JHFARR.COM

Yes, friends, it took a week for ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE: Notes from Taos to pass review at Apple, but now it’s live and you can buy it for $5.99. Apparently there were several direct links to Amazon in there—not allowed!—that I’d forgotten about, and it took a while to track them down. If you read the book in iBooks, you can tap on each of the eighty-five high resolution photos to see them full-screen. I love that about iBooks, though I’m informed the Amazon version looks great, too.

Now, about that title… Would you believe it, I had no idea it was such a common one. That makes the sub-title absolutely necessary. It’s not that this slipped past me, though. There’s a chapter in the book where we meet a mountain biker on a lonely trail and he calls out, “Another day in paradise!” as he goes by. That’s where my claim comes from. I just assumed it was “mine” and didn’t bother to research it like I usually do.

I’ll set up a book page shortly. In the meantime, here’s the Introduction / Prologue from the book. Familiar territory to most of you, but remember this is for the masses!

The floor is hand-smoothed adobe mud spread directly on the roughly leveled earth. The internet cable comes in through a hole at my feet drilled through eighteen inches of adobe bricks. There’s a wood stove and a gas wall heater. No ceiling lights or closets. The oldest washing machine I’ve ever used empties into the kitchen sink unless you forget to hook up the hose. Once I found a baby scorpion on the counter. Black widows thrive in nooks and corners. We’ve had coyotes, foxes, and stray cattle ten feet from the back door. There’s a ninety-mile view from the mailbox.

Our now-dead landlord renovated our 120-year-old, nine hundred square foot adobe in the early 1960s. It had no bathroom, kitchen, or indoor plumbing at the time. That’s not unusual today, if the subject is “old Taos”—our neighbor only has an outhouse. Some highways here weren’t even paved then. Many county roads and Taos streets still aren’t and never will be, regardless of how upscale the neighborhood.

Northern New Mexico (El Norte) is one of the most compelling places I’ve ever lived, with impossible vistas, extremes of climate, mountains, deserts, wildlife, and extraordinary people. It’s also ancient, isolated, and harsh. We came here from established lives in Maryland in 1999, neither of us young or wealthy. Speaking for myself, it was the most outrageous, dangerous, and necessary thing I’ve ever done. I wrote about the early years in my previous two books, Buffalo Lights and Taos Soul. The chapters in this volume first appeared at JHFARR.COM from 2010 through early 2016. I’ve edited and arranged them here thematically (not by date) for greater impact.

Since relocating to Taos almost seventeen years ago, we’ve moved at least half a dozen times. During these years, the landlord died, my in-laws died, my mother died, a sister died, a brother died, and Hobbs the Wonder Cat died, too. She who gave me birth went mean and loco by degrees in Arizona, compelling my siblings and me to lock her up and take her money like she feared. (See The Helen Chronicles for more.) The others all went peaceably enough, but my sister’s three-month tailspin broke my heart. As for Taos itself, I met a German woman at a party several years ago, an accomplished chef, who said the best one-word description for the town was “dangerous!” She repeated it twice more on her way out, shaking her head, but of course I understood.

The worst thing one can do regarding Taos is be seduced by marketing and myth. For all the spectacular surroundings and cultural diversity, Taos is anything but “nice.” Its history is wild and violent, laced with suffering and greed. There’s a deep, dark energy in the landscape and the kind of people attracted to such things that ruins you for normal life, not always in a good way. The physical town is a textbook example of unchecked sprawl, lacking proper infrastructure, and expensive. Out-of-place retirees in shiny new Subarus drive up and down the one main street like Wile E. Coyote stepping off a cliff. Realtors and bandits run amok. As a resident of thirty years said recently, “It’s a love/hate relationship for me, but I can’t seem to find another community of misfits I might fit into!”

Never mind, the mountains call. You will not find your grounding here, but in the stars.

– JHF, Taos, New Mexico, 2016

Got it? Get it! Good.

The little bastard just hung there looking at me, its oversized ears flared open and facing front. Kind of cute, actually, with big bright eyes, and the last thing I’d expect to see clinging to the rough boards in the northwest corner of the bathroom ceiling. The space above the “closet,” actually. There’s a wide wooden shelf maybe six and a half feet off the floor with two pieces of conduit suspended underneath. Our clothes hang from these rods. The space above is storage for empty cardboard boxes, family relics in plastic bins, and my old Yamaha guitar that hasn’t been out of the case for years.

I wanted a photo but missed my chance. My phone was nearby, but I’d have to break eye contact with the animal to grab it. I tried. In that split second, it silently vanished. Fortunately, I’d gotten a good enough look to know it wasn’t a mouse. Too big, for one thing, and those ears! Too much brain for a mouse as well. There was just something about the way it sized me up.

A subsequent Google image search revealed that what I had was a pack rat. I don’t know why they call it a rat—more like a large mouse, really, which comforted me somewhat. I also knew I could kill it. I baited an old-fashioned mouse trap with peanut butter and placed it just out of sight on the shelf, where I promptly forgot all about it. Happily for all concerned, I didn’t see him again for over a month, though the next time was in the kitchen!

[continue reading…]

Hah! Big enough for you? I don’t have a page for it here yet, but you can grab it now at Amazon. It’s also at the iBooks Store and was approved but later put under review because of an overlooked link to an Amazon page—big no-no! I’ve fixed all that, and now we have to wait. This is a gorgeous digital book. It displays beautifully on Kindle devices and the free Kindle app itself (on any computer or device). My favorite way to read this is the iBooks app on iPads and iPhones, because of the optional scrolling view. If you have one of those, you might want to wait (a few hours? a few days?) for the already-uploaded iBooks version to go live at the iBooks Store.

Here’s the official blurb. It should sound familiar to longtime readers of this blog, which provided most of the heavily reworked content. (Think of it as a thematically grouped curated collection with better photos.) I expect Another Day in Paradise: Notes from Taos will be the last of the original series (Buffalo Lights, Taos Soul) covering life at our current location in this charming but funky old adobe in Llano Quemado in Ranchos de Taos.

John and his wife moved to the high desert of Taos, New Mexico seventeen years ago from Maryland. These very personal notes from Taos cover the last six years. From the introduction: “The floor is hand-smoothed adobe mud spread directly on the roughly leveled earth. The internet cable comes in through a hole at my feet drilled through eighteen inches of adobe bricks. There’s a wood stove and a gas wall heater. No ceiling lights or closets. The oldest washing machine I’ve ever used empties into the kitchen sink unless you forget to hook up the hose. Once I found a baby scorpion on the counter. Black widows thrive in nooks and corners. We’ve had coyotes, foxes, and stray cattle ten feet from the back door. There’s a ninety-mile view from the mailbox. Northern New Mexico (El Norte) is one of the most compelling places I’ve ever lived, with impossible vistas, extremes of climate, mountains, deserts, wildlife, and extraordinary people. It’s also ancient, isolated, and harsh. We came here from established lives in Maryland in 1999, neither of us young or wealthy. Speaking for myself, it was the most outrageous, dangerous, and necessary thing I’ve ever done.”

43,000 words, 82 chapters, 85 beautiful high-resolution photographs. Sections include A Certain Edge, Llano Quemado, Mystery Train, Garden of Eden, and Amor y Muerte. ISBN: 978-0-9830838-4-9. Just $5.99.

To get things rolling, I finally activated the JHF✫NEWS. This was originally conceived of as a new releases newsletter. Given my erratic output up to now, however, I’m probably going to make it monthly for a stronger connection with readers and subscribers. For example, there are works-in-progress to talk about, and I’d like embed a monthly video report. There will also be rewards for current and new subscribers to be announced next month. In any event, you can easily sign up or unsubscribe as often as you like. Give it a try. Just one email per month.

I’ll let you know when Apple relents. Onward through the fog.

On the third day, it arose, or rather, sputtered. But I will take what I can get. The alternative is scary, like not shaving or buying new clothes because you never go out, or training yourself not to see the cobwebs and the dust gators. (No bunnies here.)

When I put away the high-rent gas powered Craftsman Brushwhacker™ last fall—you know, one of those noisey gadgets for whacking weeds—it was running better than ever, though not without a struggle. After having the fuel line replaced by an otherwise useless Taos repair shop (“We did that, but it still won’t run.”), I’d resorted to the internet. My hunch was that it simply wasn’t getting enough gas. Internal combustion engines are funny like that, and it’s the first thing smart guys look for. The thing has an actual carburetor, Zoroaster be praised, which means there’s a tiny screw to adjust for the fuel-air mixture and another to confuse you. Imagine my joy, however, when I discovered that unlike the case of the last carbureted automobile I owned, a ’67 Saab V-4, touching that screw was now against the law. That’s right. Only an authorized repair facility like the one that had just failed me possessed the special tool needed to get a grip on the modified screw was allowed to do the work, according to the EPA. The rationale is that millions of people tinkering with their tiny little engines, all of which had been perfectly adjusted for life at the factory, would pollute the atmosphere and kill us all—this after mandating adding ethanol to gasoline in sufficient quantities to make a lot of them run quite badly. This being America, however, I found a workaround online.

It couldn’t have been simpler. All I needed was a certain size of the kind of wire connectors you crimp tight with a pair of pliers, and I was good to go without the “special tool.” A few degrees of counter-clockwise nudging on the screw, and the little two-stroke screamed like a banshee. Success! I tidied up our rented estate, drained the remaining fuel, and stored it in the back of my pickup truck for the winter.

Somehow it got to be spring and then June. I hauled the Brushwhacker out of the truck, put freshly doctored gas in the tank, and yanked ten minutes on the starter cord. Nary a pop. The thing was as inert as a Monty Python parrot. It would have made a good redneck bass boat anchor. But here’s where I got clever. Namely, I did nothing but let it sit under a tarp behind the house for two whole days. Maybe there was a tiny spider in the fuel line and it would dissolve, but I was really trying to keep from going postal.

On the morning of the third day, I remembered an old carburetor trick for starting dead cars: to see if the motor’s getting any gas, just pull the air cleaner off and drip a little down its throat. On the evening of the third day—yes, I purposefully waited—that’s exactly what I did, and it fired right up! I don’t know how long it would have run, since I shut it down immediately, but the prognosis is good, and now I can pretend to clean this place up outdoors.

I’m proud, though. I know stuff the kids don’t know, like what a carburetor is, or how to catch a chicken with a chicken hook. Both of these would stand me in good stead in Cuba, say, where I am not, but hope to visit before Yangqui car freaks buy up all the vintage wheels. Plus, I’m glad I waited: the symbolism of the three day interval is important! Wait before you roll away the stone, then wait some more.

Otherwise, you have to work.