Nichols and Davis Team Up for Literary/Photography Fest

At 5 pm on Saturday, Oct. 18, author John Nichols and photographer Bill Davis will discuss the genesis and publication of the 1979 memoir, If Mountains Die, one of John’s favored nonfiction works happily illustrated by Bill’s images. Audience members will be treated to an old-fashioned slide show in the Mural Room of the Historic County Courthouse on Taos Plaza.

John’s prose captures the texture of the country and the pleasure he felt whether on a wood run or while angling for trout. “But the serenity of fishing in ice and snow is so attractive I have become an inveterate bad-weather angler. No experience is better than pulling a rainbow trout from gloomy, lead-green water during a thick snowfall on a windless day, and laying that silver-and-pink body on clean white powder in the shadow of a thick spruce tree.”

After a wood run, he says, “In bed on crinkly clean white sheets, the window open, we lay quiet, listening to the valley, smelling apples and pears rotting in our little orchard, and getting faint whiffs also of the snow gathering in the mountains.

“I have never loved any moment any better.”

John discusses Taos history and the struggles between the bourgeois businessmen, hippies, and Chicanos. The hockey player turns sociologist and also recounts the facts and figures of poverty as well as reciting the history of violence during the brutal seventies.

One of my favorite scenes concerns Nichols’ dive into local politics and the battle of the Tres Rios Association against the San-Juan Chama forces and the attempt to create the Indian Camp Dam out on the Rio Grande del Rancho in the Pot Creek area. Ultimately, in addition to his fervent love of Taos, John dedicates the book to Andres Martinez, the mayordomo of Tres Rios and leader of the battle against the dam and conservancy district.

Davis’s 65 photographs preserve a place, a place whose time has almost passed but lives on in If Mountains Die. You can savor the prose and the photos like a fall afternoon or winter morning when the breeze is just right and the sun at midday warms you up. It’s my favorite book about Taos.

Bonus: Last week The Taos News featured a ghost and tunnel story about “Doña Luz Lane” and “Red Cat Melissiana, a folk art and antique store housed in an old adobe.” The story aimed at creating rumors about Guadalupe and Taos Plaza.

Now, some of us know that “old adobe” as the once and famous House of Taos, a pizza parlor specializing in the Chicago thin crust, patted, pampered, and prepared under the watchful eye of Ron Kalom and delivered to your table by Carol Kalom herself. Ron saved his shekels and bought the complex from retired Town Councilor Eugene Sanchez’s Uncle Juan, a legendary lawyer in Taos.

While we dined, who should emerge occasionally from his 12-year stint in the darkroom basement of the pizza parlor but photographer Bill Davis. He says he climbed around the dirt piles, fixing valves and locating leaks but never saw a tunnel. You can ask Bill himself on Saturday night. Nichols was a regular, too.

And I was a regular at the Hotel La Fonda and never saw gopher nor brick pile turned tunnel. There is an old hand-dug well under the Historic Taos County Courthouse, however, and several bodies buried there. You can see the skeletons shine in the moonlight. So Taos County staff nailed the trapdoor shut lest folks get the wrong idea about haunted public buildings.