I spend some mornings at a wonderful coffee shop telling stories. Most of the stories might be true. It is lovely to drink coffee and laugh with friends. Without water we wouldn’t have coffee nor green chile. I love the Rio Grande. Today’s podcast has a little of this and that stories. When you hear people talking about how the West was won, it was not with guns, though they were important. Rather, it was very precise technology that tamed the West, and that technology is still in use. For hundreds of years the vast wild lands of New Mexico had plenty of lizards, snakes, deer, rabbits and coyotes but nothing that could be shipped somewhere else for money. What could use the land commercially were cattle and sheep. Then came two inventions: windmills and barbed wire. Oh, yes, and railroads so when going to market the cows didn’t walk off their pounds or take twenty cowboys a month to get there. What made the difference in ranching was only a hundred or so feet of dirt away from the thirsty cows, sheep and people. That first great invention was windmills.

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I am told that an Iceberg is 10 percent visible and 90 percent below the water line. Las Cruces hasn’t seen an Iceberg in forever, except in Hollywood movies. What is the commonality of Icebergs and Las Cruces and most towns in New Mexico? What you see, the roads, buildings and houses are only a part of the entire story of building Las Cruces. When I was a little boy, my grandfather’s ranch south of Carrizozo, NM was what would be considered primitive because it had kerosene lanterns for light and a wood stove for cooking and heat. Water was pumped by a windmill on a hill and put in a tank to gravity flow into the house. There wasn’t electricity other than batteries for the radio and no propane, yet. It was 30 bumpy miles on dirt roads to the nearest paved road in Tularosa. When we hit the pavement, everyone would say, ah! I was very lucky to experience cleaning the lantern chimneys every Saturday and reading by kerosene light while listening to a radio powered by batteries. That was 1954 and the Rural Electrification Act finally came to the ranch, and they had electricity for the house and the water wells.

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I had an interesting question from someone: “Why is everyone so taken by chile?” Most of us were born here in New Mexico and do not remember a time when we were not eating chile peppers. Yes, we had baby food, but then came green and red chile. We loved it. Let’s explore why people here and all over the world find New Mexico chile so very great. And it is great. There are facts about New Mexico chile to think about: for people coming to New Mexico, it is a taste that some visitors and residents embrace enthusiastically, while others do not. Why is that, Michael? Chile Peppers are unlike other edibles; they take getting used to early on in your adventure in a novel taste. The enjoyment of chile peppers works out over time if you have a satisfied expression after a meal using chile peppers, what we call the chile afterglow. Now we are talking chile with an e, not chili with an i in Texas or winter chilly with a y.

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