John Nichols and William Davies

If Mountains Die

A celebration—in words and pictures—of one of the most beautiful areas of the United States: the Taos Valley of northern New Mexico.

When John Nichols moved to Taos in 1969, he felt "strung out, on edge, going down fast, and scared stiff." Outraged by the Vietnam War, depressed by New York City, uncertain about his own career as a writer (he was, at twenty-nine, the author of two acclaimed novels, The Sterile Cuckoo and The Wizard of Loneliness), he was returning to a spiritual homeland, where he had spent one memorable summer as a teenager, and where he hoped to create a new life for himself and his family. This eloquent, moving, and often funny book is his account of exactly how his life has been transformed by daily, intimate contact with this extraordinary landscape—at once hostile and nurturing—and by his growing sense of responsibility toward the land and the people who live there.

Nichols writes with wry amusement about the joys and tribulations of living in an adobe farmhouse that is always at the mercy of nature. He is rapturous about the pleasures of trout fishing in mountain streams and graphic about the difficulties of maintaining a primitive, but vital irrigation system. But he is most passionate about his farmer neighbors and thier continuing struggle to prtect a rewarding way of life and a precariously balanced ecological system that are both increasingly threatened by overcrowding and human greed.

To complement Nichols's deeply felt text, William Davis has provided sixty-five color photographs that dramatically capture the variety and intensity of this astonishing land—mountain and mesa, forest and desert, river and farmland—in all its seasons and moods. The result is a lyric tribute to one of the last truly wild areas of the United States.