Belated!

I realize I have not posted pictures of my trip to Coatepec, Veracruz Mexico last August, and so I am just now getting around to it. I think it’s because I posted so many of the pictures to friends. At any rate, partially this is to assure people that I really do have a social life here, so many friends in eastern cities/large cities imagine that I live in a tiny hermit house far out in the wilderness and never see people or go anywhere and am totally without human contact or something. Really.

The Ortiz house/villa, and entrance, where I am privileged to stay — it came down through the family from Julio’s wife, Luz ‘La Guera’ Ortiz and has a fascinating history with several very funny stories attached when it was the only hotel in Coatepec and many outrageously wild parties went on there but that’s for another time.

Here’s Julio, one of my favorite people, brother of my friend Elvia, he’s an architect. He told me what project he was working on but I forget…

Elvia at the Coatepec market — she goes there every day and everybody knows her, knows what it is she needs for the day. I love the market.

And another of her brothers (she was the only girl) Jaime, who is an enormous amount of fun — he has a PhD in electrical engineering from an English university, I forget which one, and he told me a great story about being a consultant with the mayor of Jalapa, when we were all at lunch at a very elegant restaurant in that town, from which I did not get any pictures. Or maybe I did, I’ll look. Anyway he worked on El Farallon, (an island) Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, decades ago, and Jim and I got to go and stay with him at El Farallon —so interesting!

Best of all was a trip with Jaime and Elvia to the coastal town of Tlacotalpan, on a very muddy, mosquito-laden shore of the Papaloapan River where it feeds into the Gulf of Mexico —a mile broad — which was a colonial town from the 1700s where all the houses are preserved and painted the most fabulous colors. Preservation by means of the Mexican government department of antiquities, a very worthy use of the money. At any rate, the aristocrats of the 1700s and 1800s lived in these lovely places and of course the poor in jacales. It was a shipping port — I think produce from the interior. At any rate, it was frozen in time.

Y como siempre, desde los tiempos de Ulyses, la colgada secando en los techos, las banderas de los pobres.

When Jim and I lived in King William and I used to keep my horse at the Fort Sam Houston stables, a group of us used to ride on the grounds where permitted. Down into Salado Creek and around the edge of the national cemetery, where Jim is now buried.

One time when we were near the edge of the National Cemetery we saw a pile of gravestones, just heaped up, some scattered around, all broken. A retired Marine sergeant who used to ride with us. Don Diaz, rode over to them and looked them over and said, “They’re being replaced. They got broken or worn or stained and they’re being replaced, these are discards.” And he leaned down to read the names, as if he might know them.

Don and I used to ride together from time to time, just the two of us, and he told me a lot of stories about Vietnam. He didn’t mind telling me the stories because he knew my husband was a combat veteran. He said he knew a lot of young soldiers that got killed because of poor training. He said they’d been trained as if they were going off to fight a regular army as in WW2. He also told me good stories about growing up poor and Hispanic in San Antonio. I hope he is still among the living. He was a great guy.

AP photo

People who do stuff

I’ve been reading Rob Henderson on Substack, I like his writing very much. Like Paul Fussell (Class) and David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) he writes about “class” or better “status” but from a relevant perspective. I would add that the non-upper/middle/class world — ‘working class’ and village and rural and small town life, the culture tends to form around what people DO.

The urban world in general coalesces around how people can appear and the culture urges an eternal struggle for social status.

Wallace wrote that we seem to be becoming a world of ‘appearers’ rather than ‘do-ers’.

So when journalists or retirees or anthropologists step out of an urban upper/middle/’class’ world into that of the village, rural, or ordinary working people world, they tend to assume that the social scene they have entered is also formed around how people can appear. They assume that the people around them are also in an eternal fight for social status.

They are very much mistaken and often come to grief because they can’t question their own cultural biases.

The culture of non-urban people is around doing stuff and doing it well. Sometimes fearlessly. The culture of the non-urban does not impose that terror of losing social status, of slipping down a notch, of social shame, of being ejected from society because of a non-approved-of signal.

When one does something and does it well, sometimes fearlessly, what one gains is respect, not status.

I didn’t get any pictures of the full eclipse but these shadows came through my windows from the trees outside. They replicated the progress of the eclipse itself. Very strange. The shadows — or light-impressions — on the red floor downstairs were when it was almost completed, making crescents, and the ones upstairs in the study were when it was at full.

I saw a clip from a pro-Palestinian protest at Chicago city hall and the screaming, yattering young woman (clearly a non-Palestinian) looked just like something from Skibidi Toilet.

The young men of Hamas were raised on the deeply seductive, narcotic pleasures of hate cartoons and the notorious ISIS murder/torture films, as Salvador Ramos, the killer of Uvalde, had fallen completely into the narcosis of various kill games on the Internet. People need to take this seriously. People can be turned into mass murderers of little children, into young men who would behead babies, BY THE INTERNETS’ MOVING VISUAL IMAGES.

Is it any wonder that both the ancient Judaic tradition and the Protestant reformation were deeply suspicious of visual images? How do we separate “this is information” from “behave like this, you can be a god”?

Got me.

I love it. It’s not hard to figure out. The screaming toiletheads like demented things surround us in present internet time, television time, raging, screaming, blaming, accusing. As George Will once said, ‘Anger is all the rage’. The Georgian man sussed it out and made it into a war and the people said Yes! By billions of hits.

The toiletheads advance out of nowhere in a state of head-trembling rage, shrieking incoherently, they are in such a state of ungovernable fury that their heads are trembling. That’s the real fascination — the trembling.

In some circles it’s au courant to go into a rage so intense that your head trembles. The toiletheads hate,hate, hate and want to puke blood on you. They come in squads, they’re all killed, they come in more squads.

So as for the basics; the toiletheads are all head and a toilet for a body. The good guys are all body and a camera for a head. There are no women. Well, one maybe.

The cameraheads are calm and emotionally contained. They wear suits, black gloves and don’t puke on things. They interact with each other. When their squads fan out they nod to one another, point, agree, coalesce. They work together in units like military people do, their camera-heads turn to one another, they give each other thumbs-up.

The toiletheads don’t interact. They apparently don’t see one another. They don’t coordinate their actions. They stare straight ahead in their flying toilets, bellowing and screaming hate (all of it unintelligible) doing the head-trembling thing. So they seem like a kind of fecal black magic chattering wildly at very high decibel numbers and hurl themselves in their flying toilets at the cameraheads and the monitorheads, inflamed with shrieking malevolence. They are in a state of extremely primitive emotion. The toilets are perfect; the fury is toxic waste.

It’s a relief when the cameraheads take over the scenario. They are calm, trained and manly. They have broad shoulders and narrow waists, their suits are impeccable, they move forward fearlessly into the Iwo Jima of the industrial-colored streets and take on the toiletheads. They blow them apart. This is their plot, to keep flushing the toiletheads down into some distant acid vat, with their neat black gloves they use the plungers and pull the lever or turn flamethrowers/rocket launchers on them. It’s wonderful.

The cameraheads are faceless. The toiletheads are all face. The cameraheads are silent. The toiletherads rarely shut up. The two sides are contrasty from beginning to end.

So that’s it. That’s the plot. Skibidi simply and brilliantly evokes very primal feelings and the very barest of epic bones. David Foster Wallace would have had such fun with this.

Really it’s the first vacation I have had in years. I mean just travel and fun and not having to do a reading or a talk, just enjoying myself. Meanwhile I am preparing to go — arranging for animal care, called Rusty Redden to bring a round bale to the lower pasture and Auriel will drop feed into their over-the-rail feeders every morning so they have Nutrena Safe Choice Original, water, salt and free-choice hay. Sooty goes to the kennel because if I leave her in the house with DT he’ll beat up on her. Girl Dog and tomcat DT will stay in the air-conditioned house all day, Auriel to feed them and give them hugs every day. They all adore her.

Sooty peacefully sleeping before DT comes along and pounces on her. Anyway, they love her at the kennel.

It’s 105 but feels hotter. I remember the time in San Antonio, when Jim and I were in the midst of a kind of constructional shambles, with one air conditioner for the entire leaky old place, when it hit 111 F.

This is DT plotting as to how he can torture and abuse poor Sooty.

Horses don’t seem to mind the heat as much as other animals. I’ve seen them lying out in the blazing sunshine at 100 F.+ snoozing away as if it were chilly! At any rate, enough about the heat — my lovely cool room in the Pink Palace (the Ortiz House across the street from the old Contreras villa, which Elvia now owns and cares for) coming up next week!

The heat has been higher, but this is extremely persistent. It’s been at about 104 F for over a week and another week to go. I wrote Elvia in Coatepec that it was 41 C. and she could hardly believe it.

My two horses stand in front of the mist-producing nozzles all day long. All the rest of the critters are in air-conditioning. I am trying to save my trees. All over town people are putting out umbrellas on their fences and gateposts as a kind of joking appeal for rain.

So I am watering my trees a LOT before we are put under water rationing. The dust is pervasive and it’s affecting my allergies but there’s something horribly gorgeous about it all.

Next week I am flying to Veracruz where Elvia and Jaime will pick me up and we’ll drive back to Coatepec which is at 3000 feet, cool rainy!!! I get to stay in the same wonderful room in the big Ortiz house as I did last year. Elvia’s book group is not meeting until the beginning of the academic year but she says she has a lot of reading to share with me, I am still going back and forth between the English and Spanish version of Juan Rulfo’s El Llano en Llamas. The stories are incredibly revealing about the conditions of the common people during the Mexican Revolution. Great reading. Also working on the Great Trilogy, entitled 88.3.

And it’ll be all the way down to 102 when I fly out of San Antonio! A cold snap!

It’s not that 103 F. is so terrible but that it’s going on now for more than a week, hitting 103 every day.

I recall in gruesome detail coming back from our ride at Fort Clark last year in June and it was 108 F. on the return trip. Evelyn had left early Sunday morning, and April and June and I left later. The place looked scalded.

Fort Clark is near the Rio Grande and we were heading back up into the Hill Country, which meant pulling hills — April and June were in her trailer, a living-quarters 22-foot trailer with two horses, which meant she was pulling about, I guess, at least 9,000 pounds, and I had just my small trailer with Jackson in it, so the trailer is rated at 3,000 lbs. and Jackson weighs about 1200, so say four thousand. So when we started up the grades, my temperature gauge started ominously climbing above 210, slowly, slowly, and the outside temperature stated 108 F. This made me extremely nervous. So I slowed down and it dropped back to normal but then I couldn’t get up the hills.

I noticed April, behind me, was dropping farther and farther behind so I knew she was having the same trouble. The trouble was that if you stopped to let the engine cool down and stop overheating, there wasn’t any cooling down! I thought if April stops totally I can at least take one of their horses –Indira or June’s horse Missy — in my trailer and try to get up the hills with two horses. To get out in that heat and unload and then reload a horse made me about pass out just thinking about it.

What I did was, when I topped a hill at about 40 mph., I shifted to neutral and coasted down. With 4000 lbs pushing me I sometimes got up to 75-80 mph which got me partially up the next hill and the temperature gauge down to 210 again. When I topped the next grade, I could see April farther and farther behind. I knew she was having trouble.

Here’s the relative sizes of the trailers. First picture is Evelyn’s 22-foot (same size as April’s) when we were in New Mexico. Only picture of it I have.

And that’s my little trailer.

So at any rate, we basically crawled home, coasting down hills and creeping up the ensuing hill coming at us, creeping up, getting every yard out of the coast that we could before shifting back into gear. And so we made it home, without blowing any engines, nursing our vehicles and loads like they were fussy babies, mile by mile.

That was 108 F., 103 doesn’t seem so bad except that it’s going on for weeks. I am trying to book a flight to Veracruz for August, going to visit the wonderful Contreras family and my friend Elvia, who like me is a book fiend, and the town Coatepec is at 3,000 feet and cool!

This little town does a great 4th of July parade. Expect the unexpected! No horses this year — maybe us Saddle Sisters will ride next year. Meanwhile a group of us sat out on the front porch of the Main Street shop and drank Wanda’s very good lemonade and waved at everybody.

I’m having trouble getting all the pictures sized just right, it’s a pain but I guess I’ll figure it out sooner or later.

The big truck is the water well drilling people, it was the biggest truck in the parade.

Then there was a dedication of a monument to the veterans of the Sabinal Valley; Diane Causey worked very hard to raise money for it and Linda Weber, who wrote Finding Utopia about a murder here in the 1920’s, dedicated all she made from her book’s launch here. It was wonderful of her to do that and it’s a fascinating book. So many people contributed that Diane and the Sabinal Museum people had enough left over to invite the town of Sabinal’s high school marching band to come and play. They did the National anthem plus the armed services medley.

I’m embarrassed to say I forget this man’s name but he is a combat veteran and spoke for the dedication, as well as the Church of Christ minister.

Such great kids from the Sabinal marching band. May you ever live in peace and security and never have to go to war, no not ever.

It hardly seems like June with the heat back again full force and this seems to have brought out the scorpions. Here’s one under blacklight — ewwww. But it’s the only way I have found to get rid of them. Go out after dark and look around with blacklight flashlight and spray them with Raid Wasp and Hornet and they thrash around and die horribly, all in glowing blue and it is a gratifying sight.

They glow very brightly. They all seem to congregate on the west-facing back outside wall, the hottest place. I stepped on one getting up in the middle of the night which I regret extremely and have for the past three days.

But other than that, wonderful visitors including Susan Paddlety-Dunlap, Kiowa from Oklahoma, decorative artist and unofficial ambassador for the People, who tells me her mother was a cousin to Scott Momaday and said Momaday had a beautiful reading voice, and I mean to find him on Youtube so I can hear his voice. Although she’s not a horsewoman I saddled up Jackson and she made a great picture seated on the palomino. We had a good day. She brought me one of her favorite books, The Ten Grandmothers plus she had made me a wonderful bookmarker. She brought back my old copy of A Quaker Among the Indians by Thomas Beattey which, although it has the attitudes of the 1890’s still has useful information about the Kiowa plus very good lithos of various tribal members, which I intend to have framed one of these days.

We had a great visit! I only get to see her once a year when she and her husband come down from Fort Worth but it’s always a delightful and informative time even if it was 100 F.

I said, “Oh wow, is that a Johnny Was shirt?”

“No, but it looks like one, it’s a Johnny Wasn’t.”

The heat has hovered around 106 and more every day for more than a week and I am keeping my elderly horse Buck up in the front corral shelter with a mister on him. he stands in it all day. I put up a box fan for him but he doesn’t like it.

I texted this to my cousin in Missouri and she replied that she loved the sunset picture — I said, ‘That’s the sunrise! And hot already!’

Buck standing under the mister.

June 24th was the PRCA rodeo here, I went down to see what was happening and saw friends Hattie Barham, the wonderful photographer, up on her stand as always, sat by Robin Moore bank clerk and her husband and kids. There was bronc riding, calf roping, breakaway roping for women, and barrel racing. Everybody trying to make points to continue on the competitive circuit toward the NFR in Vegas this fall.

As soon as they announced the bull riding, the pickup men and clowns gathered instantly. On guard, on watch.

My photos are terrible and so is my little camera, Hattie of course will have beautiful images. She was a professional journalist photographer and traveled the world for quite a few years, for AFP and others. She and her husband now own a well service company here and are very busy with all the new people moving in since Covid.

Then yesterday Michael and Naomi Nye came out from San Antonio — they had been to the Flato ranch near Rocksprings, and I was so delighted to see them again! I had not seen them since they lost their beloved son to Covid. We had long talks, good lunch at the Lost Maples cafe and a visit here at my house. Naomi (world’s greatest poet) brought me a splendid book self-printed by a historian of letters from the 1860’s to 1880’s a real treasure, as it will have a wealth of details from that time period. Michael took some pictures which I will put up later on as he hasn’t sent them yet. A very special time with them.

And that’s it for June 27th