Driving through Carson National Forest, the landscape completely changed to ponderosa pine and stark-white aspen. Green grass. My car wound up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, until I thought I couldn’t possibly go any farther, and then it wound down, down, down, braking … down, down, down, braking … down the mountain and into Angel Fire, or as locals sometimes call it, Anglo Fire. It’s not very diverse, especially compared to the rest of New Mexico. Apparently a lot of Texans transplanted to the little ski town in the mountains.
I was on my way to the home of Marcia and Guy Wood, lifelong journalists who came to live in Angel Fire about 35 years ago after several years in Colorado. I can see why Angel Fire attracted them; it reminded me so much of Colorado, I couldn’t believe I was still in New Mexico. Gravel roads led up to their house, which sits at 8,800 feet and has incredible views through huge windows that line its walls—the blues and greens of mountains covered in pines, and a full moon with big, cumulous clouds flashing lightning in the distance that first night I arrived. I stood on their back deck and took it in, at total peace.
They were the most pleasant hosts. I got their life stories in a nutshell that first night, how they started newspapers in various cities and bought and ran a weekly in Angel Fire for a time. Guy’s grandfather and father were in the newspaper business, too, as is his son. I guess it’s just in some people’s blood. He still reads the papers every day. It was newspapers that brought us together. The former city editor at The Frederick News-Post, Andy Schotz, had connected us after meeting Marcia and Guy at a journalism conference. “They’re your kind of people,” he’d told me. They are. Journalists who also have that love of nature and need for space and beauty that only a home in the wilderness provides.
To give you an idea of where they live, one neighbor spotted a mountain lion in their yard, and another neighbor is in witness protection. Bears are the norm. They can’t leave birdseed on their porch, a practice that I learned myself while living in Hedgesville, West Virginia, where my backyard was literally 20,000 acres of wilderness preserve. There are only about 1,000 year-round residents in Angel Fire, and when I learned about the weather conditions, I wasn’t surprised. It snows until May or June. They got 220 inches of snow last year. Temperatures get to 20 below.
They got married nine months after meeting one another and have been married for more than 50 years. They’re one of those couples who makes me believe in marriage. They laugh a lot and have that uncanny kind of simpatico that can’t be manufactured.
Marcia loves to cook and fed me home-cooked meals while I was there—enchiladas and blueberry muffins and quiche. After staying with Maryann and eating at her home, I was beginning to feel real spoiled.
They had a bedroom ready for me, too. I almost cried when I saw it. It was like heaven. I fell asleep next to a big window, cracked open to let in the cool night air (it went down into the 40s), moonlight streaming onto the bed.
I dreamt that a light snow dusted the mountaintop, and my brother and I traveled to the Rio Grande Gorge, which I’d seen the day before. “It’s enough just to see these things,” we said to one another in the dream, agreeing that we both loved to travel to simply take in new places visually. It seemed much deeper in the dream.
“They had a farmers market today, but I think it’s still too early to have much there,” Marcia told me the following morning, when I got out of bed and joined them in the living room. Their growing season usually starts in June—July, this year.
I decided to stay another night, so that I could hunker down and get some work done, which I did. The following morning, I joined them on their biweekly food run to a town about 45 minutes away, with Always Loving Mankind Food Pantry. We left at 8 a.m. and headed for a nearby church to load 96 bags of groceries into a work van and get on our way. Guy drove, knowing the route inside and out. We passed through a cloud (literally) and past Eagle Nest and its lake, then through Cimarron Canyon, which revealed its wild fire devastation from a year prior—some 35,000 acres of dead, charred-black trees from Ute Park to Cimarron.
No one answered the door at the first stop, and Guy set the bags on the front porch.
“Maybe we should leave it in their car?” I said, not quite acclimated to the elevation but feeling like I’d learned a thing or two about bears (turns out, I hadn’t—they break into cars).
Once in Cimarron, in the foothills of the Rockies, most of the roads we traveled were dirt or gravel. We’d stop at a small shack or trailer, carrying bags, adding fresh bananas and pistachios and milk to each one, and knocking on doors, most of which were opened by Hispanic women, often with children at their feet or elderly women who had a sort of depth about them, women who had lived a life of farming and hard work, a life they were proud of and grateful for. The town is nearly all Hispanic, desolate, poor. One woman’s little house was painted in day-glo colors. She had a sun-shiney kind of pride about her, and I was told that she changes the paint color fairly frequently. She was gardening and cleaning a storage bin when we arrived. Another woman looked ravaged by meth. Another, in her 90s, was soft spoken but had a quiet fierceness in her face, like an aged Georgia O’Keeffe, and her house was filled with exquisite “paintings” she’d done by stitching thread on a canvas. I’d never seen anything like it. They looked hyperrealistic. Another woman, not on the route, had painted murals onto her home.
We were so exhausted by the time we got back to Angel Fire, we all immediately took naps. Then we ate cake. It was a problem cake that had started as brownies the day prior, which Marcia was baking for a party.
She was using the recipe instructions for high elevation, but still, the brownies weren’t turning out right.
“I think I might’ve put in too much oil,” she said, hovering over bowls measuring cups. “I asked Guy to get me more oil from the store, and I think maybe I measured it out twice.”
She said the first batch tasted like a weird, oily version of a chocolate cake. She decided to try again (she sent Guy to the grocery store at least twice to get more ingredients and mixes) and made two separate pans of brownies from two boxes of the same mix, although different from the first brownies/cake. Oddly enough, when they came out of the oven, each one looked completely different, and she fretted over them a bit.
“Worrying is praying for trouble, dear,” Guy reminded her.
She wrapped them up and took them to the party anyway (what could she do?). Later, she told me that they were a hit—people ate all of them—but she thought they were awful, worst than the first batch. Meanwhile, I tried the chocolate “cake” and thought it was great. I don’t know if it was the exhaustion from a day of delivering groceries in the heat, or if somehow the oil had found its way into the cake, but by that second night, it tasted even better.
Angel Fire was yet another place that I didn’t want to leave, but eventually, I was hugging Marcia and Guy, taking selfies, and saying our goodbyes.
“Could you just text me to let me know you’re somewhere safe every so often?” Marcia asked.
My heart.
“Yes, of course!”
She sent me off with two slices of chocolate “cake”—which I proceeded to eat for dinner that night, as I camped under the stars in Abiquiu, thinking of her and Guy. I’ll never forget them and the magical corner of the country that they call home.