There is a short stretch where the trail follows a power line service road and, at the top of a hill, peels off and heads down to the Rio Nambe. Standing there, I looked down on a hillside of badly burnt trees. Not far in the distance whole landscapes were reduced to gray moonscapes — the way so much of the Jemez looks now. A helicopter, hovering overhead, was dropping loads of straw on denuded mountainsides. The restoration effort was already under way.

A sign that had been posted at the edge of the burn area didn’t say, in so many words, that entry was prohibited. But it gave enough good reasons to stay out — falling limbs and trees, flash floods of ash and mud, burnt-out stump holes, fire maddened nests of hornets — that I almost turned back. Most of the destruction was below the trail (it had acted as a partial fire break) so I followed it a little farther. When I reached a spot where the trail had washed out, I decided to call it a day.

It was a relief to drive home through old familiar aspen groves. I told myself that this beauty now exists because fires, long ago, had cleared the pines, opening new niches in the ecosystem — that someday, decades from now, the ashen lands of the Pacheco Fire would be as beautiful. It was too much of a stretch for my imagination. All I could honestly feel was a terrible sense of loss.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Las Conchas Fire, June 26

Sunday evening I stood on the second-story portal of my house in Santa Fe and looked west toward Los Alamos where smoke billowed like a mushroom cloud from the Las Conchas fire. Hours later in the darkness, the glow of the flames was so bright it looked as though the sun had got stuck on its way below the horizon. I remembered the Cerro Grande fire, 11 years ago, and something I wrote for the Week in Review of the New York Times: Chaos Theory; Harness Fire? Mother Nature Begs to Differ. Reading it again after all these years, I see that my theme was the illusion of control.

Las Conchas, where the fire is said to have begun — the specifics have been maddeningly imprecise — is near the trailhead for the East Fork of the Jemez River, a cool, shady meadowland where two friends and I had gone hiking just the week before. We had planned to hike that day to Nambe Lake in the Sangre de Cristo mountains on the opposite side of Santa Fe. But the forest there had just been closed because another fire, called the Pacheco because it was mistakenly reported to have begun in Pacheco Canyon, was burning out of control. I can see its plume from the east side of my house. I feel surrounded.

Late in the afternoon the smoke from both fires filters the light and gives everything an eerie orange cast. Doomsday, it seems, would look like this. I try not to imagine what is happening now to so many of my favorite places: The high meadows of Rancho Viejo where the Rio Capulin flows on its way to meet the Nambe. The Upper Crossing of Frijoles Canyon, one of the only places in New Mexico where I’ve seen fireflies at night. All of that appears to be burning and there is nothing I, or really anyone, can do about it.

A neighbor, fearing fallout from the fire near Los Alamos, is flying with her child to Denver and what she feels instintively is safer ground. The odds of a radioactive release appear to be vanishingly small. It is probably more likely, God forbid, that her plane would crash. As with Cerro Grande the great threat is not from a nuclear reaction but a chemical one: oxidation. It starts as an innocent spark. Fueled by the trees we love and the air we breath it consumes mountainsides and memories.

Pacheco Fire, June 25

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

As The Santa Fe Review inches slowly toward blogdom, I am almost tempted to turn on the Comments feature. I received some wonderful responses to my last post. I’ll mention just a few. One reader remembered a night around 1970 when he lived on Hillside Street and the temperature dropped to 26 below. Gas pipes burst and people were without heat. Something like that is happening now in Española, Taos, and elsewhere in the state where gas pressure has dropped precipitously. Rosemary Romero, the city councilor for my district, wrote to say that her mother is driving in from Sombrillo because her house is without heat. We have been luckier so far in Santa Fe.

The account of my arctic Eastside walk reminded my friend Larry Calloway, legendary New Mexico journalist and editor in chief of the Crestone Conglomerate, of the time he worked with Richard Bradford (the author of Red Sky at Morning) and lived on Camino Don Miguel. (I didn’t mention in my post that parts of the movie were filmed there.):

Dick Bradford and I had adjoining desks at the NM Department of Development. We were both so poor, as I recall, that we carried our lunches. These were temp jobs writing tourist blurbs, thanks to a Republican governor (Cargo) who did not owe much to the usual hungry Democrats. One afternoon Dick took a call, listened for a long time, said quietly, “I am very glad to hear that,” and hung up. I asked him what the news was. He said in his emotionally flat, almost shy way: “My book is on the New York Times bestseller list.” And he walked out.

A couple of years later Tova and I began our ill fated marriage in a hovel rented from Bob Sinn on Camino Don Miguel. (It was not a friendly neighborhood in those days. Our welcoming included some guys bashing in the back window of our new Chevy pickup.) One afternoon agents of a film crew asked us to stay inside for a while. I looked out my study window and saw “John Boy” (Richard Thomas) waiting for his cue to run down the hill to Johnny’s Cash Market. The shot made it into “Red Sky at Morning.”

Sinn offerred to sell us the guest house for $17,000, but we did not think it was worth it. About ten years later at a juried art show, I saw a small watercolor of the front of the same crooked little house. The price tag was $10,000.

– Larry Calloway

George Johnson
talaya.net

At about 8:45 p.m. I looked at the thermometer I’d placed outside the window and saw that it was 12 degrees below zero. Such an extraordinary event shouldn’t go unexperienced so I put on my long johns and walked for a mile. I hadn’t worn them since the last time I went cross-country skiing at the old Johnson cabin 8,000 feet up in the Jemez mountains. That was with Nancy, the woman I was married to.

As I headed west on Camino San Acacio, each footstep squeaked against the snow, and I’d flare my nostrils feeling the sting from the ice crystals breaking away. I remembered a day like this in Minneapolis walking alone along the icy Mississippi, so cold and quiet it was like being on another planet.

Orion, my favorite constellation, loomed to the south over Reservoir Hill where Tom Ford soon will occupy his mansion. Who would have thought that someone could make infinite money from designing clothes? To his credit he had the architect site his new home, one of his homes, in a relatively unobtrusive way. It was dismaying when late last year a security fence with bright metal posts suddenly appeared, cutting diagonally across the piñon-covered hillside, a barrier against thieves and paparazzi. Mr. Ford’s builder, Doug McDowell, promises that the posts will be repainted to make the ugliness disappear. I’m sure that is his intention.

When I got to Camino Don Miguel, I followed it downhill toward Johnny’s Cash Store, the last of the old neighborhood groceries. It was almost 19 years ago, walking in the opposite direction, that I first saw San Acacio and knew I wanted to live there one day. Most of the Eastside is hunkered down at the level of the river, shady and protected. When you reach San Acacio the sun comes out and the sky cracks open. The colors explode.

As I entered the semi-secret passage to Martinez Lane, I felt as though I were walking in a remote village a century ago. I remembered those magical scenes in Red Sky at Morning and thought about how its author, Richard Bradford, lived just about a mile from me on Halona Street before he died not long ago. I probably could have met him if I tried.

My plan was to turn right at Acequia Madre and head toward home, but I didn’t feel like going back yet. I took a left instead. Acequia Madre (this is a note for my foreign readers) means “mother ditch,” the main irrigation canal for what once was farmland, and the small lots along its bank have become the most valuable real estate in town.

Acequia Madre to Camino del Monte Sol to Canyon Road . . . then past El Farol where mambo music vibrated through the door. I peeked in at the dancers and thought for a moment that it would be nice to be the kind of person who casually walks into a bar, buys a drink, meets new people. It is probably too late to change.

Rising almost vertically from Canyon Road, Camino Cerrito leads back uphill to San Acacio passing by the old playground for Cristo Rey Catholic School. It is closed now, the children gone, a consequence of gentrification. Gentrify. What a funny word: “to renovate and improve.” From the Old French genterise, “of gentle birth.” They swoop in gently from afar, gut old middle-class houses, turn neighborhood groceries into art galleries. Palace Grocery on East Alameda is for sale.

But I quickly forgot all that. These old streets bring back good memories. On “Keep Santa Fe Beautiful Day” we would walk along here picking up the beer cans and other trash that had accumulated during the year. Me, Nancy, Tom Turney (he was still the State Engineer), and Willard Lewis (world class raconteur, Republican, and zinfandel connoisseur). Once we delivered 250 pounds to the dump. It’s called a transfer station now.

Back home I opened up the casita and turned on a tap so it dripped very slowly. In parts of the universe like this where there is friction, even the tiniest motion produces heat, enough I hope to keep the pipes from freezing. It is midnight now and 14 below. At absolute zero all motion stops. But there is still 446 degrees to go.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Dear readers of The Santa Fe Review,

I have decided to take the plunge with a new blog (I still wince at that word) about my current project: “The Cancer Chronicles: Notes for a Book in Progress.”

I hope you will tune in.

santafereview.com/chronicle/

George Johnson
http://talaya.net

Today on the cover of the weekly science section of the New York Times, I have a story, Unearthing Prehistoric Tumors, about the antiquity of cancer, which has probably existed since the first multicellular creatures slithered on earth. Several people have asked what I have been doing while away from The Santa Fe Review. The Times article is a sample of what I will be writing about in a new book about the science of cancer to be published eventually by Knopf in the United States and Bodley Head in England. I will post updates on my progress along with (I hope) more communiques on life and politics in Santa Fe. So many things have been happening and I just haven’t had time nor will to write about them. The other reason for my absence is a divorce, unwanted and unexpected. It will take awhile for life to seem interesting again.

Almost two years ago I wrote about my aversion to blogging (please see My Anti-Blog). I was an early adopter of the Internet. Since the mid 1990s I have had my own Web site, coded entirely by hand, describing my books and providing biographical information and links to my newspaper and magazine stories. Why would I also want a blog? And why would I need Facebook? Anyone could find me with a Google search, and my email address is on my web site.

Gradually I am becoming less hardcore. I now have a mostly private Facebook page, which I use to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, and lately I have been thinking of starting a blog about some of the amazing things I have been discovering about cancer. This post is a way of sticking a toe in the water.

Merry Christmas and New Year.

George Johnson
http://talaya.net

Venice Beach, Thanksgiving, 2010

You might have thought from the flashing red and blue lights on the police cruisers cordoning off Canyon Road that there had been a toxic chemical spill. There must be a less obnoxious way to keep cars out of the neighborhood for the annual Christmas Eve farolito walk.

“Union Pro-tec-teeva — what’s that?” said a loud voice behind me as I rounded the corner of Acequia Madre and Camino del Monte Sol. “Must be some kinda union.” You could tell she didn’t consider that a good thing. I started to explain that La Union Protectiva de Santa Fe was a mutual support society, almost a century old, started by neighbors to help one another with burial costs. But the moment passed.

“Everything’s closed,” complained a young blonde walking up Canyon, like she was expecting a last-minute shopping opportunity.

To bypass the hordes of revelers — some texting Christmas greetings on their cellphones — I cut up Gormley Street to Acequia Madre. It was a little more peaceful, and the display at the school was as pretty as ever, disrupted only by a high-tech exhibitionist projecting tiny blue fiber-optic laser lights into the trees. Any other night it would have looked cool.

I was glad to arrive at the Plaza and find it all but deserted. I listened to my wife (now ex-wife) sing a solo (Handel’s “Let the Bright Seraphim”) at First Presbyterian then ducked out the backdoor before the religious part began. I warmed up at La Fonda’s Fiesta Lounge with a glass of wine and the Bill Hearne Trio. In the hotel lobby I spotted Colonel Hawthorne with his long, white beard regaling a couple of tourists with memories of Oppenheimer and Los Alamos and complaints about the financial crisis: “It’s not a credit shortage, it’s a cash shortage!” A genuine Santa Fe experience.

According to a column in yesterday’s Journal by Dan Mayfield, the farolito walk ended badly with the Santa Fe police making “a slow, honking, sirens-blaring, crowd-parting, lights-blazing show-of-force,” their crackling bullhorns ordering pedestrians off Canyon Road. Christmas Eve is all about crowd control.

Every year there are fewer farolitos. Most of the bonfires are lit by art galleries instead of neighbors, and there is a charge for hot cider. Maybe it is time to put an end to this over-produced “tradition” and see what springs up naturally to take its place.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Christmas truck, Camino don Miguel

Around sundown on December 24th, I was walking down Camino Don Miguel toward Acequia Madre hoping that when I rounded the corner I wouldn’t see the usual police cruiser parked catty-corner from Union Protectiva with its red and blue revolving lights wiping out the glow of the farolitos. I got my wish. To block off the area to traffic, the city was using one of its friendlier public safety cars and its blinking orange beacons were barely a distraction. Turning right on Camino del Monte Sol and heading toward Canyon Road I encountered a woman in a witch’s hat decorated with battery-powered flashing lights. Another postmodern Christmas Eve in Santa Fe.

It was better this time. Just two or three years ago one of the galleries set up a public address system and had a d.j. blasting out happy talk and Christmas carols. But the shoulder to shoulder crowd with its dogs and cellphones seemed as big and noisy as ever. The closest I came to the silent night I’d hoped for was when I walked down the cul-de-sac of San Antonio Street where it almost seemed like what I imagine old Santa Fe to be. Near Acequia Madre Elementary I watched a flying farolito rising like a Christmas star and wondered, as I do every year, why the city can’t work with PNM to turn off the streetlights, or why for that matter we have to have streetlights at all.

On my way back I stopped at the bonfire on Acequia Madre and Don Miguel where the commissioner of the ditch and his family were serenading the night with guitars. Now this finally felt neighborly. I spotted Councilor Heldmeyer among the revelers and she told me that earlier that day a man driving an enormous tractor-trailer rig had squeezed onto Canyon Road, breaking some tree branches, and parked on a sidewalk with a load of sculptures to sell to the Christmas Eve strollers. When a tow truck arrived to haul away the vehicle, the interloper became so incensed that he had to be handcuffed.

Returning home along Camino San Acacio, I felt like Charlie Brown wondering about the meaning of Christmas. The closest I suspect I’ll ever come to seeing an angel is a flying farolito, but even an agnostic can be moved by Linus’s reply.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

With September rushing to a close, it has become clear that, for reasons both personal and professional, I will not be able to keep up the schedule I established a year ago of monthly editions of The Santa Fe Review. I’m beginning a new book, probably the most difficult one I’ve attempted, which is tentatively scheduled for publication in 2012. That sounds like forever except to an author.

Beginning next month, this journal will appear in what has become the traditional blog format, with new posts, whenever the spirit strikes me, appearing on top with the previous ones scrolling below. The old monthly issues will still be online and available from the main page. I will also be recycling some of my older posts. (The Review started in 2004.) No matter how long you live in Santa Fe, there are some things that never change.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Nine years ago today I was sitting in my office wondering why I couldn’t reach the New York Times website when my wife came upstairs and told me the news. We turned on the television in time to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. For the next few hours it seemed possible that every plane that flew over was here to bomb Santa Fe or Los Alamos, or, later on, that every package delivered to the door addressed “George Johnson, New York Times” might contain anthrax.  We are each the center of our own little worlds.

Dinosaur Inn. Vernal, Utah

The day after the disaster an editor called from the Times and asked me to write a short essay, one of many that would appear in that Sunday’s Week in Review. The result, Orders of Magnitude, was about horror too deep to fathom. Ken Kesey captured the feeling in an email he sent to friends: “Everything was so clear that day, so unencumbered by theories and opinions, by thought, even. It just was.”

The mental gridwork had been shattered, and in the aftermath there were reasons for hope. Commentators talked about the end of irony, the end of ideology, the end of the superficiality and posturing that had led us into the political swamp. It seemed possible that the world could be different.

And then a few weeks later things were already settling back to the same depressing routine. Democrats and Republicans were fighting over the privatization of airport security. Violence had returned to TV. On the two-month anniversary I tried to restrain my disappointment when I wrote another piece for the Review, Double Bind:

Not knowing what to do with ourselves, we react to the
unprecedented with the same old scripts -- fly flags
from car antennas, wear ribbons on our lapels --while
wondering whether we should be aspiring higher, whether
normal is really good enough anymore. We look
everywhere for reassurance that the old life is
returning. But simultaneously comes the vague yearning
for some kind of fundamental change . . .

Last weekend, over the Labor Day holiday, I drove through northwestern Colorado to look at outcrops of a geological layer called the Morrsion Formation — striped, colorful bands of sandstone and mudstone that are a rich source of dinosaur bones. On a long, lonely stretch between the barely existent towns of Fruita and Rangely I entered an electromagnetic black hole: As the radio hissed with static I kept hitting the “seek” button, locking momentarily onto either NPR or Fox. Back and forth, back and forth. Two different Americas, two different realities, separate and immiscible.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review