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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. There was clatter and much talk in the background. I'd forgotten about the time difference between the East Coast and the Southwest and had called at an inopportune hour: lunchtime on a Saturday. 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.
Having known about Pie Town for many years, I was itching to go. You'll find it on most maps, in west-central New Mexico, in Catron County. The way you get there is via U.S. 60. There's almost no other way, unless you own a helicopter. Back when Russell Lee of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) went to Pie Town, U.S. 60--nowhere near as celebrated a highway as its more northerly New Mexico neighbor, Route 66, on which you got your kicks--called itself the "ocean to ocean" highway. Big stretches weren't even paved. Late last summer, when I made the trek, the road was paved just fine, but it was still an extremely lonesome two-lane ribbon of asphalt. We've long licked the idea of distance and remoteness in America, and yet there remain places and roads like Pie Town and U.S. 60. They sit yet back beyond the moon, or at least they feel that way, and this, too, explains part of their beckoning.
When I saw my first road sign for Pie Town outside a New Mexico town called Socorro (by New Mexico standards, Socorro would count as a city), I found myself getting cranky and strangely elevated. This was because I knew I still had more than an hour to go. It was the psychic power of pie, apparently. Again, I hadn't planned things quite right--I'd left civilization, which is to say Albuquerque--without properly filling my stomach for the three-hour haul. I was muttering things like, They better damn well have some pie left when I get there. The billboard at Socorro, in bold letters, proclaimed: HOME COOKING ON THE GREAT DIVIDE. PIE TOWN USA. I drove on with some real resolve.
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. Pie Town, on the Great Divide--it sounds like a Woody Guthrie lyric. Something there is...
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