John Nichols' Magical Thinking On the High Road to Taos
‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ and ‘Nirvana Blues’ brought magical realism to the literature of the American West, celebrating the collision of the rational and mystical.
photo: Ernie Bulow
By Paul VanDevelder
On the ‘High Road to Taos’ from Santa Fe, New Mexico, sick and maimed citizens from pueblos throughout the Sangre de Cristo mountains have for centuries traveled by foot to the mission at Chimayo to get healed and unbroken by Catholic sacerdotes with mystical powers. The road is so thronged with pilgrims during Semana Santa (Holy Week) that only the homicidal drive it on four wheels. Accounts of miracles witnessed by the faithful at Chimayo would fill a shelf of books in the Vatican library the way they animate countless pages of John Nichols’ twenty-three books, a carved in granite literary legacy that will weather the ravages of time as a monument to mystical adventures in the American Southwest, and to the mountain and mesa culture of Northern New Mexico.
Nichols, born in California and raised on Long Island and in New England, lived, breathed and channeled his adopted culture into a portable typewriter for most of his adult life - in a ramshackle abode with collapsing ceilings and broken plumbing - in his beloved Taos. He wore asceticism like a Franciscan monk, and among the locals he was better known for giving away money than for writing books. Or telling their stories. On one of the countless evenings we spent sitting around piles of books , tea cups and assorted papers and letters on his kitchen table - hurling hysterical insults at one another across forty-seven years of books, hijinks, lovers, wives and fishing stories - he explained his relationship to poverty in a declarative sentence: “It’s what I have instead of religion.”
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What started the journey into magical thinking for Carse was an encounter with a student on Washington Square whose class binders were labeled: Shit #1, Shit #2, and Shit #3.
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Many of the mystical accounts he captured in his books would slip nicely into the pages of Breakfast at the Victory Café - a luminous meditation by NYU’s professor emeritus, James Carse, a lifelong rationalist who, like Joan Didion, one fine day tip-toed out of the known world on a pilgrimage into the realm of ‘magical thinking.’ Carse’s little book, like Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Nichols’ Nirvana Blues, among others, emanate a faint glow from the fourth dimension adventures they found there.
What started the journey ‘to the other side’ for Didion was the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, over a spaghetti dinner. The rational world that illuminated her culture-defining work for four plus decades suddenly lay at her feet in a million pieces. What started the journey for Carse was an encounter with a student on Washington Square whose class binders were labeled: Shit #1, Shit #2, and Shit #3. What launched the journey for Nichols was a trip to the library in New York City where he identified Taos County, New Mexico, in 1968, as one of the three poorest counties in the United States. He loaded up a first-generation VW bus with books and his new wife, Ruby, and drove there with movie option money from his first book, The Sterile Cookoo, burning a hole in his pocket. For fifty-five years he hiked the mountains and mesas, fished the rivers, wrote books, raised his kids and danced with the dark-eyed women, seldom leaving the county except for brief skirmishes with Hollywood directors Costa Garvas (Missing, 1982) and Robert Redford (The Milagro Beanfield War, 1988).
In the mystical realm, it turns out that Didion’s spaghetti dinner and Carse’s toast points at the Victory Cafe have much in common with beanfield wars on the mesa. Nobody made the journey across that dizzying gap of human intrigues with more humor and literary wonder than Nichols, who departed for exalted residency in the mystical realm this past Monday, November 28, 2023; but not before leaving a scribbled note and a slice of peach pie for us on the kitchen counter; “You guys, enjoy! I couldn’t finish it.” Pure Nichols.
On a recent drive home from Santa Fe to Taos on the ‘high road’, a sign flashed by my window in a twilight blur of bright green and yellow. This skinny stretch of tortured pavement along knife-edge ridges was not engineered for casual gawking. The sign jerked my head around for a second glance but I was too late to catch it.
“You see that?”
“I did,” said my unflappable partner, refreshing her lipstick.
“Was that what I think it was?”
“Bigfoot Crossing. Seems we’ve entered magical thinking country.”
“Wanna go back and get a picture?”
“We’re good. It’s the locals way of telling the all-hat-no-cows crowd they’re not in Dallas anymore.”
My partner is fluent in French, Spanish and cultural divides. She went to medical school in Dallas before relocating to Santa Fe, and when John pressed her to buy New Mexico license plates for her car she noticed the locals started waving to her with all five fingers. Just ahead in the twilight lay the village of Truchas, best known as the Hispano/Latino village where the Sundance Kid filmed The Milagro Beanfield War, adapted from John’s wild romp of a door-stop novel – vivid from page one with the region’s animism and distain for the rational. The novel is also home to one of my all-time favorite characters, the Brazo Onofre (Onofre’s Arm), the severed appendage of a local no-good that went missing at the medical clinic after an ill-advised amputation and was resurrected in legend as a phantom cipher responsible for all manner of inexplicable misdeeds in the fabled town of Milagro, aka Truchas. If a box of ammo goes missing from the till at the local adult slash grocery store, the mysterious theft is ascribed to the Brazo Onofre and that’s the end of it. On the high road to Taos, Brazo Onofre abides.
Like our neighbors scattered throughout the mountains and mesas of northern New Mexico, Taos locals don’t quibble over mysterious ephemera lodged in the fourth dimension. John was drawn to that dimension like a buzzard to a carcass. Magical thinking, as he explained to me soon after we moved here, is the currency of exchange that explains the mostly-invisible phenomena that constitute the nouns and verbs of everyday life in Northern New Mexico - as much today as it has for many centuries. The high road connects point A to point B on a GPS - or Taos to Santa Fe on a Rand McNally map - but that connection camouflages an ancient world populated by invisible puppeteers who sit at the intersection of the mystical and the rational. Thus the state’s slogan: The Land of Enchantment, a nod to landscape as a living soundstage for mystical healing, UFO’s, aliens, the Brazo Onofre and Bigfoot. These were the essential truths of the place and constituted for Nichols a sacred symbiosis; he gave that landscape and its’ people a voice, and that landscape kindled in him a cauldron of wonder.
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It’s rumored that local residents have heard of daylight savings time, but there’s no evidence of it in clocks on the main plaza or the watches on people’s wrists. Time, here, is only a thing to remind us that mortality is a euphemism for irrelevance.
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“White people amuse us,” says my friend Pico, whose clan of Pueblo Indians migrated to the mesa from Chaco Canyon twelve hundred years ago. Six centuries after they arrived, Pico’s ancestors traded corn and beans for shiny trinkets with Coronado’s men who were searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. “The Christians want us to believe this Jesus dude was crucified and came back to life and a month later his disciples watched him rise to heaven to be with God. We’re down with that, that’s cool, but when I tell them my grandfather Clarence shape-shifts into a golden eagle, they look at me like I’m from Mars.” Nichols was enchanted by that collision of world views and he harnessed the energy of those collisions to the plots of his novels. On the mesa, at 7,500 feet of elevation, sparks light up the night sky when the rational world arcs across tales of magical thinking.
As soon as we moved to Taos, three local folks – a banker, a plumber, and a gentleman running for mayor - volunteered accounts of close encounters with Bigfoot. We even got text messages from the television station with news flashes from the Taos Sheriff’s Office alerting campers to Bigfoot sightings in county campgrounds. We met the wannabe mayor while waiting with John for take-out mole enchiladas at a local dive that was serving refried beans and tortillas fifty years before Kit Carson moved here. Electioneering pleasantries kicked open the door to the magical.
“Do you folks like to camp or hike?”
“Both,” offered my partner. “That’s what sold us on the place, and those signs about UFO’s when you come into town.”
“I’ve seen a couple of UFO’s, but no aliens, yet.,” he said. “My wife and I were camping up on the Cimarron last week and saw a Bigfoot jumping from rock to rock across the river. I’ve lived here my whole life, I’ve only seen him twice.”
“Speaking of Bigfoot,” I asked, “are there any election-deniers in Taos? We’re not oriented to politics on the mesa.”
“Election-deniers?” He puzzled over that. “Not that I know of. We all know Donald Trump beat Joe Biden.”
Our new home sits on the edge of the historic district not far from John’s little abode. We commonly refer to Taos as “a funky little mountain town not far from the United States.” It’s rumored that local residents have heard of daylight savings time, but there’s no evidence of it in clocks on the main plaza or the watches on people’s wrists. Time, here, is only a thing to remind us that mortality is a euphemism for irrelevance. Few people have have mortgage payments in Taos because long-time locals live in adobes built by their great-great-great-great-great grandparents, who passed them along, and nobody pays property taxes because those same great-great grandparents are buried out behind the corn patch, and thus, all the homes that surround ours are legally classified as cemeteries and indemnified from taxes. If zoning laws exist here, nobody has broken the news to the town council. Spanish haciendas border lots with single-wide trailers with outdoor refrigerators. Our neighbors drive pickup trucks with ‘Bigfoot Saw Me’ bumper stickers while rez dogs lope up and down alleyways behind world class art galleries as tri-lingual free range roosters crow twenty-four seven in Tiwa, English and Spanish. For Nichols, in 1968, and for us, fifty years later, Taos was love at first sight.
Our introduction to magical thinking peaked with a story told to us by a school teacher we met one evening in John’s kitchen. It seems she had a precocious young man named Joey Little Weasel in her second-grade class who was constantly disrupting her lessons with magical tales.
“This kid is super cute and wicked smart,” she said, “but I couldn’t have it in the classroom. I told him to come back on Monday with a new attitude or he was going straight to the principal’s office.”
On Monday morning she asked the class if anybody did anything special over the weekend. Little Weasel’s arm shot up. “I thought, okay, I’ll give him a chance. ‘Tell us your story, Joey.’”
“On Saturday my dad and I went fishing at Blue Lake,” he began. “We didn’t get a single bite until all of a sudden my dad’s reel starts screaming, the rod bent over in half and he fought that fish for two hours, it was so big it took both of us to drag it into the boat.”
Teacher jerked Little Weasel out of his chair and marched him out the door to the principal’s office. After a private word, the principal invited Little Weasel to take a seat in his office where he slumped, awaiting punishment. The principal pressed his fingertips together and began, “Miss Lopez tells me you and your dad caught a big fish this weekend.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What a coincidence. My boys and I fished at Blue Lake this weekend, too. We were roasting marsh-mellows and watchin’ the stars come out when we heard a loud noise in the bushes, I mean loud, and all of a sudden out of the dark comes Bigfoot! We screamed and then it happened, a miracle! A tiny little dog leaped out of the bushes and ran right up Bigfoot’s back and bit him in the neck and the beast let out a roar and ran off into the night, just like that, that little dog saved us!”
Little Weasel jumped out of his chair and stabbed the air with a triumphant finger. “I’ll have you know you’re lookin’ at the proud owner of that little dog, and that’s the third Bigfoot he’s run off this summer.”
John and Nora and I wiped tears of laughter off our cheeks for half an hour. I was still laughing the following morning when I told the story to Pico. His smile formed with a feather light inscrutable Graham Greene native way of knowing things that mark the intersection of the rational world and magical thinking.
“That Joey Little Weasel’s goin’ places,” said Pico. “When you depend on rationalism to bring order to your world, you’re gonna run out of road sooner or later, and when your tires hit dirt and gravel it’s gonna to be tree trunks and bad news all the way to the bottom.”
Nobody captured that alive-and-well paradox with more literary exuberance than John Nichols. He made perfect sense of the ineffable and made it stick. Well done, compadre. Twenty-three books, three major feature films. Not a bad run. I know you hated computers the way you hated phones. But no apologies, dude, I’ll forever keep your laughter and magical thinking archived on my voice mail.
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