Pie Town Is Calling You

To the unknown!

Pie Town, NM.

They say that the Age of Exploration is over. Everything out there has already been discovered. We’ve been to the top of Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench; we’ve staggered to the North Pole and frozen at the South; we’ve trekked from East to West, shot satellites into space, and mapped the Earth’s surface down to the inch. The only suckers left chasing mystery are tuning into “Ancient Aliens” and falling for internet scams. A long line of conquerors, from Magellan to Google, have at last subdued the unknown. If you want adventure now, better look to Mars.

That’s what they say.

Buy into that line of thinking, and you’re sure to live a small life with short horizons. Reject it, and your eyes will open to the infinite grandeur. The world is full of baffling enigmas. Life is but a momentary chance to shine light in its shadowy corners.

Let me give you an example: I like pie. It’s one of my top interests. Everybody knows that about me. Now, one day I was looking at a map and I stumbled upon a dot in the remote New Mexico desert: “Pie Town.” Isn’t that interesting? A town called Pie Town. And there’s a place there that sells pie. How about that? You better believe that caught my eye.

But there’s more. Right down the road from Pie Town was another tiny dot: Datil, New Mexico. At that, my intellectual excitement went into overdrive. You see, I come from St. Augustine, Florida. Do you know what grows only in that part of Florida? Datil peppers. We make hot sauce out of them down there and it’s very tasty. Anywhere else you go, nobody knows what datil peppers are. Their loss!

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Right there, in parched west-central New Mexico, you have Pie Town, close by to another little town with a name that has something to do with me. What are the chances of that? Is that a coincidence? Is the universe sending me a message? What goes on out there? If I didn’t find out, I would forever be haunted, like explorers are by buried treasure. But my buried treasure is pie. So I booked a flight to Albuquerque.

“I’m going to Pie Town,” I’ve been telling people recently.

“Pie Town?” they would say.

“Pie Town.”

“Okay.”

“That’s right. I’m going to Pie Town.”

“Okay. For what?”

For what?? For what did mankind go to the moon? To have a damn barbecue? I’m going there to find out what’s there. I’m going there because life is a journey and all journeys must have destinations. In doing so I join a long line of adventurers who overcame the nagging of those with small minds. “Oh, Shackleton, why go all the way to Antarctica? Will you be home for church on Sunday?” This is the sort of inertia that drags on everyone who chooses to be a bit unorthodox, a bit daring. While I condemn many of the things that conquistadors did in their quest for gold, I understand the crazed compulsion of the search itself. There may be an entire town made of pie out there. If you think you’re keeping me away from that, brother, you don’t know me very well.

When people accept that they cannot hold you back from your task, they move on to adjacent forms of subversion. “What’s there? What does it look like? How will you get there? Why don’t you look up some videos of YouTubers who have had this same idea before you?” These are the wheedling cries of those who would turn on the lights at a haunted house. “I must know everything! I must leave nothing to the imagination! I aim to drown myself in information, allowing it to suffocate all romance!” This attitude accounts for much of the misery of modern life. As Charley Crockett said, “When that open road starts to calling me/ There’s something over that hill I just got to see.” If you look up everything on Google Maps first, you’ll never need to see anything. Chill out.

Undertaking a spiritual journey into the desert gives you a certain kinship with those who came before. Just as the hardscrabble dreamers used to wake beside their covered wagons and gather wood for a morning fire, I too wake in the Albuquerque airport Sheraton and pour the water into the little single cup coffee maker. The details may have changed, but the need to buy some water bottles and gas up the Toyota before you turn west off of Interstate 25 at Socorro has not. Once you get on Route 60, my friend, you are really out there in the middle of nowhere. You would have to hitchhike all the way to Magdalena just to find a coffee shop. Look within—out here, you are on your own.

The Chihuahuan Desert ecoregion is dusted with shrubs of various sizes, brown grasses interspersed with the grasping fingers of the creosote bush and isolated Cottonwood trees. It’s not the featureless, undulating red sands of the Sahara, but the pointillist palate of Van Gogh if he ran out of everything but green and brown and yellow. I’d call it a scrubbedy landscape. The sun is hot and the dust attacks the windshield even if you keep on spraying the wiper fluid every fifteen minutes. I bet navigating this land by horse was a real nightmare. And many of them, in the olden days, were doing so while drunk on whiskey. Hot and sweaty and drunk and falling off your horse into a thorny bush, growing more ornery by the hour as your modest canteen was drained. What a nightmare! This general experience probably has much to do with why many of the Old West “ghost towns” in this region are now abandoned.

Yet mankind persevered. Twenty miles outside Magdalena you’re thinking about six shooters and covered wagons and prairie dogs and then—bam!— you see a hulking, white space telescope. Pointed up at the stars. Keep turning your head and you see another. And another. And two dozen more, gleaming white dishes the size of buildings slung out in an enormous crescent over miles of open desert, antennas reaching up to grab some cosmic rays that I’ll wager are very interesting indeed. This is the Very Large Array, the self-descriptive name of one of America’s most important astronomical sites. Where our imaginary drunken cowboy was draining the last drops of his ill-advised whiskey and cursing at wolves just a couple centuries ago, scientists now come to look at black holes and wonder what’s happening inside them. As parables of optimism go, this one is hard to beat. Never lose hope. This land may be inconvenient for an afternoon stroll, but you better believe we’ll figure out something useful to do with it.

Forty more miles down the road is Pie Town. The first and main thing you’ll see there is the wooden general store-looking Pie Town Pie Company building. Inside is the entire Pie Town EMS staff in matching t-shirts, taking up a corner table. There was a line of tourists waiting to get their hands on some of that pie. A harried and forgetful woman took orders at the counter. I waited patiently. When I finally made it up there, I ordered one slice of New Mexico Apple Pie—flavored with a little green chile—and one slice of Blueberry Lemon Buttermilk. They were both good. Lemons aren’t native to these parts, but thanks to modern shipping they are transported fresh all the way out here for inclusion in the pies. Wonderful! A triumph of logistics.

There was also a peaches and cream pie, and a cherry almond pie, and a few others. Based on the ones I had, I feel confident that those other ones are good, too. I can say all the pie was good to eat, whether you’re talking about the crust, or the filling inside. I enjoyed it. What am I, a restaurant critic? You know that pie was tasty.

There’s not much else to see in Pie Town so I headed back down the road. At Datil, I pulled off and talked to the lady in the gas station. “I come from St. Augustine, Florida, and we grow datil peppers there!” I told her. “Oh really? Wow,” she said. She didn’t give a fuck. I thought about buying a hat but they cost $30, which seemed a little steep for a joke that takes so much explanation.

Like a free diver on a world record descent, I didn’t linger unnecessarily. I had been where I was going. I had slipped the surly bonds of everyday life to touch the face of Pie Town. I’d had two pieces of pie and I was happy as a clam. Is this what life is all about? If so, it’s okay with me. David Hume taught us that we’re not promised tomorrow. You have to take advantage of every sliver of daylight. Keep it moving. I hit that gas and pushed on, screeching south at Socorro heading towards Elephant Butte. Past Truth or Consequences, on the road to Las Cruces, staring out at those craggy Sierra de las Uvas Mountains looming dead ahead. There’s something over that hill, baby, I just got to see. For me, it’s pie. What is it for you? You better go find out, before that sun goes down.

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Also

• Previously, on the open road: America Is Becoming Dallas; Ride or Die, Cowboy.

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