Tag: southeastern new mexico

March 25, 2010

New Mexico Trip #3: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Texas

I admit, I was instilled with some serious anti-Texan prejudices as a child. The flatlanders came to New Mexico to ski (“If God had meant for Texans to ski,” went one typical grumble, “He would’ve given them their own mountains”). They set up resort enclaves in Ruidoso and Red River, and decorated them with chainsaw-carved bear statues. They came to Santa Fe to swan around saying, “How kaaaay-uuuute!” about everything, and then buying it.

But since I’ve grown up, I’ve met some perfectly excellent Texans, who have much better taste, and realized my attitude was probably not productive. Besides, now New Mexicans have moved on to hating Californians.

So now when I go to southeastern New Mexico, where the state line is just a formality, it’s kind of cool—like two vacations in one.

You get your green chile (admittedly, often mixed with cream-of-mushroom soup, which gives me the heebie-jeebies), but you can also get your barbecue. I ate some beautiful brisket in Carlsbad at Danny’s BBQ—the smoke ring was lurid, and the flavor was so good I didn’t even bother with sauce. Here’s my dad’s pork, which came in a portion bigger than his head, and we had to stuff it into sandwiches the next day.

I seem to have lost my photo of that (or perhaps I never took it–the beauty is just seared in my brain), so in lieu of that, here’s the menu board at Pat’s Twin Cronnie in Portales, NM, where fad diets are not catered to:

I didn’t realize how deep the Texan strain went until this visit, when I noticed the much-fetishized Blue Bell ice cream in grocery stores in Tularosa and Artesia. I imagine the Dr. Pepper down in those parts is also fresher.

I also saw that this doughnut shop in Hobbs had kolaches on the menu:

Unfortunately, the doughnut shop was closed by the time I rolled up. Actually, maybe for the best—if the paint job outside was any indication, it was the kind of place where I wouldn’t be able to decide what to order.

Another food item I associate with Texas is pecans. But they’ve got pecan trees all around Tularosa (and yummy pistachios!). And just south of Las Cruces is Stahmann Farms, the largest privately owned pecan orchard in the United States. Take that, Texas!

This week, I’m giving away copies of my Santa Fe guidebook–go here to enter!

March 24, 2010

New Mexico Trip #2: Know Your Meat

Southern New Mexico is a little alien to me because they do weird things with their chile down there, and they engage in businesses that you don’t see that much of up north, such as oil drilling, UFO spotting and cattle ranching. I was driving around Roswell, headquarters of “alien” in southern NM, when I saw the sign: Sale Barn Cafe.

I pulled in, as it’s well known that cafes near livestock auctions are good. Or at least it seems like they should be—even though of course they are not slaughtering the cow right out back, like you imagine.

The parking lot was packed, but it didn’t occur to me there was an auction in session until after I’d wandered through the cafe, cautiously nosed into the main building itself, perused the ads for ranch horses, and then heard the buzz of activity through the swinging doors behind me.

I stepped through and found myself in a short concrete hall leading up to the front, below the rings of seats. I stood there a bit, trying to decide whether I was welcome or not. When it became clear that the place was not going to fall silent, and the entire crowd of cowboy-hatted men was not going to swivel around to stare at me, I sidled in and took a seat, all casual-like. After a while, I took a little sound recording of the auction:

Roswell Cattle Auction

And after a bit more, I started taking some photos. When I eventually moved up in the bleachers for a better vantage point, a handsome younger rancher leaned over and said, “Hey, you’re one of those animal-rights people, aren’t you?” Best pickup line ever.

I said no, I wasn’t, but I was curious about where my meat came from. He went on to explain the whole system—how these cattle weren’t being sold for slaughter, but between ranchers to round out their herds. Ranchers running short of grass were selling extra head to those whose sections were just now getting green. He clued me in to the various codes, signals and marks on the cattle—it felt a lot like learning the basics of a new sport.

He also explained, as a side note, that they used to auction horses for slaughter here, but that got banned—and as a result, now New Mexico is infested with horses that have been set loose because their owners couldn’t afford to keep them and had no other way to get rid of them. I’d always suspected there was another side to the ‘protect the wild horses’ story, but had never heard it.

As I left, I asked the rancher for his name or a card. But he politely declined. He still thought I was one of those animal-rights people after all.

I’m running a contest all this week, for free copies of my Santa Fe guidebook–enter here.

March 23, 2010

New Mexico Trip #1: Setting the Scene

Fun New Mexico fact: It snows here!

Many people mistakenly think New Mexico is warm like, say, Arizona or Texas. This leads to many panicked purchases of coats and boots upon arrival in Albuquerque. The sun does shine nearly every day, but hell yeah, man–it snows here!

Which was precisely my fear when I first arrived. Snow can fall in huge blizzards anytime up until May, and that can put a serious cramp in my carefully timed research trips. Four years ago around this time, I got caught in a tremendously awful blizzard that shut down all the interstates, and I caught a tremendously awful cold while waiting out the storm at a friend’s house.

So for this trip, I concentrated on southern New Mexico. The Chihuahuan desert spreads over a lot of the southern part of the state, and there are fewer mountains–which still means it can snow, but the risk is a lot less.

For most of the trip, I toodled around the desert lands and the open plains of “west west Texas” (as eastern NM is sometimes known). I also headed west, and popped into Silver City, tucked up in the mountains, just after the snow had melted from the worst storm they’d gotten in like 80 years.

Normally, I think of the flatter parts of southern New Mexico as a little bleak and short on scenery. But in the middle of winter, the relative warmth is welcome, and the scenery was beautiful this time of year. Tiny spots of green were just showing up, and the winter had been so wet that the earth was darker, giving a sharper contrast to all the gold-blond scrubby plains that look so monotonous in summer.

I spent one long day driving from Silver City to Roswell (304 miles, when you take the direct route–which I did not). It was like watching an eight-hour film, with the clouds scudding overhead and the vistas opening up at each mountain pass. Near the end of the day, there was a stubby rainbow, and then the clouds turned bright pink and loomed up on the horizon like the biggest cake in the world. After the sun set, lightning crackled all along the horizon.

I’m running a contest all this week, for free copies of a Santa Fe guidebook–enter here.