{"id":3276,"date":"2015-10-16T08:36:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-16T15:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3276"},"modified":"2015-10-16T08:36:23","modified_gmt":"2015-10-16T15:36:23","slug":"diary-this-american-road-gallup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3276","title":{"rendered":"Diary: This American Road, Gallup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"krazy<\/p>\n

Living in southern California, one gets to Arizona every now and then, but to get to New Mexico requires something like volition \u2014 which means I certainly hadn’t set foot\u00a0in New Mexico before. Nor had I ever actually driven over the California-Arizona border, the point at which the landscape goes all\u00a0Krazy Kat<\/em>. Having read collections of that\u00a0strip over and over again in childhood (I got deep into prewar newspaper comics for a while there, which seemed to speak\u00a0to me of a better, more nonsensical time), I remembered that George Herriman drew\u00a0a great deal of aesthetic inspiration from the American southwest, but I’d forgotten that its setting of Coconino County takes its name from an actual county in western Arizona.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

But New Mexico looks even more Coconino County than Coconino County. After what felt like a few hours of admiring the landscape, we made our first New Mexican stop in Gallup, a town along Route 66. Those on the\u00a0Krazy Kat\u00a0<\/em>tour of the southwest \u2014 or, indeed, anyone with a certain idea of America \u2014 will want to spent some time attempting to get their kicks on Route 66, but all I’ve seen of it suggest that few kicks remain to be had. Countless other observers of American life have said this better, but most towns serviced primarily by the withered\u00a0bloodstreams of the railroads or the old U.S. Highway System, rather than the mighty arteries of the Interstate Highway System, have become towns on life support.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

And so at least half of Gallup’s businesses along Route 66 have permanently shuttered, some of them what looks like\u00a0decades ago. Of those that remain, many have posted loud “BUYING PI\u00d1ONS” notices\u00a0in their windows. Pi\u00f1ons, it turns out, are nuts that grow on local pine trees, and though a surprisingly robust economy appears\u00a0to have grown around them, nothing about it\u00a0strikes me as a good sign. But just a block or two off the forlorn Main Street of America, we found a caf\u00e9 in continuous operation since 1970 that gave us a heartening dose of New Mexican cuisine. And by New Mexican cuisine, I mean one comestible\u00a0above all: the sopaipilla.<\/p>\n

\"Cross-country<\/p>\n

I first learned about sopaipillas from Adam Cadre’s novel\u00a0Ready, Okay!<\/em>, whose protagonist delivers what I recall as a rapturous monologue in praise of their deliciousness. Still, it took me years to actually try one since, at the time, something about the spelling \u2014 particularly that “I” in the middle \u2014 struck me as unnecessary, show-offy. But these lightly fried, unsweetened pillows of steam-filled dough have nothing excessive\u00a0about them, and despite the importance of cutting back on one’s food intake while on the road, I find myself able to put away two or three of them at a sitting without even realizing it. Some of this gluttony I put down to a simple when-in-Rome enjoyment of place\u00a0and the culinary culture thereof. Some of it I explain away as a desire to put a little more money into a local economy clearly in dire need of it. And besides,\u00a0where am I going to get a decent sopaipilla in Seoul?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Living in southern California, one gets to Arizona every now and then, but to get to New Mexico requires something like volition \u2014 which means I certainly hadn’t set foot\u00a0in New Mexico before. Nor had I ever actually driven over the California-Arizona border, the point at which the landscape goes all\u00a0Krazy Kat. Having read collections […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3276"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3283,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3276\/revisions\/3283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}