The Valley of the Pinons

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Valley of the Pinons

Taos, New Mexico is so cool that it doesn’t need a Starbuck’s.  More than that, Taos coffee is blessed with pinon, making it the best in the world.

Although Taos is an international vacation destination, especially in ski season, it remains a small town (only some 5,000 residents), with farms inside the city limits.  One can dine in the elegant La Fonda (lafondataos.com), Doc Martin’s in the equally historic Taos Inn (taosinn.com/restaurant), or the more recent but equally famous and excellent Michael’s Kitchen (michaelskitchen.com), and ponder that the provider of one’s morning glass of milk might be contentedly munching grass in a small pasture only a few blocks away.

Taos is centered on its plaza, as it has been for hundreds of years, and the very walkable area features numerous shops, galleries, museums, coffee shops, and restaurants.  People still park on the plaza, and although you might have to circle a time or two you’ll probably find a place to rest your Texas plates.  You needn’t go early, though, for any shopkeeper in Taos who opens before ten is considered something of an eccentric.

The plaza itself offers benches, statues, a bandstand, trees, and bits of green for picnicking, and on weekends and holidays musical groups queue up for performances: a mariachi band might be followed by a nasal hillbilly claven, and that by a dance troupe or gospel singers.  Taos is truly multi-cultural, and in a charmingly unselfconscious way.

The multi-cultural thing hasn’t always worked, though, and First Nations, Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans took turns slaughtering each other through the centuries.  Things are pretty quiet now, but last week the Taos County Commissioners fired the county manager.  He should consider himself fortunate; many Taos governments in the past were modified through murders, executions, revolutions, and conquest.

In 1861 many of the Anglo residents of Taos were pro-Confederate, and the First Nations and the folks of Spanish heritage, roughly treated by the Americans, were open to suggestion.  Kit Carson and several other patriots, in a come-and-take-it act worthy of Gonzales, Texas, nailed the American flag to the pole in the plaza in Taos, and guarded it day and night.  As the war progressed, the Taosenos, as part of the New Mexico Volunteers, were essential in the victory at Glorieta Pass.  Because of the loyalty of Taos, their Plaza is one of only seven sites where by law the flag is displayed for 24 hours.

Hippies migrated to Taos a generation ago, and in their senescence they mumble around in their clattering Volkswagens and bad wigs.  Their influence continues in old-fashioned head shops, dime-store mysticism, and dusty store-front healing centers.  The crystals have been replaced by magic rocks, and Moby Dickens (mobydickens.com), the best-known local book shop, features Tarot card readings on Saturdays.  Little-old-lady superstition does not logically gee-haw with literacy, but Taos is tolerantly loopy about that sort of thing.

English and American artists found Taos a century ago, liked the light and the pinon, and made it home.  The Euro-Taos style of painting tends toward impressionism on the cusp of expressionism, with much use of orange, yellow, blue, and green.  The merciless brushes of the less-talented can deteriorate these colors into cliché’, but there is a great deal of good work accomplished in Taos.  The earthernware is of course influenced by the various First Nations groups, who still dominate this art, and also the jewelry.  There is also the usual pretentious clutter; someone will carve a misshapen face onto a stick, glue a feather or some weeds to it, and sell it in the streets as, oh, nature-rain-dancing-woman-spiritual something-or-other.

Down the road a few miles is the community of Ranchos de Taos and its much Ansel Adams-ed and Georgia O’Keefe’d church, St. Francis of Assisi / San Francisco de Assiz.  Photographs and paintings portray the church as standing in isolation, but in fact it has always stood within its own plaza and is now fronted with utility wires, road signs, and advertising.  On a Wednesday morning a nice lady set up her easel and her paints, surely by accident, on the spot where an American lieutenant was shot dead during the 1848 revolt.  And yet, though artists and revolutions and centuries pass, Mass is still offered daily at the parish church.

Nothing about Taos is Disneyfied; the area is layered in history and cultures and repeated changes of national flags, and yet it continues as a rural community which mostly defines itself without lapsing into preciousness and insularity.  Whatever happens in Taos, there will still be breakfast at Michael’s Kitchen, and the sweet scent of pinon will still drift over the plaza.

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