Dinner at Vermejo Park Ranch

Vermejo Park Ranch spans 590,823 acres across New Mexico and crawls up the southern slope of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains across the Colorado border. There among the meadows of grazing bison, ghost towns, granite bluffs and mountain lion lairs, and towing ponderosa pines, we met up with Elise Bow and ran with her and the ranch life for a day and a good night. After a ramble into the snowy high country, we were invited to sample the heaping bounty of the ranch and of Texas-style hospitality when we were invited to a hunting party’s cabin for dinner. Our plates were piled high with what seemed to be half of the horned and antlered passengers on Noah’s Ark. Fork after fork, I ate some of the best mammalian megafauna the North American content has cultivated: wild boar, bison, beef, venison, pork, and elk all cooked by Allen, our host who often comes to hunt the ranch.

There is much talk about the virtues of local food by people who have the time and conviction to espouse upon it. I suppose it is a desire to know and be in control of what we eat, or at least feel empowered to make informed decisions. But it seems that those closest to any craft have the least to say about it. As we ate and heard texas tales and jokes, I sat beside my friend James, a Vermejo hunting guide, whose pants were still blood stained from the successful Elk Cow hunt earlier that morning. I was too busy laughing and listening and eating to form any opinion of my own. And even if I did, my mouth was too full to tell it. Some people want to know how things work, and where those things come from, and who does the work to get them to us for our pleasure, use, and consumption. – And some don’t. Some want to turn over stones, sharpen knives, open hoods, and get a front row seat to the process. – And some don’t. I have no idea which is a better approach, but I know which is easier.

Those that do, seem to do so not to espouse loudly on their knowledge, but rather to be able to sleep quietly at night. By the two-thousandth calorie I ate that night, I decided that informed decisions are never come by easy, and total conviction – on any topic – is usually come by through at least some application of willful ignorance; nothing really understood is ever simple, or easy to come by, quick to accomplish, and scarcely convenient to reconcile.

The more I see (and eat) the more I learn the same and single lesson: I know very little in this world. Education is not equal to knowledge, and just because you have either doesn’t guarantee you always have something to eat. Getting up, doing the work, and figuring it out won’t promise a good meal either, but it is the best way I have seen at attempting to do so.