New Mexico Mercury

When pollution and poverty meet

Clear Lake, at 68 square miles the biggest fresh water lake in California, gleams serenely all the way east to the distant mountains.  It all seems so pretty, so peaceful, so healthy, and in some ways it is, but it is not at all what I had been lead to expect.

After all, this lake, at 480,000 years the oldest lake in the United States, is the world’s worst case of mercury poisoning...

My Own California

Long before the Mamas and the Papas recorded their famous song 48 years ago, “California dreaming” was a national preoccupation, and it still is: the land of eternal spring, endless beaches, waving palms, bare sensuality, and men and women—in the title of another famous song by Bob Dylan—“Forever Young.”

These days I am spending a long bit of time in another California, where the mornings are foggy, the ocean is bitterly cold, and many of my neighbors are elderly and not at all rich. The roads are narrow and hilly, and most people, while polite, prefer to ignore their neighbors rather than socialize with them in suburban style. In such respects it is not much different from the East Mountains in New Mexico...

‘For in the end, hate could kill us all’

Twenty-seven years after the end of World War II, two families who had survived that conflict, one of them German Jews and the other German Nazis, fight a different kind of war on a street in Manhattan: the war of the delis. This is the core of a drama penned by a Sandia Park playwright and scheduled for a reading this weekend in Albuquerque.

The story could have been told as a comedy, however it is anything but; rather, it is an explosive tragedy in which old wounds bleed again onto 55th Street. That there is a beacon of hope, even potential salvation, at the end, does not dim the soul-destroying conflict between two families on the same street trying to sell sandwiches, salvage their self-respect and pay back for their history...

The Gardener and the Woodsman

A story by Wally Gordon

Jackson and Enid moved to the mountains when he was 49 and she was 39. They bought a big house on 20 acres of dense forest an hour from the city, where they both taught at the community college. They could afford the house on teachers’ salaries only because it was rundown, the land overgrown, the property uninhabited since a bank foreclosed on it four years earlier. Jackson wasn’t sure, but Enid was, and that was that.

Five days a week Jackson and Enid drove together to work. He taught welding, spending his day with fire and fumes, on his feet all the time, sore at day’s end. She taught art and comparative religion, and talked about the gods of Hinduism and the ethics of the Tao...

When U.S. Grant turned on Lew Wallace

Lew Wallace made the most ambitious effort of any New Mexico governor to reform our state’s errant political ways but famously conceded, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”

Wallace was not just a territorial governor from 1848 to 1851. He was also one of the most celebrated novelists of his time due to the success of his historical epic, Ben-Hur. Before he was a governor or a novelist, however, he was a major general in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he became an arch-foe of his boss, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant...

‘Sierra Challenge’—the impossible dream

After years of declining customers and service and increasing crime, Mexico finally ended rail passenger service a few years ago—with one exception. The tiny and impossibly scenic Chihuahua al Pacifico line still runs from the prosperous ranching state capital of Chihuahua to the Pacific Ocean, primarily because it is the greatest tourist attraction in the Copper Canyon region of the Sierra Nevada.

A new book, Sierra Challenge: The Construction of the Chihuahua al Pacifico Railroad (Brranca Press, 206 pages), by the late Glenn Burgess and his son Don Burgess, tells the dramatic story of the construction of the railroad in words and photographs...

Two plays deep in the heart of New Mexico

Last weekend I saw two plays that have deep roots in New Mexico. Although they sharply contrasted with each other in most respects, they shared something of the humor and tragedy of life amid our luxuriant culture and arid land.

One of the plays was Revelations, a comedy performed by the Sandia Performing Arts Company at Vista Grande Community Center in Sandia Park. The other was Dreamlandia, an ambitious tragedy performed by Working Classroom in the Barelas neighborhood in Albuquerque...

Tijeras: 40 years of speeding slowly into the future

When Tijeras incorporated as a village in 1973, it had about 300 residents, a cement plant next door and a highway to Albuquerque, where most of its residents worked. Preparing to celebrate its 40th birthday Aug. 17, it has 546 residents, a cement plant next door and a highway to Albuquerque, where most of its residents work.

By this perspective, remarkably little has changed over the course of a generation. That continuity, however, represents a notable achievement, according to Mayor Gloria Chavez, the village’s longest-serving chief officer, because the whole purpose of incorporation “was to have a voice.”

The village has not wanted to pursue the Edgewood model of expansive annexation and tumultuous commercial growth...

Harry Truman and the decision to drop the bomb

On the eve of the 68th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, historians are still unable to answer the most basic questions: Who decided to drop the bombs, why were they dropped, why were they even built?

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. In the decades since, the mysteries about the decisions have only multiplied the more researchers have delved into documents and the memories of those involved...

My journey through racism

Race and racism are back on the national agenda due to the furor over the killing of the black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, the acquittal of his killer, the more than 100 demonstrations across the United States recently and President Obama's dramatic declaration that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago.

These emotional events, producing a roller-coaster of passions, have reopened the temporarily suppressed debate over what it means to be white or black in America.

Against this background, there is, I believe, new relevance to an essay I wrote in 2008 after Obama's election as President, an essay that is a chapter in my anthology published last year, A Reporter's World: Passions, Places and People...