As I write this, Taos Mountain, usually visible from my house, is concealed behind a wall of white smoke from four fires in Colorado that have burned over 130,000 acres collectively, while south of us there is a 2,500-acre fire just outside Santa Fe. It has been consistently hot here, ending our dry, drought-ridden summer on a hazy note. It’s been a bad year to have a garden (my second year gardening), especially on the mesa where I live, and I recently surrendered it to the rabbits and birds desperate for food at the end of summer. Good thing my partner is a farmer! No shortage of fresh produce here. In fact, I had to put a moratorium on lettuce delivery because I can’t possibly eat the amount I’m given no matter how much I desire to be a true hare.
I’m going to end the season by busting up my raised beds (the previous owners built them from wood and they’ve been falling apart since before I bought the place) and make plans to erect a small greenhouse next spring. I will likely still plant a few things outside of it for the critters, though. It’s good to share with the animals who lived here first.
My mom sent me this wind spinner for my birthday and I’m kind of obsessed with it? (Photo taken on a clear, pre-wildfire day!)
Over the past few weeks, a number of friends have gotten in touch with me about their plans to come to Taos for short or long-term visits. Usually these communications begin with the question “should I?” and I feel that this question puts a strange burden on the person being asked. I’m torn between wanting to see my friends, even if from a distance, and wanting to protect my town. My default answer, for a number of reasons I’ll go into here, is stay where you are. I can’t stop you from coming here, nor is it my role to be the bearer of permission, but that’s my advice whether it feels good to hear it or not.
It might seem enticing to come to a rural area with a relatively small population and ride out the pandemic here, but Taos is not the average rural town. We are a town with a neighboring Pueblo that has been barricaded shut for its own protection since March. Our hospital is a critical access hospital, meaning it is not equipped to care for people long-term (and does not have a COVID unit) and anyone with a serious COVID infection will incur an automatic $30,000 bill from the Medevac transport to Albuquerque alone. On top of a terrible illness, you are risking an incredibly expensive experience for yourself or for someone else, if you happen to bring COVID here and infect someone.
In addition to the hospital situation, Taos is a major tourist destination for our region. The Ski Valley brings people here all winter long and the Sangre de Cristo mountains, Rio Grande Gorge, and other nearby outdoor attractions bring people here the rest of the year. At the start of the pandemic, the town of Taos placed ads in neighboring states asking tourists to stay home rather than visit us. There is never an off-season as far as tourism is concerned, and what’s more: many of the homes in our town are owned by Texans and Coloradans who live here during their chosen season and rent out their houses to other tourists for the remainder of the year, making affordable housing an impossibility for many locals.
Since the pandemic started, those out-of-staters with second homes here have turned those second homes into first homes. During April there was a steady stream of UHauls and pickup trucks loaded with furniture ambling into my neighborhood, and house sales here have skyrocketed beyond the expectations or lifetime experience of veteran realtors. Many of these home-buyers are people moving here from out of state with remote jobs. This increase in population coupled with an increase in time spent at home overall has resulted in things such as stressed wells and water tables while people start gardens for the first time.
One day a couple months ago, while out in my own garden, a couple parked their pickup along my property and asked me if I knew where their lot number was located. They’d bought a piece of land without a house on it and had never seen the land in person. I told them the lot numbers differ from the street addresses; they’d stopped at my house because the address was close to the number they were looking for. They didn’t seem to have any paperwork from the purchase on them and I didn’t have the information they were looking for. It seemed like they had made an impulse purchase from a distance just to have a piece of land here. I haven’t seen them since, but there isn’t any new construction going on in my neighborhood so I’m not sure if they decided to build a house here or sell the plot and go elsewhere. A pandemic mystery.
When visitors obey the directive to quarantine for two weeks upon arrival and heed the pleas of signs around town directing them to “Mask Up!” then we have little to complain about. But the influx of visitors (out of a recent count of 1,600 vehicles headed in and out of Taos, more than 800—50%—of them did not have New Mexico plates), and the anti-mask attitudes some of them have brought into businesses, has locals feeling so uneasy that many of us without “essential” jobs would rather never leave our own homes than risk exposing ourselves to heedless strangers. And as the partner of a very high-risk person, my concern is not only for myself.
People seeking the open space our town offers, and what they assume will be a more relaxed atmosphere, might be surprised to find a little town utterly unprepared for what will happen if an outbreak occurs here, and locals stressed and unhappy about the number of outsiders shopping in the grocery stores. The local newspaper is an endless stream of murders, suicides, car crashes, stabbings, and arsons these days (so not much different from any other place!) Every time I go out I witness an almost-car-crash, presumably because anxiety levels are so high, and even I have caught myself checking the license plates of people who have done terribly selfish parking jobs (they’re never from New Mexico!) but I digress.
Just a few things to think about if you’re considering doing any unnecessary travel at this time, particularly to a small town. My friend Julia Daye said much the same in a piece she wrote in May in response to a Forbes article encouraging people in cities to escape to small towns (including Taos in their list of top pandemic destinations).
Tl;dr: if you can, just stay home. If you’re intent on traveling, please follow these guidelines for traveling safely and also these Taos-specific guidelines for your arrival here.
This concludes the rant portion of this week’s newsletter. Please briefly enjoy this photograph of my hair being extra in front of a painted Koi pond before moving on to the next section.
About two months ago, the poet Jennifer Sperry Steinorth emailed me out of the blue after reading about my erasure work, and I was excited to visit her website and see that she makes gorgeous erasures herself (far more gorgeous than anything I’ve ever done; her work motivates me to try new things). After exchanging a few emails, we agreed to trade work through the mail, and today I checked my box and found a copy of her latest book, A Wake with Nine Shades, as well as a selection of postcards featuring erasures from her forthcoming work, HER READ (Texas Review Press, 2021). I borrowed the title of this newsletter from one of her erasures.
The phrase “to suffer amour is splendid” relates nicely to this next book I want to talk about, which is Joyce Lee’s Dancing in the Presence of Men. The book was released this year and I got to attend the Zoom launch/birthday party for the Leo author herself a little over a week ago.
I first met Joyce after I saw her read at Awaken Cafe in Oakland four years ago. The piece she performed was so powerful that I introduced myself to her afterward (rare for me, a shy one) and immediately befriended her on Facebook. We were Facebook friends when her husband passed away unexpectedly and later when my father died by suicide (both, coincidentally, men named David) and we felt a kinship with one another in our open expressions of grief as well as in the strangeness of the losses we experienced.
I have always been struck by Joyce’s openness, not only in expressing herself but in receiving others, and the way her openness offers permission for the same from others. I felt honored to witness the outpouring of love and appreciation she received at her Zoom launch; I am clearly not alone in my feelings.
Here is an excerpt from her piece “Processing the Vortex” in Dancing in the Presence of Men:
The sucky thing about grief is feelings. I gotta either feel the grief or numbness. Every religious person in my family has been offering me Jesus like He’s a trending strain of cannabis that I’m oblivious to. I’m drinking way too much because I was drinking too much before the grief, and now the drinking has grief as an excuse. When I don’t drink, I sort of feel. I don’t feel sad per se. Grief doesn’t feel like the sadness I’ve identified as sadness all of my life. It also doesn’t feel like the sadness that others describe when they compare me losing my husband to the loss of their step great-grandmother. I found my husband dead in our home. People seem to want me to be sad when I am not. I’m in grief. Grief is so much more permanent. It’s a casual, numbing fire. Honestly, when people compare their sadness in losing a pet or step great-grandparent to the grief I feel in losing my younger husband, I really want to punch them in the face—left hook! I digress. For me, grief is mostly an uncomfortable indifference.
I can actually feel myself uninterested in. the. whole. fucking. world. I don’t give a shit about blue skies or sunny days. Outside, the gorgeous California spring looks like a painted sheet that I usually want to snatch down and use as a blanket to hide under until I die. (What’s the point in proceeding with my life when we’re all just going to die?) Every minute feels like I’m a kid in a corner being punished, waiting to be set free. Nothing’s fun. People are boring. Life is boring. Unless I get high or drunk. My indifference isn’t just emotional, it’s physical, so I have to overdrink in order to feel drunk. I’ve done that more times than I care to admit. I’m embarrassing to myself.
Joyce currently lives outside the US and relies partly on book sales for her income, so I encourage you to purchase a copy if you are able!
READ / WATCH / LISTEN
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Like most people, I read the short story “The Lottery” in school but never continued in my Jackson education. I read this after a long phone call with my friend Lucé Tomlin-Brenner and loved it as much as she knew I would. I’ve now checked out The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery and Other Stories from my library.
The Girl with All the Gifts. Fungal zombie girl destroys the status quo for the sake of a radical new world. My favorite line: “It’s not over; it’s just not yours anymore.”
On Being Podcast: “Navigating Loss without Closure.” Pauline Boss discusses the concept of “ambiguous loss” (and how it relates to the experience of living through a pandemic) and the impossibility of closure in anything but a real-estate deal.
All books in the Dream Pop book shop are still on sale for 20% off with code SUBSTACK
If you have already read and loved Erase the Patriarchy, consider giving it a review on Amazon or Goodreads, but please do your buying through University of Hell (and tell your friends to do the same!)
Buy my books on Bookshop.org!