Letter #90--Dear MM

Flagstaff Is Number 1!

I sent a letter, not to you, but to a dear friend/fellow professor who might want to retire to Flagstaff. I wrote,

Dear MM, Oh, how exciting--both the idea of retirement and the idea of you moving here.

Flagstaff is the very best. It has access to nearly everything (except for Trader Joe's) and yet isn't overrun except for once and a while when it's hot in Phoenix. Little traffic. Low crime. Fun people. Everyone is in good shape—it’s hard to find people who don’t run marathons or race bikes or hikes the Grand Canyon once a spring. With access to National Parks. Close to Sedona.

There is no water--I mean, there's enough to drink (I checked directly with the guy at the water treatment plant) but nowhere to go sit by the water (well, except by the water treatment plant).

There is some of that chain stores-are-everywhere thing going on. Applebee’s, Culvers, Walmart, Sportsmans Warehouse but there are a considerable number of local shops. Barefoot Cowgirl Bookstore, Farmer's Market Store, Rainbow's End, Winter Sun, that are great.

There are more and more exciting restaurants: Root, Shift, Commerce, to go with Tinderbox (where you and I ate last time we were in town) and Proper and Brix. Great Mexican food at Martanne’s, Salsa Brava, Tacos Los Altos and Pobolitas.

The healthcare is pretty good. Flagstaff Medical Center is solid. For major stuff, sometimes they'll send you to Phoenix.

I love everything about here except the fact that NAU, or my department at least, has serious budget woes.

For traveling, Flag airport is OK and the drive to Phoenix to fly isn't bad.

It's pretty expensive--property values are high like they are all over the west.

3 bedroom, 2 bath, $350,000.

But groceries aren't more expensive than, say, Salt Lake City. No sales tax on them! And, every weekend, there is awesome stuff going on.

I'll send you to the link about goings on in Flagstaff.

It's kind of hard to grow tomatoes here but not impossible!

Move here! We will have so much fun.

            A couple of days later, Flagstaff was listed as number 1 small college town. It highlighted the same things as I did and included some things I’d forgotten about or become so accustomed to that I forgot how awesome they were: the urban trail system and Buffalo Park, the Arboretum, and the Flagstaff Symphony. I added the link saying “we’re number one” to my Facebook page. One of my favorite magazine editors warned me about such lists. She said Charlottesville, Virginia used to top those lists and now, Charlottesville’s local charm is not so local—the chain stores have taken over. It barely counts as a small town anymore. There’s traffic. Crime. Several Walmarts.

            Then it became clear that the HUB, an apartment building to house 600 people (but only 300 cars) will be built even against much community push back. People don’t want the lot by Fratelli’s pizza, Revolution Bicycle, Motherroad Brewing or Pizzacletta to be turned into a cookie-cutter, traffic-causing, parking stressing, not-in-keeping-with-historic-looking, small town Flagstaff.

           

            What draws people to Flagstaff is the very things Flagstaff will lose as it draws more people here. As NAU must grow to sustain itself and the cost of tuition, its marketing to potential to students relies on not so much charm but amenities—new housing, recognizable chain restaurants and stores, fancy  buildings but they really aren’t Flagstaff.

            There’s a risk in pivoting to meet expectations. You turn away from what made your school, your town, your community unique. By the time you turn back to point and show, see how great Flagstaff is, that Flagstaff has been replaced by big box stores and carbon-copy apartment buildings.

            Don’t PHX FLG is one of my favorite bumper stickers. It’s not so much Phoenixing Flag that’s the problem so much as cooking-cutting Flagstaff. Once Flagstaff becomes everyplace it will just be a busy place with traffic and no parking and still no water to sit by, except at the overtaxed water treatment plant.

Letter #89--Satire

Dear Governor Ducey,

I admit that I have been mentioning podcasts over-much in my letters to you but I spend an hour in the forest with my dogs and my phone every day. I may as well learn something while I run. The latest news? Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History reports that satire does not work. He pointed to studies that showed Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report” was beloved not only by liberals who thought he was skewering conservatives but also by conservatives who thought he was making fun of liberals. When Tina Few played Sarah Palin, Fey teased Palin for her accent and word choice more than her politics. When Saturday Night Live had Palin on the show, it became very clear: ‘This is all in good fun. You’re not so bad, Sarah!” Gladwell goes on to describe real satire where the audience knows who you’re skewering. You hit home. Real satire, is painful. Real satire is not ambiguous.

            My friend Rebecca sent me a Facebook Message with a link to a Hulu show. The host is a plastic dog. The show invited real Trump supported and showed them fake advertisements for the Trump campaign. One ad had illustrations of Mexicans being locked in port-a-potties that were lifted onto a flat bed truck and driven them across the border. Another had a guns installed on the wall in women’s restrooms so women could shoot any transgender person that might happen in. Another had a cartoon where poison was dumped into Chinese rivers to make “China less competitive.”

            The focus group nodded. They said, “That seems like a good idea.” They said, “Well, if Trump thinks it’s a good idea…”They did not laugh. This was not satire to them. I, viewer, did not laugh because I was like, what the hell? It wasn’t funny either. But what was I looking at?

            I emailed Rebecca back. “Those are not real Trump supporters. They have to be actors.”

            “They are.  That’s the whole point.”

            “Why would you let yourself be filmed nodding at looking at people being locked in port-a-potties. It’s not only wrong. Cranes lifting port-a-potties onto flatbeds. It’s ridiculous.”

            “I’m sure they signed a waiver before they went in. Not after.”

           

            I described this video to my 15-year-old neighbor and he said, “Well, they probably just go along with whatever Trump says. They just want someone to follow.”

            I thought about this—that no matter how ridiculous things get, people will still support Trump. How did people get to this point? The world is pretty ridiculous. This millennium seems more ridiculous than most. It’s ridiculous that planes fly into buildings. Ridiculous that a war began over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. That in 2007 you had $100,000 in your retirement account and in 2009, $20,000.  Ridiculous that winters are getting colder. Ridiculous that summers are getting hotter. Ridiculous that Los Angeles is running out of water while Louisiana floods. Ridiculous that the police shoot black people on video and still the police are not held accountable. It’s ridiculous that with every camera we have more evidence that you “can see with your own eyes,” the more Photoshop wizards change those photos and videos into what someone else wants your eyes to believe.

            I don’t believe those people in the focus group really believe what those fake ads advocated but only because I don’t believe anything I see on TV. Advocates for Donald Trump say they like that “he tells it like it is.” But that “is” doesn’t exist. So desperate are people to escape from ordinary ridiculous, they’ll take extreme ridiculousness as salvation. We are all on Candid Camera all the time. There is something nice about the idea that someone is behind the scenes who unambiguously tells the cameraperson to shoot from over there, who knows the the “gotcha” scene should unfold right before the mark begins to think, “hey, something’s fishy here.”

            It’s hard to imagine there’s no director. That we’re all on camera. We are each the mark.

            As William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem Spring and All about loss and desperation,

            “No one to witness

            and adjust.

            No one to drive the car.”

It’s a lot of work to drive a car. It takes a lot of knowledge. I wonder where someone would get some of that.

Letter #88 Scarcity and Abundance

Dear Governor Ducey: Scarcity and Abundance

I have a book manuscript making the rounds. It’s about sustainability. I ask, What is sustainable? Golf courses? Individual automobiles? Turtles? Marriage? Life? Sustainabile to an otter is not the same as sustainable to My agent sends it to publishers. She generally protects me from their comments, obviously rejections since no one has offered to publish the book yet, but since I have a long relationship with one of the presses, she did send me their rejection which, although they enjoyed it and my experimental essayistic form, they thought it was too much a memoir and didn’t adhere enough to the form of the essay. So I’m back to revising the book even though I’m pretty sure this is why my agent doesn’t send me all of my rejections. The book was too much essay for one agent. Tonally weird to another editor. I could have 400 versions of the book by the time I’m done. A sad, fractured, book. I’m grateful to my agent for keeping me in the dark.

            I’ve been here before. With the book that’s forthcoming this January, Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse, I had an agent who wanted me to put more Italy in the book, more Wyoming, more chickens. I ended up with a book about Italians in Wyoming killing chickens. That did not go over well. The agent dropped me and I went back to the book, making it a combined essay/memoir collection about peaches and apocalypses, salmon and chickens. There’s still a little Wyoming in the book. No Italy. It’s with a small press who embraces a little memoir and a little essay. In fact, my argument is that the two together, personal narrative woven with research/journalism is the way to make your story important while simultaneously making your research relevant.

            The underlying theme of Canning Peaches for the Apocalypse is scarcity and abundance. In one version of the book, I actually named every paragraph “scarcity” or “abundance.” A lot of the book is about my kids, my daughter being born early, my son being born during the swine flu scare, and the idea that when you have kids, your perspective narrows. Everything—health, wealth, happiness, seems vacillate between extreme scarcity or extreme abundance. Zoe came down with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Babies who were born prematurely can die from this form of the common cold. Zoe developed pneumonia. Her lung sacs wouldn’t inflate. An abundance of mucus. A scarcity of fluids. It wasn’t until we realized feeding her twice as much milk would restore her fluids, which would, in turn, kick the mucus out of her sinuses and let the sacs in her lungs inflate. It took eight days for us to figure out the balance of supply and demand. Who knew her body needed twice as much liquid as normal to fight the RSV?

            I mentioned last week that I love the podcast Freakanomics. I like to know about economies. The ideas behind scarcity and excess, supply and demand fascinate me. I understand that value goes up when supply is low. I also understand there are fundamentally limited, or scarce, resources—or at least that our economy relies on the idea that there are scarce resources. “Money” is scarce, at least in this capitalist system. It has to be for our political system to work. Governments have to fight over whether to sustain roads or sustain schools, sustain the military or sustain the environment.

            But while the things to pay for fight for “tax dollars,” the one thing that is not actually scarce but incredibly abundant, is education. Education, by its very nature, propagates itself. People who can read, read books. Books introduce you to history, make you more empathetic, give you facts that don’t need to be written in quotation marks. They describe the social ramifications of supply and demand. Books in accounting and finance, give you insight into how much scarcity is real and how much is manufactured. Books create books. Teachers create teachers. I understand this is not exactly the Republican dream. And maybe, the sheer fact of its abundance makes education suspect to those deeply invested in our capitalist system. The more you know the more you know and perhaps there are certain things they who are in government don’t want us to know. The first being, that, while education isn’t necessarily free, it’s never going to run out of stock.

           

Little Boats and Hatch Chiles--Letter #87

Dear Governor Ducey,

            On Sunday, Erik and the kids and I stopped by the grocery store to buy ingredients for chili verde. Hatch chiles are at the Farmer’s Market Store, as they are every August. I could write a whole letter about the Farmer’s Market Store—how it’s the place where you can ask the owners when the Utah Peaches are coming in and she’ll give you an hour by hour play and even invite you to call her to see if they’ve made it. It’s the kind of place that sells pinto beans in bulk and cantaloupe for a dollar. The Farmer’s Market store provides an excellent slice of Flagstaffian demographics. Navajo, Hispanic, Hopi, Korean, and white customers all line up to buy cases of roasted Hatch Green Chiles.

            When we were at the not-Farmer’s Market Store (Whole Foods. Farmer’s Market does not sell fish or pork, cage free or otherwise), I saw the Arizona Daily Sun headline: “Flagstaff Charters Lacking in Diversity.” I read the article. I choked a little. My daughter is going to go to a charter school this year. I’m already struggling a bit with this idea. My dearest friends and one of my sisters are public school teachers. I am conflicted about the way charter schools have more flexibility in the students they admit. They don’t have to teach everyone. They don’t have to provide buses or lunches. And, they aren’t subject to charges to desegregate. Flagstaff Unified School District is working to desegregate their schools in an attempt to bring equal opportunity to every student.

            My daughter is moving from one of the most diverse schools, Puente de Hozho, to one of the least. 80% of the students at her new school will be white. On the one hand, this goes against the grain of what public education should provide. An equal opportunity to learn. On the other hand, when the FUSD schools developed programs to retain students who they had been losing to the charters, those programs filled with also white people.

            Unequal access to education is entrenched. I work at NAU. I have colleagues who reminded me of when I needed to get on the charter school list. I have time to make my kids’ lunches. My husband has time to drive them to school. I can pick them up. My privilege makes it possible for my daughter (and later son), to go on to greater privilege. This privilege hands its misery onto the next generation.

According to key findings of a new study of the racial wealth gap released this week by the sponsor of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Corporation for Economic Development- If current economic trends continue, the average black household will need 228 years to accumulate as much wealth as their white counterparts hold today. For the average Latino family, it will take 84 years.

There’s no necessary correlation between being minority and poverty—except that the United States is built upon the backs of that inequality. My daughter, at Puente, worked with students who did not have all the advantages she does. In so doing, she learned that not everyone learns the same way or thinks the same learning system is the only learning system. She wants to go to a charter not because she doesn’t want to learn alongside these students. She wants to go to a charter because this particular charter sets the bar very high.

What I want is that very high bar be made available to everyone. I don’t think Charters make it impossible but I don’t think Charters make that the primary priority. They can’t, I guess, to do what every school should be able to do: maintain small classes, focus on academics rather than sports, prepare students for a wildly changing global economy. The small academies within FUSD, like the one my daughter would have entered if she had stayed at FUSD, have those opportunities as well.

I think all schools should be as small as the charters. I think everyone should have access to them. So my daughter and I agreed that we would work at the charter to find ways to make it more accessible to people who don’t already have her economic privilege.

The first plan? Maybe I’ll make an additional lunch and send it with her every day. Maybe I’ll offer to pick someone up from school. But obviously, the change needs to be a fundamental one. An acknoleggement that a rising tide raises all the boats. To make it possible for her Latino counterparts to accumulate as much wealth as she in fewer than 84 years, we’ll have to be the flood.

Letter #86: Picture Canyon Redux

Dear Governor Ducey,

            The city called. After my last letter about getting lost in Picture Canyon, my editor at Flag Live said someone from the city was trying to reach me. I knew I was in trouble. I imagined they were going to say, “Nicole. Please stop saying bad things about city property. We need good support for our city, not your complaining ways.” But that isn’t what they said! They were worried! “We are getting new signs in just a couple weeks. We know it can be confusing.”

            What’s this? They didn’t blame me for not checking my compass better? They didn’t tease me for my lack of bad-sign reading ways? Thank you, City of Flagstaff, for worrying about me.

            I was so grateful that I took my kids out to the canyon. I was going to try this again. We parked in the shade, got out of the car. I told them to look around. It was 9:00 a.m.

            “Which was is east?” They each pointed to the sun.

            “Which way is west?”

            Zoe, ten, sang her “Never Eat Soggy Waffles song. I sang my Never Eat Slimy Worms song.             Max, six, said, “What waffles? Are we having waffles? I don’t like worms.”

            Zoe and I looked at each other. We’d keep an eye on Max and his directional ways.

            I showed them my iPhone compass and said, “This is a good tool but batteries run out. It’s probably better to have a real phone but today, we aren’t going to leave the river, so it will be hard to get lost.”

            We walked to the sign that said, “You are here” which pointed out the water treatment plant was to the right and the outdoor classroom was just a few feet ahead. This is the exact same sign on the other side of the trail that reads “you are here” in the same spot. This news, combined with the kind call from the city, made me think really that maybe I wasn’t an idiot. All the more confidence to march on! The kids complained a little about the smell from the water treatment plant but I told them how hard the city worked to make the water as clean as possible, raking the solids, aerating the fluids, mixing good microbes in with the bad to do what rocks and silt and clouds do. By the time we made it to the first bridge, the smell had abated and the water looked as clear as a bell.

            We looked at another sign that read, 1.0 mile to Arizona Trail. “Oh, that’s where I went wrong too. I thought the whole loop was one mile.”

            “We were just on the Arizona Trail,” Zoe reminded me. Her museum of Northern Arizona camp this year was called Climate Games. They measured bugs and carbon output and miles of AZ trail.

            “It goes all the way from Mexico to Utah,” I told Max who may not know.

            “We just got back from Mexico. And we’re going to Utah. But I don’t want to walk there,” he said.

            “No. I don’t so much either.”

            “How long would that take?” Zoe asked.

            “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen days? If you walked ten miles a day. Almost as long as I got lost last time.”

            “Well, and last time it rained.”

            It was too early for monsoon and the storms seemed to have abandon us this week. We hiked along the trail, looked at the waterfall, and then, instead of following the Arizona Trail/Loop signs, we turned down a small path the followed along the river. I told the kids to note how Mount Elden was now to our right, the river to our left. They got it. We saw a huge hawk washing himself in the river. The hide of a deer that might have gotten caught on a fence. We hiked up toward the rocks where we found the thing I had been looking for the week before: spiral petroglyphs. Max and Zoe climbed through yucca and sticky thorns to see them. Scratched but satisfied, we climbed up the rest of the hill and followed a path above the river back to the car.

            The happy news is that you can re-do most everything. If you make a mistake, like taking 100 million dollars from the Higher Ed budget, you can undo that. Flagstaff has continaully worked to improve Picture Canyon that they recently won the Governor's 2016 Archaeology Commission Award. The award recognizes the work done to protect, preserve and interpret resources within the Picture Canyon National and Cultural Preserve. Even you reward revision and revamping. There is nothing stopping anyone from rethinking past thoughts and revising past ideas. Thanks to the city, and my intrepid kids, I now think Picture Canyon is pretty awesome.