Letter from Elsewhere

The hand-lettered sign says “coming later”. It used to say “coming soon”, but years ago “later” was stuck on top. Whatever it is may never come, but that’s fine. Those of us who love Taos can appreciate the wait. And if it never comes, that’s fine too. Something will.

Across the road are two large, painted-wood rabbits, one of them holding up its fingers in a peace sign. The junction nearby is known as the blinking light, though the light hasn’t blinked for the 23 years I’ve lived here. It’s a perfectly functional traffic light, with left-turn arrows and everything, but we like to make-believe it’s a little wonky. It’s Taos.

That’s the explanation for the sign, the rabbits, the light that never lost its name: it’s Taos. The outlandish is normal. We’re rebellious and artisanal and low-tech and defiantly local, for good and for bad. Neighbours take each other in when the gas is cut off in minus-20 temperatures: it’s Taos! The roadworks on the main drag through town have been going for three years: it’s Taos. The ex-mayor and the ex-police chief, who’s also a whitewater rafting guide, run the medical marijuana grow operation: hey – it’s Taos.

It doesn’t really feel like America here, though it clearly is. Taos is a sort of lacuna in the greater nation, a long way from anywhere in a vast and empty high desert landscape, bulwarked by the Blood of Christ Mountains to the east and the 800-foot-deep Rio Grande Gorge to the west, and beyond that a 100-mile horizon of extinct volcanoes. The Spanish who settled the Taos valley 500 years ago included crypto-Jews, seeking safety at the farthest edge of New Spain. I think of it as the edge of America, though it’s over a thousand miles from any coast. 

Mainstream America is a foreign country; they’d like to think we’re the foreign ones, but the Spanish names belong to families that have been here since before the English landed at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Taos Pueblo has been here even longer – roughly a thousand years, though nobody knows for sure. A spectacular multi-level adobe structure that may be the world’s oldest apartment building, it’s a UN World Heritage Site and the oldest continuously inhabited building in the US. The Pueblos are the only Native Americans who were never chased off their land; Taos is one of the largest and most traditional of the 20 Pueblo tribes.

These are the “three cultures” of Taos: the Pueblo, the Hispanics and the latecomer Anglos. You hear Tiwa, Spanish and English in the post office. Other languages, too. Despite the fact we’re so remote this is an amazingly cosmopolitan town: people from Finland and Palestine, from Togo and South Africa, from Laos and India and Sri Lanka live here. Outlaws hide out on the mesa west of the gorge, where the cops don’t dare go. It’s Taos.

Dennis Hopper made Easy Rider here and hippies built communes here. DH Lawrence lived and died here. Georgia O’Keeffe discovered the desert here. The gigantic metal sculptures that spin around and spit fire at Burning Man are made here. The night skies are so clear that if you can’t see the Milky Way it’s probably because the moon is too bright. And I irrigate my field according to the acequia system, unchanged for 500 years. I go to the ditch meeting, held at sunset under a tree down the road every six days, and the mayordomo apportions the water. You could call it un-American. It’s Taos.

Like the sign and the blinking light imply, time seems to run differently here. Past and future hover companionably over the present. Christmas Eve at Taos Pueblo has a Mad Max vibe: gigantic bonfires, nineteenth-century rifles, no electricity and a language only a thousand people can understand. it could be 2000 years ago, or 2000 years into the future.

They say the mountain either accepts you or rejects you. It’s true: Taos Mountain is a powerful presence, saddle-topped and often snow-capped. Sometimes people arrive and have to leave within the hour – usually to comfortable, Disneyfied Santa Fe, 70 miles away – before nightfall. The mountain makes them so edgy they can’t stand it. Others move here and are weeded out within eighteen months, when they’ve had enough of the dirt roads, the mud and dust, the haphazardness of it all.

They don’t want to know their waitperson socially or see the plumber on the ski slope. They don’t find beauty in uneven fences made of rough-barked sticks or appreciate that the ugly four-lane strip on the south side of town keeps the Santa Fe riff-raff out. People who want things to be neat and tidy and run as they think they’re supposed to, who want money to matter more than it should, will move on, snarling righteously, contemptuously, disgustedly: Taos!

But if you find serenity in the lackadaisical, the mutable, the cyclical, the scruffy, you’ll acquire that equable “It’s Taos…” and know the mountain has accepted you. It might even show you treasures. One day I saw a perfect thunderbird overlaying the dark trees of its southern slope: the shadow of clouds. 

It used to be that the only Mercedes in town were from the 1960s. There were no Porsches and very few Audis. The classic Taos vehicle was a hand-painted 1970s pickup, a crappy old sedan with plastic flowers glued all over it, or a patchwork of plastic sheeting and bumper stickers and duct tape. But what seems like half of Austin and Los Angeles bought property here during the pandemic. Their eighteen-month cut-off is coming up, so the weeding out will begin. It’s Taos.

Meanwhile, we’re weeding up. On 1 April, recreational marijuana became legal in the state of New Mexico. For years we’ve watched Texans driving through on their way to Colorado to get stoned. Now they can do it closer to home. The ex-mayor and ex-police chief are already in business, as I mentioned, and other growers only have to improve the packaging and rearrange the paperwork.

Am I concerned this will turn Taos into Weed Central? Not a bit. I’ve always been baffled by the criminalisation of a substance whose primary effects are relaxation, the munchies, and overuse of the word “dude”. Amusingly, when the state legislature legalised cannabis, they also legalised delivery of cannabis and alcohol, with the proviso that “delivery alcohol” has to be accompanied by a food order. Evidently they saw no need to make it a requirement for delivery cannabis, as you’d have to be a moron to take an order for weed and not say, “Would you like pretzels with that?”

We don’t have industry here, and we don’t want it. We don’t have reliable digital communications; I don’t even get cell service at my house. The pandemic drove a stake through the heart of our economy: tourism income crashing, rents skyrocketing. Now Taos can do what it does best: artisanal, rebellious, organic, back to the land, outside the mainstream. 

Coming later: cannabis cash to finish the road works. Local people buying the fancy houses. Hand-painted and bud-decorated Audi and Porsche weed-mobiles driving past the funky rabbits and fire-spitting metal art and tumbledown coyote fences. Hey – it’s Taos.

Allegra Huston is the author of “Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and the novel “A Stolen Summer”. She’s also co-director of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops