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Taos, New Mexico

story and photos by Amy Maestas

Taos’ colorful culture — its bohemian artists, goddess worshippers, cloying New Agers, freethinking farmers — always sets up for success anything remotely alternative. In the 1960s, when much of the country dressed and act much looser than any time before, Taos was one of only a few laissez-faire towns in the Intermountain West. At the time, Taos’ communal idealism made way for 27 separate communes thriving at once.
Much of the attitude spills over into today, though the ideals are less about shared spaces and more green. It’s a breeding ground for environmentalists and conservationists, many of whom help keep the town on the map of unconventional places. Its public radio station, K-TAOS, is completely powered by the sun. It’s a world-famous solar powered radio station, reaching out in a swath from Southern Colorado to Espanola. It makes sense that the station — the multitude of Taos private residences adorned with photovoltaic panels — has been relying on the sun since 1991 for its energy. After all, Taos earliest civilized population, the ancestral Puebloans, were the brainiacs and designed their cliff houses to maximize solar energy.
Today, with rapidly depleting fossil fuel sources on everyone’s minds, Taoseños alternative lifestyles stand as novel examples. Most notably is the odd lean-to looking structures spread across a dirty nearly untenanted expanse just a few short miles for town limits. Though conceptualized nearly 30 years ago, in the past decade these earthships have started popping up — or, more often, sideways — as their creator and owners have realized the benefits. And also after many have survived the protracted scraps with the local government’s building standards.
In the mid-1970s, Michael Reynolds was watching a national newscast, which highlighted the growing number of used tires in landfills. Disgusted at such waste, Reynolds studied the benefits of the rubber’s technology. He soon realized how insulating tires are and their painfully slow degradation. Eventually, Reynolds invented the earthship model, where houses are built with earth-rammed tires eventually filled in with aluminum cans and glass bottles. They are powered by the sun and designed to use every drop of water that enters and exits them. The amazingly temperate houses are entirely self-sustaining, allowing most owners to live off the grid.
Earthships shot to a higher level of visibility when Hollywood actor Dennis Weaver built his own in Ridgway, Colorado. Today, Taos’ earthship community is growing, acting as testimonials to those who go to and leave the small resort town. Reynolds first and own house is the company’s visitor center. Not far are model earthships that can be rented by tourists.userfiles/images//TAOSearthship1.jpg

I didn't give the history and impact of art in dusty old Taos, New Mexico, enough due until I was in a shop's dressing room, trying on a new shirt that was one more reason to procrastinate working.
Of course, I'd known like everyone else does that it is an art community, where serious collectors and casual strollers flock for good doses of talent and high-desert high-culture. Galleries and ateliers are prolific in this town of 4,500. The caliber of art slides the spectrum, from mostly unknown local weavers to worldwide famous painters. But inside the small dressing room at trendy clothiers Sapo de Taos, a barely visible adobe wall out of place and in the way, seemed too notable to brush off "Taos as art town" as a worn clich�.
The makeshift dressing room was wedged between old pillars. Above the corrugated tin "wall" an otherwise industrial-looking ventilation duct, jutting from the middle of an old fresco. The slightly washed-out mini-mural is of a stately, mustached gentleman driving a topless Model T, escorting a period-dressed woman. The side door reads "Taxi". Above the car are three bright-red words in common font: "Safety. Economy. Comfort."
Turns out, the historic wall was part of the now-gone Taos Stage and Tour building - smack dab in the middle of the Taos Plaza. It wasn't so much the mural-as-advertisement that intrigued me. Rather, it was that the timeless painting tucked away inside a contemporary dressing room withstood the town's storied history and was meaningful enough to someone, somewhere, not to scrape the cracked adobe wall - or even take a sledgehammer to it - leaving it in place, as if to make a silent statement about how easily the past blends with the present.

Choose your own Taos
Part of Taos' allure in the 21st Century is how it seems to epitomize the adage of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." While other similar ski towns in the West have been enduring population booms and facelifts at highway speed, Taos has somehow managed to remain on the fringe of a trend. That's not to say Taos hasn't been touched by modernization or influxes of city slickers turning rural; it has. The town has gotten more press since Hollywood star Julie Roberts moved to town. But by a combination of fate and a mellow but purposeful community plan, it takes some a bit of digging here to find the most obvious changes. A Taos of five years ago looks dissonantly similar today. Of course it has grown. Of course maybe one or two of locals' favorite but secret gems has fallen victim to economy and evolution. It's just that Taos doesn't wear its modernization on its shirtsleeve.
Who knows how long this will last. Chain businesses do exist in Taos, though sparingly and, fortunately, off the main plaza and historic areas. Residents will get stirred up when an outsider wants to butt in. The recent buzz is about a new and inevitable buzz - Starbucks. The mega-giant coffeehouse is moving in. Acceptance is a weird admixture of apathy and apoplexy. It's weird only because even as Taos' growth is tempered, residents and visitors can take their pick of what type of town it is.
This languid town somehow accommodates this choose-your-own-Taos quality. If you want, it can be a village of artists. It can be a commune, a spa haven, a spiritual sanctuary or shopper's delight. It is a place where rough-and-tumble cowboys, humble farmers, and socialites live in a kind of egalitarian Vanity Fair. Between its tangibles and its Indian, Anglo and Hispanic cultures, Taos is ultimately urbane and eclectic. Much of that is attributable to its variegated past.

Petite Pueblo
Similar to other Southwestern settlements, Taos's history - its very existence - has a timeline 6,000 years old. Its earliest settlers - nomadic hunter-gatherers, hunkered down in villages at Taos Pueblo - an intricately built expanse of meticulously built homes with practical intrigue, some of which still stand today. It's a petite pueblo with a big history. The adobe walls glistening with mica caused the conquistadors to believe they had discovered one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold Not once, but twice Spanish explorers came here. When they saw the mica on the walls, they believed they had discovered one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. The first time around, Taos inhabitants drove away or killed every Spaniard in sight. The revolt was the most successful in North America, and radical enough that it took 13 years before the Spaniards dare revisit.
A quarter century later, Taos became a permanent Spanish settlement, where the population ebbs and flows during chronic attacks by the Plains Indians, the boom and bust of the trade industry and the Mexican-American war.
By the time New Mexico officially became a state in 1850, Taos was a well-established town in a valley of scrub pinion and lacy gray-green chamisa, humbly situated below the red Sangre de Cristo Mountains that glow lavender in the evening's lambent light.

Taos Society of Artists
An early colorful history - and colorful landscape - was a magnet for eclecticism. In the late 1800s, the scene was set for what lends to Taos' historical intrigue. It was then that an illustrator and painter left Denver to travel to Mexico, where they planned to spend a summer sketching. About 20 miles north of Taos, a wheel broke on their wagon, stranding them on a canyon rim. The loser of a coin toss, Ernest Blumenschein left behind his friend and headed to the nearest village. He soon found Taos. His friend, Bert Phillips, joined him.
The duo didn't press on to Mexico. Staying put, they are two of Taos' artistic icons, who set the way for many more artists to call it home. It all came about in the early 1900s - before 1920s Paris and 1960s Greenwich Village. Led by Blumenschein and Phillips, a small group of artists formed the Taos Society of Artists. It was, by most peoples' standards, the incubus for the town's adopted counterculture. They brought the muse and the muse has stayed, in whatever form the artist has needed it. It was also the start of a long list of famous people who were drawn to Taos for assorted reasons - a long enough list that the name-dropping, if not done properly, comes off as pretentious and desperate. But the list can't be ignored: Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Will Cather , Carl Jung, Martha Graham, Leopold Stokowski, Marsden Hartley, Gertrude Stein and ? well, others. Restricted by an editor's word count, the list must be truncated.
Many of them came to Taos on account of Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy but tyrannical New Yorker. Sterne moved to town, married local Tewa Indian Tony Luhan and then built a showy 22-room adobe mansion at the base of Sacred Mountain, which quickly became an avant-garde literary salon. The house is now a National Historic Landmark.
Among the loquacious Luhan's celebrated guests was D. H. Lawrence, whose imprint on Taos is oddly alluring. Over the course of three years, Lawrence lived in Taos only a total of 18 months. But he wrote much about New Mexico and its landscape, which had a stronghold on his soul, believing that the state was his "greatest experience from the outside world" he ever had. Today, Hotel La Fonda, the decidedly representative hotel on Taos Plaza, houses (out of public view) some of the Lawrence's paintings, which were confiscated by police from a London gallery. The "forbidden art" by the "rebel" Lawrence was deemed obscene and too sexually liberal for the time (1920s).

Tierra real
Other architects and painters left indelible marks on the Taos art scenes. Their vestiges make up the town's celebrated galleries and museums. But as much culture as these Europeon-trained artists contributed, they were living among the pinion and rattlesnakes, which for a rough Western town is the heart of the land.
Contents of Taos' galleries - even its historical museums - often don't represent the non-glamorous side of this town's Hispanic community and influences, especially the agriculture. Indeed, in abundance - and for cheap - are chili ristras, Talavera pots, sarapes, wooden santos and other culturally inspired goods. Shops near Taos Plaza have some of the finest textiles and wares. Fortunately, more galleries are representing Hispanic and Indian artists, who until 6-7 years ago couldn't even push their way in the froufrou places.
Drive away from the polished and well-lit shops that beckon over-dressed tourists. It's then that you see the tierra real - real land - of what makes up this town. In fact, you have to go even farther out of town to soak in the importance of the land that sets Taos' stage.
Coming from the West, our drive over the Brazos Cliffs is an exercise in moderating emotions. Going over Brazos Peak at more than 11,000 feet, the expansive vista of pine trees seemed eerily quiet. Yet these mountains do have a marked hush during the winter, when a good snow year pounds the area and turns into a white-knuckle drive. Their rugged magnificence - natural beauty is only one of the few absolutes I allow in my life - make you simultaneously frightened and calmly grounded by looming wildness.
But the absence of snow here, where the little bit on the ground is melting and carrying the ochre-red soil with it onto the fading black pavement, is a bleak scene. La Ni�a is omnipresent on the Brazos. The 75-mile stretch of this state highway is a good setup for the realities of the arid land in the Taos valley. Here, while the transplant artists and painters lived out their dramas, farmers of this land for hundreds of years have struggled with the sole necessity - agua; water.
Another famous Taose�o, writer John Nichols, contributed to this town's recognition with his triumvirate tale of water. Most popular of his books is The Milagro Beanfield War, an eye-opening and timeless story of community pride and social activism. Robert Redford made a movie based on the book, taking the story to a wider audience. Though a fictional account, Nichols relies on the Taos valley as inspiration for telling how Hispanic farmers of small-town Milagro, N.M., go up against a resort developer by backing one of their own who illegally diverts water to irrigate his bean field.
Acequias - irrigation ditches - have been the lifeblood of the area since being built in the late 1600s. Their existence has literally dictated life and death for decades of farmers who have tilled this land since the invention of land grants. The Spanish mantra sin agua, no hay vida - without water, there is no life - rings just as true and loudly now as it did then. These farmers today still tell you that the centuries-long war fought in Taos is only about water, fought less and less by valley's residents and more and more by governments and communities as far away as Phoenix. "It is a war," they say, "with yet no victor but with many losers."
No matter how you customize Taos, it never seems contrived - at least to this outsider. The art on the cracks of leaning adobe walls, whether hidden behind corrugated tin or showcased brilliantly on the side of a mercantile, remains not because Taos is just another town on the road to a great ski resort. It remains because somehow this place is mysteriously inimitable. You just have to try on a new shirt to pique your interest in blending your own type of visit there.

Amy Maestas is a contributing editor of Inside/Outside Southwest Magazine and fast becoming a Corner Town aficionado.