The Santa Fe Review

The day before the city elections, a reader who is a realtor with Sotheby’s told me what she thought about my final dispatch in last month’s issue. “You’re right about one thing,” she said. “If enough people pull the lever for Mr. Coss, we will have more of the same.” She didn’t mean that as a good thing, but her words got me thinking: Would it really be so bad? As mayor, David Coss has done more than anyone at City Hall to support river restoration, and he was crucial in striking the deal to keep the College of Santa Fe, an important cultural resource, from closing. He has given dependable support to affordable housing and Santa Fe’s minimum wage — noble efforts to keep this place from becoming another Aspen.

Then I picked up the newspaper on election morning to see that he had received a last-minute $5,000 donation from Andrew and Sydney Davis, the immeasurably wealthy couple who maneuvered around Santa Fe’s land use laws to build their castle in the sky,  a sad monument to the city’s failure to protect its scenic ridgetops.

How far Mr. Coss has strayed from his roots. Five years ago when the Davises wanted to close off and gate the public street that leads to the mansion — the project was just getting under way — Mr. Coss, who was then a city councilor, showed no sympathy: “I think they’ve basically manipulated the escarpment ordinance to build a trophy home that the rest of us have to look at,” he told the New Mexican. A few months later the Davises sought revenge by contributing $10,000 to David Schutz, the land developer who was opposing Mr. Coss in the 2006 mayoral election. Now the Davises are on board the Coss bandwagon, as is Mr. Schutz himself, who also donated to the mayor’s reelection.

The same thing, of course, happened with Garrett Thornburg. As a councilor Mr. Coss questioned Mr. Thornburg’s plans to plop down his corporate “campus” in the middle of a northside neighborhood. Mr. Thornburg retaliated by supporting Mr. Schutz. But when it came time to shell out for the 2010 campaign, he too had become a believer, another of Mr. Coss’s influential new friends.

I guess you can call that building bridges or loving thy enemy. But inside the voting booth, it didn’t sit right with me. I pulled the lever (o.k., darkened the oval — I miss the old voting machines) for Miguel Chavez, knowing Mr. Coss would go on to win by a landslide. I still think he is the best mayor Santa Fe has had in awhile. The bar was set pretty low. What he lacks and maybe still can gain is a vision, something bolder than his slogan un lugar para todos, or, roughly translated, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Returning to Santa Fe on New Year’s Eve, I was curious to see if there had been any snow over the Christmas holiday. The night before our departure for St. Thomas, a few inches had fallen, enough to make for a slow, nerve-racking drive to the Albuquerque airport. But it was clear as we pulled back into the driveway that the week had been mostly dry. Amy Lewis, who operates the weather station at Seton Village, tells me that there was a grand total of 0.82 inches of snowmelt for the entire month of December — 2 1/2 times less than in December 2008. For the year she measured 13.74 inches of precipitation. (Please see the Ultimate Santa Fe Precipitation Chart.) At the Santa Fe airport the total for 2009 was only 10 inches, making it the driest year since 2004. So far in January there has been no new moisture at all.

Dry weather at least makes for good flying, and early last week Tom Blog took me up in his Cessna for a look at the town from about 1,000 feet. We headed up Cerrillos Road, passing over the wasteland that was the old Santa Fe Indian School. From there we headed northeast over Thornburg headquarters (I wanted to take in all my favorite sights) and circled over the villages of Chupadero and Rio en Medio. Flying back south over the foothills, we got a stunning view of the Santa Fe River all the way from the Canyon Road treatment plant past Nichols and McClure Reservoirs, stacked one above the other on the mountain. I had never seen both of them at once. Frozen and white with snow they shone among the pines — the source of 40 percent of Santa Fe’s drinking water.

Nichols and McClure Reservoirs

After pausing for a look at the Tom Ford mansion and what turned out to be my best photo of the day (warning: this is a 5.6 megabyte download), we headed west toward the Rio Grande, where the rest of the city’s water comes from. Construction was continuing at the new treatment plant on Caja del Rio Road, which will clean the water pumped up from the Buckman diversion dam.

Buckman Treatment Plant

We flew along the pipeline past Diablo Canyon and the Buckman well field to the Rio Grande, then followed the river north to where it meets the Chama. All of this territory, my favorite part of the world, seemed so compact and finite from the air. Before I knew it we were almost to Abiquiu Lake. We cut south past the black volcanic mesa called Cerro Pedrenal and ascended a few thousand feet higher for a flight over the Valles Caldera and Redondo Peak, then down the other side of the Jemez Mountains to Cochiti Dam. Back when I was finishing high school in Albuquerque, a corporation called Great Western Cities announced that by 1980 it would build a town next to Cochiti as big as Santa Fe. Thankfully it turned out to be a scam. I’d forgotten the story until just recently when Emlen Hall, the retired UNM law professor I mentioned in a previous post, sent me an article he wrote almost 30 years ago in The New Mexico Review.

The Santa Fe River, or at least the dry river bed, enters the Rio Grande just north of Cochiti, and as we headed back home I watched it until it disappeared inside the deep basalt canyon at La Bajada. Someday I’d like to hike that stretch, from there north to La Cienega. (How esoteric all this geography must sound to readers who don’t know northern New Mexico. Live here long enough and it’s like being indoctrinated into a cult with its own private language.)

Before we landed I spotted the river one last time, fat with discharge from the sewage treatment plant on Airport Road. We’d come full circle, seeing where water comes into the city and where it goes back out again.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Almost as soon as I entered the lobby of the Lensic on Saturday night, I could see that the audience was different from the usual symphony crowd. I spotted Geoffrey West, a physicist and theoretical biologist whose work I wrote about years ago in the New York Times, and Doyne Farmer, who appears in my book Fire in the Mind. There were other scientist friends like Joseph Traub, the Columbia University mathematician. Sandra Blakeslee, fellow science writer and cohost of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, was in the audience. And during intermission I nearly collided head-on with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobelist whose exploits I chronicled in Strange Beauty. I don’t think he has ever forgiven me. I felt for a few hours like I was living in a small town.

Science is as much a part of Santa Fe’s soul as music and art. With the Santa Fe Institute and the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra both turning 25 this year, they had come together to produce Voyages of Discovery in honor of Charles Darwin and Felix Mendelssohn, who happen to have been born 200 years ago.

While waiting for the show to begin, I talked for a minute with Cormac McCarthy, who once advised me that “a semi-colon is simply an excrescence similar to bird lime.” (He had been reading the manuscript of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments before it went to press.) He has also raised my suspicion of commas. I’d met him in the 1990s at a Santa Fe Institute dinner, and I remember his lamenting the lack of a really good biography of the quantum theorist Paul Dirac. (There is one now: The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo.)

Davis mansion and Santa Fe Institute

Symphony concerts customarily begin with board member and psychotherapist Penelope Penland, her hair radiant as electrified neon, thanking the evening’s underwriter — usually Garrett Thornburg or Eddie and Peaches Gilbert. This time it was Andrew and Sydney Davis. Earlier that day the New Mexican reported that the county had finally finished determining the value of their new home, which looms on a hilltop over the Santa Fe Institute: $20.4 million. County Tax Assessor Domingo Martinez says it’s probably the most expensive house in New Mexico. One can only hope so.

Other than the coincidence of their births, Darwin and Mendelssohn didn’t have much in common. But if you look hard enough you can find connections. Both men went on big boat trips and got very seasick. They came home and produced great works — Origin of the Species and the Scottish Symphony. Only the former is indispensable.

Between renditions of the composer’s work, the actor Jonathan Richards read letters from Darwin. Kirk Ellis, a documentary television producer, filled in for Mendelssohn. David Krakauer, a Santa Fe Institute researcher and impresario, alternated with the orchestra’s conductor, Steven Smith, in providing commentary. Whether or not this all congealed, it was a noble experiment and a good excuse for bringing two different Santa Fes under one roof.

It was snowing after the curtain calls, and music was booming from Evangelo’s across San Francisco Street. Back at home I searched the web for a list of other 1809 birthdays: Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kit Carson, Edgar Allen Poe. A century later in 1909 Wallace Stegner, Al Capp, Lionel Hampton, Malcolm Lowery, and Vivian Vance were born. Samuel Johnson arrived on earth in 1709 as did Jacques de Vaucanson, famous in some circles for inventing a mechanical duck, an early attempt at artificial life. Maybe they all could be squeezed somehow into a grand finale celebrating Santa Fe’s 400th —  and the human preoccupation with anniversaries that end in zeroes, or at least with a 5.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review