Gustatory Demise on the Continental Divide

For a second or two it felt like a real punch to my stomach when the waiter told me that the little cafe would be closing soon. I cherished stopping in on the way back from a standard summer bicycle ride. The food was surprisingly good here, just a few pedal kicks from the continental divide, on the edge of an old mining town. 

To actually get pleasure from a restaurant is so rare for me that it is worth dwelling on this wonderful little cafe. Normally I consider food at restaurants to be mediocre, tasteless, and obscenely over-priced. Oh, and the background din. This year they had added a overhead shelter made of galvanized, corrugated steel, one of the building materials used in decaying New Mexican dumps, a great favorite of mine. 

Red chiles hung dried in bunches next to my table. The rafters of the structure looked like de-barked pine logs, and made me think of the ponderosa forest I had just bicycled through. Off in the distance was a pair of mountain peaks which some friends and I had recently hiked to. Nothing was spectacular at this little cafe, yet everything offered a positive association, and they all added onto each other.

I'd always arrived here, having finished most of the 2000 feet of climbing of this bicycle ride. After eating I only had to pedal uphill for a few seconds to the Divide, and then coast back to the Little Pueblo, 1100 feet lower. Sitting at their outdoor tables, I could gloat about the cool breeze up here. Summer has abruptly ended around these parts, and for the first time this summer I deliberately chose to eat in the sun this morning.

OK, so much of the credit goes to the calm euphoria that bicycling puts me into, before dropping in to this little cafe. So what? It still counts, and I will miss it.