The Taos hum has long been a mystery. Ever since 1956 residents of Taos County have periodically noticed what some have described as a low-frequency vibration, a deep rumble from the earth most often felt through the soles of the feet. They say it is most noticeable when barefoot, but there have been reports of some people sensing the rumble while wearing Birkenstocks. High heels and Gucci loafers seem to have a dampening effect on the vibration.
In 1967 this vibration grew so powerful that the straw binder in the mud plaster of the famed Ranchos de Taos Church was induced into an acute state of harmonic resonance that caused the mud plaster to fall off in whole sheets, leaving the Church looking like a peeled hard-boiled egg at Easter.
I was born in 1956 and have been reluctant to come forward with what I know about this startling phenomenon. Ever since my eleventh birthday when my uncle first introduced me to the sport, my passion has been trout fishing. My uncle was somewhat unconventional and a bit of a purist. He didn’t believe in using a hook, a line, or a sinker. He believed the best way to learn about Nature was to ditch the things separating you from pure wildness. Not even dry fly fishing was pure enough for him. He used his hands. More precisely, he used his left hand, having lost his right hand in a cat fishing accident on the lower Rio Grande years before I was born. But that is a different story.
My uncle taught me how to lie down quietly next to the River and to close my eyes while allowing my left arm to sway in the current. He taught me how to split a willow branch to fashion a clothes-pin-like nose clip to block out my sense of smell; how to use dried river moss for earplugs to block out my sense of hearing; and how to chew Russian thistle leaves to block out my sense of taste. All this so I could concentrate my perceptive powers on the sense of touch in my hand that was dangling in the River. He taught me how to lie so still that I could feel the slightest movement in the water from the flutter of a small fry to the unmistakable ecstasy of a lunker. Best of all he taught me how to clamp down just behind the gills so the big ones couldn’t get away.
Most days we had the River blissfully to ourselves, but once a local fisherman accidentally stumbled on me while I was lying hidden in the riparian grasses. When I rolled over to face him he took one look at the dry moss sticking out of my ears and was so startled by the willow nose clip hanging from my nose that he dropped his gear and high-tailed it out of the canyon. He left so quickly that I didn’t even have a chance to spit out the Russian thistle so I could ask him if he was having any luck. He was a bait fisherman.
After my uncle died I spent months in the canyon, some said in mourning, lying next to our beloved Rio Grande, fishing the way he had taught me. I like to think my uncle, wherever he may be, would have wanted it that way. “Life,” he used to say, “is too important not to spend fishing.”
As with any sport you practice passionately, I became good at it. This is when it happened. I became so adept at sensing their slightest movement that no trout was safe from my grasp. I was able to catch them at will. No matter how quietly I crawled up next to the River’s edge, as soon as I put my hand in the water the collective heartbeats of all the trout in the Rio Grande Gorge would synchronize. It was almost telepathic. The communal noise they made sounded like a hum.
I no longer worry about being outlawed from fishing in Taos County. Now that I am older, I rarely get back to my uncle’s favorite fishing hole. But the fish haven’t forgotten. In one of Nature’s many wonders, generations of trout families have somehow figured out how to communicate to their offspring the fear of my grasp. As soon as my pinkie finger so much as grazes the surface of the water, it inevitably starts. The resonant vibration of their quivering heartbeats is the cause of the mysterious Taos hum.
(Photo by Don Graham)
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