A lot of smart people around the world are wringing their hands over the deleterious effects of the smartphone on our communities. Everything from crashing rates of sexual congress and population decline to the rise of callous Trumpism, general disaffection from our neighbors, and loneliness, to name just a few. I’m not going to argue that the smartphone isn’t involved in the grand decline of social comity that is being observed broadly around the world, it’s just that I think there’s a far more significant contributor to these maladies lurking in the shadows, on the streets and in our garages. Call it a smartphone on wheels: the automobile.

With the advent of the automobile, and especially as it became more ubiquitous throughout modern American culture after World War II and then spread around the world, a number of new social trends began to emerge. First and foremost, the advent of automotive mobility gave people the choice to move to find circumstances more to their liking than ever before. Location, occupation, and social activities all became far more fluid for people with cars. The freedom to choose friends, jobs and neighborhoods inevitably led to a grand sorting and general insulating from the inconvenient impositions of life. Instead of tolerating those inconveniences, people could just move on with far less cost and far greater ease, and the entire economy built itself around this principle of “freedom.” The freedom to abandon your past, your family, your cultural tradition, to ditch the skeletons in your closet and reinvent yourself. For many, the car gave them the opportunity to break out of the confines of oppression and economic malaise. The automobile opened us humans to a new world of opportunity.

Much has been said about the adverse effects of the automobile, from the dangers of driving to climate change. But those are mere externalities. The car has had a much more profound effect on our ways of life around the world and across cultures. Technologies of mass production first devised for making cars have brought an endless array of products, an ever more refined array catering to our ever more specific demands for stuff that makes our lives “good,” all made available through the mobility afforded us by cars to go get the goods (and trucks to bring them to us). In the US all aspects of our society revolve around efficiency and “freedom,” the freedom to buy stuff to make us happy.

Whether he knew it or not, this was the “freedom” that President Bush touted as the reason America needed to go to war in Iraq, the freedom that Americans supposedly revere. It’s not political freedom we revere, but economic freedom, made possible by the automobile and its derivatives. We may talk about traditional bulwarks of social wellbeing - regional culture, government, religion, education - as being the core elements of our social flourishing, but we ignore the truly revolutionary effects of the automobile on our culture, almost as if we were blind to them, as if they didn’t matter. The truth is we are a car-culture first and foremost, and car-culture is supplanting and weakening our other cultural traditions.

Enter the smartphone. I think it’s a mistake to think of the smartphone as a paradigmatic difference maker. What it really is is a car without wheels and no back seat. Almost everything we have done in a car, we can now do with a smart phone, from socializing and shopping to sex. Only now we don’t even have to leave home. As insulating as the car is from all the challenges of traveling and the inconveniences of dealing with people, and as pleasurable as it is to go where you want and get what you want with the ease of driving, the cell phone does most of what the car does even better, more conveniently, less expensively. And whether it is by effective design or by the random processes of millions of choices, humans have taken to cars, and now to smartphones with the same kind of blind indifference to the possible downsides because attending to the social effects of car culture would call into question the core assumptions of what Americans (and the rest of the world) have come to value as the most important social good - convenient consumption, the freedom to make ourselves happy buying more stuff while avoiding the frictions of being around other people.

It’s not hard to see how the appealing utility of both cars and phones has had the effect of reducing our exposure to other people, consciously or not, and that we seem to prefer ever more the isolation brought by cars and phones, as seen in the popularity of delivery services, work-from-home scenarios. etc. that grow out of the new smartphone technology. We may decry the decline of our traditional social institutions, but we’d best not forget the malign influences of car-culture and the American appetite for “freedom.”

In winter the ford presented another set of challenges. Assuming the snow wasn’t too deep to get to the creek in the first place, fording it got the brakes all wet and overnight they’d freeze stuck to the rotors. The next morning you’d free the frozen brakes with some fancy clutch work and then drive back across the river to get to work, rewetting the frozen brake parts so now they were coated with even more ice and of no use in slowing you down until you had pumped the pedal for half a mile and thawed them out with friction. Unless you forgot, which made for some thrilling incidents in town when you got to the stop sign.

For those times we couldn’t drive across the ford, we had a long, slightly wobbly handmade wooden footbridge to get across. The good news was you could get your groceries across the creek without getting your feet wet or slipping on river ice, the bad news, you still had another quarter mile to go with your groceries to get to the house. All of this was tolerable to us rough and tumble youths, me and Susie were living the good life over there on the other side of the creek. But then we got married and then we had a little boy, and we were both getting a little tired of lugging so much stuff around. It was time to think about building a bridge we could drive over.

When I had first come to El Rito in the early seventies, I was only eighteen, but I knew even then that this was the place for me. I started out living with a bunch of alcoholic dropouts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, who had exchanged their cushy academic lives for a rough and tumble existence, eking out their lives in a high, cold, muddy canyon in the mountains of northern New Mexico, seven miles of hell-road past little El Rito, far from civilization, running water and lights. All those St. John’s boys were middle class city boys with only rudimentary country living skills, and what inspired me to join them in part was their willingness to attempt great projects, like building their dream houses out of forest products and salvaged materials without a lick of knowledge or experience (and no YouTube). I had been so inspired by the whole scene, I got a job in California and polished up my carpentry skills for a few years before settling down out there in rustic New Mexico.

By the time I was married and thinking about building a bridge over El Rito Creek I had more than ten years experience doing carpentry work, which in no way entitled me to think I could actually build a bridge for cars. But that was the wonder of being young, poor and in a family way, I couldn’t afford to think I might not be up for this. Susie was pregnant again. It was time. My neighbor, who had to walk even further to get to his house from the footbridge, mentioned how he’d seen some railroad cars for sale up in Mosca, Colorado, maybe we could drag one down our driveway and plop it across the creek. It sounded like a plausible scheme. I drove the hundred miles to Mosca, found a forty foot by ten foot wide former boxcar with the box cut off the top and the wheel assemblies removed, so it was more or less ready to be pressed into service as a bridge. For a few thousand dollars I could have it delivered to the top of my driveway. I’d need to build some pretty stout concrete abutments both to hold the bridge up and to withstand the power of a roaring river in flood stage with big trees like battering rams floating downstream.

I took measurements of my new railcar rusting out in the field and went home and started digging out foundations and forming up to pour the concrete abutments upon which the bridge would rest. I winged it on how much clearance I’d need above my guesstimate for the high water mark at flood stage. I hoped two feet would be enough, maybe? It never occurred to me that I should have an engineer look at the railroad car, where would I even find one and I couldn’t afford it anyway. Sure I could use some tips on how to support and anchor the bridge to the abutments, and a ballpark figure on the weight capacity of the bridge might be nice. I winged it on this too. It never occurred to me that the curve on the approach to the bridge would make it nearly impossible for a vehicle with a trailer to cross. Larger trucks and trailers still have to use the ford.

I had a regular job at the time, so work on the abutments took a while. I was part of a crew building a new house for the director over at Ghost Ranch, about thirty minutes away. The Operations Manager at Ghost Ranch was a friendly older guy named Jim Shibley. Aside from his duties keeping the water flowing and the funky buildings at Ghost Ranch from falling apart, he also managed the excavations at a fossil bed on the property where a new dinosaur species had been discovered. Coelophysis was a speedy bipedal predatory reptile we were glad had disappeared from the area around 200 million years prior. Jim had overseen the excavations, picking up large multi-ton blocks of sandstone with dino-bones sticking out and delivering them to the site of the new paleontology museum at the Ranch. He had experience with heavy loads. Over lunch one day, I must have shared with Jim my harebrained bridge scheme, which by then was nearly ready for delivery of the railroad car. I remember Jim saying that if he had time, he might want to come over and watch the commotion, which I took to mean he wasn’t coming. I figured we’d be okay without him.

It’s hard to know what to call this approach to such a monumental undertaking. Naive? Stupid? Hubris? Ignorance is bliss? I don’t think I ever really considered the possibility of failure until the day the bridge arrived. So massive, so inert, so hard to drag down my driveway. In my mind it weighed essentially nothing. But thinking about how I did this thing back then with so little qualification, so little preparation and so little hesitation…. It needed to get done and I was going to do it. From there it was only a matter of doing the steps, hiring the right people to help and hoping they’d show up.

On that fine August morning in 1984, a semi-truck arrived at the top of my driveway with a seven or eight ton railroad car, a rough and rusted flat metal frame with curling plywood on top. I had hired a man from Santa Fe named Cliff Odom to come up and wrestle it down my driveway and onto the abutments with his crane, a “Stinger II” mounted on the back of a long flatbed and powered by a big Mack diesel. Seven or eight tons, he said, was about his limit. He set up his rig, picked up the railcar, the semi-truck drove out from under it, and he lowered it gently onto the paved road. It looked gigantic and forlorn all at once, a truck with no wheels, a fish out of water.

The plan was to drag this behemoth down the driveway with Cliff’s big truck. I thought the railroad car could slide along on huge steel beam underneath without digging a furrow in the dirt road. Cliff chained the railcar to his trailer hitch and started down the driveway. The sound was hideous. Dragging seven tons was not like anything I’d ever heard, the earth rippled with the vibrations of that massive chunk. Huge round boulders began popping out of the roadbed as the railcar lumped along, and it quickly became apparent that dragging the weight of this car was going to destroy the driveway. I waved Cliff to a stop.

He shut down his rig and got out. We stood around scratching our heads trying to think of something that might mitigate the damage. It was possible that he wouldn’t be able to drive back out, the driveway was getting so dinged up. We’d been shuffling around tossing out one implausible idea after another when we heard a truck driving up the road from town. It stopped at the top of my driveway. It was a long flatbed, a rusty forties vintage, and as the motor wound down, the door opened and out hopped Jim Shibley. I’m not sure I even gave him my address, hell, I didn’t even have an address. Last driveway on the right before the cattleguard was about as specific as I could get. I had no idea he was coming. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Jim had brought his dinosaur boulder truck, with a primitive steel cable hoist on what he called a gin-pole, two steel pipes stuck on the back end of the flatbed in an “A” with a pulley in between, and a drum feed he could raise and lower the cable while reaching out the back of the cab from his driver’s seat. He said he thought he’d be able to pick up one end of the bridge and Cliff already had the other end hitched to his truck, so together they could carry the bridge down the driveway rather than drag it. However, Jim would have to drive down backwards. With Cliff in his truck, more than thirty feet long, the bridge at forty feet, and Jim in his long flatbed, the whole train measured longer than a hundred feet, and they would be making a ninety degree turn now just before getting to the steeper narrower part of the driveway.

Jim backed his flatbed to the uphill end of the railcar, hooked up his cable and lifted the car off the ground. So far so good. I was trying to orchestrate a synchronized start, but signals got crossed. Cliff started off but Jim was late and instead of rolling down the road, Jim’s truck, the front end, abruptly lifted off the ground all the way up to about eight feet. It was terrifying! I jumped up to grab the bumper to try and pull it back down. I was but a flea. Jim, up there in the elevated cab of the truck, calmly reached out the window to the cable control lever and lowered himself back down to earth as smooth as you please. “Nice view up there,” he said.

On the second attempt they took off together and started down toward the creek. Slowly. They made the turn smooth as you please, Jim steering backwards of course. Now on the steep part, the road was barely the width of the truck axles, and I was walking alongside monitoring. On the inside the truck tires were just about rubbing against the hillside and on the outside, one of the dual tires was riding on air over the edge of the road. There was no room for error. Cliff and Jim crept down the road, 15,000 pounds of railcar swinging between them, and without a hitch or a stop, they crossed the ford and dropped the railcar in the middle of the creek.

Jim packed up his truck and prepared to hit the road. I pleaded with him to take some kind of payment for his miraculous rescue of the project, but he refused and drove back to Ghost Ranch with only my thanks. Cliff, meanwhile, set his truck at the far edge of the creek, unfurled his crane, hooked up to one end of the bridge and deftly hoisted it onto the abutment. Then he set up in the middle of the river and picked up the other end of the railcar and set it down on the abutment on the other side. After a final adjustment of a few inches, Cliff was done. He packed up, I wrote him a check, and he drove away, and there I was with my new rusty metal hulk spanning the creek on two concrete pedestals. It looked more like a sculpture than a bridge. Of course I’d have to build up earthen ramps on each end of the bridge, fix the deck surface and put up railings to be able to drive on it, so for now that’s all it was, a sculpture. But it was beautiful.

It took a few weeks to handle all the tasks to get the bridge functional. I hired Dan Trujillo to do all the welding, and his brother, Avedon, came with his backhoe and scooped up the material for the approaches, I bolted on some two by eights for railings, and then we had us a bridge. It is now forty two years later and I’m still crossing the bridge, as are my three neighbors. The whole project cost me $8000 dollars, which I split with my neighbors (except for the one who refused to pay - she’s long gone now, and I didn’t kill her, I swear, she actually lives just down the road). There have been a few dicey moments, once during spring runoff a bunch of floating trees lodged against the upstream side and pushed really hard, but the bridge didn’t budge. A drunk neighbor once nearly tipped his truck over the edge into the drink, and another time he came speeding over the bridge and slammed into my fence, taking out a few stout posts and putting an irreparable dent in his radiator. Now I worry about climate change bringing more powerful storms our way, but meanwhile the creek gurgles beneath and our brakes don’t get frozen up and we don’t have to lug our groceries up the driveway in two-foot deep snow! Actually, if the snow was that deep we probably would have to lug the groceries up the driveway.

Epilogue: Back in 2010, Wendy and I were living in Santa Fe and had reason to employ the services of a crane to place our hot tub in the walled courtyard of the house we were renting in town. It occurred to me to look up ol’ Cliff Odom in the phone book and sure enough he was listed under “crane service.” I called the number and a creaky voice answered. It was Cliff and yes, he definitely remembered the job in El Rito and he’d gladly come move my hot tub. On the appointed day he showed up with his Stinger II, same rig, and Cliff, a little stouter and a little more rumpled, but with the same suspenders and the same understated charisma, picked up the tub and dropped it gently into our yard. And then he charged me only a hundred bucks. I guess he remembered the El Rito Bridge Project fondly. As do I.

A Hell of a truck

Trump’s histrionics are perpetually unserious, but the effects are not. He exploits this wrinkle to great benefit. We have to take his words seriously because they affect us gravely, but he is not affected. He can spout whatever foolish notion occurs to him at 1:00 am, he can jerk the world markets around with a transparent lie. By the twentieth time it’s a joke really, and yet his pals make billions every time. He tosses us his stupid ideas and horrid insults like fish to a croaking seal. We chug them down even though we know they’re poisoned.

It’s hard to believe that so many Americans aren’t disturbed by the corruption, the government waste, sharply rising prices, wanton killing and abject mistreatment of people, our expensive war launched without good reason and which seems likely to seriously degrade American wellbeing, to name just a few. These are real maladies that conservatives in the past have stood firmly against, and yet today they seem utterly unconcerned. What explains their abandonment of what recently they held as core principles?

Desecration (from a Google definition). To desecrate: to treat (a sacred place or thing) with violent disrespect. Similar: violate, profane, pollute, contaminate, infect, befoul. These words seem remarkably accurate in describing Trump’s M.O. across the board. His desecrations puncture the aura of immutability of our beliefs. Every Trump trial-balloon policy initiative (that’s how he does “policy”) and every Trump thought (expressed to the media) employs desecration in some manner. It’s the one thing Trump does consistently, and Dada is the perfect format for delivering his theatrical desecrations. The fact that he performs the presidency as theater is itself a desecration of the office and everything related to it.

What is this “sacred” thing that Trump so consistently treats with violent disrespect? Of course we have the religious sense of the word, and we’ll get to that in a moment, but first we have to consider the secular meaning of sacred. In the secular sense of it, sacred means we as a society have agreed to abide the “sacred” mandates that govern our behavior as citizens, voluntarily, because, as it says in the Preamble, “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Patriotism as a celebration and defense of the Constitution, is a sacred mandate that has been utterly warped by Trump, as he has done to the rule of law, the codes of ethical behavior, the mandates of speaking truth with sincerity, pretty much every guideline or law, sacred or civil. All, we have assumed for centuries, are core aspects of being American. To the extent there is a secular sacredness that informs our American identities, Trump desecrates it with unseemly gusto. It’s the one thing he does every time. It’s his core value. Desecration of America as we believe it to be.

We could then lose ourselves amid the mysteries of what Trump’s motivations might be, but they are not really germane. His appetites are atavistic and bottomless, principally greed and humiliation of his doubters and strangely, his allies too. The real mystery is why Trump isn’t reviled by everyone. What about his will to desecrate all that is sacred - the foundational principles that inform Americans’ lives - appeals to people? The fact is, he desecrates the sacred beliefs of his ardent supporters almost as much as those of his enemies. Sure his supporters love it when he’s “owning the libs.” But something seems to take the sting out of his “owning the cons” too. At this point Trump owns almost everybody.

I’m not qualified to offer a serious psychological analysis here, but I think the answer does have to do with psychology much more than the exigencies of Trumpian political extortion and grift. People who used to identify strongly with a set of values and beliefs are abandoning them and forgiving Trump his trespasses. How does this work?

I think Trump gives people permission to act out, to shake off the constraints and burdens of rigid (religious, or other) social mores and feel free to lash out, to join him in tearing down all structures of society. It’s a slow motion riot. Trump and his high-status cronies’ misbehavior gives permission to lesser people to forget their promises to be good, thoughtful, law-abiding, ethical, patriotic, truthful and kind. If our leader, the most powerful man in the world, does it, why shouldn’t I?

When the word first came to me, I thought boiling down the Trump phenomenon to this one theme, “desecration,” might be too dramatic. But then I thought about how Christians have rallied around Trump. I had always thought the most durable forms of sacredness came from fealty to divine authority. Trump has methodically transgressed, or desecrated, every sacred Christian moral stricture and stone-engraved commandment, multiple times and without remorse. In response, conservative Christians in particular have abandoned their core Christian values and marched off with Trump into his amoral stomping ground.

The way Christians have failed to stand up for the teachings of Jesus is mystifying. Something weird is going on. Of all groups you think would defend their sacred principles in the face of such desecration, it would be pious Christians. What gives?

I’m not convinced that this is all a quest for raw political power or a form of economic populism, though of course they play a role. Christians and conservative Americans have been proudly trumpeting their tightly held values and beliefs for decades, they’ve built their identities and franchises around them, and they used to protest loudly when they felt others might be trampling them. But upholding those sacred ideals is hard, it takes effort, it might even chafe a little. Trump’s Dada performance schtick gives Christians (and anyone else looking for an out) permission to break free from the burden of abiding the strictures of belief and shows how easy it is to get away with it (guilt-free, while still feigning fealty to the Christian gestalt). To Trump it’s just a joke, his work is pure theater, nothing in the world is serious. That’s Dada! Instead of criticizing Trump for desecrating their values, conservative Christians seem grateful for him letting them off the hook (of having to actually abide and police their own moral rules) and they ignore, or worse, applaud, whatever uncharitable desecration their favorite thespian blurts out.

The prompt was, roughly: What is Love?

Love is an early morning with your granddaughter

On her fourth birthday

Giving her the card you sweated over the night before

The one with lots of colors and her name BOLD and flaming

Like she is

With love love love love four times on the inside

And red hearts

Love is dressing her in her ballet outfit for her dance class

And she didn’t resist or fight or scream

Not even once

Love is my wife saying I’m so mad at you

And me getting it

Finally and forever

just how hard it is to love

How hard it is to love me

Love is me finally realizing there is only one thing

Love

And all the rest is foolish diversion from the truth

The truth is love if you can find it

There amid the ashes of your broken burnt-down heart

Love is what you grab with both hands and hold up to the sky

And maybe ask

Why have I forsaken you

Or maybe just be grateful for having found it at all

To Critics, Trump Remarks Reveal a Billionaire Out of Touch

The article focuses on Trump’s recent admission that he doesn’t think at all about Americans’ economic welfare when he’s working out his next moves against Iran. In the lede, we hear that the president has “opened him[self] to criticism that he doesn’t grasp the economic strain of his war with Iran.” We could lose ourselves trying to parse what Trump’s stupid utterances really mean, as the Times article does. But doing so draws our attention away from a much more poignant truth. Trump’s words reveal his utter incompetence, both in terms of his profession as president and in terms of his mental ability. Calling him a “billionaire out of touch” is actually a fawning headline guaranteed to make Trump smile. There’s nothing he’d love better than to be known as a man so rich he can barely be bothered to worry about how his pronouncements affect America’s losers.

The proper word to characterize the vast majority of Trump’s verbiage is “nonsense.” C’mon! What kind of president doesn’t think about how his decisions affect the economy for the Americans he is the supposed leader of? The proper way to investigate its meaning is to ask whether the guy is in his right mind, is he competent, is it safe to leave him sitting as president when he speaks like he’s clearly out of his mind? Sure, his comment dismissing our economic welfare has policy implications, as did his kidnapping of the Venezuelan president or his tariff bluster. If only Trump had meant these wildly off-target gestures as policy. Calling what the president does “policy” doesn’t make it policy. By now it’s clear, Trump doesn’t really do policy. What if the Times called it “theater” instead?

This is where a powerful institution like NYT influences our perception. By looking at that specific statement without grounding it in the gestalt of Trump-speak, including a nod to the fifty-odd lunatic tweets a few nights before and his history of saying things he doesn’t mean or his outright lies or the changing list of really stupid reasons he trots out to explain why attacking Iran was a good idea, to pick out that one comment as if it were a serious policy admission, or even just a public relations stumble, amid the torrent of drek is the Times misleading us to think Trump has a cogent policy perspective at all. Not only does Trump not think about Americans’ economic interests, he doesn’t think about policy either. All he thinks about is himself, and these days he’s not even very good at doing that. And knowing Trump, that’s a sure sign he’s losing it.

So yes, I would say America has a moral framework. But are we as a nation following the mandates of our moral framework? Clearly no. In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to see the current political moment as an assault against the moral framework that has defined our nation, imperfectly, of course, since our founding.

In the political theater, it’s hard not to see the rise of MAGA and every Trumpian impulse as a rejection of America’s moral framework. Trump and his acolytes commit moral crimes across the entire spectrum of basic moral prohibitions, and they do so with grandiose indifference to the laws, the rationales and the traditions that inform them. Their very brazenness exposes the weakness of moral laws and encourages the rest of us to disregard them as well. The insight that Trump has exploited his entire life with great success is that if you don’t engage with the moral universe, the moral universe can’t see you and the moral laws don’t apply, or something like that. (The impotence of moral and statutory law to bring Trump’s behavior in line is something of a mystery)

For a scofflaw like Trump (who scoffs at the laws - could there be a better term for him?), our moral laws only work as long as we, as a society, as a polity, as a nation, uphold them by somehow holding him to account for his transgressions. But we have become complacent because we believe that the morals, and the institutions we have built to enforce them, will do the job for us when by now we can see they are simply not up to the task. Remember when we thought Robert Mueller or Merrick Garland or Jack Smith or Fani Willis or Letitia James or E. Jean Carroll, or the Pussy-Grabbing tape or the Russian pee video or Trump’s criminal association with Epstein was going to bring him down? We have thrown every moral and institutional force at our disposal at him and every one has failed to even slow him down. He’s like Godzilla, he eats our attempts to derail him and emerges stronger (or more deluded?).

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has been climbing ever higher up the ladder of criminal severity, smashing away at the laws and institutions that would hold him to account. But now he is poised to commit (has already committed and is continuing to do so without compunction) the most severe crime there is, mass murder and crimes against humanity by bombing Iran. And as bad as mass murder is in its own right, the senselessness and zeal with which Donald Trump commits these crimes - with his prosecutable war crime threats and utterly irrational policy moves, his lack of planning and lack of self-reflection, the disgusting abuses of military powers for which he assumes zero moral or practical responsibility - the context within which he commits the mass murders of Iranians makes the severity of the crimes so much worse. Even Hitler had a practical design for his crimes against humanity.

And yet we remain paralyzed, unable to react, frozen with uncertainty or waiting in the vain hope that our institutions might save us from this moral abomination who is now our president, who is committing crimes against humanity in our names, using our money, and ruining our civilization and our planet in the process, today, right now. This is not okay.

So on this day, Easter Sunday, 2026, a day in which we ostensibly celebrate the persistence of divine moral authority in our human realm, it’s time we move to reestablish that moral authority and stop this guy’s wanton criming, for God’s sake!

I have to disagree. In fact, I’d say the culprit in this is Americans not making rational choices, in particular, not making the hard choices of crafting policies that would balance out the economic distributions among our citizens. And there is a particular political philosophy that has engendered this approach, libertarianism, which has been subsumed into conservative political thought.

I believe the entire premise of libertarianism is misguided at best, and willfully ignorant of its obvious flaws and negative externalities. Cowboys are not good social engineers. And whether conservatives and libertarians and their ilk like it or not, the system our economy operates under is a system of social engineering. Choosing not to make policy is as much a social engineering play as is crafting policy to address social problems.

Conservatives in general eschew the idea that government has a role to play in social engineering, which is the same as saying no one should have the power to dictate the direction of our society and our economy. They call it “laissez-faire capitalism,” and under the guise of the “wisdom” of the marketplace, conservatives have all but unraveled the institutions of humane wisdom, democracy, rational address of social problems, and the powers of our government and the electorate. And in the absence of thoughtful government policy, the billionaires have stepped in.

Neither the billionaires nor the marketplace have any wisdom about, or interest in, human satisfaction. Their interest is money, plain and simple. Mr. French observes in his article how even in this time of comparatively broad prosperity, wealth doesn’t seem to make people happy. He employs this nonsense equivalence, saying that both Republicans and Democrats are unhappy with the economy when their party is not in power, as if it were some mysterious malaise affecting us all. He should instead ask himself which party is dedicated to economic fairness and all the other qualities that actually might make people happy, such as tolerance and broad opportunity and a government that rationally addresses social problems.

I was barely twenty and I’d been saving up working as a carpenter/laborer for nearly a year in 1975, when I bought my first car, a pickup truck, a twenty-three year old 1952 International Harvester with beautifully rounded everything. The hood, the fenders, the cab, it resembled a cranky grey gnome. The truck’s bed could fit eight foot sheets of drywall and plywood in, which is what I used it for, picking up materials at the hardware store and bringing them to whatever job I was working on. In fact my boss is the one who sold it to me for a few hundred bucks, a couple weeks work. He went on and bought a new Dodge so he wouldn’t get broke down in that old clunker.

I loved that truck. I named it Lucky Strike. LSMFT - Lucky Strike Means a Fine Truck. I taped an empty package of my Lucky Strike cigarettes with the target logo to the rear window, looking handsome right next to the sticker that said “Ignore Alien Orders.”

It quickly became apparent that my boss had been the sensible one in pawning the truck off on me. Lucky didn’t love to start when he was hot, and the six-volt battery never seemed to have the kick the engine required, so Lucky regularly ran out of juice and then I’d have to push start to get him going. This was fine when I’d been smart and parked him on an incline, but I remember having to push the truck out of a parallel parking spot onto busy Polk Street in San Francisco, pushing it down the street with the front door open, one hand on the wheel until I had enough momentum, I jumped in, popped the clutch and prayed. I don’t know how I did it.

Driving around downtown San Francisco in Lucky Strike was always an adventure, especially with a heavy load of drywall which made the truck sag in the back and the front wheels would float a little. With the steering mechanism already worn and floppy from its years in service as a utility company truck, and its very large steering wheel - in the days before power steering they made the steering wheel big to give you leverage - I’d have to swing the wheel back and forth a lot just to keep Lucky in his lane. And in the tight confines of downtown San Francisco and on the highways that took me to jobs down the peninsula or crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, you can imagine the kinds of traffic nightmares I’d be trying to navigate. Oh yeah, and Lucky didn’t have power-assisted brakes either, so stopping when loaded, or even empty - that truck was all metal - took some planning and heavy pumping on the pedal.

Still, I loved that truck. I felt that Lucky matched up with me in personality, a little funky, definitely not high-performance, old-fashioned and rounded, not edgy. I thought I looked pretty good in my truck, and so did my girlfriend, Sarah, who could squeeze right up against me on the generous bench seat because the gearshift, three-on-the-tree, was attached to the steering column. Lucky was my commuter car, my work truck and my adventure cruiser. Topping out at just over fifty-five miles an hour, I never had to worry about going too fast. In fact, I once got pulled over by a CHP for going too slow on Hwy. 101. He didn’t give me a ticket, but he did confiscate my half-drunk after-work Budweiser tall boy.

Over the years of my affair with Lucky Strike, I lived in San Francisco, then Berkely, and finally in Marin County. And doing my work as a carpenter, it seemed no matter where I lived, the job we were doing was in another county, so Lucky was a commuter getting stuck in traffic twice a day. One time I was driving on the Bay Bridge returning home to Berkeley at the beginning of rush hour and I ran out of gas on the bridge in a middle lane of five or six lanes of traffic. Lucky’s gas gauge never really worked so running out of gas was a constant worry. I actually kept a stick in the back of the truck which I could push down the neck of the fill tube into the gas tank to see how much gas was in there, but it seems I’d forgotten to check. Fortunately, I had a filled gas can in the back and all I’d have to do is pour it into the tank and I’d be on my way. Unfortunately, I was stopped with heavy traffic zooming by on both sides on the gloomy lower deck of the Bay Bridge, so getting gasoline into the tank would be a grim and risky venture.

Before braving the roaring stream of traffic, I thought I’d try to see if Lucky would start, maybe it had just been a hiccup. I pushed the starter button and the starter groaned and turned the engine over slowly, not nearly enough to start even if I’d had gas in it. But when I took my thumb off the starter button, the starter motor continued to crank, ruhhh…ruhhh…ruhhh…, and I couldn’t get it to stop, the solenoid was stuck in crank mode even when I turned off the key. This had never happened before. I quickly hatched an utterly foolhardy plan, a stupid plan. I couldn’t leave the truck in neutral because the parking brake wasn’t functional, I would have to put the truck in first gear, get out and pour the gas in while the truck lurched slowly with each ruhhh down the lane. It never occurred to me that once the gas was in the tank the truck might actually start and then I’d be standing out there in traffic with the truck driving away in first gear.

I carefully edged out of the front seat onto the roadway, cars whizzing by way too close for comfort, grabbed the gas can out of the back, and started pouring gas while the truck continued its slow groaning, lurching march down the highway lane. I had to step along in rhythm to keep up while pouring the gas. I tossed the empty can in the back, jumped back in the cab and, of course, the truck still wouldn’t start. Then I heard the whoop of a siren and a very loud broadcast voice telling me that he was going to push me. It was a patrolman riding up behind me, and he pushed me down the road toward an exit. I put the truck in high gear and popped the clutch and it fired up and I drove off, home to Berkeley. We lived to drive another day.

Alas, Lucky’s last day did eventually come. I was doing a job on top of a mountain between Sonoma and Napa counties, up a steep and winding road. Poor Lucky’s ticker gave out lugging up the hill and I had to have him towed to a gas station, where they literally put him out to pasture under a really big eucalyptus tree. I bought a used Volvo station wagon with lots of safe lockable space for the burgeoning collection of tools I was lugging around. Also, the Volvo actually worked quite well, even the gas gauge, so I was unlikely to stall out on the Bay Bridge. I moved on from Lucky Strike, though every time I drove past that pasture, I’d wave and call out his name. Luuuuckyyyyyy!

A Birthday Present

More than a year had passed since Lucky’s demise and I was feeling emotionally healed from the loss. Now I loved a Volvo. My family had invited me to celebrate my birthday with them at our family’s summer cabin in Sonoma, and so after work one Friday I drove my Volvo up the driveway to our place only to find Lucky parked in front of the house. What the hell?!! I really didn’t know what to think. Would my Volvo be jealous?

My mother had hatched a plan to revive Lucky and give him to me for my birthday. She paid to have him towed to the garage and they put another engine in, checked the brakes, and there was Lucky back in my life. I didn’t feel all that lucky. What did I need a second vehicle for, an old run-down truck that could run out of gas on the Bay Bridge and wouldn’t start when it got too hot, and how would I pay for it? The Volvo was a vastly more practical car, and frankly, I’d gotten used to the luxuries of a modern car with seat belts and a dependable starter. Lucky stayed up at the family retreat and lugged firewood around. Mostly, I felt done with Lucky, I just didn’t have room in my heart for two cars.

Lucky, however, was not done with me.

Boarding School

My younger brother, Will, was accepted for his junior year of high school at a boarding school outside of Sedona, Arizona. If my Mom’s resurrecting Lucky and giving him to me for my birthday seemed like a head-scratcher, sending eighteen-year old brother Will to drive ol’ Limp-Along Lucky to Arizona for his senior year of high school seemed downright foolhardy from a parenting perspective. Aside from the high likelihood that the truck just wasn’t really up for a thousand mile drive through deserts and over tall mountains, along with my brother’s youthful naïveté and complete lack of mechanical skills, and then the exceedingly gentle supervisory environment at the school, one might ask - as it appears my parents did not - what could possibly go wrong? I suspect that the principle reason my brother was invited to drive the truck to Arizona was that it would relieve my mother of driving him there. Will was the last of us four, and I think Mom was just about done with the parenting thing. Dad was out playing tennis with his new wife.

Will tells of many adventures with Lucky in that fateful year, of driving to school on the interstate, going up the many long inclines, redlining in second gear at 35 mph, and then of the school year with only a few kids falling out the back and remarkably, of drinking and driving perilously, but with no fatalities or stints in jail or meaningful sanctions from the school. I’ll leave those stories to Will. But as with all good things, senior year at Verde Valley came to an end, and Will was going to have to do something with the truck. Looking at the map, his eyes drifted to the right, eastward where his older brother (me) was now living, in remote rural New Mexico. Where a life could scarcely be successfully conducted without a truck. Everybody knows Ted loves Lucky Strike; I don’t remember consenting to Will’s proposal that he deliver Lucky to me.

Returning From Mexico

In March of 1979 I accompanied my friend Donald Martinez and his wife Bertha on a three thousand mile three week trip down through Mexico to the capital and back in his green Peugeot sedan. I sat in the back the whole time while Donald and Bertha argued in front. Otherwise, it was a pretty great trip. The last leg of the return is a long slog through the deserts of northern Mexico and southern New Mexico, and I remember I was getting drowsy, thinking I might get some shuteye as we were getting closer to home, but it occurred to me to mention to Donald to keep an eye out for a rundown old grey International Harvester pickup, as my brother might be driving it, slowly, on the highway on this day, I wasn’t really sure.

I woke up on the north side of Santa Fe just as we were coming into the roadside town of Pojoaque, not much there but the road, and as I’m blinking my eyes open, I can see further up the road a bunch of cop cars, lights ablazing, stopped around a car, a truck, a grey truck, a grey truck with those iconic oblong rear windows of the 1952 International Harvester pickup, one of which had a sticker that said “Ignore Alien Orders.”

I’m not sure we ever learned the offense for which Will had been pulled over in Pojoaque, but it must have been pretty bad. There were three cop cars surrounding Lucky, and the lead cop was leaning into the driver side window as we went by. I yelled, “Stop the car, that’s my brother.” Donald pulled over onto the shoulder, got out of the car and strolled over to where the cops were about to find the cup of whiskey my brother had clumsily spilled all over his lap as he tried to hide it under his seat, and the open bottle of Jack under the sweater beside him. My brother probably deserved a night or two in jail just for being so stupid as to drink whiskey out of a Sierra Club cup while driving. But somehow Donald knew one of the cops or had some kind of movida (special motivation that could convince cops not to do what they were sworn to do, like a bribe or knowing somebody important), and he walks up to the cop who’s about to pull my brother out of the truck and after a minute of conversation, the cop backs off and they all retire to their cop cars and drive away. It was a freaking miracle!

El Rito

So Lucky found me again, like those dogs in “The Incredible Journey,” crossing thousands of miles of desert, braving the heedless choices of a drunken high schooler, and narrowly escaping the clutches of the law and the Rio Arriba County wrecking services, Lucky found his way to my remote hideaway in the mountains above the humble New Mexico town of El Rito. During the dry season Lucky turned out to be a godsend, lugging firewood and at one point I loaded an entire outhouse in the back, fully formed, and drove it up to my house so I could live with the splendor of a real outhouse and no longer depend on my “outbench” for my daily business. But the seven mile dirt road up to my hideaway was so rutted and rugged, especially during any wet spell, neither Lucky nor my Volvo was up to the task. After a while I got tired of slogging my groceries up the muddy or snowy road on foot. I bought Avedon Trujillo’s 1970 International Harvester four-wheel drive heavy duty pickup so I could drive home under most conditions - sometimes the road was simply impassible.

Once again Lucky was left out in the cold. My neighbor Steve expressed interest in purchasing Lucky, but like most of the young drifters who ended up for a spell in the little gringo community around my hideaway, Steve had no money. He offered a hunting rifle in exchange for Lucky. I accepted, but Steve never came through with the rifle and then, when he got frustrated with the truck, he just left it for me and lit out of town. He’d done just enough bad modification on Lucky that it seemed hopeless to try to fix him one last time and what would I do with him anyway.

This truly was the end of the line for Lucky. I had him towed to the local junkyard in town. Every once in a while I’d go visit him in that desolate field of junk cars, but it was so depressing, and they tell me one day a salvage guy came and took Lucky to the smelter. I’ve gone out into that field a few times since, even just a couple of months ago, thinking maybe I’d gotten it wrong and Lucky was still out there somewhere, wouldn’t it be cool to see ol’ Lucky. Well, Lucky’s gone, and this time he’s not coming back.

like a tiger

maddened by the beauty

Oh, the orange-pink fire on a fresh, pale blue morning dome

innocent as a baby’s gaze

My marvelous eyes swim for the shore

but there is none

Nothing to cling to but the vastness of it all

And that’s where I am in the seasons of my own life, teetering for a moment at the brink, considering how graceful I want to be falling into the maw of infinity, imagining that I might choreograph my descent into the stillness of my own winter solstice, like a golden leaf navigating its glorious path to the forest floor. This is not morbid thinking, but simply acknowledging the truth of my own mortality and trying to get a hold on the ineffable beauty of knowing my time is short. I can no longer afford to waste precious moments not paying attention to their passing, to their preciousness, pretending those moments will flow past me forever. They won’t.

This photo, then, represents for me a most poignant moment in my own life, as my wife, Wendy, and I take on the task of choreographing our remaining precious moments, our beautiful descents, apart from one another, two leaves on a branch weighing the golden moment of release. I have no doubt that our dances will be brilliant.

Today, according to the last census 749 people reside in El Rito. Less than 200 live in Abiquiu and Ojo Caliente, towns which at least in appearance seem to have a lot more going on than El Rito. But El Rito has one thing none of those other towns has, which is a state-sponsored school of higher learning, established in 1909, that drew educated people into the town from around the nation, and young men and women from around the region, strangers who looked different and harbored different ideas. From a depression-era assay of the economic status of rural towns of northern New Mexico in the early thirties, the authors proclaimed El Rito to be an economic powerhouse compared to the other northern towns - not a particularly high bar to clear. El Rito could support a robust population, I infer from their book, because of its unusually productive grazing lands cited in the book as the source of El Rito’s effulgence.

Bolstering that notion is the story of turn-of-the century El Rito sheep rancher Venceslao Jaramillo, who became wealthy grazing thousands of head of sheep in the verdant high country (overgrazing and changing the landscape forever, as was the practice at the time). He was an influential legislator in the territorial New Mexico government. Mr. Jaramillo lobbied for state resources to build a school in his home town to teach locals to become teachers in their own villages (instead of the preachy, probably racist, white foreigners who tended to fill those positions). That this radical idea of proper education for children in these subsistence agrarian communities would take root in the remote town of El Rito is almost as improbable as the rise of the wealthy El Rito sheep farmer who made it happen, but I’ve always felt there was something a little different about El Rito from its surrounding towns, and I suspect the new school played a role in prying open the provincial attitudes that prevailed in the region.

Which brings us back to the El Rancho Bar. Perfecto, the bartender and owner, told me that he had attended the Normal School and trained to be a teacher. But going into the Great Depression, which was around the time Perfecto graduated, there would have been few paying teaching jobs. Perfecto told this story from his perch behind the bar: for a number of years around the Depression he and others from the area walked to the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, a distance of more than a hundred miles from El Rito, to harvest potatoes for pay. They’d work for a few weeks filling hundred pound sacks of potatoes and lug them out of the fields. At the end of the harvest as the gang broke up they’d salute their co-workers with a saying that Perf often repeated in the bar when we were leaving. He’d say, “Hasta las otras piscas de papas.” Until the next potato harvest. It was an odd saying, and almost all non-El Rito Spanish speakers laugh, or look at me funny, when I try it on them. But what gave that saying a real poignance to me about life in El Rito at that time was hearing the story of Perfecto’s last season picking potatoes, in the mid-thirties, I guess. They’d already piled up all the sacks of potatoes and were ready to walk back home with their wad of cash when the farmer gathered all the workers around and said, “I know I owe you for all the work you’ve done, but I don’t have the money to pay you. You’re welcome to take as many potatoes as you like.”

In addition to the character building aspects of such injustices, I think the El Rito Normal School had a profound effect on the people of El Rito, making them far more tolerant of strangers and open to new ideas. In the seventies, the school had become a thriving vocational training school, teaching the trades to people from all over the state and beyond. There was a popular class in new adobe building techniques. A new idea was taking root in northern New Mexico, of using windows to collect heat from the sun, so-called passive solar design. One of the disadvantages of living in a classic New Mexico mud (thick-walled adobe) house has always been that it takes a lot of heat energy to keep all that mud warm in winter. A man could spend a lot of his precious summer gathering firewood just to stay warm in winter. But if you put in some large south facing windows, you can save a lot of firewood by harvesting warmth from the daylight. Not only was there a class at the school, but just outside of town there was a small gringo “commune” dedicated to perfecting elements of design for heating adobe homes. People came from around the country to study at the feet of Peter Van Dresser, an early pioneer of passive solar design, just one of the many groups of people from outside- including quite a few hippies in the sixties and even a murderous motorcycle gang - who wandered into town, settled for a while before moving on. But locals seemed to be a little more tolerant, strangers didn’t get a lot of flak from the townspeople. They may not have particularly liked these interlopers, but they didn’t burn them out or run them out of town. At least not very often (save that thought).

I think it must have been Donald, Perfecto’s son, who picked up on the solar heating idea, but together Donald and Perf decided that the old El Rancho Bar was too cramped, and that El Rito deserved a nice place to settle down and drink Perf’s liquor. In 1981 they purchased a small building on the other side of town (five hundred yards to the south) and set about remodeling it. Beyond the thick hand hewn piñon trunks they carved into bar stools, and the glossy red cedar slab bar-top set on a grouted field stone base, the classic viga (log) rafters with rough-sawn planking on top, beyond the cozy wood stove and deer heads mounted on the walls, these guys decided to incorporate solar heating into their design. They installed a Trombe wall (glazed panels directly heating an adobe wall), an even more sophisticated version of passive solar design than mere south facing windows. Altogether, the new El Rancho Bar was a radical departure from the El Rito traditions of simple, practical, no frills, and no hint of ostentatious excess for comfort or for the pleasure of craft or design. But then Donald always was a bit of an odd fit for El Rito. He drove a French car, and he later ran an abattoir that composted the offal, and he was an aggrieved Republican in a county that voted straight Democrat year after year.

What really smacked the new El Rancho Bar into the stratosphere of WTF was the glowing profile it received in an Italian architecture and design magazine. Somehow someone in Italy found out about the new bar way out in bum-fuck El Rito and sent a photographer and journalist to profile it as the world’s first passive solar heated bar. We may not have been able to read the story in Italian, but the tiny photo of the bar in a glossy magazine from Europe made us drinkers of El Rito feel almost downright cosmopolitan at the new El Rancho Bar.

Epilogue: The stylish new El Rancho Bar was never a great success. It seems Donald may have been a few decades ahead of his time in El Rito, perhaps he projected his own aspirations to style on an unappreciative audience. I remember a few times sitting on those really nicely made piñon-trunk barstools with drinks on the glossy cedar top and the wood stove crackling merrily, but I don’t remember it being crowded. I remember one wintry afternoon when my friend Terry was teaching Morris Chavez, the town bully, how to play chess, over beers. I remember wincing at the sound of the plastic chess pieces hitting the floor, and Morris roaring, “No you read the focking rule book, man." I remember picking up my beer and slinking out of the bar.

It seems El Rito drinkers preferred drinking outside. Pretty soon Donald and Perf closed up the back barroom and we all convened outside leaning against our cars or sitting on the “liars bench” - a plank on two cinder blocks - drinking beer and passing pints of cheap whisky or tequila like the rustic people we were, or were trying to become. Before long, Donald and Perf sold the bar to Bobby Trujillo and went back to cattle ranching. I don’t think Bobby ever opened up the back bar and now it’s a wholistic health clinic called Synergy, with no trace left of the solar innovations or the bar, and Perfecto died in 1991. Donald is still there, maturing like the rest of us.

It is amazing to me how hard we’ve tried to mold their insane murderous rhetoric into some kind of norm, how long we have failed to parse their words for their true and obvious meaning, which is unfettered bloodlust.

The principle reason conservatives proposed as the reason we need our right to bear arms is that someday we might need to repel those legions of jack-booted thugs taking away our freedoms. But now that those thugs are here doing just that? Not a word, not a single threatening show of those precious, freedom-saving arms to get the thugs to back off.

Turns out that was bullshit. Not just regular bullshit, but gold-plated bullshit. Look how eager those same whiners are - oh my god can you believe it? - those same whiners who righteously whined in unison about the dangers of thuggish fascists stomping on their rights are now signing up in droves to become jack-booted, masked thugs stomping all over people’s rights! That’s crazy, right?

We need not waste a lot of energy trying to understand their point of view here, because it is now as clear as day they are insane, that ideas like freedom and justice and truth have no place in their ravings. Rather they are clamoring only for extreme and vicious remedies to feed their insanity. And their insanity at its core is simple bloodlust. They want to kill people.

The murder of Charlie Kirk by an obviously insane fascist extremist is but a minor, if telling, murder. In the glorious language of insane bloodlust, his attack is a call to join in, he’s unlocking the shackles of hesitation that hamper his fellow would-be bloodletters still grasping at the remnants of their humanity.

The shooter didn’t kill Kirk because he disagrees with him, an ideological adversary, he killed Kirk because he didn’t have the bloodlust. The message was: Ideology (conservative or otherwise) is immaterial, what matters is killing. This was the blue collar lone-wolf equivalent of Trump’s coup on January 6th, an invitation to those who are dabbling in bloodlust to just let go and jump in. A lighting of the fuse, hoping it sets off a chain reaction. Nothing would have pleased Trump more that day than if they’d done some killing in his name. Hang Mike Pence? Proud Boys shoot up the crowd? Hey, they weren’t there to hurt him.

Until today I had seen Trump’s own bloodlust, as evidenced on January 6th, as a personality quirk, just another utterly despicable personal quality in the man himself. But today, as he stirs up murderous hatred among his mad supporters for those “lunatic liberals” who had nothing to do with the murder of Charlie Kirk, we see it’s not just Trump who is bloodthirsty, lusting for murder, it’s the glue of the MAGA bond, it’s the clarion call, it’s what drives everything they say and do. What we’ve heard today is the baying of hounds.

We are in the midst of a gruesome crescendo that leads to only one outcome: death. Critics call the media’s efforts to explain MAGA as “sane washing,” but we all do it too. Whether it’s confusion or simply an aversion to facing the abject fact of their murderous misanthropy, we’re still giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The time has come to say it outright and without hesitation: These people are insane. Their message, in every word they say, is a call to murder. Because by now the only words that would direct their passions toward something constructive, that would cancel their call to murder, are the ones you never hear from them: Stop the hate, violence is wrong, etc.

This is America’s “Hutu Moment.” We can no longer fail to hear what their words convey, from the cruelty-curious, who merely talk about rounding up immigrants and feeding them to the alligators, haha, to the bloodlusty pirate patriots, calling outright for murder of innocents, it all pushes the same button. It’s all about goading the bloodthirsty to murderous action. Eventually they will succeed. While we spin in confusion over their blatant cruelty and performative misanthropy - why would they do that? - we have to realize it all points in one direction, murder. These people don’t have weapons to protect an ideal or a society, they have weapons so they can kill. People. They aren’t patriots, they’re wannabe assassins waiting for somebody crazier than them to start the shooting. And then they’ll join in because, well…..

Because crazy is better than dead. Under Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, the Hutus in Rwanda, etc. - we’ve seen this more than a few times - if you weren’t crazy you were dead. This is the true definition of fascism. It’s not a particular form of governance, it’s a simple rule: If you aren’t crazy, you’re dead.

Photo by Carlos Maer

Perfecto Martinez and his son, Donald, owned and tended the El Rancho Bar in downtown El Rito. It was a no-frills bar in a small building, unusually bright for a bar, not a dank den of dour dudes. My friend Avedon told of a time in El Rito when, during a timber boom in the late 1940’s there had been nine bars in town, and he himself had tended one of them (right across the street from El Rancho) at the ripe old age of nineteen. He said he kept an axe handy behind the bar, so that when things started to get a little spicy, he would sink his axe into the wooden bar top near the would-be rabble-rouser, and that usually calmed things down.

By the time I got there, there were only two bars in town, El LLano Bar, which nobody ever went to because during the depression the owners had taken advantage of people’s hardship and screwed many local families out of their land holdings, and El Rancho. Perfecto never had to brandish an axe, to the best of my knowledge. But his bar did have a peculiar hazard that seemed cruelly designed to kill drunken patrons. Entering the bar from the street, the door opened onto a raggedy carpeted floor that a few steps into the room - enough space to build a little momentum toward the bar - stepped up about a foot, with a forty-five degree transition helping you up the way, or rather, tripping you on your way if you, for some reason, happened to be only partially in control of your motor function. This little rise in the floor had been built to accommodate plumbing underneath, as the building transitioned from the colonial period to the modern era, a typically “El Rito” solution. What turned this tangible menace into a true death trap was the bumper pool table placed just past the transition, to perfectly meet the skull of an unwary stumbler failing to negotiate the transition. I never saw or heard of anyone dying this way, but it was something I worried about, even if nobody else did. I also don’t remember anyone ever playing bumper pool. The people who came to Perfecto’s bar were there to drink.

Just past the bumper pool table was the simply constructed plywood bar front with a thick plank top, and a few stools in front. Behind the bar, Perf (as Perfecto was known) sat on a stool with a sliding lid top-load cooler full of beer in front of him and a couple of simple shelves behind him loaded with miniature bottles of liquor, everything from whiskey to schnapps. Perfecto had a shiny bald head and twinkling squinty eyes that hinted at merriment. Every time I walked into the bar he would proclaim in Spanish, “I adore you!” It was his little joke. He knew my name was Ted, and in Spanish most Teds are Teodoro, and swapping out an “a” for an “o”, he’d say “Te adoro,” I adore you. I tried not to take it personally, but I think Perf liked me, and I know I loved him. I still get a little misty thinking of him sitting behind the bar. When we hoisted our drinks for the toast, it was never shots in a glass, but those tiny bottles raised up, then down and eventually inside. I had never drank in a bar before I came to El Rito, so I had nothing to compare, but I was surprised at how many times people bought drinks for everyone in the bar, even little ol’ gringo me.

It was a small bar in a small town, and there weren’t often more than half a dozen patrons at any one time, but still. People seemed so generous, and Perfecto chief among them, though I think he had ulterior motives. Once Perf got the round-buying going it was hard to stop - performative largesse goaded on by mutually reinforced abandon to the liquor gods. There was a saying I learned there from the more serious drinkers, “Vamos en la peda!!” Let’s get fucked up! Sometimes we’d pile up two or three free drinks in front of us on the bar top, an embarassment of riches, a sign that we were well on our way to the peda.

The old men of El Rito were usually the early birds at the bar, only sometimes waiting til afternoon to begin their sessions. Perfecto, always well-attuned to a business opportunity, would open before noon. Arriving at the bar mid-afternoon, it was not uncommon to see an old man passed out on the bar top with his head resting on his arm. Many of these old guys didn’t have their trucks anymore, either because someone had taken away their keys or they’d rolled it in a ditch, or they’d rather spend their cash on drinks than gas, so they rode a horse or walked to the bar. Getting there was hard enough for a weary old stove-up farmer, but getting home could be positively treacherous. Staggering home drunk, the weed-choked shoulder of the road impassible, you’d often see a guy doing his best on the paved road. Drivers mostly slowed down, offered old grandfather a ride home, but it had happened more than once that an old guy perished on his way home, hit by a car or laying down in the ditch on a winter night to rest, never to rise up again.

So it was that the old drinking men of El Rito earned themselves a uniform. I don’t know who came up with this brilliant idea, but it still seems like another perfect “El Rito” style solution to an El Rito problem. When all these old guys first showed up at the bar in their bright orange hunter’s vests, and caps to match, we thought they were merely breaking out the hunting gear a little early. It turns out that someone procured a bunch of safety vests and hats and handed them out to the old guys to keep them visible at night so they wouldn’t get hit, or give them a chance of being seen if they passed out on the shoulder. Today such a public highlighting of problem drinkers would be a social work faux pas, a grievous humiliation of our hard-drinking elders. But in truth I got the impression those guys wore their orange apparel with some pride.

I remember one quiet old guy who frequented the El Rancho Bar, his name was Gilbert L. He had very dark skin and a full head of standing-up-straight black hair with but a few streaks of gray. His features strongly suggested indigenous origins, but that was not uncommon in this town. He rarely had much to say to anyone, and when he spoke to me, I had a hard time understanding him because of the liquor and because his Spanish pronunciation was heavily inflected by something else. I’d offer him a cigarette and we’d smoke together quietly. When he’d had his fill of drink he’d lay his head on the bar and go to sleep. Every once in a while, apropos of nothing, he’d raise up his head and say, “Yo soy Apache!” in a rather officious tone, proclaiming his Apache heritage in Spanish. Sadly, I never asked him to explain, and I didn’t begin to understand how much that proclamation had to do with the long history of El Rito until many years later.

My introduction to the term “genizaro” (pronounced hen-ees-a-roh) came from the principal of the local grammar school, Esperanza G., who explained that in the Spanish Catholic church there was a list of terms that identified what proportion of true white Spanish blood every citizen was known to have. The more Spanish blood the higher the status. Some of those old terms have become low-grade insults in modern usage, like the word “cholo,” which now means a person of gangster culture who dresses a certain way and drives around in low-rider cars. But when the Church was the reigning authority in the tiny town of El Rito, these words and the status they signified impacted people’s lives significantly. Genizaro was at the bottom of the list, the lowest status and the lowest, if any, Spanish blood. Most genizaros were full blood native american slaves living in Spanish households.

El Rito was first settled by the Spanish in the 1700’s, in a small outpost about ten miles downstream from the current village. There’s a melted adobe church - just knee high walls out on the plain - that marks the spot. Eventually the settlers moved the town to higher ground with a more commanding view, and they built the church that still stands in downtown El Rito in 1832. The church was built with five-foot thick adobe walls as a refuge from the threat of Indian plunderers. Four different tribes helped themselves to the gross domestic product of the Spanish farmers settled in outposts such as El Rito outside the capital Santa Fe, some sixty miles to the south. El Rito and the many other small villages in the north were meant to provide a first defense against Indian raids, keeping the threat and occasional violence as far as possible from the civilized capital city. These little villages had a lot of contact with the native populations, and what I’ve come to understand through looking into this term “genizaro” is how much the populations of these small towns were infused with native blood of both the marauding tribes and the Pueblo people who had allied themselves with the Spanish colonies, as they too had been victimized by the raiding parties of Utes, Navajos, Apaches, and most fearsome of all, the Comanches riding in from Texas.

I was told this story* by an old old man named Pablito, probably in the mid-1980s, of an incident from what must have been well before the turn of the nineteenth century, where Indians were snooping around in downtown El Rito. The women were in the kitchen doing chores when one of them noticed an Indian man peering in through the windowless opening, presumably looking to do mischief. From a large cauldron of boiling water, she scooped up a potful, snuck over to the window and hurled it in the face of the man in the window. Then the women raced outside and killed the injured man while his accomplices made their getaway.

In those early days one of the most significant economic assets was children, for both native and Spanish communities. Beyond the obvious prizes of livestock and produce, native raiders also occasionally stole children to be raised and become productive members of the tribe. The children could also be traded back to their parents, as there was an annual “flea market” in Taos where such trades could be made. At the same time, Spanish raiding parties kidnapped native children and held them as slaves in their households, and many of those genizaros grew up and incorporated into the Spanish culture, especially in these outpost villages like El Rito, where necessity sometimes overcame the exigencies of race and status. So indeed, without benefit of DNA testing, I can only surmise that the darker complexions and strong indigenous features of many of my friends and acquaintances in El Rito were related to these events.

Maybe fifteen years ago, my landline telephone in El Rito went out of service, and the repairman who came was from the nearby town of La Madera. His name was Carlos O. and he was a very engaging phone repairman. He told me the story of how his Apache grandfather had been kidnapped as a young child and been raised, as a genizaro servant in a Spanish home in La Madera. Upon his eighteenth birthday, a delegation of Apache elders came politely knocking at his captors’ door. The young Apache was summoned, the delegation told him that he had reached the age of emancipation and they’d come to take him home with them, back to his Apache family. Carlos’ eighteen-year old grandfather considered their proposal and then told them, no, he’d rather stay in La Madera with his Spanish family, and that was that.

Carlos himself was raised in the Spanish village of La Madera as a cultural New Mexico Spaniard, speaking an arcane Spanish unique to northern NM, but who also became curious about his Apache heritage and eventually opened a “store” called Apache Drums where he made drums and celebrated some of his Apache traditions, while also being an English-speaking Americanized telephone technician.

Back at the El Rancho Bar, Gilbert, it seemed, was still conflicted about the legacy of his Spanish and Indian roots. His “Yo soy Apache” had more than a hint of defiant pride. I just wish I’d asked him to tell me about it.

* In a very strange turn of events, I was recounting this story this past July (2025) to a man I’d just met, Roque by name (and with strong indigenous features, coincidentally), in Santa Fe, and he stopped me mid-story and said “Wait, this is my grandmother’s story!” He told me his grandmother had lived in El Rito and he proceeded to tell a slightly different version involving sneaking Indians, hot oil and steam, and no dead people. Pablito, who first told me the story forty years ago, is long dead, and so is Roque’s grandmother, so I’ll just leave it at that.

To the mountain, said Death, that’s where I’d like to go, 

‘Mid the sun-shattered rock and the shrunk banks of snow,

Draw my last gasp of breath looking up at the sky,

To know that even for me there’s an end drawing nigh,

I’d think for a moment of my own mournful try

To make sense of the work, to endure, not to die,

Then I’d look at the mountain, all that stone stacked so high,

And take comfort remembering the one thing I know,

That even the mountain will, in time, be brought low.

PS - There’s nothing like a run down cemetery to inspire thoughts about the nature of finality. This one is in the “town” of Benton, CA, above the hot springs there. The tall peak in the second photo is Boundary Peak, which straddles the line between California and Nevada at the northern end of the White Mountains, where the oldest known life form, the Bristlecone Pine, is making a stand against finality.

My mother used to tell about how when she took one-year old me to the park in my pram, I would address everyone who passed by with a hearty greeting and my hand raised in a friendly salute. “Hi, man!,” I’d say, anticipating the popular greeting adopted by the beatniks and hippies flocking to San Francisco a few years later.

And so it was, some seventeen years hence, driving up that twelve mile grade into the tiny town of El Rito for the first time, I knew I had found my home even before I got there. Every car we passed on our way into town for what would be my first extended adventure in New Mexico, the driver waved to us. Just a small flick of two fingers from the top of the steering wheel, or maybe the whole hand raised a bit, a little shake of those two fingers in our direction. This tiny gesture struck me to my infant core. I still remember, now fifty years later, the first time I drove into El Rito. I felt so welcomed.

We still do it, I call it the El Rito salute, though by now it’s a dying cultural remnant of a time when people out here in the hinterlands were a little more connected, a little more dependent on one another, and everyone was a little more up in everyone else’s business. The young people hardly wave at all. It’s another sign that the “community” of El Rito is dissipating.

I couldn’t have known it at the time - what does an eighteen year old boy know about anything? - but the community of El Rito was dissipating at the very time of my arrival in 1973. I started thinking about this many years later, after I had studied human behavior for some years at university, about the major social transformation that was occurring just as I got there. The signs were all around me, and I waded right in, innocent, unaware of the profound march of history and human evolution playing out in this rural backwater town that had been settled by Spanish Mexicans and native Americans in the 1700’s.

The truth is I didn’t jump right into El Rito society from the get-go. I had come to visit a tiny gringo settlement seven miles out of town, up the roughest road I’d ever been on, up in the mountains above town, a place called Potrero Canyon. “Potrero” means a place for grazing in Spanish, and there were indeed lovely grassy high mountain fields ringed by pine forest and tall cottonwoods lining the tiny creek (usually) flowing from its spring source further up into the mountains. This was my second revelation that I had come to the right place, as I’d had recurring dreams as a kid of having a small cabin in a forest of tall pines, and here were all these guys building their dream cabins in this beautiful forest. This place was my dream made manifest.

I was traveling with my grammar school buddy, Jim, whose older brother, Terry, had dropped out of college and taken a bunch of his friends with him to this forsaken outpost where they could build funky houses and drink as much beer as they wanted and carry on without anyone, neither their parents nor the townsfolk, being the wiser. These guys had been at it for several years, alternating between occasional jobs around the area and harvesting firewood to sell, meanwhile gathering resources, cutting and peeling logs for roof members, making mud bricks and stockpiling them, rummaging around the area for salvage windows, sinks, doors, and then launching a community barnraising when the time was right. The key ingredient appeared to be beer, as long as there was beer on site, the Potrero community would show up to help out.

The community being this core group of five or six St. John’s College proto-philosopher dropouts with almost no practical life experience, taking on an incredibly harsh environment at 8,000 feet elevation, where the temperate season lasted mid-May to Mid-October, and the rest of the time it was freezing, with deep snow in winter, and mud pretty much all year round - and let me tell you, this was no ordinary mud, this mud was as slicker than a used car salesman. A modest rain would turn the deep rutted barely-passable steep boulder protruding so-called road into a car and truck-swallowing bog where you’d succumb to gravity and with a sickening sliding kerblump into the ruts and hope like hell you didn’t sink and run aground. Going sideways down the steep part was normal. And if you’ve never tried putting chains on your tires when you’re stuck in mud, I don’t recommend it. Walking the final two miles up was a rational choice anytime the road became dicey, which was much of the time, the only problem being how the mud built up on your soles as you walked, turning them into something a P-Funk strutter in platform boots would look on as a style challenge.

But the community usually, at least during the glorious temperate seasons, also consisted of a crowd of visitors and hangers-on, including me and Jim, so a room-raising - most of these “houses” being built started with a single room or two that would eventually be added on to - would be a few days or week’s work for a gang of gung-ho youths eager to get the big stuff done, and drink a lot of beer. In fact, the guy that Jim and I ended up helping that first summer had come up with a brilliant innovation that combined enthusiastic beer-drinking with clever resource management: he invented (but never patented) a way to use empty upside-down beer cans to insulate his roof. The more we drank, the warmer he’d be in winter. All he had to do was buy the beer.

Ah yes, buying the beer. Certainly there were other supplies needed to keep projects progressing and spirits high in Potrero Canyon, and groceries and hardware were available at Martin’s General Store (since 1916) in town, but there were few trips to town that didn’t involve a stop at the El Rancho Bar, directly across the street from Martin’s Store. This was downtown El Rito, with the 1832 fortress/church (five-foot thick adobe walls to discourage raiding Indians from trying to break through) a little way down the road, and that was it. Downtown El Rito.

The proprietor at El Rancho Bar was a kindly middle-aged man with a very shiny bald head named Perfecto Martinez. Somewhat surprisingly given that this was a town that had survived more than 250 years at a very modest subsistence level, with a racial profile that mixed at least five different regional tribes with already mixed racial strains of European Spanish and indigenous peoples coming up to settle New Mexico from Mexico, and a proudly, perhaps rigidly, Spanish Catholic culture that struggled to co-exist with the radical apostate Penitente sect popular in the area, the El Rito bar scene was congenial, even to this new strain of gringo college dropouts trying to carve out a life in the locals’ traditional grazing lands up in the hills.

As an eighteen-year old growing up in the sixties, I was no stranger to the charms of alcohol. My father, a mostly high-functioning alcoholic, had let me drink an occasional beer since I was big enough to help him cutting brush and firewood, and he’d always kept a well stocked cabinet from which I could furtively sneak drinks when needed. But to be welcomed into this manly den of adult drinking, as Perfecto did, felt like an initiation into manhood. Here in the El Rancho Bar we’d find the denizens of El Rito, young and old, mostly friendly, some a little edgy, almost always just men, hanging out at the bar. With my rudimentary high school Spanish, I managed to impress a few of the old men who hardly spoke English, over a couple of beers and maybe a congenial round of shots. “Arriba, abajo, a centro, y adentro,” the toast for every new round. Eventually we’d leave, sometimes a bit wobbly, with a stack of cases of beer in the back of the truck, hoping they’d last a few days. The problem with stacks of cases of beer is that they tend to promote more beer drinking, leading to a quick downgrading of supply, and then another trip to town on the horrible road, which, itself gave many good reasons to drink more beer.

For five years before I finally moved there, I lived in California learning my trade of carpentry and I came out to El Rito several times each year, bringing friends and staying for weeks at a time. But since that very first time I’d always had in mind that this would be my home. And for every visit, there would be at least one session at the El Rancho Bar to see how Perfecto was doing and check in on the ranchers, rowdy boys, and old grandfathers who frequented the bar in addition to the Potrero crowd.

So it was through these old grandfathers that I got to know the town of El Rito. Most of them spoke passable English, though some of the older ones barely did. It had only been about twenty years since they’d paved the road into El Rito, and same for electricity, so many of these old guys had lived their lives riding horses and working year round to feed their families, farming, hunting and fishing, and only taking temporary jobs to earn cash. They spoke the language of their ancestors, a version of Spanish that still uses expressions that fell out of fashion in Europe in the 19th century. It wasn’t uncommon to see a horse tied up at the hitching post out in front of the bar, stamping at the flies, hoping his owner wouldn’t lose track of him.

Most of these old men were pretty serious alcoholics, they lived to get drunk and they came to get drunk every day they had the money to pay for it. Alcohol played a role in their lives, in their ancestors’ lives and in their children’s lives too, with many through the generations succumbing to alcohol-related diseases like crashing their cars and getting into fights. More than a few younger men I knew died in car crashes while driving reckless and drunk, these older guys had probably survived due to their attenuated relationship with the cash economy, where they didn’t have the money to buy a truck in good enough shape to get much over forty miles an hour and they didn’t have the cash to keep buying liquor to the point of senselessness. They still had to go home to their wives and families. I remember one of my older friends recounting his life in probably the nineteen twenties or thirties when he was a barefoot twelve-year old tending his family’s sheep in the hills above town. Nothing gave him more pleasure than than settling down under a tree with his sheep bleating about him and popping the cork on a pint of cheap sherry wine and drifting off to sleep. His name was Prudencio. Even as an old man, he was the least prudent person I’d ever met. But he was usually too poor to be a good alcoholic.

Before they got blotto, or had to meander back home, some of these old guys would chat with me. I’d try out my crappy Spanish and they’d correct me, and I’d improve, endearing us each to the other. Some of them took me home and introduced me to their wives and I got to know their families on down the line, see them at fiestas in town or out in the forest. But of course, learning a language in a bar full of men can be problematic, as I found when I proudly started deploying some of my newly learned bar words around their sweet old wives, and noticed them blanching and looking shocked.

This is one of the things I really loved about El Rito, is how everybody knows everybody. Getting to know one old farmer/rancher at the bar opened the door to knowing generations of his family, sometimes dozens of people. In my neighborhood in San Francisco when I was a kid we knew a few families in the houses on our block, but there was little sense of community, no multi-generational crowd. Many houses on our block were occupied by complete strangers. In El Rito everyone knows where everyone else lives, who’s related to who, who’s in trouble and who’s been getting better, who’s sick and who just died. El Rito was a real community. An insular community, yes, where no gringo, not even Greg Martin, who was third generation El Rito gringo married to a Hispana, and who ran his general store with kindness and generosity, was fully accepted by the Spanish majority (95% in those days, a little less now). But even now, thirty five years since I lived here full time, a friend will come into town asking where I live, and a random local I barely know will direct them to my house.

I’ve often described this rural traditional culture that I stumbled into as a “culture of poverty,” but that’s a little misleading. It would be better to say it is a culture formed under conditions of scarcity, which is obviously what generations of subsistence farming would yield, a culture that was wary of fickle Nature and thrifty to a fault. Not only that, but El Rito and the rest of the villages ringing the heart of the Spanish colony in Santa Fe were the frontier of a porous defense against Indian attack until the late 1800’s, so in addition to vicissitudes of nature and a generally spare economy (further compromised by inconsistent and inadequate support from the powers in Santa Fe and Mexico City), the people of El Rito had to contend with sporadic warfare and thievery from four indignant tribes contesting their occupancy.

If cash were the only measure of wealth, the people of El Rito had been destitute for centuries before dependable sources of outside income became available, beginning with World War II. A government survey of the region during the Depression, taking measure of communal wealth of the rural towns of northern New Mexico, El Rito was seen as prosperous due mostly to its generous grazing lands (potreros) in the upper canyons along El Rito Creek, and the fertile and comparatively well-irrigated farmlands around which the town was settled. It turned out that until the 1930’s subsistence farming in El Rito had been a pretty good way to get along for a century or two.

But then, the economic depression and a catastrophic years-long drought had brought the entire region to the brink of despondency. The purpose of the 1934 survey was to find out why nearly 80% of the people in the area were receiving “relief,” principally food support. Even with relief, child malnutrition was epidemic. All this to say that Riteño culture had been under considerable stress for a long time.

When the pall of the Depression began (very slowly) lifting in these remote subsistence villages like El Rito, barely thirty years before I got there in 1973, it had done so by introducing an entirely new way of subsistence through wage labor. Working for the Man. Working for the white man. Young men in these subsistence farming communities had left town to earn cash for decades, but it had almost always been to support their family’s farm-based lifestyle. But now young people were beginning to gravitate toward full-time employment and careers in the modern economy, a few adventurous souls at a time. Still, the majority of young men when I arrived in El Rito were earning their cash fighting forest fires in far-away states, getting paid far more than their sheep-herding or potato-harvesting fathers had been when they went out for work, but still trying to eke out a living with catch-as-catch-can employment. They were caught between the traditions of their ancestors and the appeal of the new economic realities brought in by anglo culture, of which I - just another jipe jediondo (stinkin’ hippie, in the local parlance and my favorite alliterative phrase ever) - was a product and a symbol, I suppose.

Not only were the elders’ historic traditions being overturned, but the very language of their ancestors was being lost in the gringo school system, with some parents choosing not to teach their children Spanish for fear of not fitting into the ascendant gringo culture and economy. How could this not be taken as a rebuke to the grandparents’ entire existence? For these old men whose own grandchildren spoke a different language, I imagine that my efforts to communicate in Spanish might have tickled them a bit, a small but meaningful gesture of respect they might have been craving from their own families.

What this city-raised, scraggly-bearded, obscenely wealthy (in comparison) outsider gringo didn’t know as he blithely ingratiated himself to the local elders at the bar was that he had arrived at the very moment of this centuries-old New Mexican traditional culture’s collapse into irrelevance, at least from the perspective of these proud, heartbroken old men. Now at the tail end of their incredibly hard working lives, at the time when they would have been seen in earlier generations as the respected founts of cultural wisdom, they were coming to realize that they were as valuable to their community as the broken down horse-drawn wagons moldering in their back fields. What else did they have to live for, but the pleasure of drinks among their fellow has-beens, the pleasure of forgetting, and maybe a glimpse into the future with this punk white kid fumbling over their language, but having mastered the local toast. Arriba, abajo, a centro, y adentro!

The recent flooding in central Texas has left me thinking about my own idyllic stream-side existence in New Mexico, and the nature of human consciousness. My El Rito adobe home stands next to an arroyo that was diverted by Spanish subsistence farmers sometime in the 1800’s to protect their irrigation ditch from being inundated and filled with sediment. With shovels, they built a modest berm that sent the arroyo flow sideways and out into a field down the way, past my neighbor John’s house. Topographically speaking, the flow coming off the ridges behind my house wants to run in its old channel that runs by my house. The berm has held up to this day, not because it is some kind of engineering marvel, but because we haven’t had one of those rainstorms like they had in Texas the other day.

Two days after the disaster in Texas, the New Mexico town of Ruidoso, 250 miles to the south of me, got one of those rainstorms, and the little creek around which the town was built turned into a raging monster, taking out houses and killing three people. Last summer a violent storm hit much closer to home, in the nearby Jemez mountains. Floodwaters roaring down local arroyos hit the Chama River, a major tributary of the Rio Grande, with such force it changed the course of the river, washed away multiple residences and carved off acres of arable bottomland and left a plug of sediment in the old riverbed 100 yards wide, 5 feet deep and more than a mile long.

So this sinuous V-shaped weed-choked ten foot deep ravine running by my house, mostly inactive for the past 200 years, tells a story about the landscape that I don’t really want to hear, in the same way that all those Texans living and going to summer camp along the Guadalupe River didn’t want to hear. It’s a story that calls into question that comfortable feeling of permanence we humans naively impute to our surroundings, to the point where we ignore the stern warnings carved into the landscape. In Texas they even had a nick-name for the Guadalupe River basin, “Flash-Flood Alley,” which is literally what the arroyo running by my house is. The Guadalupe River, like my arroyo, has been behaving itself more or less for years now, leaving locals with the impression of permanence, that this riverside - or arroyo-side - life is just going to keep on going as is for the foreseeable future.

My stream-side idyll is also threatened by the stream itself, which is fed by a hundred narrow arroyos along its ten mile course through the high country above my house. I have to cross this stream to get to my house, on a bridge I constructed by dragging a seven-ton flatbed railroad car down my driveway forty years ago. We’ve had some “gully-washers” or “turd-floaters,” as the cattlemen say, over the years, even one of those “Biblical” rainstorms in 1980 that did flood me out of a little dugout house I was living in nearby (flash flood waters flowed into my house), and turned my placid creek into a raging orange torrent. But when you see what these more recent storms are doing to the landscape, you understand that we aren’t talking about the storms of yore. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker last week, “It can be said definitively that in a warming world, flooding of the sort that occurred in Texas will become more common.”

When I see those images of destruction in Texas, or of houses in southern New Mexico washing down what was an hour earlier a narrow stream, or when I drive by the site of last year’s nearby flash floods, only twenty minutes drive from my house - you can still see a ruined mobile home dangling hopelessly over the edge of a raw arroyo bank - I can’t help but apply those images to my own landscape. In El Rito, just a few hundred yards upstream from my bridge in the placid creek is a catastrophe waiting to happen. It’s the accumulated tangle of years of drought-killed cottonwood trees that slowly floated down the river piece by piece in modest rain events and spring runoff and got caught up here. But in a big storm like we’ve been seeing, super-sized by forces related to climate change and thus incomparable to what’s passed before, that tangle of trees, and the many more further upstream, would push free into the muscular current and tumble downstream, grinding and pushing anything and everything in their path, including my bridge, toward the Chama River, toward the Rio Grande, toward the sea.

People live with risks to life and property all over the world, and almost always the danger is apparent, known to the many. In California, where I’ve spent much of my life, the threat of mass destruction and death from earthquake is omnipresent, and we’ve gone through several horrific episodes of wildfire, and floods, too. And yet we delude ourselves with a comforting illusion that the world is largely unchanging, that tomorrow it will be very much like it was today. I don’t like worrying about disaster, so I kind of just don’t do it. Much. Of course, this little piece I’m writing now is me worrying about my house or my bridge washing away and about profound changes to the landscape that might happen. I look warily at the incredibly beautiful thunderheads building up over the mountains behind my house. Is this gonna be “that” storm?

I think it’s interesting how we accommodate to these omnipresent risks. People build houses and run summer camps in flood zones, in fire zones, in earthquake zones. These little river floods are nothing compared to the risk of flooding from earthquake induced tsunamis along the west coast, and yet millions of us just go about our days blissfully ignoring the danger. It feels like the same kind of apathy that has lost us our democracy and our benevolent climate. The danger doesn’t seem real. Yet.

The day after my house flooded back in 1980, I went for a walk up the riverbed. It had been transformed from a normal boulder-strewn creek into a broad flat expanse of pure white sand. Instead of disaster, it was magic. Yes, the soggy house was a mess, but the creek was totally transformed into a winding white roadway so smooth I could walk with my eyes closed. It only lasted a day or so before all the sand washed away and the boulders popped back up. I had a memorable moment of terror on that walk, when I stepped on what appeared to be solid ground and sunk instantly up to my crotch in a drift of hail ice.

This was so cool. And cold, too. Who ever heard of this phenomenon? The storm had begun with a big dump of hail (it had completely shredded my vegetable garden - all that was left of the corn plants was stalks and threads) which was followed by heavy rain which washed the hail into the stream. Floating on the current the hail collected in an eddy, mixing in with other floating detritus like piñon pine needles. The eddy was filling up with hail and pine needles until the river receded. Overnight the hail on the surface melted and disappeared, leaving the dark pine needles on top covering this pocket filled with hail. It looked like solid ground. I don’t think there’s a moral to this part of the story.

Post Script

I finished writing the above last Saturday. On Tuesday afternoon Wendy and I left El Rito for Santa Fe with a thunderstorm looming up in the hills behind the house. We heard a few rumbles of thunder, no different from days past, when promising (and incredibly beautiful) banks of clouds built up, made some noise, and then slid on by without making much fuss. A hour later, just as we were climbing the last hill coming into Santa Fe, we got a call from my neighbor, John. His voice sounded somewhat garbled, almost as if he were speaking under water. He was kind of shouting.

“Are you here? This storm is epic. It’s doing damage, the arroyo is running full tilt, I can’t even go outside, it’s almost continuous lightning, I’ve never seen anything like it, this is the big one……”

John sounded a mix of awe-struck and freaked out. He was looking out his window at the arroyo diversion flowing behind his house, and it was topping the berm and flowing in gaudy sheets into his vegetable garden right next to his house, while the main flow just blasted out into the open field below, carrying off his little foot bridge, carrying boulders and sand and tires from the neighbor’s yard. By the time the storm tapered off, he had a fresh five inches of sandy soil covering his garden, and a field filled with round rocks and sand.

A neighbor on the other side of the river recorded four inches of rain in his rain gauge, and he was nowhere near the center of the storm. A rain gauge half a mile down the road got a quarter inch. This storm was pinpointed over our backyard. Once the lightning had abated, John went out and checked the neighborhood, sending pictures of what he saw. The arroyo by my house was running more than a foot deep, but well contained within its steep walls, with most of the runoff being captured by the 200-year old diversion and rushing past John’s house and out into the field. John’s driveway was completely submerged, and the river had risen three or four feet and raged through it’s willow-choked banks carrying logs and huge rocks, leaving new thick banks of sandy silt and carving the riverbed a little deeper. It took out the huge beaver dam and pond at John’s riverside, and we later saw another beaver dam washed out upstream. But remarkably, there had been almost no damage to our infrastructure. The bridge over the river was secure.

A couple of days after the storm John and I went to look a little further up our nearby drainages. The next arroyo up had absorbed the brunt of the storm. Who knows how many inches of rain fell on those hills in that hour or two, but regardless the tally, the results were dramatic. Huge boulders littered what had been a smooth road, stumps and trunks of trees had been tossed about willy-nilly. Down where the outflow from the arroyo met the river we found a broad delta of sandy deposits spread out throughout the forest floor, a smooth mucky expanse hundreds of feet wide among the trees. Here the urgent pulse of the massive flash flood coursing downhill met the more level riverbed and had to wait for the river to drain, forming a burgeoning flash flood lake. The slowing floodwaters dropped their burden of sediment, before joining the river and flowing down under my bridge, massive and muscular, carrying logs and boulders that crashed and carved their way between the river’s banks, but somewhat tamed by the river’s moderate incline. The roiling waters remained well below the deck of my bridge.

John said this was the big one, and he might be right. That storm in 1980 dumped two inches and flooded my house, and this storm measured four, almost certainly the biggest storm in those intervening forty-five years. They call such storms “hundred-year events,” as if nature and storm systems go by a schedule. That’s the problem with climate change, it scrambles the actuarial tables. This could be just a warm-up for what’s to come. I guess I’ll just keep worrying. A little bit.

Flood photos by John Evascovich

Top photo by Eric Gent

I like to leave for New Mexico in the wee hours, driving through the sleeping neighborhoods and along the empty interstate in darkness, like I’m escaping before they realize I’m gone. I’m not running away from anyone, it’s more like I’m ditching my ghosts, my California existence and all the accreted memory of half a life, before they wake up and catch me and drag me back.

Thankfully, Wendy talked some sense into me. Too many loose ends to tie up, we finished packing while waiting for morning rush hour to subside, and left at a leisurely late morning hour. The ghosts seemed satisfied that I’d gotten my affairs in order, they did not claw and clutch at me as we left town. The road was open and remarkably tranquil.

We decided on a route that would take us through Yosemite Park, if not the storied valley itself, along what turned out to be a tortuous and confusing loop through the foothill towns, hitting the worst traffic of the entire journey in downtown Sonora. But soon enough we were free of all that, ascending the rolling flaxen hills and into the piney woods of the high country. Our expectations of a summer tourist traffic jam in Yosemite were decidedly overblown, I don’t think I got stuck behind a lumbering camper once, all the way to Lee Vining. We pulled into a picnic ground with a crashing Sierra creek and we were the only ones there. I took the dog on a boulder hop along its banks, lush and jumbled, feeling my car-stiffened muscles slowly returning to sentience. I washed my face in the chill water and took in the symphony of sound and the shimmering dance of light across the stream.

Amid the crush of sour news about humanity and the state of earth’s habitability, it takes but a few moments in the presence of this kind of pristine natural beauty to cleanse the palate, to reset my hunched shoulders of a defensive mindset and open my chest to the sky and free my heart, turn my trudging, off-balance walk into more of a lighthearted scamper. I returned to the car refreshed and excited for the road.

A few miles down the way we came to a busy pullout with a magnificent view looking back down the glacier-carved granite fissure of Tenaya Canyon above Yosemite Valley, of Half Dome. I had to get out and look beyond the crowd of fellow gawkers. Again, the majesty of nature, even when viewed with a hundred of your fellow earth-wreckers, kind of takes the sting out. This is the kind of beauty that will endure, no matter how much we fuck things up.

On through the naked granite labyrinth, roadside tapestries of red penstemon, orange paintbrush and blue lupine, past Lake Tenaya, through the green expanses of Tuolemne Meadows, up along the timberline and over Tioga Pass, and the long steep descent to the east side, the dry side, of the Sierras, to Lee Vining and Mono Lake. Wendy had dreamed we would camp at Benton Hot Springs, an hour east of Mono Lake, where a thousand gallons of a hundred and eighty degree spring water pours out of the mountainside every minute and is channeled to a bunch of campsites you can rent, except when they are already rented. We decided the ponderosa forest tucked alongside the towering Mono Craters would be a fine place to spend the night, driving a mile through the forest on dusty volcanic ash to a lovely flat spot beneath a towering pine tree, and a glimpse of the lake through the trees. We made camp and ate the delicious dinner we had prepared the night before.

I had a ghost in these woods. Maybe thirty years ago I had made camp with my good friend and geology professor from college, John Reid, on this side of Mono Lake, maybe a couple of miles from our present location. In the years after my failed juvenile attempt to adapt to the adult demands of university life, I had nonetheless kept in contact with this inspiring teacher who had awakened in me a love for the never-quite-finished stories that rocks tell. His area of research expertise was in the Sierra granites and he often brought groups of students to conduct research in the eastern Sierra. He and I had conducted a research project involving volcanism in the Owens River valley, forty miles south of here, trying to use the Owens River itself as a device for measuring volcanic activity, the swelling and deflating (due to nearby eruptions like the Mono Craters) of the magma chamber deep below over millennia had affected the course of the river.

I remember sitting around the fire with John, talking long into the night about his ever-degraded marital situation. He had a special knack for marrying women who drove him crazy. For some reason he thought of me as the kind of friend who could offer sage counsel, or maybe just an ear, despite being 20 years his junior and recently divorced myself, while I depended on him to keep me informed about the subtleties of tectonics and the wrinkled, beautiful planet upon which we walk. In that way we were peers. Tragically for me, John ignored the encroaching symptoms of prostate cancer until it was too late, and he died in his sixties, long before I was prepared to let him go. I’m still raw over losing him. My melancholy flares up on the east side of the Sierra. After dinner I took the dog and went for a walk towards the steep volcanic promontory nearby, the Mono Craters, where I had walked with John so many years ago talking about the processes of rocks and humans.

Mono Lake from the north side

Wendy and I bedded down under the stars, but were unprepared in our flimsy summer sleeping bags for the cold air that tumbled down from the heights later that night. By dawn we determined that our best move would be to throw all the gear into the back of the car and thaw out while driving toward a warmer spot where we could make coffee and regroup. Wendy had conjured in her mind a vision of a nice park with picnic tables and green grass with the sun shining and warming us, and by some magic, that very park was in the first town we came to, Benton, hardly anything more than a state-line checkpoint to keep contaminated fruits and veggies from spoiling edenic California.

For the next five or six hours we slogged through the desolate section of the drive, through the dusty basins of western Nevada past the soul-sucking metropolis of Las Vegas (though with very artfully decorated concrete walls rimming the interstate through town) and down the blasted, open-wound landscape from Vegas to Kingman. Thankfully, as we turned east and slowly began the long climb back up into the mountain heights toward Flagstaff, we regained our sense of hope and reason to live.

Part of what sustained us and soothed us through the rough parts was another six-hour segment of the book we’d been listening to for the past five months on our long drives through the southwest, Cutting For Stone, in a comforting East Indian-accented voice. We passed through entire geologic epochs listening to passages describing arcane surgical procedures, including gaudy gouts of blood and other pulsing bodily fluids and flapping tissues that kept our adrenaline levels up, so no need for ancillary coffee. But what really kept us going was the promise of dinner and a nice bed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow.

La Posada is really quite a remarkable landmark, a Harvey Hotel designed by Mary Coulter and built in the 1930’s. La Posada retains the charm of its origins, cultivates a robust relationship with the local Navajo citizenry, and keeps a lovely flourishing garden landscape where we could again “cleanse the palate” after a long day of driving (and tense surgical proceedings). And perhaps most remarkable, the restaurant inside offers some of the best food I’ve eaten at any restaurant anywhere. Some months ago a friend recommended it to us, and she insisted we go to the restaurant and order the Piki Bread, a Hopi (and I think other local tribes make it as well) construction which is a far cry from “bread” and isn’t even on the menu. Piki Bread resemble filo dough in its flaky consistency, but it’s made of fine-ground blue corn and wood ash, paper thin sheets rolled into a blue-gray cylinder and served with a tepary bean hummus made with a hint of wasabi, if my tastebuds read it right. That, and the rest of the meal was delicious, in this, our second visit to the restaurant, as was our first some months before. They may have served me, that last time, the best steak I ever remember eating.

It’s amazing how much a good night’s sleep impacts the next day’s drive. With a hot coffee in hand we headed into the sunrise yesterday morning eager for the road. Santa Fe, our destination, was not much more than four hours east of us, there were beautiful thunderheads on the horizon to shade us and a lovely red rock landscape to enjoy much of the way there. We fired up Cutting For Stone and miraculously, mercifully, twenty four hours of drama and three trips across the southwest later, it reached its conclusion, almost at the moment we pulled into the driveway.

Tenaya Lake and the road before us

The principle strategy of the Republican Party has been to keep immigration and the migrant influx into American communities as chaotic and unregulated as possible, the better to highlight their racist bonafides and keep the issue roiling and unresolved, a perpetual irritant to the American electorate. Republicans lie and deride established fact, exaggerate the fearsome pet-eating otherness of the dark-skinned invading horde as pretext for seeking military rather than policy solutions. Policy is simply not up to the task of meeting the savagery of their made-up alien emergency. Then they blame Democrats, and the government in general, for failing to bring order to the immigration process. It’s a winning strategy for the fascists.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that sabotaging immigration policy has been the Republicans' most potent political strategy of the past 50 years. In doing so they've stymied the democratic process (not just on immigration, but altogether), leading people to see government as inept, to lose faith in democracy, and vote for a cruel autocrat, while giving voters a "legitimate" forum to express their racist bile.

Trump and the Republicans’ current laser focus on "immigration" (Note: they’re not making policy per se, just performing ritual militaristic cruelties) confirms that Republicans recognize this policy abomination to be the crux of their political success.

But I don’t think it’s quite fair to say the Democrats’ message was uninspiring, or they lost because they didn’t say the right things. I personally think Joe Biden was one of the most effective presidents in history, and Kamala Harris was an inspiring candidate. She and her party represented noble ideals that humans have aspired to for centuries, and which are aligned with enduring spiritual and ethical mandates. Donald Trump and the Republicans’ message had no positive spiritual or ethical content whatsoever, and not a single ideal that didn’t denigrate and demean one group of people or another.

And here we are, four months into Trump’s American makeover, and the headlines say that Democrats are still searching for a compelling message, as if promoting and defending the basic premises of our constitutional democracy wasn’t a good message. Perhaps we should just repackage it, rebrand our democracy, dress it up so it looks good on Etsy and Pinterest. Not to say that a good PR campaign wouldn’t do our democracy some good, I just think we may have already passed that point.

To me the question is not whether Democrats can come up with a message that appeals to American voters, the question is what to do when American voters have lost their appetite for participating in democracy. If the only option for Democratic strategists is to find a message that appeals, but to do so they have to start hedging on their commitment to democracy because voters don’t care about that anymore, what does it even mean to be a Democrat?

We have to look at what Trump voters were voting for, because any Democratic effort to cut into that demographic would require an appeal to whatever they were drawn to with Trump. Our first observation has to be that Trump voters were not voting for anything, only against. A Trump vote was a vote of “No” on a long list of Big “D” and small “d” democratic initiatives. Joe Biden’s core strategy was to show how government under Democratic control could deliver a strong economy and respond to regional needs effectively. Biden used the levers of power diligently in service of his vision and Democrats’ general commitment to fairness, economic and domestic security, and the rule of law. Clearly, every Trump vote was a vote of “No” to the Biden initiative to show democracy working for the people.

Beyond that, whether one was paying attention to the serious matters of governance or not, a vote for Trump was a vote rejecting the basic principles of the rule of law. There is simply no rational way to vote for a felonious Trump and still stand for the rule of law. The most commonly stated reason people voted for Trump was “immigration,” though their votes had nothing to do with immigration policy, as Trump had no plan for dealing with immigrants under the rule of law or in concert with Democrats. More than anything, a vote for Trump was a vote against foreigners living and working in our country, legal or not, in an orgy of communal racist ire. Anti-DEI is in the same vein.

Another big issue for Trump voters was inflation and the price of eggs. All you had to do to see Trump as a better “economy” president was ignore everything Trump said about his plan for the economy (as sparse, disjointed and discredited as his “plan” was) and ignore Biden’s success in reining in inflation and keeping the economy humming. People who complained that Biden’s “good” economy did nothing for them may have been correct, but to conclude that Trump would do them better required some serious magical thinking. A good “Biden” economy meant a better chance of opportunities for everyone, even if they hadn’t materialized in your neighborhood yet.

So in order for Democrats to appeal to Trump voters, how might they trim their message? Maybe they should give up on that government-working-for-the-people thing, because the people just don’t seem to notice. Or how about going flexible on that rule-of-law principle, upon which the entire premise of democracy rests? On immigration, maybe Dems should start getting spicy with all them furriners, and drop all that LGBTQXYZDEI namby-pamby compassion, let the hand-cuffs and billy clubs and bullets land where they may. And why worry about economic policy if people ignore the results of it? Both Biden’s good economy and Trump’s overt destructive economics seem to have little effect on the people.

Promoting and defending democracy might, in today’s world of AI and manly indifference (or proud ignorance), seem boring, so two-centuries ago. But the choice Democrats face is starkly binary because Republicans have completely detached from the mandates of democracy and the U.S. constitution. Dems have to choose whether to stay true to their principles, or wander along with the Republicans in the magical realm of Emperor Trump, where it’s fun to be mean to people and disregard the credible institutions that built our country.

Or maybe there’s a third way. What if Democrats step back from the cauldron of political foment and focus on a simpler message, maybe not even a message but a symbol. Maybe even a sex symbol. Make Democracy Sexy Again?

The funny thing about my friend’s recommendation for a credible Democratic candidate for president is that I had been thinking of the same guy. This guy is not a policy guy (though he is a guy - that’s critical), he’s not political, he’s not even an overt Democrat! These are all advantages, in that he is not burdened by a deadly association with boring old democracy and swampy politics, he’s an outsider with an established reputation as….. a superhero. And he is the anti-Trump. Where Trump is weak and full of bluster and hot air, this guy is super strong but modest in his report. Where Trump feigns competence, this guy exudes it. Where Trump lashes out with contempt and hatred, this guy, a giant among men, is kind and respectful. Where Trump is old, this guy is young. Perhaps best of all, he’s got some truly stunning tattoos.

But seriously, an assessment of Trump voters’ list of preferences shows a definite inclination for the fantastical. Dems have to know by now that any rational argument will fall on deaf Trumpian ears. And so it might make sense to embrace the fantastical, and put up a candidate whose reputation is intentionally larger than life, but still inclined in the direction of humane democratic values, without getting too specific.

My friend and I are formally committing our support for Dwayne Johnson, a former pro-wrestler known as “The Rock” and now a star of the cinema and a surprisingly good singer and voice of a demi-god in the Disney cartoon movie Moana. (You should definitely listen to his “You’re Welcome” from that movie.) When I imagine Dwayne Johnson assuming the office of the presidency in the wake of the current occupant, I have to admit a little flash of excitement not entirely due to the relief factor. I think I’d like a sexy demi-god, smart but somewhat detached from the tangle of political argument, sitting at the Resolute Desk not acting like a clown.

And all I can say is, you’re welcome.

We may not understand fully to what end Trump would so damage the economy, but I think we could draw a fair conclusion looking at, among a thousand other indicators, the memecoin-dinner and Project 2025. Altogether, Trump's policies suggest not so much ignorance of destructive effects but overt intention to damage and destroy the institutional architecture of American society for personal gain while cult-ivating the political support of Christians and billionaires.

We assume, and the headline reinforces our comforting belief, that we still live in a normal world where even if he seems wildly misguided or ignorant, our institutions still hold sway; the implication being that Trump will pay for his foolish ignorance. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's not Trump who is ignoring things.

It's us.