Blue Corn Meal ( A New Year’s Folly)

(For Faolan, Daisy, Liam, and Thranduil, since only one of you knew their grandmother H)

This story starts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the summer. I think it was July, as this was before we started spending July 4th at my cousin’s Richard and Lois’ home in Pentwater, Michigan.

We’d gone fishing up at Red River, New Mexico, staying in one of my dad’s doctor friend’s cabin in the north meadow above Red River and right on the stream(ish) river. The cabin was huge but lacked TV and this was before VCRs. It had a telephone, and it was a party line, so you could pick it up and listen in to other people’s conversations. It was deep brown and was trimmed with turquoise shutters. The high peaked ceilings like the rest of the cabin were made of raw, glazed pine. Two huge candlestick pines framed the house, and it sat back from a dirt road. The road led north to a meadow and a beaver dam lake. A fork in the road led to an active, but antique gold mine. My understanding is that someone later packed the old mill up, and hauled it board by board to Houston, where it became a restaurant. There were lots of old mine shafts dotting the landscape up there, and this was before anyone thought to put steel bars over the shafts. We found one such mine opening, a huge cavern right off the road, and when we went in, there were beautiful quartz crystals in a maze across the ceiling. Well, my mother, being my mother, and a dedicated rock hound, decided to chip some of them loose. They had a greenish tinge that she thought came from a vein of copper running through the wall. About 8-10 feet back, you could see where there had been a mine fire as all the timbers holding up the ceiling were burned. The smell of a bear was also pungent. In case you don’t know, bears are stinky. There was also a deep hole where the open shaft was down into the mine. This roadside mine was also on the way to a field of old mining cabins, where you could walk around and go in them, as they were abandoned, along with the mine. One rainy, misty, and (insanely for July) snowy, day, my dad was convinced we saw a ghost. A group of cows had been grazing up near the cabins, but they wandered off into the woods. We were in the car, and a cowboy materialized out of the treeline. He rode over to the car, and asked my dad if he’d seen his herd of cows. Dad said he thought they’d gone off around the mining camp, and the cowboy tipped his hat…and disappeared. Personally, I thought I saw him ride back into the treeline, but Dad swore up and down the cowboy was dressed in clothing fitting for the 1800’s rather than the mid- 1970’s. I’m still not sure about that one, but my parents were freaked out, so…

Anyway, the cabin was designed to be a ski lodge for the doctor’s family and his guests. No one used it in the summer, so he was happy to let my dad go up and check on the property. Squatters were a problem as were summer storms with vicious lightning. A house could burn down in a matter of hours, and no one would know about it, or be able to fight the fire because of the remote location. The house wasn’t an A-frame design. It had a big front door, heavy with a screen on it, and same at the back by the kitchen. It also had a wide front elevated porch, which I decided was my stage. I took my 8 track tapes of Cheap Trick, and played to my imaginary Budokan audience with them. (So, this had to be 1978 or 1979, because I had Dream Police although we started coming up to the cabin in 1976 because I remember we had lunch at the Pink Adobe in Santa Fe. There used to be a photograph of us sitting outside on the patio, and my mother was wearing a centennial red, white, and blue handkerchief blouse. (it is probably in one of the storage units, in a glass frame, which used to hang in the kitchen of the house I grew up in on 70th street in Oklahoma. This is provided the heat has not destroyed it.)

Anyway, bears walked across the porch at night. There was a homemade zipline behind the house that went down the riverbank. Dangerous really but I loved it, and I had a couple of friends up there with me. (Angela, which damn near destroyed our friendship because there was really nothing to do but read, and she wasn’t a big reader. Tracy, who really wasn’t a friend…I’d call her a frenenemy now, she and her family came up. My dad was friends with her dad, for a while, before her father died) She was a bully, and mean to me most of the time when her parents weren’t looking. I tried to be nice because my dad and her dad were friends, but I was really happy the day we graduated high school because I didn’t have to deal with her unless I wanted to. I tried a couple of times after that, but she was still the same asshole, so I gave up after she got married and had kids. Anyway, one night when Tracy was there, a pack of coyotes came through and howled right under our windows. Tracy was so scared that she went crying hysterically to her parents. She was shaking so badly that the bed she was sitting on was vibrating.

They were loud, but I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. It was bad enough that they left the next day to drive home. I wonder to this day what the hell they were expecting? I think my dad and her dad got to go fishing in the river, but I don’t really remember. Nor do I care, as this story isn’t about Tracy, whom I’d always equated with Lucy on the Peanuts cartoons. This is a comment about the wildlife, and how close we were to nature. I remember watching the striped chipmunks run all over, and the blue columbine flowers that covered the riverbank, along with the indian paintbrush. I also remember the rainbow trout in the stream, and hiking back and forth between the cabin and the meadow in waders, carrying creels of fish, and other fishing gear. There were other cabins and homesites up around the meadow and further north as this was the dirt switchback track leading up to Wheeler Peak.

Anyway, it was on one of these sojourns that we picked up the container of blue cornmeal. It might have come from Questa, Taos, or Santa Fe. The fact is, it remained in mom’s kitchen for a while before she decided, one fateful New Year’s Eve to cook it into cornbread muffins. It is a southern tradition to have black-eyed peas and cornbread on New Year’s. Mom found it sitting, innocuously, in her kitchen and decided it would be fun to make blue cornbread. Keep in mind, it had been a few years since she bought it, as it was now at least 1982 and I’d moved from the Cheap Trick (1) phase (as opposed to the Cheap Trick 2 phase which is a different story) and into the AFOS phase. So, we all sat down to dinner of black-eyed peas, pork chops, spinach, and blue cornbread.

Long about ten-thirty, I got violently sick, and my dad who never threw up, bazooka barfed everywhere. My mother, who ate significantly less of the stuff, never the less, was puking to beat the band…and my mother could barf on command so this was serious. I remember laying on the couch at midnight, unable to lift my head, watching a live AFOS performance from somewhere, and wondering what the hell happened. I also remember my parents weakly calling to me from the backroom and wishing me a happy new year.

Not one of the more pleasant New Year’s celebrations I’ve ever had, and certainly not the worst. As I look back on it now, it strikes me as funny in an odd way. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and as a family, we became even tighter knit, just my mom, dad, and me.

So, what made us so sick? As it turns out, Dad asked around, and found out, by accident, that a lot of blue cornmeal mix had been recalled in New Mexico for pesticide contamination. Our symptoms were consistent with pesticide poisoning and as one of my dad’s friends’ remarked…we were lucky to have survived it. Mom threw the remaining container out, so there was no testing of it to make sure. But, I believe we survived because none of us really ate a whole lot of it. Traditionally, it is New Years Day that southerners eat black-eyed peas and cornbread, not New Year’s Eve. So, in saving the majority for the next day, my mother saved us. To this day, I look at blue cornmeal chips with trepidation and rehash this story with my husband. Oh, I will eat them, and in fact, like them because they have a different texture than regular restaurant-style chips. But, blue corn chips always brings back this memory to me, and what it was like growing up with my mom, dad, and me.