John Nichols sent me a 65-page letter after he read Unf*#!ing Believable. Laid up with a bad
back and unable to work (he usually stays up all night writing and sleeps
during the day), he managed to type the single-spaced letter on the ancient
computer he uses as a word processor and then got his IT friends to translate it
to printable material.
So what did he say in a 65-page letter? Well, first off, he
warmed the cockles of my heart by telling me how much he loved the book and that
“it is a beautiful, and powerful political and personal work and one of the
best I have read in a long time.” But that only took a page or so. The 65 pages
came from “much of what touched me so deeply is that you and I have shared many
similar experiences in life, and your recounting of these experiences really
struck home” and “triggered so many similarities in my own life.”
He then went on to discuss, page after page, these shared
loves and experiences. Ten years older than I am he talked about his musical
inspirations like Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline and
all the old blues guys who were the genesis of much of the rhythm and blues
folks I talk about in the book. He revealed that he actually took guitar
lessons with the Reverend Gary Davis in the Bronx one summer. He plays guitar
every other Monday with a group of friends in Taos.
A great sports fan, especially baseball, he couldn’t believe
that I got so mad watching the Cubs and Indians (because of their mascot, Chief
Wahoo) in the 2016 World Series that I turned off the TV (I turned it back on).
When I saw him in person to talk about the letter I gave him some grief about
his being a Boston Red Sox fan (racist town) and he explained it by referencing
his childhood years of listening to their broadcasts on the radio and
developing a loyalty. Loyalty came up a lot in the conversation: loyalty to
teams (I lost my loyalty to the Lakers during the Kobe Bryant years); friends
and family; political allies.
We share a history of journalism and political activism in
northern New Mexico communities along with a love of the landscape that
nurtures them. In the early 1970s I was a staff writer at the alternative rag Seer’s Catalog; John drew political
cartoons for the paper. He was a contributor to the “muckraking journal” The New Mexico Review and helped Betita
Martinez and Rini Templeton put out the Chicano movement newspaper El Grito del Norte. Arriving later in el
norte, I regret never getting to meet Betita and Rini, but I did follow in their
footsteps with my own radical rag La
Jicarita News. We used to take photos of folks “reading La Jicarita” for promotion: Here’s John.
When we weren’t writing John and I were outdoors, he
fly-fishing the Rio Grande, bird hunting, hiking, and snowshoeing; me, hiking,
backpacking, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing. I put my love of the
outdoors to financial use and published five guidebooks over the years while
John found a more aesthetic value in publishing photography books (his latest, My Heart Belongs to Nature, was
published this year). His roaming centered around his home in Taos County: the
sagebrush mesas on the west side of the Rio Grande; the Wild and Scenic River
canyon north of Questa; the Williams Lake/Wheeler Peak mountain terrain that he
hiked and snowshoed. My ramblings took me further afield, throughout the vast
Pecos Wilderness where I now live, across the Sandia and Manzano Mountains
where I used to live, and all the places I explored for the guidebooks I wrote:
San Pedro Parks Wilderness; Wheeler Peak and Columbine Hondo; cross-country
skiing the Chama yurts; the Jemez Mountains; just about everywhere in northern
New Mexico.
I learned about his health travails: asthma; a heart
condition that led to open heart surgery in the 1990s; an inner ear condition
that leaves him off balance; his struggles to get health insurance. About the
only time he had it was when he worked in the movie industry writing screenplays
and was covered under the Writer’s Guild. I learned a lot about that part of
his career, too: the two years he was involved with Robert Redford’s filming of
The Milagro Beanfield War that “almost killed me.”
He talked about capitalism, socialism, democracy, global
domination, and conspicuous consumption. He’s about as close as there is to a
Luddite: he’s not on the Internet (we communicate via the telephone and
snail-mail); he lives in a three room adobe house near the Plaza; he drives a
decades old truck; we share music via CDs as he has no iPod, no iPhone, no real
computer (a word processor). He told stories about learning how to irrigate,
grow gardens, raise animals and fix his first house in Ranchitos, helped and
hindered by his neighbors who’d been doing it for centuries. He talked about
the books we’d both read, the books he’s written, and the books I’ve written.
And he talked about death. He lost his mother at age two and he almost died
during the open-heart surgery.
When Mark died in 2010 John sent me two panoramas he’d constructed
from photographs of the Lake Fork Peak area on the west side of Williams Lake,
where he spent many days without seeing another soul. They highlight the peaks
that ring the valley: Frazer, Wheeler, Simpson, Old Mike, Spoon Mountain, Lake
Fork Peak. He wrote that my book, Day
Hikes in the Taos Area, first guided him up Wheeler Peak. I have many
chapters in Unf*#!ing Believable
called “Diary of a Bad Year” that mostly talk about the 18 months Mark lived
with the death sentence of pancreatic cancer. In his letter John says, “your
descriptions of Mark dying break my heart and they are beautiful.” He’s working
on a book about the “short life and quick death of my mom called Goodbye Monique.”
There was much more that was said in those 65 pages but this
gives you an idea of the depth and breadth of John’s letter. He ended it like
this: “As always, hasta la victoria, siempre. Or, as I remember Betita Martinez
used to say, ‘Adelante, siempre! P’atras, nunca?’”
