Hey, it's Taos

10 minutes + 10 minutes + a bit of editing = magazine article

I was asked by the UK’s Perspective magazine to contribute to their series “Letter from Elsewhere” with a piece about Taos. Both halves of this piece were already written, so all I had to do was stitch them together. We had used “Coming Later” as a Prompt of the Week, and “Hey, it’s Taos” was written to the prompt in Session 6 of Write What You Don’t Know, “A Defining Word or Catchphrase.”

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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. Neighbors 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.