Crestone, Part 1

About an hour and a half north of Taos, at the very foothills of the Rockies, lies the enchanting little town of Crestone where some several hundred people live dreamy, anachronistic lives.  The town itself has four or five streets, forming a few rectangles containing at most a dozen businesses, the most prominent of which is the modest coffee shop, Shambala.  Built in an old house and painted a dark turquoise, Shambala occupies the first corner you encounter as you enter Crestone via the only road leading to the town.  The location and the picnic table outside make this the front door and the living room, and it is the center of daily social life in Crestone for many of the colorful residents.  Groups of regulars gather and chat and gossip, some in shifts according to their own personal schedules for work and so forth, and some who seem to center their activities around the table for most of the day.

Among the full timers is Steve, a completely pixilated elf who lives in a yurt in the compound adjoining Shambala, where he tends the garden on the grounds and in the Lexan Geodesic dome.  When he gets your attention, Steve rambles on with almost schizophrenic incoherence, but with a watchful twinkle in his eye as he seemingly paces his excursions to the near limits of rational attention.  Something is going on in there behind his extroverted, Robin Williamsish free associated preaching about Light and Mother Earth, and the souls of rocks and asparagus.  Under the good graces of the owner of Shambala, Steve and half a dozen other people live in the compound, along with some chickens.  Will Omega is living in his car nearby, having recently arrived from Flagstaff, and he appears at the picnic table frequently, selling his wooden Indian flutes (five hole pentatonic recorders) and offering beginners lessons to facilitate his sales.  Rev, the Reverand, sells pot and is a regular too, his business both benefiting from and aiding the social scene at Shambala.  Jullie, a very pretty usually barefooted girl probably in her later twenties, often wearing a rolled bandanna around her forehead, frequently lends her joyful bright smile to the table, and offers home made cookies to friends, noting with a giggle that they, too, have medicinal ingredients (pot).  It's a hippie town.

It's also a "Spiritual" town.  I resent that that term is often used to refer to any and every far fetched belief system dealing with the human longing for a sense of purpose, with the common and false attendant implication that if you are rational, you are not sensitive to the fullness of life; it makes me feel belittled, and by folks who, in my opinion, are the ones missing the fullness of the "miracle" of scientific reality.  In any event, Crestone owes its large proportion of residents pursuing a spiritual life to a number of reasons, including Crestone's seclusion and natural beauty, it's purportedly health giving hot springs, and, most importantly, the beneficence of a wealthy family who long ago began giving land to not-for-profit spiritual organizations.  And so the surrounding hills have thirty or more retreats for Buddhists and other groups, including a variety of new age healers and so forth.

Nestled into the foothills and radiating outward from the town itself, is a large flat lands in which an enormous development, Baca Grande, was begun in the '60's.  Originally conceived as a residential community for the military at Los Alamos, it was later re-interpreted as a generally populated retirement community, and  in the '70s, owing to poor sales, the project lost momentum.  What remains is a two tiered region, half of which, the Baca, has two to four acre lots with infrastructure for electricity and water, some with houses, and the other half, the Grants, has similar sized pieces of raw land available.  And over the years, some of each portion has been settled on a shoe string by the colorful inhabitants of Crestone.  I will tell about my stays with folks in each in future posts.

I love Crestone.

I was 5 in 1960, when my parents, artists, moved us to a charming brick and stone Tudor house in a 200 year old village on Long Island.  I remember the excitement and optimism of the move, and in the years that followed, the excitement of the times, my parents love and admiration for the Kennedys, the Smothers Brothers poking political wit.  Our house was full of painting, music, puppets, drums, and I bonded to the make-the-world-better zeitgeist of the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mommas and the Poppas, over the nihilism of the The Rolling Stones and the Doors.  In '65 my father, possibly influenced by the free-love atmosphere, got involved with my best friend's mom, and his marriage to my mom, his true love, went downhill from there, raging on in fits and spurts for the next thirty years or so.  But one enduring legacy I have, possibly heightened by contrast with the chaos in my life that followed, is a soft spot for the idealism of the '60s and Hippies, and even the naive spiritualists.

And so I love Crestone because I love the reverberations of ancient long lost longings it stirred for me, and I stayed there, entranced, for what I can now hardly believe was only two and a half weeks.

I'll post more about this magical portion of my adventure, but for now, here is a link to some pictures of the town.  Click here

UFO bait...

Heading north from Taos to Crestone on 285, I happened across Roy and Ruth's UFO Center.  You couldn't miss it; it's in the middle of a long bleak stretch of dusty nothingness.  They have erected a metal viewing platform... I guess being 15 feet higher up really helps when you're spotting UFO's.  There is also a lot of crap, scrap metal, and UFO paraphernalia laying around on the ground... I suppose it's UFO bait; I spoke with Roy a while, but didn't ask him.  We talked about the economy!  As a trucker, he had made enough to support his family and set this place up, with dwellings for some of his kids and himself and Ruth.  Now in semi retirement, they built and have run this place for about 10 years.  They are both fairly tongue in cheek about it, but when I teetered too close to skepticism, they reeled back, so I guess they are believers.  I prefer that to thinking they were shameless hoaxers.  Roy said business has been off the last two years as tourism in general is way down, and they are hurting a bit.  A little bit of reality at the UFO Center.  Click here for more pics on Flickr.

Two Cute Girls On My Bus

Near the end of May, back at Talpa Gardens, I got to know Lindsey and Heather, whom I met by chance a few days prior at World Cup, a coffee place in Taos.  The three of us took an 83 mile drive around The Enchanted Circle, which circles Taos Mountain and runs through ski towns and beautiful forest.  The two were working as volunteers on the farm as "Woofers", kids who travel and trade their labor for lodging and learning on small farms.  No one has to pay me to take a drive like this, either :-)  Click here for a Flickr slide show.

The Taos Pueblo

Two or three miles from the center of Taos is the Taos Pueblo settlement, the longest continuously inhabited Pueblo settlement in existence.  Tourists have access to the central area, the deeper recesses and perimeter are where the inhabitants still live and these are off limits.  I learned that actually only a handful of people still live here, but there is additional native population living on reservation land outside this Pueblo construction.  These buildings are in amazing shape for mud buildings.  That is to say, they are surviving ongoing water damage and decay pretty well.  Most of the inhabitants keep their distance and don't want their photos taken, except a few who are running the small souvenir and craft shops, who will pose for a small donation.  I photoed one in what appeared to be her home, where she was preparing food on a hot plate for sale on the table outside.  I also photoed a woman sitting outside and when I asked her her name, she answered "Susan" in a startlingly American sounding accent.

This is a sad place.  One can have all the respect in the world for the history and traditions, but it's evident that this is not working, the tourism is not supporting the community, and it will end eventually, except perhaps for some caricatured version that might survive with government funding.  I probably shouldn't go to tourist attractions.

Click here for a Flickr slide show.

The Taos Mesa

I'd heard about the Taos Mesa a couple of times.  The first was from Craig, whom I met at Tannia and Jeff's farm, Talpa Gardens.  Craig is a welder from Columbus, Ohio, who had arrived in Taos several weeks prior, fell in love with both the town and a women, and had decided to stake a claim out on the Mesa where he would build a studio and make art, although he admitted he had no experience or training in art, and only a little in construction, except for his welding, at which he was proficient.  Craig's ironic sense of humor and enthusiasm for his dream on the Mesa were infectious.  He told me it's an area out west on the flat lands, beyond the Taos Gorge, where property is still available for cheap.  There is no infrastructure, no water, electricity, or sewers, only unnamed dirt roads.  Ownership records of the land are murky.  Some large corporation owns a lot of it, and divided it into quarter acre lots long ago, some of which can be purchased for a few hundred dollars, including back taxes.  Other larger chunks are available from private owners.  Craig was in the process of making repeated trips to the Mesa to identify places he liked, and alternating these trips with visits to the town planning department to find records and then trying to contact the owners.  He'd sent out 6 or so letters, but had been told by friends that it often took a hundred tries before success.  Craig was boundless in his energy, and we had a good time a few days later when he helped me weld a broken strut on my bus' door opening lever.

The second time I heard about the Mesa was from Clay, the bus traveler I met at the east end of the Taos Gorge Bridge (May 23rd post below.)  "The Mesa is pretty cool.  Some of the old timers have been there quite a while and they can be pretty weird.  It's pretty lawless, though.  If you call the police, they will only come and meet you at the edge, because the roads have no names and they can't find anything in there."  I of course wanted to know more.  "I can take you out there, if you want" Clay offered.  "What if I just went out to look around?"  "Sure, but just be cool.  A lot of people are out there because they want to be left alone.  If you pull up to the wrong house and they don't know you, you'll be greeted at gun point."  Gulp.  "Thanks, how do I find it?"  "Over the bridge, out past the water tower, first left, then the first right takes you to TP, (I learned later that's Two Peaks) or straight takes you to a sign that says 'Evolve', and go right there."  I figgured anyplace with a sign can't really be trying to keep people away, so off I went.

The only worse roads I have ever driven on were in Coasta Rica, where I cracked a gas tank on a rented 4x4.  These are dirt paths with deep ruts at the sides, potholes a foot deep an d 3 feet round, and continuous "washboard" texture hard packed along the surface, which forced me to keep my speed to about 10 miles an hour.  I rolled along and looked at an amazing array of odd houses cobbled together out of found materials, shipping containers, abandoned cars, buses, campers, and scraps of wood.  Though I remained a bit skeptical about Clay's warnings, as I proceeded I kept my head down, in case of sniper fire.  Then I noticed a few of the homesteads were surrounded by stockade fences, with pointed tops, as I remembered from movie westerns, to keep the Indians out...  "Don't get out of the bus, don't get out of the bus...", I parrodied to myself from Apocalypse Now's "Never get out of the boat..."  I did manage to get a number of photos through my windows and through the open door.

Click here for a Flickr slide show, which includes a friendly encounter.

After a point, I tired of the rough ride, and feared I might damage my suspension, so I turned around and headed back to Taos.  Soon, I saw an old bearded man sitting in a derelict car in one homesteaded compound, so I opened my door and waved.  He waved back.  I felt better.  A little further on, a car passed with a woman in her twenties, with a nose ring, and two dogs.  She looked like she was going home, somewhere here on the Mesa,... how bad could it be?  Finally, an open top Jeep with about 6 twentysomethings comes along, so I slow down and wave, and they stop.  I asked "Who lives out here?" meaning, generally.  The driver answered "I do", somewhat defensively.  So I explained, I'm an architect, and I'm curious who's out her, and what are they building, and I made it sound as chatty and innocent as I could, and the driver said "We're building an Earthship just 100 yards back, you want to see it?"

Ben had saved some money and now was getting help from his friends to build this house.  Suddenly it became clear to me what was happening.  The Mesa, former exclusive home of loons, outcasts, and malcontents, was being gentrified.  As I'd seen Bed Sty in Brooklyn, the East Village in Manhattan, as is happening in Treme in New Orleans, Laptops and I-pods are coming to the Taos Mesa.

I spent an hour learning about their construction, which had been learned by many of them as volunteer's on Mike Reynolds official Earthship projects.  One of the kids demonstrated his skill on the slack line they had rigged next to the mess tent where they ate.  I learned of another Mesa dweller who could help me convert my bus to run on vegetable oil, possibly doing the conversion for a lot less than I'd feared.  I got his number.  Then I said my goodbyes, thanked them, and found my way out of the Mesa and headed back to Talpa Gardens.

I tried a short cut, which led me to a road that meandered all the way down to the bottom of the Taos Gorge, and then back up the other side.  The short cut added an hour or so to my return trip :-)

Thom Wheeler is having fun

Back on May 18, I wandered on my scooter along some back roads winding into the foothills of the Rockies east of Taos.  There are many galleries and studios tucked in here and there, and though rain was threatening, I took a chance and stopped at Thom Wheeler's place, as it seemed particularly over the top and picturesque.

  Click here for a Flickr slide show of Thom's unusual home and studio, which he designed and had built on his income from his art work.

Remember me?

I've been up in Crestone, Co.  It's sufficiently remote that I had no T-Mobile cell phone service and very limited access to internet via my Verizon Broadband dongle.  I'm now heading west again, but have stopped in Taos to regroup a bit, so I'll do a few posts to catch up.  A few quickees from before Crestone, then I'll try to explain Crestone, which was quite remarkable...