Edited version:
Smithsonian , Feb 2005 v35 i11 p72
Savoring pie town
Paul Hendrickson.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there:
Pie Town. And then too, there are the old photographs--those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half decades ago, at the heel of the Depression, on the eve of a global war, by a gifted, itinerant, government, documentary photographer working on behalf of FDR's New Deal.
His name was Russell Lee. His Pie Town images--and there are something like 600 of them preserved in the archives of the Library of Congress--portrayed this little clot of high-mountain-desert New Mexico humanity in all of its redemptive, communal, hard-won glory. Many were published last year in
Bound for Glory, America in Color 1939-43 .But let's get back to pie for a minute.
"Is there a particular kind you like?" Peggy Rawl, co-owner of Pie Town's Daily Pie Cafe, had asked sweetly on the phone, when I was still two-thirds of a continent away. But the chief confectioner was willing to take time out to ask what my favorite pie was so that she could have one ready when I got there.
HISTORY
Continental Divide: this is another aspect of Pie Town's strange gravitational pull, or so I have become convinced. People want to go see it, taste it, at least in part, because it sits right on the Continental Divide, at just under 8,000 feet. Something there is in our atavistic frontier self that hankers to stand on a spot in America, an invisible demarcation line, where the waters start to run in different directions toward different oceans. Never mind that you're never going to see much flowing water in Pie Town. Water, or, more accurately, its lack, has much to do with Pie Town's history.
The town had been around as a settlement since at least the early 1920s, started, or so the legend goes, by a man named Norman who'd filed a mining claim and opened a general store and enjoyed baking pies, rolling his own dough, making them from scratch. He'd serve them to family and travelers. Mr. Norman's pies were such a hit that everybody began calling the crossroads Pie Town.
The place was built up, principally, by
Dust Bowlers of the mid- and late 1930s. They were refugees from their busted dreams in Oklahoma and West Texas. A little cooperative, Thoreauvian dream of self-reliance flowered 70 and 80 years ago, on this red earth, amid these ponderosa pines and junipers and pinon and rattlesnakes.
In the mid-'30s, something like 250 families lived in the surrounding area, most of them in exile from native ground gone arid. By the time Russell Lee arrived, the town with the arresting name boasted a Farm Bureau building, a hardware and feed store, a cafe and curio shop, a hotel, a baseball team, an elementary school, a taxidermy business.
Lee came to Pie Town as part of an FSA project to document how the Depression had ravaged rural America. Were Lee's photographs propagandistic, serving the aims of an administration back in Washington bent on getting New Deal relief legislation through Congress and accepted by the American people? Of course. That was part and parcel of the mission of the
FSA/OWI documentary project in the first place.
But with good reason, many of the project's images, like the names of some of those who produced them--Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee--have entered American cultural myth. The results of their collaborative work--approximately 164,000 FSA/OWI prints and negatives--are there in drawer after drawer of file cabinets at the
Library of Congress in a room I have visited many times.
What happened in this dot of civilization, to go on with Pie Town's history, is that the agricultural dream dried up--quite literally. The good growing years lasted not even a generation. The winters became balmier. The snows wouldn't fall, not like they once did; the earth refused to hold its moisture for the spring planting. And so, many of those once-exiled families found themselves exiled again. Some of them had already long moved on to cities, to jobs in defense plants and airplane factories. They'd gone to Albuquerque, to California, where the life was said to be easier, the paychecks regular.
The "town" looked like no more than a wide spot in the road, with the Daily Pie Cafe and the post office and an art gallery just about the only visible enterprises. I just had to adjust my eyes, I just had to give it time--to find the drilling business, the realty office selling ranchettes, the mobile home campgrounds, the community center, the several churches, the fist of simple homes that stood along the old main street before they relocated U.S. 60, the long-closed old log hotel still standing on the old U.S. 60, home now to bats and spiders and snakes. Russ and Jean Lee had lodged there while he'd made his pictures.
VISITOR INFORMATION
I encountered Brad Beauchamp. He's a sculptor. He had topped 60. He was staffing the town Tourist and Visitor Information Center. There was a sign with those words in yellow lettering on the side of an art gallery. There was a big arrow and it directed me to the rear of the gallery. Beauchamp, instantly friendly, ten years a Pie Towner, is a transplant from San Diego, as is his wife. In California, they'd had a horse farm. They wanted a simpler life. Now they owned 90 acres and a cabin and an array of four-footed animals. They were making their living as best they could. Beauchamp, a lanky drink of water recovering from a bicycling accident, talked of yoga, of meditation, of a million stars in the New Mexico sky. "I've worked real hard on ... being calm out here," he said.
"So are you calmer?"
"I've got such a long way to go. You know, when you come to a place like this, you bring all your old stuff with you. But this is the place. We're not moving."
Since the sculptor was staffing the visitor's center, it seemed reasonable to ask if I could get some Pie Town literature.
"Nope," he said, breaking up. "That's because we don't have any. We have a visitor information center, but nothing about Pie Town. We do have brochures for a lot of places in the state, if you'd like some."
FOOD
And then there was the
Daily Pie . I've been to some restaurants where a lot of desserts were listed on the menu, but this was ridiculous. The day's offerings were scrawled in a felt-tip pen on a big "Pie Chart" above my head. In addition to regular apple, there was:
• New Mexican apple (laced with green chili and pinon nuts),
• peach walnut crumb,
• boysen berry (that's the spelling in Pie Town),
• key lime cheesecake,
• strawberry rhubarb,
• peanut butter,
• chocolate chunk creme,
•chocolate walnut,
• apple cranberry crumb,
• triple berry,
• cherry streusel, and two or three others that I can no longer remember and didn't write down in my notebook.
The Pie Chart changes daily at the Daily Pie, and sometimes several times within a day. A red dot beside a name meant that there was at least a whole other pie of that same kind back in the kitchen. And a 1 or a 2 beside a name meant there were just one or two slices left, and apparently wouldn't be any more until that variety came up in the cycle again.
I settled on a piece of New Mexican apple, which was a lot better than "tasty." It was zingy. And now that I've sampled my share of Pie Town's finest selections, I'd like to relay a happy fact, which is probably implicit anyway: at the Daily Pie Cafe--where so much of Pie Town's current life unfolds--they serve much more than pie.
- Six days a week they make a killer breakfast and a huge lunch.
- Two days a week they dish until 8 p.m.
- On Sundays, the piece de resistance, they're glad to work you over with one of those all-afternoon, old-fashioned turkey, ham or roast-beef dinners with potatoes and three vegetables.
SURVIVING LINK
I went around with "Pop" McKee. His real name is Kenneth Earl McKee. He has a mountain man's untrimmed white beard. When I met him, his pants were held up by a length of blue cord, and the leather of his work boots seemed soft as lanolin. He had a little heh-heh caving-in-on-itself laugh. He has piercing blue eyes. He lives in a simple home not even 200 yards from where, in the early summer of 1940, a documentarian froze time in a box on a pine board elementary school stage.
Pop McKee, past 70, is one of the last surviving links to
Russell Lee's photographs. He is in many of Russell Lee's ) Pie Town photographs. He is that little kid, third from right, in the overalls at the Pie Town community school, along with his cousin and one of his sisters. The kids of Pie Town are singing on a makeshift stage. Pop is about 8.
In 1937, Pop McKee's father--Roy McKee, who lies in the town cemetery, along with his wife, Maudie Bell--had driven a John Deere tractor from O'Donnell, Texas, toward his new farming dream, pulling a wagon with most of the family possessions. It took him about five days. Pop asked me if I wanted to go out to the old homestead. I sure did. "I guess we will then," he said, cackling.
"Life must have been so hard," I said, as we drove to the homestead. It was out of town a little ways.
"Yeah, but you didn't know it," he said.
"You never wanted a better life, an easier one?"
"Well, you didn't know no better one. A fellow doesn't know a better one, he won't want one."
Paul Hendrickson, who teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of the award-winning Sons of Mississippi.
Original story:Smithsonian , Feb 2005 v35 i11 p72
I think the addition of photographs and other graphics would help make this story a useful Web experience for readers. I like the idea of having an interactive map on the screen so that readers can see where pie town is in relation to them and how to get there. If there were sound recordings from an interview, that might be a nice thing to add, as well.
Changing this article for posting online was far more difficult than I had imagined. First of all, the original article was written more as a feature, telling the history of the town, rather than a travel article. I still think the story includes useful information on how to get there, what to expect and where to eat. It certainly sparked my interest in Pie Town! I tried to break down the story into sections and added two lists, one of the types of pies available at the Daily Pie Cafe and the other of the restaurants daily offerings. I didn't see much else to put into list format and I think this flags up the point that this article is not written as a "how to visit" Pie Town piece. In ordedr to make it more in that vein, I excised portions of superfluous detail and background. I feel like I sacrificed some of the author's voice, but it helped focus the piece. I still think the article could be improved with the addition of more useful information on lodging, prices, etc. and by cutting more of the details.
