New Mexico Mercury

An unlikely Jerusalem and its merry band of misfits

Beginning in early spring and continuing into late autumn, I often see a man walking on Raven Road in my neighborhood with a backpack, a shabby jacket and a smile. He is elderly, lean, with long hair and a beard as gray as my own. He wears dirty boots, a torn shirt and shabby pants. He is always by himself, although when I greet him, he responds with a friendly word and wave.

This man, with all his repulsiveness and attractiveness, is much like the protagonist of Jerusalem, an unusual play, in equal parts entertainment and philosophical statement, that opened last week at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque...

What Does Real Reform Look Like?

When a state’s children protective services fails to serve or protect children it is supposed to help, what is to be done? What is the root of the problem a state faces in trying to help children who are abused in their own families? How can a system that almost everybody calls dysfunctional be reformed?

Since the death of 9-year-old Omaree Varela in Albuquerque last month, legislators, officials of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department and advocates for children have been asking these questions. So far, they have no good answers...

Explosive art: something new under the sun

Ever since Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel invented dynamite 150 years ago, people have been trying to make lemonade out of his lemons. The most famous example is Nobel himself, who created the Nobel Prizes, rewarding peacemaking and sundry civilized achievements in literature and science, to atone for the murderous violence he unleashed on the world.

The effort to find useful, even pleasant employment for explosives continues today in New Mexico, home of the biggest explosive of them all, the atomic bomb.

A new book published by the University of New Mexico Press, Detonography: The Explosive Art of Evelyn Rosenberg, parses and celebrates this current effort...

Omaree Varela article source responds

George Ortega (pseudonym)—the source at the state Children, Youth and Families Department for my article, “Why did Omaree Vaela die?"—responded to the article with following letter:

Wally, Thank you for writing “Why did Omaree Varela die?” Hopefully it will spur some action. I want to clarify a few points you made...

What to watch for at the Legislature

Wally Gordon breaks down what to expect in the 2014 Legislative Session that begins today with an inside perspective from former longtime Senator Dede Feldman.

Why do people smile?

Do people smile because they are happy or because they are too dumb to know they should be frowning? That, it seems to me, is the basic issue posed by the article on Denver by James Burbank. Maybe I am just a happy fool, but I opt for the former.

I have always liked Denver, and I still do. I have visited the city often since the 1960s when my brother was doing his training there in psychology. I edited a newspaper there, got married there and lived in a charismatic little tree house above a museum...

Why Did Omaree Varela Die?

The killing of 9-year-old Omaree Varela in Albuquerque has done what hundreds of other tragedies and at least three other deaths have failed to do: force the public and the state to reexamine the way CYFD handles cases involving abused children.

Finally an honest book about the New Mexico Legislature

After her first New Mexico legislative session in 1997, Sen. Dede Feldman said it was “like riding a motorcycle in a thunderstorm in the nude.”

When she left the Senate 16 years later, the liberal Democrat from Albuquerque’s North Valley still felt like “Alice in Wonderland” in this “crazy unpredictable place” dominated by “peculiar personalities [and] strange alliances"...

New Mexico Then and Now

Thirty-five years ago I arrived in New Mexico to spend a night camping on my way to San Francisco. Although I have since spent shorter or longer spells in many places, including most recently northern California, I never really left New Mexico after that fine autumn night with stars blazing in crisp mountain air.

I have been remembering of late what life was like for me and for this state when I arrived in the fall of 1978...

A Special Kind of Paradise

We stand outside the handsome visitors center, an atoll in the midst of a vast brown sea. The sea is the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, 230,000 acres of Chihuahua Desert, Colorado Plateau, high plains grasslands and two mountain ranges, the Ladrón and Los Pinos.

There are few people in this 30-mile by 15-mile slab of New Mexico between Belen and Socorro: a scattering of ranchers in enclaves along the Rio Grande, a few biologists and geologists, five rangers, a handful of volunteers living on the reserve for three months at a time—and we, of course, a photographer and a reporter who have come to discover the story of this unique place...