Bbehold the cool, dry New Mexico sky over Taos! This time with beautiful clouds. The amazing thing is, it covers the whole state and then some. Even more astounding, there are people here who do not know this. (I’ve been spotted at the meetings.) My head and heart are full this morning. It’s that kind of day.
A couple I know but haven’t met in person came up from Albuquerque for the Alabama Shakes concert in the park on Saturday night and got stiffed by the owner of their pre-booked overnight casita, who’d apparently rented it to someone else and was high on evil drugs to boot. (There was more, but that’s enough.) They left yelling “Fuck Taos!” all the way out of town and spent the night in Santa Fe. Now that is an awful story, so I looked up the vacation rental website that sent them to the Casitas from Hell. Naturally, I hadn’t heard of it—we’ve never gotten a room that way—but it seemed to be legit and there were 717 listings under “Taos”…
That was something of a shock to me. My wife thinks I’m naive, but I plead willful blindness to the distortion of a tourist-based economy. In such an environment, owners can make way more than landlords who lease. On the other hand, 717 houses, apartments, and rooms rented out nightly from just one website are that many places where no one can live. Life is more nuanced than that, but you see how the headwinds build. I wouldn’t worry too much, though.
Send more heroin and meth, and we’ll turn this around!
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
I like to take similar pictures. I call then “Taos sky moments.” Never get tired of them.
John Nichols used to sell sky photos to supplement his income, probably before digital photography made everyone a genius. But I never get tired of them, either! We don’t have a TV. I can sit outside for hours just watching the clouds.