By Jessica Rath

Did you know that there are hundreds of different varieties of garlic? I didn’t, and I had no idea that there are two subspecies of Allium sativum, the relative of onions, leeks, chives etc., distinctive because of its pungent odor and taste. It took a visit with La Madera garlic farmer Bill Page and his wife Claudia to divest me of my ignorance. And as it so often happens with these interviews, it was a delight to meet my hosts and experience where they live. The scenery around La Madera is absolutely stunning.

Bill grew up in Denver, Colorado, together with his younger sister and brother. They were raised mainly by his mother, an unconventional and sophisticated individual who  took her children to Europe for several years, so they could be exposed to different cultures and learn foreign languages. After more than two years at Swiss boarding schools where he learnt fluent French, Bill returned temporarily to the U.S. and got a Bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College in California. He got married and went back to Europe for a year, but it ended in divorce in the late 70s, after 16 years.

In October 1985, Bill married again, and  when Claudia, his current wife, closed up her business in 1994, they moved from Denver to La Madera.  They bought into a family compound of 30 riverfront acres with a brother of Claudia’s, Nick, her sister Leza, and Leza’s husband Daryl.  In March 1995 they had finished building their house and moved in.
​
Do you remember the showing of the documentary Navalny in El Rito, a while ago? Part of the work actually happened at Claudia and Bill’s house. The film’s editor, Langdon Page who secured an Oscar for his team, is Bill’s son. His other son, David, is Executive Director of the non-profit national advocacy organization Winter Wildlands Alliance.
 
Right from Day One Claudia and Bill got involved with the Acequia Association.  There was an irrigation ditch, but it was dry. They had to  resurrect the ditch, and with the help of a neighbor they got the water flowing again.

“At various times I've been the Secretary, Treasurer, or the Mayordomo, or the President, or whatever, on and off for all those 30 years, and so has Claudia, and so has Daryl”, Bill told me.  “People at the bottom of the ditch have to take more responsibility than the people at the top of the ditch if they want the water. That means, if nobody wants to be President or Secretary or  Treasurer, or whatever, we are the ones that have to do it”.

I was curious – how does one become a garlic farmer, I wondered.
​
“Well, after my father saw this place, he said, ‘Bill, I think you ought to grow garlic’. I had no experience with garlic, but I was inclined towards agriculture, so I thought – , why not give it a try? I bought 20 different kinds of seed garlic and tried them out in little patches until I narrowed them down to three varieties which were doing well in this area. The three I ended up with all grow nice, big bulbs and they are all pungent and spicy. The Hispanic community loves to use them in their salsas. As soon as I started growing them out, I got carried away, and at one point, we had over 10,000 head in single planting”.

Twenty different kinds? I thought there was only garlic. One kind. All the same.
​
Bill had a lot of explaining to do. “No, there are a lot of different kinds of garlic. Add the fact that people like big bulbs, so they buy something that's not even garlic. They buy elephant garlic, which is technically a leek. But all the rest of the garlic is divided into softneck garlic and hardneck garlic. They're two separate genetic strains of garlic. I eliminated the soft necks, because their main advantage is for people who want to make garlic braids, because their necks are soft”.
 
“I have three varieties. One is called Red Rezan, another one is Romanian Red, and then there  is a German Brown”, Bill continued. “But there are hundreds of different varieties with lots of different tastes; some are mild, some are bland, some are big, some are small”. 

Hardneck garlic works well for smaller restaurants, Bill explained. They’re much easier to peel and each head has only three to six bigger cloves, compared to a head of softneck which can have up to 20 cloves.

“When you want to sell garlic to restaurants, it's very nice to offer them hardneck garlic, like the kind that I grow”.

Bill’s mentor was Stanley Crawford, the well-known garlic farmer and author who lived in Dixon. He died last year, which was a great loss to the garlic community, Bill said. But there was a big difference between the two: Stanley didn’t grow garlic for its culinary value but used it as a decorative item.

“He would harvest lots of softneck garlic and hire  people from Dixon or Embudo to help him dry it and braid it, and then he would put a ceramic medallion on each braid. He could get way more money for his garlic than I could, selling them at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, because people like the chile ristras, and they like to hang a garlic braid next to their ristras. He was able to sell them for what amounted to at least $5 a head. But I wanted to grow garlic that was culinarily interesting”.
​
And then Bill told me about the legal battle which took Stanley Crawford to China, New York, and Washington. Most of the garlic sold in this country, about 85% of it, comes from China. As long as the buyer knows this and can decide which one to buy, that’s fine. But Stanley found out that some of the garlic which is sold by Christopher Ranch, a garlic supplier from Gilroy, California (known as the Garlic Capital of the World) originates from China but is sold under the Christopher Ranch label. 

“So Gilroy gets to import Chinese garlic under the Christopher Ranch name, and they never pay tariffs. Nobody can investigate them for dumping garlic when China has too big a harvest  and  they're drowning in garlic. They can sell it for 10 cents a head here, and make a lot of money”, Bill told me. I was shocked to learn this, of course.

There is also a Netflix documentary, Garlic Breath – Episode Three of the Series Rotten, which shows how Chinese laborers work under deplorable conditions, that the Chinese companies manage to avoid paying import tariffs, and that the cheap garlic then is sold under the California company’s label. Christopher Ranch, of course, denies everything. I tried to find out whether this legal dispute has been resolved, without success.
​
“These days I grow the same three varieties, but I only plant 700 cloves”, Bill continued.  “Last year, it might have been 800 or 1000,  but basically, I have no energy left for sitting at a Farmers Market selling garlic. I could probably sell it in bulk, but I don't have the people to do the harvesting. It takes quite a few people to harvest and hand-cure it so that it lasts a long time”.
 
“Currently I grow just for friends and family, to give away, and to keep my strains. I tell people, I would rather have them buy for planting than for eating.  I'll go ahead and give you ten heads if you promise me to plant six of them and just eat four. The problem always is that people buy ten heads and they end up eating it! Which is too bad, because everybody ought to be growing good garlic. It's easy to grow, one of the simplest crops there is, really. You plant it in October and you harvest it in July. It doesn't take much water. You water it once when you plant it, and you don't have to water it all winter, and you start again watering it in the spring”.
​
We went outside and Bill showed me his garlic field.  I noticed all these curly things – what are those? 

“That's what we call the scapes. They’re part of the  hardneck garlic.  You want to pick these when they're young and small, and you can just chop them up and mix them with vegetables and eggs and salads. It's pungent and spicy. The plant gets more energy into the bulb and will be bigger  if you cut this off”.

Are you growing any other crops, I asked Bill.
​
“I’ve always grown a lot of  rye, and  quite a bit of wheat. And I grow vetch because it puts nitrogen back into the soil and reproduces lightly. We're getting into what's called no till planting, where you don't worry too much about weeds or anything else. You just plant right into a pasture or a meadow every year, and then arrange to harvest it. It's a sloppy, messy way of planting, but it's much better for the soil”.

“There's a big machine that you can borrow from the Farm Service Agency or from what's called the East Rio Arriba Soil and Water Conservation District, a big machine that is called a No-till Seeder. So it's built to plant your seeds, vetch or carrots, anything you want. It's got about ten to fifteen seed compartments, one right beside another, and the seed goes down through the cutter knives and gets planted. And you can vary the depth of each seed”.
That sounds very impressive, so much easier for the farmer!

 “It took a day and a half to plant all of our land. The whole place is 30 acres, but the plantable area is about ten and a half acres. And with the no-till planter I could plant it all in a day and a half”. Without this machine it must have taken two or three times as long, I bet…

“We also grow other vegetables, because Claudia has wanted to. This year, she planted some potatoes. And she planted some beans. Your biggest problem is that elk or deer come to your garden and eat it all! Claudia planted a row of beans, 300 feet long on some of these terraces, and it takes a small herd of deer or small herd of elk two or three nights to eat them after they get to a certain size. And then it's all dead. It's very discouraging”.
​
There’s no way to keep  them out, but at least they can’t get at the potatoes.

What a lovely and informative afternoon this was. My embarrassing ignorance about garlic has finally been fixed. It is such an essential ingredient of cooking all over the world that it deserves more attention than I gave it. Thank you, Bill, for taking the time to show me around.
​
And if you want to grow your own garlic – I’m sure Bill will help you. I went home with a head which I will plant this coming October.

When Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon crossed the New Mexico desert in Oppenheimer, they did it by Dragon.  That’s the nickname of a locomotive — part of the Sky Railway co-owned by Game of Thrones mastermind George R.R. Martin and New Mexico entrepreneur Bill Banowsky — that thrust Murphy’s Robert J. Oppenheimer and Damon’s Colonel Leslie Groves to their destinies and became one of the key Oppenheimer locations.
​
It was one of countless resources that Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-magnet origin story of the atomic bomb found on location in New Mexico, dubbed the Land of Enchantment. Enchanting is exactly what the state proved to be for a production that took advantage of its sweep and history, giving the historical biopic the immediacy of a speeding train. 

“We’re blessed out here these days. Production after production after production — it’s a great place to be,” says David Manzanares, who helped find key locations for Oppenheimer. He spoke to us phone by phone recently from another New Mexico set, for a project he couldn’t disclose just yet. 

Oppenheimer is largely the story of how Groves and Oppenheimer developed the A-bomb in total secrecy. But these days, New Mexico is where filmmakers go to build hit movies and shows — with at least a little secrecy. A wide array of locations are at their disposal, from twinned natural wonders to anonymous offices to trains named for mythical beasts. 
​
Our own research bears out filmmakers’ sense of awe: On our latest list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker, Santa Fe is at the top of smaller cities, and Albuquerque is second among big cities.

Manzanares remembers the day in 2021 when his friend Todd Christensen, the former head of the New Mexico Film Office, first reached out to him about a 1940s-set New Mexico project. Christensen couldn’t reveal much more than that — “we respect each other’s NDAs,” jokes Manzanares — but he soon thought of a perfect place. 

It turned out to be one of the most stunning Oppenheimer locations.

New Mexico, Manzanares explains, is in his blood. Growing up, he always thought of himself as simply Spanish. But when his son Maximiño came home from college, asking about his background, they began to investigate their Indigenous roots, and found that their connection to the land was “as old as the dust.”

“This is where they’ll bury me,” says Manzanares, who has also worked on New Mexico locations for films including Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Magnificent Seven, and Hostiles. “It’s a really cool feeling to have — a sense of connection.”

One crucial section of Oppenheimer required an empty, panoramic shot of the future site of Los Alamos, where the physicist and his team would build the bomb. But on the same day, Manzanares recalls, the filmmakers also needed to film the completed town, against a nearly identical backdrop.

Manzanares suggested locations in Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, where he grew up, about an hour away from Santa Fe. He is the field producer for Ghost Ranch, which until Oppenheimer was perhaps best known as the home and frequent subject of painter Georgia O’Keeffe. 

Ghost Ranch features breathtaking vistas, streams, plains, and monolithic cliffs, with nearby mesas, red rocks and Abiquiu Lake.The film took advantage of the area’s natural beauty for scenes of horseback-riding and camping — as well as its Los Alamos set. 

Buildings that appear in the film are now available for other productions, and can be toured, by appointment, by the general public.

For the scenes where Oppenheimer is grilled in a small, shabby office of the Atomic Energy Commission, the film needed the opposite of wide-open spaces. The production found a nice, crowded office in downtown Santa Fe’s PERA Building — named for the Public Employee Retirement Association. 

In the film, the drab office masks the ruthless trap set by Oppenheimer’s jealous nemesis, Lewis Strauss — played by Robert Downey Jr. But in reality, the walls of the PERA Building hid from the general public a soon-to-be Best Picture winner populated by Nolan and some of the most famous actors in the world.

Soon, the trucks and trailers in a nearby parking lot drew the attention of people who inundated Santa Fe Film Commissioner Jennifer LaBar-Tapia with questions. 

When MovieMaker first named Santa Fe as the No. 1 small town on our list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker — a position it has held for two years running — we called LaBar-Tapia “part sheriff, part cheer captain, and all rock star.” 

She’s also a pretty good detective, it turns out, when it comes to sussing out imposters.
“I was starting to get calls from people that claimed they were from our local newspaper,” she says. “And of course, I can’t say what’s happening.” 
She knew they weren’t really reporters, she says, because they were calling her office line — and real local reporters have her cell number. 

​She’s also a pretty good detective, it turns out, when it comes to sussing out imposters.
“I was starting to get calls from people that claimed they were from our local newspaper,” she says. “And of course, I can’t say what’s happening.” 
​
She knew they weren’t really reporters, she says, because they were calling her office line — and real local reporters have her cell number. 

When it comes time for a project to announce its presence in New Mexico, it’s up to the state film office — aka Film New Mexico — to handle the formal announcements. There have been a lot in the last 15 years — from Breaking Bad to Better Call Saul to the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to the Tom Hanks Western News of the World.

Boldfaced names don’t just visit — several live in Santa Fe, where they appreciate the scenery, the 300 days of sunshine each year, the thriving art scene, and the distance from Hollywood. It is a refuge for many, including Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, and George R.R. Martin.
​
But only one of the three bought a train.

For years, the Santa Fe Southern Railway, which runs 18 miles from Lamy to Santa Fe, had up-and-down financial fortunes. But some of its greatest moments were captured on film. 

It was featured in the 2008 Ed Harris Western Appaloosa, as well as one of the most impressive episodes of Breaking Bad, “Dead Freight,” which features a train heist of methylamine.  
In 2019, Bill Banowsky and Martin joined together with other investors to purchase the train line. They had become friends because Banowsky owns businesses in the Santa Fe Railyard, including an 11-screen movie theater, while Martin owns a single-screen theater in the rail yard.

“This was a dying railroad that was about to go out of business,” Banowsky recalls. “They approached me and they approached George about the idea of us stepping in to save the railroad.”
Banowsky was hesitant at first. But Martin, he recalls, “just lit up, like a kid — and was all about having a railroad.”
He recalls Martin saying: “This railroad that we’re buying comes with two locomotives. We’ll paint one like the head of a wolf and one like the head of a dragon. And we’ll have fire coming out of the dragon’s mouth and the wolf will howl!” 

The railroad gives even more authenticity to Oppenheimer: Lamy, a stop between Los Angeles and Chicago, was the actual arrival point for scientists coming to work at Los Alamos in the 1940s. Additionally, the sequences shot on board the train cars literally propel the dramatic exchanges between Oppenheimer and Groves.
“The trains were actually moving, and so the background that you see is the New Mexico background adjacent to our tracks,” says Banowsky. “It’s all the train moving in real time.”
And like the film’s Los Alamos set at Ghost Ranch, the trains are now open to the public. 

Banowsky and Martin rebranded their venture as the Sky Railway, refurbished the cars, hired an artist to paint them, and developed events including music performances and a Murder on the Orient Express-style experience.The once-struggling railroad has now had a financial turnaround, he happily reports. 
“It’s a live entertainment venue on rails that has become a very popular tourist stop,” Banowsky says.
Main image: 

“Dark Silhouettes” screens in statewide competition Saturday, September 14
NNMC
​ 
ESPAÑOLA, N.M. — "Dark Silhouettes,” a film produced by Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) Film & Digital Media Arts students Natalia Tealer, Lukas LeDoux and Nicholas Taylor, has been selected for the New Mexico Student Filmmakers Showcase. The showcase, which features film screenings and an awards ceremony, takes place from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, N.M. The event is free to the public.
 
The New Mexico Student Filmmakers Showcase is sponsored by the New Mexico Film Foundation, San Juan Community College and Eastern New Mexico University. “Dark Silhouettes” will be competing against films from college film programs around the state. Northern students have won awards in this competition three times in recent years.
 
"Dark Silhouettes,” comes out of film professor David Lindblom's Voice and Documentary Filmmaking class, where students closely examined three films: "italianamerican" by Martin Scorsese, "Little Boy" by Danny Lyon and "Meshes of the Afternoon” by Maya Deren." For a final project, students produced a short film using techniques, devices and production values similar to those in the films.
 
The New Mexico Student Filmmakers Showcase is a statewide film screening event that celebrates and showcases the amazing talents of New Mexico's college and university film programs. Submissions from around the state are judged over the summer. The showcase is a festival, networking event and awards celebration all in one. The event is free to the public, but RSVPs are recommended.
 
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Cutline:
 
From left: Lukas LeDoux, Nicholas Taylor and Natalia Tealer produced "Dark Silhouettes,” which has been selected for the New Mexico Student Filmmakers Showcase.
 
About Northern:
 
Northern New Mexico College has served the rural communities of Northern New Mexico for over a century. Since opening in 1909 as the Spanish American Normal School in El Rito, NM, the College has provided affordable access to quality academic programs that meet the changing educational, economic and cultural needs of the region.
 
Northern is an open-admissions institution offering the most affordable bachelor’s programs in the Southwest. Now one of the state’s four regional comprehensive institutions, with its main campus in Española, Northern offers more than 50 bachelor’s, associate, and certificate programs in arts & human sciences, film & digital media, STEM programs, business, education, liberal arts, and nursing. The College has reintroduced technical trades in partnership with two local unions and five public school districts through its new co-located Branch Community College, the first of its kind in the state’s history.  Northern is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) and has earned prestigious program specific accreditations for its engineering, nursing, education, and business programs. Learn more at https://nnmc.edu/.
 _______________
 
Arin McKenna, M.F.A.
Staff Writer/Reporter
Communications & Marketing
AD 128
505.747.2193
arin.mckenna@nnmc.edu 

Northern New Mexico College
921 Paseo de Oñate
Española, NM 87532
www.nnmc.edu
​

By Zach Hively

Long may they stand.
​
Piñon trees are more patient than I am. Famously, they produce cones and nuts in cycles—every three to seven years, the internet tells me, which tracks with my undoubtedly flawed observations on my near-daily walks.

So, my delight simmered over when, earlier, this summer, I saw the cones starting to form in the ’hood.

I waited. I knew the birds would get theirs. I knew the ground needed its share. But I wanted some too.

I finally, finally, let my fingers dive in. They got sticky with pine sap that I couldn’t wipe on my clothes, could only rub in sand. I plucked a half dozen nuts from one young tree, just to taste, just to delight.

Imagine the feeling of cracking open your first wild-plucked piñon nut in years, and biting into the nothing inside.

What could I do but laugh? You can’t reasonably expect anything from a piñon tree except that it keep on standing longer than any human ever has—and even this, painfully, isn’t certain anymore.

In honor of the piñon shells, here’s a poem from the vault for the trees. (This poem is untitled, as are all the poems in Owl Poems [2022, Casa Urraca Press]).​

I might outlive the piñon forests
in these mountains, in my desert.
We are not meant to live longer
than whole swaths of trees.
Long enough to believe we always
have more time, enough of it to kill
some just to get through it, too much
to comprehend what it’s worth.
 
My older dog can admire a pine stick
for an hour, which I spend begging
for him to stay four, five more years.
I cannot spoon him and swoon at his sleeping
without hearing the hole, like a flooding well,
he’ll leave with me when he’s gone.
And he will be—gone.
He knows it, and he chews a branch.
 
I know it, and I distract myself
trying to get a signal. Five more years
—a miracle for him, while I might yet outlive
the piñon forests in these mountains,
in our desert. Someday, I will want
to die, to leave my own hole, to answer
the owl, earn her trust, find myself
outlived by the trees we have left.

​​By Zach Hively

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, because it spares me coming up with an original thought: I was an English major for a reason, and that reason is power tools.
​
Now don’t get me wrong—I like power tools. Largely the power part. It’s the tool part that steered me toward analyzing literature.

Without further preamble, I hereby announce my new YouTube channel: Zach Fixes Things (Specifically the Things in His Own Home).

Let’s begin with fixing my windows. Every single window in my house has come off its track to one degree or another, making them impossible to open and/or close properly, or at all. So look up here, my dearest millions of viewers, up inside the window track. The manufacturer placed these little metal clips here, that you can pop out like this in order to easily remove the window from the frame. But either these clips are junk, or the previous residents grew so frustrated with the windows coming off the tracks that they attacked these clips with the battery end of their power tools. Watch me carefully, and you’ll see my subtle solution. I roll up these towels—I do this by hand, but you are welcome to use your drill to save yourself time and splinters—and then I stuff the towels in the window … like this … to block the drafts during winter. If my house gets too hot in summer, you can probably brute-force open one or two of these windows. If you break them, you can buy me new ones. And if you actually succeed in opening a window, but the window won’t close again, you can just buy me a bigger towel for Christmas.

Now let’s turn our attention to the slow-draining shower. We here at Zach Fixes Things (Specifically Things in His Own Home) recommend against using harsh chemicals, because power tools are more fun. This slow drain could be blocked by accumulated hair, or hard-water deposits, or my dog’s missing chew toy. There is no way to know without a snake camera, and no way to get a snake camera until that YouTube ad revenue starts rolling in.

So let’s turn to the one tool every man should have in his arsenal, no matter what he majored in, or whether or not he is a man at all: a Sawzall.

Remove the drain cap and stick the longest Sawzall blade you can find down the drain and let ’er rip. As you can see, after a few moments, the water now drains effortlessly. Where is it all going? Tune in next week and we’ll find out. For now, hit that subscribe button so the algorithm will keep you coming back forever.

Oh, and please, whatever you see here on Zach Fixes, do not try it at home. Come try it at my home instead.

Zach’s Substack is free. The free stuff today will remain free tomorrow. Someday, he might offer additional stuff. Zach+, as it were. You can tell Zach that you value his work by pledging a future paid subscription to additional stuff. You won't be charged unless he enables payments, and he’ll give a heads-up beforehand.

​Pledge your support

By Peter Nagle

​​As I noted last month, historically, stock markets tend to be volatile in September and October, which is to say they can be fairly negative. Then in November/ December there is often a year end rally. No idea if that will happen this year. It’s been pretty positive so far in 2024 so maybe we will defy history.  

What I do know is that, given where we were 3 years ago (the Pandemic), we have a very favorable economic climate now. For the 3 months ending on 8/31 consumer spending is up 4%, which is remarkable. Consumer Spending is 70% of our economy. Personal income statistics are also up. The jobs report comes out today, Friday, and that will have an impact, positive or negative, on markets depending on the number of jobs created. (“Notes” are written several days in advance of Jobs publication).

Inflation continues to decline. It’s at about 2.5% now, very close to the 2% Fed goal. Of course, inflation was over 9% at one point and the impact of that is still being felt. Just look at the price of pies at Bode’s - over 20 bucks! They’re hard to resist though! 

Interest rates will be lowered starting this month, and that will probably continue in Nov. and Dec. This is really great news for things like mortgage rates, which are coming down too. The so-called “soft landing” scenario of our economy is playing out very well so far. 

Then, of course, we have the Election on Nov 5th - that ought to be interesting! Personally I just hope we know who our new President will be, without question, on Nov 6th. Or shortly thereafter. Given the personalities involved, that’s not a given. 
 
What all this says is that if we do get weakness in markets in the next 2 months or so, it might be smart to buy your favorite equity investments on this weakness.


In any case, there are a lot of variables floating around out there this year, more than usual. Buckle your seat belts and come along for the ride!
 
(Peter J Nagle is a Financial Advisor with over 40 years experience. Any questions or comments can be directed to: Thoughtfulincome@gmail.com.)