To Perfect Ambivalence, and Beyond!
Wherein I get a full dose of rural fruit-growing reality.
To Perfect Ambivalence, and Beyond
I felt an identity, real oneness, with the property I owned in La Joya, on the bank of the Rio Grande. I still feel it today, a year and a half since I sold it and left. In truth I took it with me and still retain a mystical connection to the sinuous flow of the river and the ethereal colors, textures, and light of the lush landscape. In that regard, the epiphany that led me out there and prompted me to buy was genuine. The place became a permanent part of me.
I could hardly have wanted a more beautiful seat in the rustic heart of nature. That was the joyous, and most enduring, part of an experience that began with love of the natural beauty and became increasingly bipolar as local culture hassles kicked in and played out over time. In the end, the experience left me perfectly ambivalent, as the natural brilliance of the place weighed dead even against the cacophonous downside. The property per se, including the gracious, comfortable old adobe house, registered a perfect ten on my internal affect meter, and in the beginning there was no ambivalence around that.
But it was not an unmixed blessing. Most any goodness or benefit entails some corresponding cost, foregone possibilities, unforeseen complications, or just plain trouble. And I had my share of these in that place.
The clincher for buying it had been Pete’s assurance that he would maintain it for me for a modest monthly fee. He did that faithfully. He also built me a deck on the bank of the river, where I spent many a sunrise and sunset hour watching mandalas on the river surface morph, ripple, and wind downstream. He also built a carport, a new fence that my athletic dog couldn’t clear in a bounding leap, a large pergola over a flagstone patio with kiva fireplace in the yard, and a deck on the roof of the gracious old adobe from which I enjoyed a majestic view of the river streaming out of Embudo Canyon.
He was also a great friend, like a brother, and we spent hundreds of hours playing guitar like teenagers in a garage band. He was a good improvisational lead player and could jump in and find a part with anything I was playing when he got a nod to solo. He was a deadhead dedicated to the art of freeform jamming, whereas I’m a songwriter devoted to the structured art of the song, and he had a learning disability that kept him from remembering chord progressions. We played a lot of songs at least 100 times each, but the 101st would be like the first to him; he would just follow the chords he saw me playing without anticipating changes he couldn’t remember. We played a couple of open mics in Dixon and Rinconada but could never improve much without being more in sync with arrangements.
I couldn’t help expressing frustration over this at times, and it made him feel like I was picking on him. Beneath the brawny blonde exterior, he had a childlike disposition that I unintentionally wounded, and I’m sorry I threw those jabs at him. At the time I viewed them as minor peeves.
Despite everything, until just before I put the place on the market, I never considered him anything other than a brother. I trusted him completely, and his little shortcomings were an endearing part of the package. Mine must surely have been more irksome. Given the close relationship, I didn’t think much about how dependent I was on him for the upkeep of the property which he and his wife Vicki had sold me. It felt to me like a family kind of arrangement, one for all and all for one.
Vicki was very different. Complicated, a deep well. She was a nurse practitioner at the Espanola hospital until retiring abruptly at the onset of the pandemic. She was Hispanic and had grown up in Penasco, a short distance to the east, and had innumerable cousins living in the county. She completely dominated Pete, something like a puppet master adroitly dangling strings from behind a curtain. She was usually cordial with me, especially when her mother Emma was visiting. Those were the most neighborly and family-like times we enjoyed. Emma and I shared the same birthday and got on famously. But the whole cordial tone of neighborly relations began to change the day Vicki retired from the hospital and dedicated her time to property improvements on their adjoining place.
***
On a Memorial Day weekend, a couple of years into my residence there, the sound of pounding drums mysteriously wafted over the river, punctuated by cheering crowd noises. I didn’t know what to make of it; no one in the area did. It seemed a curiosity at first, with no precedent. I wasn’t particularly concerned over the prospect of an ongoing nuisance like the one that then ensued. I just wanted to know what it was. The drumming and cheering continued for four bewildering days.
The next time I saw Pete, he told me that Vicki had found a website explaining the matter. A fellow named Berry had bought fifty acres on the opposite bank of the river, less than a quarter mile to the south. On the website, he styled himself a Grammy-winning musician, who had spent years in Africa perfecting his exotic chops before having to flee for his life. The claim about the Grammy turned out to be grossly exaggerated. He had written a song that was included on a record by the Paul Winter Consort that had indeed won a Grammy, and Berry contended that anyone who contributes in any way shares full glory.
The website laid out his plans to subdivide and offer lots for sale for a utopian musicians’ community. It also touted a continuous run of festive events, like the Memorial Day weekend hoot, all through the summer and fall. Given the nuisance just past, my neighbors and I agreed this could not be allowed to proceed. It was not possible to enjoy the special beauty and tranquility of the land while a mini-Woodstock raved on across the river.
I took the lead, lobbying the Rio Arriba County Planning & Zoning Department to shut down the flagrant violations of the county noise ordinance. My neighbors, even Danilo Leyva, Jr., the county official whose parents lived right across the road, encouraged me but did not follow with any action of their own.
The lower-ranking Planning and Zoning officials with whom I spoke could hardly have been more agreeable with my complaints, even as they downplayed their ability to help. When I finally spoke with the department head, he laughed and said the area needed economic development like this. “What? Hippies, doing ayahuasca and bathing in the river?” I replied, but it was clear he was not favorable to my entreaty. I suspected corruption, which is endemic and deeply rooted in Rio Arriba County.
I resorted then to district court, filing suit as my own attorney. Berry likewise defended himself. As before, all the neighbors were verbally supportive, but none dared join the suit. The frontier mentality held that that would only invite retribution. Nasty things have happened around there under analogous circumstances.
The hearing must have been a bad joke to the judge. When testimony ended, he referred us to a mediator to work it out between us. That process turned out to be another laugher, ending in an agreement allowing Berry to hold three pre-announced events per year, on the proviso that they abide by the restrictive county noise ordinance. No one really was satisfied, but I felt that I had done my best to control and minimize the nuisance, if not shut it down completely.
Preoccupation with the situation had been a major downer, weighing against enjoyment of the uniquely beautiful property for the months it took to grind through the legal process. If such enjoyment rated a positive ten on the affect meter, the Berry situation weighed only about a minus three against it. It injected a significant dose of ambivalence, just not nearly enough to negate the pride and joy of ownership. A bit of periodic inconvenience could hardly tarnish routine enjoyment of such a beautiful place.
***
That same summer brought a bumper crop to orchards of La Joya, fruit basket of New Mexico -- cherries, apricots, peaches, nectarines, pears, apples, and grapes. Advantageous water access favored the ubiquitous orchards lining the river, but in many years a late hard freeze in that high country would kill the buds and ruin the crop. That year, however, my peach trees were so loaded that big branches groaned and broke from the weight. Ditto throughout the valley. I picked fruit to eat on the spot and much more to dry. Motorists on Highway 68 pulled over to buy brimming baskets-full at the highway stands. The juice of just-picked fruit dripping down your chin is a wonderful thing.
But the law of polarity holds that no blessing is unmixed, and a bumper fruit crip is no exception. Birds too have a yen for ripening fruit and left to their own will decimate a whole bumper crop, so defense is imperative for anxious growers. Owners of a large orchard and highway fruit stand just to my south opted for a propane-powered device referred to as a “bird cannon.” It sounds just like that sounds, like a cannon, emitting a blast as loud as a small field artillery piece about every thirty seconds. They had theirs set to blast twice per minute from 6:30 AM to 9:30 PM. My poor dog shivered and shook and nearly came out of her skin; and so did I. There was simply no living with that. You could hear it loudly indoors as well as out. I stopped once at their fruit stand and asked if they had any idea how disruptive that was to neighbors, and they responded by calling the state police on me, for trespassing and disturbing their peace.
I started looking for a close-by little getaway spot and ultimately bought one in Santa Fe, just so I could get out of there on short notice. I could feel every blast register concussively in my brain and believed it was unhealthy to be exposed to that for any length of time. Better to hit the road, I thought, and fast.
The bird cannon, however, was not the only disruptive sonic bird repellent. Another neighbor, nearby to the north, preferred to blare classic rock music at them, at just a little bit louder volume than Hendrix at Woodstock. I complained a few times to the county sheriff and state police, but they said he threatened them with guns and dogs from behind a locked gate, and they declined to challenge him further.
It turned out the guy was a deadbeat who had never made a payment on his ramshackle place and was evicted soon after the crop came in. I certainly got my share of Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple that summer, from early morning to late at night, with extra, very loud percussion from the bird cannon. (If he’d had a sense of humor he might have played the Byrds, my favorites, but no.) I suppose that in itself this demonstrates the bipolarity of good things; even good music can be an instrument of torture.
The combined noise nuisance from the orchards weighed seriously against enjoyment of the place; I’ll give it a minus five on the satisfaction meter. It precluded an entire summer’s worth of outdoor idylls, to the point where I began quietly hoping for late freezes in the future to take out the crop early so we could enjoy the summer in peace. I could buy my fruit at the store. I was closing in on perfect ambivalence.
***
Pete stopped coming around immediately after Vicki retired from the hospital at the beginning of the pandemic. It slowly dawned on me that something was up, but I couldn’t guess what. He would wave from a distance when he saw me heading down to the river deck, but days and then weeks passed without our exchanging a word.
They had an Airstream trailer parked just across their property line from my place, and tenants had recently moved in there, apparently for a long-term stay. They hadn’t mentioned anything about it to me, which, given how close that was to me, I thought was not a very neighborly thing to do.
One day when I saw Pete on his river deck I went over and asked him what was up, both with respect to the trailer and why he wasn’t speaking to me. “Haven’t you heard, there’s a pandemic,” he answered. I knew that was a dodge and pressed the matter pointedly but to no good effect. He wasn’t talking to me even when I stood right next to him. I strongly suspected that the little general of the household had issued him a non-visitation directive. I knew then, with my caretaker not talking to me, that I would need to be leaving there. The cold shoulder from the neighbor I had considered a brother rated at least a negative two and half on the affect meter, which sent the balance a notch past perfect ambivalence, into an unsustainable situation.
I first offered to sell the place to Danilo Jr., without a realtor, for a below-market price. When I didn’t hear back from him, I listed the property and received an immediate offer and several other lively expressions of interest. As it turned out, the offer came from the tenants in the trailer, who both turned out to be medical doctors, moving down from Durango. They had the same glowing reaction to the beauty of the place that I had (call it a ten on the affect meter), and simply had to have it, which they now do.
A year later I had a call from Danilo Jr., saying that a drumming festival was happening again across the river. I told him what the mediation outcome had been and wished him luck; I had taken Berry on, and now they needed to do the same. I haven’t heard any news since then but have to assume the doctors are probably on track toward their own case of perfect ambivalence in the beautiful place by the river. I’m dealing with a whole other set of issues now in beautiful downtown Santa Fe, and I don’t miss the old place. It’s still with me, minus the downside.
