The mesa lacked almost every incentive for a permanent population. The one resource it had was cheap land tucked far away from neighbors, cops, building inspectors, and anyone else who might stop a person from doing whatever the hell he wanted on his very own scrap of dirt. Even among the recluses, word was eventually going to get out. Fugitives came to live in hiding. Veterans and retirees came to stretch a monthly check. The hippie communes that had taken root in Taos County in the ‘60s and ‘70s disbanded, and a few diehards decided that isolation on the mesa was the next best thing. Environmentalists came to build the experimental Earthship homes that would have been banned by county building codes. Entrepreneurs and enthusiasts came to grow marijuana. Many came to build a life that didn’t revolve around a steady job and a mortgage payment. Others came simply to retreat into themselves. Today, Taos County is one of the poorer counties in the country. Some do better, some do worse, but the gradation on the mesa, as in much of Taos County and New Mexico at large, is in terms of who has more of not very much. The only common culture, Elliot feels, is one of poverty.

it is amazing to find this level of anarchy in the continental us

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