Pot of Gold
An Obituary
December 12, 2022
Victoria was my neighbor, once upon a time. In the truest sense of the word.
Back in those days, circa 1990, she lived in her family compound which was located just beyond the fenced grounds of Navrongo Secondary School, where I taught. Navrongo is a town northern Ghana, about ten kilometers from the border. From my bungalow’s front porch I could look across a low gulch and see Victoria’s compound.
Before I moved in, the previous Peace Corps volunteer told me about this amazing, gorgeous, powerful woman who would appear on my porch and welcome me. In addition to being an expert farmer, Victoria had a sewing stall in the Navrongo market on market days, and did civic work in her village, teaching literacy classes to women and leading them in small business development.
Then I began living in Navrongo and no Victoria showed up. Someone told me she’d had an accident; she’d dropped a pair of scissors on her foot. I figured I’d meet her as soon as her foot got better.
A week or two later, I was eating lunch at a local bar with my friend Marcia, a second-year Peace Corps Volunteer who was working at the nearby teachers’ training college. “Have you seen Victoria yet?” she asked.
“No.”
“Come on,” Marcia said when we’d finished lunch and were climbing on our bikes. “Let’s go to Victoria’s house. Something isn’t right.”
When we reached there, I followed Marcia as she hiked up her skirt and marched through the labyrinthine earthen compound, past goats and chickens and little grain silos, to arrive at the door to her room. And there, for the first time, I laid eyes on Victoria.
A decidedly diminished Victoria. She lay on a mat in the throes of fever, and although I’d never met her before, I could tell she had lost a lot of weight. Arms that would normally bulge with biceps were atrophying. She had one foot elevated and covered with a cloth. Marcia demanded she remove the cloth.
“Oh Victoria!”
I won’t describe the foot in detail. It was severely infected, with swelling climbing up her shin. Flies buzzed around a coating of local medicine that had been applied to the leaking wound, which Victoria waved at, weakly, with the cloth.
Marcia wasn’t having any nonsense. “Victoria, if I give you money will you promise to go to the hospital?” Then she said, “Never mind, we’ll be back.”
We left and rode towards town to fetch Dr. Ross, a British guy who lived near the hospital. When we returned, it was a no brainer for Dr. Ross that Victoria needed to be admitted to the hospital straight away and that she needed major antibiotics, immediately, or else she was going to lose her foot and possibly her leg.
So, the beginning of Victoria’s and my neighborship had to wait a little while. After she was discharged, she moved to a house near the hospital so she could more easily go for checkups. “Hello Pete!” I’d hear her call as I rode my bike past on my way to the market. I’d turn and see her, smiling and waving from the veranda, her foot wrapped in a cloth.
Eventually we became neighbors. And for two years she was always there, always caring, always patient with my rough edges, always checking on me to make sure I was okay. She cooked goodies and brought them over, gave me friendship, gave me advice, helped me when I was sick, and farmed my allotted half-acre of school land with me. We turned my front yard into a peanuts patch. In the market, Victoria’s sewing stall was my ground zero, the place where I parked my bike before going shopping or hopping a lorry to Bolgatanga to run errands.
She was always ready to help with anything, like the time she cooked for an end-of-year party I threw for my Upper Sixth Form students. I did what I could to help her as well, but it paled in comparison. One time she came over with a Coleman pressure lantern some aid group had donated to help with her nighttime literacy classes. We worked and worked on that thing, but we couldn’t get it to light.
She’d drop by on random late afternoons and hang out on my couch and laugh and talk. “Turn on the radio,” she said once. “I was in Bolga today, and I went to the radio station and dedicated a song to you.”
After I moved back to the USA, Victoria kept in touch via letters. I remember one letter in particular she wrote during my first year back, when I was intensely homesick for Navrongo:
We have missed you. Sometimes I walk out into the fields and call into the sky, “Pete, Pete,” and so on.
And I would leave the cold hyper-processed air of my office cubicle, and walk out onto the hyper-manicured lawn of a soulless suburban Seattle business park, and gaze up at the sky and call, “Victoria, Victoria.”
And so on.
“She’s a pot of gold,” Dr. Ross told me once.
One of the projects Victoria worked on with local women was agroforestry. “You see Pete,” she said to me one day while I was back in Navrongo on a visit, setting her scissors on her market table and exclaiming with a grin: “This thing the Sahara, it is expanding. We have to stop it.”
That was Victoria: seemingly invincible. As long as Victoria was going to help stop the Sahara from expanding, I felt like we had a fighting chance. I’ve carried that image of her in my mind ever since: of her powerful form wielding her machete like a battle axe, forcing back the Sahara.
I guess that’s why it’s so surreal that she’s gone. What? Victoria? Gone? That’s not something Victoria does.
I’d deluded myself into believing she would always be there. She’d be the one I’d sit with, I assumed, when we were ninety. She’d tell me that she wasn’t so good at farming anymore because she’s old, and I’d say, “Victoria, that’s what you told me forty years ago!”
Of course, she was not invincible.
She was simply human. Simply extraordinary.
Farewell, pot of gold!
Sweet River
November 12, 2022
In the steamy eastern lowlands of Guatemala, the Río Dulce, or Sweet River, exits Central America through a jungle gorge and empties into the Caribbean.
Near the river’s mouth, you’ll find the unique town of Livingston. To this day you can’t really get there by car or bus. You have to go by boat.
“Livingston?” you say. “Sounds British. Must have been part of British Honduras, now Belize.”
Nope. This town was never under the crown. It’s named after American lawyer Edward Livingston (an uninteresting story I won’t bother to relate).
Livingston the town, however, is interesting. This charming grid of streets on a bluff above the sea is home to the less than one percent of Guatemala’s population that happens to be Black.
“Aha,” you say. “Former slaves, and then they kept on living there.”
Nope.
These are Garinagu people, and they were not slaves. They speak Garifuna, which is a modification of Karifuna, an Arawakan language native to Caribbean islands.
How did they get here?
The story involved St. Vincent, the island in the Lesser Antilles that is a bit to the west of Barbados and a bit to the south of St. Lucia. Arawak people (also known as Caribs) migrated there circa 1200, displacing, exterminating, and assimilating the Taínos who were already there. Of course they didn’t call it “St. Vincent”; that’s what Columbus named it when he saw it on St. Vincent’s feast day in January of 1498. To the Arawak it was “Youloumain,” named in honor of Youlouca, the spirit of rainbows.
A small island, only eighteen miles long and a few miles wide, it at first did not attract much attention from the exploiting, marauding French and British. In fact, during the early colonial years St. Vincent was an indigenous safe haven of sorts, especially after many Caribs fled there from Martinique following a 1660 revolt against the French.
Then, in 1667, the British reported seeing a small number of Blacks living on the island. Rumor has it that two Spanish slave ships wrecked off St. Vincent sometime in the first half of the 1600s, but modern researchers believe that most of St. Vincent’s Blacks were actually escapees from other islands. As with any other combination of homo sapiens, it wasn’t exactly harmony between the races on St. Vincent. However, over time the two groups did mix and an ethnicity known as “Black Carib” was born.
No way were the Caribs, Black or otherwise, going down without a fight when France and Britain finally began trying to plantation-ize St. Vincent in the 1700s. Known as the Carib Wars, the conflicts went on all century, and were particularly intense in 1776 when the British made a concerted effort to conquer the island, and the Caribs delivered stiff defense (supported by the French; this was a Caribbean theatre of the American War).
When the British finally crushed the Caribs of St. Vincent in 1796, incoming governor William Young was particularly displeased by the presence of Blacks on the island. In a report, he complained that they owned good land and had “no right to live there.”
What did the British administration do? You guessed it. Deported them. They went around the island, examined people one by one, and said, “You look Black. Get on the boat.”
In all, about 4,200 people were rounded up and shipped to the semi-desert island of Roatán, about forty miles off the coast of Honduras. Due to disease and atrocious conditions, barely over half made it there alive. The survivors knew their days were numbered on the infertile island and that they needed to do something, quick. So they got permission from the Spanish authorities in Honduras to move to the Honduran mainland, mostly to the town of Trujillo.
From there they have persevered, fanning out to create dozens of tightly knit communities along the coasts of Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala. In Guatemala’s snippet of coast, it’s at Livingston.
Over time they came to call themselves “Garinagu” as a people, “Garifuna” as an individual and a language; words which are based on the Arawak of their Caribbean island roots.
Of course, racism is real and racial harmony is elusive. Each country in which the Garinagu now live—including and especially the United States—has long regarded them as inferiors. Each has a history of discrimination and disenfranchisement, and placed enormous pressure on them to assimilate as subordinates.
Here in Livingston, however, these pressures ebb. Here at the mouth of the Río Dulce, identity, pride, and community are sweet. Life isn’t easy but self-respect, ethnic assuredness, and vibrant intact culture and language are a soothing balm.
Here the Garinagu own their streets. And you are more than welcome to come and hang!
Why Livingston? Perhaps it has something to do with the isolation, with being left alone in relative peace. Remember, you still need to get here by boat.
Jobs have been a factor too, mostly for men, mostly on the nearby banana plantations, especially after the United Fruit Company—now known as Chiquita and Dole—began its sordid reign here about the same time the Garinagu arrived in the 1800s.
But that’s a whole other fascinating and appalling story we won’t go into right now.
Palace Among the Trees
October 14, 2022
“The volcanoes are out!” I exclaimed to Doña Victoria, my host grandmother, as I reached her top floor atrium-weaving-room-kitchen in Tecpán, Guatemala.
“Yes!” she called back. “They are beautiful! Open the windows so that you can see them better.”
Through a section of wrap-around windows, three conical peaks poked into the blue horizon. I hadn’t seen them for a few days, what with Storm Julia blowing through and bringing black clouds and lots of cold rain. Through the opposite bank of windows, a densely-forested hillside rose from the edge of town: a classic Guatemalan highlands ridge of towering pines.
“Come for your breakfast,” Doña Vicki called.
I got to the table and she set a hearty, steaming bowl in front of me. “Caldo de huevos.” she announced. Egg soup.
“¡Levanta muerto!” I replied, saying the dish’s nickname which translates to “raises the dead”. Purportedly, Guatemalan egg soup is an excellent cure for morning hangover.
Doña let fly her infectious laugh and brought a warm, cloth-wrapped bundle of blue corn tortillas. Then she joined me at the table with her tea so we could have our daily morning chat.
How did I get so lucky as to live with the Socop family? Led by Doña Vicki, who is a veritable beam of light, the house is full of good vibes, laughter, talk, and weaving—lots of weaving. Doña Vicki and her daughter Odilia run a home industry producing vibrant, authentic Kaqchikel Maya huipils, or blouses. It’s a craft dating back more than fifteen hundred years, and the clothing remains central to Mayan, and in this case, Kaqchikel identity. A subject worthy of many PhDs, each huipil is an intricate and beautiful work of art, containing patterns and symbols depicting the Maya cosmos and its supernatural inhabitants.
To weave, Doña uses the same style of back-strap loom that has been in use for centuries. Working five to six hours a day, it takes her about a month to create the fabric for one huipil. Business is good, not only locally but also with Guatemaltecas in Houston, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles.
“Mmmm,” I said, soaking up warm soup with a thick handmade blue tortilla. Fortifying, to say the least.
I need Doña Vivki’s substantial food to get through my workdays at the agricultural institute where I’ve been interning for the past several months. Called Utz Samaj, which translates to “good work” in Kaqchikel, the school is part of a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life of socioeconomically vulnerable communities. My department is all about cultivation in “areas protegidas” i.e. greenhouses. It’s a lot of learning for me, and a lot of physical labor.
Tecpán itself is in interesting place. After I bid good-bye to Doña Vicki I walked to my bus stop, through mists rising in the central plaza where people were setting up their market wares. Not for the first time I marveled at this normal, workaday Guatemalan town hardly any non-Guatemalan has ever heard of.
All appeared as gritty and down to earth as ever, nondescript even, to the extent that you’d never guess this place once played a central, outsized role in the history of Guatemala!
Clues will come, however, if you lace up your shoes and go for a run out to the ruins. This is what I do several times a week after work. It’s an utterly lovely trot on a curvy hilly road among soaring pines with not too much traffic.
Another great thing about it is I’m not the only runner. On any given afternoon I meet a dozen or so of my fellow keep-fitters also doing the ruins run (me being the only Gringo of course; I haven’t seen a non-Guatemalan, anywhere, for weeks). And at 7,400 feet in elevation, this is an Olympics caliber training course!
After four kilometers you’ll reach a dead end which is your turnaround point. These are the gates of an archaeological site called Iximché.
What is/was Iximché?
To explain, I’ll back up a little.
Back in the 1400s, during the late Post-classical Mayan period, the K’iche’ people dominated this area of the highlands from their capital at Q’umarkaj, today about two hours by bus from Tecpán. The Kaqchikel were then an up-and-coming group, and for many years they allied themselves with the K’iche’ and lived among them. Tensions were building, however. The rising Kaqchikel prominence caused friction.
All it took was a minor incident to set things off. One day in the market in Q’umarkaj, a K’iche soldier tried to seize bread from a Kaqchikel bread seller without paying for it. The woman drove him off with a stick, and things escalated from there. The Kaqchikel lords in town demanded that the soldier be executed; the K’iche’ nobility demanded that the bread seller be punished. The Kaqchikel lords refused, were sentenced to death, and had to flee.
Their people followed. The long and the short of it is that the Kaqchikel established their own capital at Iximché (named possibly for the breadnut tree that grew all around), on a defensible ridge surrounded by ravines. Defenses were necessary because the days of harmony with the K’iche’ were over. The two groups warred constantly over the next fifty years, which was all it took for Iximché to reach its zenith as a city and boast a sprawling complex of temples, pyramids, and not one but two ballcourts.
Things could have continued in this manner, but in 1510 a messenger arrived at Iximché with a warning from Moctezuma II of the Aztecs: Beware! Strange, smelly, violent pale people had appeared in the Caribbean.
A second message arrived in 1512, warning that these folks had made landfall in Veracruz and the Yucatán.
For a little while, the Kaqchikel had bigger things to worry about. Aside from constantly fighting the K’iche’ they had to contend with a plague of locusts in 1513 and a big fire in 1514. Then, in 1519, another plague killed a significant portion of the population. This was probably smallpox, introduced by the Spanish and traveling down the Central American isthmus prior to their physical arrival.
Then, in 1521, the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Prudently perhaps, the Kaqchikel sent a message to Hernán Cortés, offering an alliance.
It was with this in mind that Pedro de Alvarado, bad-boy conquistador-mal-extraordinaire (and soon-to-be husband of Beatriz the Unfortunate) entered a highlands region already weakened by fighting and disease. With the help of the Kaqchikel as well as the Nahuatl warriors he brought with him from Mexico, he defeated the K’iche’ in short order, executed their leaders in the main plaza of Q’umarkaj, and burned the city. He was then invited to Iximché and given a warm welcome. So charmed was Pedro by this reception that he declared Iximché to be the capital of the brand-spanking-new Spanish colony.
The good relations lasted only a few weeks, as tended to happen with the Spanish back then.
Pedro immediately went off to Lake Atitlán to battle K’iche’ insurgents. When he got back to Iximché, with little else to do at the moment, true to form, he began demanding gold from the Kaqchikel. Alarmed by this and other assorted Spanish bad behavior, the people of Iximché abandoned their city after ten days and fled to the forested mountainsides. Pedro in turn declared war on the Kaqchikel.
The Spanish built a fort nearby and a town grew around it. They had to decide what to name the new capital, as Iximché would no longer do. They turned to their Mexican Nahuatl mercenaries, who provided the name Tecpán Guatemala.
Tecpán is Nahuatl for “palace,” and guatemala means “place of many trees.”
So there you have it: Palace Among the Trees.
It’s an apt name to this day.
Tecpán was short-lived as the colonial capital. The Spanish abandoned it in 1927 due to continuous guerrilla attacks by the Kaqchikel, and moved the capital to a sweeter (they thought) spot in a valley between volcanoes Agua and Acatenango, which they named Santiago de los Caballeros. In hindsight they should have left it at Tecpán, as the new site did not work out very well, unfortunately, for Pedro’s wife Beatriz or for anyone else (as explained in the previous post).
Today, unless you head out to the ruins, you likely won’t find anything extraordinary about Tecpán other than the gorgeous tree-filled setting. If you hang out here a while, however, you might be seduced by its working-class charms. Market days are every Thursday and Sunday and are feasts for the senses. Recently the town kicked up for its annual fería, a week and a half of carnival rides in the plaza, streets full of food and arts and crafts, and even a parade of dancing horses.
Over 90% of the population remains indigenous, and most are descendants of the Kaqchikel like the Socop family. You may be the only extranjero around, and not only are you welcomed, you are made to feel included and part of the fabric of life, part of what is going on.
Yesterday morning I came upstairs again. “Oh wow! The volcanoes are out again!” I exclaimed to Doña Vicki.
“Sí, muy lindo, verdad, Pete,” she said over the roar of the blender, in which she was preparing a watermelon-rambutan smoothie. “Come for your breakfast.”
I got to the table and she set a hearty plate of fried eggs and black beans before me, along with a scarlet smoothie.
I gazed across the table, and out through the sparkling bank of windows.
“You have a palace among the trees,” I told her.
She let fly her laugh.
“I’ll bring the tortillas.”
Unfortunate Beatríz
September 15, 2022
“Here’s a fun fact,” I told the person behind me on the trail, who happened to be a child of about eleven years. “We’re climbing this volcano exactly 481 years after tragedy struck below.”
“Tragedy?”
“Yup. In the wee hours of the morning of September 11, 1541. That’s when the unfortunate event occurred.”
It was 5:00 am and we were socked in, in fog, high on the slopes of Guatemala’s Volcán Acatenango. Unfortunately I couldn’t gesture majestically to show where it happened, because we couldn’t see anything. And it was still dark anyway.
The previous evening, however, we’d been fortunate. The rainy season clouds had parted and given us a great view from our base camp of the action on neighboring Volcán Fuego, about two kilometers away. Every fifteen minutes or so the mountain blew up! I’d never sat next to an erupting volcano before and it was completely thrilling—a once in my lifetime (so far) experience.
“What happened on September 11th, 1541?” my trail mate asked.
For context, we’ll go back to August 29th. That’s when Beatriz de la Cueva finally found out that her husband, Pedro Alvarado, the governor of the Spanish colony of Guatemala, had been squashed beneath a rolling horse two months previously in Mexico.
They’d only been married for a few years, and a long life of widowhood now stared unfortunate Beatriz in the face. She was from a noble Spanish family and had beautiful, expressive eyes which had apparently attracted Pedro to her after his previous wife, who was Beatriz’s sister, died shortly after their nuptials. Now at age thirty-six, Beatriz was a childless widow stuck in a damp palace in Guatemala.
Aggrieved, she ordered the capital to go into an extended period of mourning. This capital was Santiago de los Caballeros, the exact location of which is unknown today. Consensus is that it lay about two kilometers west of the current town of Ciudad Vieja, in a valley of fertile pastures beneath volcanoes Acatenango and Agua. In 1541 it was a thriving town.
You might say Beatriz was unfortunate for marrying Pedro. If they ever gave an award for cruelest conquistador, Pedro would be shortlisted. Deemed excessively brutal even by his conquisting contemporaries, he was also one of the least capable of governing, caring only about the next opportunity to murder, pillage, loot, and become wealthier. He was on his way to the Spice Islands to do just that when the horse rolled over him in Mexico, having left affairs in Guatemala in the hands of his brother Francisco.
Regardless, Beatriz was distraught over the death of her husband to the extent that she ordered the palace’s walls to be smeared with black clay.
She also ordered herself to be the next governor! It’s true. On September 9th, Beatriz became the only woman to hold such a position in a major division of Spanish Latin America during the colonial era. You can imagine this didn’t go over well with many folks, least of all Francisco, even though she appointed him lieutenant and put him in charge of the day-to-day governing.
When she ascended to the governorship, still-mourning Beatriz signed the declaration as La Sin Ventura, “The Unfortunate One.”
Little did she know how even more true this would become.
Coup plotters got to work right away and prepared to storm the palace a day and a half later, early on the morning of September 11th.
Simultaneously, heavy September rains continued to pour down, saturating the mountainsides and filling the crater lake of Volcán Agua to an above-average level.
Then an earthquake struck, Agua’s crater wall collapsed, and the lake emptied downhill in a wall of mud.
The three story colonial palace, built next to a creek bed on the slope above the settlement, was directly in its path.
The earth-shaking and noise were enough to rouse two-day governor Beatriz from slumber, and she ran to the rooftop chapel. The wall of muck soon arrived and swept most everything and everyone else away, including her courtiers, the approaching coup plotters, and most of the town and its population.
Among the survivors was Leonor, Pedro’s daughter by his indigenous mistress. She made it through by holding on to a tree.
And Beatriz too survived! In her rooftop chapel.
Then a second tremor struck and the chapel roof collapsed, killing Beatriz.
She’s buried at the rebuilt cathedral of Santiago de los Caballeros, in the lovely nearby city of Antigua.
Four decades later, Leonor had her father Pedro’s remains moved from Mexico to Antigua, where they lie next to his unfortunate bride with the expressive eyes.
Workerbee
August 31, 2022
“What are we doing today?” I asked Chico, my foreman, as I joined the work team inside one of the greenhouses at the agricultural training institute in Guatemala where I’m interning.
“Podas de frutas,” (pruning of fruits) he replied, and showed me what to do.
It’s been nearly a month since I started, and I continue to learn new things every day about how to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in commercial scale greenhouses. Typically I feel like an oaf every time I start with a new procedure, but by the time I’ve done it a few hundred or a thousand times, I’m usually okay at it.
In addition to learning, I am bringing a needed pair of hands. “We’re short of workers right now,” Maria Felisa, my supervisor, told me recently. “So many are in Canada.”
Aha, I thought. August is harvest time in Canada.
You may have seen the headline last week describing an August 11th letter issued by Canada’s Migrant Workers Alliance for Change. In it, the organization calls out as “systematic slavery” the country’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). A national day of action is planned for September 18th, the day before Canada’s parliament resumes. Thousands of Guatemalans are currently in Canada under a similar program—the TFWP (Temporary Foreign Worker Program)—and quietly enduring the same abuses.
Meanwhile I’m here backfilling so to speak; a reverse migrant learning how to grow food.
As I worked the tomato vines to pluck misshapen fruit and adjusting the number of green tomatoes and/or pollinated flowers on each branch to four, I watched a bumblebee land on one of the plant’s fresh tiny yellow flowers.
“Hello there!” I whispered. A fellow imported worker!
Have you ever wondered how pollination takes place inside an enclosed greenhouse? How the flowers, in the absence of wind, get the movements needed to transform into beefsteak tomatoes that land on your plate?
It’s done by bumblebees! Or in Spanish: abejorros.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but it isn’t. In fact it’s a quite recent innovation. And it is interesting.
Only by the mid-1980s did we figure out how to raise bumblebees in captivity and create transportable colonies. Now, for about $175 plus shipping, you can purchase a carboard box containing a fully functional hive of about seventy workers serving one queen. Set it at an elevated location somewhere in the shade in your greenhouse, give the bees a couple hours to get settled, and then open the doors and walk away. That’s it. The bees proceed to work like crazy.
No longer do we humans have to go into greenhouses three times a week with a mechanical wand to perform the soul-crushing job of agitating each and every branch of each and every plant, trying to shake loose the pollen grains from the stubborn tomato anthers. Bumblebees do a vastly more effective job, and they create superior fruit. And they work for free! The labor cost savings are game changing even here in Guatemala. Indeed, the advent of our enslavement of bumblebees has been key to the worldwide expansion of the greenhouse tomato industry.
Note that it’s bumble bees we’re talking about: the bigger, bumblier cousins of honeybees, those hyperintelligent hymenopteras with secret lives.
Honeybees have historically been the species humans have employed for managed pollination, but truth be told, they are rather hopeless in a greenhouse. Chief among their problems are that they only work hard in the middle of the day, and only when it is sunny and warm. Bumblebees on the other hand work much longer hours—morning to evening—and they keep going when it is cool, cloudy, foggy, and rainy outside, conditions in which honeybees won’t even come out of the hive. What’s more, bumblebees visit many more blooms per minute than do honeybees, and they do it with their big hairy buzzy bodies, providing strong thoracic vibrations that are extremely efficient in accomplishing the task. A bumblebee can pollinate a tomato flower in a single visit whereas it takes a honeybee seven to ten visits to accomplish the same feat.
Fun fact: honeybees, in their quest for nectar, don’t cope well with the long narrow corolla of tomato flowers because their tongues are rather short. Bumblebees on the other hand don’t care much about nectar; they like to snack on it, and their tongues are long enough to reach it, but it’s the pollen they are mostly after to feed the young back in the hive. This means they do a fantastic job spreading pollen between flowers in the process. Additionally, they fly between plants more randomly than honeybees do, which results in a higher degree of cross-pollination, which in turn results in far fewer misshapen and odd fruit.
And more fruit! By using bumblebees, you can get up to fifty percent more kilograms of tomatoes per greenhouse than is possible with mechanical agitation (And with honeybees? Don’t ask). This ramps up the cost-benefit curve of bumblebees into overdrive. The fruit they make tends to be tastier as well; a recent study conducted in greenhouses in China’s Gobi Desert asserts that bumblebee-pollinated tomatoes contain more fructose and glucose, less sucrose, citric acid, and malic acid, and more consumer-pleasing volatile compounds compared to their mechanically-pollinated counterparts.
Did I mention that bumblebees don’t sting? It’s true. To get stung by a bumblebee is quite rare. They don’t swarm or get aggressive like honeybees do. You go about your work, they go about theirs; everyone’s cool with each other.
There’s more, and it’s related to the fact that bumblebees aren’t as smart as honeybees in certain ways. Unlike honeybees, they don’t fly miles from the hive or have sophisticated communication systems to inform their brethren where the juiciest flowers are—traits which induce honeybees to leave greenhouses for finer pastures. However bumblebees, in their bumbling along, have a better sense of direction, and are better able to navigate an enclosed space such as a greenhouse. Put honeybees in a greenhouse and they have a hard time orientating themselves. Refracted light confuses them and they get lost, bang against the glass, et cetera.
What’s more, a bumblebee hive is compact and easily bred, transported, and handled. Colonies are small and robust, composed of about 70 workers, growing to as many as 200 during an eight to twelve week service stint. A honeybee colony is a different matter altogether. At 20 to 80 thousand swarming individuals it is far less portable, and requires a full-body suit.
Hail to the bumblebees! I am in awe of these affable creatures, working so hard to get quality vegetables to our markets at a cheap cost. They are the lynchpins of the modern tomato, cucumber, and pepper industries.
However I can’t help but wonder, What’s the catch? There has to be one. Or more than one.
One potential problem is that the imported bees could invade nonnative countries and wreak environmental havoc. Anytime you have a species being bred in captivity by a small number of companies and shipped all over the globe, there is cause for concern. Already, stable populations of imported bumblebees have established themselves in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Tasmania, Chile, and Israel, and there’s real danger that they could displace the native bumblebee populations, which could disrupt the pollination of indigenous plants. Imported bees can also introduce non-native diseases, more virulent pests and parasites, and non-local genotypes and traits selected by commercial breeding which could result in unknown bad consequences. Think: teenage mutant workerbees.
These grave concerns are being tracked and studied, and so far there have been no known catastrophes—yet—to put the brakes on the massive bang for the buck humans are getting in forcing bumblebees to work the world’s greenhouses.
“And what about bee wellbeing?” I find myself, perhaps crazily, asking myself. They work so hard, and for what?
It feels mean to me sometimes, how we are tricking them. We get them to fly around indoors for us for twelve weeks to create our food. They labor tirelessly to nurture their young, every single workerbee laser-focused on the same singular goal, which is to ensure the survival of the colony. And it never happens. In the end they all die. The colony always dies.
Another way to look at this, however, is that their relationship with humans is making bumblebees very successful as a species. Propagation of a species, after all, is never about the happiness and wellbeing of its individuals—quite the contrary. Just look at all the cows and the chickens of the world.
Not to mention the humans! Ever since we humans became domesticated by wheat during the agricultural revolution—and not the other way around, as Yuval Noah Harari so eloquently explains in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind—we have propagated like crazy. We certainly are a successful species from a biomass and genome spreading perspective! There are now billions and billions of us—many if not most living in abject misery.
Consider the case of commercial bumblebees. In the course of being tricked into performing all this work for us, they have spread all over the globe. We even have the genus Bombus living in the middle of the Gobi Desert now, for heaven’s sake. Regardless of how any individual bumblebee is feeling these days, as a species they have certainly propagated and gotten around.
As a greenhouse worker myself, I have to say I am grateful for the bumblebees. Every time I see one I feel a certain degree of respect.
Working this internship has also helped me develop more respect, as well and compassion and gratitude, for the people: for the human workers who toil to make our food happen.
I will never look at a tomato on a plate the same way again, now that I better understand the sheer magnitude of labor required to get it there. It feels like we should be paying about ten times more than we do for each tomato. Though we may be tricking and exploiting bumblebees, I cannot imagine greenhouse cultivation without them, because even with them working so hard there is still so much for humans to do—so incredibly much. It’s true we no longer have to go around with a wand to pollinate mechanically, but man oh man, imagine! Every single tomato plant in a four to eight thousand plant greenhouse still needs to be visited over and over again by a person, more than a dozen times in total, to perform the intricate, mind-numbing, body-exhausting procedures to make the planting, training, pruning, and harvesting happen. Then: rip it all out and start all over again.
It’s no wonder there’s forced labor in Xinjiang. Yes; we must stop sourcing tomatoes from there.
I feel for the workers.
And I’m grateful for the bumblebees.
Chickenbus
August 14, 2022
“Aha, so those are the chicken buses,” I told myself, on reaching the lush temperate western highlands of Guatemala a week ago. You can’t help but notice these splendid celebrations on wheels!
The term comes from the foreign travel literature and is disrespectful and derogatory. Guatemaltecos don’t use this name for them; many have never heard of it. Instead they call their iconic, everyday, every-person’s intertown transport camionetas. It is indeed rare to see live animals on buses in Guatemala these days, and although camionetas can get as crowded as chicken wagons sometimes, so can public transport just about anywhere else in the world.
However, most countries don’t elevate basic transport to the level of proletarian street art. In Guatemala, the camionetas are fabulous to behold, vibrant elements of social fabric and national identity. They are symbols of culture and integral to national psyche and pride. And it’s cool how each superb camioneta is in the midst of having a second life, after being a castoff, run-of-the-mill yellow North American school bus.
Here’s how it works: When school buses in the United States reach the age of ten or so, and/or have been driven for approximately 150,000 miles, the school districts don’t want them anymore even though usually they still work fine. Thus, they get auctioned for between three and six thousand dollars apiece in places such as Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania (where a company called 422 Sales is having its fortieth anniversary school bus auction on September 10th, in case you’re interested). The buses are then driven to Guatemala via Mexico and sold to importing middlemen, who in turn sell them to Guatemalan owners, usually via a payment plan.
It is important for a new owner to put a bus into service quickly, in order to service the payments, but first the makeover must happen. Otherwise how will the “new” bus be able to compete for passengers? Many riders only want to board something that is clean and well-decorated.
So, off to an expert workshop the bus goes, where it gets fitted with luggage racks and is sanded, primed, and given a unique hand-masking-taped design. Racing lines are popular, as are names, slogans, and symbols such as birds and stars.
Of course, all school-bus-yellow and black lettering must go, to be sprayed over in vibrant shades of cream, scarlet, and cobalt. The former color combination may have shown up well in dawn and dusk to make it evident to USA drivers that children were in transit, but is way too drab for Guatemalteco esthetic.
Along with the pizzazz of the paint job comes chrome grills and bumpers, chrome siding, curvy window dividers, flashing lights, colorful electro-kinetic signboards, tassels, and a sound system.
Now it’s a camioneta!
There’s no denying how good the buses look when they are spiffed up like this. It’s hard to believe they were once but mundane yellow school buses, plying monochromatic American suburbs.
It’s a good representation of ingenuity and resilience—both Guatemalan and American (though enabled by the wastefulness of the latter). And how cool it is, that something so functional and well-engineered for safety—after all, the buses’ designs were optimized over many decades to securely carry schoolchildren—gets saved from the scrap heap by Guatemalan creativity and geographic proximity, and given years more of life in such vivacious style.
The more I watched the camionetas, each one different from the last, the more addicted I became to watching them. Along with the elation I felt came a feeling tinged with sadness—that I was witnessing something beautiful, but nostalgic and fleeting. Something that is bound to disappear over time.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Facts are, camionetas are enchanting, functional, heavy, and they drink diesel. They are hardly appropriate for the future. They will necessarily disappear in Guatemala, some years after the American supply of discarded fuel-combusting school buses necessarily dries up.
How long does the Guatemalan camioneta have left? Electric school buses are currently making big gains in the USA, with 12,275 committed to this year by school districts in thirty-eight states. This is approximately equivalent to the entire school bus fleet of North Carolina, which may seem small, but it’s a ten-fold increase over a year ago.
For now, however, the diesel school bus still reigns supreme in the United States. This means that in ten years there will still be plenty of unwanted ten-year-old, fuel-belching yellow school buses available at auction.
But hopefully by then no one will want them.
Hopefully by then we’ll have electro-camionetas!
Cabin Creek
July 14, 2022
Ah, July. Here in Longmont, Colorado it’s time once again for ice cubes in the coffee, sleeping in the basement, and bidding au revoir to the Cabin Creek snow gully.
Actually, these things usually happen in June. particularly the last one.
“The saying goes: We’re doing good if that line of snow up on Longs Peak makes it to the end of June,” a friend, who is a Longmont native, told me once.
“You mean the Cabin Creek snow gully?” I asked, pointing. My friend nodded.
“And that’s Mount Meeker, not Longs Peak,” I added.
I tend to overshare on this whenever I get the chance: on the fact that almost all of what we see of our town’s soaring namesake is not really Longs Peak, but rather Mount Meeker. A little bit of Longs does show up, as a knob above and behind Meeker. Together they are known as the Twin Peaks.
Truth be told, I’m glad I live in Longmont, and not Meekerville.
For much of the year, a striking line of snow fills the gully of Cabin Creek on Meeker’s east face, and lights up bright white in the morning sun. Being a fairly deep cut, it remains white long after the adjacent slopes have melted. Ever since my friend told me about the “end-of-June, doing good” rule, I’ve monitored it each year to see how good we’re doing. And for the last bunch of years the verdict has been “not good”: the snow has disappeared significantly prior to June 30th, beaten by heat.
But this year was different! Here it was, the 12th of July, and the Cabin Creek gully still displayed a thin line of white!
A word on the Twin Peaks above the gully: they are hardly twins. Rather they are distinct and differently-shaped mountains. Longs gets all the glory, attention, and crowds, being Rocky Mountain National Park’s sole fourteener (peak over 14,000 feet), and possessing a startling, sheer northeast face that is up there with Yosemite in terms of being an extreme rock climbers’ mecca. Meeker, only 350 feet lower, is almost entirely overlooked, which is more than fine by me—more on that in a minute.
The men that the Twin Peaks are named after were hardly twins as well. Stephen Long was one of the USA’s most prolific expedition leaders in the late 1810s and early 1820s, scouting more than 26,000 miles of American West. One of the many things he determined, more than a century before the Dust Bowl proved him correct, was that much of the land west of Missouri was a “great desert…unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by people depending on agriculture.”
Nathan Meeker, on the other hand, was an artsy progressive fellow from Euclid, Ohio. He tried to make it in New York City as a novelist and poet but, unable to make a buck, returned home to Euclid and became a traveling salesman. Apparently he was able to avoid religion until early adulthood. Then he got married, and his wife forced him to get baptized, and in this manner Nathan got bit by the Christian bug—bad.
The newlyweds moved to the soon-to-fail utopian colony of Trumbull Phalanx, in Ohio, a settlement that was based on the ideas of French socialist thinker Charles Fourier. Fourier inspired several such movements in America at the time, even though quite a few of his ideas proved far too strong for American Christians to handle. For example, Fourier is credited with originating the term “feminism” in 1837, and he viewed the traditional home as a place of exile and oppression for women. He believed all important jobs should be open to women as well as men, and given based on skill and aptitude. Contrary to the times, he viewed women as individuals and not as half of a human couple. Furthermore, in an age before the word “homosexuality” was part of the lexicon, Fourier wrote about the fact that both men and women possess a wide range of sexual needs and preferences, which may change throughout their lives, and which may include same-sex ones.
Fourier was all about liberating the individual through education and freeing of passion.
Nathan Meeker wasn’t—quite the contrary. Nor was Christian America’s version of Fourier’s utopia, which was decidedly not about liberating any passion, gayness, or women.
After the Ohio colony failed in 1837, Meeker knocked around a while as a journalist. When he came west for work in the 1850s, he was inspired to relocate here and try again for the Christian utopian communal economic enterprise thing. He recruited for and founded a colony at what is now Greely (25 miles northeast of Longmont) which he advertised as a “cooperative venture for people of high moral character and temperance”.
Like all the others, the colony lasted only a couple of years. It failed financially, it failed irrigation-ally (water fights have gone on since the beginning of White settlement here), and also, the colony members failed to meet Meeker’s standards for Christian values.
After that Meeker continued in his quest to impose Christian values on others. Despite having no experience in Indian affairs, he got the governor of Colorado to appoint him Indian Agent in charge of the newly established Ute reservation at White River, in western Colorado. Though he lacked experience, he was thoroughly on board with American white supremist imperialism and its efforts to subjugate indigenous people, force them into Christianity, compel them to become sedentary farmers, and abduct their children and isolate them in residential schools so as to purge those who survived of their language and culture.
Thus Meeker set out to colonize the White River Utes, who at the time were animist nomadic hunter gatherers and who prized, more than anything else, their horse herds. Meeker didn’t like any of this. Early on he forced them to relocate to a valley bottom, where they were instructed to plow and plant. Few complied; instead, they grazed and raced their horses in the fertile valley. Meeker, incensed, withheld government rations and annuities, and asked the United States Cavalry to patrol the area’s borders to prevent any Utes from leaving to hunt and gather.
He also plowed under their horse racing track, and apparently said out loud that there were too many horses and that it was time to kill a bunch of them.
Long story short: instead of killing their horses, the Utes killed Meeker. It’s known as the “Meeker Massacre.”
And now we have Mount Meeker. Like so many other things, named after some White male asshole.
Of course, just because Meeker the man was a jerk doesn’t mean Meeker the mountain is not to be loved. And I personally am very glad so few people around here pay attention to Mount Meeker, and instead focus on Longs Peak next door.
There is nothing meek about climbing Meeker, although it requires little in the way of technical expertise. It’s easy to know when to go: as you study the progress of the Cabin Creek gully melt, you will automatically also observe the progress of the melt on Meeker Ridge above it. As soon as the ridge is largely free of snow, just go! Like I said, it’s no slouch; the climb involves exactly one full vertical mile of elevation gain. The trail begins at a tiny obscure trailhead and peters out on a wooded saddle, well beneath the ridge. From there it is necessary to follow cairns to the tree line and ridge, but you gain it, it is obvious where to go (and go, and go). When you finally reach the top, can have the pleasure of a thrilling and rather dicey rock scramble to reach the second of Meeker’s own twin peaks, if you want.
Here’s the best part: on any given summer day, hundreds if not thousands of people are vying to get to the top of Longs Peak next door. Meanwhile you will likely sit in complete solitude on top of Meeker where, if you bring binoculars, you can see the colorful gaggle of the crowd on top of Longs. Each time I have climbed Mount Meeker, I have been the sole human being from the saddle all the way to the summit. On my most recent climb last summer, I didn’t see a single person all day after leaving my car (which was the only car).
By the way, I just checked: as of today, July 14th, the Cabin Creek gully snow is still ever-so-slightly hanging in there.
The Bell
June 16, 2022
I stared at La Campana as if I’d been beamed into a dream.
“Am I really here?”
That’s how it can be when you go way back with a place. The scene before me was so familiar. It had replayed in my mind so many times, over decades. To see it again, now, felt surreal
But this was the real deal. This was the field with the old broken swing, down the street from my friend Luisa’s house. And there was the granite cap of La Campana—The Bell—rising above the town of Limache, in central Chile’s coastal range.
Limache has held a special place and energy for me ever since I first came here in 1994. It’s a mysterious, soothing energy, with a touch of bittersweet. It emanates from the circular pérgola in Brasil Park, and resonates from the mesmerizing trees that line Urmeneta Avenue.
Perhaps the age of the settlement has something to do with this. People lived here, and called it “Limachi” before the arrival of the Spanish. There are two theories about this name. One is that it derives from Quechua for “people of Lima”, and it is true that the Inca installed a mitimae—a community of colonists—here when they were expanding south. Another possibility is that the name comes from lli, meaning “large crag or rock”, combined with de machi, which means “of the witch”.
The large crag or rock is, of course, La Campana. The mountain and the town go hand and hand. According to folklore, when the Spanish arrived, the machis of the area decided to hide all the gold. To thwart the invaders, they piled it on top of La Campana and laid a granite cap over it.
Actually there isn’t any gold up there. However there is a sizable amount of quartz, and perhaps it’s the quartz beneath the granite cap of La Campana that adds energy to this whole place.
Sometimes big mountains come in small packages. This rather unremarkable, 6,170-foot coastal range peak has an outsized story and importance. The tale of the witches’ hidden gold its only claim to fame.
Now it was time to climb it. I promised myself, during my last visit in 2014, that I would do it this time.
I got up early and left Luisa’s house just as the sun was beginning to poke over La Campana’s shoulder. I walked to Urmeneta Avenue, and waited only a minute before a colectivo came along with a kindhearted driver who took me all the way to the park entrance. As I began hiking up through forest, the freshness and energy of the superb morning was augmented by the fact that I was walking in the footsteps (or horse hooves rather) of a 23-year-old Charles Darwin.
You may have learned that it was Mr. Darwin’s experiences in the Galapagos Islands, more than anywhere else, that were instrumental to him in his development of his theories of evolution. In truth Chile played a pivotal role as well—perhaps even more than the Galapagos. And this little-big mountain that I was hiking up had been a part of it.
For fifteen months, while the H.M.S. Beagle charted Chile’s coastline, a seasick-prone Darwin spent much of the time ashore hiking, riding, investigating, and specimen collecting. On August 14, 1834, while the Beagle was docked at Valparaíso, Darwin obtained horses and set off with a companion to the Hacienda San Isidro, at the base of La Campana. Two days later, with a fresh change of horses, they began the climb. They summited the following day.
I didn’t need as much time as Darwin. The ascent of La Campana is steep, but it’s only seven kilometers to the top; a rather run-of-the-mill day hike. Within a couple hours I reached the abandoned quartz mine at the base of the final pitch.
“Sorry, but you are not authorized to go to the top,” a warden there informed me, holding a printed list. I wasn’t aware that I’d needed to make an advance reservation online.
Aw shit, I thought. Then I thought: No big deal. I’ve climbed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of crags such as this one. All I really wanted to do today was get into some of the warming sunshine on a nearby hill and enjoy gazing at The Bell in close-up.
Which is what I did.
“Am I really here?” I asked myself, dreamily.
Darwin of course didn’t have anyone telling him he couldn’t go to the top. As he and his buddy scrambled up the “rough mass of fragmented greenstone” as he put it, they passed numerous attempts at gold mining. Even on the summit a small pit had been excavated. Apparently those El-Dorado-drunk Spanish weren’t taking any chances with the folk tale’s dubious veracity!
Here’s what Darwin wrote in his journal:
We spent the day on the summit, and I never enjoyed one more thoroughly. Chile, bounded by the Andes and the Pacific, was seen as in a map…Who can avoid wondering at the force which has upheaved these mountains, and even more so at the countless ages which it must have required to have broken through, removed, and levelled whole masses of them?
Six months later, Darwin was be farther south, in Concepción, Chile (near the bodega I’d just got done working at), experiencing some upheaval of his own in the form of the 1835 earthquake. Viewing the devastation, he noticed rocks lined with marine shells that were now elevated well above the tide. He saw that the nearby island of Santa Maria had been raised a whole nine feet. These experiences, combined with others he was soon to have, such as finding fossilized forests and seashells high in the Andes, revealed and affirmed to Darwin the constantly evolving nature of our planet. It was an unambiguous, first-hand view of how these slow-changing features of Earth are products of thousands of successive uplifts over unfathomable periods of time.
Which led Darwin to ask, “How do living things change in order to adapt?”
Twenty-four years and a massive amount of research later, he published his answer: On the Origin of Species.
I sat on La Campana and thought about how all this must have looked to Darwin: pretty much the same as how it looked to me now, minus the deforestation and the dryness due to drought. I’d arrived a mere 188 years after him—way less than the tiniest blip in time.
Some birds flew by.
I thought of the geese honking in Luisa’s backyard.
And then I thought of the extraordinary bar-headed geese of Asia.
Perhaps you’ve heard of them. How is it, that they can fly over the Himalayas at elevations of five, six, even seven thousand meters every autumn, from China to India, and then fly back each spring? These birds flap—they don’t glide—and they go from sea level to the tops of the Himalayas in less than a day, where the way-below freezing thin atmosphere contains a third as much oxygen as at sea level. And they do it while consuming ten to fifteen times more oxygen than they do at rest.
Researchers have identified a suite of adaptations which set bar-headed geese apart from other geese, which make them able to do this: an ability to breathe more deeply and efficiently, modified blood hemoglobin that binds oxygen more efficiently, heart left ventricles that have significantly more capillaries, and modified cellular structure of flight muscles that decreases the distance oxygen must diffuse to reach mitochondria.
Even more fascinating to me than how they do it is why they do it. Why do bar-headed geese fly over the Himalayas?
Perhaps the answer is because they always have. They, and their forbears, have always flown south for the winter and north for the summer.
But the Himalayas haven’t always been there.
Not very long ago, geologically—a mere 40 to 50 million years or so ago—the island of India began crashing into the Eurasian Plate. Since then, it has continued to move north at about five centimeters per year, sliding beneath Asia and creating the Himalayas, which still rise about a centimeter a year.
I bet if I lived for 40 million years, and walked from China to India and back each year, I’d scarcely notice that my initially-level walk increased by a centimeter each year. By the time I was crossing 6,000-meter passes it would be more than business as usual. It would be the way it had “always” been. And my body would be totally attuned to it.
I thought about this during my hike down from La Campana, and on the bus rolling back to Limache. Forty million years! I feel I’ve adapted pretty well after bagging only 58—and this has been without the aid of natural selection.
I got down on Urmeneta Avenue, a little distance away from Limache’s center so that I could walk beneath its amazing trees on my way to Santa Isabel supermarket.
Inside the store, I tossed a packet of candles into my cart. Then I went to look for a cake. What would be the flavor of my Chilean birthday cake, to commemorate today’s completion of my 58th year?
Lúcuma, of course.
I bought it and carried it back to Luisa’s house.
Tales of Caliboro
May 14, 2022
In the mythology of south central Chile, near the summit of Cerro Caliboro, more specifically a little bit down to the west, there is a hollow that forms the bed of a small lagoon. Here a wonderful animal lived. He was called the Little Bull of Caliboro.
His color was deep bright pink. His bearing was slender and majestic. His eyes were huge and expressive. But the most magnificent thing about the Little Bull, his most brilliant distinctions, were his horns. They were well proportioned and expertly-turned, and they shone brighter than the sun because they were made of solid gold.
When the Little Bull walked, his horns lit up like a lantern, and many animals followed him. Back then the hills around here were covered with huge thick trees that formed impenetrable forests. On Caliboro, Little Bull reigned benevolent and supreme since the entrances, crossroads, and exits were known only to him. Whoever else entered became lost forever. Not even the lions, who lived in a den on a different hill to the northwest (which is still called the Cave of Lions) could pursue the Little Bull and his followers on Cailboro, where they lived peacefully and in protection.
When Little Bull bellowed, black clouds formed over the hills and it rained infallibly and torrentially. To this day, whenever Cerro Caliboro becomes covered in thick dark clouds, it is a sure sign that storms and rain are imminent.
More About Caliboro
Many Chilean children learn the legend of El Torito de Caliboro, the Little Bull of Caliboro, before they learn their alphabet. Earliest memories might be of picture books depicting a bright pink little bull with golden horns leading his animal followers through a hillside forest primeval. This story is central to the mythology of central Chile, and Cerro Caliboro is a real place that is home to this myth, not unlike how Mount Olympus is a real place that is home to Greek myths.
It’s a major claim to fame for an otherwise little known, secluded, very off the beaten track sort of place. Set in the Mediterranean-esque Maule Valley of south-central Chile, Caliboro has a dirt road, and the nearest towns of San Javier and Linares are over thirty kilometers away in different directions. At night the stars are very bright thanks to an absence of light pollution, and aside from the sound of the breeze, the silence is profound. The clear air and bright sunshine are enchanting.
The name “Caliboro” derives from the Mapudungun words coru and calil, which translate to “bone of human flesh.” My boss, whose family’s vineyard has been here for over two hundred years, told me that the story is when the indigenous Mapuche first arrived at this hill, they found a graveyard of human bones on its lower slope from an earlier civilization.
Beginning in the mid-1500s, the Mapuche started to be displaced by a hardy stock of Europeans, who brought with them cows, goats, sheep, and intensive agriculture of cereals and other crops, including—due to the wine needs of church friars—grapevines.
A lot of magical realism exists here: a palpable, mystical energy. Someone told me the soil contains lots of quartz, and perhaps this is part of the reason. Someone else told me that Caliboro is like a Macondo Seco, or a dry version of Macondo, the fictional locale immortalized by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the novel, Macondo begins as a tiny settlement with almost no contact with the outside world. It grows to become a prosperous place, before its downfall.
Indeed the similarities are striking. Chile, to begin with, has always been much more isolated than Colombia. This long thin strip of land is separated from the rest of the world by the Atacama Desert in the north, the continuous wall of Andes to the east, the icy Antarctic to the south, and the vast Pacific Ocean to the west. And Caliboro is an isolated place within this isolated country: an area of intoxicating solitude.
The houses of Caliboro are largely made of adobe, still, although this is changing in favor of higher-tech earthquake resistant materials. Whitewashed in lime and topped with terracotta tiles, their outer brick corridors lead to opulent vegetable gardens, which prosper despite a sparseness of water.
Houses and people are few. And the people work hard. They also play hard, and it’s pretty fun and can get out of hand sometimes. Over this past Easter weekend some horse races were held at the Media Luna (Half Moon), the local rodeo stand. Lots of competition, accompanied by abundant drinking and betting, led to arguments. “Did you hear what happened?” a workmate asked me first thing Monday morning. Apparently an argument led to a fight in which two men got stabbed, one quite seriously in the intestines. Both were taken to hospital in San Javier and will survive.
But yes; hypermasculinity is present, big-time, in Chilean campo culture. And like everywhere else it is prone to going toxic.
Trouble
Back to the legend of the little pink bull:
Naturally, people coveted his golden horns and wanted to catch him and kill him, and melt the horns down. They also wanted to harvest his animal friends and make charqui, a dried and crushed meat jerky popular to this day, which they could transport on the placid waters of the Rio Perquilauquén (Mapudungun for “purgative”) and sell to hungry people living in towns.
But Little Bull and his followers remained safe in their sanctuary on Cerro Caliboro, with the forest almost impossible to travel through and anyone daring to enter quickly becoming lost. For many years people tried to hunt Little Bull, and they failed every time.
Eventually it became clear that the only way to get him and his followers was to combat the forest, i.e. to get rid of it.
Cutting it down proved to be a long and arduous task. Wave after wave of effort was made, with no golden horns to show for it and barely a hunk of jerky. But plenty of exhaustion was experienced by all involved.
Then someone had a bright idea: “We don’t have to cut the forest down. We can just burn it.”
Origin of Myth
Stories come from somewhere. Myths spring from real life. When European settlers began to arrive in Chile nearly five hundred years ago, the Earth was vast and limitless to them. Its purpose was to serve and be dominated and plundered by man, as so instructs the Book of Genesis.
The Mapuche, on the other hand, had probably learned a different lesson over the thousands of years since their sapiens ancestors arrived in the Americas. The extinction of the megafauna in very short order was but just an early, and perhaps forgotten, step in a long sequence of degradation, but by now they were likely instinctively more conscientious of the limitations of nature. Their customs and legends centered more on the need to respect the Earth, and to preserve it.
With the Europeans came hundreds of years of intensive agriculture and environmental exploitation, resulting in large scale deforestation and elimination of most of the native vegetation. Much territory to this day is used for increasingly large, industrially-farmed monocultures. At first the fertile flat bottoms were ideal for many crops, grapevines not excepted, and cleared and planted as such. Soon the hillside forests were being destroyed and converted to slanted fields of cereals and wheat. Of course, the easiest way to clear a forest is to burn it down. This came with the added bonus of purging the animals, which could be harvested as they fled and made into edible protein.
So on the hillsides, first came the cereals. Then came forestry monocultures for timber export. The latter began in the 1970s, promoted and subsidized by the neoliberal state as economic policy of the Pinochet dictatorship. It takes several decades for a tree crop to grow, so when the Pinochet regime ended in 1990 the trees were still very much growing. And these tree plantations continued—and continue—to be promoted by subsequent civil governments.
All this has resulted in drastic changes to the health of the soils throughout the area. Along with serious loss of soil has been a huge loss of biodiversity, and an alteration in the water balance. It can be argued that there has also been a decrease in the prosperity of the average person, a loss which of course doesn’t show up on the balance sheets of the agriculture corporations, or in the net worth of the elite, or in government GDP figures.
As a result of all this, the region is more vulnerable than ever to wildfires. One such incendio was sparked by a piece of machinery this past December and tore through a swath of the lower slope of Calboro, nearly torching the 200-year-old winery that I’ve been working at these past couple months.
In some ways it’s like Macondo all over again. Macondo began as a small and isolated place, and grew to become prosperous and thriving. But the arrival of a banana plantation was the beginning of its downfall. Environmental destruction, then human abandonment ensued, followed by a windstorm that wiped it off the map.
Incendio
As the people set fire to Cerro Caliboro, Little Bull and his herd took refuge in the deep forested hollow of their lagoon.
But the flames approached.
Very scared, Little Bull led his herd to the summit. When he got there, he let fly a huge bellowing that could be heard for miles around.
Suddenly a massive thick cloud appeared and covered the entire hill.
Cosecha
“Woo-hoo!” I yelled as the rain shower intensified.
Across the road, a big black cloud had formed, completely obscuring Cerro Caliboro.
I stood in a plastic bin along with 500 kilograms of freshly-harvested grapes, elevated eight feet above the ground by a forklift, tied-off by a waist belt. Armed with a pitchfork, I shoveled grapes as fast as I could into the rotating teeth of the de-stemmer machine, where the fruit got separated from the stems and converted into a slurry that flowed through a fat hose to one of our biggest stainless steel fermenters inside the bodega. We were processing the last cosecha, or harvest, of the year. The previous evening we’d received thirty of these bins—15,000 kilos of grapes. The de-stemmer was located beneath the bodega’s tall sloping terracotta roof, but where I stood shoveling madly I was totally exposed to the elements.
“Woo-hoo!” my workmates hooted back from beneath the shelter, laughing, as a veritable downpour ensued.
It was my honor to get my turn with the pitchfork during the most intense minutes of a week-long period of rain during which the sun did not come out a single time. It’s quite a rigorous workout, to shovel 500 kilograms of grapes as fast as you can to keep up with the de-stemmer, so we were rotating the task between three men. Another guy piloted the forklift, and another collected the rejected stems and tossed them into a tractor trailer to be sent to compost.
I had a second honor that day: My turn with the pitchfork came when it was the last bin to be shoveled. And as such, I closed out the bodega’s cosecha for the year.
And lo and behold, the very next day, the sun, the glorious sun came out! For the first time in a week! And with it: snow-covered Andes.
Drawn like a magnet to observe the wondrous mountains, at midday I walked down into a nearby industrial-mechanized grape farm that was in the process of being scoured by two enormous harvester machines that straddled each row to move through the vines as giant monstrous sieves. The grapes in this field were low quality, my mates informed me. “Full of water” from irrigation, they said. The fruit would be used by a corporation to make jug wine. These were not the dry-farmed, hand-harvested grapevines of my organic bodega.
I have to say that mechanization is definitely a quick way to get a lot of grapes—orders of magnitude quicker than the laborious days I’d spent in the fields with a pair of industrial scissors, clipping grape bunches one by one. Oh! The days I spent doing that, coming home exhausted and sleeping sounder than I’ve ever slept before in my life. I got pretty good at vine surgery, at getting only the grapes. Only occasionally would a leaf land in my harvest bin, and I’d pluck it out.
But here these machines were getting more grapes in ten minutes than I could clip in a whole day.
As I watched, I noticed they were getting more than grapes. They were getting lots of leaves too. In our hand surgery method, this was a no-no. We were only after the grapes.
“What did you think?” Kako, my foreman, asked from his forklift seat when I huffed my way back up to the bodega.
“Amazing! The mountains, I mean. As for the harvesters, it’s quick, but I noticed they’re getting a lot of leaves along with the grapes.”
Kako grinned and waved his arm dismissively. “Not just leaves! Everything: rats, birds, bird nests, snakes—”
“And rabbits and spiders!” Nico chimed in. “Everything!”
So think about that next time you consider buying a box or jug of cheap bulk wine. In your glass, you’re getting a little bit of everything!
Cloud Ride
Little Bull bellowed some more, and the people heard him through the thick black cloud that had rendered Cerro Caliboro completely invisible.
Then something truly astonishing occurred.
The sun came out, and it revealed the top of the hill.
As the people watched in amazement, Little Bull made a run, and a leap, and jumped onto a passing cloud.
Other animals followed. As many as who could. But not all.
The cloud moved away towards the Andes, carrying with it the Little Bull and the friends who were able to jump aboard.
These Andes
The view of the Andes from the top of Cerro Caliboro is magnificent. A whole sweep of them have become my new friends.
Volcán Chillán, a ski mecca, rises in the south. Next and most impressively comes Longaví. Now that we’ve had that week of rain, which was snow up there, Longaví’s lava dome shines white, and it displays a luxuriantly long, snow-caked skirt. Mapudungun for “head of snake”, it looks fierce but is non-threateningly dormant. It last erupted about six thousand years ago.
A jagged snow-caked ridge of cordillera continues northward, and then we get to Cerro Azul and its stark northerly protrusion, Quizapú. Unlike Longaví, Quizapú wasn’t there six thousand years ago. It wasn’t there even a scant two hundred years ago. It burst out of the side of Cerro Azul in 1846, surprising some local arrieros (backcountry herdsmen) who were camped nearby. Then, on April 10, 1932 one of the strongest eruptions of the twentieth century anywhere in the world occurred, sending ash to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and southern Brazil. When all was said and done, we had most of the striking protrusion we see now.
Quizapú acts up in tandem with its northern brother, Descabezado Grande (Spanish for “Big Headless”) as they are part of the same complex. Descabezado’s name is self-explanatory; its silhouette formed in times of yore when a part of its old upper cone collapsed during an explosive eruption.
End of Story (?)
As Little Bull and some of his herd floated away towards the Andes, the other animals scattered through the smoldering forest, and were hunted down and made into jerky.
(Now all that’s really left around here for people to hunt are rabbits, which they do with sport and enthusiasm on weekends using trained dogs. But if you see a rabbit pelt draped over a barbed wire fence, that’s not their work. Nor is it witchcraft. The vultures here scavenge rabbit carcasses, and for some reason they like to hang the pelts on fences.)
As witnessed by all, Little Bull and his band of animals survived. They haven’t been seen or heard from since.
It is hoped, and believed, that one day the bull with the golden horns will return. Chilean children are told this will happen when the hills and valleys are covered by native trees again. When the impenetrable forests are formed, once again.
Looking for Little Bull
I had a day off the other day. It was sunny. Naturally, I headed up Caliboro.
It was my sixth time climbing Caliboro. I’d come about as often as I could these past months, to enjoy the exercise, the beauty, the breeze, the views, and the solitude—oh man, the solitude. When you go up here, you know there’s not another human being around for miles. It’s just you, the hills, the stubbly trees, the grasses, the Andes, and the birds and other animals who live up here.
This time I was determined to find Little Bull’s grotto.
As I climbed through last December’s burn, the bodega and the fields and the river dropped away to reveal quadrangular-shaped grape farms turning yellow and burgundy-purple in late autumn. In front of me, thanks to the recent rain, a wintergreen carpet of short grass was pushing up through the longer dry grass. And flowers! Tiny yellow flowers were everywhere.
As I reached the second of three minor summits, I began making my way through a by-now-familiar, unmaintained government reforestation project. Some years ago, perhaps out of guilt or shame magnified by legend, a concerted effort was made to return the native forest to Cerro Caliboro. To do this, a decidedly non-native network of hoses connected to small reservoirs was installed, to supply hundreds of wire mesh cylinders, each containing a support stick and, purportedly, a seedling. Lots of public money was spent on this, but obviously, after an enthusiastic start, the project has fallen into disrepair. The reservoirs are dry and their auxiliary equipment is smashed and decrepit. Many of the mesh-stick cylinders have toppled over, and of those standing, few contain seedlings. However some do! Some trees will grow from this.
The web of hoses grew denser and more intricate as I huffed my way nearer to the top. Then one of the hoses moved, and I realized it was a little black snake slithering away. Then I spied a rabbit. And a white butterfly.
I reached my usual sitting place on the summit, but walked past it and descended—westward.
“Maybe that’s where it is,” I whispered, spying a deep fold between the hills which I had not yet investigated.
Down I went. As I descended, the vegetation got thicker and I began to hear things I hadn’t heard up higher: bird sounds I had not encountered before.
Down, down I continued, into deep shade, until the vegetation would allow me to go no farther. Below, all was thick and green and impenetrable, and level enough to contain some water beneath the foliage, though I couldn’t see or hear any. Certainly during wet periods, there could be water there. I couldn’t get any closer to inspect and didn’t dare try; during an earlier voyage I’d entered a lower section of this drainage and almost didn’t make it back out again.
So instead I sat, closed my eyes partway, and listened.
I heard birds: calling and responding faintly, softly, sweetly.
I heard small rustlings, also probably of birds.
However I heard no hooves, nor any movements of larger animals.
No Little Bull, nor any of his followers.
They have yet to return.
After half an hour, I got up, brushed myself off, and began climbing up the dry prickly-bush, tree spotted hillside.
Then I heard it! Hooves! And a big rustling!
Instead of Little Bull, a little wild horse appeared in a clearing before me. Shy, she ran ahead to join her group, which was already moving away from me and up along their self-made path.
And the wild horses led me to the top of Caliboro.
It’s In the Skin
April 14, 2022
Winemaking is dermatology, a coworker said to me recently. The exquisite flavors, colors, and nutrients come primarily from the skin.
There’s been a lot of skin to move here these past few weeks, along the Río Perquilauquén in south central Chile, at a place called Caliboro, where I have come to learn and help out during this busy season. ‘Tis the season, indeed! When autumn comes there’s lots of work to do, not just with grapes but with so many other things on this organic restorative-agriculture finca: fields to be readied with key-lines for new planting, fence to be built and repaired to keep the sheep and goats moving and fertilizing, wood to be chopped for heating stoves which will be in heavy use in the coming months.
For now, the days are still warm enough that the stoves are not needed, although a sweater and ear-flap hat are called for when the sun gets to slanting. The clear bright air becomes thin and cold on the skin real fast!
The focus of these months is of course on the grapes themselves. Tons of grapes means not only tons of new wine but also tons of skins, all of which need to be moved. During fermentation the skins float on top in the tanks and create a “sombrero,” and it’s important to get them good and wet once or twice a day with the juice underneath so that all that good stuff participates in the process. This is called a pisoneo (pushdown) in the smaller, open-topped vats, where it is accomplished using a flat-faced plunger and a self-descriptive method. A pisoneo can be quite the upper-body and aerobic workout, amidst dizzying fermentation gasses and buzzing of bees (the bees add their own special ingredients via their intrepid feet).
Pisoneos are not physically possible in the larger, dome-topped stainless steel tanks, so instead remontajes (remounts) are performed, where liquid is pumped from below and returned to the top via a hose. This too is good exercise, up on a ladder or a platform, manipulating a hose through an open tank manway to soak and agitate the sombrero.
Eventually comes pressing, when the skins come out of the tanks and are squeezed to wring out every last possible drop. Here at this winery the skin removal is done manually using rakes and plastic shovels, with a person going inside. And the squeezing? Feet—booted or bare—are extremely effective in accomplishing part of it, when more space needs to be created in the pressing castle while skins are still being shoveled. A hydraulic machine finishes the job, resulting in a purple pressed grape skin cake that is then moved to a trailer bed for transport to compost.
Then there’s all the equipment that needs to be moved and cleaned, tanks and sieves and floors to be rinsed, hose lines to be flushed with water and sanitizing agent, wayward skins to be swept up. All told it makes for a calorie-burning day.
Winemaking this heavily-manual way is an old profession, and it has been made much in this way, here at this old bodega, for a long time. Awhile back my boss’s family considered replacing this bodega—a word which translates to “cellar” even though the facility is entirely above ground—but since it wasn’t broken, they thought, why fix it? This grand, graceful adobe structure, whitewashed with lime and topped with terracotta tiles, has walls that are over two feet thick, and is oriented to receive the river breeze, which enables a passive ventilation and temperature-control system that for centuries has provided a wonderful barrel aging environment.
Earthquakes have been unable to take down this bodega; not even the big one of 2010, with an epicenter just off the coast 60 miles west of here, could do it—though it caused a few wall cracks, and created a tsunami that damaged San Diego and Japan.
Next to the bodega, in the central courtyard of the old house, grows a vine with a twisted trunk that is over one foot in diameter. How old is this vine? No one knows for sure. It’s difficult to tell with grape trunks, what with the outer bark constantly cracking and peeling. But it’s said that each full twist equates to approximately one hundred years.
This old-wood trunk has more than two full twists.
“Wait a minute,” you might be saying. “It’s a well-known fact that grape vines live for about a century max, and cease producing decent fruit long before then.”
That may be true in many cases, but don’t try telling this to the people of Maribor, Slovenia, where a vine grows that dates back to the late Middle Ages. In addition to withstanding earthquakes there, it has survived Ottoman invasion, fires, vine lice, and bombing by Allied forces, and it still produces grapes—enough to make a special limited vintage each year.
Perhaps the old vine here in Caliboro is of similar hearty stock. Its grapes certainly are plentiful. A vat of them is currently fermenting outside my door.
Of what ancestry is this old vine? Who are its parents? Where in Europe did they originate? Are there any others like it in the world? DNA analysis is currently underway, but in all likelihood this vine will turn out to be a one-of-a-kind hybrid, which means it will need to be given a name. And that name will most certainly be Caliboro.
Which derives from Mapudungun for “bone of fresh human meat”, but that’s a different story.
The lush shambolic field vines of this organic vineyard appear quite a bit different from the industrial bright green perfect thin rows of the neighbor’s vines, which are cookie cutter in appearance and have grapes perfectly accessible to machines, and denuded earth between them without a stray mala hierba (weed) in sight. Every one of the tens of thousands of trunks is wrapped in a sleeve of frost-protecting sky-blue plastic, since there is no herbaceous ground cover to help even out the temperature swings.
Even more unsettling is what is happening up the road from my house, in a vast expanse along the river. For weeks, gigantic machines have been churning the earth to prepare a mammoth new monoculture cherry tree farm in what was formerly grapevines. The bare, tractor-razed earth looks stark, and when I hike up Caliboro Hill in the afternoons to watch the vultures soar and gaze at the soon-to-be snowy Andes, I look down and see clouds of topsoil blowing away in the direction of the ocean. I hope they transplant some cherry seedlings soon, to help anchor down all that earth.
Where will all these cherries be sent to? China, I am told. China loves cherries.
When this cherry monoculture is completed, I’m certain it will be similar to all the other monocultures. A couple of Augusts ago I walked out into one of the monoculture cornfields near my house in Colorado. I hiked about a quarter mile in, sat down, and waited to see what I could experience. What I experienced was this: that this was not a farm. This was a factory—and a dead one at that. Sure there was green corn stalk after green corn stalk, each nearly identical to the others. But the place felt dead. I did not see one weed, one bird, or one insect. It was a sterile corn manufacturing facility created from genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, producing a starchy product big in bulk and small in nutrition. More than anything, it was creepy.
Other monocultures grow here in Caliboro in the form of timber farms on the hillsides. Paulina, my boss’s mother, informed me that not only do these non-native trees interfere with the natural flow of water and are causing people’s wells to run dry, their needles emit oils into the air which interfere with grape skins and affect their structure and flavor. Grapes have thick skins, but there are limits to what they can endure.
There’s got to be a better way, and I feel certain this organic vineyard and winery I’m working at is part of the solution and not the problem. I’m glad I got here in time to partake in the tail end of harvest. Armed with hundreds of white plastic bins and industrial-strength scissors, we waded into vines after someone tamed the biodiverse jungle-like setting with a machete. Each vine for me was a unique puzzle: to find the big hidden bunches of ripe juicy manna, and locate the best places to snip and obtain the heaviest clumps. And the place felt so alive! With insects buzzing, birds chortling, and plenty of other plants and organisms doing their thing in harmony with the vines. The sheep hadn’t yet made it here to chomp, churn, and nutrify.
The delicious skin-steeped final product, of course, makes all of this way more than worthwhile. These wines explode their flavor into your mouth in a way that makes you know they are healthy. Your body just knows.
The air here feels that way too: good and healthy. You experience it by day in sunlight so clear, and by night beneath stars very bright—since we are far from any source of light pollution—wrapped in delectable silence.
Especially at night, the air feels very good on the skin.
Paulina advised me the day I arrived: “At night, take your glass of wine and go outside and look at the stars.”
I didn’t need additional coaxing.
The night air on my skin, and the vibrant flavor of grape skins in my mouth. Now that’s a pairing!
Autumn Volcanoes
April 3, 2022
Otoño has arrived in the Pacific Southwest in all its glory. It’s time for hats and jackets and crispness in the air. By afternoon the comforting scent of woodsmoke pervades the lanes, emerging from tin chimneys. Nights are getting cold, and at higher elevations, very cold.
In the Andes, snow has begun to fall. Being autumn it comes and goes, but the higher spots get tinged in lasting white. And then there are the volcanoes: the gorgeous, conical volcanoes of southern Chile. They positively light up in white, thanks to the autumn dusting! It takes some standard wet Pacific Southwest weather to make this happen, and when the sun eventually comes out again—and it does—wow, the volcanoes are glorious!
Of them, Volcán Llaima, 10,630 feet, is one of the continent’s most active. Frequent eruptions have occurred before and since the first one recorded by the Spanish, in 1640 while unsuccessfully attempting to subjugate the Mapuche. Since then there have been about 35 more eruptions, including a biggee in 1873-76 that altered the shape of the mountain and led to its current name. Before then it had the Mapuche name as Chañel, which means “finger” in Mapudungun, and was pointier and likely about 150 feet higher than it is now. But a fissure appeared near the crater during the 1873-76 eisode and the name got switched to Llaima, which means “drain” or “ditch” (although it could mean “blood veins”; also fitting). The last major eruption was in 1994, capping off a very active twentieth century, and a significant event occurred in 2008 stretching into 2009. I hiked through the gravelly black moonscape resulting from this eruption, through driving wind and rain during my long trek into the national park.
Llaima, for some Mapuche, like other volcanoes in the region, is looked at through a traditional lens of superstition magical thinking. A spirit or guardian lives at the top, called a ngen, and a court of minor but still-powerful spirits inhabits its lower flanks. All are associated with evil. The mountain is symbolically related to other elements affiliated with malevolence: the color red, fireballs that fall from the sky, and a cosmic region called Minche Mapu, which is a negative underworld inhabited by a couple major gods of evil. This is a bad volcano!
You might think this reputation arose from its frequent eruptions. However, this concept doesn’t hold up when you consider Villarica, Llaima’s neighbor to the south, which is regarded by the Mapuche as a “good” volcano despite the fact that it is similarly active and even has a pool of molten lava visible inside its crater. Nor can beauty explain the good-bad dichotomy of these mountains: both are utterly gorgeous. Regardless, Villarica is considered to be an inducer of beneficial dreams, whereas Llaima transmits bad omens to sleeping people.
Since 1957, Llaima has been good enough to be protected by the Parque Nacional Conguillio, which also protects astonishing old-growth forests of massive moss-covered trees and, spectacularly, hillsides of araucarias that climb from the valley floors all the way to the bush line. Some of the tallest araucarias—and they can reach 250 feet in height—grow right at the tree line! It’s crazy! Seriously, they look like something out of Dr. Suess.
Chile’s national tree might be more familiar to you as the “monkey puzzle tree”. That’s what we called the few araucarias we had in Seattle during my childhood—actually, the name was shortened to “monkey tree”. The longer moniker was assigned in the late 1700s by a Brit, who saw one growing on an English estate and speculated that climbing its spike-covered spiral branches would be a puzzle even for a monkey. Indeed! Or even touching the thing, or even thinking about touching it! I touched one while hiking in Conguillio and immediately decided to never do it again.
If you think these trees look like they come from a different geological epoch, that’s because they do. Araucarias are relicts in a botanical sense, which means the range they inhabit was once far bigger. Evidence dates them to the Middle Jurassic, and it has been speculated that the long necks of sauropods evolved to browse the yummy nuts and other foliage in tall trees such as these. Now araucarias grow mostly only in their namesake province here in Chile, and in adjacent area in Argentina. Relatives dot the Pacific in places such as Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Papua.
Known to the Mapuche as pehuén, araucaria trees have seeds that are larger than but similar to pine nuts and which were and are an important food source. They were especially important to the Pehuenche, or “people of the pehuén”, an indigenous group partially merged with the Mapuche that retains some ancestral lands here.
Laguna Conguillio, at the northeastern base of Llaima, is a natural lake with no outlet stream. Rather it drains subterraneously through porous volcanic rock and discharges from a hillside about a thousand feet lower. Consequently the lake’s level varies quite a bit. It will freeze over in the coming months, when up to two meters of snow will fall in this moody, wet Pacific Southwest.
Formidable winter weather is one thing, but autumn here can also be no joke. To enjoy the stupendous sunny fall days, you need to be able to brave the wet and the cold, as the weather can really roll in. Fortunately for me, being from the Pacific Northwest, I have this in my blood. During my three nights in Conguillio I stayed mostly warm and dry, though not always. One cold and rainy night my tent leaked and little lakes formed inside. I fixed that, and the next morning I woke to a tent coated in ice.
While abundant rain, fog, and bone-chilling cold are part of the deal here, so is the glory. Any discomfort is more than worth it when the sun comes back out, and your clothes steam dry, and everything is warm and unbelievably beautiful…with fresh added white on the mountaintops!
After my adventure in Conguillio, I was ready for the main event: a visit to another Bad Volcano. One that is very dear to me. One that I have carried with me in my heart and mind for 27 years.
Volcán Lanín is the “marmie” of the Pacific Southwest volcanoes. At nearly 12,400 feet, it’s the highest thing around. However it exists in relative obscurity, tucked away as it is behind Villarica in gorgeous, remote, wild Argentine borderlands, where it rises above a pass that the Mapuche kept secret from the Spanish all the way into the late 1800s. Elusive unlike its brethren, it isn’t a pinnacle that is viewable from fertile Chilean valleys. Nope; in order to see Lanín, you need to go to Lanín.
The same isn’t true on the Argentine side, where Lanín dominates the landscape and takes its rightful place in the center of the Neuquén provincial flag and anthem.
If you are a mountain afficionado, it might be hard to get Lanín out of your mind once you see it. I’ll never forget my first time, which was also my last time—up close and personal, that is. It was the summer evening of December 23, 1994. I was making a backpacking trek through untrammeled hinterland and there, rising beyond an evening ridge, was this dreamy, triangular cardboard-like cutout of a mountain.
I pitched my tent and gazed at it into twilight, spellbound.
What was most entrancing to me was Lanín’s triangular shape, made all the more dramatic by a distinctive pointy cap of ice sitting on its top. Rather than curving to a crater, the summit is covered by a sharp, striking glacial crown. This is because Lanín probably hasn’t erupted for more than ten thousand years. In the meantime, the crater has filled with ice and been whipped up into a cornice. This ice cap is more substantial on the southern side, where it extends several hundred meters down. Here on the north side, I understand it barely exists anymore, and I wanted to inspect its status for myself.
It might seem strange that Lanín is considered “bad”, being as dormant as it is. The name possibly comes from Mapudungun for “dead rock”. However, this dead rock might be coming back to life! Faint rousing and seismic tremors were recently detected in Lanín for the first time in recorded history, in February of 2017.
Perhaps the name doesn’t mean “dead rock” at all. It’s intriguing to note that, if the last eruption occurred 10,000 years ago, that means it was likely witnessed by human beings. This volcano could have established itself as “bad” early on, and the reputation could have been handed down through millennia.
Lanín is indeed a sacred mountain to the Mapuche—one of the most sacred. The myth goes that in antiquity it was a peaceful peak. But Pillán, the god of evil who inhabits the summit, didn’t want anyone to go up it. When some Huanquimil people arrived and climbed it, they aroused Pillán’s ire, and he responded by issuing violent eruptions.
To appease the god, tribal sorcerers decided that somebody needed to—you guessed it—throw a maiden into the crater. So a young warrior named Quechuán brought the chief’s youngest daughter, Huilefún, up there to do it. He caved at the last minute and could not complete the task, and instead abandoned her near the top. Then a condor arrived, seized the girl in its talons, and dropped her in. And Lanín has been a dead rock ever since.
Gazing at Lanín that evening in 1994, I was perfectly happy with my vantage point and didn’t need to climb it and piss Pillán off. I did proceed to the summit of Quetrupillán the next day, however. Quetrupillán is a low-lying volcano that sits between Lanín and Villarica; the three form a triumvirate. After climbing, I descended Quetrupillán’s western slope on Christmas eve, pitched my tent in a meadow, and then noticed my vision was getting blurry. By the next morning I couldn’t open my eyes as I was snow blind. I spent the day sleeping, rising periodically to feel my way over to a stream and dampen a rag to lay over my eyes. By the following morning I could open my eyes without too much pain, but everything was blurry. I continued downhill and towards Villarica, proceeded to get lost in the forested saddle as torrential rain arrived, and eventually, a day and a half later, stumbled into a town which turned out to be Coñaripe. I must have been a pretty scary sight, because at first they refused to give me a hotel room.
And I never forgot Lanín. Since that time I have carried its image in my mind as a personal friend, a force, a talisman.
Now, on the blustery autumn morning of March 29, 2022, I set out from Puesco just like I did in 1994. I needed to see my old friend again. However, snow had arrived in the upper country, coating the trees and bushes, impeding my progress. Sixteen kilometers later found me on the ridge of what I believed to be my tent site of yore, in half a foot of fresh snow, wind, and boiling clouds, with my whole body long wet from plowing through the thick snow-coated foliage along the faint trail.
No Lanín in sight.
Early stages of hypothermia had set in by the time I got back to the trailhead that evening, soaking wet and exhausted. Fortunately, the former military border post where I got yelled at by a soldier in 1994—apparently he thought I was trying to invade Argentina—is now a national park cafeteria, complete with a wood-burning fireplace and hot chocolate. And they stayed open until 8:00 pm!
I had one more day left to try and see Lanín before I had to leave. After a very cold night, I awoke and poked my head out of my tent to a clear blue sky. Today was the day!
I didn’t hike the sixteen kilometers in this time. Instead I took a newer path that climbs a more proximal mountainside. Like always, I was the sole hiker.
Rest assured, I got my time with Lanín.
Glorious Lanín. Dusted in autumn snow.
The north side of the ice cap looks to be hanging in there, but only barely.
Being so sacred, climbing Lanín is highly regulated and restricted. Both the Chilean and Argentine national parks that encompass the mountain make it a priority to promote respect for the spiritual and emblematic meanings the volcano carries for the Mapuche. Ceremonies occur each year during which it is not possible to climb Lanín at all. Particularly important is an annual period of ritual that takes place near the eastern base—east, where the sun and life are born. Lots of prayers to the god Nguchén occur then. Lots of stuff is asked for.
If we weren’t required to be so respectful of religion all the time, we might say this is foolish. But these beliefs are not one iota less audacious, magical, and Marvel comics-like than the ones held in utter seriousness throughout the world by modern people everywhere, as well as their governments’ leaders. Indeed, in the United States today, it is unlikely you’d get elected to any position of real power unless you claim you have a personal relationship with an invisible wizard who you talk to and plead with regularly.
How unsurprising it is, that in Lanín’s case the wizard became appeased by an act of violence against a woman. This too is no different in our modern religions, which in every case make it their central tenet to demean, denigrate, humiliate, and subjugate people, especially women.
Never was this more obvious than in Mexico recently; downright creepy. In December I witnessed the week-long celebrations of the Virgin. Wild obsession over The Virgin. That’s it—they never even used her name. She didn’t even have a name. In place of a name she had an adjective, one that described the nonpenetrated status of a female body part. And then there was the ever-present cross, a symbol of horrific violence. Let’s not even get into the written stuff Christianity has: myths and legends every bit as crazy as anything the Mapuche ever dreamt up. Yet people swear by them as fact, and operate by this stuff to this day, including the people in power.
Religion is a cult plus time, and just a blip in time in fact—a mere thousand years or three for the religions we humans are stuck in now.
Why must being in the grip of fantastical, magical thinking be respected? And for the people who are: has it ever begun to dawn on them that perhaps the great invisible wizard isn’t even there?
And that this isn’t a problem?
What is there, in fact, is a universe—a beautiful one, one that we are part of, that we are made of, that we are not separate from. One that isn’t out to get us, one we don’t need an imaginary wizard to protect us from. We don’t need these superstitions, this supernaturalism, these conversations in our minds. Even if we did, it would have nothing to do with any of it being true.
We sapiens do have incredible imaginations. Is it our species’ greatest attribute? And/or, will it be the cause of our downfall?
I’ve never gotten into religion, probably less because they’re silly and groundless and more because real things are far more magical to me than imaginary ones. Living in the real world is way too damn magical. And this trip has reminded me that it’s always better to get to livin’ (thank you Dolly Parton), which means knock it off with the prayin’. I think it’s more important now than ever before, what with the clock ticking on so many things such as glaciers.
I’m all for worship: of what is there. Lanín is there. I have carried it in my mind ever since that magical evening in December of 1994 when its triangular shape watched over me. Since then it has been a personal symbol for me, one of beauty, of power.
As the afternoon wore on, I didn’t want to leave my mountainside. I just wanted to sit with Lanín. But I had an evening bus to catch, and continuing life I needed to head on to.
As I sat, I imagined sitting there millions and millions of years ago and witnessing part of the whole story of this mountain. I squinted my eyes and imagined a scene close to its birth, when it was an up-and-coming volcano exploding out of the ground. Then I imagined how everything looked at around the halfway point between then and now, clouds and smoke boiling everywhere, searing hillsides chockful of prehistoric araucaria trees.
Then I opened my eyes wide to the Lanín of the here and now. Fun and cool it is, to have an imagination!
“Goodbye, Lanín,” I said as I finally rose to leave. “It has been real, seeing you again.”
As I turned to go, something entered the corner of my vision.
It was a condor. With her massive, seven-foot wingspan, she sailed on the thermals, rising and flying between Lanín and me. She circled and soared I don’t know how many times as I watched, transfixed. She flew directly over me, not more than fifty feet above me, at least three times.
Then she sailed away towards Lanín, and was gone.
If that’s not religious, I don’t know what is.
No. Scratch that. It just is.
I am. Lanín is. The condor is. We are. No more, and no less.
Physalis Peruviana
March 16, 2022
“What’s this called?” I asked the waitress at Victoria, a venerable picantería (lunch spot serving gourmet local dishes) in the heart of old Arequipa, Peru. I pointed to the fruit on top of our ice cream and alpaca rice.
Pale orange and the size of a large cherry, it arrived crowned with a papery husk which added an artful touch to the beautiful dessert. All our plates here had been delightful works of art.
“Aguaymanto,” she said, spelling it out while my boyfriend Dewey typed it into his phone.
And in this manner I finally encountered physalis peruviana, also known as aguaymanto or ground cherry: fruit of a flowering shrub native to Andean foothills.
I crunched into it and felt tartness flood my mouth. Then came sweetness.
The aguaymanto felt like a metaphor for Peru: tart and sweet. Traveling in Peru is not for the faint of heart. It requires strength and endurance. It isn’t easy, but at the same time, it is very easy—if you are willing to go out and do it. Intense life experiences are waiting to be had, as long as you’re willing to take deep breaths, muster your stamina, and go have them.
Take Vinicunca for example. Also known as The Mountain of Seven Colors, this recent addition to the world travel bucket list has come into renown only in the past five years or so. To get here you get up at three thirty in the morning in Cusco (par for the course for travel in Peru) and join a van. Maybe you got up at three thirty the previous morning to go somewhere else, and will be boarding an all-night bus in the evening to go yet somewhere else, but you have to do it.
You might be familiar with Vinicunca’s supersaturated photoshopped images via Instagram, but you might not know that reaching the famous vista is only icing on the cake of a stupendous hike amid towering higher mountains with mighty glaciers spilling down them, or that you may be hiking higher than you’ve ever hiked in your life—to over 17,000 feet. Or that you’ll be part of an alpine carnival that culminates in a full-blown fiesta at the notch beneath the viewpoint, where your lightheadedness will be well-assuaged by local women serving fried alpaca meat and steaming coca leaf tea, huge smiles all around. Here you can get your passport stamped, and pose (and maybe get spat on) by a colorfully-clad llama.
Ah yes. Tart, and so sweet.
That’s also how it felt to me two days previously, at Machu Picchu, when I was searching for the view stone I’d stood on 27 years ago. Had I walked past it without seeing it?
“No puedes regresar, amigo,” I heard one of the guards call to another visitor. “You can’t go back, my friend.”
The guard was referring to the fact that the covid-era walking circuit is one-way only through the ruins. But what he’d said felt like it applied to life.
It was a tart, true fact: I couldn’t go back 27 years.
Perhaps my stone was gone, long unearthed and moved to improve the flow of visitors.
Then I saw it! Right there on the hillside, where the trail wound around ahead.
“Dewey!” I yelled. “There it is! There’s my stone!”
“Go to it,” he said, and prepared his camera.
My stone was in a roped-off area, and I decided I’d get as close to it as I could without breaking the rules. But then the only guard who had a view of us turned his back, so I ran out and stood on it while Dewey snapped away.
Sweet! Rule-breaking for sure, but this was important! This was historic!
I guess you can go back, sometimes.
“Now sit over there,” Dewey directed, pointing to a different area that wasn’t roped off. “This will be your comparison photo for 27 years from now, in case your stone is still off-limits then.”
“Looking forward!” I said, smiling and turning to gaze at the ruins. “To the next 27 years! Going forth!”
Peru is a great place for going forth. From Vinicunca’s 17,060-foot summit, you can drop down, down, down, to a mere 550 feet above sea level within the next 20 hours, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. There, along the swollen chocolate-brown Madre de Dios River you can stare partially-submerged caimans in the eyes, gape at birds and flowers you’ve never seen before, and zipline and canopy-walk through the trees in pouring tropical rain.
Then you can go back up: to stunning Lake Titicaca, the highest big lake in the world. Take a two-day lake tour (only a few dollars, but in reality, priceless), and homestay with a welcoming family on Amataní Island. Go in rainy season when it is green and flowers are everywhere, with the vast azure water spread out below.
“What is this place?” you can forgive yourself for asking yourself. “Where am I? Greece? Switzerland?” No; the soaring white mountains across the lake in the distance are the Bolivian Andes.
You are in Peru.
Nothing will prove this more clearly than dancing the night away at Amantaní Island’s community center, hand-in-hand with everyone, dressed in a colorful woven poncho while an eight-piece live band of flutes and guitars jams. Your lungs will assure you that you are dancing at 13,000 feet. When the music finally stops and you go outside, you’ll totally understand why it’s called the milky way.
You can keep on going. Get up one more time at three thirty in the morning, in Arequipa, and board a bus to view a ring of 22,000-plus foot volcanoes in the freezing dawn.
And witness the flight of the condor in Cañon de Cholca.
Tart and sweet—that’s travel in Peru. Like a pale-orange aguaymanto on ice cream with alpaca rice!
Tropical Ice
February 16, 2022
You may have seen the news last week: the world’s glaciers contain significantly less water than previously estimated. In an article published in Nature Geoscience on February 7, it is reported that high-resolution satellites have tracked the movement of 98% of the world’s glaciers in recent years and enabled a much more accurate assessment of their volume. Overall, there is about 20% less glacial ice remaining worldwide than previously thought. In the soaring high tropics of Peru, it is about 27% less.
This information weighed on me as I hiked to Laguna 69 in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca (White Mountains) a few days ago. I’d come here to revel in the beauty, but also to inspect the ice. I was last here about eight years ago, in 2014, and now I was anxious to see what changes had taken place in the interim.
Walking in mountains is my favorite thing to do in the world. Walking amidst snow and ice-covered mountains brings lumps to my throat and tears to my eyes. One of the reasons I get so emotional is that I know I am witnessing something mighty and invincible looking, yet fragile and fleeting—something that will disappear within my lifetime.
Here, in a narrow stretch of Peru’s White Mountains, lies the densest concentration of tropical glaciers in the world. They coat 33 peaks over 5,000 meters (18,000 feet) in height; 16 of the peaks are over 6,000 meters (19,700 feet).
And their ice is doomed. Within a few decades most of the 250 or so White Mountain glaciers will be gone. When I was last here, in 2014, I read that 20-30% of the surface area of the ice had disappeared since 1970. That figure is now closer to 40%, and accelerating. Scientific consensus is that any ice lower than 5,400 meters in elevation is done for. This means that only the tippy-tops of the highest peaks of the White Mountains will remain white.
Ahead of me, Mount Chakrarahu looked to be holding up pretty well, towering above the cirque where Laguna 69 lay hidden. Though largely obscured by clouds, the mountain’s western slope looked almost as glaciated as I remembered it. This was encouraging not least because it is now summer in Peru (albeit rainy season), whereas the last time I was here it was winter (albeit dry season).
I turned and looked behind me, and had to gasp and hold my heart. There, the clouds had cleared enough to reveal most of Huascaranán. This stupendous white giant is Peru’s highest point. At 22,205 feet, it’s the fourth highest summit in the Western Hemisphere.
What will this mighty mountain look like in ten, twenty years? Certainly it won’t look like it does now: a soaring sentinel cloaked in eternal snows. Instead it will be a hulking dark rock, capped by a white hat.
Now that we know there’s less ice in Peru’s glaciers, we know it will be gone sooner. “But wait,” you might say. “Loss of heart-thumping glacial scenery aside, might this be good news for coastlines? Less ice melting means less water raising the sea level, correct?”
Correct. But that’s not going to save the coastlines. The previous overestimate of glacial meltwater accounted for only a small percentage of projected sea level rise.
Here in Peru, the fact that the glacier melt will run out sooner than later makes a dire situation more dire. Agriculture here depends on seasonal meltwater, as do millions of people for their drinking and electricity. Peru is way behind the eight ball in implementation of alternatives, and now there’s even less time than previously thought.
What are the alternatives? Probably it’s not a good idea to construct expensive and disruptive reservoirs in steep mountain terrain prone to earthquakes. Small man-made glaciers known as “ice stupas”, like the ones being tried in Chile and India, could help a little. Best might be to build solar-powered desalination plants; the first such municipal project came online in Peru last year, and more are in the works.
The fact that there’s nearly a third less ice to melt here than previously thought doesn’t alleviate the looming dangers. Rivers will sharply swell in volume as peak melt is reached, flooding communities before dropping off in flow considerably. Glaciers steepen as they melt, so there’s no avoiding the menaces of avalanches and outburst floods. An outburst flood happens when a large chunk of ice drops into a lake contained by an unstable natural dam. Outburst floods are nothing new; many modern towns and cities here are built on the alluvial deposits of ancient ones.
I hiked past emerald-hued Lake Consuelo, and descended a little to travel through the high basin beyond it. Above, the glacier tumbling down a shoulder of Chakrarahu looked similar to how I remembered it from before. The ice looked to be holding up pretty well.
I climbed the final rise, wrapping around dramatic cliffs. Then my breath caught in my throat. Ahead, in a V-shaped cut in the mountain, appeared turquoise, glacial-silted Laguna 69.
I walked to it, mesmerized. I reached its edge, sat, and gazed across to where a long thin waterfall plunged into cerulean water beneath Chakrarahu’s massif. I hugged myself, overcome with emotion.
Being choked up was due to mixture of things. Number one was that it was so intensely, impossible-to-describe beautiful here.
Number two was that I was saying goodbye. Sure, much glorious ice remained and appeared invincible and reassuring. But this was deceptive; an illusion. Even if I make it back here within another eight years, there will be much less ice left.
The experience was sort of like the feeling you get when you watch a beautiful sunset. Glorious, not least because of the fleeting nature of the proceedings. Beautiful, precious, and temporary.
Except in this case, when it’s gone it will be gone. This “sunset” will never happen again.
I rocked back and forth, swallowed, and wiped my eyes. There was a third feeling I was experiencing: one of deep gratitude, for being alive, and for being here to witness this supreme beauty one more—likely final—time.
And I thought, “What can I do? What can be done?”
The answer is: nothing. There is nothing we can do, now, to make the melting stop. The deed is done.
But we can continue to do our best to persevere, preserve, and take care of our vulnerable planet. Part of this means loving it and being present in it, while we still can. The planet needs us. It needs mentally and emotionally healthy humans to be its stewards.
I don’t like to tell people they should travel if they don’t want to, and I am mindful of the significant carbon footprint travel can have. However, if there is a way to make it lower-impact, I believe it’s worth pursuing. Going for a significant period of time, and roaming using public transportation, for example, might result in a smaller footprint than staying home
As the B-52s sing, “Roam, if you want to.” Go. Go out and love and see the world while you can.
For those who say it’s too expensive, I suggest reconsidering that old story. How much is it worth to you, to see the Cordillera Blanca before the “blanca” is gone? Is it worth a $470 round trip ticket to Lima, a $14 bus ride to Huaráz, and a $22 van excursion to/from the Laguna 69 trailhead? That’s less than $600 altogether. What do you spend $600 on in the USA without really thinking about it? How many gas tank fill-ups is that?
If it is worth it to you, to see the White Mountains while they’re still white, then go. Go this year. Or next year. But don’t wait ten years, because it isn’t going to wait for you.
At Laguna 69, I dried my eyes and gazed across to the waterfall.
A quote came to mind. This was from the late great acting instructor Stella Adler. She was talking about her stage craft, but to me it applies to everything:
There is one rule to be learned:
Life is not you.
Life is outside you.
If it is outside, you must go toward it…
The essential thing to know is that life is in front of you.
Go toward it.
Orizaba
January 19, 2022
The tallest volcano in North America is also Mexico’s highest point, and the third highest mountain on the continent overall after Denali and Logan. Dormant but not extinct, Pico Orizaba last erupted in 1846. Its most violent eruption seems to have occurred in 6710 BC.
Located 300 miles south of the Tropic of Cancer on the border between the states of Puebla and Veracruz, Orizaba is one of only three volcanoes in Mexico that still has glaciers. Its soaring ice, lit in the morning sun, is visible to ships approaching in the Gulf of Mexico when the coast is still bathed in shadow.
A lovely closer view is to be had from the hilltop adjacent to the small city of Orizaba, one of Mexico’s oldest towns, which for eons has been an important settlement along the route between the central highlands and the coast.
After taking in the morning view from here and hiking down, the walk along the eponymous river running through town is a delight. This is also a great place to go for a run.
Stonework paths line each side of the waterfall-imbued stream and cut beneath dramatic archways of venerable street bridges above. While walking or running here you’ll gaze into the eyes of, and breath the breaths of, the animals who live in the intermittent streamside enclosures: jaguars, tigers, toucans, hippos, lions, spider monkeys, coyotes, ostriches, and emus.
If it’s after 1:00 or so, it’s a good idea to climb to the overpassing bridge of Poniente #2, a street that runs through the center of old town. By now LuzyLu has switched over from breakfast and put out her signboard listing the 40-peso set-menu options for the day in the five-table dining room adjacent to her kitchen. Everything she makes is delicious, but if she’s got green mole stew don’t pass it up! This warm dish is especially comforting a cool day when it’s cloudy and drizzling out the door.
The trip to LuzyLu’s little restroom is unforgettable. It’s via a narrow metal walkway that winds around the exterior of the building, about thirty feet above the rushing creek. I accidentally dropped my pen once while making this jaunt, and it almost fell through the grating to land in the exotic duck cage below.
Why am I mentioning all this? Because Orizaba, to me, is a reminder as I head into a new year to trust my gut and go with what feels right. And if things don’t feel right, change them so they do.
When you pay attention to your instincts, what is for you will not pass you.
Something wasn’t right with the Yucatan peninsula. It just wasn’t the place for me and my partner to wrap up our nearly four month voyage through Mexico. So we got on an overnight bus on New Year’s Eve and headed back to the Mexico we love, the Mexico that is home, the Mexico of the central highlands. And lo and behold we stumbled upon Orizaba.
Then we headed onward to Taxco…and Valle de Bravo…and Mexico City again. All incredible.
Thank you, Mexico! Everyone, every place, everything. You are amazing.
