“You know the street are filled with vipers
Who’ve lost all ray of hope
You know it’s not even safe no more
In the palace of the Pope”
—Bob Dylan, “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”
Winds, the Ides of March, blew with ferocity whistling through the air darting in and around the peaks and crevices of the two mountain ranges that in some manner isolate our Espanola Valley. Far away in California, on the last day of March we were not protected, and those winds delivered a damning newspaper investigation on the drug scourge that leaves our city pock-marked and ugly.
The Jemez and Sangre de Cristo Ranges hold the majesty of mountains above our heads, but they cannot protect us from ourselves.
Oh. If those mountain winds could talk. What a tale they could tell of our history. Perhaps they would whisper and open the window to the shrouded mystery of how we became known as the smallest city with the biggest drug problem in the country.
Here, where three rivers meander and merge certainly there is the truth of our history flowing along the Rio Grande, the Rio Chama, and the Rio Santa Cruz but rivers like mountains don’t speak.
The stories being written and told about us could have had their words stolen from the musician Bob Dylan: our streets are filled with vipers who’ve lost all ray of hope. Their faces are blank and their eyes dead.They wander, zombie-like, through our streets.
Our story, the one about the massive problems with homelessness and drug abuse and drug overdoses, is left to news reporters to tell, some from here and some, faraway, such as the reporter from Los Angeles, at their best only scratch the surface. None offer solid recommendations for solutions.
At the very least we have a crisis in local government leadership or lack of it. Politicians always want to blame these problems without solutions on lack of money. That’s not the problem. We have a history of our elected officials misusing money.
No, we have men and women still in power who represent generational decay of values and ethics. They are branches of family trees old, withered and weathered. The hang in the foul air of patronage and nepotism and corruption that our mountains have watched and whose excesses have flowed like our rivers for hundreds of years.
The mountain winds blow heavy and strong, holding untold secrets. Our rivers flow steady and unrelenting.
But nothing carries the power of the ferocity of truth. Change will only come to Española with enlightened and new leadership.
It’s Easter, a time of rebirth and hope. Embrace it.