Many people were friends with John Nichols. His Hispano neighbors who shared the acequias that served the Lower Ranchitos area where he first lived in Taos taught him the ins and outs of getting the water from the ditches to his fields, how to fix his roof or plaster the house, and argued with him about whose responsibility it was to keep the horses or sheep or dogs out of his garden and chicken coop. When the bureaucrats came to town to persuade Taoseños that a conservancy district to impound irrigation water was a good idea, John teamed up with his wonderful compadres to let the state engineer know that the people of Taos thought it was a bad idea, and in the battle over the Indian Camp Dam he made life-long friends of the farmers and acequia parciantes who valued his courage and writing skills.
Those writing skills, which had already produced two novels published in New York before he left for Taos, took the New Mexico Review, based in Santa Fe, to new levels of muckraking, as he exposed the travesties of the Vietnam War, the plight of the miners fired at the Questa molybdenum mine, LANL and nuclear warfare, and the battle against the Dam. As he wrote in I Got Mine: confessions of a midlist writer, “[I] absorbed more information about my town—its history, politics, poverty and personalities—and Southwest water wars, water law, and government chicanery that I could have ingested at a top-ranked university over thirty year of scholarly research.”
His love was fiction, however, and while his political activism never took a back seat, he wrote 13 novels over the course of his life. His first novel published after moving to Taos, The Milagro Beanfield War, never made it to the best seller list (John would say that was an over statement at best), it did become a local favorite, and he became a New Mexico celebrity. His fans became his friends. He faithfully answered mail from people he’d never met, often maintaining correspondence with them for decades. He knew everyone at the post office where he stopped every day to get his hundreds of letters that always arrived snail mail (he never had an internet account although late in life he got a tablet so he could go online and do research and read La Jicarita!).
He maintained relationships with all his New York friends, both political and literary. They came to Taos to visit and go fishing, grouse hunting, climb mountains or sit around and smooze while playing music. For years, every Monday night, he played music with a group of friends (Rick from Brodsky’s Bookshop and others) complaining that they played too much Val Morrison instead of fifties rock ‘n roll like Rock Around the Clock.
John was my friend, too. We had a long history before we even met in person. When I was living in Albuquerque I wrote for the alternative newspaper Seer’s Catalog. John sent down political cartoons from Taos for the same radical rag.
When I published my first book, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in the New Mexico Forest Communities, John sent me a wonderful letter of congratulations. From then much of our work efforts were conjoined. When he read my next book, Unf*#!ing Believable, a collections of my blog posts, he wrote me a 65 page letter telling me he loved the book but more importantly that ““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.” I read and critiqued his manuscript of I Got Mine; he went over every chapter of my ¡No Se Vend! Water as a Right of the Commons.” I published the memoir, Goodbye, Monique, of his parents’ short marriage and his birth before his mother died of endocarditis in 1940, the same disease John suffered from for years (Acequia Madre Press). He read my novel and returned it with dozens of yellow stickies that said either “I like this” or “this is terrible.” I never published it. He wrote me hundreds of other letters, supporting my political battles with the powers that be, sharing information about our families, celebrating the good and commiserating the bad.
During Covid we often spoke on the phone and if the weather was nice we’d meet at Baca Park and walk around the grounds or through the new riparian area to look for birds. On a last hike part way up the Williams Lake Trail John took this selfie of us.
Many of John’s friends know that he was a master at writing obituaries, or memorials. The combination of his warm heart, comic sensibility, and impeccable timing made them unforgettable. He delivered them when neighbors and Hispano friends died, in Spanish. He delivered them for friends and family back East. I got to hear them when he read them for our mutual friends Ron Gardner and Bill Whaley. We joked about him writing his own obituary because no one else could ever do it as well. I’ll end this tribute to John with the story of the one he wrote for Bill but failed to deliver, in November of 2021.
We were gathered at the Farm House Cafe. John had written “A Few Words About My Friend, Bill Whaley,” but when the time came for everyone to get up and deliver their reminiscences, John started feeling unwell, handed the pages he’d written to me, and went home. As I waited to stand in place for him, my stomach started to rumble and I knew what was about to happen. I’d previously eaten some bolete mushrooms a friend had included in a stew, even though the last time I’d eaten bolete mushrooms I’d vomited them up three hours later. It was now three hours from the mushroom stew so I ran to the bathroom, threw up everything, and went back out and read John’s memorial:
“I loved and admired Bill for his chutzpah, his arrogance, his intelligence, his lack of fear, his gentle and compassionate sides, his stupidity and his screw-ups, his angels and his devils, and his ability to recover and try again during his complicated, often hilarious, often self-destructive, yet also courageous and humane existence.”
With a little revision, John might well have written this for himself. We’ve all lost someone we considered one of our best friends, because that’s what he tried to be to everyone he knew.
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