The best thing about visiting Alamosa (CO) is that it’s an actual town with reasons to exist that don’t depend on tourists, like Taos was when there were stores for locals on the Plaza. Railroad tracks, the Rio Grande, and Adams State University may have something to do with anchoring the place. I saw kids riding bikes on sidewalks with curbs and thought we could have been in small-town Iowa. There are buildings made of bricks in a functioning downtown. In one of them you’ll find “the brew pub” (San Luis Valley Brewing Company), our lunchtime destination.
While all of this is reassuring in a vaguely Midwestern sort of way, that is to say, quite different in shape and tone from where we live, I may have been in Taos too long to escape. Though it’s good to be reminded of the outer world again, the crazy doesn’t work unless you take it all the way, and too much normal only breaks your heart again.
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 have to think about this one. I once said that I would never live in a place without curbs and sidewalks. But yet here I am. I tried the curbs and sidewalks scene for 30 years. the problem was that is everyone was the same in that neighborhood. I miss my friends but when I go back to visit the conversations are still the same as they were when I lived there. Too much sameness leads you into a lack of diversity.
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