Melancholia, a Very Bad Haircut, and the World's Best Pie

Leaving New Mexico, in Three Acts

Sunrise, City of Rocks State Park, NM

Act One:

There was a chilly wind

blowing through the City of Rocks as I left our campsite and walked into the desert. It was dawn, the end of March, my birthday. The sky was turning pink and orange. The world was silent except for birds and the constant whoosh of wind.

At the exact moment that an arc of golden sunlight appeared above distant mountains, I felt the cold wind suddenly turn warm on my face. A rogue gust had just arrived from the east, from a place already heated by the sun. In that instant I thought I could feel the turning of the earth. I had an unsettling sense of being on a planet in motion.

I felt my own significance obliterated by the scale of the planet and the sun.

As I continued on the trail I thought this:

My life does not matter.

To be clear, I meant it in the best possible way.

To feel the briefness of my own lifetime,

to feel insignificant in the presence of ancient rocks,

to feel my body as only a speck of matter on a planet

is to feel a sense of liberation.

At that strange moment

facing the rising sun, I thought of the last scene of the film Melancholia, where a previously hidden planet emerges and collides with Earth. (I love that movie, and it’s not a spoiler to tell the ending since it’s foreshadowed in the first scene)

Melancholia is a film about depression, but also about the acceptance of death. In the second half of the film, Kirsten Dunst’s character, Justine, appears to transcend her depression by fully accepting the inevitability of death. In her state of grace, she is finally liberated. Finally, fully living.

Ten weeks in the desert

changed me. This time of year, wind can gust over 50 mph. Dust gets everywhere, even in your mouth. Then there’s a thing called a haboob. It’s a giant dust storm. One day a haboob closed the highway for eight hours. The week before we left, the rattlesnakes came out of hibernation. You might say there’s not much to do out there, so far from everything, but still, my days were full. I was (mostly) at peace.

I guess I like the extreme nature of desert life.

Highway rest area near Socorro, NM

It takes about a week

for Eric and me to get organized for travel. After all this time, we’re practiced at dividing the labor. There’s decluttering and lots of cleaning, truck and trailer maintenance, preparing food to stow in the freezer, packing every single thing away like a Tetris puzzle.

Then we have to disengage our hearts from a place that has become home, and turn our view outward, to the road and the unknown.

Sunrise, the day we left City of Rocks

Act II:

I want to be

low-maintenance. I am low maintenance. I only have three pairs of shoes. I haven’t stepped inside a Sephora in over two years.

Consequently I thought it would be a good idea to get a haircut at Walmart in Silver City, New Mexico.

When I was having cancer treatment a few years ago, I lost all my hair. I actually thought I looked good bald. At least until I lost my lashes and eyebrows, and then I looked like a praying mantis, but even that was kind of cool in a bizarre way.

At that time

my daughter Kiki worked the front desk at a salon in Northampton Massachusetts, and when my hair started to grow back she took me there to get it dyed neon pink. Because why not. For the next year, a few of my happiest afternoons were the ones when I met Kiki at her salon. I’d get my hair trimmed, and after, we’d walk down Main Street and go out to eat.

Kiki loved her job at the salon. The Friday before she fell into a coma, she called, excited to tell me she’d been offered a promotion and a raise, and would start her new position that Monday. But on Monday she was unconscious in the hospital.

A couple of months after she died, I went back to the salon. I didn’t really need a haircut, but I needed to go there. I parked in my regular spot. I walked down the block, expecting to see her in the doorway, waiting for me. One of her stylist friends trimmed my hair.

That day was one brutally painful day in an unrelenting series during those first months. I did not believe I could live through that kind of pain but I’m still here.

Some parts of normal life

are harder on the road.

Like going to a doctor, or finding a dentist, or getting a good haircut. I thought, I’m low maintenance! I’ll just go to Walmart. Like that would prove something.

What it proved was this: it was a good way to get the worst haircut of my life. I could have saved time and 28 dollars, if only I’d had a pair of dull safety scissors and a blindfold.

On the way home, I felt sorry for myself. Wasn’t it unfair? Haven’t I suffered enough? Shouldn’t I be exempt from things like bad haircuts and losing my wallet and getting tendonitis? But it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.

Act III:

If I wasn’t already married

I’d marry the chicken pot pie at Pie-O-Neer, in Pie Town, New Mexico.

After leaving City of Rocks at dawn on a clear windy morning, Eric and I drove on a deserted two-lane highway through some of the 3.3 million acres of Gila National Forest.

Destination: Pie Town, population 188.

The Pie-O-Neer Restaurant in Pie Town, NM

It wasn’t even noon when we arrived, but we’d been up since 5 am, so we went straight to the famous Pie-O-Neer bakery and restaurant. The Pie Lady said the lunch pies weren’t out of the oven, and told us to come back later.

We pulled into

one of the four campsites at Pie Town RV Park, and wandered the few blocks of dirt roads that constitute the town. The Continental Divide Trail is nearby, and we ran into a hiker who’d joined the trail at the Mexican border. He said he hadn’t talked to anyone in a long time, so we chatted for a while. He told us he’s doing the Calendar Year Triple Crown, which is a feat that involves hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail all in one calendar year.

Can you imagine? I could not have been more in awe of this cheerful, rugged young man. I was also strangely envious. Envious of the solitude and the challenge. I wondered if I could have done that when I was younger. And who I would be now if I had.

Scenes from Pie Town

The man was looking for a place to fill his water bottles, but was reluctant to use one of the spigots at the RV park because, as he said, he “didn’t want to give hikers a bad name.”

You get discouraged by how shitty people can be, and then you meet a friendly walking-man on a grand adventure, who just wants to be a good hiker and won’t take a quart of water that doesn’t belong to him.

Faith in humanity is restored one connection at a time.

He told us about the Toaster House

just down the road. It’s a hiker pit-stop, a free place to sleep and shower and eat and socialize. The Toaster House was donated for this purpose by the late Nita Larronde, known as a “Trail Angel” for her dedication to the hiking community.

Front gate, The Toaster House

Many hikers have left old shoes at the Toaster House

Ok, so you’re probably wondering

about the pie. Lunch was a classic chicken pot pie. A whole personal-sized pie, served on a vintage steel school lunch tray, with a green salad, a pecan pie muffin, and a savory cracker-type thing shaped like a chicken, made out of flaky crust dough. Oh, and good lemonade too.

Telling you it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had does not do it justice.

A man was on a phone call, apparently talking to his sister, loudly describing his delicious lunch, the charming restaurant, the friendly pie ladies – raving on and on. He was telling his sister about his drive – “oh my god, it’s just so beautiful here, I mean spectacular like you wouldn’t believe” – and his meal – “I’ve never eaten anything so good!”

The waitress came by

our table and we were all rolling our eyes about the man on the phone. He was so loud. But there was something sweet and vulnerable about his enthusiasm. Hearing him, I wondered, how often do any of us unselfconsciously love something openly, honestly love something out loud, in front of other people?

I actually felt tears come to my eyes. Was I really crying because of the guy on the phone? It probably wasn’t just him. I’d only had four hours sleep. Eric and I had been talking about Kiki at lunch, how she was so good at making pies, and then I couldn’t help but think of her pie pans and recipe books in a cardboard box, back in a New Hampshire storage unit. We were in that odd state of travel, having freshly left one place but not yet landed in another, and I felt kind of raw and emotional.

“Sorry” I said to the waitress. “It’s just really touching to hear someone so delighted. He sounds so happy.”

Then she told us about the time she definitely saw a UFO, and how moving to Pie Town was the best thing she ever did.

When we left, we got a Pie Town sticker for the truck, and two slices of pie for later. Peach for me, and something called Coca Cola Pecan for Eric.

“Thank you!” we said to the waitress. “We’ll see you next year!”

“Thank you too,” she called after us, “and thanks for crying!”⁜

One last thing…

Entrance to [a]SP.***A”©E Gallery

We couldn’t leave

southern New Mexico without visiting a special spot in Silver City called [a]SP.***A”©E . . .Studio/Art/Gallery. Born from the mind of the wildly creative artist Jean Robert P. Béffort, the gallery houses an interactive explosion of visual stimulation, featuring painting, collage, mosaic, found-object assemblages, murals, and more doll heads and limbs than you could imagine. (I personally can’t get enough of severed doll parts.)

Do yourself a favor and check out this 4-minute video about Jean Robert’s one-of-a-kind “Holographic Universe.” It will expand your idea of what art can be.

Thanks so much for reading, or listening. Please say Hi in the comments!

Love, Tina 💛

Links!

Watch the trailer for the film “Pie Lady of Pie Town” here:

Pie Lady of Pie Town

Look at Pie Porn here:

Pie-O-Neer on fb

I’m not saying you need watch “Melancholia” just because I loved it. You might hate it! But 14 years later I still think about that film:

Melancholia on Netflix