Santa Fe After All

Feb. 21-25

Thursday in Deming our plans changed yet again.

The weather forecast for Santa Fe forecast had downgraded from snow emergency to a dusting.

I had planned to go to Santa Fe not to see the place but to visit Karl and Jeanie, my former next-door neighbors (in the days when I had a door of my own), and Jack T. and his wife, Sunny.

Jack and Karl both said I was being too cautious.

[Snow? Bah! Harry! Come on! The forecasts here are always way overblown! Jack T.]

[I second the motion, Harry. Get your ass up here. Karl.]

So Joanna and I spent a large part of the day devising a new itinerary. I think this may be Plan C. We’d spend the weekend in Santa Fe and then head toward San Antonio, making the trip in three days.

After making the new arrangements and finishing my previous travel log it was time for dinner. 

There’s a pizzeria in Deming called Forghedaboudit, which claims it offers “authentic New York Italian cuisine.” When I saw a name like that, and the website with the gangster caricatures, I wanted it to be good, but couldn’t keep myself from being skeptical. 

I read a few reviews and said, “What the hell. We can always throw the spaghetti agains the wall and eat somewhere else.”

But no. This was good. Sweet fennel sausage, dark red sauce, cheese ravioli. It felt like Mario’s or Lorenzo’s back in Jersey. 

I recommend that, the next time you go to Pancho Villa State Park, you stop in Deming for the ravioli at Forghedaboudit. And try the Chianti, too. It’s pretty damned good.

Friday we drove about four hours from Deming to Santa Fe. We took Interstate 25, which brought us to Truth or Consequences, N.M.

The town was once called Hot Springs, because it is the site of Geronimo Springs, a heavily mineralized natural hot water spring. People have been taking baths in it since prehistoric times. 

There’s a small park with a reconstructed bath house, a bare wood shack, really, surrounded by astonishingly colorful walls that look almost like Sicilian majolica.

A sign nearby told the story of an Apache raid on a family that was bathing in the hot springs. Two women were abducted. The U.S. cavalry was notified and gave chase. When the troops closed in on the raiders, the Apaches killed the women and escaped. 

I remember “Truth or Consequences” as a daytime TV game show when I was a child. We used to watch it in the summertime at my grandmother’s house. Before that it was a radio show.

According to Google, in 1950 the radio show’s host, Ralph Edwards, offered to broadcast the show from the first town that changed its name to Truth or Consequences. 

Hot Springs changed its name on March 31, 1950, and the show aired from there on April Fool’s Day. 

Edwards visited town every May for the next 50 years. The town’s annual fiesta began as a celebration of Edwards’s visits. 

Events include a parade, of course, in which one of the celebrities is the Hatch Chile Queen, named for the peppers grown in the area around Hatch, N.M. There is also a dance held in Ralph Edwards Park.

It sounds interesting, but I don’t know that it’s enough to draw me back to T or C.

We also took a brief detour as we went through Albuquerque. There are interesting things near ABQ, the National Petroglyph Monument, the cable car to Sandia Peak, and a pueblo that may be one of the sites that Coronado visited on his quest for the cities of gold.

But as I say, they are outside the city proper, so we didn’t detour to see any of them.

We got to the Holiday Inn Express on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe in plenty of time. We booted up and searched for places in the neighborhood for dinner.

There is a wide variety of good food in Santa Fe, only not much of it is in our neighborhood. We weren’t in the mood for Mexican, so the remaining choices were fast food and bar food.

The nearest bar with a reasonable beer lineup was the Second Street Brewery Taproom on Rufina Street, about a mile from the Holiday Inn.

I had a very tasty hamburger and a few very good house brews.

Double X ESB is easily one of the best ESBs I’ve had outside of London. I haven’t been in London for a while, so maybe Double X is right up there with the best that city offers. Nutty, not sweet, malt flavor is balanced with a good bitterness.

Joanna said she detected a bit of chocolate at the end, but I didn’t get that.

El Gato IPA has a hint of fragrance and a mouth-filling bitter bite. Overall, it’s OK, but not a favorite.

The better house IPA was the six-pack of 2920 that I took home. This had all the characteristics I’m looking for—lots of flavor, sharpness, bitter not sweet. All-around good.

It started to snow at dusk, just around the time that my first beer came. When we got home, I closed the curtains, opened a beer, and hunkered down for a siege.

Saturday morning we found more than a dusting, but far less than a foot. Three or four inches had fallen.

In the sun, the worst of it didn’t last too long. We stayed in hotel till about three in the afternoon. By then the snow had plenty of time to melt, and only a handful was left on the car. The parking lot and the roads were starting to dry.

We drove into the old town to see St. Francis Cathedral, but only got a glimpse of the outside. I couldn’t find a place to park.

The sidewalks were sloppy and the streets were not well plowed, and some may not have been plowed at all. There were several stretches covered with packed snow.

When we talked to Karl about it later, he said it was the most snow he has seen in the year and a half that he and Jeanie have lived in Santa Fe. Maybe Santa Fe is one of those places that doesn’t get enough practice at removing snow.

We went to dinner with Karl and Jeanie and Karl’s brother Stan, who was in town for the snow.

We went to Estevan, a restaurant in the old town where Wiley, Karl and Jeanie’s son, works as a cook in the kitchen.

He made the guacamole dish that Joanna had as an appetizer. It was a layered block that included sweet corn under the guac.

It was restaurant week and we all ordered from the special prix fixe menu.

After the guacamole, Joanna had rainbow trout and a cake made with almonds and chocolate. She was enjoying it at first, but then the chocolate flavor started to register, and that was it.

I had a poblano filled with mashed mushrooms and served in a sauce that looked like tomato, but was actually pureed pinto beans and garlic. The ribs had been taken out of the pepper, so it wasn’t overly hot, just enough to tickle the tongue. Overall it was delightfully savory.

I chose the rib-eye for my principal plate. I don’t eat rib-eye often, but this time I was in the mood for tender meat with lots of fat.

My dessert, tres leches cake, was something that I tried at least once before, but long ago. I managed to forget how downright delicious it is.

Sunday was Georgia O’Keeffe day. A museum of her work is across from the courthouse.

I have always been attracted to the surprising colors and biomorphic forms she created. She is one of the few abstract artists that I enjoy.

I forget when I first fell in love with Georgia O’Keeffe. Possibly when I was a teenager and she was still alive. What a bold and wonderful character. She followed her own vision. 

She was openly living with Stieglitz in the teens and twenties and making no apology for it. Talk about a strike for freedom.

The compositions she painted always keep in touch with the reality we share. The colors are bright. 

A documentary at the museum has excerpts from her interviews. In one she mentions that men criticized her use of color. As she put it, they told her that the only way to be taken seriously was to paint in dingy colors. “I liked colors,” she said.

O’Keeffe denied the sexual intent that has been interpreted in many of her images, and that may be true. There may have been no conscious sexual intent, or even any unconscious intent.

But the nodes of a bell pepper, the crease of a peach, and the human ass all share a similar structure. So do the petals of flowers and the human nymphae. And that similarity was noticed and remarked centuries before O’Keeffe was born.

I think the thing that appeals to me most about her work is its dreamlike reality. Has anyone applied the term “surrealism” to her work? It may fit.

After the museum, we took a stroll to the Santa Fe Plaza, a large square surrounded by antique, or at least antique-looking buildings. Most of them have porticos over the sidewalks. 

The buildings in the old town are required to be rendered shades of tan, but many have vividly colored wood trim. The plaza is ringed by examples of that.

When we arrived there were people under the porticos and on the square itself selling jewelry.

We were hungry by then and had lunch at Plaza Cafe. 

We each had a cup of chicken tortilla soup, which is chicken vegetable, and instead of croutons, it has strips of crisp tortilla.

We shared a great BLT that included avocado. In fact, just about any food called New Mexican has avocado in it. The soup had pieces of avocado.

Just to be a wise-ass, I had a beer, Elevated IPA from an Albuquerque brewer called La Cumbre. It is well made, bitter enough with lots of flavor and some fragrance.

When we came out of the restaurant, the vendors were packing up. Joanna browsed a few stands but managed not to buy anything.

Karl’s posole, which we had for dinner few hours later, didn’t have avocado. It did have tender pieces of pork and red, yellow, and blue hominy. 

We all sat around swapping stories after dinner. We turned the table on its side so everyone could sign it. We took the TV off mute to hear Lady Gaga sing at the Oscars.

We had to call it off early, though, because Karl and Jeanie needed to go to work in the morning. Stan had a flight at 6:30 or some other uncivil hour out of Albuquerque, which is an hour away.

Monday morning we got together with Jack T and Sunny for another great time telling stories. My dish, a chicken enchilada, was very colorful, with black beans, white sauce, red and green sweet peppers, a golden brown tortilla, and reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe.

We were facing a three-hour drive so there was no beer or margarita.

We saw some interesting things on the way. First we crossed a basin, a plain surrounded by mountains with no streams in or out. The only water in is precipitation; the only way for it to go out is evaporation.

A long section of the trip was through seemingly endless flat country. The land rolled a bit but we couldn’t see any mountains on the horizon. 

Much of the time we saw a few cows in vast pastures where they were dwarfed by the landscape.

We passed a few dying towns. One had a post office and a couple of run-down businesses, but the motel and many other buildings had been abandoned long ago.

We stopped to stretch next to a curiosity. Two large cutouts of men in cowboy hats stood facing each other across the highway. One was pointing while the other shrugged.

I have no idea what it was about. But it was fun to see out in all that empty country. 

We finally came into the heartland of conspiracy theory, our latest destination, Roswell, New Mexico. 

We managed to catch one of the “Men in Black” movies on television Sunday night to prepare us for this part of the trip.

When we entered town there were favorable omens. Next to the “Welcome to Roswell” sign someone had put a bottle of wine, just like an offering at Marie Laveau’s tomb. 

It had a label with little green bug-eyed men and was called El Marciano. Better than that, it was empty.

Does that mean one of the little green men in Area 51 managed to sneak out for a drink?

The town has a UFO research center. Maybe we’ll learn more there.

Till then, happy landings to all and to all a good night.

Harry