A singular voice goes silent, but the echoes remain
Nov. 28—One of my most treasured possessions is a copy of The Magic Journey, by John Nichols.
Actually, I've got two copies: The first one, acquired in maybe 1982, was consumed so often and so voraciously its spine broke after a decade. I must've read it 25 times in college.
Since then, a re-read of The Magic Journey has been a personal, near-annual pilgrimage to genuflect at the power of the written word — to say nothing of Nichols' immense talent and work ethic, now silenced with his death Monday at age 83.
This admittedly odd devotional came at a cost, of course: The paperback is as fragile as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every time I pulled the book off the shelf, I'd have to rearrange the whole thing because untethered pages wafted over the floor, like winter snowflakes in the author's beloved home, Taos.
Slowly, I'd rearrange the contents in proper order, read and revel. That's how good Nichols was: Your 65th examination of his stuff was as revealing as the first. Even more impressive, particularly for a local audience: Nichols, who wasn't from here, was comically and brutally incisive about New Mexico, if not the human condition. In fiction and nonfiction, treatise or rant, he bored through the veneer and facade and got right to the bone and marrow.
The second Magic Journey came to me in December 2015, when Nichols' son-in-law, Marco Harris, presented me with another copy of the book. Marco and I had become friends in Albuquerque, and when he'd heard I was a fan, he was kind enough to give me a new copy, a worthy successor to my old reliable.
Amazingly, Nichols wrote a short passage on the title page, addressed to me. I have to tell you, I treasure his scrawl, punctuated by a goofy drawing. You know how they tell you to have a "go bag" ready in case of fire or disaster? The Magic Journey is going with me.
"Thank you for liking this book," he wrote. "It's by far my favorite."
Just for the hell of it, I thumbed the newer copy Tuesday afternoon to a random page, landing on 408. Consider this:
"Autumn, with its sad and mystifying alchemy of death; autumn, that colorful deciduous time of year when leaves tumble off cottonwoods, elms and aspens in great clattering sheaves, skittering among chickens and dry papery cornstalks, gathering in crisp drifts against the firewalls of direct roofs. A southern sun, dead leaves and smoke heralded the end of another brief season. ..."
He is writing about fall in Northern New Mexico, and whether you've been here 80 years or 80 days, you not only understand, you can feel the leaves under your shoes, and the sadness of summer's end.
God, what a gift.
I know Nichols will almost be tied to The Milagro Beanfield War, the seminal, insightful and often hilarious account of Northern New Mexico in the late 1960s and '70s. Though I'll always be partial to The Magic Journey, his follow-up to the Beanfield War and the second entry in what is often known as the New Mexico Trilogy, I was blown away in the 1980s when I learned my wife's father was actually a protagonist in the first book.
Nichols' Kyril Montana, the heavy in the Beanfield War, was loosely based on my father-in-law, Charles "Red" Pack. In the days before New Mexico governors had squads of bodyguards in their employ, Pack stood watch over five New Mexico governors before his death in 1979.
Details are scant (at least when I'm around), but Red grew close to several of his bosses, occasionally doing some undercover police work that usually didn't make the papers. But it did contribute to one of the greatest books ever written about the state.
When my mother-in-law told me how Nichols spent time with her husband as part of his research, I was floored. And today, as I chuckle at more passages from my favorite book and favorite writer, I could kick myself for never meeting him. That's my fault, not his: When the garrulous Nichols wasn't working to hone every word each night, he spent his days learning more about the world and people around him.
"Even when I was I was a kid and went to book signings with him, it would just go on for hours and hours," his daughter, Tania Harris, recalled Tuesday afternoon. "He would talk to every single person in front of him."
And now, silence comes in the fall, with its mystifying alchemy of death.
It's a sad time, made even more poignant by a singular voice, now stilled.
Phill Casaus is editor of The New Mexican.
