Taos the Ancient and an Old Friend

South of Colorado Springs and all of its bad vibes (Air Force Academy with its hazing and right-wing religion, “Focus on the Family”, and those American Taliban, the Christian Reconstructionists) the atmosphere changes for the better. The next town is Pueblo, then Trinidad. Between these two refreshingly Hispanic names is Walsenberg, not so atmospheric, but this is where I leave the freeway and go west across La Veta Pass into the San Luis Valley. (From here on, as you see, nothing but evocative names.) The little town of San Luis isn’t much. It is part of a cluster of tiny settlements (San Pedro, San Pablo, San Francisco) that are the northernmost extent of Spanish colonial settlement north of Santa Fe ~ all of them older than anything in California. For now I have crossed the sub-continental divide that was the rough border between French Louisiana and New Spain, leaving the Mississippi watershed for the Rio Grande.

The great San Luis Valley runs for about a hundred miles north and south, lying between the San Juan mountains on the West and the Sangre de Cristo range on the east. It is said that this is the inspiration for the phrase in America the Beautiful, "...for purple mountains' majesty above the fruited plains..."The valley floor is almost 7,000 feet above sea level. Last weekend, when I was in Boulder, the temperature was twenty below in Alamosa, the valley’s main town. Taos is at the south end of the valley. And in the middle is Colorado's fourth highest mountain, Peña Blanca (Blanca Peak), which everybody just calls Blanca. She is my favorite mountain, my candidate for the American holy mountain.

Blanca

Because there is something about Blanca’s majesty that is almost sinister. Although I have seen her many times, I have never seen her peak; she is usually shrouded in a cloud. In the summer it shrinks to a kind of celebratory banner, trailing from the peak, but it is still there. She is always white, hence the name, and in the winter, her glaciers extend down to meet the snow on the valley floor. Topping 14,000 feet, she seems all alone, even though her range extends north and south on either side, Under her one-hopes-benign shadow, I turn south at Ft. Garland and a few miles later I am in "the land of enchantment" itself, New Mexico.

Questa, Lama, Arroyo Hondo ~ more evocations of distant past and personal memory. In Questa I bought for my mother a turquoise and silver bracelet, made by a part Menominee Indian, whom I had first met at New Buffalo commune in Arroyo Hondo.

Building New Buffalo Commune

New Buffalo was the location of the hot springs scene in Easy Rider, and Pepe lived there when I stopped by on my third bus trip (old school bus converted to a hippie RV). On my SECOND bus trip to Taos, we got stuck in the mud going up to the Lama Foundation, one of the famous centers of hippie/newage spiriutality. Murshid Sam Lewis is buried there (“Sufi Sam” of 60s San Francisco, the model for R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural).

Sufi Sam

And then Taos itself. I stay in an adobe motel across the street from the pricier Kachina Lodge. My place has a “Kiva fireplace”, one of those adobe semi-circular corner affairs and an outdoor hot-tub.

"Kiva" fireplace

I brave the ten-degree weather to soak in it and to contemplate the strange lights in the sky, which I am told, are called “stars”. There seem to be a great many of them at this altitude. Milky Way clearly visible. Thus soaking (with the plastic tub-covering pulled up to my chin to save warmth), I reflect ~ as is appropriate for New Year’s Eve ~ on the past. Taos’s past and my own.

On my FIRST trip here in the hippie bus, we risked death by climbing up the dirt switch-back out of Arroyo Hondo to a commune on the high plain (llano) called Morning Star.

Pueblo at Morning Star, 1971

The building was a row of adjoining adobe huts, which they called their pueblo. This was one of sixty-some communes in Taos County. We visited for the afternoon, and then made our way in a snowstorm to Santa Fe, where the communards we brought with us had an outpost where we could crash. The sixty-mile journey took us six hours, because the roads were extremely treacherous and the old exhaust-manifold-vacuum- driven windshield wiper was not up to the thick, wet snow. We had to stop every ten minutes to clear the windshield. We took two of the communards with us all the way to San Diego.

David and Penny Pratt told us about life as hippies in the environs of Taos. They explained that if they were ever walking up the road and saw a car coming, they would dive into the ditch, because it was just as likely that a Spaniard would swerve at them, or even shoot! Many of the hippies carried guns to defend themselves. The inhospitable natives were not to be called Mexicans. They had been here since long before there was a Mexico. The first Spanish families settled here in the 16^th Century. Before even the Calvinist theocrats set foot in Massachusetts. But early as they were, these Spanish were immigrants too, of course.

Taos Pueblo

To the Pueblo Indians (a very generic name, they are more properly known by the name of their respective pueblos) the Spanish are newcomers pretty much the same as the hippies, and they keep to themselves. It is virtually impossible to get into one of their Kivas for a ceremony.

Kiva open to public

The Pratts observed that this country was overlaid with stratum after stratum of history and prehistory, from the Anasazi ancstors of the Taos Pueblo to the Aztecs who are rumored to have ranged this far and to have left a cache somewhere on Blanca, to the Athabascan nation we call Apaches, whose Jicarilla tribe is settled on a reservation not far to the northwest, to the Conquistadores and the Padres and the Spanish settlers (including Maranos ~ crypto-Jews fleeing the Inquisition), to the Penitentes, who arose in the vacuum of episcopal oversight. The diocesan See was Durango, almost five hundred miles to the south. Then came the Mexican Revolution and the Pueblo Revolt and the 1848 war, and suddenly Taos was in the United States. New settlers arrived over the Santa Fe trail from Missouri, including the first archbishop of Santa Fe, the French-born Jean Lamy, who was sent from Cincinnati in the 1850s. (Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop). Lamy had to deal with Penitentes and their secret Moradas cult, with unofficially married clergy, and with a laity that, though Spanish, was pretty much pagan.

Penitente Morada, Taos

Then came the Texas cattle people, who made Albuquerque their center. But still the Santa Fe-based Spanish were sufficiently strong to remain a political force to be reckoned with. In the late 19^th Century, for ten years the territorial congressman was from Ojo Caliente, across the river from Taos. Though an Anglo, he was not a Texan, having been sent back to his parents’ home-town of St. Louis to be educated. A bit later came Georgia O’Keefe and D.H. Lawrence, and finally none other than C.G. Jung. The latter got one of the Taos Pueblo Kiva guys to talk.

C.G. Jung

You can read about it in a remarkable essay in Memoriues, Dreams, and Reflections. Something about consciousness at the top of the world, which is where you are if you are in Taos, from the Pueblo point of view. And REALLY finally, come the hippies, refugees from the flesh-pots of California, following Jung in search of the mystical enchantment that is palpable here.

Well, the hippies weren’t really the last newcomers. Now there is urban sprawl at the Top of the World, including, I am sorry to report, Walmart and plenty of fast-food. The old Plaza is pretty chic. Must be like Santa Fe was 50 years ago. All artisanal shops and galleries. Think Stillwater in adobe. Nevertheless, I am happy to report, the magic is still here.

Part of the magic for me was my visit to my old friend, Gendron Jensen, who lives with his wife, Christine,

in a fabulous Japanese-style house about twenty minutes up in the mountains behind Taos. I got stuck in the driveway, naturally, but his kindly neighbor (a Spaniard who is in charge of security at nearby Los Alamos) pulled me out with his winch and a couple of fat-tire ATVs. The Rio del Pueblo valley (tributary of the Rio Grande) is a lovely, remote spot. Around one corner I spooked a big bull elk (or are they stags?). What a magnificent creature!

The Jensens are both successful artists, with shows in their résumés in all the big cities and in Europe. Still, they have to watch their pennies and it’s a never-ending hustle. They both are artists of the pen, drawing beautiful creations, she abstract, he of bones. (His sobriquet is the Boneman.)

Bell Mueum

I met Gendron through the late Fr. Paul Berg, whom we remembered at length during my visit. Paul was an Episcopal priest at Grand Rapids when I met him. He was a central figure in a remarkable revival of interest in an abandoned Russian church in the muskeg north of the iron range, in a place called Bramble. Paul is buried in the orthodox graveyard there. (Another story.)

G. gave me Paul’s pectoral cross, which I will wear habitually now. Paul was a man of very special and unique holiness. Wherever he was, he attracted people of unusual creativity, like Gendron, and his friends included a wide array of artists and poets. Gendron calls him Paulus Dei and we decided that we must write about him at length. Here I will just say that Paul inhabited the liminal reaches of the church and society. He was counter-cultural in the best possible sense, and a huge influence on anyone who knew him. That G. thinks me worthy of his cross is an honor of which I am not sure what to make. G. and I learned from Paul of the charming Russian iconographic motif, Our Lady of the Unexpected Joy. G.’s gift was certainly that for me. But I have a feeling that it is a sacramental sign of something else.

Here in the mountains, whose underlying rock is a deep blood-red, named for the Eucharistic Mystery, I find myself confronted with opening possibilities. G. and I have already agreed to travel to San Salvador next winter to visit his old friend, who was St. Oscar’s private secretary.