Taos: the first Week

OK. I'm going to tell you guys a little about my trip to Taos. Taos is situated in the northernmost part of New Mexico, at the foothills of the Rockies. It was usually pretty hot during the day but at night it dropped down to the mid-50s, something I could really get used to. Needless to say, Taos was gorgeous. I was there for a month last summer, taking photography classes, but this summer I was in SMU's archaeology field school at the SMU-owned Fort Burgwin (I highly recommend), so I was living in a tent in the mountains for a month. Every morning at 6:30, i'd wake up and crawl out of my little tent and greet the sun to the east. Spectacular. This is my tent, which didn't take that long to set up-

-I even had some time to help someone else who had never gone camping before. Luckily, I went a lot growing up. You wouldn't believe it, but that little one-man tent was the most comfortable thing ever, especially for sleeping on top of hard desert dirt. It's a REI mountaineering tent, partially constructed out of recycled materials, and it was at a fair price. It got pretty cold at night, but it kept the heat it so well. Sometimes if I didn't wake up early enough in the mornings, i'd get up sweating. But this is the creek behind my tent.

We were really out there in the woods. It was a fifteen minute walk to get to breakfast in the mornings, but the nature trail was a nice wake-up exercise. The Arroyo Hondo ridge spreads out to the east of campus, and it's a good hike. I tried to go up to the top or halfway to meditate at least twice a week, after work. It was amazingly peaceful up there. The last two weeks we were at Fort Burgwin, these lovely little yellow flowers were everywhere in bloom along the path.

It still amazes me looking at these pictures from last month. Anyhow, SMU recently went all-green on this Taos campus they have, so all the energy and water is from environmentally-friendly companies in New Mexico, and we even used biodegradable cups, baggies, and sacks for our lunches we made every day. It made me really proud to be on a campus like that every day. I know the people of Taos appreciated it.

Another beautiful thing about Taos is the culture- not just the booming art culture (that started in the 1920s and is still in full swing today), but the hispanos and Pueblo people living there. One woman that we got to know really well was Guadalupita Tafoya (we called her Pita), a Pueblo-Spanish woman who has a great reputation in town. She's the mejor doma for the St. Francis of Assisi chapel in the main plaza (you know, the famous Paul Strand photograph of the adobe church corner?), and this is it, after the annual enjarre, where the community pitches in to replaster the church with traditional adobe (mud and straw) and we clean the inside, too; cleaning the ceremonial items, sanding the pews, dusting the vigas. I painted two doors and polished god knows how many brass crosses.

It's so beautiful on the inside, but we weren't allowed to take pictures. But there is a lot of hand-painted crucifixes and carved woodwork. All the pews were handmade, and there's like, sixty-six of them. Wow. Well, because of her status, everyone answers to Pita, and she worked us HARD when we volunteered to do the enjarre with the community, and everyone loved us for it. Here's the class getting dirty shaping adobe walls.

That's me on the far right with the scarf on. That white shirt? It got so messy I had to throw it out. Everyone's boots and sneakers were caked with mud.

It was a good experience, though. We tried to work with the community a lot when we were working at both dig sites, since they have huge historical relevance to the people of Taos, and most of the townsfolk don't leave the area for generations. And if they do, they always come back- which affirms my conclusion to live in Taos, NM for at least a year in the future. When my friend Kate and I drove down highway 68 for the last time out of New Mexico into Colorado, I almost cried. I had withdrawal for a week afterwards, it seemed. And I miss my tan, i'm not going to lie. I'm already reverting back to my undead look.

Currently listening to: "Modern Guilt" by Beck

Love,
Amanda