Scrap-Wood Feast

The orchard lay east and south of the house. Winnowed by years, hot summers and bitter winters, when I was young all that remained were two apricots, two peaches, and the singletons: a single apple, gnarled with age but far from infirm, and a barren cherry, infertile and alone. Those few steps from the back walk to lush flavor, juices running from mouths edge and lip, were a delight still unmatched by anything less carnal among adulthood's discoveries. A delight now gone, as first apple, then a peach, then cherry, then the last peach succumbed to age, and finally the two apricots failed after a twenty-eight below winter.
Bones of limb and trunk stood, the untended dead, until they fell and were left there still. The world spun and the lives of those who should have, who once, cared tumulted and failed too in the heats and colds of life, illness, and poverty.
Eventually, some of these bones were dragged away and piled with others, mill worked lengths of oak so old and left exposed so long that they had regained the twists and arthritic bends of their rooted life. This oak, saved from boxcars by my great-grandfather and by his son for projects unknown, and the fruit woods lay together, bleaching and cracking in the sun and storms, more kin to Temujin's distant cairns than to sweet ripe fruit or warm hand worked carpentry. And so... and so... the years passed.
My life here is a complex one, as maybe anyone's is raised on land, in a place that is of such strong character and all at once fire, hammer, anvil for, and fiber soft, strong, and raw woven into, the character of those generations lived, worked, fought, nourished, fucked, slept and died there. I've run from this place, run to it, fought and feared it, and at last undertaken to live with it. To make peace, if not friends, with the ghosts and make for myself, my family, a home. Bones into meal, my days are ones of working the remains of one-hundred years of life here into the next years, the next generations. Building from what they left things my ancestors would recognize and be proud of, but that also serve me and will serve my son and daughter in their lives beyond my ken. It is nourishing work, the soul well fed with calloused hands, and the place looking and feeling alive once more. To nourish soul, place, mind, and life, you must also nourish the body.
The landscape is littered with small  arroyos, washouts between the hard unnourishing knots of bunch grass, from the sides of which spill rusting cans and shattered jars. Long ago sheepherders, homesteaders, and cowboys lived here, much on what came out of cans. Venison and beef may hang but a few months out of the year here, and jerk dries the already dust parched mouth. The harvest of even small gardens goes further if put up in mason jars, and what a revelation a can of corned beef to go with it instead of hard salt-beef as dry as the stones. The ones who came before fed this way, leaving their trash piles rusty evidence of their passing, staying, eating, living.
We eat our share of canned goods. Much of it is even not real bad, and nothing keeps here like canned food, safe from spoilage and depredations of the larders enemies, mice and bugs. There is no substitute for fresh meat, though, and every trip to town brings excitement for whatever large cut we'll be bringing home. A smoke-house will be built, but until that day the town run brings omnivorous joy at the first meat not out of a can in two or more weeks.
Meat and bones, this is a natural pairing. The long dry, long removed from nourishment or use, bones of the orchard, the bones of the carpenter, can now be put to rest in use The small kitchen in the old adobe has only a cast-iron wood burning stove. Almost three square feet of smooth black iron cooktop, above an oven big enough for any Yuletide goose. Put to heat, entirely, by a firebox for only wood. Outside, in the long established New Mexico fashion, is a summertime kitchen, centered around a large wood brazier over which can be placed a grill or sheet-iron cooktop. If we eat it, it was likely made over a wood fire.
Nearly eighty years ago my great-grandmother planted an elm tree beside the overflow pond from the well. Still alive today, this elm has become gargantuan, though no official recorder has ever measured it the tree stands unique by size. On water nearly constantly every day of its life, the old elm reaches ten feet above the thirty-five foot windmill tower and stretches branches thirty-feet in every direction from its sixteen foot diameter trunk. The old elm has given rise to, and outlived, many children, sprouting all over the yard as elms do. Also as elms do, the old tree sheds branches from time to time, dropping whole limbs to become bones alongside its outlived children. These bones make a hot fire with a mild smoke, and though poor fair for heat compared to native cedar or piñon, elm makes a fine cookfire.
Today these bones are cut into short lengths and put into a kiln to turn into charcoal. The charcoal, cherry, elm and a bit of apricot, goes into my smoker below pounds of pork belly brought from town. The pork belly has been bathed in a sauce of honey, balsamic vinegar, coconut aminos, and spices and herbs including safe, garlic, pepper, and clove. As the sauce reduced, a few shattered black walnuts were added, over the brazier fire.
Brazier smoke mingles with the rising smoke from the smoker as the sauce bathed meat is placed onto the rack and closed in for the next six hours, to slowly cook swirled in the smoke of history, of life. When it emerges, tender and falling apart beneath the fork, it will nourish the body and soul of my hard working, fully living, family. The bones of trees that were, will have turned to powdered ash, and others will wait for the next days cook fires, and the nourishment it will provide.

The Santa Fe Super Chief and Albuquerque Depot, Circa 1943

This is a photo of the Santa Fe line's Super Chief, that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles. It was taken in 1943, at the Albuquerque depot, by Jack Delano.
This was posted on a military forum I hang out on earlier this evening. There are quite a few history buffs, train geeks and Americana junkies there, understandably, but I was still surprised to see something so close to home getting attention. Credit for bringing it to the forum posters attention goes to A Continuous Lean, where the photo is included in a neat look at the Super Chief.

I am kind of a geek for New Mexico rail history. My great-grandfather was the head machinist at the Belen, NM yards when the roundhouse was there. I grew up with pieces of steam locomotives in my backyard. I am not a huge train nut, but there is still something about them. Trains are cool. Trains are industrial, and mechanical and engineering-in-action and magic. The history and stories surrounding the railroad industry are equally magic. If you can't see it in this photo, you're lost and will never understand.
There are so many cool things going on in this picture, I'm sort of overwhelmed by it. It is a collection of some of the most iconic American images, all together as functional elements in a piece of reality. A reality long gone, before my time.
There is, of course, that fantastic engine. Its bright red and yellow preserved in perfect Kodachrome by Mr. Delano. There are men in denim work wear, carrying lunch, pumping diesel - Working and living a hard, earned, life. Men in suits, and hats (what happened to hats?). Those fantastic automobiles when cars really looked like, and were built like, something to be valued and appreciated.
Behind all this, in Mission-Revival glory are the old Albuquerque depot and the Alvarado Hotel, both gone and replaced by a tacky facsimile. Built in 1902, the Alvarado was one of the Harvey House hotels, and among the largest and most beautiful. It was demolished in 1970 and replaced with a parking lot. The rest of the original depot burned in the late Eighties or early Nineties. The reproduction buildings were put up later, a supposed tribute to the original.

A truly great photograph. An ordinary moment, frozen on film, that has in the passage of time become an amazing moment.

Tommy

"I saw the whole relationship right there," he laughed with her as I sat down coffee in hand, "But that's okay, it was a good breakup. I got the place, you got the instruments and the dog. Even though it was my dog..." His grin opened up from the long white mustache and goatee. Old laughter, lascivious once, now a joke on itself.
On the outside, it was just an old hippie, better than sixty and sharing laughter with a couple twenty-something kids in a small town coffee shop.

He had been sitting there on the couches when my friend and I walked in. Back to the window and drinking coffee, paper held open to the crossword. An old flat brimmed hat, and a canvas musette bag beside him on the deep cushions of the couch. His hair, white and long, but clean shaven from his cheeks and sides of his jaws, and back lit. Old clothes, but clean, with a well cared for leather vest, and lots of shined silver and polished stones around his neck. Another of the peculiar creatures that lurk the coffee shop, an unknown who looked somehow so right for the place.
My friend and I, lost in our conversation and food sat opposite him in the same corner circle of lounge chairs and couches. Our talk ranged music and tattoo's, she was wearing a fresh one, and life in general. We sandwiched on turkey and avocado, drinking coffee and lemonade.
The gent opposite continued his crossword for a time, and then rustled to life in a creak of leather couch, folding of newspaper and shaking out of his tobacco pouch. I watched him with interest, his leathery hands sunk into his makin's with delicacy. Pinching and distributing just the right amount of fine tobacco, and gently rolling the fragile paper with an unconscious competence of practice. I smiled, thinking of my father and all the men I had grown up around, and of the pouch in my pocket, full of hand rolled cigarettes and makin's. "Someone who stills rolls his own" I said, unaware of where those words would take me.
The next hour was filled with story telling, rich with mirth and memory. A wanderer from time to time and place to place, he told us about old girlfriends, houses, gigs and rooms full of drying peyote. He laughed at those girlfriends who had gone straight, become soccer moms and grandmothers. About this town, thirty years ago, and the "hippies and Techies" running wild and painting the town green for St. Pats. He showed us a picture of his own grandkids, from Philadelphia, a place distant in both miles and time, and talked about his daughter. How he'd reassured her that she was no wilder than her mother had been, a young Sicilian girl rebelling against Catholic school and marrying a nice Sicilian boy. "But you ain't supposed to run off with the hippies, ah no... So that's just what she did," he paused, "She was wild, and ran like the wind..." and he smiled to no one in the room.
The old hippie continued, and somewhere his history with Socorro county became the topic, his coming full circle again to old places, and busking in front of grocery stores. And then he let drop a gem.
"When I first got here, I ended up out on the other side of Ladrone mountain, down by the Salado."
This man, this stranger from far and wide, kids in Philly, and friends in the Pacific Northwest, had uttered the name of one of the most personally sacred places to me in whole world. Riley, the little ghost town on the Rio Salado, where I've been to a lifetime of matanzas, fiestas, weddings and funerals. I saw Riley every day as a kid, on the 45 mile drive into town for school. It's about as middle of nowhere as anywhere on the Earth, in relation to anyplace ever called "somewhere".
He spoke of the old hippie place, and the travel trailer with the metal siding (that's still out there) that had been his, and of the people.
"Did you know the Bustamante's?" I ask
"Herman? Oh yeaah..." and the names went on.
"The ranchers, they didn't much know what to make of us, but those guys, they thought we were all right."
And he told us a story of one of the old men out there, a name I forgot to remember, "The hippie girls, they go down there in the river for mud baths, and he rides down there and sees them. Of course, 'bout the only woman he's ever seen naked is his wife, and he just wants to get outta there, man. But the hippie girls, 'Oh hey man, can we pet your horse? He's soo pretty', they wanna pet all over that horse. And all of a sudden, the sky is real interesting, and that cactus over there, never noticed it, I'll look at it, and anything but them naked hippie girls."
After another forty-five minutes of talking and laughter, I finally got his name; Tommy. We shook hands, and he made a mental not to himself, "Morgan the Blacksmith, and Rebecca the... artist people, band posters."

It wasn't long after that we parted ways, shaking hands with Tommy and going on our way, bellies full of food, coffee and laughter.
Tommy, who dried peyote in that little house on California that never got torn down during the renovation of Socorro's main drag. Who dated a girl that wrecked her van in a canyon in the northern reaches of the state, and lived down there for a year, and then ran into this girl 30 years later here, and could only laugh at her minivan and pearls. Tommy, "the old hippie, crazy guy", who played Arlo Guthrie songs for an autistic girl in a home, and got the first reaction anyone had ever seen her give anyone, singing "...bringing in two keys, don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs man." Tommy, the random coffee shop encounter with memories, and a shared past. Well, Tommy, The path is strange and twisted, and I'll see you out there.