Roadside Table
January 15, 2009, by Melissa Howden
Photo by MA Howden
If you’ve been following my recent exploits, you might recall that I was planning to relocate for love. The move complete, I find myself in new country, learning a new language, even though I reside in the 47th U.S. State of New Mexico.
I’m no stranger to New Mexico, my parents and grandparents were born and raised here. I spent most of my childhood summers here, and graduated from high school here. But even so, after 39 years, I’ve moved from the cosmopolitan, urban San Francisco Bay Area (7,000 square miles and approximately 7 million people) to a rural county (2,200 square miles and about 50,000 people) where the main town of Taos (meaning Place of Red Willows) has a population officials estimate as between 5,000 and 7,000 people within 5.4 square miles. Having also moved from sea level to 7,000 feet, the adjustment is not only cultural but also physical—I am simultaneously gasping for breath and learning the local language. One might be best served with a set of regional flash cards to help the transition.
Roadside Table: To some such a sign might signify something poetic, but in my new neck of the woods it means just what it says: table by the road, nothing more, nothing less.
The sign, and the table appear just at the top of a canyon just before you reach The Horseshoe, which, I’ve learned is what the hairpin turn on the way in and out of Taos is called. One needs to know this language to get around because generally speaking, street names aren’t used as directional aids.
Given directions to a coffee house on the North Side, I was told to go past The Old Blinking Light. After several false starts I stopped at a gas station and asked a guy in a 10-gallon hat if he could direct me to The Old Blinking Light. Without a word he looked at me and then pointed to the intersection nearby with a standard stoplight. It seems that the light used to be “blinking” but sometime ago was switched out to a standard light. This last bit of information does not make it into present-day directions.
Directed to the Sleeping Boy Plaza, was confounding until a local revealed that there used to be a sleeping boy statue wearing a sombrero on a ledge of the building. The building was sold and the sleeping boy went missing. However to the locals the plaza will always be, Sleeping Boy Plaza.
In Taos, the week actually starts on Thursday because that is when the weekly newspaper comes out. And when one hears that the town or county or any other entity is on two-hour delay, that indicates that we’ve had a lot of snow and people can’t get out of their driveways to work for several hours: Two hours, approximately.
When ordering chile on your enchiladas, Christmas Style, indicates a preference for both red and green chile.
After a particularly heavy snow storm, I heard the local police chief on the radio listing things one should keep in their cars for emergencies—Northern New Mexico’s version of the California earthquake kit. One item on the list was a Toe Strap. In my mind’s eye I envisioned a lovely strappy sandal and couldn’t for the life of me figure out its use in a snow emergency. My lovely love kindly suggested to me that the chief might’ve meant a “tow strap”—something to be used when you need to have your car pulled out of a snow drift.
Change is a challenge. But while I learn the language, and how to drive in and shovel snow, I relish the more visceral experiences, which help to define my sense of place—the light on Taos Mountain, the smell of pinon smoke in the air, the sound of crunching snow underfoot, and the fact that people here wave at one another, whether you know them or not. And oh, by the way, the view from the Roadside Table is spectacular and that’s its own kind of poetry!
January 15th, 2009 at 8:39 am
This entry is great. It captures the awe that we can only experience when we’re new to a place and open to it’s mysteries. It’s really about being in love.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:15 am
I also recently moved from the big city to a rural landscape. Without the layers of concrete & signage, structures & vehicles, landscaping & endless streets, you can sense the America our forebears saw when they came to this continent. It must have been breathtaking.
Have you ever read the journals of John Muir that tell of his trek from San Francisco Bay to Yosemite? How he came across “herds” of grizzly bears romping in flower-filled meadows southeast of San Francisco? A vanished landscape, yet we can still experience it thanks to his writing.
Keep writing about New Mexico…you’re giving us a mini-vacation to that enchanted land.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Melissa, I know just how you feel. I moved from LA to El Portal (pop. 635) and moved into my husbands miners shack. A few years later, we knocked it down and re-built. We’ve since sold and moved to Midpines. That house, 20 years later, is still the “The Biscovich House” (As in, “you’re gonna veer left at The Biscovich House…”). Whattayagonnado? Meanwhile, breath deeply that clean fresh air. Doesn’t it make you feel so alive? Much love, Connie
January 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
When I first moved from Haiti to New York, I had to figure out that a “regular coffee” was coffee with milk in it (to a native French speaker, that’s cafe-au-lait), which I detest. I also had to come to grips with the idea that coffee in America was some kind of watery brown stuff that vaguely reminded of coffee. Regular coffee in Haiti is what is now commonly referred to as expresso. When I moved from the east coast to Los Angeles, I quickly found out that a highway is not a freeway or vice versa. And neither do people say THE 101 freeway. They leave out the pronouns here when referring to freeways. Oh, the learning curves. You may sound like a hick for awhile, but hell, you’ve got crunchy snow while we’ve got sandpaper dry Santa Anna winds here!
January 15th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
So now you’ve got me wondering… how does GPS cope with folky signs, local highways and Byzantine byways? How often would one be steered into a crick or a ditch because Demanda, the annoying GPS lady, doesn’t know about the Sleeping Boy Plaza? Modern times and ancient ways make for strange bedfellows.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Don’t know about the GPS lady. UPS can’t or won’t even try to find my house. They say they’ve delivered to my address but then I find they delivered to the Bed and Breakfast down the road, or even further down the road at the home of the owners of the B&B. And then Lisa, the owner of the B&B and I talk, and meet at the back fence and she passes the package over.
Like that!
Oh , and to get to my house you turn right (or left) at the little church.
January 16th, 2009 at 6:40 am
The first time my Brooklyn-born husband asked for a soda at a deli in Michigan, the waitress looked at him and said, “We don’t have those here. You’ll have to go to across the street to Stroh’s.”
OK. So the midwest didn’t really know from a good pastrami sandwich but we were also going to have to do without Dr. Brown’s cream soda? Turns out a “soda” was an ice cream soda, and they did have them at across the street at Stroh’s ice cream parlor.
Had we asked for “pop” and pronounced it “pahp” with that middle vowel vocalize like the “baaahing” of a sheep, we would have been asked, “What kind, Sprite, Seven-Up or Coca-Cola?”
Regional quirks bring out the quaintness and charm when one makes a big move. Comforting, that amidst all the retail cookie-cutter sameness of the big box stores, “Christmas-style enchiladas” actually means something.
I’ve long harbored a dream of moving to New Mexico. Thank you for your posts.
January 21st, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Yo cuz! Welcome! You got here just before one of the biggest snowfalls of the year – good timing! I can’t believe you didn’t know where the old blinking light or the sleeping boy plaza were. With your attention to detail I thought for sure you would have researched all of the idiosyncracies and local flavors before your big move. You do know that mornings in Taos start at 1pm and that instead of keeping bottles of water in your emergency kit you need to keep hot chocolate and salsa. Love you