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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Pie Town, NM
  • Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:46:40 -0700


We began this list while we lived there near Pie Town, NM.

More on the Caudill couple where they lived
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query


Here's a short excerpt from
Savoring Pie Town, in Smithsonian magazine
(the interesting thing about this is, old timers there confirmed for us
that the climate did change and destroyed a lot of dreams)
Sixty-five years after Russell Lee photographed New Mexico homesteaders
coping with the Depression, a Lee admirer visits the town for a fresh slice
of life
* By Paul Hendrickson
* Smithsonian magazine, February 2005
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/pietown.html?c=y&page
=2

For Doris and Faro Caudill (and their daughter, Josie, who was about 8 when
Lee took his pictures), the PieTown dream became closer to a nightmare.
Faro got sick, got lung trouble, the family moved away (just two years
after the pictures were taken). Faro sought work in the city, Faro ran
around. An acrimonious divorce ensued. Doris ended up married to another
man for 39 years. She even went to Alaska to try the American homesteading
dream all over again. There is a beautiful book published several years ago
about the Caudills and their saga, but especially about Doris: Pie Town
Woman, by Joan Myers, a New Mexico author.

In 1942, when Faro Caudill hitched the gate at his PieTown homestead for
the last time, he scrawled on the wood: “Farewell, old homestead. I bid
you adieu. I may go to hell but I’ll never come back to you.”

And yet what you also get from Myers’ book about Doris in her very old
age, not long from her death, is a deep longing to be there again, to have
that life again. She told the author she’d like to have hot and cold
running water, though. “As old as I am, I like to take a bath now and
then. We would take a bath on Saturday night. We had a number three
bathtub. I’d get the water all hot and then I’d bathe Josie and then
I’d take a bath and then Faro would take a bath. . . . You kind of wore
the water out.”

What happened in this dot of civilization, to go on with PieTown’s
history, is that the agricultural dream dried up—quite literally. The
good growing years lasted not even a generation. It was the water once
more, a grapes of wrath anew, the old Western saga of boom to bust.
Somehow, by the ’50s, the climate had seemed mysteriously to shift, just
as it had in the places abandoned earlier by those Okies and West Texans
and Kansans. 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. The corn and pinto bean fields, which two decades before had
yielded rich harvests, as long as its tillers were willing to give to them
the sunup-to-sundown work that they demanded, withered. 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.

But the town never died out entirely. Those who’d stayed behind made a
living by any means they could: drilling wells, grazing cows, running mom
and pop businesses, opening cafés called the Pie-O-Neer, recently
reopened, or the Break 21. And new homesteaders always seemed to arrive,
willing to try out the PieTown dream.
-----------------


paul tradingpost@lobo.net






  • [Livingontheland] Pie Town, NM, Tradingpost, 01/29/2009

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