More Ernie Pyle

Quoted from The Spell of New Mexico, reprinted from New Mexico Magazine, 1942:

"We like it here because you can do almost anything you want to, within reason. In four months, I haven't been out of overalls more than half a dozen times. And I go to the Alvarado Hotel's swell Cocina Cantina always in my overalls, and nobody raises an eyebrow.

We like it because we can have Navajo rugs in our house, and piñon and juniper bushes in our yard, and western pictures on our knotty-pine walls. We like it because you can take a Sunday afternoon spin into the mountains and see deer and wild turkey, and because I have a workbench where I can make crude little end-tables and such stuff for our house.

We like it because you aren't constantly covered with smoke and soot, and because the days are warm and the nights are cool, and because the weirdest kind of desert weeds are always springing up in our bare south lot. We like it because we can see scores of miles in any direction from our house, and yet we can drive downtown in seven minutes."

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"We like it out here because we seem to go to bed early and get up early--and certainly out here he who does not see the dawn at least once a week is missing perhaps the loveliest thing the desert has in its Horn or Plenty. We have seen sunrises so violently beautiful they were almost frightening, and I'm only sorry I can't capture the sunsets and the thunderstorms and the first snows on the Sandias, and take them East and flaunt them in people's faces."

~~Ernie Pyle~~