The road to San Augustin passes nothing, nothing but a pistol-pitted sign welcoming travelers to county road C-24, nothing but dry wind and green-gold prairie, the asphalt twisting in deference to property line and gulch, pockets of fattened cows standing bored sentinel. I drove slower than the speed limit, my son riding shotgun, and watched the sun fall from my ears to shoulder in the rear view mirror.

A coyote stood at the edge of the road as if waiting to cross. Rough skin rose under her coat, a crisscross of scars and wayward tufts of fur. She looked like she knew something interesting about us, and I turned my head to keep her in vision. We watched each other until she became one with her fleas, a mere dot on the horizon, until my car edged past the Las Vegas Land Grant and into the Tecolote Land Grant at the Charles R Ranch. The late September sun framed her body, hung low in the sky, orange and swollen.

Louis counted two mobile homes, an ancient crumbled adobe, a simple stucco residence, another, until they disappeared behind us, until we turned with the road again and the plains turned to steep rock valley. I slowed to ten miles per hour, kept the car from sliding too fast down the canyon wall.

“Mom, we’re almost here. Look, see the river?” I followed the line of his pointed finger across scarlet land to an oval protrusion of sage and rock and sunburnt clay, the river nestled inside, and listened as he described the kind of thing only thirteen-year-olds notice.

“This is so New Mexico. It’s a chile canyon.”

I let the car coast as Louis rolled down his window, took deep breaths of rich valley air. “Yeah? Why is that?”

“The clay is red, and the plants are green. This is a Christmas canyon.”

Louis was right. The land spoke of chile and reflected sun, all the shades of ochre and sage an artist can create, shades beyond any palette. Juniper and piñon broke the sun. The land spread in lumps among deeply irrigated soil, some places covered in mold-colored lichen, some places layered in gold and black dirt beneath a constant wave of tall grass.

A lone red-tailed hawk led the way, swooped high above the rocks then fell just inches from the road. His talons extended toward invisible prey. He was missing two flight feathers and the remaining ones were ragged and broken. The wind from his journey seemed to signal a temporal change. As we crossed the Rio Gallinas a herd of goats splayed from canyon wall to acequia. We left our world behind, our world of stock market bailout, of hungry consumer, of constant cell phone interruption. We traveled back in time.

San Augustin hides behind a swayed hogback ridge, a collection of adobe homes in various states of repair and a simple steepled church dating back centuries. The village looks tired, looks sleepy and forgotten, but looks are deceiving. A handful of men and women still work the land in the old ways, still follow the river of weather and moon in a pageant of goat, pumpkin, and chico. The land still breathes.

“I was born and raised in that house over there.” Huero Gonzales sat in a pitched-roof adobe home, his back ramrod straight against a wooden kitchen chair. A ristra of ceramic red chiles dangled near his head as he pointed toward a simple whitewashed home across the dirt street. “I’m 74 already. I have eight children, twelve grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren now.”

Huero motioned for us to follow as he walked through his house to the back door. A beautiful framed photograph of the San Augustin church taken in the 1970′s graced the living room wall, paying homage to the community of faith that gave the village her name, gave her a refuge. Huero smiled as he told stories of the decades before his birth, stories of Apache raids against the village, when men and women of the village would gather at the sound of the big cow hide drum and hide on top of the church’s exposed vigas, ready to dump steaming hot water on the marauders.

“Now the church is only open one day a year, San Augustin’s Day, the 28th of August,” explained Huero’s wife of 51 years, Eva Gonzales. “Huero built the sacristy of the church with his brother. Before that, people were going through the windows and stealing the saints.”

Huero’s back door opened to a yard resplendent with summer’s final bounty. Rope strung from tree to porch to tree, every linear inch holding golden ears of roasted sweet corn whose kernels would become the northeastern New Mexican delicacy called “chicos.” Some say the word chico comes from a Spanish word for something tiny. Others say it comes from the Pueblo people, comes from a similar-sounding Tewan word that means corn. Chicos have graced the tables of New Mexicans for centuries, sometimes slow-cooked in stews alone, sometimes with beans and pork and spicy chile.

Thousands of ears dried in Huero’s backyard; thousands of hand-shucked ears first baked in a wood-stoked horno. The smell of fire and corn mixed with Huero’s cigarette as he sat at a picnic table. The strings of chicos rustled in the wind, reflecting the afternoon sun.

“I only went through the eighth grade. I graduated from the IC School. I went one year over there.” Huero bent low to pet his dog, Bruja. “I would walk on the weekends, walk all the way to McAllister Lake with the family goats and cows. It was my job to watch them. I used to saddle the horse, get the goats, while my mother made cheese.”

The valley came alive as Huero spoke. I could see him chasing heifer and bull, collecting wood for fire, spending early mornings in prayerful walk past the church, courting a beautiful young village woman who would become his wife. Bruja seemed to grin, too, seemed to appreciate the stories of Huero’s loyal working dog, a blue-heeler named Blue.

“I got me a job, four dollars a month cutting logs, not with a chain saw, a hand saw,” reminisced Huero. “My hand would come out shaky. The next year I got a job catching the minnows in the river. I put some bread in the water, and I would scoop them into a crate. That was money in those days. I worked a team of mules.”

Huero recounted the small jobs, the big jobs, the ways he kept his family fed during difficult times. He delivered mail to the villages of Trujillo and Maes. He began driving a school bus, taking children from the valley into town, a job that would remain his for thirty-five years.

“Everything is easy now,” sighed Eva. “Those days, not easy. Everything is so easy now.”

Huero jumped up to stoke the horno’s fire. He added fresh pieces of dried wood. Flames licked the interior roof. Louis sat at the edge of the picnic table, his eyes riveted on the burning embers, his attention fully on Huero. The wind gusted, lifting the strings of chicos, shaking them like ghostly rattles. Huero pumped water into waiting buckets of fresh corn, then filled the horno with the soaked ears. He patted fresh clay made from his own earth around small cracks in the oven, sealing it shut with a broad, flat stone and more clay.

“The corn needs to sit in here overnight. In the morning, you can’t believe how good it all smells. I make hornos for other people, and hope that more people in town call me to make them a horno. It’s a dying art. Not many people can make them the right way, the way that will last.” Huero squeezed his clay between his fingers, demonstrating the properties of his home-gathered earth. “If I make a horno in town, I have to haul the clay out there. This is the only place you can find clay like this.”

The corn sizzled as the horno’s flames leapt around the stalks. Smoke filled the backyard, the sweet smoke of harvest, of hard labor’s pleasure, of traditions still strong and true.

“We used to wash the clothes, carry water from the well, we didn’t have water inside or nothing. My mama, if we forgot something she would tell us you can’t forget. You don’t forget your rear end, because it is attached.” Huero laughed, slapping his butt in a playful manner. “Life was so hard then. It’s hard now, but I remember when it was much more difficult.”

My son steadied a bag of chicos on his knees as our car wound up the canyon. Our clothes smelled like fall, like horno smoke, like Huero’s words of cigarettes and memory. We lurched forward, in time, in space, until San Augustin disappeared behind us, her fertile valley awash in mystery, in the fading fire of Indian Summer.

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Here’s a slideshow of my trip to San Augustin: