Taos Hum or God’s Call, Annoying Either Way

By Carol Mell, 12-21-07

	Caption: On top of everything else this pastor has to put up with, he also hears the Taos Hum most nights.

The Albuquerque Journal North, the newspaper that runs my column, revisited the Taos Hum issue again recently. My former editor, Polly Summar, contacted me about finding hum hearers. She remembered the column I wrote about Wayne’s unfortunate ability to hear the hum. In the end he was the only hearer she could find.

I’ve copied my column about the Taos Hum below and below that the links to the story and video featuring Wayne.

Is it Taos Mountain or the Hum Calling? If you ask me you’re better off not listening.

Here in Taos Valley, where fresh batches of starving artists collect as fast as beer bottles tossed into my driveway, folks are fond of saying that if the mountain calls, you will stay. If not, you’ll be turned away, forced to search for your muse (or cheaper rent) at lower altitudes. In Taos, quite a few are called but very few are chosen.

I’m a wannabe writer among the vast legions doing the Taos Shuffle, a term used here to describe the conga line of new Taoseños as they shamble from one job to another watching their bank accounts run as low as a well in August. 

My husband was the one to get the call to Taos but then he’s in the call business, being a minister. Payment is optional in his line of work but a call is required. Still, he didn’t expect it to keep him awake nights. About one month after moving here from the Arizona desert, Wayne started getting up and walking around the house at night complaining about an infernal noise, a hum that he said sounded like a low rumbling.

“It’s just those red chiles you had for dinner,” I suggested.

“Can’t you hear it?” he moaned. “Listen!”

I thought it was either humbug or the refrigerator. When Wayne worries about bills, the sound of the refrigerator gives him nightmares of Dali-esque utility meters spinning out of control. I reasoned that maybe, after living for seven years on the Arizona-Mexico border with frequent Border Patrol flyovers, on a busy street favored by ambulances, near a Marine Corps Air Station and an Army Proving Ground where they explode ordinance; Taos was just too quiet.

It so happens I know just how noisy absolute silence can be. As a college student, I went far down under the earth’s surface with my Dad, whose job it was to turn the pump at the bottom of a gold mine on and off so the shaft wouldn’t flood with seeping groundwater. My Dad always got jobs like this while trying to stay alive in his mountain cabin in Eastern Oregon. He would have made a good Taoseño, though he wasn’t an artist but a common misanthrope. Anyhow, every twelve hours he’d walk the one mile down the sloping tunnel to the bottom of the shaft to flip the switch.

Dad turned off the pump and the string of light bulbs. We stood there in the silence and darkness. Time seemed to stop and I was sure I was falling over. I could hear Dad’s asthmatic wheezing. The longer I stood there straining to hear the silence, the more deafening it became what with my heart thumping, my lungs pumping and the whirring thrum of blood coursing around in my brain. Until then I had always imagined there was a motor at the center of the earth, an engine that turned a rotor that caused the planet to spin like a rotisserie chicken. The earth, it turns out is plenty quiet, it’s our bodies that are noisy. So, it made sense to me that the sound of Wayne’s own organs against a too quiet background were keeping him awake nights.

We’d both heard of the famous Taos hum so I decided to do some checking. According to old news articles still floating out there in the ether, in the early 1990s hum hearers convinced then Congressman Bill Richardson to send scientists and observers to our valley. (Paranoid types think their devices are still here listening.) These best scientific minds were instructed not to laugh as they examined electromagnetic field noise from electric gadgets, microwave communications and cordless phones. They also peered seriously at nearby military installations and the gigantic molybdenum mine on the other side of the mountain. Not finding the hum, they concluded that there must be something special about the people who hear the noise, some two percent of the population.

Around Taos Mountain it seems there are bona fide hum hearers and well, most everybody else. It figures my husband would be among the first group. After all he spends a lot of time listening for spiritual whispers from outer space. He’d finally heard something and now he couldn’t shut it off.

Working off my theory that is was just too blamed quiet, I solved the problem. I bought a humidifier and plugged it in by our bed. The soft whirring covers up the hum. God may have trouble reaching him but in my book that’s a small price.

I have some advice for all those people concentrating their psychic, spiritual and life force energies on hearing the call of Taos Mountain. Forget it, it’s not worth losing sleep over.

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t so you might just as well and let’s hope on Humbug Mountain that includes sleeping.

Here’s a link to the story the Albuquerque Journal North did recently about the Taos Hum.

http://www.abqjournal.com/north/268301north_news12-09-07.htm
Here’s a link to the video the Albuquerque Journal North did about Hum Hearers including you know who, my beloved Wayne.
http://video.ap.org/v/Legacy.aspx?g=884a878c-0cdd-4a1b-876e-3fffae85b518&f=nmalj&fg=copy