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Too Many Tamales
From Santa Fean, April 2002
By Richard Mahler
The city of Santa Fe's environmental engineer didn't think
it was any big deal. "Every holiday season we get a lot of
calls," he told the local newspaper when a reporter asked
about the rash of plumbing problems during late December
1988. "People are cooking up a lot of tamales and all this
grease goes down the sewers and clogs them up," shrugged
the man who had sent crews out for a record 17 hours on Christmas
Day. When a major blockage backs raw sewage into sinks and
bathtubs, he deadpanned, "It's a terrible thing."
Welcome to Santa Fe, a city different from any other-and
so smug about it that you are constantly reminded of that
on roadside "beautification" signs. This is the 393-year-old
tricultural community that a prominent New York publication
designated in the late 1980s as "the most 'in' place in the
United States." (Runner-up, according to Manhattan-based
author Michael Korda, was Sedona, Arizona.)
The tamale story appeared exactly six months and one week
after I'd escaped Los Angeles to reside permanently in a
faux adobe bungalow, quickly learning that few can afford
to build with real mud anymore. But this was not the only
time I had found local effluent to be a newsworthy topic
for The Santa Fe New Mexican, our daily newspaper.
In August, front-page headlines one again clamored about
the clogged sewers. With more than 100,000 out-of-towners
showing up to browse through Santa Fe's Indian Market, they
flush away...
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