Pie Town, New Mexico

How on earth have I never heard of Pie Town, New Mexico before??

(It's 160 SW of Albuquerque. That's why.)

Still, now that it's on the radar, I don't think I'll be able to return to New Mexico without a detour. 

The Feature piece in Travel New Mexico from last August is here. 

The Smithsonian Magazine featured a piece by Paul Hendrickson on the town that you need to go read in full, but is so delightful, I have to include an excerpt here: 

Having known about PieTown for many years, I was itching to go. You’ll find it on most maps, in west-central New Mexico, in CatronCounty. The way you get there is via U.S. 60. There’s almost no other way, unless you own a helicopter. Back when Russell Lee of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) went to Pie Town, U.S. 60—nowhere near as celebrated a highway as its more northerly New Mexico neighbor, Route 66, on which you got your kicks—called itself the “ocean to ocean” highway. Big stretches weren’t even paved. Late last summer, when I made the trek, the road was paved just fine, but it was still an extremely lonesome two lane ribbon of asphalt. We’ve long licked the idea of distance and remoteness in America, and yet there remain places and roads like PieTown and U.S. 60. They sit yet back beyond the moon, or at least they feel that way, and this, too, explains part of their beckoning.

When I saw my first road sign for PieTown outside a New Mexico town called Socorro (by New Mexico standards, Socorro would count as a city), I found myself getting cranky and strangely elevated. This was because I knew I still had more than an hour to go. It was the psychic power of pie, apparently. Again, I hadn’t planned things quite right—I’d left civilization, which is to say Albuquerque—without properly filling my stomach for the three-hour haul. I was muttering things like, They better damn well have some pie left when I get there. The billboard at Socorro, in bold letters, proclaimed: HOME COOKING ON THE GREAT DIVIDE. PIE TOWNUSA. I drove on with some real resolve.

Continental Divide: this is another aspect of PieTown’s strange gravitational pull, or so I have become convinced. People want to go see it, taste it, at least in part, because it sits right on the Continental Divide, at just under 8,000 feet. PieTown, on the Great Divide—it sounds like a Woody Guthrie lyric. Something there is in our atavistic frontier self that hankers to stand on a spot in America, an invisible demarcation line, where the waters start to run in different directions toward different oceans. Never mind that you’re never going to see much flowing water in PieTown. Water, or, more accurately, its lack, has much to do with PieTown’s history.

The place was built up, principally, by Dust Bowlers of the mid- and late 1930s. They were refugees from their busted dreams in Oklahoma and West Texas. A little cooperative, Thoreauvian dream of self-reliance flowered 70 and 80 years ago, on this red earth, amid these ponderosa pines and junipers and piñon and rattlesnakes. The town had been around as a settlement since at least the early 1920s, started, or so the legend goes, by a man named Norman who’d filed a mining claim and opened a general store and enjoyed baking pies, rolling his own dough, making them from scratch. He’d serve them to family and travelers. Mr. Norman’s pies were such a hit that everybody began calling the crossroads PieTown. Around 1927, the locals petitioned for a post office. The authorities were said to have wanted a more conventional name. The Pie Towners said it would be PieTown or no town.

The Good Pie Cafe's Pie Chart, with photos

And make clear note of the hours to try a piece of that New Mexico Apple: you'd better head out of Albuquerque in the morning and go straight over, and only Monday through Wednesday. Got that?

It might just be easier to plan a road trip and camp for the weekend of the festival, (second Saturday of September) when everyone is sure to have their pies for sale.

Another Pie place of note in the "town" and one that is open Thursday through Sunday 11-4 is the Pie-O-Neer, featured in the New Mexico Travel link above. The Pie-O-Neer Website

Pie-O-Neer Facebook Page

4/7/13 Three Year Surgery Anniversary

Three years ago today

Two years ago today

One year ago today, I was so far removed from thinking about health issues, I didn't even mark the date. It was a Sunday and I could've gone out and done anything I pleased. Instead,  I posted about the weather. And the rest of the month and following were largely about the Red Rocks Boot camp I'd started, with zero idea so many of the exercises were pushing my hips (which burned  so often and my trainers always dismissed as "good") into their showdown with their own surgery this year. 

So this year? It's a Monday. I'm in bed again with the surgery table, ice on the hip, and grumpy. I do have this guy staring back at me, though. He turned out pretty cute, rushed paint job and all. 

by this evening, less grumpy, more puppy

Tennessee, June 1979: the incomplete collection

Another one on the list of "To Revisit for Scanning" is the only trip we took out east to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in June 1979. I think seven years ago when I was scanning through mounds of boxes, I was only interested in "people highlights" and didn't take the time I should to digitize more thoroughly. 

Here's all I've got to show for the Tennessee Trip at the moment. Ironically, about a quarter of them are in Mexia, where we picked up Me-Maw to go with us. 

Then there are a handful of the Opry

And, since these weren't in Texas yet and they were a proud sponsor of the Opry, my first trip to a Cracker Barrel:

And Sword of the Lord Publishing, apparently

This was not a camping trip, but we did have drives through the mountains and picnic lunches, as well as trains and battlegrounds, and Ruby Falls Caverns

A Bedridden Week in Review

I plugged my phone into the computer tonight and off-loaded my pictures. I was amused at all of the photos from the past week were entirely me, in bed, with my animals.

And that's pretty much the ENTIRE week. After the shot and the flare up, I took to bed, worked from bed, ate in bed, iced my hip all day long, and experimented with how little Vicodin I could get by on just so I would know where things stand.

So, starting from last Sunday, when I was alone, here's the whole week:

 

so I did get out of bed to help Bob get the second window in the dining area covered in the stained glass film to match our other window today. 

And, even though part of me thought I should just call it off, I kept to my plan to go out with Amber this evening. My friend Tanya had alerted me that the Target gorillas had new Easter bonnets, so before we hit up the Arts on Fire, we had to stop and check them out. 

It turns out they are all wearing necklaces with their names, and all are named after the characters from The Big Bang. I posed with Bernadette, my favorite. All their hats had flown off (are are anchored around their legs with fishing line) so we reaffixed them while we were admiring their Easter adornments.

So it was 4:00 by the time we got to Arts on Fire, and by the time we'd looked at all our choices and really gotten going, we only had about 90 minutes to paint them. Amber went for a travel coffee mug (comes with a lid).

And I chose an Owl jar. 90 minutes really isn't enough time to feather detail this little guy in alternating blue and green feathers as well as brown detailing, but I got him in just under the wire. I did 4-5 coats on him like they instructed so his paint would turn into the brilliant, dark colors after his glazing. Sam assures me this will happen, even though he's very pale right now.  I'll go back and pick ours up next Sunday once they've been fired. 

We followed that up with dinner at the place next door, The Landsdowne Arms, which turned out to be a really nice Irish pub.

Now THAT'S fish and chips!

I was telling Amber over dinner how glad we'd made this pact to get out and do something each month. It's so easy to get sucked into being in the sickbed and staying there. You're in pain, so you try to rest, but mostly you just end up thinking about the pain, which is the last thing you need to be doing. It doesn't help. It actually feels like it makes everything worse. 

Add to this reading about upcoming surgery and reports from those going through it, ahead of you, and commiserating, and it really can become a pit of despair. 

Getting out into the world and getting away from all of that for just a few hours was such a relief, even if I was limping around and popping pills. I'll take that over endless malaise and self pity any damn day!