Green Machines
The chile roasters in front of their rotating wire basket.
My lungs filled with the heavy air of roasting green chile as I waited my turn at the gas pumps. Gabriel continued filling the pump of some tired local elementary teacher. She slumped in the seat of her beat Ford Escort as if five minutes of fuel were twelve hours of good sleep. I waved, and she bid me hello. I realized she wasn’t sleeping; her closed eyes meant rapture.
"Cómo estás, Birdie! You smell the chile? It’s finally Fall.” She reached outside her window and waved a plastic bag of cinnamon-laced biscochitos my way. I accepted a cookie, took a bite.
"Hey, thanks. I love chile season.”
The end of September in New Mexico means chile, means waxy green pods stuffed in burlap bags at the local grocer. The new, bright red ristras can be seen hanging from balconies and porches, and men man caged machines where the green chile harvest is turned over shooting flames to produce a blistered skin.
Chile is so important to New Mexico that it’s been declared the state vegetable, even though scientists call it a fruit. Most people credit Juan de Oñate, the Spaniard who founded Santa Fe in 1609, with bringing cultivated chiles into our area. He spread the tiny dried seeds of chiles he carried from Chihuahua along his route, with native farmers, with mission monks, with the hope he would return to vibrant fields of fragrant spicy peppers.
The old monks roasted chile in the same manner we do today – over fire with a continuous flipping and tossing of pods so that they are evenly blackened. You can see these roasters at various locations around town – at Lowe’s, at Wal-Mart, on Bridge Street where a quiet man smiles at me as he turns his wire machine. Sometimes I pause and watch him, watch his wiry arms load new green chile into the 55-gallon basket turned on its side, watch him close the hatch, rotate it over a fire fueled by canisters of propane. He concentrates on the chile as it spins, his brown eyes closed in rapture as if his meditation coaxes them to life, to the daily communion of red or green we take at each meal.
I watched two cousins spin green in front of Lowe’s on Mill Street. They chatted with their customer as the broken black skin fell from the wire basket into a trough below the flames. Greg Luhan spoke to me as Orlando Luhan fiddled carefully with the cage, made sure his customer’s chile burned even and true. Greg shrugged his shoulders when I asked him how long he cooked chile.
“Just a month. It’s a job, you know?”
He laughed, as if roasting chile was a small thing, something unimportant. His black hat covered his eyebrows, made him seem mysterious, a chile Ninja. But his dark eyes gave away his emotion, his connection to these long green pods.
“It smells so good.”
I let my words smile for me, let him know I loved his work, loved the way the sky rose with the scent of our ancient land. He smiled, too.
“Yeah. It smells good.”
Birdie, you're gonna make me cry.
Posted by: Miss T | May 05, 2007 at 05:59 PM