THE FATUOUS PHONY WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE

My wife and I went hiking on Labor Day. She wanted to show me a new trail not far from our house. We had to cut through the woods and do some arroyo clambering before we reached the road to the top of the mountain. She'd only been there once before and somehow we ended up behind a neighbor's house on the wrong side of the fence. There was a wire gate and as we were going through it our neighbor approached – skinny, white, pale (why do people who fear the sun live in the southwest?), bony shouldered in a tank top, shorts and running shoes with a large, smooth, gray rock in one hand and a smile of recognition on her face. The gate was at the back of her property and my wife explained that we had inadvertently ended up on her side of the fence. She is our neighbor. We’ve had dinner together at Harry’s Roadhouse (she invited us). She chatters like a magpie with a sort of Tennessee-ish southern accent and we had a friendly chit-chat about tomatoes, kidney stones, the trail we were about to hike, old dogs, the bear that ate its way through the neighborhood a few nights ago, a possible dinner together in a couple of weeks before they head back east. Neighbors talking. Pleasant (despite the fact that she clung to that rock the whole time like she might need to bash a bear or something). Then we went on our way up the mountain and she went back to her house. On the way down we stayed off her property because that is the neighborly thing to do and found a different route home. A very good day. A wonderful day in the neighborhood as Mr. Rogers used to say.

The next day an email arrived from the neighbor:

Hi again.  I hope this message is not received as "unfriendly" - it is not our intent!

We am (sic) requesting that you not hike across our property or open the gate at the rear of our property to gain access to our private driveway when you are hiking in the areas around our property. The honest truth is that we just don't want our property - or our driveway - to become part of anyone's hiking trail again.  It has taken us the better part of 2 decades to stop the many people who used to routinely hike through our property [along with their horses, loose dogs, friends, family, house guests, etc.] as well as up and down our private driveway at all hours of the day and evening. 

Unfortunately, we have learned from experience that when one person begins trespassing, then more and more neighbors and hikers [many of whom are not neighbors] think they can do the same thing and the trespassing problems begin all over again for us. Once people start trespassing, they end up hiking all through our property and it becomes simply too invasive of our privacy, and creates security issues - which become truly troublesome for us as part time residents.

We can show you another access point ....

We understand the tensions these issues can provoke among neighbors - so, please feel free to call me or email me if you want to discuss this further.

Thanks for your understanding about our request.

OK - on to something more fun. I will send the pictures ... of the bear shortly.

And, let me know if you do want some of the bounty from our tomato crop when it comes in!

Thanks!

I love the way she chattily chirped “Hi again” then put quotation marks around the word “unfriendly” to show us she didn’t mean it that way. But she did mean it that way. She is unfriendly, un-neighborly, unwilling to simply ask us politely to find a different way to the start of the trail. But she was perfectly willing to make excuses (“The honest truth is...”) and feel compelled to give us the history of their decades long fight for privacy (the honest truth is I don’t give a shit about that and why didn’t they just build a fence after the first decade or so) and have the audacity to imply that if she let us get away with it even one time, there is no telling what sort of riff-raff might follow on our trail (we are her un-riff-raffy neighbors for fuck’s sake).

First there is the offer, "We can show you another access point ...." Then there is the use of "tensions," "issues," "provoke" and "neighbors" along with the invitation to "please feel free to call me or email me" to talk about it. Oh, please. We don't need for you to show us anything and there will be no further discussion. This is it.

And finally the cheery, fatuous fakery of the “on to something more fun” part? She can keep the picture of the bear (she's scarier than the bear anyway) and stuff her tomato bounty with whatever or wherever.

My wife (always more kind and courteous than I am, but someone who likes honest talk rather than weaselly passive-aggressive emails) wrote back to say: Thanks for letting us know.... You should have said something yesterday. We will find another route to hike because being a good neighbor is important. To which our un-neighborly neighbor responded thanking us for understanding because she really feels we might become friends.

Friends? We won’t become friends because what we understand is that she is the sort of person we don’t want to know, the sort who gives Santa Fe a bad name and who cannot understand the pompous arrogance of sending an offensive message like this via email and not expecting it to be seen as unfriendly and tension-making. She is the sort of obliviously silly and condescending person we would never befriend.

Despite its long history as a place where cultures collide, Santa Fe attracts all sorts of people who never quite fit in someplace else. In fact, it is a place where those people can get together, tolerate each other’s quibbles and quirks and call it home. Always has been. People give each other lots of leeway here to dress, eat, sleep, pray, philosophize, fleece, fake and marry however they please, as long as they respect other people’s ability to do the same.

It's not always easy because some are more tolerable than others, but there is one particular type that is intolerable.

It is the person from somewhere else – Maryland, Virginia, perhaps, somewhere just outside D.C., a place like that – skinny, white, in this case female (but not always), lives around here part time, does a little volunteer work somewhere safe for people like her and believes that entitles her to be a local, lives in a nice little place surrounded by trees up a dirt road off Old Santa Fe Trail, is afraid of things that go bump in the night (or day), fearful of strangers to the point of paranoia, yappy as a Pomeranian, untrustworthy as a pit bull and as self-righteously selfish as Ayn Rand.

What a disappointment to discover that one of those people is my "neighbor." But she is. The good thing is she will be leaving soon for the tidy confines of wherever she confines herself back east when she is not here. Maybe she won’t come back. She's clearly not from around here.

p.s. Being unfriendly is my intent.