Eat, Pray, Run … 11 years in Santa Fe

Part I: Comidas

You can’t eat the the big, blue, delicious skies of New Mexico, but if you could, they would taste like roast chiles on a crisp fall day.

No, you can’t eat the incredible beauty in Santa Fe, but that doesn’t mean its endless vistas or rugged landscapes can’t intoxicate you — or deceive you.

Indians, Conquistadors, modern artists and tourists — they have all fallen prey to its wily charms.

Elizabeth Gilbert in her best-seller, “Eat, Pray, Love,” traveled and searched the world — Italy, India and Bali — to heal her broken heart through food, prayer and love, bolstered by the royalties of a cushy book advance.

What Gilbert didn’t realize was, she could have experienced her transformations, all in one place, Santa Fe.

First, she would have eaten herself through a culinary trail of chile, “Christmas” — that’s local lingo for ordering your food with both red and green chile.

Second, she would have burned through her book advance in a year or so after sinking the majority of her funds into a ramshackle but picturesque adobe on Santa Fe’s historic east side. (It’s one of the oldest and most expensive areas of town.)

Third, she would have explored the region’s inherit spirituality and discovered Shamans, Indian medicine men, crystal healers, Buddhists, Catholic monks, Sikhs, and Wiccans, but settled on becoming a New Age zealot after falling hopelessly in love with a handsome (but flaky) famous Santa Fe sculptor at a week-long, silent meditation and yoga retreat at a sweat lodge in the Jemez Mountains.

Her whirlwind romance with the sculptor would fall apart quickly after they actually started speaking to each other (not just gazing at each other longingly and sweating over a fire pit.) 

Gilbert would then date and fall in love with the half dozen, non-gay, artistic men her age living in Santa Fe and have her heart broken each time.

She would then trade “love” for the comfort of living with several stray cats and dogs at the aforementioned ramshackle adobe.

Finally Gilbert would wake up one day to realize her money and savings were almost gone. She would begin to scrounge for work in Santa Fe’s tourism-based economy and learn first-hand the old joke about making a living in the City Difficult: “How do you make $1,000,000 in Santa Fe?”

The answer: “Start with $5,000,000 and stay a few years.”

She would find out her advance degrees (not in hard sciences so no job options at Los Alamos National Laboratory) were useless in getting her viable employment that paid her more than $10 an hour and settle for a job as a waitress at an upscale, touristy restaurant.

Gilbert would then spend the last of her funds at yet ANOTHER week-long, silent yoga and mediation retreat in Abiquiu (a.k.a., Georgia O’Keefe country), make peace with herself and God, and settle into New Mexico so poor she could never, ever afford leave it.

Yes, I am being facetious about the City Difficult because spending 11 hard-working years there will do that to you.

The picture I painted is not of one person I knew while I was there but it IS bits and parts of MANY people I met there and their stories — artists, writers, creative, spontaneous souls of many backgrounds who came there entranced by Santa Fe’s beauty and left duped or spurned by its economic hardships and hostilities.

My made-up story is a poor man’s version of  “Eat, Pray, Love” and a common one in New Mexico.

Even a beautiful place can have an ugly underbelly. In Santa Fe that happens to be — it’s hard as hell to make a decent living there, and if you happen to be a “trust-a-farian” (trust-fund baby) when you get there, chances are good you won’t be by the time you leave.

There are few well-paying jobs and it’s expensive to live there. The median family income in Santa Fe, according to one report I found: $52K; average home cost in SF: $306K; average per capita income of New Mexico: $29K.

OK, so you’re not going to get rich living in the Land of Entrapment but here’s some very good news.

Santa Fe, and New Mexico, is an AMAZING place to run AND eat, and fortunately, you can eat really well there at just about any price point, from fast food at Baja Tacos to La Casa Sena, to The Compound.

Chile is gastronomical king — found in everything — from breakfast burritos, to carne adovado, to green chile stew, to posole.

So are tortillas and blue corn as in blue-corn pinon pancakes at the Tesuque Village Market’s restaurant. Or eating breakfast burritos bigger than your face at Tecolote or The Pantry restaurants — I used to love doing that after a long run.

Do NOT, however, make the mistake of calling the cuisine “Mexican” though — the locals will correct you quickly, it’s New Mexican and it’s Spanish influence they say, not Mexican.

I moved to Santa Fe in 1992 after becoming engaged to my first husband. The economics of the place (rightfully) scared the living crap out of me but my first year exploring the cuisine was unrivaled.

I ran a lot as part of the Hash House Harriers back then and the runs almost always ended at a new restaurant I’d never been to before then. Almost each time, the food was really, really good.

When I went back this visit with my friend, her children and my own, I likewise was not disappointed. In fact I ate too much yummy food.

The hardest part of being in Santa Fe again was being there with children. Santa Fe is not what I’d call a kid-friendly town. Of the four places where we ate — only one had a children’s menu. The weirdest part — you don’t SEE many other children eating with their families at the restaurants or out and about many other places for that matter. With our pack of five kids we stood out everywhere we went.

Where I do believe Santa Fe IS more welcoming of children — the outdoors and in nature. That’s what I will explore next in “Eat, Pray, Run” — Part II: Spirit. It’s hard not to look at its beauty and find God somewhere in Santa Fe, and if you don’t find Him, He usually finds you if you stay there long enough.

My favorite part of going back this trip, besides getting my chile fix, was exploring Bandelier National Monument again with my children, and revisiting my old running routes.

Until then, bueno bye for now.

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Aging is inevitable, but growing old is a choice. Lace up your shoes, and let’s go!

Mileage today: 7; Mileage since Boston: 717.3.

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