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A Quickie Note on Dogs

Recently I was in a locale back east full of groomed, pure bred dogs. Got me thinking about the mutts in my neck of the woods. For white honkey Four Corners, purebreds are disdained for pound puppies or, better yet, rez dogs. A rez dog is the ultimate anti-status dog, and therefore full of status. I'm not sure if it doesn' t smack of slumming it, a little. You know, rich kid goes west, buys a kayak, finds hapless rez dog at some inevitable gas station in the middle of the desert. And then proudly states, "She's a rez dog," when asked where the dog was found.

Rancher types still possess the heelers and Aussie shepherds of the universe, for I see these dogs out working with the cows and sheep. These same types populate the pound, too; my dog surely has some heeler or shepherd in her, as well as something Arctic. She loves nothing better than deep snow, hates hot days. So a subset of the working dog around here is the sled dog.

Then there are the Rottweilers and I bristle at them. I project mean things onto Rottweiler owners. As in, wondering if they are cousins to Michael Vick. Not fair, I know. Buy why a Rottweiler? Isn't that like owning a gun designed solely to kill people and nothing else? Yes, Rottweilers scare me. But they are popular around here and I'd like to know why. No doubt I'm missing the boat on something.

I have a friend with a dog rescued from a puppy mill. These dogs are akin to the rez dogs, the pound dogs, to all dogs left by the side of the road. We're good at taking on these often difficult creatures. And we're good at taking our dogs out on trails, in snow or dust. We don't groom them to perfection, nor necessarily flaunt their pure bred status, when such exists. That just isn't how it works. So it was interesting to see the pure breds, with their coats glossy and free of tangles, in this other place. But they were still dogs, running and prancing, and I liked that. And I liked how dog preferences reflected regional differences as well. It's one of those small things that orients us, and lets us know where we are.

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Abandonment

This Wednesday I drove past a little non-town in Utah called Woodside, which rates an abandoned gas station and the usual sprawl of rusty car husks, rotting in the desert sun. Nothing redeems Woodside. No one lives there anymore and even when they did you would probably still drive by and wonder why. The country around it is relentlessly barren, overgrazed, and hot.

I was driving by it because I was on my way back from Salt Lake City, where I had spent the last 36 hours attending to the sudden and vicious death from esophageal cancer of my friend, some-time lover, and soul mate, Peter. He and I share a history that is riddled with a long absence of him from my life, and, in a way, when he cut off communication ten years ago, it was as if he had died then. He severed ties not because he didn't love me, I have since learned, but because he loved me too much. And one of my first thoughts when I heard his voice on the phone telling me he was dying was: Oh no. I have to go through your death all over again.

But I've learned that real death plays a far rougher hand. He looked like the proverbial Auschwitz victim by the time I arrived. I thought I was staring at a corpse on the couch. He had clearly taken a turn for the worse since talking with him, briefly, the night before. And his wife, Betsy, whom I have always liked, said ? and it meant the most coming from her ? "he was waiting for you to come." The grace of that is indescribable.

Many gifts rained down on me while there. When lucid, Peter made it abundantly clear that he loved me and always had. I think he wanted to rectify his behavior of ten years prior. But I made it clear to him, too, that none of that mattered. Discussions with his father, his wife, his friend Matt, all gave me glimpses into the life I'd missed out on for the past ten years, and validated much of my experience with him. It also made me realize that I knew Peter in ways no one else did, which left me honored and a little disconcerted and really lonely. How could you celebrate a life with others when that life had vulnerabilities only ever shown to one person? It was as if Peter and I knew each other's deepest suffering from some pre-birth place we carried into this life, and would carry into the next. It turns out I knew far more about those places in him than I had ever realized.

By the time I left, it was clear he had only a day or two remaining. He was off fluids, surviving on morphine, bouts of agitation, and sleep. And so, driving into the desert, I saw Woodside and seized. My first entry for this blog discussed how western landscapes evoke great and terrible love in me ? for my father, and for Peter, mostly ? but I tend do this with all special relationships. Woodside and the hundreds of other towns like it ? Pie Town in New Mexico, Ludlow in the Mojave Desert ? epitomize for me the utter abandonment of my father, and now, of Peter. I managed to avoid staying with this feeling too long during the drive, deliberately passing Woodside at 75 mph with a studious avoidance of its dilapidated presence. But home this afternoon I fell into an anxious nap and awoke out of it shaking in my chest and in complete dejection at that sense of emptiness. I began sobbing in earnest then, and called my husband for solace. Woodside had returned full force.

But other things happened, too, on that drive home. I got to Moab and was hungry enough to treat myself to a good lunch. I bought a commemorative ring for Peter in Monticello. And when I approached Cortez, it was as if the earth's crust buckled in a circle around my home turf. Severed was the landscape of Peter in Salt Lake, the landscape of my father in southern Utah, the landscape of my twenties and early thirties in New Mexico, the landscape of the Hopi and Navajo reservations in Arizona. Only Colorado remained a bit tethered to the east, because part of my establishment of this home turf has meant owning Colorado as, really, ground zero (see "Golden" blog) with Durango at my center. I realized, as the image of this breaking crust consumed me, that I would no longer be emotionally homeless, searching for the ruins of my father's heart, or the ruins of my love for Peter, in landscapes not fully mine.

Woodside still haunts. It may for a long time. And what I've written here feels woefully inadequate, disgustingly inarticulate. But it's what I have, as I continue to hold this loss in my hands.

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Ode to the Breakfast Burrito

Back when I was a confused 20-something, I worked as an archeologist for what was then called the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, NM. We occupied the old St. Vincent's hospital building east of the cathedral and plaza, and each morning a small, elderly Hispanic man would come around with a little cooler filled with $3.00 burritos. I tried not to indulge in these things too much, partly for cost control and partly because they were so special to me that I thought if I ate one every day they would lose their luster. My strategy must have worked because breakfast burritos have only grown on me, and if you ask me my favorite food, I will say, hands down, the proper kind of breakfast burrito.

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Quickie Thoughts Inspired by Moving and Vacation

1. The best thing about the American West is the amount of public land and access to it. I've come to accept I'm quasi-urban in my tastes; I've lived far from town, on 35 acres, and though it was quiet and lovely, it was not, ultimately, for me. Most of all what I hated was my reliance on the automobile to get me anywhere, and the fact that, oddly enough, I had less access to hiking trails, ski ventures, and so forth, surrounded as I was by other ranches and ranchettes. In town now, I can walk out my door, go three city blocks, and hike to Denver if I wanted to. Even Albuquerque and Salt Lake have favorable attributes in this direction ? you do have to drive or take a bus or bike a little to get there, but on the edge of town you can easily find ample space in which to roam. Santa Fe is the same, and even Phoenix has desert hills left in the middle of it for public enjoyment of open space. That's one of the first things I feel when I visit the in-laws back east ? that the cities are big and fabulous and an amazing polyglot of people and food and smells, but that my daily dip into nature, solitude, the peace of trees and the sudden surprise of stumbling on a deer or rabbit, could not occur should I live there.

2.  I love public transportation. I now live on a bus line! In a small southwestern town! Who knew this was possible? I ride it to work. It's fantastic. And it's even more fantastic seeing that the Main Avenue line, at least, is well used. I've loved public transportation ever since I went to pre-Wall Falling Down Berlin at age 17 and got to wander that whole city with a pack of fellow teenagers without having to rely on parental cars or the worry that goes with borrowing them. I was thrilled. Plus, I'm a writer, and there is no better place to stare at people and try to figure out the stories behind them than on a bus or subway line. The car isolates us. It stinks up the air, creates an unbelievable amount of noise (listen to your town at dawn. Then listen to it at 5 pm. Arrgggh.), makes us detest our fellow drivers, is the leading cause of death for those under 25, and causes obesity. Blech. I get the "love affair with the automobile" that Americans supposedly have when I am on the open road on a long trip, or when I see a remodeled thing from the 1950s replete with wicked fins and two-tone styling. No doubt about it -- there is something about cars like that; in the Eisenhower era of conformity, they were audacious. They still are. But man. My "love affair with the automobile" ends there.

3.  We're about to fly the coop for the annual Back East In-Law extravaganza. This year, it takes place in Chautauqua, NY, home of the Chautauqua Institute, a sort of elite summer camp for all ages. We're doing this because my son's step-cousin (got that?) is on the brink of being a professional ballet dancer, and is dancing there that week. So my stepmother-in-law, who used to be a camp director, has rented a rambling Victorian into which copious family members will stuff themselves for the week. Last year, it was the Berkshires and Hyde Park country, which made me want to organize a road bike trip with my best girlfriends and ride the rolling countryside for a week, indulging in wine and summer theater at night. Most of the time it's southern Massachusetts, where I get my ocean and seafood fix. And all of the time it's a nice break, a chance to sniff humid air, eat bluefish, and talk to people whose lives are entirely different from mine.

4. But it's nice to come home. Now that we've finally gotten to town, I feel I have my perfect combination of urbanity (the bus line! The downtown job!) and wilderness access. I look out over our mountainous terrain and the river valley and I'm flooded over and over with how beautiful it is. Four Corners territory has never let me down in that way. It's my church, my god, my great love. It always will be.

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My Country Tis of Thee

Well, I went to Silverton. I'd been hearing about the magnificent 4th of July fireworks for several years now, and I tried to bribe my son and husband into enduring the crush to go. Every year it seems to become a bigger and bigger phenomenon, and this year it went viral. A friend of mine said the RV magazine featured it, and we all know that's a death-knell to Best Kept Secrets around these parts.

My little family was not interested in attending, however. My son, at 11, has not quite outgrown his fear of loud noises, and when he heard that half the fun was listening to the booms echo off the surrounding mountains, he said no thanks. My husband is not into crowds or traffic jams.

 I was saved by my friend Karen, who summers in Santa Fe after taking jobs back east and realizing there is no place like home in the Southwest. An anthropologist, she and her husband try to do research with hunter-foragers in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez' henchpeople will let them. Unfortunately, the henchpeople are getting more and more stubborn, so her husband stayed to grovel at the feet of government hacks for permission to do their work, and Karen came home. I hadn't been camping all summer ? a sacrilege ? and neither had she. So we set up a tent half way to the famed mining town-turned-fireworks-host, and left to attend the festivities.

I am not sure what I expected, but it was not the scads of Navajos up from Arizona, nor the wads of Hispanic-Indian-White New Mexicans and Texans. The Strictly Whites tended to be of the RV and ATV set, at least where we were perched, but overall the place was crawling with Desert People Dying to Get Out of the Heat. The party next to us spoke Navajo and offered us coffee, which was cool. The vehicle behind us was a long trailer with about five ATVs on it.

"Guess who they voted for," said Karen, allowing herself a brief liberal swipe.

Well, yeah. I am of the persuasion that Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" should be the national anthem, not that paean to war, "The Star-Spangled Banner." Never mind that I confess to goose bumps when I hear the latter; on principle, I believe in the awe this land's natural beauty inspires, and is espoused by Guthrie. More importantly, I believe in the song's sense of responsibility. This land is your land: take care of it. The rockets' red glare is a cheap high by comparison.

For eight years of unholy war against all of what I considered to be deeply American values, I want to take back the word "American." I am NOT "un-American" for defending our wild places, or our planet, for that matter. I am not "un-American" for believing that free market capitalism is a seriously flawed economic system and an even more seriously flawed myth. I am not "un-American" for believing that we do not torture people, nor hold them without right to legal counsel. I have come to tears at the insult regarding this. I'll be out hiking and come across an elk in the gloaming by a river bed, and in less than a second I know all over again that such moments have saved my life.

Years ago, I remember talking travel with someone who, when asked what he was most impressed with in all of his roaming, said, "North America. We have some of the most astonishing country right here." And I knew he was right. So to be told that the very territory that has uplifted, awed, saved, cradled the ecstatic, held me in all my love affairs and profound hurt, allowed me to vote, given me the right to write nasty letters to my congressman, etc and so forth, was somehow not really mine to claim, still upsets me mightily.

So I'm not going to smirk at the ATV-riding Texans and tell them they are somehow way off the mark about what America is. I'm going to understand that the lashing out from that quadrant has, in its own way, to do with a profound hurt, a sense that some myth they thought was sacrosanct has been corrupted. I will say I think that myth is a fallacy, insofar as I understand it to be some variant of John Wayne. No doubt this is a gross oversimplification. But no matter ? I respect the hurt. I also respect that we probably see eye to eye on more things than we realize. Karen's tales of Venezuela gone bad under a megalomaniac leader brought that home.

So what I was most proud of in Silverton? That I was in a country where I could sit next to Navajos who still spoke their native tongue, as well as a zillion other stars and stripes of human critters, and that we all got along. We were all polite. We all loved the show. The booms echoed off the mountains so deeply both Karen and I thought a tsunami must be coming. Those under the fireworks directly thought they were falling right on them. And even the traffic getting out wasn't bad.

Nestled in our tent later, we talked till 2 a.m. At five a.m. I briefly woke to a hooved animal chomping at something outside. At 6:30 I got up right as the sun was hitting a big lily pond and saw a beaver swimming in the distance. I did a little yoga, meditated. But most of all I was in a reverie (liberal word), or prayer (conservative, if you will) of gratitude.

Only here. Only here. Ka-boom.