They sit yet back beyond the moon, or at least they feel that way, and this, too, explains part of their beckoning. We’ve long licked the idea of distance and remoteness in America, and yet there remain places and roads like PieTown and U.S. Late last summer, when I made the trek, the road was paved just fine, but it was still an extremely lonesome two lane ribbon of asphalt. 60-nowhere near as celebrated a highway as its more northerly New Mexico neighbor, Route 66, on which you got your kicks-called itself the “ocean to ocean” highway. Back when Russell Lee of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) went to Pie Town, U.S. There’s almost no other way, unless you own a helicopter. You’ll find it on most maps, in west-central New Mexico, in CatronCounty. Having known about PieTown for many years, I was itching to go. But the chief confectioner was willing to take time out to ask what my favorite pie was so that she could have one ready when I got there.

I’d forgotten about the time difference between the East Coast and the Southwest and had called at an inopportune hour: lunchtime on a Saturday. There was clatter and much talk in the background. “Is there a particular kind you like?” Peggy Rawl, coowner of PieTown’s Daily Pie Café, had asked sweetly on the phone, when I was still two-thirds of a continent away. Many were published last year in Bound for Glory, America in Color 1939-43. His Pie Town images-and there are something like 600 of them preserved in the archives of the Library of Congress-portrayed this little clot of high-mountain-desert New Mexico humanity in all of its redemptive, communal, hard-won glory. And then too, there are the old photographs-those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half decades ago, at the heel of the Depression, on the eve of a global war, by a gifted, itinerant, government, documentary photographer working on behalf of FDR’s New Deal. The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there: PieTown.

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