Path to the River
I pulled up to the business school of the University of Houston, as I had many, many times before, after meeting with my financial advisor sometime in 2015. I took a whole new perspective on Melcher Hall that morning after hearing my advisor tell me that even under a very pessimistic scenario I was looking good for retirement, at any time. I hadn’t expected such a robust bill of health, and it lifted me a step or two off the ground for the rest of the morning.
With that, I started thinking about retirement. I was editor of a leading journal at that time, but otherwise was backing off from my own research and from opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and former doctoral students. I was making a lot of money for doing not very much and had a cross relationship with the long-entrenched department head. I could have stayed on the gravy train indefinitely, but found that I didn’t have it in me to do so.
Having been a prolific scholarly writer, reviewer, and editor, I thought that my rhetorical skills would transfer to creative non-fiction and memoir. I will put that assumption to the test here once more before I finally concede that it’s incorrect. When friends and colleagues asked me what I planned to do in retirement, I glibly answered “read, write, and play guitar,” and for six years that’s pretty much what I’ve done, though to date I don’t have all that much to show for it. Just a bunch of songs, poems, and fragments, and a good album of original songs. I’m also happy and healthy, with two sweet homes and a rental unit, some trusty friends and a trusty dog, healthy body, mind, and spirit, and a lot of good inspiration to look back on and forward to. So many brilliant people have touched my life with their gifts and left traces of them with me, if only I remember to draw on them.
I proposed a deal to the department head in which I give back my faculty line and endowed chair, in exchange for a career-ending sabbatical leave and designation as Professor Emeritus. The one little technicality with that, he replied, was that the career-end sabbatical, per se, doesn’t work, because you’re not coming back, which is a requirement. However, he quickly added, I can just forget to put you on the teaching schedule. I told him that would work just fine for me, thanks, and went whistling off down the hall, a freer man.
I was very fond of Houston after living there for fifteen years, but here I was at retirement, a time for change, as I saw it. Traveling to Argentina with my dear friend Macky (short for Maria Cristina) had started me thinking about living half-years in Latin America or Spain, but that thought had faded as we continually broke up and made up again. Still, I wanted another cooler place to go during the summer months.
I’m a believer in retirement -- as a phase of life in which to cultivate and realize yourself, do as you please, live well off the fruits of your labor, with new interests, places, people, and preoccupations, reflect on nature and the spirit, and grow into the best old person that it’s in you to be. That’s coming from someone long divorced, who’s been in and out of a number of relationships, and been living on my own for a long time now. Close companionship is the most I seek in any romantic relationship, and I’m not looking too hard for that. I have good friends close by, and my sweet dog Leah is family and good company.
In one of my last trips to an American Marketing Association meeting, Ken Evans, then president of Lamar University, commented to me, apropos of what I forget, that it was a good time to buy real estate in Santa Fe. That hit me like, duh!, why not New Mexico? And the rest, as they say, is history. My intention here is to relate that history, as plainly and truthfully as I can, for the sake of posterity, if nothing more.
It seemed perfectly natural to me to be thinking about moving to New Mexico. It’s desert, southwest, mountainous and beautiful, like Arizona, where I’m originally from, only different. I used to cover both states selling college textbooks back in ’79 and ’80, so I was well familiar with Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Taos, and much of the rest, and knew going in I was going to love it. It’s scenic to the highest degree, especially, I think, to the eye of an old coyote like me. It’s rich in ancient and modern cultures, and somehow inviting to creativity and spiritual questing. It has drawn so many artists and dreamers through inspiration to these pursuits, and I suppose you can count me as just another.
I don’t recall processing my objectives very specifically at the time I got interested and started looking, but was vaguely searching for some mystic truth that would reveal itself through close correspondence with nature, and a muse to set it to verse and music. I also would need some personal and social support for essentially a new life, and assumed it would probably, hopefully just happen naturally once I arrived. I suppose it did, but it takes a while, and the process continues. As with love, adaptation is a long, long road.
In pursuit of the same nebulous goals, I also sought disconnection -- from the bluster of mendacious and corrupt politicians, sensationalist media, crass materialism, disinformation, hypocrisy, ignorance, and other mind pollutants. Mental, as well as physical, health, of course, is required for good retirement, and I have had to increasingly filter my media inputs in the interest of sustaining it. The same goes for mixing socially. It can be a fine balance between optimal connection and trending gripe by gripe toward the dark side.
At that point, I wasn’t thinking about or interested in moving from Houston, only in finding a cool place to spend the warmer months, and New Mexico, on the face of it, had so much to recommend it. Mountains for one thing, extraordinary natural beauty, color of light, and texture of landscape. For all its music and whatnot, Texas has little of this type of natural beauty, and you have to travel a long way even to see it, like to the Big Bend, New Mexico, or Colorado.
I assumed I could handle, would indeed probably thrive in, a beautiful rural spot among the mystic hills and valleys. Thoughts of inspiration and vague ideals overrode due concern over potential effects of isolation. I believed that I, the crusted-over introvert, could probably deal easily enough with that while I was doing all that creative stuff. To the extent that I had any concern over fitting in with local native and Hispanic culture, as a fluent Spanish-speaker and cultural relativist, I figured I could do it as well as any, and had no aversion at all on that score.
I had no thought of transgressing any unspoken duty to remain in Houston for the sake of my adult kids, who, though their mother still lived there, had moved on to other parts of the country. I remember being rather close with Tim at the time, who lived near me in midtown Houston, and he was quite supportive, I thought. Sara was in school in Brooklyn, and I don’t remember talking much to her about it. I expected before long to have a beautiful place I could proudly show them.
It didn’t take long for a property that I saw online to attract my interest, an old adobe with an ancient ruin on the property overlooking the village of Galisteo and the vast Galisteo River watershed. Unfortunately, that deal fell apart over radon gas (or I suppose that may actually have been a fortunate failure). Anyway, the quick false start put me back, undaunted, to square one.
Back in Houston, I was cultivating the friendship of a distinguished attorney named Jerry Hatcher, whom I had met at a lecture on “the psychedelic revolution” at the Jung Center there. I believed I could make out the aura of an enlightened soul around his silver hair, and quickly gathered that he was an experienced and perhaps very wise participant in said revolution. That proved true, as he was in fact a long-time adherent to the Native American Church, and he had successfully obtained for the NAC legal use of the sacrament of peyote in a major court case of the 1990s. After entertaining my novice’s interest in this topic through several lunches near his downtown office, he introduced me to an NAC “nephew” of his, one Jimmy Henriquez, a jewelry artist who had just moved from Taos to Dixon, New Mexico.
Despite being a Chicano from east L.A., Jimmy had the rank of elder, with very deep roots in the Native American Church. He had found it a linchpin in his life at the time he first arrived in Taos with a wife and couple of kids in tow and a few pot busts behind him. That was the early seventies, when he was in his early twenties. The NAC had taught him to walk a straight path, from which he has not deviated much since that time. He’s a gifted artist in silver and turquoise jewelry and pencil and ink drawings.
Jerry’s purpose in making the introduction was to have Jimmy introduce me to the NAC during my New Mexico sojourn. My hope was narrower: merely to find a source of psychedelics to experiment with on my own. Jerry believed that that was not the way to go – considering this sacrament merely as a ticket to ride on a personal trip. Influenced by Carlos Castaneda and Aldous Huxley, I was curious whether it might reveal something of the underpinnings and latent spaces of reality, and I thought it probably would. I didn’t really see why I needed the Church context for a glimpse of that. But Jerry was the man.
I exchanged several notes with Jimmy, who corresponded with the bonhomie of a long-lost brother. We arranged a lunch meeting at the Dixon Art Studio Tour in the first week of November 2016. I was on another house-hunting trip then after the first contract had fallen through, and came down from Taos that day to meet Jimmy and his then girlfriend Susana. They had been friends for forty years and had recently decided to see if they could make it as a couple. She was quite the charmer, I thought. We met at Susana’s house in Dixon and drove over to Zulie’s, the restaurant belonging to the difficult Mexican woman whose husband, Chalako, has my vote for best short-order cook in New Mexico. (Chalako’s late father Roger was universally acknowledged as “the first hippie in Dixon,” an honorific distinction. Like, 1966 I think.)
They were about my age. Jimmy was solid, stocky, and serious, with pencil moustaches; Susana was short, curvy, and ebullient. I thought they were a very lovely couple and hit it off with both of them.
Susana asked about my property search. I told her I was looking for a second home, for summers, as that was my conscious thinking at the time. She said she and Jimmy had just seen a place that was well within my parameters, and that I should go check it out. It was on the bank of the Rio Grande, a beautiful old updated adobe house, over a hundred years old, with a vineyard and orchard, in the lushest riverine environment I could imagine, at the foot of beautiful Embudo Canyon.
“Sounds beautiful,” said I, “but probably not too practical for me.”
“No,” she said, “do yourself a favor, and see it if you can.”
Having a little time before needing to get back to Santa Fe, I decided to call the realtor, Beth, and do as Susana had suggested.
She made an appointment for 3:00, but I was free from the lunch by 1:00, and decided, against my better judgment, to drive down there early and see what I could see. I was particularly curious about the river. Having a major river flowing by your house was a concept I hadn’t really imagined before, and it greatly piqued my interest. While she was describing it to me, I had the misguided idea that maybe you could find your way down there, undetected, to see what the Rio Grande looks like flowing out of the canyon. But no such luck. It was a dumb idea.
The dirt road across the highway from the post office led me inexorably to the property. I was nearly an hour early. And there, sure enough, was the river, right where it was supposed to be. But there was no way to get down to it without coming through the gate and making my presence known on the property. I was busted.
I had hardly gotten out the car when a big blonde fellow, maybe a few years younger than me, ambled out of the house hollering, “you the realtor?” “No, the client,” I hollered back. “Well, come on in and have a cup of tea then,” he said; and I did. That was my first encounter with Pete, who seemed like a great guy, right from that first howdy do.
We sat dunking tea bags, sipping, and introducing ourselves in the large kitchen of the commodious old adobe. He gave me the tour of the house, which was set on a lush acre of fruit trees with vineyard and gardens in the old farm community of La Joya, in Rio Arriba County. I had been looking at properties around northern New Mexico for a while and had not seen anything vaguely resembling this spectacular lushness.
It was the first week of November, and groves of cottonwoods and fruit trees were blazing in the unique light of Indian summer. Pete and the realtors couldn’t have summoned a more welcoming afternoon. There seemed to be something happening; I was feeling it. Was it that land, the house, the river, Pete, all that stuff talking to me? I was completely caught up in the moment and thrall of the setting.
Tea and house tour finished, Pete led me down to the river, about a hundred yards down a gentle but significant slope from the huge deck at the back of the house. The Rio Grande in all its natural glory, right where it emerges from the long canyon winding south from Taos. It hasn’t been dammed or altered much north of here and flows clear and wide at this point. I was momentarily transfixed by the infinitely sinuous ripples folding, unfolding, and refolding on the sun-sparkled surface and found myself thinking this should be a state park or nature preserve or something, but a private residence? That I could potentially buy? That seemed at once ludicrous and like a stunning possibility. Like a cool thing to do, something so out of the ordinary that maybe only you could imagine it. It seemed more like the place had found me than vice versa, like it was reaching out with a kind of intent, and getting through on my wavelength.
By the time Beth the realtor arrived, Pete and I had picked up and were jamming on a couple of acoustic guitars that he had brought out of the closet after I remarked about an old amplifier tucked back in a corner of the living room. A bit unusual for a real estate showing perhaps, but it seemed perfectly natural at the time. Beth was disconcerted that I had jumped the gun and beat her to the property, but she sensed things were going well and held her peace, even venturing a tentative harmony on our stab at “Pancho and Lefty.” Even this rustic performance resonated in the superb acoustics of thick adobe walls, wood ceiling, and stripped-pine vigas, as if the place were made for music. I had a sense that never really left me that the walls were soaking it up like sunshine, to whisper it back to you later, in the language of old adobe.
Her arrival soon prompted another quick tour so she could see it and I could verify that my eyes had not deceived me. No, the river was still there, check, with the late afternoon sunlight reaching toward a golden climax over the western mesa. As we crossed the bridge over the cement-lined acequia, Beth exclaimed, out of the blue, “that’s the best ditch in New Mexico!” which struck me kind of funny because, really, how could you know? But after a moment’s reflection, I had to agree with her; not because of the cement lining but because it branched from the Rio Grande maybe 300 yards north of where we stood. The lushness of the landscape was testament to the acequia’s significance. If the entire state were to dry up, heaven forbid, this would be just about the last place you could still get a good irrigation.
In the radiance of color, flow, and light, I sensed that what had begun as a lark, a curiosity, a data point on a long search, had morphed into a possibly imminent buying decision. I was beginning to discern the trajectory of a very uncertain future taking off from here. On the way back to the house from the second trip down to the river, after he had told me he would help with the maintenance (as he and his wife Vicki were just planning to move down to an adjacent bungalow), I confided to Pete that I intended to make him a solid offer for the place. The visit had opened unimagined possibilities, like an epiphany. I had looked at quite a few properties and was set to jump for the right place; and I concluded on the spot that this was it, and the time was now. A place to commune with earth, river, and stars and strive toward a personal vision of transcendence.
The day after I moved in, while walking along the country road into the place, an eagle rose out of Danilo Leyva’s peach orchard across the road and rose slowly in ascending circles from a tree near where I was walking to a great height. I stood and watched transfixed until it disappeared into the altitude over a nearby mesa. It seemed a beatific welcome and portent of good things to come.
