Essays
Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities
Hightech daytripping
March 2, 2005
“Como se dice “achiote” en Ingles?” I asked my wife, Deborah. She is much more fluent in Spanish than I. She shook her head, then grinned and picked her laptop off of the back seat of the car and attached it to the cell phone and in a minute was on the Internet. “It is the small red seeds of the annatto tree, a common tree in the Caribbean and tropical America. As we just learned from La Senora at Reyna’s Deli, achiote is the paste spread on cochinita pibil, pork that is pit-barbecued in the Yucatan style and served with a habanero sauce.” My tongue still tingled from the habanero sauce. She read the recipe out loud as we drove down the road.
Deborah and I were out gallivanting around, headed southeast of town to look for some Chimaya. “Don’t you just love the Internet? Don’t you just love having the equivalent of the Library of Congress available at the touch of a finger?”
“Don’t put it away – see that field of filaree in bloom. I remember reading a long time ago that it had a herbal medicine use.” I gave her the Latin name. She chortled, “Bingo! It is a diuretic. And listen to this, the name originated in Morocco. The Moors that conquered Spain gave it the name al feria, and alferillo is the Spanish name. I wonder if the plant came to Spain with the Moors, too. Filaree is the English twist to the common name.”
“Does that site have the ecological history of how the plant got to North America?” In programs on wildflowers I have always told folks that it came with the churro sheep brought by Don Juan de Onate in 1598 when the Spanish colonized New Northern New Mexico. She scanned the document, then I heard the click of her nails on the mouse pad.
“No, but Michael Moore’s Southwestern School of Herbal Medicine site does say that it came with early Spanish settlers. I guess the little curly haired seeds were trapped in the fleece of the sheep. I cannot see those settlers hauling hay from Chihuahua City to Santa Fe.” Deborah and I own four of Moore’s books. His books and a dozen other books about plants and animals are often in the car when we go moseying around. When we are out of range of cellular communications, they still come in handy. Someday satellite telephone service might be cheap enough for we residents of the vast and sparsely populated countryside of the American West and northern Mexico to be able to have internet access anywhere – even in the depths of McKittrick Canyon in the Guadalupe Mountains!
We are still in the learning stage about the capabilities of our high-tech equipment. The cable we bought for hooking up our GPS unit to the laptop did not work, despite the claims of the manufacturer. (It was not the more costly cable distributed by the manufacturer of the GPS.) We already enjoy geocaching, especially when the oldest grandson comes to visit. We hope to use the GPS to map locations of specific plant populations with limited ranges or of sporadic seasonal occurrence. We want to be able to go back to a plant and find it when it is in seed or in a vigorous condition perfect for taking cuttings.
An example of such a plant is Chimaya, or Mountain Parsley. Despite thirty minutes of hiking in the general area where JoAnn Merritt had originally found it, (and still the only place it has been found in Midland County) we did not find any specimens. If we had found it, we could have least created a waypoint for it on the GPS. Later I wondered what the word meant and about its derivation. We found half an answer within minutes – according to the Penasco Valley (Picuris, New Mexico) School District website Chimaya is a Pueblo Indian word. Unfortunately the site did not give a translation.
Chimaya is better known in New Mexico, where it is often used in ways similar to cilantro. (Is the famous sanctuary and town of Chimayo named for the plant?) Its roots are reputedly delicious when cooked. Unlike cilantro, however, its dried leaves retain flavor for months. It deserves to be examined for potential cultivation. It can only be harvested in February and March, for its leaves die to the ground as soon as summer’s heat returns.
Back in January, Deborah and I went to Cloudcroft for supper. One Sunday, sitting around after a late brunch, she had sighed, “We haven’t gone any where recently. We never go anywhere.” When I hear that teasing tone, I know we are in for an adventure. “Let’s go check out the Lodge in Cloudcroft. We might want to book a weekend there sometime. You don’t want to do that, do you?” She sighed again, and pouted. “What the heck,” I said.
Deborah drove. I put the laptop on my lap, to take notes about what we saw. It was amazing, typing away, and not looking at what I was writing. Before we had the laptop, I often took notes as we wandered about, and often missed seeing a flower or animal she saw because I was looking at the paper as I wrote. I often keep a wildflower or bird list, but I also like to record stray observations about what we humans do within the landscape, such as “drillstem pipe fences are a common feature of oil field towns.” Writers write impulsively and compulsively, which is probably repulsive behavior, but Deborah humors me. She even told me that one of the reasons she bought the laptop was so that I could write such “effluent” as we drove. What a sweet lady!
As we drove into Artesia, we used the laptop for another of the reasons she bought it. “Log on to the gas price site – it is bookmarked. Find out which station in town has the cheapest gasoline.” I did so, and then surfed the web for a minute, looking for what Artesia had to offer. “Hmm, if we had more time we could…” and read off some of the local attractions. My notes for the drive would have filled three single-spaced pages of print, but I accidentally deleted them as we drove back into Midland at midnight. Oh, fooooie!