Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

Simon Gonzales (right) talks up the firewood he's selling to customer Jeff Willey near the intersection of Tramway Boulevard and and San Raphael Avenue Northeast. Gonzales was working Saturday for wood seller Joe Chavez, who has been bringing wood from the village of Capulin to Albuquerque for 15 years.

Photo by Michael J. GallegosTribune

Tribune

Antonio Chacon (left) and Simon Gonzales load firewood for delivery. Wood sellers say prices are rising and places to sell wood, like this lot along Tramway Boulevard N.E., are becoming more scarce.

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It's only a couple miles from the Cottonwood mall to the Corrales village line, but it's one of those short stretches of road where the scenery changes a lot, and quickly.

As the chain stores and faux-adobe condominiums of Albuquerque's cluttered West Side give way to cottonwood trees and real adobe houses, it seems fitting that this stretch of road is one of the metro area's last refuges for another piece of New Mexico tradition: the roadside vendor.

They sell what you'd expect: chile ristras and pi¤on nuts and, this time of year, Christmas trees. Lauren Tapps sells the wooden benches he recently started carving and painting in his free time. A bit further into Corrales, a sign advertises duck eggs at $3 a dozen.

But the backbone of roadside business remains an aromatic staple of life in the mountains: firewood.

"You cannot get this kind of wood anywhere but in New Mexico," says 75-year-old Alberto Quintana, standing beside rows of cedar and pi¤on stacked in the bed of his truck, ticking off his far-flung base of customers. "I have people from Texas, Colorado, Utah, Montana, Ontario . . . that's in Canada."

Twenty years ago, Quintana was a construction worker who'd become too old. No one would hire him anymore, he says, so he started cutting wood and selling it from his truck. Now he's too old to cut the wood, so he buys it from other people and sells it.

"I sometimes think I am too old for this and I want to go home, but then I think I would miss my friends," Quintana says. "I love to see my people, my customers, and I get very happy."

Still, selling wood isn't always such a bucolic pursuit. Competition for dwindling roadside space can be fierce, and Quintana and other longtime sellers say they face a growing number of ne'er-do-wells who undercut their prices with shoddy firewood.

Quintana calls them the "freeloaders." They come out with a load of green wood, sell it cheap, and disappear before people can complain that it won't burn.

Joe Chavez, who sells his wood across town on San Raphael Avenue Northeast near Tramway, says he's been physically threatened by wood sellers who resent his reputation for quality firewood.

"There's a lot of envy and jealousy," he says. "There's a lot of crazy people with fly-by-night operations."

Chavez has been hauling his wood down from the village of Capulin, about 30 miles north of Cuba, for 15 years. He recommends the following test for quality. If the bark flakes easily off the wood, it's been properly cured and dried. If the bark holds on, the wood is green and won't burn right.

Beyond that, each variety of wood has its own properties. Pine puts out the most BTUs and - like pi¤on, which smells good - it doesn't pop. Cedar also smells good but - like juniper - has a tendency to pop and send sparks flying onto your living room carpet.

Even among longtime wood sellers, there are matters of contention. Chavez said the scourge of bark beetle that has killed most of the Pi¤on pines in northern New Mexico has been something of a boon to the business, producing a near infinite supply of dead and ready-dried timber. With that supply, Chavez said he never cuts down living trees.

But Quintana said trees killed by the bark beetle make for unfit firewood. All his wood, he says, comes from green timber that has been dried for a season.

"If the beetle killed it, the wood doesn't have that sap and it gets to be like cardboard," he says. "There's no weight to it, and it's just no good."

Quintana said the shrinking supply of what he calls "number one quality New Mexico wood" has caused prices to double in the last decade. He sells a row of logs from his truck bed - roughly a fifth of a cord - for about $80.

The "freeloaders" selling bad product, he says, have further ruined the market, and with development encroaching on Albuquerque's last open roadsides, the future of the wood seller is difficult to see.

"One day it may be impossible to make any money," he says. "But I doubt I will be here to see that!"

In the meantime, there are still his many great customers.

"The man from Ontario," he says, "he came here for the balloons, and he left with two rows of wood. He said he would burn pi¤on for Christmas and cedar for New Year's."