I notice memoirs from time to time on DKos. Here's my contribution.
I’m writing this memoir in honor of Robin and her daughter Sundew, both of whom are now dead. I would like to offer this piece of writing as my small gift to their memory.
I first met Robin in the fall of 1974 at a craft show in the Loretto Mall in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She reminded me of a woman I once knew named Carol.
“Are you named Carol, by any chance?” I asked by way of introduction.
“No,” she replied.
With most women, the relationship would have ended right there, but Robin and I had some sort of instant connection. So we kept on talking.
It turns out she had just broken up with her boyfriend after travelling around the country in a bus. (A lot of hippie-types traveled around the country in buses back then.) She and her two-year-old daughter, Sundew, had moved into a little wooden house that Salty Dingman had rented her, about a mile south of my homestead, on the other side of the Rio Grande from me. There were a bunch of hippie-types living in that neighborhood, so she fit right in.
About a half mile down the river from her stood a two-story house, with a little hot spring bathhouse. (That’s how Radium Springs got its name.) Max and Dan, two young hippies, lived there. They were marble miners. Mr. Preece, the old man who owned the Broken Arrow Rock Shop in Radium Springs, had a mining claim about 5 miles west of the highway. Max and Dan would drive Mr. Preece’s truck up the bumpy dirt road back to the marble mine, blast big chunks of marble loose with dynamite, then winch the boulders onto the truck and drive them back to the marble processing area, where Mr. Preece had a big diamond saw. The diamond saw had a blade about six feet long, studded with industrial diamonds, with a spray of water to keep things cool. The saw moved slowly back and forth and cut the marble into slabs. Dan and Max cut the slabs to a saleable size and polished them until they glistened. I once swapped Dan and Max some dope for a couple of bookends that they cut and polished for me. Dan was Robin’s boyfriend.
We counterculture denizens all socialized quite a bit, soaking in the hot tub at Max and Dan’s house, making music, sharing meals, smoking dope. We were always smoking dope, it seemed like. We liked to get high.
One family came down for the winter from Wisconsin every year, living in a teepee behind Max and Dan’s house. People did stuff like that back then. Do they still?
This was the “countercultural era,” when a certain cohort of our age group believed that an alternative to the mainstream monoculture was actually possible. We had no way of knowing that our beloved “alternative lifestyle” was fading away even as we were living it, and that within a few years it would be gone. Judy and I had a lot of spare time during these years, which is another way of saying that we didn’t have jobs, and consequently were very poor financially. But we were very rich in unstructured time at a young enough age to fully enjoy it. When our peers were already locked into the System and getting established in their careers, we were exploring the Goat Path (as opposed to the Freeway Path that most people were on) and digging into Reality from the inside in. This era was a time of liberation and exploration, a wild and wonderful time, and Robin was an integral part of it for us.
We were enthusiastically primitive. We lived without electricity, without clocks, without calendars, and mostly without money. Life became an organic flow, greatly enhanced by periodic hits of our magical marijuana, without which I suspect our lives would have seemed much more boring. But stoned, we were invulnerable. We could, like, just sit there and watch a rock in all its magical rock-ness, and in that moment all was good. (In all honesty I must say that some of my most profound experiences were completely drug-free.)
I remember wading the river during the wintertime with Bob Clark and walking down the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to hang out with Robin. And driving up to see the Tonuco Peak petroglyphs with her and Dan; baking bread with her and Judy; driving to upper Broad Canyon to look for arrowheads (we found one); performing “Sympathy for the Devil” in her house with Dan and a bunch of friends one night; hiking to Ash Spring together on a cool cloudy monsoon afternoon. Lots of good memories from a magical time. She was a bright spirit: friendly, intelligent, good vibes; a good person to hang out with; a good person to have as a friend.
I really don’t remember Sundew all that well. She had a gimpy eye, as I recall, but other than that was a typical two-year-old. There always seemed to be kids running around, and Sundew was one of them. From my perspective, she was just another element in the total lifestyle package.
I remember one evening going over to Max and Dan’s house with my friend Dave, who was gay. Dave had learned to enjoy his marijuana during his Army service in Vietnam, so I figured he would enjoy going over there and partaking. So we went over there and partook, and then he went to the bathhouse to take a soak. A couple of minutes later, Robin went to join him. Dave was a sweet guy and safe in his gay way, so he was no doubt a very satisfactory bath partner for her. But I remember feeling very quite seriously jealous of him right about then.
One afternoon in the summer of 1975 -- June, as I recall -- Robin and Sundew paid us a spontaneous visit. This involved them walking up the tracks for a mile, crossing a floodplain covered with saltgrass and tornillo trees, and crawling through the thick saltcedar and coyote willow thicket at the edge of the river. We heard her calling to us from across the river (nobody had phones back then), so I dragged my pontoon boat into the water and paddled over to meet them. A friend had loaned me a little aluminum boat made by cutting out the top of an aircraft wing tank, with pontoons attached to either side so it wouldn’t tip over. We had attached a cow skull onto the prow of our ship, and cut quite the mythic figure paddling across the Rio Grande.
When I reached the other side, I loaded Robin and Sundew into my trusty craft and paddled back across the river. Judy and our daughter Sue Ann met us as we climbed out of the boat. Sue Ann was 5 at the time, and the two little girls had become instant friends. They started playing together at the edge of the river.
“Want to see our new goat?” Judy asked Robin.
“Sure,” Robin replied.
So we walked over to the goat pen and talked about goats for awhile until Sue Ann came up to us, alone.
“Sundew’s gone,” Sue Ann said.
Oh. My. God.
We ran back to where the girls had been playing and there was the river, flowing quietly and relentlessly downstream like it always does. There was no sign of Sundew.
Robin freaked and dove into the river, calling for Sundew. My memory goes blank right about then. I think that particular memory circuit self-protectively fried itself out of existence. I’m sure she screamed and cried, but all I remember is hopping into my car and driving to Leasburg Dam to see if I could spot Sundew’s body going over the spillway. This involved driving a couple of miles downstream, crossing the river, hanging a left onto Fort Selden Road, then immediately turning left along the Leasburg Canal Road, and driving a mile up the river to the dam. There were several hippie-types there hanging out (in other words, smoking dope), including one guy I knew. I imperiously told them to keep a lookout for Sundew’s body floating past, and they immediately bristled with hostility. I can’t blame them. God, what a prick I was. But I was totally freaked out and not capable of my usual standard of friendliness.
Watching for Sundew’s probably-submerged body in such a vast expanse of water seemed pointless, so I drove back home. Somewhere along in there somebody went to the Clarks’ house down the road and called the sheriff (we had no phone at the time). A deputy came out, took his report, walked down to the edge of the river where Sundew had disappeared, and said they would send divers out in the morning. I don’t know about now, but this used to happen all the time back then... a couple of times a year, a family would be picnicking along the river, and suddenly somebody would notice that Johnny or Suzie had disappeared, and a fun family outing would turn into a tragedy. The sheriff’s job was to find the body, so the survivors could perform the age-old human ritual over the mortal coil from which the spirit had departed. They usually found the body, sooner or later, and I’m sure there were many closed-coffin funerals.
Afternoon turned to evening. Dan arrived in his car, picked up Robin, and took her home. The next morning, the Sheriff himself came out and sat on our dock for a couple of hours as a couple of scuba divers scoured the river downstream, checking to see if Sundew’s body had gotten snagged by overhanging saltcedar branches. (Saltcedars, seeking light, grow way out into the river.)
Drowning victims usually float to the surface after a few days. As the body decays it fills with gas, giving it buoyancy. They found Sundew’s body five days later, stranded on a sandbar several miles downstream.
In my perception, Robin always had a haunted depth to her after that. She had fallen into the abyss, and I don’t know if you ever really come back. She was forever changed. She seemed wise beyond her years. She moved away eventually, and I heard she had become a park ranger, working at various New Mexico state parks.
I visited Robin a few times in 1981, after I had left Judy and hooked up with Ellanie, the woman who would become wife #2. By this time Dan and Robin were living together. Dan had built them a house way back in the hills near Truth or Consequences. Since Ellanie lived in T or C and I was spending a lot of time there, it was easy for me to visit Robin on my way back to Radium Springs.
Robin and I were living two very different lives by then, so we had a few good conversations and that was that. We never lost our spiritual connection; some things are forever. As time went on I got totally caught up in my own drama, and never saw Robin again. I later heard that she and Dan had two little girls. From time to time the idea would pop into my mind to visit Robin, but I never did.
Then, in 1994, a mutual friend told me what had happened to Robin. She said that Robin had been suffering from endometriosis, and was experiencing intense, unremitting pain. They tried everything, but nothing helped. Constant pain can drive you over the edge. One evening, right before Dan was to come home from work, she wrote a note, said goodbye to her little daughters, walked out into the desert, and shot herself in the head with a pistol.
I will always miss you, Robin. There is nothing more to say.
Wed Nov 27, 2013 at 9:43 AM PT: Thanks for your wonderful comments. You have warmed the cockleburrs of my heart!