SOCORRO, NEW MEXICO — You discover things when traveling: Even familiar objects look different on the road; they make us look at ourselves differently, too.

The desert here is beautiful, a good place to be during Passover. Among these vast stretches of wasteland, interrupted by occasional thrusts of rugged mountain peaks, the mind hearkens back to Sinai.

Socorro is a truck stop town an hour south of Albuquerque. The highway sign tells passing motorists that there are 22 modern gas stations, 20 restaurants, a dozen motels and one campground.

Jews? Not many. But in Furr’s, the bigger of the tiny town’s two small supermarkets, I bought myself a box of matzah.

This isn’t exactly miraculous, not on the locusts-vermin-and-blood scale. After all, this is a college town, home to the New Mexico Institute of Mines and Technology. Home, also, to the operations center for a nearby radiotelescope installation called the Very Large Array.

About 200 scientists of the International Astronomical Union Colloquium No. 164 gathered here one Passover to compare notes. As the spouse of one of these scientists, I tagged along for the scenery. My wife and I were probably the only Jews here.

So how come I could get matzah here? This bizarre proliferation of things Jewish must mean something.

I think of friends, more assimilated than I, who decline matzah even though our Ancestral Bread of Desolation is so readily available. Then I look in the mirror. OK, so I bought a box of matzah. Whoopee. So how much matzah will offset all the weekends not spent in synagogue, all the other commandments conveniently ignored? More than I could stomach, for sure.

And who needs matzah in Socorro, anyway? Anybody kosher enough to need matzah just would not be in this nowhere little desert town during Passover week. And it’s not like Furr’s had the Ol’ Affliction mixed in with the crackers and Melba toast. It was right there in the Bright Orange Packages section, next to jars of gefilte fish and matzah ball soup mix.

Gefilte fish? Matzoh ball soup? Here?

Well, say I to myself, it’s just food after all. Some well-meaning supermarket buyer probably spotted it in the back pages of Ethnic Food Digest, without knowing its religious significance.

Can it be that these bone-dry crackers serve some purpose in my life other than to organize the annual intestinal labor strike? That these curious jellied fish balls have meaning that transcends their jellied, fishy selves?

I don’t know. Maybe.

I do know this: I never stop to ask myself this when I see a box a matzah at the local kosher supermarket. Something happens when we discover familiar objects in an unfamiliar setting. Things look different when seen in a different light — and we start to see ourselves differently, too.

That’s the thing about traveling, that I mentioned.

When not wandering in New Mexico, Adam Katz-Stone is based in Annapolis.