Barbara Waters, the fourth and final wife of Frank Waters, the godfather of
Southwestern literature, passed away January 11th of this year. She
was a fine writer and scholar in her own right, and as head of the Frank Waters
Foundation, a vital force in the preservation of her husband’s literary and
cultural legacy.
The memorial for Barbara Waters was held at the Millicent
Rogers Museum in Taos and at the Frank Waters’ home in Arroyo Seco on June 27th.
What follows is a short biography of Barbara Waters abridged from the Frank
Waters Foundation website. (To read the entire biography, go to
www.frankwaters.org/new_page_3.htm). After the bio, I have added the tribute to
Barbara Waters I presented at the memorial – one of many made by her numerous
friends.
Barbara
Waters: Biography
Barbara Waters was born on
September 26, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois, and grew up in La Grange and Oswego,
suburbs of Chicago. While raising her two sons –Terence and William Hayes – she
attended Northwestern University and earned a bachelor’s degree in
secondary education with an English major.
In 1968 she divorced her first
husband and came to Taos, New Mexico, where she met Frank Waters in 1970.That
same year she began dividing her time between Taos and Tucson, where she
taught English at Canyon del Oro High School until 1985.
Barbara and Frank were
married in 1979, the same year that she earned a master’s degree in
journalism at the University of Arizona. In 1988 she earned another master’s
degree in Counseling and Guidance and began therapy practices in Tucson and
Taos. She organized the Frank Waters Foundation in 1993, two years before
her husband’s death in 1995.
Barbara discontinued her
psychotherapy practices in 1995 to write her memoir Celebrating the Coyote. Her work has appeared in Western American Literature, Chicago Tribune,
Arizona Daily Star, and the Salt
Journal. She also has essays in Frank Waters: Man and
Mystic and in The Spirit That Wants Me and wrote a foreword for The
Woman at Otowi Crossing,
Frank Waters’ novel about the making of the atomic bomb. In addition to her
writings, Barbara Waters was the president of the Frank Waters
Foundation, a consultant for the Southern Arizona Friends of C.G. Jung, and a member
of the Society of the Muse of the Southwest.
She died January 11, 2015.
 |
| Mountains near Arroyo Seco |
Barbara
Waters Tribute
It is an incredible honor to be asked to speak
here at the memorial for Barbara Waters.
When I interviewed Frank Waters for Southwest Profile in June of 1989, there
was a festival taking place in Taos, and the traffic crawled through town. I
was coming up from Santa Fe, and as the minutes ticked by and the cars inched
forward, it became clear that I was going to be quite late. So, a few blocks
past the plaza, I pulled over and called Waters from a phone booth. (This was
in the Dark Ages before cell phones.) When he answered the phone, he sounded
very disappointed, which prompted me to apologize profusely for my lateness. He
explained that my lateness wasn’t a problem; instead, he was concerned because
Barbara was late returning from Tucson, and the phone rang, he had thought she
was calling.
I finally arrived in Arroyo Seco almost an hour
late, and we started the interview, which took a couple more hours. At the end,
Waters was still clearly very concerned about Barbara, who still hadn’t
arrived, and the last thing he said to me, after complaining about the lack of
a bypass around Taos, was, “She should be here soon. I think I’ll throw
together a little supper for her. I bet she’ll be hungry.”
At the time, I was impressed by Waters’ love and
concern for his wife, and I thought she must be a very special person.
Twelve years later, when I met Barbara at the
Robinson Jeffers conference at the Mabel Dodge Luhan house, I discovered that
Barbara was indeed a great soul. Over the next decade, I visited her repeatedly
while researching Frank Waters’ life, including an extended stay at their
Arroyo Seco home, and I always found Barbara to be warm, compassionate,
intelligent, most helpful, brave in adversity, and sharply honest.
The last time I saw her, my wife Brenda and I
visited her in Arroyo Seco, and she was gracious as always, sitting in her
armchair, a stack of books and journals on the coffee table in front of her;
surrounded by the artwork of Fechin, Lady Brett, and Hopi artisans; the cool
aspen-filtered light coming in through the east-facing windows.
I will miss those visits, as we will all deeply
miss her presence in this world.
I would like to finish with a passage from the
novel The Man Who Killed the Deer. Here,
Frank Waters describes the Day of the Dead at Taos Pueblo:
The women kneeled down, lighted more candles, and from under
their shawls took out wafer bread, loaves of long-bread, cornmeal baked in
cornhusks, pans of panocha, even a cheap store sponge-cake to place on the
sunken graves.
It was el Dia de los Muertos, and they had come with
offerings for the dead.
They who lie here were
as alive as we are who have not forgotten. We too will lie here and will not be
forgotten. Are we all alive, or all dead, in this unceasing file from one
mystery to another, through this watery blue veil of November sky? Let no man
say. Let him say only: I am the seed of the husk that lies here, my Corn
Mother; and I am the seed of those husks which will follow after me; and this
meal I now place here is the bond between us all; and may our Earth Mother, our
Corn Mother, attest I have not forgotten.
Recently I was hiking in one of the many canyons
that grace the Uncompahgre Plateau and give it its distinctive and dynamic
landscape. The trail, an old mining road from over half a century ago, begins
on a sandstone slope that eases down to the canyon rim. Myla, hunting for
lizards, lead me off the trail and towards one of the high cliffs that form a
tight bend in the canyon. As I walked past the scattered juniper trees towards
the rim, I heard a sound that at first I thought was the wind blowing through
the canyon’s cottonwood trees. But when I reached the rim with Myla, I realized
with surprise and joy that the stream at the canyon’s base was not only
running, but running strong. This is a stream that is almost always dry or
nearly dry, especially in the summer, so this was an exciting moment.
