Santa Fe
I had never felt air like that before - thin, but not clean. It felt like a soft invisible dust on my face. I thought about the air as I sat in a shoddy lawn chair and stared at the mid-morning sky. I had learned to examine the sky early in the day before the yellow sun would begin to squeeze my eyes. The cloudless sky was a blue beyond blue, incompressible, vivid, and fixed; with no sense of motion in it. The two, the air and the sky, were odd and foreign to me, as much as they were intense and beautiful. I knew taking a photograph of the sky would be senseless. That is why I never pointed my camera upwards when I was in Santa Fe over twenty years ago.
I was twenty-nine years old at the time. I had gone to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to be an intern at the Coyote Café. I wanted to encounter a gastronomy different from the one I had been cooking in Toronto’s kitchens in the late 1990’s. At that time, Toronto’s food scene toggled between Cal-Ital cooking and Pan-Asian French. Grilled portobello and goat cheese salads with a balsamic glaze, or agnolotti pasta doused in truffle oil, dominated one menu, while the words ‘sesame seed oil’, ‘shitake mushrooms’, and ‘wasabi mash potatoes’, ruled the other menu. Both sides claimed tuna tartars, laced with soya sauce and mirin, layered on crushed avocados, presented in cylindrical form and a scallion ribbon garnish, as their own. These ubiquitous words on Toronto’s menus, and in the food I was preparing, at the time led me to believe they encompassed all cuisine. Then one fortunate day, a new word appeared: chipotle.
My chef had handed me a small can with ‘chipotle in adobo sauce’ written on its side. He said it was tasty and told me how he wished it to be used. I opened the can and dug out one of the soft moist chiles. The chile was coated in a deep red sauce, thinner than tomato paste and a tad shiny. I detected a light smokiness as I lifted the can and chile to my nose. I placed the chile on a cutting board and began to chop. I stopped, slid my finger across the cutting board and gently brought it to my mouth. I froze as I processed the taste; it was like a new word one intuitively understood but its definition remained elusive. I had eaten Mexican food, even worked as a food runner at Carlos & Pepe’s in Montreal when I was at university, but I had never tasted anything so clear, abrasive, expressive, and engaging. A new world of pleasure was on my tongue and in my mind. I suppressed my giddiness and continued with the recipe. I chopped the chipotle and mixed it into a cup of mayonnaise. I then added a teaspoon of the adobo sauce from the can, a squirt of lime juice and a pinch of salt. I tasted the sauce for heat and balance, adjusted the acidity, and passed the mixture through a sieve, removing all particulates, such as chile seeds and skins. The sauce was then added to a squeeze bottle. Like many of the zombie cooks in Toronto at the time, I had the day before made a similar concoction with hoisin sauce and mayonnaise.
When served, the ‘chipotle-mayo coulis’ was squeezed, splattered, and squirted onto a triangular black plate like a Jackson Pollock; pink lines swirled and crossed over three pan-seared scallops arranged in the center, resting on a bed of mesclun greens. The delicate smoke, with a rich-tang and a sweet-bitter heat, danced lightly on the palate, and complemented the buttery-ness of the scallops. That inspiration led me to the Coyote Café and the heart of southwestern cooking. It is also the reason I found myself, at the age of twenty-nine, in the middle of a youth hostel’s compound, sitting in a chair looking at the sky.
I thought about all that, as I leaned forward and rested my elbows on my knees. Where I sat the earth was red brown, like partially dried blood, and crept onto the grey-white patio stones in front of my chair. Behind me was the small bunkhouse where I slept. Ahead, the main building, with larger dorms, the facilities of a hippie-hotel, and the front desk. Both buildings were adobe in style, built with sundried mud bricks and earth mortar that is smoothed down before it’s dry, leaving a soft texture and a beige brown colour. The walls that encompassed the whole youth hostel were made from the same material. In the corner was a weedy mesquite tree in its yellow mustard bloom. Beside the chair, in the dirt, were cigarette butts and three beer bottle caps - two Michelob, one Budweiser.
I thought how odd Coyote’s kitchen seemed to me. How it wasn’t what I’d been expecting. Because of Coyote Café’s fame, I assumed it would have been like the other high-end restaurants I had interned in before, in Montreal and Toronto. Instead, it was like a Roadhouse, with big food and big flavours, with no apparent finesse. Big Marinated steaks, with a choice of ‘Red’ or ‘Green’ sauce. Even the kitchen was big, with twenty-five cooks or more, spread over two shifts, with a cooking line in the dining area and a prep area behind. I had never worked in a place that large, nor had I ever desired to do so. All the cooks knew how to work the ingredients and make the recipes; this cooking was second nature to them, whereas I struggled and could not fit the ingredients and recipes into my cooking vocabulary. Honestly, I was lost. None of the principles I had learned in culinary school, or the kitchen I had trained in, applied. There were no clear sauces with subtle singular flavours, served with small portions of choice proteins. The food did not evolve through a coherent tasting menu. What I was seeing felt like a detour to my career, like a country carnival. Fun, but not connected to who I thought I was - a cook or chef. It was not an existential culinary crisis; those would come later in my career and were often softened by the events of this day I am recounting. But, as I sat in that chair, I felt out of place with the food I was cooking. I could not see myself in it.
Just as I made this observation, I looked back up to the sky and noticed a bird of prey. I watched it glide high above, as it surveyed the earth below. The bird appeared to stop in mid-air and hang in a single spot. I had seen seagulls leisurely hang over the ocean, enjoying the wind, but this one seemed to have purpose as it hung, a quiet patience. Then the bird veered to its right, pulled its wings in, and descended at a remarkable rate. With a dash it was out of my view. I was left with an empty sky and anticipation - I wanted to see the bird’s reward. I wanted to see it return in the air with an animal in its claws and flap away into the distance. After a few minutes the bird did not reappear, and I began to accept I would never know if it caught its prey.
I breathed a deep breath, smelled the remnants of distant wood smoke, and considered my new nickname, the one I was christened with on my first day in the Coyote’s kitchen – ‘Choo-Choo’. My christening had taken place very quickly. I was introduced to the team as Ronnie Atchison from Canada. One person sang a jingle I had never heard before, another joined in on the chorus, and a third said “Choo-Choo, that is what we will call you”. They explained that the jingle belonged to an old TV commercial from the 1970’s and 80’s, for a local railway called ‘Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe’.
The kitchen was filled with nicknames just as blunt as mine. ‘Whiskers’ sported a large moustache, ‘Pilot’ attached the same airplane-pin to each cap he wore, ‘Bel’ was from Biloxi Alabama and spoke with a beautiful southern accent, and most egregiously, ‘Tex’, whom, I naively asked one night as we drank post work beers, “Why ‘Tex?’. He sighed and smiled, and answered, “Because I am from Texas.” I looked astonished at its simplicity. He then added laughing “I know, it is only one state over, but that is what they saw”. I never did learn his real name, though I did know his story. He bugged out of Amarillo Texas one night, in a pickup truck, with only his Knife Roll, a mattress, and a plastic shopping bag of clothes. His girlfriend stood at the top of the driveway with a shotgun as she yelled at him. He never said what she was yelling about, nor was I was sure if the shotgun part was true, but he was a very affable person, and I could see him drifting away from his problems - as affable people tend to do.
My co-workers told me about a plaque in the main square that explained the jingle, though few of them had read it. My plan that day was to find the plaque in the main square and learn the origins of my name.
I rose from the lawn chair and went back into the bunkhouse, changed my clothes and secured my luggage in a locker beneath the bed. With a flush of anxiety, I double checked if my wallet and key were in my pocket before leaving the bunkhouse. Then I crossed the compound to the main building. Midway, I stopped and looked back. Everything remained still: in the center, the empty lawn chair with its baby-blue and light green vinyl strapping; on the left, the bushy mustard- yellow mesquite tree. In the background, from side to side, a sand-brown wall and a blue-sky banner above; in the foreground, the deep red earth was interrupted by greyish-white patio stones in the middle; on the right, the beige bunkhouse with its only window ajar and dull reflections in each of its eight glass panes - a flat black mark to indicate the door. The image contained an impression of humans in their absence – neither here, nor there. I looked at it for a moment, turned, and walked through the main building to the exit, a gate framed with old oil-soaked railroad ties.
From the youth hostel I stepped onto Cerrillos Road, a commercial drive that led from the highway to the core of Santa Fe. I first became fascinated with Cerrillos Road when I took the airport shuttle to the hostel. An untamed cluster of business trades, small lunch cantinas, used car lots, mechanics garages, and many tire and wheel shops. Chihuahua Tires, Monkey’s Tire Shop, Amigo Tire & Auto, and on and on. In front of their stores the tires were stacked ten-or-more feet high, and in the window display, their profiles were perched on stands like trophies. I questioned the need for so many tires, in a desert, with no snow. Then one day, I noticed a small Honda Civic cruise past with tires so wide, they protruded outward from its body. It felt awkward and odd to me. The old Dodge minivan, creeping along like a snail, on thin tires like elastic bands wrapped around flashy hubcaps, its carriage gliding a few inches above the road’s surface, had an impractical style – a rolling oxymoron. Added to that, a VW bug bearing monster wheels slowly navigated a street corner and a parked Toyota Corolla blushed brilliant whitewall tires. Every car had tires they were not born with. Like the cook’s nicknames in the kitchen, the cars adopted a new persona when they were on the road. Perhaps it was American individualism at play, I was never sure.
I was enjoying Cerrillos Road’s aesthetics - how all the signs’ fonts and the adobe structures’ timeless designs dislodged my sense of the proper - when I came across a gathering of people. They stood in a circle in the empty lot across from the gas station at a bend in the road. Parked behind them was an old greyhound bus. I did not see the bus, or the people, the night before when I returned from work and bought cigarettes and beer from the gas station. They must have arrived early in the morning. It was Sunday.
They looked like lost Deadheads still traveling the road after Jerry Garcia had died five years earlier. They sang a song I did not recognise as they passed a large eagle feather from one to the next. As the song progressed some resisted passing the feather on, while others rushed it onward. The song ceased and the feather was left in the hands of a young man. He was about the same age I was at the time. He was lean and wore a loose open dress shirt under a suit vest and bellbottom jeans - good looking, a young Jim Morrison. He cleared his throat and spoke.
“I know you guys don’t think I do a lot. Like, I know that.”
I slowed my pace and maintained my course.
He continued “But I do stuff. I do. And it hurts that everyone is angry with me.”
A few others with their heads down gently bobbed them in agreement.
“I know I don’t clean or cook. But I am always there to listen. And to share a bed. You know, community stuff.” A woman in her late thirties raised her head and gave him a stern stare, just as two young women - barely twenty - giggled. Someone else huffed in protest, another shushed, and an elderly man tried to keep decorum.
“He has the feather, let him speak!”
A moment of silence, then the man with the feather spoke again “It is about love, that is what is most important.” More heads bobbed, “and I am not good at cooking or cleaning. But I want to stay with the family; you are all cool. I will help more. This is my Sunday word.”
“Pass the feather my brother.” The elder commanded.
The song commenced again, and the feather continued its rounds.
I was almost stopped by my desire to hear another Sunday Word, imagining what scandals a troupe of lost souls could harbour, when my feet helped me resist the temptation and carried me past the vacant lot and into Santa Fe’s centre.
I found the main square, or Plaza as they called it. It was organised like spokes on a square wheel. In the center stood a memorial pantheon and a gazebo. Along the paths were benches in sets of twos and ornate trash cans. The surrounding streets were lined with Spanish colonial style buildings. I roamed up and down the paths searching for the plaque. The sun was higher in the sky and my head was a little soupy from its deceptive heat. As I felt a touch of dementia, I found the bronze plaque. In fact, it was two plaques, each on the opposite sides of a very geometric piece of limestone that rested on a three-foot high granite block. One read:
“On The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe”
A popular song written by Harry Warren and Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The song was published in 1944 and won the 1946 Academy Award for Best Original song for the movie The Harvey Girls, sung by Judy Garland.
The popular song also topped the charts when recorded by Bing Crosby and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
The City of Santa Fe wishes to recognise the great contribution the song has brought to our proud community.
(View lyrics on the other side of this trapezoid)
May 13th, 1983
As instructed, I walked around the trapezoid and read the other side:
“On The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe”
Do ya hear that whistle down the line? I figure that it's engine number forty-nine She's the only one that'll sound that way On the Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe See the old smoke risin' 'round the bend I reckon that she knows she's gonna meet a friend Folks around these parts get the time of day From The Atchison, Topeka And The Santa Fe
(Read story of these lyrics on the other side of this trapezoid)
May 13th, 1983
I was briefly happy to see my name in print and tried to hum the tune I had heard in the kitchen. But my attention was drawn to the word trapezoid. I had heard of the New Age beliefs in pyramids’ powers, first observed in pyramids of Egypt. How any pyramid structure helped to preserve food, sharpen razors, aid in meditation, and improve one’s sex life. Perhaps people had the same belief in trapezoids, based on the shape of ancient Mayan temples; Santa Fe felt like a place where new-ageism and the occult could foment, and all lines of reason could be blurred.
This train of thought was quickly interrupted by a loud angry voice. A man wearing a yellow-collared navy-blue golf shirt tucked into pleated khaki pants, with short well-groomed hair, was yelling into a cell phone. Some person had done something wrong at some office. The man looked like an angry L.L. Bean model, ranting as he posed in the middle of the plaza. No one else in the vicinity seemed to notice this odd outburst, furthering my sense of alienation in Santa Fe.
Then the day’s heat continued to rise in a manner I was unaccustomed too, the sun’s pulses masked by a dry breeze, and I felt disorientated by it and the angry man. I looked for refuge. Even if I walked far from the angry man, the thin leaves on the trees in the plaza provided little shade. In a bit of a panic, I looked around for options. I saw a gift shop in one of the buildings lining the plaza and headed in its direction.
The small gift shop was adjacent to the Governor’s Palaces’ entrance. I began to peruse the postcards and noticed the I LOVE CHILES tea-shirt on a small teddy-bear, when I heard the clacking of footsteps coming from a connecting corridor. It was a security guard who, I learned, doubled as the store’s clerk.
“Howdy”
“Hi”
“Welcome to Santa Fe’s smallest store.” He said with a chuckle, then continued “Not sure if that is true, but I have fun sayin’ it. So small, it does not even employ a full-time cashier, I double as security guard, you see.” Another chuckle, as he pointed at his badge.
I smiled back and turned back to the post cards; one card had caught my eye. It was an old map, possibly from an advertisement from the early part of the twentieth century. The map showed New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Mexico, and a train line. Above, in a font from the time, read “The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Line,” and beneath the map showing all the stops, it read in smaller print, “A Truly Trusted Service”. I took the card to the counter to pay.
“Classic, love this one. Lots of history there. Nice choice.”
“Yes, I saw the plaque in the square. My name is Atchison.”
“You don’t say. Funny thing about that plaque and the old A.T. & SF, the line never reached Santa Fe proper, when it was first built. Still doesn’t today. We are connected by what they call a spur line.”
“Really? So why does the name include Santa Fe?”
“The rail company had planned to come to Santa Fe, named it as such Santa Fe. But when the surveyors and engineers finally made their way down here, they realized Santa Fe would be too difficult to build the line through. So, they made a stop at a little town called Lamy, before heading down to Albuquerque; they were the ones that prospered from the railway, we only got the name.”
“Too bad.”
“Not really, it kept Santa Fe a special place. None of us would want to live in Albuquerque, we love Santa Fe. It would not be like it is today if the train came through. A fortunate miscalculation… some would say.” He chuckled, as I paid and took my leave.
I returned to the sun and the building heat. The angry man was gone and a group of tourists - old people - were looking at the pantheon monument in the middle of the plaza. I saw the tourist bus parked beside the plaza. I knew their day was planned down to the food they would eat, and for a moment I was envious. I had no idea what direction to turn, or where to eat. I sat down at the nearest bench.
I studied the post card. The railway line’s path meandered from Colorado down to Mexico and westward. It looked more like twisted driftwood than an organised plan. The post card did not show the topography of the region, leaving one to imagine the mountains, valleys, and rivers the train snaked through. I had just begun to think about how the map would look if the railway was built today - straighter lines, greater efficiency – when I heard Mr. Shaw’s voice for the first time.
“What do you have there?”
“A postcard.” I had not noticed the man, Mr. Shaw, when I sat down. He was sitting to my left, on the bench next to mine.
“And what is on the card?”
“A map.” The man was relaxed, his left leg crossed over his right. His right elbow leaning on the arm of his bench. He wore a thin dark suit jacket that was rumpled and lived in. His pants were a different material and colour, but not jeans. A dark green canvas sash-bag strap crossed from his right shoulder to his left hip, the bag itself was out of my view. His hat was a floppy thing, with a wide brim, a ribbon, and a pinched crown, more of an oversized fedora than a cowboy hat. Underneath his hat, his face was a warm, deep, leather; someone who worked and lived under the sun, making his age elusive.
“Oh, of Santa Fe?”
“No, the old train line. Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.”
“Humm. Do you love trains?”
“Yes, but that’s not why I got it. My last name is Atchison, and I had never heard of the rail company.”
“It is famous around here. Where are you from?”
“Canada.”
“El Norte.” It was the first time I heard his accent, a rough Spanish one. Barely discernible in English, but lively in his mother tongue. “That makes sense, the Santa Fe line never got to Canada. As far as I know.”
As he said this, I recalled my father having once said all the railway lines were connected across the continent. I thought about that as he continued.
“What are you doing here? I hope you don’t mind me asking. You don’t look like the tourists over there”, pointing to the group of elderly tourists, who were now milling about the Gazebo as their guide pointed towards its roof.
“I‘m here working at the Coyote Café. Learning how to cook. An internship.”
“Nice. Do you like it?”
“Yes. But. I am not sure.” The man’s eyebrows rose a little as I said this.
“Why not?”
“Not sure. I came down here to learn how to work with the ingredients. I thought I would see something like I saw back home. Just more of it. Back home I work in fine dining. Cooking that has finesse. It’s hard to explain. The Coyote Café is famous, but I don’t see myself in it, like I hoped I would have.”
“I have heard of it, but I have never had the pleasure to try it. I’m curious, what are they doing in there?”
“The food is big. Like in a roadhouse. All the sauces are gloopy like paint, from a paint store. Lots of heat, nothing subtle.”
“Is this a bad thing? Sounds nice to me, paint stores are colourful.”
“It is not what I’m used too. It’s all too much. I can’t make sense of it. But the truth is, I don’t even know what I want to cook.”
At this point, without taking his right arm off the bench’s armrest, he turned his head away from me and looked downward over his left shoulder. He began something with his left arm. I discreetly leaned forward to see what he was doing. He was pouring tea into two cups. The cups were made of unvarnished clay and had no handles. They looked as if they were shaped by untrained hands or intended for an art gallery. The pot was a camp-style tin coffee pot, light blue freckled with white. A small piece of canvas lay beneath the tea service.
He turned towards me and offered a cup. I obliged. Then he took the other one for himself. With his look of encouragement, I took a sip. I saw no reason not to. There was no malice in his face. The tea tasted more bitter than I was used to, it was different from any tea I had tasted before.
He smiled, gave me a cheer, and drank his tea down in one gulp. I followed suit. He took my cup from me and placed the two cups back onto the canvas nap. Along with the small pot, he folded and rolled the tea service into a small bundle and placed the bundle into his bag. He then looked at me. His eyes were brown and open. He was smiling.
Now let’s take a moment, before the hallucinogens of the peyote kick-in. To look at myself, as a young man, sitting in a park, in a strange land, accepting tea from a stranger, and soon flying high for hours to come. As I look at that day, I am still surprised how calm that young man remained. He never panicked. Even after he realized he had been drugged. Today, I am still not sure if the calmness was due to the ‘tea’ or the demeanour of Mr. Shaw, and honestly, I gave up worrying about that years ago.
“Let me see your postcard.”
I passed him the postcard,
“You see, my friend. Here is the first clue to your dilemma.”
I shifted closer to him and leaned in as we looked at the card. My stomach began to turn, a side affect from the peyote. He continued, “It is in the railway map. Look at all the places it is going, down into Mexico, across to California, over to the Gulf in Texas, and to the north and Colorado. It is like a metal string, tying all our people together. Or acting as a river that runs both ways. Taking goods back and forth. You see, the food you cook comes from all these places.”
“Hmm. By the way, what was in that tea?” I asked.
“A story.” he laughed, and his face shimmered from an energy wave, which travelled from the back of his head, through his flesh, to his lips. “A story, my friend, a story. Let me tell it to you. It’s told with the food we eat. You will see. It is fun. And perhaps, in a small way, it will help you with your cooking.”
He gestured back to the postcard, “You see the railway. Your railway company line.” He pointed his finger at the post card, the veins on his hand drew down his finger to his fingernail, that was shaped like the head of a fountain pen. “It goes over borders, like air. You cannot think of New Mexico or old Mexico, Texas, or California, to find the answers to your food. You will be trapped in state lines that do not exist in food. The railway’s path finds the food.” As his finger traced the map, illustrations of mountains, valleys, and rivers emerged; villages with trails of smoke rising above and farm fields being tended to. It was all too much, and I looked up for relief. My chest embraced the sky and I felt vertigo, followed by unburdened tranquility.
“Come with me! I will show you.”
He stood up and began to walk out of the plaza, confident I would follow.
“What is your name?” I asked him as we briskly walked.
“It is Mr. Shaw.”
“Like Shaman?”
He laughed “No, just Mr. Shaw. With a ‘w’, and no ‘man’.”
We walked along a paved road that turned into a broken cobble street, and finally dirt. The town had disappeared, and we arrived in an old market. It felt like we walked for ten minutes, but it could have been three hours, I am not sure. Nor did I desire to find out after that day.
Old wood planks made the table stall. A burlap-like material, supported above by greyed wiry tree branches and heat-twisted cracked posts, blocked the sun. Behind each stall stood a man or a woman, some had smiles, others looked detached. A refreshing wind blew over the chiles in the wicker basket and chimed the ones hanging from the stall’s rafters to dry. in the background I could hear the market, the people chatting, laughing, ordering, crates being stacked, and tables shuffled. The sounds of a restaurant without the constricting walls. Here the same sounds drifted into empty fields. A fragrance from the chiles could be detected beneath the smell of smoking of Jalapeños in the distance. A rapture of fiery reds, bumblebee-yellows, rich tans freckled with black spots, vibrant greens, and death-like purples, blanketed the market.
“When a Chile is fresh it has one name, when it is dried or smoked, it has another. My friend over there is smoking Jalapeños. They are no longer a Jalapeño after they are smoked. It becomes a chipotle. It is like a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. If you look at a beautiful butterfly, you do not think of the caterpillar it once was. You think of the butterfly, and you call it as such. One flies, the other walks. Both are beautiful, but different. Just as a butterfly can no longer be a caterpillar, a chipotle is forever chipotle. With every transformation there is a little something left behind. Something lost. But the birth that follows can be as beautiful as the butterfly or the chipotle.” Mr. Shaw said this with reverence as he stared at me. Then he sank both his hands into a basket of brilliant red, yellow, and orange habaneros, and lifted them up with his long fingers. His eyes radiated sparkles as he watched them fall from his hands like gems.
“These chiles are our home. When we taste a chile, we are home.”
The old woman behind the stall made a queer smile at Mr. Shaw. Then she gestured we buy the chilees that had fallen from his hands. Mr. Shaw smiled, and like a courtesan said “No my lady. Today is about educating my friend! There will be no purchases today!”, and with that we were onto the next stall.
“We have the Habaneros, whose seductive sweet fruit will burn a lover’s soul. The mighty Poblano! The base of a symphony, or a knight on guard, always present in its role! The quick-lipped Serrano adds a dash of spiciness and then is gone. While the famed Jalapeño builds and builds its heat, green and strong.”
His language sounded like accidental poetry, a monologue from an archaic play. As he spoke, the chiles began to spring into character on the table, each playing a role. With great delight I wanted to touch them as I had never touched them before. To talk with the chiles, ask them questions, investigate the different roles their characters may perform, to hear their motives and fears. The baskets of chiles became small theatrical stages, places where stories could be found. The baskets no longer held the ingredients for a recipe, they held a spectrum of life and I wanted to eat it.
“My friend, we must see the other characters – the dry cousins,” Mr. Shaw directed. “We have the Ancho. Feel its leathery strength.” He passed me the dry ancho, it felt like a soft wrinkled baseball mitt.
“It is dry, but not dry” I said to him. “The dry chiles I have felt before were brittle.”
“They were old and forgotten. Like the dried tarragon in your parents’ cupboard.” For a moment I believed Mr. Shaw had somehow seen their faded tarragon.
Mr. Shaw adopted a serious tone. “Dried chiles should be treated like spices, lightly toasted before being placed in rejuvenating water, bringing them back to life.” He turned towards me and said in a rabbinical manner “but don’t forget to remove the seeds before placing them into the water. The seeds are special and should be saved. One can always use chile seeds in a kitchen.” Then he lifted the ancho into the air and preached, “It was once a Poblano. Now it is an Ancho. After it has bathed in purifying water, to deplete the bitter and the dirt, its Fruit and Flesh will return!” He held the ancho chile high in the air, and he clenched his right arm to his chest as if holding a bible. His ecclesiastical words echoed across the market, as I stood astonished by the spectacle I was witnessing. “Remove the re-born fruit and discard the purifying water that has become unholy. The water now possesses a dirty bitter sin that will triumph over goodness!” He looked at me severely and commanded “You will not work with sin!” In my peyote induced state, I shuddered as he preached. Somehow, he knew I had not discarded the impure water the day before and rendered a sauce inedible. I now understood the sin I had committed.
With fear in my eyes and cinders in my mind, Mr. Shaw calmed me down and took me closer to a basket of Guajillo chiles. Each was four-to-six inches in length and one inch wide. Their red-clay colour was smooth; partly shiny, partly dull. Mr. Shaw picked one up and whispered as if we were in a speakeasy. “El Norte, this is the Guajillo chile, very popular. It permeates dishes with a taste of our earth, the red of the desert, and the tobacco of the cigar O’Keeffe and Kahlo shared in New York in 1933. Smell it, you will see it.” I smelt. For a moment I saw the two artists laughing as they drank tequila and stood in front of an open balcony. Behind was the New York night skyline. Georgia leaned lightly against the door frame as she passed the cigar to Frida, who drew a puff and blew it outward. Their laughter suddenly stopped and in unison their heads turned towards me. They stared at me as one does at an imposter, cold and unflinching.
Mr. Shaw gently asked, “Did they like meeting you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Give them time. You are new to this land of theirs. You need to see what they see, before they allow you in. But for now, we must go! And meet the pig!”
Mr. Shaw hurried us from the market and down a road. He walked briskly as we headed towards a small farm. A simple low-rise adobe home with a small wooden manger on one side and an oversized doghouse. The yard was an island of dried mud surrounded by small patches of vegetation and a low wall. In the middle sat a large fat swine, regal and confident, that appeared indifferent to our presence.
Mr. Shaw began to whisper instructions as we came close to the wall. “This is the pig. He protects his food. We must be very quiet. He is blind in his right eye, that is why he does not see us. We have to stay on his right side. And do not say the word Chicharron. Or else he will be furious with us.” Then Mr. Shaw climbed the wall.
I asked him “Why are we going into the yard?”
“To see the pig, of course.”
“But we can see the pig from here.” I whispered.
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
“No. you see him like a stamp on a piece of meat, a sticker, a hieroglyph printed on plastic. We have come here to see a pig! You can not understand what you cook, if you don’t see what you cook.”
I made no further protest. We climbed the wall and slowly walked through the yard. I did not follow Mr. Shaw as much as keep him as a barrier between me and the pig. Mr. Shaw focused on the pig, never letting it leave his view. My eyes bounced from the pig to Mr. Shaw and back again. Each time the pig appeared larger than I expected.
“You see El Norte” Mr. Shaw whispered “you see the life marks on his skin. The battles he has won and lost. His hair. His snout. His whiskers are like a cat, around his mouth and eyes.”
I saw the pig’s right eye was damaged and I felt more secure as we approached in his blind spot His hair was visible, shorn and matted with mud in places, covering a patchwork of pink and whiteish skin, as if it had been dowsed with bleach. He had a scar from under his front right leg to his shoulder. His ears were missing little pieces at the tips, and his eyes seemed impossibly small. His chest rose and fell as it breathed and slurped the air.
“Why can’t we say Chicharron?” I whispered.
“O ‘Lord.”
The pig turned his head and squealed a sound fiercer than any dog bark I have ever heard. Without instruction I began to run beside Mr. Shaw towards the fence. The pig chased with incredible swiftness and power. I felt my feet sliding in the mud, and I prayed I would not fall.
Then Mr. Shaw spoke with admiration for our predator as we ran to safety: “The pig is fast. In the wild they are dangerous beasts. A beautiful animal when understood. See how quickly he is gaining on us. Just amazing.”
The wall was now three yards away, and the sound of a huffing locomotive crawled up my spine and into my ears. In my peripheral vision I saw Mr. Shaw take three long strides and hurdle over the wall as I leapt headfirst. My dive landed as a bellyflop on the wall’s edge. I felt the pig’s snout hit my ankle as I scrambled over.
From my view on the ground, I saw only the pig’s ears and tail behind the wall circling in a frenzy, like the dorsal fins of a shark as it hunts just below the surface. I looked up at Mr. Shaw, who was hunched over with his hands on his knees. We both breathed heavily. Then Mr. Shaw laughed as he rose upright and pronounced “Now you know what you eat! Let’s get some tequila.”
The sun was lower in the sky and the fields and hills glowed gold as we walked towards town. A late afternoon star - or planet - caught my eye as I listened to Mr. Shaw speak the virtues of tequila. I believe he said - desert waters, trapped in the agave cacti, provided a pure nectar for celebrating joy and grief. I thought the words joy and grief fit our setting, as I saw a heat-mirage blur the road ahead and felt the hot dead air. Just as I had known my whole life that winter’s cold could bring both joy, with its the first snow, and grief, I now recognised the desert sun possessed the same duality; that behind its beauty and joy, death and grief could be found.
I believe I saw a carcass of a bull beside the road, and I imagined how the bull succumbed to the heat we walked in. How its horns prevented a comfortable position to lay its head as it died. In time, after no flesh remained, I could see how the weight of its horns would twist the head from the body and leave the head and horns to float in the dirt. These images and ideas did not bother me at the time; I believe I found solace in knowing joy and grief could be found everywhere, and I remember feeling more at home in the desert.
Soon enough the buildings along the road were larger and more frequent and Mr. Shaw used the words Blanco, Reposado, and Anejo. I tried to understand the different tequilas he was speaking of, but I could not. So I suggested we buy all three types of tequila, and see if I could match his words with tastes. Mr. Shaw thought my idea was genius and complimented me on my thinking as we walked out of the store with three bottles in hand.
Outside of the store was a yellow Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. I remembered driving with a friend in one on a back road of southern Ontario in my late teens. It brought a smile to my face. Mr. Shaw walked around to the driver’s side and opened the car’s door. Once sitting he patted the passenger’s seat with his hand and said, “your chariot awaits, amigo.” I did not question if we were stealing a car or not, and it seemed preposterous to ask. I sat, and he said, “Let us go to where all this comes from.”
We drove up Cerrillos road and passed the hippies in the vacant lot as they cooked on a BBQ. We drove past tire shops and the little cantinas on the side of road. We passed the Youth Hostel and the airport where I landed, and my journey began. We drove until the cityscape was stripped away and only the railway line was our companion. I looked across the terrain at a mountain. I was mesmerised by the illusion of evening light and shadows it created on the mountain’s face; it was as if two cubist eyes followed our car as we drove along.
Then we passed a boxcar alone on the line. It was painted the same mustard yellow as the mesquite tree I studied that morning and had a blue logo; a large circle with a thick plus-sign in the middle; crosswise was printed the word ‘Santa Fe’. The boxcar was the same one I had seen as a child on a family trip to visit my grandparents in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It was the mid-seventies and we travelled by train in a sleeper-car during our March break when the North Atlantic was still cold and brutal. I remember seeing the boxcar at night, after we ate in the dining car and our small booth had been transformed into bunk beds. As my brothers slept in the upper bunk, I was below with my parents – I must have been about five. As the train passed Quebec City during the night on the south shore, my father stirred me, “Look Ronnie, that is the Chateau Frontenac.” I can still remember his smell, a mixture of scotch and tired deodorant. When I lifted my head and looked outside, I saw the old building – an illuminated castle on top of a cliff – high above the St. Lawrence River. It was magical. The river itself was magical too, with packs of ice that slowly bobbed, bumped, and rolled over one another, reflecting light from streetlights and the moon as they flowed down the river. Then we passed a single box car, on a short track beside the main line, with the same Santa Fe logo. As we passed the box car, my father inhaled a small breath then said, “Oh, that one is far from home.”
Mr. Shaw broke the silence. “What do you cook at home?”
“I like to play a lot. I cook a lot of different things. Try this and that.”
“What do you love to cook?”
“Not sure if I love anything in particular. Sometimes I just want to see what happens.”
“Do you know who you are when you cook?” I remember this question - exactly as he asked it. I remember thinking it was an odd question and I had no response. Today, it seems less odd to me.
Mr. Shaw continued as our Rabbit hummed along, “The important thing is to know who is in front of the stove. If you don’t know who you are as a cook, how can you know the food you are making?”
He slowed the car, looked over the dashboard to the right, and parked. We exited and he retrieved two folding chairs from the back seat and handed them to me. He dug back into the back seat and pulled out two woolen throw blankets and the three bottles of tequila, cradling them in the blanket like triplets. We walked fifty yards and Mr. Shaw stopped. He twisted to the left and then all the way to his right, nodded his head in towards the horizon, and said, “This will do.”
Mr. Shaw indicated to me where to place the chairs as he knelt and uncradled the bottles of tequila. Then we sat facing north, sunset to our left and an escarpment of red rock ablaze to our right. Grey-blue hills filled the distance. It was a perfect spot.
“You see, tonight it will get very cold, almost freezing. The next, tomorrow, it will be very hot by mid-day, and this will continue and continue, day after day. This is what the chiles like, cold nights and hot days. That is why they grow so well here. They like it here. It is their home.” Mr. Shaw shifted in his chair and began to rub his hands together, then asked, “How about some Tequila?” He then pulled out two teacups from his sash. He poured a healthy amount of the Blanco into one cup and passed it to me. Then poured himself one as well and put down the bottle. Relaxing back into his chair, he spoke again “You see. It may seem simple, but we eat the chiles because we are here, and they are here. We share the same land. The food and the people. Our tastes, the things we like, are not so much by choice. One doesn’t choose where one is born, what your name will be, who will live in your home. But whether you like it or not, it is your home. We have had good leaders and bad leaders – invaders even. Terrible things. But we have also had weddings, festivals, and babies being born. The joys of life, all in our home.
“Home is where we eat chiles, and corn, and the cactus, the tomatillo, tomatoes. They are the story of our home, not the lines on a map, an imaginary border, defined by people from far away. The big general who says ‘Your land stops here! Your land starts there’. Or, your food is like this, it is called such-and-such’. Those people say a lot of things, but their words do not come from ground underneath us now like the food does. Names mean nothing to us. We know our food. We know our story. We know who we are when we cook, that is why it tastes so good. You get the idea?”
In the moment I knew I had no story to cook with and I found his words intimidating. I had never thought of cooking as more than recipes, techniques, and style, before that day. The challenges that lay ahead in my career seemed more daunting after I had heard his words, than it had when I woke that morning. As much as he undid my perception of what cooking was, he did provide a clue to what it could be. A clue that I have never stopped following.
“Did you used to be a Chef?” I asked Mr. Shaw
“Ah, no. My mother was a great cook. She would tell me stories about the coyote bringing our food to our land, as she wrapped tamales. No, I have been eating here for a long time. And I have always tried to understand what home is. You see my friend home is where the flavour is. Find your flavour and you will find your home.”
The sun went down beyond the horizon and the landscape appeared as three strokes of paint; A swath of dark brown crudely shaped like earth and hills across the bottom, a small brush stroke of brilliant and dying red orange tracing above, and a large brush of dark blue-sky forever on top. I wondered where I would find my home as we sat and talked and listened to stories of coyotes and spirits. We drank and drank, and the line between his voice and my dreams was eventually erased.
When I woke in the morning, I was sitting in one of the folding chairs covered in light April snow, and the sun was about to rise. Mr. Shaw was gone. I slowly gathered the chairs and the mostly empty bottle of tequila and headed to the Rabbit at the side of the road. I was happy to see the key in the ignition. I had no idea where Mr. Shaw had left to, but I knew he would be fine. I turned the key, turned the car around, and headed back to Santa Fe.