It was shaping up to be a really less-than-action-packed trip, but then, on the last day, the snake thing happened.

I’d actually gotten done with my planned itinerary early. This absolutely never happens, which makes me wonder if I totally overlooked a page in the atlas. Beverly and I were a full day ahead of schedule when we rolled into Chama.

I had thought Chama was kind of a big deal, tourism-wise, because the cool old Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad starts there. Well, there’s that–but only that, and it turns out that railfan tourism isn’t really the bonanza I thought it was. Just because I like trains doesn’t mean lots of other people do too. Odd. Anyway, we visited all the motels and lodges and I took some pictures of the train, and we had pretty much done Chama in about three hours.

In the process, I happened to encounter my first real live case of meth mouth. Like Republicans, tweakers are a phenomenon you hear spine-tingling tales of terror about in New York City—usually via public radio—but you never see them in real life. But unlike Peter’s kindly Republican friends in Baltimore, this chick who was the caretaker at a Lodge That Shall Not Be Named (But Has Very Big Trees Out Front and Is Named for Them) did not make me feel as though there was hope for all humanity to live as one. I checked my wallet, and backed away when she coughed her hacking cough.

So that was Chama. The antidote to the speed-freak encounter was a very pleasant dinner in a place called Marion’s, where the waitress squeezed us on the shoulder a lot and the view was lovely. And then we split, and drove back home that very night.

What I’m getting around to saying is that this left me with a whole two extra days of unscheduled fun. I spent one day tooling around Albuquerque and checking up on things, and the next we bundled in the car and went down to the Salinas mission ruins around Mountainair.

To get off track again, let me just add that I was exceedingly grumpy about being accompanied. I can’t ever decide whether it’s better to have people along on a research trip (staves off total boredom) or go it alone (much faster, and sometimes cheaper, but you can’t drive and take notes at the same time). Invariably, whichever way it is, I’m always wishing it was the other. So on this last day of work, I was looking forward to just zipping out and doing it quick, and maybe listening to the radio really loud in the car.

But if Casey and Beverly hadn’t come, they wouldn’t have been there in the Shaffer Hotel dining room in Mountainair with me, ogling the beautifully carved and painted ceiling. The Shaffer is this great old Pueblo Deco building that was just renovated and opened in December ’05. About 10 minutes after I’d finishing writing in my notebook, “carved wood ceiling crawling with turtles, lizards, birds and snakes,” we heard this light smacking noise and looked over. A snake—an actual live one—had fallen out of the ceiling and was sitting there, stunned, on the table.

Sure, it was a very, very small snake, as big as my hand. And just a garter snake, not anything venomous. And it didn’t fall on our table—it fell on a table over by the window, where no one was sitting.

Casey nipped over and picked it up and then he went to show the kitchen staff. That wouldn’t have been my first move, because not everyone in the world has been raised not to fear snakes. But fortunately no one in the kitchen got too hysterical, and our waitress said, “Yup. At least it wasn’t a rattler.”

Oh, fair New Mexico. We love, we love you so.