Colombia Journeys 3

The Fincas, part 1

The Colombian word finca, like the Russian word dacha, covers a lot of semantic ground, from small working farms to country houses and vacation homes.  Since everyone knew we wanted to get out of Medellin as much as we could, people generously whisked us off to the whole gamut of fincas.

Nico and a hatful of guavas

pineapple fields above Barbosa

The valley of Gabriel's finca was once planted entirely in sugar cane, and owned by a single plantation family.  Although most of the sugar cane industry long ago moved elsewhere, there are still fields of it, and men bring it down from the slopes on muleback on stone-paved tracks that were used before Colombus.


Gabriel took us on a meandering walk through the mixed landscape of cane, coffee, fruit trees and pasture to the little factory where they make panela, the cakes of evaporated cane juice that Colombians value so much for cooking and drinking.  On this day, the shed was deserted except for a large bullfrog.  A mill race from a small creek turns a waterwheel for shredding the cane, and we followed the process in our imaginations as the juice moved to a tank and then a series of cauldrons and finally to the moulds where it was shaped and hardened.  The place had a gentle smell of fermentation from the mounds of shredded cane being dried for use as fuel to heat the process.

at the panela shed

Swimming amid the sugar cane

The original plantation has been parceled out and most of the various houses were owned by various brothers and sisters of the plantation family, now in their 60's.  An elder brother occupies the great house, a white-washed edifice with red-wooden trim, which sits upon a grassy hillside guarded by a noble white horse.  The owner took us inside to show us around the century old house.  Built of tapia pisada (rammed earth), the walls are 18 inches thick with high-beamed ceilings.  I felt the immense dining room table, built for the ages.  Amidst the plain, sturdy pieces were a few more delicate, brought by some French abeula ages past.  A gray cat slept upon a chair.  The kitchen had a great stone oven, though the old man cooks upon a camp stove.  And built into the counter was a concave slab with a stone roller for grinding the corn for arepas.


Dora, a local woman who helps out, cooked us lunch and afterwards we went with her and her daughters to swim in the creek.


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Far to the south, Gabriel's sisters keep a finca near the village of Uvital, in that part of country they grew up in as girls.  We spent three days with Esperanza and La Mona at her refugio.  The village itself sits mostly upon the top of a ridge, but the house sits just below on the eastern side.  It's a traditional style with bedrooms strung along around an inner courtyard with veranda all around.

Finca of the Tias Angel

The gardens of bougainvillea, citrus, orchids and palms draw in the birds, and I counted over 30 species in Uvital during my stay -- hummingbirds, tanangers, flycatchers, anis, antbirds, carpinteros, euphonia, and others.



The kitchen is strictly the domain of La Mona, though she let Porter in to make buñuelos, since Alberto had trained him already in the task, and since Porter is a great devourer of these spheres of hot cheese-dough.  And we ate well and drank coffee and hot chocolate and aguapanela.  

Walking Uvital

In the morning clear you could see the snow-covered Nevado del Ruiz 80 miles to the south, belching smoke and ash into the sky.  And closer by, each evening we watched the clouds and the lightning decorate the sky in the restless air of these valleys.

The mountain Cerro Bravo above Uvital

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The finca of Monica's uncle Guillermo sits atop a ridge above the Rio Poblanco.  When Monica last saw him over twenty years ago, he'd only recently decided to do what he'd always wanted to do: become a farmer.  So he'd married a campesina and lives upon his ridgetop with chickens, pigs, dogs and a parrot named Patu.  Monica says he is unaged since she saw him last -- only happier and more content.

Mona makes natilla on the woodstove

We had a delicious, traditional lunch there: centered on fresh beans, chicharron, plantains, rice.  And afterwards, while I hiked down to the river, La Mona decided to make natilla -- a kind of pudding from milk and sugar and cornstarch.  Her brothers ate it up.

Lunch at Guillermo's

Guillermo took us on a walk through his fields of coffee, which unlike the great monoculture coffee-deserts of some neighboring slopes, rely on a mix of trees to shade and fertilize much of the coffee.  Every five years they cut the coffee plants back to a stump to revive them, so each section is upon some moment of that five-year cycle.  Off the edge of the property he showed us the large plantain grove they have to feed the coffee workers who swarm to the larger growers for the autumn harvest.  There were small fields of yucca and beans, as well as a large kitchen garden and fruit trees -- citrus and avocado and zapote.  He showed us the greenhouse for drying the coffee -- though at the moment it was drying beans -- and the equipment for fermenting, hulling, and roasting coffee.

Guillermo's coffee

Colombia Journeys 2

Pictures

The Uvital-Medellin Chiva

Nico and abuela cracking palm nuts

Which is Gordo and which Lindo?

Colombia Journeys 1

Medellin

Monica, on her mother's side has 15 aunts and uncles - on her father's side even more.  Her maternal grandmother alone had 9 brothers and sisters, and the number of great aunts and great uncles and their descendants (her parents' cousins) is uncountable.  Still, even with vigorous colonies in Florida, California, New York and elsewhere, the family epicenter is Medellin.

Lunch at the Tias Gallego

So, too, it was the base of our visit.  One of Esperanza's cousins lent us her apartment for our stay, and the Tias Angel, (pronounced "AHN-hel") where Esperanza has been staying - looked after us.  We traveled outside of the city, but always circled back to Medellin.

Outskirts of Medellin

The park of lights

This city of over 3 million people, is strung along the center of the Aburra Valley, about 5,000 feet above sea level within one of the northernmost strands of the Andes.  It has the usual Latin American urban problems -- poor barrios of displaced people, pollution, traffic and crime, as well as a few extra ones, like its recent history as a staging ground for international drug mafias and gang violence.  But it is also a city anxious to put that notoriety behind it, to make the worst barrios livable, and to give its middle class a world-class city to be proud of.

Outside the Palacio de la Cultura

The sprawling family is built of engineers, doctors, bureaucrats - though memories of days as plantation owners still echo.

It's not that family members are wealthy - except in comparison to the comunas, but we saw the city mostly from that class elevation.  There are places not to go, because they've been ruined, and places to go because they showed the culture of Antioquia or they were clean and modern like the new metro.

The city is filled by their memories and their landmarks, although it has long since grown beyond them.

One day, with cousins, we took the Metrocable up over the barrios to Parque Arvi.  As we passed over the hillside barrios, you could see how they accrete like coral.  The newest dwellings hodge podge and a single story with roofs of tin held down with rocks or bricks.  In the oldest neighborhoods the buildings have acquired 3rd and 4th stories, and the pragmatic city had laced in sidewalks and schools and paved the roads for fleets of creeping buses, motorcycles and pushcarts.

On our way down, as we passed above the barrios and Saturday evening got underway below, there was the thousand sounds of humans - talking, shouting, laughing, selling.  People out and about as though they didn't have television to keep them inside.  Kids flew kites from the rooftops and more than one decorated the cables upon which the gondolas run.

Medellin, Mother and child(ren), by Botero

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It's been over 20 years since Monica last visited her relatives in Colombia.  The boys and I have never been.  But the tias have been saying to her for a while that she has to come visit because they'll all be dead soon.  So tomorrow we head down to New York to stay with friends and then first thing Monday morning we fly to Colombia for three weeks -- our big trip for this year.  I'm not too clear on what we'll be doing exactly, but spending time in Medellin and in the fincas outside of town.  We'll spend time with profusions of aunts and uncles and cousins, and I'll wish I'd studied Spanish like I'd planned, and I'll have myself a cultural experience of some kind or another.

I'm not taking my laptop, but maybe I'll be able to post now and then . . . We'll see.

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Because the grandparents complain that I don't post enough pictures . . . 

Nico moved from the Lower School to Middle School.


And I was teasing Porter about inheriting the '97 Saturn
when we get a new car and he turns 16.


He thinks he can hold out for something better.

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Bug Blogging . . . 

Dew on a Day Lily Leaf

Blue Damselfly

A Red-Spotted Purple, wings closed

Red-Spotted Purple, wings open

Green Dragonfly

Red Clover with Dew

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I was at the local hardware store buying a few things, including a coil of hose to replace the one that Porter ran over with the lawnmower last fall. (Though admittedly the bits have come in handy for a dozen little projects.)  And I was talking with one of the women who work there, and she told me how she'd had to replace her hose because a raccoon hadn't been willing to let them out of their house and so her husband had blasted it with the shotgun, which had done for the raccoon, but had had some collateral damage as well.  How a few days later her husband had called her all annoyed, saying "What did you do to the hose?" and she answered, "Why?  Is it acting like a sprinkler instead of a hose?" and he said, "Yeah, what did you, uh, mmmmm, uh never mind."  And she laughed with satisfaction.

You just don't get service like that at the Home Depot.

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Garden Blogging, first of June . . . 

Man . . . who seem’d so fair, 

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,       

Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 

Who trusted God was love indeed       

And love Creation’s final law—       

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

(Tennyson, In Memoriam)

For me, there are many, many reasons to garden without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, not least of which are the chemicals that I don't care to ingest and the corporations who make and market the stuff.  Gardening organically also calls for certain kinds of attention and knowledge and attitude that I find interesting and appealing.  You have to pay attention to what's going on down there or your plants can quickly end up devoured by your competitors.  It may happen anyhow, and such is life.

But I have to admit that I take a kind of bloodthirsty pleasure in the carnage that takes place in the garden. Spiders spin their traps or stalk their prey; wasps of every size and temperament patrol constantly; harvestmen pick their way slowly through the foliage; dragonflies careen through the airspace.  Catbirds, phoebes, chipping sparrows, wrens, swoop down to snatch the caterpillars.  I go out and I do what I can to help.  Right now I'm picking off the tortoise beetles and killing the cucumber beetles - and I'll do more of the same once their larvae hatch.  I'll put out beer for the voracious slugs.  But I like the fact that any leaf-muncher has to navigate a nightmarish scene of predation and danger - and the same goes on underground out of sight.

When we use pesticides we can devastate the munchers, and there's a clear, momentary satisfaction to that.  But we also devastate all these predators.  And it is a truism of nature that prey always reproduce faster and more nimbly than their predators do.  Gardeners who rely on chemical warfare and who destroy these allies, fall into a trap.  If they let up on the chemicals, the munchers can invade in vast numbers, without any natural enemies.  Waiting for the predators to re-establish themselves can mean a whole crop lost.  So I look with pleasure and satisfaction at my active, murderous allies among the leaves of the garden.  

Now if I can just train the cats to murder the voles but leave the toads and garter snakes in peace I could consider them on board as well.

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I follow some blogs that deal with issues like peak oil, and three of them (The Archdruid report, Club Orlov and Nature Bats Last) have simultaneously been mulling over the role of spirituality if and when this economy and society truly take a nosedive.


It stimulated me to dust off an article that I had published back in 2008 on the question of spirituality as a tool for re-making yourself and your relationship to your society.  It's included here in its entirety:

Witchcrafting Selves: 

Remaking Person and Community in a Neo-Pagan Utopian Scene.

In 2008 Exploring the Utopian Impulse, Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan, eds.

Dorinne Kondo’s 1990 ethnography of a Japanese workplace, Crafting Selves, was influential in cultural anthropology because it articulated an important change of emphasis for this field of study.  This change in emphasis was to treat the individual not just as a product and carrier of culture – but as an active agent who was manipulating cultural materials for various ends – including the creation of a socially embedded self.  This perspective does not replace earlier insights that individuals are intimately constructed within social and cultural environments.  In Kondo’s ethnography, a stress upon individual agency does not mean that these workers then transcend culture, or gain some particular, self-conscious vantage point from which they can view their own efforts at strategic self-construction.  Kondo is describing people who are acting with and within culturally-ordered expectations – they are being Japanese; being women; being young women; and being Japanese employees.  The point is that their renderings of the cultural scripts are by no means static, passive or predictable.

This paper, however, looks at people who are actively trying to transcend their culture.  In so doing they are seeking to re-create not only a new kind of socially-embedded self, but a new kind of culture as well.  In some sense this brings us back to old dilemmas of structure and agency.  As we try to conceptualize and explain the actions of human beings, where do we strike the balance between treating people as self-willed, creative actors, and treating them as things that simply derive from particular environments and histories?  In the case described below this dilemma itself is a place of self-conscious, dynamic tension.

Natural Selection

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Robyn, who occasionally posts at her blog Adapting in Place, posed the question about how we reconcile ourselves to the realization that we can't change the world.  Even the truism that you should make the world a better place can ring hollow, when it seems all we can do is make the worsening a little less.  Her take is that we don't have the power to intentionally and purposely change our world or even our own lives (in certain meaningful ways).  But we have to pretend to have that power - so that somewhere someone (probably not us) will be there to make a change - or at least adapt to a change - when the opportunity presents itself.

I think there's a truth underlying her thinking, and I see it in an analogy with biological evolution.  Most people misunderstand how evolution works, because at some point survival of the fittest won out over natural selection in the public mind.  Working from the principle of survival of the fittest people tend to think that species survive over the long haul because collectively the individuals of the species are finely adapted to their environment.  Actually the opposite is true. Species survive over the long haul because they are dragging along a whole inconvenient multitude of maladapted misfits, outliers, sorry mutants, and mothers' disappointments.

Marine Iguanas, Galapagos Islands

When the environment changes (and change it always does eventually) the process of natural selection dips into that muddy reservoir of diversity to find traits that can be useful to survival.  The finely adapted individuals are suddenly doomed to fail or at least join the other maladepts, and it is some outlier -- some flower that always bloomed too early or too late or some gazelle that was too big and slow -- that is "fit" in the new scheme. From the principle of natural selection it is diversity and often enough the crazy, maladaptive periphery that is the key to survival in changing times.  There is no plan to it, just luck and opportunity.

When it comes to humans and their cultures, people like survival of the fittest because it goes along with a number of human habits, like intentional planning and justifying why we should do this and not do that.  It flatters the successful and denigrates the unsuccessful and legitimates their divisions and hierarchies.  It can be the complacent justification for the status quo of class and status or it can be the careful plotting out of utopia as the best possible solution to our problems.  But it is always about sorting the fit from the unfit and imposing a sensible order to the world.

Galapagos Hawk

Natural selection, on the other hand, implies that it is not us, but external factors that determines what fitness is; it makes fitness seem arbitrary and ad hoc, rather than carved into stone by us and our wills.  It makes the privileged place of the fit into something that is contingent and not to be taken for granted, but something that has to be constantly re-negotiated and tested.  It throws into doubt our insistence on the right and proper way of doing something, and it holds out the idea that other,  less effective or efficient ways, are important.  In short it violates any number of human desires about order and control of our fates.

Neither of the approaches I'm discussing is a truly human attitude.  To the extent that you believe we can order our selves and our world as we desire -- then the striving for fitness and a celebration of the successes of the "best" will appeal to you.  To the extent that you think that other things overwhelm our intentions -- whether that be the indifferent Cosmos, the unpredictable happenstance of complex systems or the inertia of our animal natures -- you might embrace the necessity of trying things out and hoping for the best.

Sidewalk in Quito, Ecuador

I think that in the best of times, our ability to enact our intentions on the world is our amazing and unique talent as humans.  I don't think these are the best of times, however.  Enormous changes are probably in the offing, and our capacity to adapt to them as individuals and communities is at a low ebb.  The incredible diversity of lifeways that existed around the world before the modern, globalizing era, has been whittled down to a minuscule fraction of what it was.  

That's why I think we should all do our best to wander off in some direction that seems plausible. If things go bad, we'll still all be mostly doomed, but someone maybe won't be -- because they got off the narrow path that had seemed so safe and adaptive and inevitable just a moment before.  And if things don't go as bad as they might, and we all muddle through, we'll have done our part to lend resilience and diversity to this species of ours - no matter how unwelcome and unfit it might have been in the moment.

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It's easy to fall behind on the gardening tasks this time of year.

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The raspberries are in blossom,
and calling in the bumblebees.

The peach and apple trees have bloomed,
and formed their tiny fruitlets.





















Yesterday I added another story
to the southernmost hive, Melissapolis,
and today these bees were swarming up to draw out honeycomb upon the beeswax foundation.




In the middle hive it's been a few days since I added a hive body and the queen was already up there laying eggs in the new comb.




I installed the colonies over 3 weeks ago.  The bees that accompanied the queens will gradually die off in the next 2 or 3 weeks, but they've done their work.  The queens' own broods should have begun to hatch by now.

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Abel asks, reasonably enough, about my last post whether people were universally hopeless - or whether some of them had solutions.  The short answer is that a few had opinions on what might help turn things around, but most didn't know what to do about our predicament -- unless you consider "somebody needs to do something," a plan.  Another common proposal was, "We'll have to make do with less," which is a reasonable response, but not a solution in the classic sense.  And almost universally, people didn't feel like any of their leaders were leading on the issue.


But we (and our clients) knew that going in, because otherwise we'd already have a strong current of public support for practical solutions -- like policies to support working families and the middle class.  But we don't.


The point of this project is to help progressive advocates (who have plenty of proposed solutions they'd like to put into practice) make their case -- and, not incidentally, get leaders and elected officials to push that case as well.  So these conversations were first and foremost to map out the cognitive and cultural terrain wherein proposed solutions get heard and evaluated - accepted or rejected - understood or misunderstood.  And another part of this project involves interviews with advocates, with business leaders and with policy makers.  Over the next several months we'll work to bridge the gap between what the experts want to convey, and what the public has been able to hear.


Though personally, I can be pessimistic, I'm glad that I earn my living working for the optimists.  They might be right after all.

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We're working on a big project about jobs - in particular the fact that the quality of jobs in the U.S. has been declining.  I went off into the heartland -- Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana -- to conduct our version of ethnography.  It was a week asking people, "So, whadya think about the job situation?  getting better? worse?" and then settling into a meandersome conversation about the nature of work, the economy, what we want and what we owe one another and, more often than I'd expected, whether or not America's best days were behind it.  We might converse for 5 minutes or 20 or for an hour or more.  Louisville, Lexington, Georgetown, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio; Shelbyville, Anderson, Columbus, Indiana.  I videotaped about 40 interviews at people's kitchen tables, along the sidewalk, in the beauty parlor, sitting in the grass, in McDonald's till they chased us out.  About 40 more weren't taped, but took place on front porches, restaurants, with beers around the bed of a pickup truck, on a park bench while a harmonica man played nearby and the City Council met.  A white women in Indiana selling out her stock in a failed used clothing business; the black men of Cincinnati's West Side, unhireable in this economy with felonies in their pasts and maybe futures; 20-somethings trading their college degrees for $8 an hour folding shirts at the Gap; the old men in the barber shop worrying about the coming generation; a half dozen high school kids eating homemade burgers and mustering hope that there'll be jobs for them; the family waiting in their car outside the food pantry; the clerks, teachers, businessmen, factory workers, retirees, carpenters, students, nurses . . . 

Traveling among Americans always has the potential to depress me.  The landscapes ruined by franchise capitalism, the people who work too much and think too little, the bad food and all the cars; the awful realization that it is for this concatenation of mistakes that we destroy the earth.  But there was a strange grandeur to the tiring, sobering America of this trip.  The long, slow-motion implosion of the American experiment in middle class capitalism seems to have reached a terminal stage, and there are few individuals any longer who doubt that it could soon be them dancing at the edge of some personal ruin.  I couldn't resist asking the middle of America whether the prosperous days were gone forever, and the middle of America told me that yes, it reckoned, indeed they were.

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The downside to bees.

I don't tend to react much to bee stings -- at least when they come one at a time.  But if I get 3 or 4 stings they hurt more and swell more.

Nico says it looks like a tiny hummingbird,
but it's not - it's a stinger

Apparently, it's cumulative.   I've been stung 4 times in a little over a week.  First on my eyelid, then a few days later on my scalp.  One more under my chin, and Sunday one flew up and nailed me on that same eyelid.  

I couldn't scrape the barb out, so against all advice and common sense I tweezered it -- ensuring myself a full dose of venom.

These bees have been less placid and more irascible than last years' - disturbed perhaps by their move and by the dreary weather.  

Can you tell which eye got stung?

Or maybe there are just a minority of asshole bees in the mix.  It will be four or five weeks before I know what kind of personality my bees have.  These workers out today are not necessarily related to the queen.  They are just bees tossed together to form an artificial swarm.  In three weeks, new bees will begin emerging and replacing the old guard.

By six weeks after arrival, the new colonies will be established.  And they better start treating their beekeeper right.

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A Black Cat Naps in a White Sink

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Rhubarb sorbet recipe

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Friends came over last night for dinner.  Monica had made a pork roast with some albondigon, and we roasted potatoes, cauliflower, and the very last of the parsnips.  All simple and delicious.  

But I have a rhubarb patch that I don't know what to do with, so the experiment of the evening was making sorbet.  I copied down this recipe from The Year in Food blog:

3 cups rhubarb, chopped 1 cup water 1/2 cup sugar 1-2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced (adjust according to taste) 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 2 tablespoons gin or vodka 1/4 teaspoon sea salt

I tried this one because it was light on the sugar and didn't call for corn syrup, using vodka instead for a similar effect.  You simply simmer the ingredients for 10 minutes or so, until the rhubarb is soft, run it through a blender, chill it, and then put it in your ice cream maker.

For that we'd bought a Play and Freeze, a device built on the idea that it's more fun to play with a ball than turn a crank.  We got the bigger, quart-sized one, so I had to double the recipe above (which makes a pint).  The ball filled with the puree and ice and rock salt weighs nearly ten pounds -- so throwing it around is a bit like playing catch with a bowling ball.  (I think next time we'll set up some water bottles in the yard and use it exactly in that way.)  Fortunately we had a couple of 14-year olds who were good sports.

After half an hour we had our sorbet, very gingery, with the rhubarb somewhat in the background. It wasn't as red as the picture on the blog - more like a rosy, peach color.  If you like your sorbets in that gourmet, palate-cleansing mode, this is really nice.  (If you like your sorbet to taste like ground up popsicles, then there are recipes that will use a lot more sugar.)  But I'm going to cut the ginger in half the next time I make it.

We served it out, and I put the remainder into the freezer.  Monica's already planning the next one: Mango!

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