Hawaii Konate, the people who keep me posted on what time it wasn’t over the past while, what time they think it probably isn’t now, and what time they’re middling sure it won’t be in the future sent me a nice greeting by email.
The card arrived in my hotmail email box at 3:25 AM someone’s time, maybe mine, maybe theirs, maybe hotmail’s. I’m not sure whether that picture is of something at the Hawaii site, or whether it’s wherever they speak the language at the top of the circular they send out: BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE. [Muddy muddy muddy etcetera]
But even if I knew what time it wasn’t in that city where the place on the card isn’t, I still wouldn’t know what that thing is they sent me a picture of wishing me a Merry Christmas.
I generally don’t like people telling me what kind of Christmas to have, but especially I don’t like them telling me how to have a whole year. But in this instance, they did let themselves be nailed down on the thorny issue 0f 2012. 2012, unless they’re being cunningly sarcastic, isn’t a time that won’t happen.
The card didn’t come with one of the circulars they send out telling what time it hasn’t been all over the place, what time they don’t think it is now, and what time they don’t think it will be in the future. That would be unsettling if they hadn’t gone ahead and mentioned 2012 in the card.
So maybe there was no authoritarian motive behind telling me what kinds of Christmas and 2012 to have. Maybe they were being subtly reassuring.
I suppose it’s probably best not to try to second-guess them.
During the early 1990s the Coincidence Coordinators conspired to make Zuni Pueblo and the geography surrounding it a major focus in my life. I mentioned a bit about Zuni here: This is Zuni Salt Lake, but over the next couple of whiles I’d like to tell you a bit more about them.
At the time the overwhelming part of my salary was paid by FEMA and a part of my job involved mitigation of recurring natural disaster damage behind federal disaster expenditures. In New Mexico a huge percentage of the recurring expense was located on Navajo lands, but flooding on the Zuni River reared its head as a concern during the same time period.
Meanwhile, the Coincidence Coordinators got into the act. The search for the lost gold mine was being driven by documents from the US Archives, New Mexico State Archives, fragments of mention from 19th Century newspapers, later-in-life memories of men connected to the events and documented in books, topo maps and other researched sources.
Keith and I, examining and submerging ourselves together during that phase of my search, concluded the areas to the east of Zuni, and to the south were prime candidates for the location. Candidates based on what we knew at the time. Wilderness Threats.
By my own recollection that phase of the search lasted only three, maybe four years, maybe less. But it led by numerous routes, into more than a decade of closer association with Zuni, both as a tribe, and as a geography. I’ll be posting more about that, about Keith’s and my explorations, about the Zuni pueblo and the people living there, and about some aspects of the history and culture.
But I’ll begin by posting this piece of doggerel I wrote a long time ago about my first visit to the Zuni Rez and my first encounter with the Zuni and Ramah Navajo. That meeting with the Zuni Tribal Council burned itself into my memory as few things I’ve experienced this lifetime have.
Flooding on the Zuni land
Tribal chairman calls
Upstream Ramah Din’e band
Over grazing galls.
Ancient ruins I travel past
Forgotten tribes of old
And finally arrive at last
On Zuni land as told:
Tribal council meets, he chants
A time warp history.
I Listen long the raves and rants
And river mystery:
Navajo must have his sheep
To have his wealth, it’s plain.
Too many kids, too many sheep
Too little grass and rain.
Forgotten white man wrongs and deeds
The raids of Navajo
Corn that didn’t sprout the seeds
And stumbled Shalako
More sheep grazed than in the past
Arroyos grew wide and deep
Siltation settled hard and fast
In riverbed to sleep.
Navajo siltation choked
An ancient channel bed
Water rose above the banks
200 cattle dead
Houses flooded, ruined cars
Fields of grain were lost
A playground field a channel mars
And who should bear the cost?
The tribal chairman Ramah band
Listened to my tale
Stony silence, steady hand
Informed me I would fail.
“If those Zunis don’t like floods
Tell them to reduce the chances;
We’ll hold back our streams of muds
If they’ll call off their damned rain
dances.”
Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured. I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.
That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky. Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.
I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits. If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.
Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch. A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.
I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top. I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb. Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.
Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section. Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.
Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina. We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen. The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.
The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here? How did it come to this?”
The answer always came back the same. “We followed the yellow brick road.” We did it. He did it. I did it. We all did it. We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel. We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.
We abdicated. When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were. We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it. When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs. We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level. We watched them militarize the police throughout the country. We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.
We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.
We’re there now. There’s no going back. There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it. It’s time to salute the future. Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.
Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make. You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention. You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not. But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.
So long as it’s someone else.
We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves. Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.
Every night someone, coons, deer, hogs, break into Fortress #1 where I keep the two younger roosters and the Communist Americauna, the Commie because it’s the only where she’ll sleep, roosters because daytimes they want to beat hell out of TGSB.
Every morning I go out and repair it before releasing the roosters into the pen and the Commie hen to free range. And by mid-day the two roosters have usually found a way out, by which time TGSB is usually in the other henhouse anyway, stove up and just wanting to rest.
If they don’t find a way out, I usually let them out mid-afternoon because I don’t care for the idea of anything being penned up all time. It allows them to run free for a few hours before bedtime.
But they’re still a potential threat to TGSB, and they’re a nuisance to get back into the pen, will never go in until the Commie hen re-enters to roost.
Today I’m pulling a page from the immediate, current activities of the US Congress and Whitehouse. As of today I’m going to fix that pen so they can’t get out. Period. Until I take it into my head they’ve been there long enough so’s I feel good.
Suspending Habeus Corpus, I am. Indefinite detention for anyone strikes my fancy. Maybe if I decide I don’t like one of the cats I’ll put him/her in there, too.
The Cohoe women raised and sheared the sheep, made the dye, hand-wove this rug.
As the post-non-Y2K hard times hardened, I did a lot of scrambling trying to make ends meet. One by-product of that squeeze was that I began doing some trading with the tribes for pottery, rock art, rugs, and other products to resell.
This got me acquainted with a Navajo man who became a running buddy for a while. Curtis Cohoe. [Not to be mistaken for his namesake, the Mescalero referred to on several posts.] A man about 50 years old. Pine Hill (Self-determination) Rez. Good family, a generation earlier. His mom and aunt still raise sheep, shear, dye the wool with dye they make from crushed rock and plants, and weave good rugs the old way.
Early in his life, Curtis started out pretty well. He was intelligent, talented, and I’ve always assumed he must have attended a university. When he was being an artist everything he did was in demand. He was an excellent shade-tree baling-wire and chewing-gum vehicle mechanic, and he could chop a cord of wood with an axe almost as fast as I could cut one with a chainsaw.
Worked for the US Forestry Service as a fire fighter, then as a Ranger in California until things went haywire. Back in New Mexico, a cop raped his younger sister and got by with it. Curtis came back and beat the cop to death with his fists, which got him 10 years in prison.
Once that decade of bars was over, Curtis never really got back onto the right track. He had a lot of anger in him, and he had some brothers who were in and out of prison a lot, who kept the pressure on from the law. (Curtis was fairly frightened of one of the brothers, whom he described as a bad-ass. The other was an evangelical preacher who sold some drugs and stole in between times).
Curtis was much of a man in a lot of ways when he was sober, or mostly sober. I’d known him a considerable while before I ever saw him drunk, never realized he was sometimes a drinker. He shifted his residence frequently between the family place on the Rez and Grants, New Mexico. Maybe that’s how it escaped my notice.
But early in our friendship one day I drove up to a place he was doing some artwork painting on a table top in an alleyway next to the railroad track in Grants. I was just in time to see three semi-drunk Din’e toughs in their mid-20s approach him, exchange a few words, and start swinging.
By the time I got out of the truck to help him he didn’t need any help. The two fully conscious ones got to their feet and left at a stumbling run. The less-conscious one stuck around long enough for me to try to stop the bleeding by tying a bandana around his head while Curtis intermittently kicked in his ribcage. I’m glad I never met the brother Curtis was scared of and considered a badass.
I don’t know whether I knew Curtis didn’t have a license to drive an automobile. He frequently drove my truck running errands and chores. I had no qualms about loaning the Ford pickup to him when he needed to go out to the Rez for one reason or another provided my old Isuzu was running okay.
One day we were preparing for a trading trip to Shiprock and Curtis left in the Ford to get it gassed up for the trip. When he didn’t come back for a couple of hours and I saw a wrecker go past towing my truck I immediately went over to the wrecker to find out what was going on.
“Is this yours?” He grinned because he knew damned well it was mine. My apartment was no more than 150 yards from his yard and we both occasionally had coffee a few feet apart in the Chinese restaurant between his place and mine. “Your damned Indian’s in jail. Towing fee on the truck’s $50.”
“What did he do?”
“They stopped him for a routine traffic check. He didn’t have a license and when they called it in they found out he’d had a lot of DWIs. He’s going to be in there a while.”
I paid out the $50 to get the truck out of hock and seethed about it considerably. It would have been too easy for it all not to happen and I found myself thinking Curtis had about outlived his usefulness in my affairs.
But mutual acquaintances brought me a message from Curtis asking me to bail him out of jail, telling me how sorry he was about it all. He was going to be stuck in there for at least six weeks if he couldn’t raise bail. Swore he’d pay me back everything he’d cost me.
I wasn’t Mister Moneybags, but I could squeeze $500 if I had to, and I did over a few days, selling things cheaper than I’d intended. Once he was released he brought a friend from the Rez over and told me he was going back to Pine Hill for a while. Asked if he could borrow my pickup for his friend to drive him back out there. His friend had a license, and I loaned it to him, figuring it would be gone for a day, maximum.
The truck never came back. Curtis and his friend evidently got drunk on the way to Ramah and got chased by a Navajo-hired cop on the State Highway until they ran the truck into a tree, Curtis driving. I wasn’t long finding out he was being held in the private penal facility outside Grants, and that he was looking at two years in prison, and I was looking at losing the bail money.
A week or two later I heard a guard had grabbed him and Curtis knocked him down. He was now looking at no-less-than five years hard time.
Everything else being equal I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still there.
Sometime afterward I had a buyer for one of the rugs his mother and aunt made, so I stopped in on her for a visit at Pine Hill. Naturally the subject of Curtis came up.
“He needed to stay out of town,” was all she said.
In case you hadn’t noticed it, WordPress has evidently installed a planetarium software over-ride here with the stars speeded up and going across the blog north-to-south instead of horizontally. I’ve no idea why.
After they filmed the scene from the movie 21 grams at the motel next door to where I lived in Grants, New Mexico, I got the job of helping to clean up the site afterward. While I watched them finish things up I saw wossname, Sean Penn smoking the cigar above and leave it in this ashtray.
Those folks left a hell of a mess.
But being the sort of guy I am, I emptied those butts into a baggie and stored them away for whatever future use I could put them to. That’s bound to be an expensive cigar and I always figured on smoking it on down, but I could never build up the certainty I’d advanced to that level of risk level yet. Whatever’s on that cigar always seemed to me potentially more lethal than whatever I’ve already got and don’t know about.
But I’ve digressed. What I wanted to say is, “DAMN those movie people are a messy bunch.”
That, and, “Why don’t WordPress stars move horizontally across the screen like normal stars?”
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 