Yesterday was my idea of a perfect day. Yes, things seemed to go wrong after the sun went down, but it still seems so clear to me that days like this don’t come along often enough.
The first great thing was that I didn’t teach English yesterday. Instead, Angel invited me to pick potatoes with his family. Picking potatoes is a festive occasion, as I suppose most harvests are in most places. That’s not to say it isn’t brutally hard work. We may all be farmers, as my permaculture friends like to say, but few of us really have the stamina to live the life.
We didn’t get the earliest start, which was sort of too bad, because yesterday was hotter than most. Weather here generally follows a basic pattern of hot morning sun, followed by a cooler midday overcast, and fairly chilly nights. Yesterday was bright sunshine al day. The temperature never gets very high, but this is Ecuatorial America, and the intensity of the sunlight can microwave you pretty quickly. But it took a while to pack up the donkeys and retrieve the cattle (a young cow and a younger bull of the beef sort—most of the cattle here are dairy), and then a while more to walk down the mountainside to the potato field. Oh, yes, I did say donkeys, which are the pack animals here. Sure, there is plenty of truck transport, even in Tolte, but once you go off the road, a donkey can be pretty handy. They can carry about 200 pounds for about as long as they need to over any sort of terrain, which beats the heck out of carrying that weight yourself.
Angel and his wife Gladys and I reached the potato field to find Damasio already there. Damasio is one of the most cheerful presences in Tolte, which is saying a lot—most people here have a pretty sunny outlook. Damasio was already at work in the basic potato harvesting process: undercut the potato plants with a pick as if you were digging a shallow irrigation ditch, use the pick to dig out the potato plants, then scratch through the soil with a pick or azedon to find any potatoes you’ve buried. As you might imagine, this can take kind of a toll on the back that isn’t trained for it. Damsio is a pretty roly-poly sort of fellow, but a look at his forearms will tell you that he’s also very, very strong.
Naturally, our arrival was a chance to take a short break, which was celebrated first with a cup of chicha—that’s one cup, filled successively for each of us—followed by a shot of some kind of moonshine mixed with Fanta. That’s quite a way to start the day. Chicha is a fermented beverage, and topping it off with “trago” can really get one’s motor running. But we got right to work, some doing the main picking while others gathered potatoes and scratched through the loose soil looking for more. And every hour or so there was another round of chicha and trago. I can’t say it was exactly refreshing, but it did seem to make the work go a bit easier.
More people started to arrive. Augustin, star of a previous blog entry, is Angel’s uncle. I had understood that he was going to bring a pair of oxen to plow out at least some of the potatoes. This didn’t happen, but he did do some of the heavy picking for a while. Then Angel’s father, Joaquin (Augustin’s brother) arrived and took over the heavy pick work. Meanwhile, I tried not to experience too much shame picking up potatoes and scraping through the loose soil. Augustin and Joaquin are my age, but they generate a lot more force with a pick for far longer than I ever could.
Even so, by noon, my lower back was pretty much shot, and I wasn’t ashamed to say so. The remedy? Damasio picked a big lemon, cut it in half, and told me to rub it up and down my back. I have to admit that it did actually make me feel a little better, and smell a lot better, so it’s not a solution to take lightly.
By the time lunch came around, I was more desperate for a break than for food. But, as promised, the food was abundant and good. There were potatoes that we had just harvested with or without ahi, the local hot sauce. Of course there was cuy, which by now you know is guinea pig. But there were also small, bony fish that I found a lot more appealing than cuy. As with all real Ecuadorian emals, there was mote, big boiled grains of corn. The real taste sensation was a soul made out of roasted, ground up seeds of a squash called sambo.
So there we sat, in the shade of an avocado tree, with a present breeze blowing, sharing this food. And I do mean sharing. There were no plates, and the only utensil was a single spoon in the soup pot. And the one cup for chicha. Eating a meal here is a truly social experience. Everyone puts his or her hand in the potato pot, the mote bowl, the lettuce bin, the fish pot, and shares the soup spoon. So there we were, sharing the food, in the shade, with the breeze blowing, and the huge, lightly vegetated face of a mountain in front of us, and a blue sky over its edge, and I thought, holy smoke, this is one of the best days of my life. I’m so glad I realized it.
Lunch lasted about an hour, and by then it was about 2 o’clock. Back we went to picking and scraping, maybe a bit more slowly than before. A few more people showed up from parts unknown to pitch in, and that was a good thing, because they were all, men and women both, a lot sturdier than I am. And one of them brought more trago, this time flavored with some sort of grapefruit flavored stuff, and Damasio made sure we finished that, too. And just about the time that I thought I couldn’t take any more picking (because by now Joaquin made sure that I had a chance to do some of the real work), the day was over. Potatoes were being distributed among the sacks to make donkey loads. Ivan, one of the boys in fifth grade, led the donkey up and down to the road so we could catch a truck back to the center of Tolte.
While we waited for Ivan to finish his work, Damasio, Segundo and I talked about English and Kichwa. Segundo taught me a new phrase in Kichwa, “hukunyukan,” which mean’s “Let’s go.” Damasio and Segundo were very pleased to be able to speak this much English. And soon they were saying, “Let’s go” for real, and up to the road we went.
Somehow, Damasio found some trago to buy that we hadn’t consumed yet, and here’s where things became more difficult for me. This stuff was brutally string, and uncut with anything else. By the time I got off the truck, I really was feeling that I had gone too far—but I still had a PTA meeting to attend, because AVANTI had sent clothes down from Quito for the children. This meeting, as most meetings here, was brutally long and inefficient, although we did manage to give out the clothes, which was a good thing. Still, there was a point about midway through the meeting when the whole room seemed to be revolving in a most unattractive way. I remember Paul Battaglia telling me,” Stay off the moving sidewalks,” but I couldn’t stay out of the writhing room. I may have dozed off for a while, but I was coherent enough to give out the clothing when the time came.
The meeting started at 7, and didn’t end until about midnight. By now it was really cold, but I had left my sweater at Joaquin’s house. But I live near the meeting room, and I was looking forward to getting into bed. I was cold, tired, and ready for rest. But this was not to be. Jose and Narcisa have the habit of putting the key inside the house at night, especially if they think I’m already inside. And that’s where it was, and I could wake them. After a while of shivering and pounding on the door, I went back to the plaza, where I figured I’d have to hole up in the library if I couldn’t get into the house. But some of the parents were still in the meeting room, and Martina, the president of the group, took charge. First she tried to wake Jose and Narcisa, but had not luck. Then she borrowed a sweater from a neighbor so that I wouldn’t freeze. Unfortunately, this garment was clearly a woman’s clothing, but fortunately, no one was awake in Tolte to see me put it on. And we did walk all over Tolte, because Martina had an idea that Jose and Narcisa might be at the church. The church turned out to be closed, so we went back to Martina’s house. She also had trouble getting into her house, but eventually Pablo, her husband, heard us and let us in. Martina called Jose on the phone, managed to wake him that way, and by the time I got back to the house, the door was open for me.
So was that a rough ending to a perfect day? Well, sure, but consider the effort that Martina went to to get me back in my house. And how well taken care of I am here in so many ways. It has taken me less than two months to have the day I had yesterday, and I expect that there will be several more before this experience runs out.
Post Script: I woke up Saturday with sore muscles not in my lower back, but in my backside, hips, and hamstrings. It's like they told me at the gym--I'm a string guy with a weak core.
No comments:
Post a Comment