San Louis Potosi

 

 

November 4, 1998

It was not Mexico that was lost when I set out to look for her, it was me that was lost.  Yet Mexico was lost too, at least

to Americans such as myself.   I first realized it the Sunday evening I arrived in the North Central Town of San Luis Potosi.

 

I got out of the cab that had just taken me from the bus station on the outskirts of town to the hotel I had selected from my

guide book in the center of town.  I felt at risk in getting out of the cab and paying him off.  I half understood the driver’s assurances that my hotel was just a block up the street, as he seemed to have said, but I didn’t trust him.  Why hadn’t he delivered me to the hotel?  What could the man be up to?

 

But what choice did I have?  I hung my bag over one shoulder and my lap top over the other and headed off into the pedestrian only section of San Luis Potosi.  Feeling nervous and insecure, I watched the people I was meeting in the street – would I be robbed?  If not – why not?  I was helpless and alone in Mexico!  Why was I even here?

 

"What if he just dumped me!" was what I was thinking.  "Why didn't he take me to the hotel?"   It wasn't that I didn't see

that the street was closed to traffic.  The driver had told me that the entire "El Centro" was closed to traffic. I was afraid of any transaction between me and a Mexican - afraid that I would

somehow be taken advantage of - screwed!  Afraid, not only because I was in a strange country where I didn't speak the

language, I would not have felt this in Europe. I was afraid because this was Mexico!  I was afraid of being in Mexico, I was afraid of

Mexicans! 

 

Why should the cab driver take me to my hotel?  I asked myself, what was in it for him?  I had no idea where I was, he

could take me anyplace and just tell me to pay up and get out!  My Spanish was not better than the driver’s pointing and

urging understood it to be.  I trudged up the stone paved street toward the plaza the driver had assured me was only a block away

I did not look up at the buildings or pay much attention to the vendor stalls that began to fill the streets as I walked toward what I hoped would be my hotel. I was unhappy, trudging up the street carrying my bags as best I could and looking at my feet.

 

It was about six o'clock and the air was thick with evening and Mexican warmth.  As I neared the square, I heard music, a choir singing somewhere up ahead, but I was not in the mood for music. Besides the music was discordant. When I reached the corner of the plaza itself, I could see that there was indeed a conflict. I stopped for a moment to figure out what was wrong with the music! Music was coming from the bandstand in the center of the plaza, where a full and very vigorous band played.   The singing was coming from the cathedral on the corner of the square very near the bandstand. The effect, while discordant in a way, was harmonious in another way.  The crowds that attended the concert at the bandstand blended with the overflow of the crowds that stood upon the steps to the cathedral which was too full to hold everyone and the overflow spilled into the plaza. 

 

Yet, only the attention of the two groups was turned a different way, those that had come to the Catholic service attended upon the open

doors of the cathedral, those that came to the plaza for the concert looked toward the bandstand.  Otherwise both crowds

were one and the music, in a haphazard way blended into an only slightly discordant whole.

 

It is tempting to suggest that I somehow perceived the tension in Mexican society as I stood there, my bags hanging off

me, looking at the Plaza.  Perceived the complex relationship of the parts of Mexican culture, even to suggest that I

understood the vast and historic tension that exists between the secular culture and the Catholic church - but that would

be an exaggeration.  What I really felt, standing there at the edge of the Plaza de Armas in the viscous evening light and

the warmth of the February evening was something quite different.  I felt enchanted.  I was Dorothy opening the door of the gray old house of her childhood and seeing OZ in full color for the first time!

The blended crowds, one facing the open Cathedral doors, the other the bandstand had more in common to my eyes than anything that I could see that separated them.  Both were made up of lovers with arms entwined  and bodies pressed close; men and women with children by the hand, teamed as husband and wife in a way I was not used to; old men chasing small toddlers who ran bouncing on short legs and screaming in delight at being chased by grandpa;  Singles, staring intently

into the midst of the mystery of their choice -whether it be the open Cathedral doors or the Vivaldi coming from the bandstand.

 

The Plaza de Armas was full of what seemed to me to be people completely content with their lot in life, happy to be in

this plaza on this early Sunday evening, splendid as a painting by Monet in the heavy evening light. Where was the travail

of the Mexican Murals by Rivera or the horrors of those by Orozco?   Why was I looking upon a scene so serene that only a French Impressionist could have captured it?  Where was the Mexico that my California politicians conjured – railing against illegal immigration?  The Mexico from which small brown people fled North and hoped only to wade across the Rio Grand and escape into the welfare arms of the United States?  Who were these tall, happy, elegant people? Who were they to be so splendid in the serenity of their own town square on an ordinary February evening? It was at that moment, standing on the corner of the Plaza De Armas in San Luis Potosi, with my bags hanging off my shoulders, that I began looking for Mexico - like Dorothy - newly crashed into Oz.

 

 

Basin Montana, An Appreciation

 

Basin Montana is one of those little towns that progress and modern life have abandoned, or, in the less dramatic case of Basin, just bypassed.  Highway 15, was a two lane job that connected the State Capital with  one of the State’s principal cities, Butte, and it used to go right through the town of Basin, between the bank and the Post Office.  Right down main street. But when they built the four-lane down at the bottom of the hill, the town was by-passed.   Bypassed by  few hundred yards, but it was enough, Basin became the exclusive interest of a couple hundred, or fewer, Basinites.  Today the town consists of  bar, a restorant (they share a building and the Laundromat is at the back of the bar), a post office, a potter and the Montana Artists Refuge.  That’s right, Basin no longer has a grocery store or even a gas station.  If you want something besides  lunch, a drink, a piece of pottery, or a place to write or paint, you go to Bolder, ten miles down the road toward Helena. 

I don’t think that Basinites particularly regret that  the modern world has bypassed their town, most of them probably like it that a dog can sleep in the street in front of the bar and that anyone who walks into the restaurant can, and pretty much has to, turn to the guy on the next counter stool and say, “Hay”, Or “Rose told Marge ya had a boy?”   They like it that you can walk into the Silver Saddle bar and ask Chester (the bar owner and tender) “You seen Willie?”  and he will say, “Nah, she and Nancy gone to Italy, don’t know when they’re come'n back.” 

No, I expect the Basinites are just as happy that we all rush by on the freeway down there outside of town  (They can always get out there on the freeway themselves and head out for Helena or Butte or Florence, Italy if they have a mind to) and they know the name of the dog sleeping in the middle of main street.

            If you’re a stranger in town like I am then everybody stops playing pool or talking and turns and looks at you when you open the door into the Silver Saddle.  The place is a little quieter then it would otherwise have been while you walk up to the bar.  Chester, having judged your trajectory, slides up on his side to meet you at the calculated point. When he puts your drink down in front of you and says something like: “just pass'n through?”  he is inviting you to mention your business in town if your so inclined.  If you say, as I did: “No, I’m hear visiting friends for a while.”  You know that Chester wants you to name those friends.  So you say.  “Nan Parsons, know her?”   “Oh sure, yeah-know I haven’t seen Nan in a couple of days, don’t know what she’s doing.”  And if you want you can tell him that you’ve known Nan since sometime in the sixties and you knew Willie since 64.  Met her at the University up at Missoula.  Chester will tell you Willie was in just before she and Nancy left for Italy and he will mention that Nan is going to South Africa pretty soon, and he’ll shake his head and say, “those gals get around,”  

Someone in town will ask you after they’ve seen you around Basin for a few days, “what brings to Basin - Mat Bouer says you’re a friend of Nan. What they really want to ask is ‘Where do you sleep?”

  This is important because the locals know every building in town and they will know exactly where you are, what your circumstances are, and who you are connected to when they know which one you are in.  I said, “Well, I was up in Nan’s little cabin but now I’m up at Lynn Crow’s place up the creek there.”  (You find yourself using extra words like a ‘there’, “up the creek, there”. or using words like ‘Naa’ for ‘no’, At least you do this if you grew up in Montana like I did).     

            Basin really has two streets, the main street of the town, bent now to resemble a bow that leaves the freeway on one end and just a quickly rejoins it on the other.  The other road is called Basin Creek Road.  This road comes down out of the north-south running canyon that was created by Basin Creek.  This canyon is sided by mountains so steep they might as well be called cliffs. Basin creek itself (in California we would call it a river) is a good little stream, all but frozen over when I first saw it early in November. 

It is up Basin Creek Road that Nan has her little homestead of fifty aches and four buildings, all of which she built herself.  Each building is a modest little structure with low rooflines and small windows, but each has a peculiar singularity of shape.  Nan’s cabin was going to be the goat shed, but for some reason I haven’t heard, she added a small section and moved in herself – I don’t think any goats every lived there, but I won’t bet the farm on it.  Just up from Nan’s cabin is her painting studio, over on the hill is the house her friend Laway  built for herself, but is now being lived in my a couple of local boys in their early twenties.  Up past the studio at the very edge of the mountain is the cabin where an put me that first four-A.M.-cold-morning, and, of course, situated about equidistant between the studio, the house she built for herself, and the cabin she lives in is the outhouse.  A doorless creation facing the woods. 

Lynn Crow’s cabin is up Basin Creek about another quarter mile, and on the other side; reachable only by the footbridge from the road.  Nan and I had talked before I got to Basin and she suggested that, since I needed electricity for my laptop (Nan has declined to bring electricity to her four buildings), I might use Lynn’s cabin.  Unexpectedly the weekend I arrived, Lynn was in Basin, from her teaching job at some collage up in Cranbrook, British Columbia and she and I agreed on an arraignment whereby I rented her cabin for the remainder of November.  

Now, while Nan’s cabin has all the look of a house built by a woman and an artist (small spaces, low ceilings with nooks and dormers all about) Lynn’s cabin has the distinct look of the male mind, all-be-it a rigors and intent male mind.  Nan’s cabin feels like a burrow, something organic and even subterranean (even from the outside it looks like it grew up from underground) and has no apparent structural support save one massive beam in the middle of it’s very small space, reminiscent of what you might find in a mine and seems held up as much by charm and a sweet native knowledge of what will fall and what will not as anything.  Lynn’s cabin asserts it’s place in the forest as a human thing, upright and rectangular.  It is replete with stark vertical structural members in the form of logs, carefully selected for uniformity of size, each to the others and from end to end, stripped of all bark or other external distractions. These are placed with the vertical uniformly of soldiers at attention, along the interior walls, (this is a rigorous rectangle of a building) and one at the middle of each short wall holding up the roof beam.  There is no interruption of the perfect box of the interior space save the steep and narrow ladder/stairs that lead up to a sleeping loft, the highest point of which is not high enough for a man, even one of my modest height, to stand up straight; but a space, none the less, suitable for sleeping.  The lack of a toilet (it is just up the trial toward the creek), and running water, is more then made up for by an absolute miracle of a heating stove.  This stove is the one thing that catches your attention when you walk into the cabin, and the one thing for which you are grateful during a long November night.  It is a smooth, black, horizontal cylinder about five feet long with a small, perfectly round mouth at one end, into which you could put a slim log as long as the stove itself, or by maneuvering a little, a few slim logs for a cold night.  Along the top of the stove is a firm and reliable rack on which large kettles of creek water are kept worm all winter to be used for washing up and dishes (drinking water is brought over from Nan’s studio to which it is piped from a spring up the ravine).  This stove, along with the rigorous structure and insulation of the cabin, makes it possible to keep worm with very little expense of heating wood or effort, unusual in this part of Montana this time of year.

            That first weekend, while I was still staying in Nan’s cabin and spending most of my time at her place catching up with all the events of our lives over the years since we had last talked, I had occasion to meet the two young men who built Lynn’s cabin.  The first evening Sean dropped by.  Sean is a tall slim man, I would say in his late thirties, large nose, narrow, long, Nordic head; he must have been what they call gawky in his youth.  He was up from Bozman at his cabin (up the creek from Lynn’s)  hunting for elk. 

I met Bob the next morning when I went down to Nan’s for what had come to be a fairly regular cup of morning coffee.   A hunting rifle leaned against the door, outside.  Inside, chatting with Nan, was Bob, whom I later learned was, with Sean’s help, the builder and original owner, of the Cabin, and some twenty acres, sold to Lynn some years back and, now, very temporarily, let to me.  The description of Bob is remarkably similar to that I have given for Sean, save for Bob’s age which is probably five or eight years less then Sean’s and his nose which is small and sharp, rather remarkably small and sharp.

            A few days after meeting Shaun and Bob I had bread rising on the back of the heating stove and soup cooking on the front, and was walking up Basin Creek, when I met the two men coming down the road toward town in Shaun’s pick up.  Shaun seemed a little excited as he leaned out of  the truck window and asked me if I would care to be a shuttle driver.  Caring little for the exact nature of the adventure I agreed at once and, over Bob's small protest (he dared not refer directly to my age and girth), I hopped as nimbly as I could into the back of the truck.  It came to be that Shaun had finally shot his elk (after about two weeks of effort), but late the night before and, unable to find it in the dark had left it, gut shot, to be recovered the next morning.

On this morning he and Bob had drug the dead animal the mile or so to the nearest point off Basin Creek Road, which point was now our destination.  Shaun warned that the dead animal stank and hoped I could stand it (how old and how much of a dandy did I seem or, indeed, had I become?) as he led the way to the kill. All three of us, me rather feebly clinging to one leg, drug the thing down to the road and pulled it into the back of the truck.  Bob, now that the truck was all but full of the dead elk and there was no place to sit, began to insist that he would ride in back. I, however, having by now established my place, and seeing myself astride the beast, a little like Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, climbed back in for the ride home.  It was only later, after they had the elk strung up between two trees and Shaun was skinning it, that I learned that my real job was to go with Bob back up the mountain to retrieve his truck.

            I have avoided describing Nan Parsons.  This is because she is probably impossible to get right.  Everything I can think to say about Nan must be quickly explained away.  Nan is a small woman, even dressed in countless layers of clothing against the cold (this is something different then the layered look, be sure of it); here, on her property, surrounded by buildings of her own hand that look like hacked out pieces of her mind; she is large, she is everywhere. 

Nan is eccentric, even, in a way, odd I suppose, yet she is sophisticated, and tenacious and the center of a large group of friends whom, it seems, come to her little cabin for something that I cannot quite put words to.  If it is wisdom they – we – come for, it is the non verbal variety.  It is not conversation she offers, though she is a marvelous listener.  I am tempted to say she has heart; and though, shy and self-effacing, she is also bold and more then a little tough.  Her hair, just now graying, is certainly the mane of a lion, (Nan’s hair, until she recently had a salon-do to get ready for her trip to South Africa, looked like it had been cut with a hunting knife and no friend to a comb).  Perhaps this is all to say that she is that uncommon thing, a woman, a person, whose confront inside her own skin is so palpable and authentic, who’s confidence feels so much like transferable self-reassurance that you can’t be with her, certainly not in her house, and not take some of it away with you; it comes as easily as the coffee and the toast.  

I first met Nan when Willie brought her to our flat on Cole street in San Francisco in the middle sixties.  It is absolutely striking to me that the Nan I drink coffee with today is remarkably the same woman that I knew then, only deeper, more resolute and self confident.  It is as though she already had everything she needed back then, and has only had to shape and shade it, and put a polish on the surface, and find a suitable setting, here in Basin, to be the gift that she is to her friends today.

            Willie and Nan, Nan and Willie, in my mind they are an inseparable entity and yet they are very little alike.  I want to say that Willie is the brains and Nan the heart of their extraordinary, life long friendship, but that is a half truth, less then half a truth.  Still if you believe, as I do, that truth is cumulative and inclusive, even of half truths and contradictions, and is reached more by adding to, then by sorting away; only then is possible to say much of anything about Nan and Willie and their forty plus year friendship and collaboration. 

            The most recent product of this remarkable pair, and the family of friends that they have assembled around them, is the “Montana Artist Refuge”.  

            I am tempted to say that the Montana Artists Refuge is the result of Nan and Willie wanting to live in this little, bypassed, town of Basin Montana and yet not miss out on anything.  It is not to much of a stretch to believe that Willie and Nan were sitting around one evening and Nan commented that it was a shame you couldn’t live here in Basin and still have all your artists friends around you like you can in New York.  And Willie saying, thoughtfully, after a moment pause, “Well, maybe they just have to come to us.”, and few days later, or in the morning, Willie would say, “I was thinking about what you said last night and I've got an idea.”   Nan would then have said: “Wow! Lets do it!” And she would have giggled a little at the extravagance of it and Willie would have been looking at her, still thinking it out.  The “Montana Artists Refuge” probably grew out of just such a conversation. 

            I had been in Basin several days before Willie and Nancy Owens returned home from Italy.  I was walking down Basin Creek Road to the restaurant for breakfast one morning and saw a woman I did not know unloading a car in front of the house that Nan had told me was Willie’s and Nancy’s. Willie came out of the house just then and, remarkably, an old relationship, lapsed for twenty years, took up its course as steady and reliable as a stream in spring, hardly a stone out of place or a root not ready to reach for fresh water.   We didn’t get much chance to talk for a day or so, then, on Friday, Willie had a gig she was playing at a museum opening in Helena. I went with her and listened to her play her trombone and sing jazz, and remembered the old days when she played and sang at the Gangway on Larkin Street in San Francisco or at my flat on Cole Street.  How long ago had it been?  Thirty years?  I want to go on remembering: our days of adventuring in Marine County, (once I bought a car that freed us from the City); how she became “Miss Williams, formerly of the Emporium” or how “I have a grease fire in the kitchen” became such a potent laugh line with us.  But now I want to try to describe the Willie I have become reacquainted with here in Basin. 

            Willie ought not be so hard to get right as Nan.  She has lived in the world all of her life, (for seven years, she told me yesterday, she lived in Seattle trying to make it as a Jazz musician), and even when she returned to Basin and settled down, possibly to a life of jazz anonymity, she began to implement her plan to bring the world to Basin.  Possibly it seemed like a manageable world after Seattle; artists, musicians, writers, selected and housed by the Refuge for a time certain, to be replaced after they have become friends with new artists and new friendships.  

How many streams of friendship run into Willies river I will never know.  It is her genius, I think, to trace a course through a large terrain and cause small meandering waterway and still ponds to flow together and toward something, something to be defined by the power of the flow itself, and yet at the confluence, to me, it will always be Willie’s river.

            I cannot describe the overlapping set of partnerships, both personal and professional that make up the control and ownership of  the Montana Artists Refuge.  I do not know most of the board of directors, much less do I understand the influence of people, friends of Nan and Willie, who have moved to Basin and bought property here, I would not hazard a guess at the roles now played Nancy Owens.  I am tempted to flesh out my simplistic notions of these maters by suggesting that Nancy may be the manager, the day to day man.  I have the vision of these three women on a boat on Willies river: Willie, her arm outstretched toward some horizon (there is just a little Napoleon in this rendering), Nan, standing just behind her either shaking her head and saying “I don’t think so Williams” or exclaiming, “Yes, that’s exactly right!”; and sitting there, almost out of sight, concerned about submerged rocks, I think I may see Nancy, driving the boat.  But these are half truths, or much less, things I don’t know about and am, therefor, free to romanticize.

            After Willie took me to Helena to hear her play, we had a couple of beers at the Silver Saddle and I had a chance to complain that I had not yet meet any of the artists in residence (that was not strictly true since I had been invited to a poker party the previous night).  I knew there were three current artists, that two were painters and one was a writer, but I could not have picked any one of them out had they been sitting at the bar.  The next day Willie took me to meet the two painters, housed in the Hewit building.  It was at this point that I began to appreciate the achievements of the Montana Artists Refuge. 

            Willie introduced me to Gus, a refugee from the literary world of Manhattan by now a year and a half into a painting career.  Gus was a very satisfactory exemplar of the artist; a smallish man with a tall forehead and slightly wild, wiry hair.  Gus seemed nervous at meeting a stranger yet happy to comply with Willie’s desire to make our introduction and let me see his portion of the Refuge’s accommodations and his own work  Paintings, strewn about the big studio that was the front of his apartment.  Gus lived in the bottom flat of the Hewit building (as I write this Gus is back in New York and I am finishing out my stay in his apartment).  The Hewit was the bank of Basin’s lost days of glory as a thriving mining town, now it is owned by the Artists Refuge. 

            Gus’s flat is a space some 90 or 100 feet long and 20 feet wide. The ceilings, befitting the grandeur of a bank, and possibly the aspirations of an artist, from twelve to fifteens feet high.  The living room, at the back, has had large widows installed, and is overlooked by a loft bedroom built over the bath and foyer leading to the kitchen and dinning room.  The final thirtyfive feet of the apartment is the painting studio fronted by great bank windows which directly on main street.  In the studio Gus showed us the results of his months of work at Basin, now about over, with a quick, slightly self-deprecating humor, designed, I suspect, to relieve us of the need to praise his work, by giving us little time to appreciate it.  Willie, none the less laid subtle claim to an anatomically interesting nude, which Gus left in the studio for her with a note attached: “On permanent loan”.  A phrase I mulled over, futilely trying to sort the Psychological intent from the factual content.

            Upstairs, in the Hewit lived an artist from San Diego, a woman named Prudence, whose studio walls were covered with bold landscapes which, viewed up close, disassemble into fuzzy green and blue abstractions.  Prudence and I got to be friends over afternoon glasses of wine and a few trips to Helena and the Silver Saddle three doors up Main Street.

            Next door to the Hewit is single story building with three apartments that is also owned by the Refuge.  Lloyd, a writer from New York, lived in the front apartment where he was working on a novel, for him a departure from poetry and journalism.  I became interested in Lloyed as a fellow writer but found him shy.  In spite of his coming to Refuge dinners at my apartment two or three times, we did talk till six o’clock the last morning I was in town when, he came over to bring me a book by Paul Thurou, whom we both admired.  Lloyed told me he was working on a novel set in Montana’s militia movement and of is sympathetic interest of a certain class of men, mostly white and undereducated, who had become lost in the brave new hightech world and had retreated to small rural communities and lives of building and dangerous frustrations.  He had met many of these men in Prisons where he had taught writing.  Lloyed gave me a clipping of an article he had done on this subject for the New York Times Magazine. 

            The bus comes to Basin only if you have a ticket purchased at Boulder the day before and have called station on the morning of your departure to remind the driver to pull off and pick you up in Basin.  If you manage all of that, successfully, the bus will take you to Butte and back into the rest of the world.