John Nichols leaves behind a legacy of stories

John Nichols focused on essentials.

Enjoying the last beautiful days of autumn. Describing life on the mesa. Asking what happens if mountains die and showing why that must not happen. The beloved writer died last week and has been paid tribute in story, photograph and column, as he so richly deserved. This is more of an institutional tribute from this newspaper, bidding farewell to our friend.

Drawn to New Mexico to escape the chaotic late 1960s, the already successful writer — The Sterile Cuckoo, his first novel, became a movie starring Liza Minnelli in an Academy Award-nominated performance — put down roots here.

He took to Taos like a duck to water. Immediately, the easterner became part of the fabric of the town. He ice skated. He fished. He went to ditch meetings. He took magnificent photographs. He raised his children. He married three times. He made friends and kept them.

Setting the course of his life in Northern New Mexico, Nichols joined the fight against the Indian Camp Dam, joining with Hispano farmers and town Anglos to successfully block construction of a dam they believed would threaten their access to water.

The fight for water, for tradition, for land and the way of life he came to revere helped inspire the first book in his New Mexico trilogy. The Milagro Beanfield War, the story of Joe Mondragón’s fight to save water for his beanfield, became the basis for a Robert Redford-directed film. In this book, Nichols wrote a story about the haves vs. the havenots, the powerful vs. the powerless, a tale both specific and universal.

As he said in a New Mexican interview as movie filming was beginning during the summer of 1986: “The story unfolds every day of every week of every month in the life, not just of New Mexico, but of the world.”

It is the book all newcomers to New Mexico should read, offering the flavor of this place with its competing cultures and values. An outsider, Nichols wrote the ultimate insider story. The 1974 Kirkus review called it “a scrappy shaggy story, down the road a long ways from The Sterile Cuckoo, full of good humor and even better intentions about a small brushfire war in a Chicano community.”

It wasn’t a best-seller, but it became a New Mexico classic and he became a favorite son of his adopted state.

The death of Nichols at 83 brings to a close the life of a giant of New Mexico literature. Not only did he set fiction in his adopted home, Nichols wrote incredible paeans to nature in his books, If Mountains Die, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn and On the Mesa.

His love affair with New Mexico was intense and passionate. For years he could be spotted hiking Devisadero Loop Trail, or hunting grouse, trailing down to the Rio Grande to fish, in all sorts of weather and seasons. It was a rare day when Nichols wasn’t outside, breathing in nature before returning to his life’s work. He loved to write. It was what he did and who he was.

At night, Nichols would hunch over his typewriter and kept producing works of fiction and memoirs, including his 2022 memoir, I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer. His self-examination was critical and honest, similar to his approach to fiction and life.

He was the friend people asked to make comments at funerals or memorial services, his witty, compassionate words offering comfort to those still here. Perhaps living with health issues, particularly a heart condition that he long had feared would kill him before his time, gave him insight into how to offer comfort after death. Now, his living friends and family will comfort one other. As for his fans, they will read and reread their favorite books, finding comfort in his words, his stories.

They are his legacy, a grand one.