News From Ron and Kathy Bird__
For more pictures of
Ron and Kathy Bird
and the Vilisar, see these
beautiful
photos
by Albert Pang
Archives
January 2004 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 February 2007 March 2007
Expert German-English translation available; business and finance our specialty.
Sachverständige Deutsch-Englische Ãbersetzung; Geschäft und Finanz unser Spezialgebiet.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
STILL IN CHIHUAHUA; NEWS FROM THE RANCHO: HOTELS IN THE CITY
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Still in Chihuahua
What started out to be only a one-day quick trip from Rancho el Nogal, commencing last Thursday morning before dawn, has now been extended day-by-day to almost exactly a week. Bob, the ranchero, had some business to do with Xavier, the cattle dealer, and he urgently also wanted to have the front end repaired on his 4WD Toyota pickup truck. He achieved most of his first mission. But the repair place could not procure the parts required and took another day to put the steering system back together using the old parts. Finally Bob got tired of hanging around and took a bus from Chihuahua to Cuauhtémoc last night about dark. He has a place to stay there and another vehicle. Cindy left the ranch yesterday about mid-afternoon to meet Bob – in Cuauhtémoc, I guess.
News from the Rancho
While he was away, the new people at the ranch got the huge front-end loader cum grader operating and started to grade the road following the summer rains. That road, as I have often pointed out in this blog, is really, really, really badly washed out. It is part of the reason for example for the pickup truck to be in for repairs to its steering.
Unfortunately, although the 50,000-pound machine on four huge rubber tires (instead of caterpillar tracks) skidded off the road and would likely have rolled over completely except for the fortuitous placing of a tree beside the road, apparently the big Michigan dozer is leaning on the tree whilst also blocking most of the gravel road. Cindy could get by it with a small pickup but not with the big Ford diesel truck useful for towing the cattle trailer. Bob has a few cattle already in Yepachic but he had also wanted to have another bunch brought out from Rancho el Nogal so they could be sold in Chihuahua. These cattle will now be driven out by cowboys on Saturday. Sure hope I am back by then!
The good news in all of this is that no one was hurt when the dozer slid off the road.
Never let anybody tell you that it is boring on a cattle ranch in the boonies. While all this dozer business was going on, the bull got out and had to be rounded up. Cindy thinks he is dangerous and he is going to be put down today. Unfortunately, having no doubt been fortuitously forwarned, he took flight and was nowhere to be found this morning. And I was looking forward to steak!
Hotels in the City
I have had some translation work the last couple of days so have been dashing from one internet café to another or back to the San Juan Hotel to find a computer that works. I had one pretty cheap place (about Pesos 10 per hour = ca. US$ 1 per hour) and the equipment was good (never assume this with internet cafés). But they closed over lunch from 1330 until 1700! Somebody should get an internet café set up here that is open around the clock, has good equipment and wi-fi connection, provides decent coffee, and is clean and comfortable. Westin Hotel had a good “Business Centre” but it’s way out on the periphery.
A word about the San Juan Hotel. I am sure that this was once a quaint little hotel. AT the moment it is basically a flophouse. You can get a room with a shower, two beds and cable TV for Pesos 130, which is pretty cheap. But it is pretty grungy! This is the third hotel I have stayed at in Chihuahua. The Teachers Hostel was the best and reasonably priced. The Hotel Jardin Central, across from the San Juan, is all right and reasonably priced if you tell them you don’t want their renovated rooms. However, the unrenovated rooms are pretty grungy too. Has nobody in Mexico ever heard of masking tape when you paint? It seems they just roll the paint on, dripping and rolling over the tiles or the wooden door frames, slopping paint on the floor. What a mess. And so easy to avoid. I am going to send for my old neighbour in Frankfurt, Frau Guder, who used to “advise” me about my own home improvement efforts. She would shake and shape things up here in a jiffy! Every moderately price hotel I have seen looks like the paint job was an expression of passive aggression!
At least it fits in with the bathrooms. At the Teachers Hostel they had recently retiled the whole bathroom, quite expensively too, it appears. However, the shower door could not open completely because the sink was badly place. At the San Juan they don’t go in for luxuries like glass shower doors; they have a shower curtain that does not fit. The two hotels are alike however in that the shower head is so place so high and inconveniently that, when the water is running, it blasts right into your face or even over your head so you have to stretch a bit to get wet. At the San Juan, when it hits you in the eyes, you are forced to look down to see the open drain and the filthy,
Monday, September 26, 2005
HANGING OUT IN CHIHUAHU; DEALING IN CATTLE
Lunes, 26 de Septiembre de 2005
Spent Sunday killing time with Bob, the ranchero. The steering on his pickup has been so beaten up by the mountain ¨roads¨ that it needs serious repair. Since on Sunday workshops are closed, only this morning did we finally get a place to take a look at it sometime today and maybe even repair it today as well. Bob wants to get back to the ranch by tonight. Maybe we will make it but I am sure it will be well after dark, if at all, since it takes five hours just to get to the ranch road in Yepachic and then another two hours of crawling along in the dark on execrable to reach Rancho el Nogal. We are going to stop at Wal-Mart and a grocery store for some supplies before we leave Chihuahua. If we have time.
This being my second time here, I am getting to know Chihuahua a bit better. The first thing to note on the positive side is that the climate is very pleasant. It might gets up to an unpleasant ninety degrees (Fahrenheit) in June. But once the rainy season starts in July, it stays much cooler (from July onwards). It in no way compares to Guaymas or Corpus Christi or New Orleans or even Baltimore for heat and humidity. The city lies at an altitude of about 1,800 meters, Cuauhtémoc is even higher (same as Rancho el Nogal: 2,000 meters). There isn’t much need for air conditioners here and therefore you are not constantly threatened with serious cranial damage that comes from cracking your head on window a/c units installed just above eye level over the sidewalk or having your clothing dripped on from first-floor units. You tend to hit these while you are looking down to avoid falling into the pedestrian traps in the pavement, i.e. open manholes, deep potholes, broken concrete, and the like.
The weather is so nice that you can basically sit outside. Perfect street café weather. Unfortunately, however, although the hole-in-the-wall shops are often open to the street, there is no café-culture here. In fact there is no coffee culture here either. The streets are noisy and the sidewalks narrow. Public places do exist (e.g. in front of the big cathedral or in front of public buildings) but they are often intolerable to sit in because of the noise, the pigeons or lack of adequate seating. If you do manage to find a “café”, it is a pastry shop as in Europe. But there is no loitering around and the coffee is basically Nescafe with lots of sweet milk stirred in and kept moderately warm for hours. Mexicans just don’t seem to spend time drinking coffee and chatting. If anything, they are always on the hustle. They are always busy.
Bob goes off to do some errands on Sunday morning and I drift down from the Hotel Jardin Central to the cathedral square and then on down to the mercado. It is just coming to life; I guess Mexican Lords Day Observance Laws are not strong because everything retail is basically open on the Sabbath. I did get my coffee and a delicious fresh pastry. But it is not a place to hang out and read or chat and I head out to the cathedral square to sit on a bench with my book. On Sunday the traffic going by is not too bad. But the Rotary Club is raising money for something or other and is polluting whatever quiet has been there with their loudspeakers.
Eventually I meet Bob back at the hotel and we drive out to the big shopping mall on the periphery where the new Chihuahua is springing up. There are a lot of big housing developments, both social housing and private mansions. The Big-Box-phenomenon is hard at work in Chihuahua: everywhere you look are huge supermarkets, Wal-Marts, KFC, McDonald, even C&A from Holland. Again, everything is open and selling. Downtown is falling into disrepute and disrepair and, according to Bob, you can now rent a substantial house downtown now for about US$150 a month. The mall is busy but the big draw is the Cineplex. The mall also has a food court and a large and well frequented outside terrace overlooking the hills in the far distance and, of course, the unshaded asphalt parking lot near up. We decide to take in a second movie this evening and check out the times to watch La Luchador (Cinderella Man, a boxing movie).
In the meantime, I pay a visit with Bob to my first private Mexican house. We visit Xavier on a new-ish subdivision out near the edge of town. Bob bought Rancho el Nogal from Xavier’s father, a tough old rancher of the old school with a large family. Xavier has not lived on the ranch for many years and is a cattle dealer in his own employ. He bought a lot of cattle from Bob and we are visiting to sort out the brands on the cattle.
The animals are branded as calves using an iron specially wrought by a smithy. Each brand has to be registered with the Department of Agriculture (federal in the USA and state in Chihuahua) and, each time a new owner comes along, a new brand is put on the cow, bull, mare, or stallion (other animals don{t get brands). If a cattle dealer is simply going to on-sell as short time later, he probably will not brand the livestock. But sometimes he puts the livestock out to pasture on his own or rented land until they are fatter or market conditions more attractive. The dealer will then apply his own registered brands as well.
If an animal has been sold several times, it might have several brands on it. Since they are branded young to establish ownership, the brands sometimes become distorted as the beast grows. They can be a little hard to figure out sometimes.
Clearly, ownership was always going to be dicey thing on the vast cattle ranges of North America where the cattle are not continually under close control as are milk cows, for example. Searing a mark into the flesh of young livestock seems rather brutal. But no animal ever seems to expire from it.
But trying to keep all the paperwork tidy is a big job, especially in Mexico. In the States, once your brand is registered you have established ownership over all cattle, horses or mules once the brand has been physically placed and has healed. After that there is nothing more to worry about and you can buy or sell without much let or hindrance.
In Mexico, however, it is much more bureaucratic and to sell an animal you have to go to the local municipal presidente and get a release. Then, when transporting across country to sell, each municipal district has to check the brands and sign off on a piece of paper; there are five checkpoints between Yepachic and Chihuahua alone. In addition, if the livestock has come from a region that has bovine tuberculosis, the animal has to be earmarked and then there are restrictions on transporting within Mexico and exporting to the U.S.A. The meeting with Xavier was to compare the paperwork that Bob had with the actual brands that are on the livestock sold to Xavier.
We sit at his kitchen table. Xavier is a short now somewhat stocky man, black hair though he perhaps around sixty. He is very soft-spoken and speaks some English, which is good for both Bob and me. His wife, one of his four sons his son´s wife and infant daughter are watching TV in the background; a family Sunday and family activities move around us quietly. The house is modern, with two stories but not particularly large. On the wall are family photos. The household is by no means opulent but cozy in a kind of urbanized farmhouse way. The kitchen furniture and cupboards have been brought from elsewhere and fitted in. In the kitchen there is a big fridge-freezer combination and an even larger freezer chest (a cattle dealer ought to be able to procure lots of beef for his table), a 6-burner gas stove, and a large microwave oven. Otherwise nothing to distinguish it from suburban American houses. Smaller perhaps and less luxurious but otherwise the same.
Xavier and Bob work on the paperwork. It is in fact rather confused since the cattle that Bob has sold actually came with the ranch when he bought it. New calves added in the past six years since Bob and Cindy bought Rancho el Nogal is probably in better order. In fact, these papers probably originated with Xavier’s father.
Later, Xavier asks if we want to see some photographs. We move to the dining room table and he hauls out a big stack of photos. They are mixed together and include shots of a huge dam in Chiapas (in the far south of Mexico; some taken from a helicopter) as well as some cattle that he bought down there, harbour facilities in Vera Cruz, the cathedral in Tabasco, pictures of mountains and springs in Chihuahua, cattle castrations (yepp!), huge snakes, etc. All pretty eclectic but typical for the life of a rancher and cattle dealer, I guess.
Many of his sales go to the U.S.A. Mexican law forbids the export of breeding stock. Ranchers in the U.S.A. would dearly love to get hold of registered Corrientes cattle from Mexico. But all bulls are castrated and all cows made infertile before export. Even rodeo calves from Mexico have to be doctored. Anyway, the trade in beef is mainly from north to south: the U.S.A. has huge herds of cattle, much bigger than Canada and Mexico. Recently there has been a BSE scare in the U.S.A. and Canada and it is not permissible to import beef from those countries. This means the price of home-grown Mexican beef has shot up enormously, which of course is why Bob and Cindy are selling beef cattle at the moment.
And there are some other factors influencing the beef market as well: for example, there has been a continuing drought lasting for up to seven years now and cattlemen (here and in the U.S.A. southwest) have been liquidating herds for lack of forage and water. Rancho el Nogal is fortunate to be well supplied with year-round streams and rivers.
Our visit to Xavier is a pleasant interlude. We are invited to stay for a meal but decline since we have had such a big brunch in the morning. We drift off to see our movie at the cineplex after first going to a small hostel for teachers in the city centre that rents hotel rooms to non-teachers as well. It is a lot cheaper and actually nicer than the hotel where we stayed last night. They have a room for us.
This morning I am awakened by the sound of a girl singing outside in the street. She is selling newspapers to passing cars. She has a lovely country smile and sings beautifully, adding grace notes to the melodic line and effortlessly rising up and down the scale. The voice is strong and reaches us over the noise of the traffic.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Sunday, September 25, 2005
A CAR TRIP TO CHIHUAHUA; A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE MENNONITES
I’m writing today from the Westin Hotel on the outskirts of Chihuahua, the 1-million-inhabitant capital of Chihuahua State. Bob, the ranchero, had to drive in from the ranch yesterday for an important meeting and I decided to make it an outing and drive with him.
The whole trip takes about seven or eight hours of which about one and one-half hours is just getting out to #16 Highway at Yepachic. The continued rains have not made either the ranch road or the remainder out to the paved highway any better. The ranch road is heavy gullies and pitted and desperately needs grading. The big rubber-wheeled Michigan dozer cum front-end loader sitting near the corral out at Rancho el Nogal might be just the thing. But at the moment the starter is kaputt. Even when it is repaired, Bob will have to get some experience operating it. It would be easy to fall off the side of a hill into an arroyo and meet and untimely end.
The rough road is extracting a heavy toll on the ranch’s various road vehicles. We take the Toyota 4WD pickup to town with the object of getting the steering repaired and stop for this purpose at a wheel-alignment and repair place in Cuauhtémoc. Bobbie, the Mexican-American guy there confirmed that the steering joint urgently needs replacing. Of course, he does not have the Toyota parts required and we will not be able now to get one in Chihuahua till Monday. So our one-day trip will now be three days.
The paved road, though, is spectacular. It is an extension of the highway that Kathleen and I took through the Tutuaca Mountains on the omnibus from Ciudad Obregon to Yepachic some three weeks ago now. The early morning sunshine is in our eyes at first but Bob has driven the route so often now that the Toyota can practically do it by itself. It is of course a little nerve-wracking to think that the right front tire might come off on some curve and drop us over the very steep side into the ravine hundreds of metres below. After several hours on the two-lane highway overtaking and meeting heavy logging trucks, 18-wheelers and a circus caravan (there is a fiesta in Yepachic or Tomachi next week) and discovering horses, mules, burros (including one dad and bloated burro at the immediate side of the road) or cattle grazing beside (or on) the road as we swing around a curve and after steady and steep climbing most of the time, we eventually come out of the mountains to look out, across and down on a huge plain with tabletop mountains in the far distance and various rivers and towns scattered around. At La Junta we debate stopping for a bite to eat at a roadside stand but decide to hurry on to Cuauhtémoc to catch the auto repair place before they close for the weekend.
It is like driving across the Dakotas. Wide grassland interspersed increasingly now with apple orchards. This is a major fruit growing region. Everything is irrigated by large sprinklers from underground aquifers. We notice however that many orchards have been left to wither and die and wonder if this has to do with the seven or eight-year drought that has been impacting northern Mexico and the south-western USA. The harvest is in full swing and we follow tractor-trailer rigs loaded with large boxes of yellow apples. There is a line-up of lorries outside an apple processing plant; since the trucks simply back up and tip their loads into the plant I assume that it must be a juicing operation.
As we approach Cuauhtémoc the orchards appear more systematic, more groomed, and are frequently completely shaded with awnings. Either these have forced the trees into a pyramid shape or the trees have been pruned to fit under the vertically zigzagging awnings. Whichever it is, the trees are pointed. This may help the sun to reach all the branches evenly and therefore for the fruit to come to ripeness at the same time (¨Ripeness is all¨). Instead of awnings on poles, sometimes trees are individually wrapped with a net so maybe the awnings and nets are to keep birds off the fruit or protect the fruit form hailstones and heavy rain. Coming as I do from the Niagara Peninsula, one of only tow or three large fruit-growing areas in Canada, I am curious. I notice there is no soft fruit here like peaches or apricots and I have yet to see any vineyards.
Besides the orchards there are large open grasslands. Bob points out the parts that have been overgrazed and those that still look pretty good. He might make a cattleman out of me yet! Mexican farmers and ranchers and Mexican agricultural agencies and departments are not very good at following through. They might have wonderful plans but they never seem to get into practice. Too much corruption along the way or somebody has too much clout. In the mountains the peoples, a high proportion of which are still Tarahumara or Pima or Apache Indians get a lot of goodies thrown at them so that there is no uprising as there was in the far south. The goodies include even house paint.
An interesting feature of the region are the two large Mennonite colonies. One is German and one is American. The latter are quite open to new communicants and are willing to speak Spanish (and have the prettier girls). The Germans still stick to German and are rather more exclusive (and the women are a little too plump). But both of them have brought a huge element of human capital to the region. It is hard to imagine that the natives or the Mexicans could have found the organisational skills or the technical know-how to install, for example, the huge irrigation systems that the Germans have put in. The latter have also introduced new foods including fruits, specialty cheeses, etc.
Being who they are, there are a lot of very good craftsmen and tradesmen amongst the Germans around Cuauhtémoc, their main town, which is now growing rapidly into an important regional centre or market town. Every Mennonite-farmer’s son has another ¨gelernte Handwerk¨ like sheet-metalworking, welding, equipment repair, plumbing, irrigation, etc. They have the reputation for quality work at reasonable rates. Certainly their industry and skills have attracted a lot of Mexicans and Indians to work, set up their own businesses, and settle down here. Mennonites and many others have all prospered. One Mennonite community, Bob thinks, is an offshoot of communities in Canada. They came down, researched sites and got an agreement with the Mexican government in the 1920s to waive military service for Mennonites.
We finally reach the outskirts of Chihuahua in mid-afternoon. We head for the food court of a huge shopping mall and I decide to stay at the internet café cum bookstore while bob looks for the truck part and visits a friend. I find a soft chair in the reading corner and continue reading my current book (Stiffed; The Betrayal of the American Male). When Bob returns we decide to really do it up brown by taking in a movie at the Cineplex inside the mall.
Finally, we head downtown to the San Juan Hotel only to find that the streets around there are full with Saturday-night partygoers, all the bars, restaurants and parking garages are full and the hotel is booked out. We cross the street to the Jardin Hotel (Garden Hotel) and find a room. It is the same hotel where Kathleen, Antonia, William and I stayed when we arrived here on the CHEPE (Chihuahua-Pacific Ferrocarril) from the Sea of Cortes last July on our way to Dallas for my Mum’s ninetieth birthday. The concierge even showed us to the same room until Bob said we wanted a cheaper one. We wound up in a rather shabby though clean room with three beds, a standing lamp with no lightbulb, overhead strip lighting, a separate shower and toilet, and towels so threadbare you could read the Sunday funnies through the holes. The hotel is marvellously quiet, though, so we were not disturbed by revellers.
This morning the city is empty. While Bob goes off to find a ranching-business contact at his house, I take a walk to the cathedral a few blocks away and stay for part of the service. The church is packed. Afterwards I sit for a while on a park bench and listen to a tour guide describing the history and architecture to a tour of quite elderly Americans. HI can hear him but I am sure, even at full hearing-aid-volume, most of the crowd were not getting much out of it. After being hit up five times to have my grungy hiking boots polished up at one of four shoeshine stands, I walk down the side streets to the Mercado district which is just coming to life. Maybe I can find a hot cup of coffee. I see handcart after handcart-loaded with onions, zuchinni, oranges, papayas, mangos, bananas (sometimes spelled ¨bananas¨ on the boxes) and all kinds of other produce being trundled into the fruit and vegetable market. One noisy trundleman directs me to Café Imperial, a very grand name for a hole-in-the-wall pastry bakery just across the street. The little pies and tarts are just coming out of the oven. I take one of the five stools at the counter and am served two hot popovers with pineapple filling without even being asked. Why else after all would I have come in just then? Delicious! Delicious!
Meeting Bob back at the hotel, we drive out to a big hotel-style brunch-restaurant at the mall. Bob is a breakfast kind of person; he can ignore meals the rest of the day, he says, if he can get a big breakfast. After thoroughly stuffing ourselves, we drive to the nearby Westin Hotel where I am currently sitting and using the internet access in the so-called Business Centre for free. (Bob sure knows his way around.) Amongst other topics on the way out from the ranch, we were talking about raising freshwater shrimp or prawns. Since Bob has a couple of warm springs on his spread, maybe it would be possible for him to raise them at least for his own use there. I research this a bit on the web, try for my own information to get some information about the cattle industry in North America, and look up the history of the Mennonites.
Mennonite History
by Daniel Kauffman
© Copyright, Mennonite Publishing House
(at www.anabaptists.org)
Three bodies of people.are in evidence as we study the history of the Reformation period. These are:
1. The Roman Catholics.--The Greek Catholics are not known in this struggle, as the conflict was waged outside their territory. At the beginning of the struggle the governments of western Europe were in control of the Catholics. The abuse of power was largely responsible for working the reaction and bringing the struggle known as the Reformation. The things about the Catholic Church which stirred the consciences of right thinking people were the corrupt practices and immorality of priests, the sale of indulgences, the ritualistic formalism of the Church and lack of spiritual life on the part of the masses; while the arbitrary power and grasping after wealth on the part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy were often displeasing to politicians many of whom welcomed the uprising in the days of Luther and Calvin.
2. The Protestants.--This name comes from a manifesto to Emperor Charles V of Germany, drawn up in 1529 by a number of princes who had espoused the struggle of Luther, in the form of a protest against what they considered unjust measures by the Emperor and by the Pope. From this time forward the word "Protest-ants" applied to those opposed to the Pope and his party. These princes supported their claims by force of arms. The conflict between Catholics and Protestants was so severe that it finally settled into a Thirty Years' War that came to a close by the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This treaty, among other things, stipulated a guarantee of religious toleration for Catholics and Protestants, but not for Anabaptists of Mennonites. The close of the War of the Reformation found the following Protestant bodies: Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians.
3. The Anabaptists.--Possibly we should have said "Mennonites;" for the original Anabaptists were the Swiss brethren who organized at Zurich, Switzerland, in 1525, which was the beginning of the organization of the Church which afterwards bore the name "Mennonite." The word Anabaptist comes from the doctrine held by Mennonites and others that baptism to be valid must be upon confession faith and that people who have not been thus baptized, though they may belong to some church, must be baptized according to Scripture before they can be scripturally received into fellowship. All people holding this belief were known as Anabaptists. Of this class were a number of bodies, some of which had no connection with Mennonites whatever. The class of Anabaptists to which the Swiss brethren, Menno Simons, Dirck Philips, and their brethren belonged stood for a complete separation of Church and State, baptism only upon confession of faith, nonresistance, nonconformity to the world, a holy life, and other tenets of Christian faith and life which were afterwards embodied in what is now known as the "Mennonite Confession of Faith." The sufferings of Anabaptists during Reformation times were most severe, for being nonresistant they refused to fight for any purpose, against either Catholics or Protestants, and were therefore marks for malice and persecution from both these warring parties. Thousands were put to death, and the rest driven about from place to place, finding refuge wherever they could.
At the close of the Reformation the dominant religions in the nations of central and western Europe were as follows:
The Roman Catholics retained control of Austria, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, although there were large bodies of Protestants in several of these countries, most notably the Huguenots of France. A |portion of southeastern Europe was under control of the Greek Catholic Church and of the Turks.
Of the Protestant countries the Lutherans had control of a number of states in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, the Reformed were in control of Switzerland and Holland, the Presbyterians in Scotland, and the Episcopalians in England.
Among the churches that have grown out of the Anabaptist movement are the Mennonites, Hutterites, Baptists, Quakers and Dunkards. The Mennonites and Hutterites were contemporary with Luther and other Protestant reformers of his day, the rest appeared on the scene later. These never attempted to control the governments in any country, as they opposed the idea of union between Church and State and were against mixing religion with politics.
To what extent the Mennonites and other Anabaptists are descendants from or successors to the Waldenses is an open question. The similarity in faith and in family names furnishes some ground for the claims of certain historians that there is a connection between the two. But as for the first organized congregation of Swiss brethren or Mennonites (that at Zurich in 1525) it is known that the leaders and at least some of the members had formerly been Catholics. The same is true also of Menno Simons and some of his co-workers in Holland. As to their leading tenets of faith, they were similar to the faith of the Novatians, Waldenses, and other evangelical bodies which had existed before them. Among the more prominent issues which brought upon them the wrath and persecution of the state churches, both Catholics and Protestants, were their rejection of infant baptism, their insistence upon a freedom of conscience, their refusal to have any part in carnal warfare, their discipline requiring faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and repentance for sin as requisites for baptism and a holy life as a requisite for continued fellowship, their zeal in not only contending for the tenets of faith which they espoused but also in turning the light of truth upon the shortcomings of their opponents, and their contending for a complete separation of Church and State.
Distinction between Mennonitism and Protestantism
When we say "Mennonitism" we mean the same as Anabaptism, for the Mennonites (though not known by that name until later) were the pioneer Anabaptists. The distinction between this movement and that of Protestantism consists in this: While the Protestant movement was a political as well as a spiritual reformation, the Anabaptist movement was wholly a spiritual one. Grebel, Blaurock, Manz, Menno, Philips, and their brethren believed in a complete separation of Church and State, held to the doctrine that religion is an individual heart experience and that therefore each individual is personally responsible to God alone for his spiritual standing and that the Bible alone should be taken as his rule of life, to be accepted without question and faithfully obeyed regardless of what may be the attitude or requirement of the State. Logically this made them nonresistant in life, and scripturally orthodox in fundamentalism. On the other hand, the Protestant movement (besides the various doctrinal standards of different Protestant leaders) was a united effort on the part of ecclesiastical and political leaders to correct the abuse of Romanism, and to support this contention, if need be, by force of arms. This committed them to a policy of State-Churchism, and logically made Protestants as well as Catholics the persecutors of nonresistant people who could not subscribe to their program. The issue involved in this distinction between the two movements was twofold: (1) State-Churchism Vs. individual conscience and choice; (2) the sword, and what is behind it. While times have changed, circumstances now are different from what they were then, and issues have shifted somewhat, yet the fundamental difference between these two schools of thought and classes of people remains substantially the same.
Trials and Persecutions
It cost something to be a Mennonite in those days. Many were burned at the stake, and the times were rare when they were entirely free from persecution. Menno himself was pursued with murderous fury, but the Lord preserved him in a remarkable way. His writings were spared and he was permitted to die a natural death. Switzerland, Austria, Holland, Germany, and other European countries were the scenes of many outrages against this defenceless people. As the persecutions became too severe in one country, they would flee to some other country where they might enjoy a greater degree of freedom. It was not until many of them had found in America an asylum where they might have the privilege of worshiping God unmolested that the rigors of persecution began to relax to any great extent in Europe. Holland was the first to extend toleration, and later on Russia extended an invitation for the Mennonites to settle in that country. While Holland and several other countries extended toleration to Mennonites--at times--before there were any permanent settlements of Mennonites in America (persecution ceased permanently during the latter part of the 16th century), it was not until after this time that persecutions were discontinued in a general way in Europe.
But in the face of severest persecutions the Church prospered in many places. The Taufgezinnten in Switzerland, the Doopsgezinden in Holland, the Hutterites in Moravia (different names by which these people were known in different countries), and Mennonites in other countries, all were faithful in their labors and exerted a wholesome influence.
Friday, September 23, 2005
AUTUMNAL EQUINOX; SIGNS AND INDICATIONS; HURRICANE RITA; DUTCH COMES BACK EARLY; A SWIM IN THE RIVER; OUTLOOK FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS
Friday, 23 September 2005
Autumnal Equinox; Signs and Indications
This is the autumnal equinox. Kathleen discussed this with Simon over desayunos (breakfast) but it seemed to carry no meaning for him. Kathleen was sure that, as a Pima Indian (he’s actually part Apache as well), an important season milestone would be recognised by the native people with some sort of ceremony. I guess not.
Another indication of sorts for the passing of time is that we are through the yellow pages of the El Paso/Juarez Telephone Book and into the city maps section.
Hurricane Rita
Hurricane Rita is currently causing more high winds, rain and another huge storm surge in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. While the eye of the storm is likely to pass over Port Arthur/Galveston region on Friday/Saturday (leaving Corpus Christi to the left of the eye and therefore in the safe quadrant of the counter-clockwise high winds), the Gulf Coast from Port Arthur/Galveston will get the brunt of the storm north to New Orleans. The hastily repaired dikes (levees) in New Orleans are not holding and the city is being inundated again.
Antonia (15) and William (13) are staying with their aunt in Corpus Christi and should be all right since the house is not on low ground. Andrew (18) is back at college in Hattiesburg, MS. The town took a shellacking during Hurricane Kristina. The town lost power and had some flooding. But it is on the fringe of Hurricane Rita’s path so, one hopes, will be spared. Elizabeth, I understand, remains at her job between New Orleans, LA, and Picayune, MS, and I guess is continuing to stay at her house in Picayune. Antonia told me that, during Hurricane Kristina, Elizabeth thought about evacuating to the prison where she works as a social worker. In the end she and three children stayed on in the house. It sustained no damage although many or all of the nearby trees were knocked down around them. Again, according to the forecasts I have seen, Picayune should be on the fringe, get lots of rain and wind but be safer than the Houston-Galveston area. I have sent emails to Elizabeth to see how she is doing but get no reply. Antonia said last week there is no internet access at present there.
Dutch Comes Home Early
Bob tells Simon and Dutch to ride out yesterday to one of the not-so-distant ranges to check on cattle there. They leave about mid-morning, Simon as usual on a mule and Dutch on the ranch’s biggest horse, a bay called Chip.
Not long afterwards, Dutch comes into the ranchhouse looking hot and very annoyed. His shirt is dirty and his white hat Stetson hat is flattened on one side. He flops down in disgust on the sofa by the window and tells his story.
Leaving the corral by the rear gate, the pathway leads steeply down to an arroyo where there is also a stream. Chip follows the mule to the stream and then refuses to climb up out on the other side. Liberal smacking with the lasso by both Simon and Dutch finally gets Chip moving. But at the next arroyo the scene repeats itself. This time, however, all the whipping and kicking availeth not. Dutch even gets off and tries to drag the stubborn beast using his lasso. Dutch is big but Chip is bigger. Chip refuses to budge. Or at least refuses to budge any farther away from the corral. Finally Simon tells Dutch he should just ride back to the ranchhouse.
Now Dutch feels like a failure. We cheer him up. Bob reacts philosophically and says he will have to break Chip again and says he himself would just use the spurs on the horse till it finally moved. I suppose we should be thankful that the ornery creature did not try to buck Dutch off into the stream or to swipe him off by riding too close to a tree. As it is Dutch has a big red abrasion and is stiff and sore where a tree branch actually caught him across the ribs. Today he is doing some more carpentry work.
Bob decides it is time for a bath. So in the afternoon Eli, Dutch Bob and I walk down to a lovely swimming hole at the river. The water is slightly silted and is moving at about one or two knots as it sweeps around a bend and before it runs over natural dam of rocks. On the outside of the curve the water has scoured the bottom to a depth of about six feet even with the river level down a bit after a couple of days without heavy rain. You can swim or just sit in the middle of the river on a big submerged even. The water is probably 75°F (ca. 24°C). Air temperatures of late have been getting up to around 80° F. This is hot around here and you feel it hot when you are in the direct sunlight. But otherwise it is perfect weather. The skies are sunny all day unless in late afternoon it threatens rain (and sometimes delivers on the threat). The rainy season is nearly over, Bob tells us. The river will get smaller but runs with water all year.
Outlook for the Next few Days
Bob left early this morning taking Eli with him. The boy is eager to see his mother and siblings. They in turn are on the way in to the ranch and bringing with them a cowboy family of four (I think) with them from El Paso. The family has their own van and caravan. But the road is impassable at the moment for anything but 4-wheel-drive vehicles and they will drive in today with Cindy and her children (including Eli) in Cindy’s pickup. By tonight the ranchhouse should be jumping with kids and adults alike.
The new family will be living in the bunkhouse about a half mile up river from here. It is a relatively new adobe building with solar power, running water (I think) and outdoor plumbing. It has its own river-swimming hole right there next to the house. Cooking will have to be done on a camping stove for the present but that is basically what we ourselves use aboard Vilisar. Kathy, Dutch and I are trying to make everything presentable for Cindy after her absence of several weeks. Bob said we should cook up a big pot of beans for everybody to eat tonight. Although we like them well enough, Bob is bigger on beans than the rest of us. There are alternatives, is what I am trying to say.
Yesterday afternoon, for example, Israel and Roberto from the fencing team show up on horseback to meet with Bob about ongoing work. We make two huge frittatas in two big frying pans with potatoes, onions, chorizo sausage and tomato sauce topped off with the nine fresh eggs. Instead of risking disaster by trying to flip these monsters in the pans, we stick them into the oven to cook the eggs on top. And, while Israel and Roberto work to repair their chain saw, Simon comes in and makes corn tortillas. (Am I the only one in Mexico who thinks corn tortillas taste like cardboard?) The cowboys scarf it all down and wash it down with instant coffee. The little bit that is left is eaten by Bob and Eli this morning before departing for the outside world. You can tell they are cowboys, I think, because they leave their Stetsons on while they are eating.
I had considered driving out to Chihuahua with Bob for a couple of days. I have been to Chihuahua before (last July when we travelled on the Chihuahua Pacific Railway through the Copper Canyon). It is a lot nicer than, say, Guaymas. There are several museums that I did not have time to visit when we were there before since we had to catch an overnight bus to Dallas (18 hours express). It would also be fun to spend a couple of days travelling with Bob since he is a really interesting guy. I would love to hear more about his upbringing on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota and how he came to be a rancher there before moving to the Sierra Madre Occidentale (Tutuaca Mountains).
Thursday, September 22, 2005
THE ADVENTURES OF ELI; A RE-POSTING OF OUR ARRIVAL AT RANCHO EL NOGAL
Thursday, 22 September 2005
We find a yoghurt cup of detergent yesterday morning and decide to make use of the bright and sunny day to finish up our laundry. The sun has already warmed up the water in the storage tank, the generator is working fine and even the agitator-washing machine performs without a hitch. I let spring water run into each of two rinsing tubs, which Eli, 6, decides is just the thing to play in. So while the generator splits the silence with its noise and the washing water gets dirtier and dirtier from our rural work clothing, Eli practises swimming and putting his face underwater in the still-clean water in the tubs. In all of this we do actually get the washing done, rinsed, squeezed out by hand and hung out in the bright sunshine to drip dry, They are dry by late afternoon before the rain squall hits us.
Eli is not big on showers, hand washing and other such un-rancher-like activities. Although it is not cast in this way, this is going to his bath. When we insist on other days that he have a wash he is well armed with specious arguments about why a bath is not such a great idea. We finally convince him one day to run out to the water tanks near the guest house and corral, strip off, and take a wash under the spout. The idea is so outrageous to him that he decides to try it. It is in fact what we ourselves do for showers although of course we wait until Simon goes off for the day on his mule. He goes into his room, strips off amid repeated iterations of “Nobody look! Nobody look!”, streaks past us through the living room, down the covered walkway to the corral area, gives himself a good rinse, and dashes back again into his room leaving a trail of water and wet gravel across the tile floor. When he comes out again he announces that it is the best shower he has ever had and he now wants to do it every day.
Dutch spends a sometimes frustrating day yesterday trying to hang the new Dutch doors for the kitchen. He has fashioned the whole thing using rough lumber, a chain saw and a few hand tools. When the chain saw quits we find some electrical tools under the daybed in the ranchhouse and he is able to do the last bits a lot more easily. As it is, his hands are raw from sawing, rasping, screwing and lifting. But now we can keep the animals out and still have enough light and ventilation in the kitchen. And Bob sees it and it is good.
Early in the afternoon yesterday I am in the guesthouse quietly having a siesta when Kathleen fetches me. Eli has tried to climb the pole that keeps the laundry line high. I had hung his bathing suit there to dry after his rinsing-tub aquatics and he was after it. On the way down he catches the sole of his foot on a rusty nail. He is shrieking in pain when I go in. We wash his foot with soapy water and Dutch gets a tube of some sort of sulpha salve for infections that he brought with him from the Netherlands. This, a band-aid, and cuddling up to Kathleen calms him and, twenty minutes later he is the same old Eli, laughing and talking. But he decides that his foot is too painful to walk on two feet and even this morning he is hopping everywhere. The lesson about wearing his sandals doesn’t stick however and he is hopping on a bare foot. No matter how often I send him back for his sandal(s) it seems he is deaf in that ear. Little Bateese. Just now he comes by, dressed for some reason in a clown suit with a frizzy wig. We get out a hammer and he personally knocks out the offending nail. Closure!
Kathleen is spending a lot of time reading classical Brother-Grimm fairy tales to Eli that she downloads from the internet. This morning was “The Fisherman’s Wife”, a poor lady who was so dissatisfied with her lot in life (she and her spouse did actually live in a pigsty) that she pushed her husband to get her more and more things and bigger houses. Finally she gets more and more out of touch with reality and wants to become king, then emperor and finally Pope. It is a magic flounder who makes all this possible. (Yes, a magic flounder. This is one up on fairy godmothers, at least.)
(The fairy stories are fun to read again and Eli is fascinated. But for a fresh interpretation people should look at www.StoriesWork.org. This site is managed (right word?) by Professor Lenora Ucko, an anthropologist living near Duke University in North Carolina.)
This morning Simon leaves with Dutch for five or six hours to check on cattle in a distant pasture. Dutch is aboard Chip, a big bay horse, the biggest horse on the spread, in fact, and Simon is aboard one of the mules. Hungry and thirsty the last time they went out, Dutch this time makes himself a sandwich from the fresh whole-wheat bread we baked yesterday afternoon and fills up a plastic bottle of water from the tap in the kitchen. Bob tells him that he can just drink from the streams near the pastures as well. The water is clean and potable. We all have another good laugh at his expense about his hardships on his first time out a few days ago.
Before they leave, Bob and I follow the ¾-inch tubing back from the house to the source in the hills. For some reason there is no water flowing to the kitchen tank. Somewhere back up there we finally note that it has started to run again. Only later do we realise that Simon has been way ahead of us and reached the source to get the water flowing again. Sometimes the pipe comes out of the water instead of the water out of the pipe.
A Reposting of Our Arrival at Rancho el Nogal
This is a reposting of a portion of the very first blog and the very first one concerning our stay at Rancho el Nogal. It begins with an email I wrote to friends.
Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico, 04Sep05
Dear All:
We arrived at Rancho el Nogal after an 8-hour bus ride through the Sierras (only double lines on the highways, which however did not prevent the driver of the admittedly very comfortable and air conditioned bus to overtake everything he came up behind!) Cindy, the owner of the ranch, met us when the bus let us down in the tiny mountain village of Yepachic, a name probably derived from the Mexican word for Apache, and drove us in her 4-wheel drive pickup truck to the ranch - 90 minutes on the worst and most washed out sometimes-gravel road I have seen and, being from Canada, I have seen some really bad ones. My kidneys are still aching.
The 17,000 acre ranch is located in a very large and currently very lush valley. The ranch buildings are sited above a bend in the Tutuaca River. Everything is very primitive but pretty original. Even the help are called cowboys and actually do their work on horseback for much of the time. This morning we helped in the main corral to cull cattle for weaning, selling, branding, fattening and selling as rodeo-roping calves or beef cattle. Imagine me slipping around in cow shit and chasing longhorns through a gate while staring at their genitals to be able to categorise them as bull, cow or etcetera (meaning too soon to tell or too late to be of importance any more) and you kind of get the idea. Kathleen wisely acted as tallyman only occasionally and genteelly shoo-shooing the unwanted away from the gate where she stood with her pen and pad at the ready. A Kodak moment!
This is the rainy season and it generally clouds up in the afternoon and pours. It is supposed normally to stop at dusk but somebody forgot to tell the weather gods today and, well after dark, it is still really coming down.
The owners left today with their two little towheaded boys for various travels on business. We are the “caretakers”, we along with Simon, a Pima Indian, the hired hand and our sometimes Spanish teacher. Our job is to be around to keep an eye on the house and buildings, to feed the 6 dogs, 2 cats, 2 pigs, 18 chickens and 1 guinea fowl, milk the (1) nanny-goat and keep an eye on the solar-charging system (no grid electricity out here).
Not two hours after the family had left the two pigs got out, found their way into the feed room, upset a big bin of dog food, and made a huge mess. I ran into the oinkers as I was heading out to coop up the chickens for the night. I coaxed one back into the pen with a bucket of kitchen slops. The other one, the white one, disappeared into the long grass like a greyhound to be seen no more. Simon, who speaks only Spanish and some Pima, shrugged his shoulders when I told him, which I interpret to mean either: a) it will come back eventually if a mountain lion or coyote doesn't get it; or, b) pigs are stupid anyway. One chicken and the guinea fowl got up in a tree and refused to come down. They can stay there all night too as far as I am concerned. The culled cows are bawling from the pasture on the far side of the river for their weaned calves who bawl back at them. Kathleen, ever the musician, says that some of them sound like horn players. One of them has laryngitis, though, I think; he’ll never make it to the Berlin Philharmonic. You can hear the cattle clearly inside here despite the non-stop drumming of the rain in the night on the tin roof. Hope they shut up when we go to bed. This morning we were wakened by a cock just outside our window. There might be chicken stew around here before the owners come back in three weeks!
If I can figure out to post my blogs you can follow us on www.vilisar.com. For the moment there are only some dated photos by Albert Pang.
Greetings to all
Ronald
Later on 03 September 2005
And what a place! The site and the view alone are worth the trip. All around us are high mountains. Below us runs a river through a lush valley. The buildings are rough and ready, some of them, the cowboys’ bunkhouse for example, is basically a log cabin. Drinking water comes from a spring way back up in one of the hills; there is a cold-water tap in the kitchen. Personal hygiene is served by composting toilets inside or an outhouse near the corral. Showering is done outdoors with the aid of a solar-shower bag if you want the water warm, or a hose if you don’t care. Bathing can be done at a thermal warm (not hot) springs a 25-minute walk from here or in the river some 100 feet below the house. Electricity is provided by large solar panels out of sight on the roof and stored in a battery bank under the eaves. There is a telephone with more or less unlimited usage and a U.S.A. number. The house and the telephone works through wireless computers, rather strange when you consider that everything else here is basic. And by “basic”, I mean “primitive”.
Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico
Saturday, 03 September 2005
It’s 0530 and a big red rooster that lives under the eaves just outside our door has just started up calling back and forth again to the head rooster over in the chicken coop. It sounds like he’s right in the guest house with us! And I was wondering how I was going to be able to wake up this morning!
What a place! And what a day we had yesterday, leaving Vilisar on a mooring buoy in San Carlos in the sweltering heat, catching a ride to shore in his dinghy with Alex, our Mad-Magyar neighbour from S/V True Companion at 0430 and then in his van in the pre-dawn darkness with no headlights (he flashed the hazard lights the whole way instead) to Guaymas to catch a 0600 bus to Ciudad Obregon to the southeast along the coast. Just as we were buying the tickets in the Guaymas-bus station Kathleen realised she had lost her wallet. We could scratch up just enough change to get on board this bus and to buy the connecting tickets in Obregon for Yepachic. Not showing up would really throw a spanner in the works at the other end: they have to drive for hours to get to Yepachic, once she has started her journey, we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, the ranchera who is meeting us,.
Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our tickets for Yepachic, buy some food for the trip (little realising that street vendors would be boarding the bus at regular intervals until we got up into the remote highlands); Waiting for the restaurant to finish the sandwiches I kept the bus waiting and the driver was already backing out of the slot and revving the engine. He shot me a stern look for delaying him, mentally no doubt tapping his foot. He and his co-driver had a lot of kilometres to cover that day, some 600 kilometres to Chihuahua through the Sierras Madres Occidentale.
The bus ride went north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, which is a secondary road running east from Hermosillo in Sonora State to the state capital of Chihuahua province. Not long after crossing the state line, is Yepachic. This route is almost as good as riding the Copper Canyon Railway. The two-lane highways are well-paved and engineered with solidly built highway bridges of obviously recent construction. Fortunately so, for as we get farther and farther up into the mountains the curves and switchbacks and ups and downs are non-stop. Incredible! Sometimes there are views straight down for 500 or more metres. At one point I was looking down at a group of turkey vultures hovering below us in the thermal up-draughts and only slightly upwards to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle and snake near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going eventually to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive another ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it.
We are both exhausted all day from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part “chameleon” dinghy on her foredeck for our absence. We stripped everything we could off the deck and stored the stripped-off jib, staysail and drifter as well as all the spare lines down below out of the sun and potential high winds. I tied off the halyards, cleared as much as I could off the decks, and lashed everything else as tight as I could. I also wrapped the mainsail tightly with two lengths of webbing. If a hurricane comes through there is lots of wind and lots of tropical rain. I left two fans running down below powered by solar panels.
Alex brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown; this had done nothing for our heads when we got up. Kathleen therefore gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep. I want to do the same. But the constant swaying of the modern, air-conditioned bus and the spectacular scenery keep me looking out the window. Cindy later tells us that many people get seasick on that busride.
The area around Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, is one of Mexico’s breadbaskets. Agriculture is big here and Obregon is the market town for all this. At first, the bus is nearly full. Country people heading back from the city. There are a lot of older guys in white Stetsons, leather belts with big buckles and cowboy boots; they look a little out of place on the coast. We are heading into ranching country. There are also older and younger women, some with children. Hours later, outside Yacora, in the high mountains, the bus is flagged down by three Indian women and two pre-school children, Pimas I later guessed, since they get off in the reservation town down the road. By this time there are only about a dozen people left; passengers have been dropping off at remote intersections and sometimes in places with no sign of even a dirt farm road.
In the afternoon, it begins to rain, sometimes heavily, as it does here every day at this time of the year. Summer in these mountains is the rainy season, like springtime elsewhere; the hot, humid, tropical, coastal-air masses bang up against the Sierras and cause huge upwellings of cumulus clouds that empty their loads of water in the afternoons and evenings. These are the same electrical storms that swoop down from the mountains to San Carlos and Guaymas on many nights. The drivers (the second driver has taken over) slow a little bit in the wet but not much. Miles to go before they sleep.
I wonder if, when we get off in the middle of nowhere, we will still be in a downpour. One of the Indian ladies tells us as she gets off in Maycoba that Yepachic is another hour down the road. Around 1600, although still under a grey sky, the rain abates somewhat as we pull off on the shoulder of the road in a loose collection of small houses, some of logs. The driver scowls at us from the front and shouts back “Yepachic” to us in the rear. We leap up out of our seats, dash to the front, struggle off with our loose hand baggage, and watch while the relief driver pulls out our two army-surplus duffel bags and the out-of-place-here red backpack with a handle and small wheels full of computer stuff and books. The driver disappears inside again, the door closes with a little whoosh, the engine revs up, and the bus roars away with its last eight or ten passengers.
A woman’s voice calls to us and we turn to see a lanky blond in blue jeans and t-shirt heading towards us. Cindy Tolle, our host and the owner (along with her husband Bob) of Rancho el Nogal. We made it!
Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone in town), Cindy tells us that she has been away from the ranch for ten days selling calves. After a little chitchat, we sling our duffel bags into the open back of the pickup truck on top of gasoline jerry jugs and boxes of food supplies and cram ourselves into the cab. Rancho el Nogal (i.e. “The Walnut Ranch”; somebody planted a few walnut trees down by the river years and years ago) is very remote. This being the rainy season, the gravel “road” is in pretty bad shape, Cindy tells us, turning off Route 16 near the edge of town and stopping to shift into 4-wheel drive. The pickup moves forward at a near crawl.
“This looks like a bad road in the Canadian North,” I venture.
“Oh, this is the good part. We’ll have to slow down when we get onto the actual ranch road. This road belongs to a gold-mining company, Canadian, I think. They are supposed to start making it more permanent in the next few days. That will be great for us.”
The drive takes an hour and a half and to say it is kidney-jarring would be an understatement. After an hour we reach the boundaries of the ranch marked by one of four or five barbed-wire gates we have to stop for. Cindy is right: the ranch road is even worse. Cindy tells us that they have a bulldozer at the ranch and as soon as the rains have stopped they will run it over the road to fill in the holes and gulleys that the heavy mountain rains have created.
As we come into a very large, lush alpine valley some 90 minutes later Cindy points out the ranch house proper on a bluff in the distance. We still have to ford a river in flood; Cindy hesitates at the edge of the rushing water, wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning. Then she guns the engine and wades right in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river on a dirt track and climb a very rough last hill. I am convinced that we must have cracked the whole frame when we come down particularly hard once and another time Cindy thinks the road is so washed out that we might not get up the steep incline.
Finally, we pull into a complex of wooden buildings and corrals situated on a bluff above a bend in the river. Now, maybe, we can say we have made it. We have had eight hours of dizzying and swaying bus-ride followed by an hour and a half of bone-jarring, basically cross-country pickup-truck ride. I chortle to myself when I think of those spotlessly clean 4-WD pickups you see in cities. They have probably never even been driven on the gravel shoulder of the highway.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
AUTUMN APPROACHING; HOW LONG, OH LORD?
Wednesday, 21 September 2005
The nights are getting cooler now and the days shorter. There is a touch of autumn in the evening and morning air. At this altitude and in the clear air, the days however can still be hot. The sun in July came up about 0600 or even a bit earlier and set about 1945. But now official sunrise is well after 0700 and we don’t actually see the sun come over the mountain until fifteen minutes later. At present the sun goes down before 1900 giving us roughly twelve hours of sun. I miss the long summer evenings of the far north but I won’t be sorry to miss those short winter days. We are on Mountain Standard Time so I guess we won’t be resetting our clocks at the end of October.
After a week or so of dry weather, we are getting daily rain or threats of rain in the late afternoon again. Yesterday, for example, it clouded up to the south and we see a curtain of rain moving from east to west. The dogs stretch and move slowly to find cover. Dutch moves his carpentry work under the roof of the workshop area and keeps working. I hide out in the guest house with a book. We get a downpour. The sun comes out again before then finally setting behind the mountains to the west. Clouds hang around to the south for a while, lightning playing occasionally in the far distance even after dark. The sky clears from east to west behind the rain. After the sun goes down the sky takes on an eternal and infinite blue-black. The stars are like fire and the Milky Way like a stripe of light paint. To the east Mars hangs brightly red and low in the sky just above where a full moon is rising behind a rocky pinnacle. Down in the valley mist is gathering over the river, warm air condensing over the cooler water. The mountains are shadows until the moon illuminates them and crowds out the stars with its light.
Around 2200 the dogs begin first to growl and then to bark in chorus. Bob arrives in the white pickup after nearly everybody is in bed, Simon in his log cabin, Dutch in the old original hacienda where he has taken up semi-permanent quarters, and Eli, out cold on the sofa across from where Kathleen and I sit reading by the 12-volt electric ceiling light. We have more-or-less given up on Bob for today even though he emailed earlier that he would be returning “this afternoon”. From wherever he has spent the day Simon gets back well after the rest of us have eaten and devours the rest of the Chinese stir-fry and rice. “Bien!” Now, while I scramble an egg and toast some homemade bread for Bob, he says he has to leave again early in the morning with Simon for a court appearance and a few other appointments.
I get up in the pre-dawn to find the whole valley full of fog and drifting along the length of the river before us. As the sun comes out, the mountains visible from the large door of the kitchen where I am making coffee turn warmly yellow at the tops; the middle and bottoms are hidden from view in the mist. The air is so Umbrian-pure it is like some sort of light wine. The dogs move into the sun to sleep.
At the ranch here in Sierra Madres Occidentale we are between 2,000 and 2,500 metres high. There is no industry or traffic anywhere nearby and the relatively dry air is, as a result, very clear. The most distant mountains that we can see might be ten or fifteen miles away, more perhaps. From the high mesa, however, you can see probably fifty miles across the tabletops.
I have been reading a book about the recorded history and culture of the Apaches (actually it’s a history of the subjugation of the Apaches from an American viewpoint). The Mexican-American border was of no particular importance to the native peoples. Gerónimo, the Chiricahua-Apache leader, retreated with his warrior/raiders into the mountains near here after successful depredations in Arizona and New Mexico. The U.S. had a “hot pursuit” agreement with Mexico in the 1870’s and 1880’s and gave chase. The American soldiers declared that the mountains here were far higher and rougher than those in the US Southwest. We know a little about that ourselves.
How long, Oh, Lord?
Late last night Bob, Kathleen and I talked politics for a while. With our wi-fi internet access we can keep up on world news. We are agreed that George W. Bush is probably the worst president in U.S. history. But, as Bob, comments laconically, there have been quite a few bad ones in last fifty years. One of the reasons Bob and Cindy moved here was their dissatisfaction at the direction their native land seemed to be taking.
Internationally, the U.S.A. has turned into a bullying imperialist power, undertaking illegal and immoral wars against small countries, badgering others. At home it is doing everything it can to destroy the social contract and the safety net that people have over and over said they want. Internationally, Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell tell blatant lies to the UNO and the American people about what a threat Iraq (Iraq! for goodness sake) is to the U.S.A. At home they cut taxes for the rich and then lie that there is no money for social security, health care, or myriad other governmental programmes, not the least of which it now appears is the physical defence of major cities like New Orleans. The government lies to the people that new pharmaceutical programmes for Medicare are an improvement when the programme is really only designed to enrich the already-richest sector of American industry and to bury Medicare under its own weight within a generation. They lie when they say Social Security is bust when it clearly is not. The idea is to kill a popular programme and substitute expensive and risky private investment programmes. The government eliminates civil rights and civil liberties under the guise of a “War on Terror”. There is no war on terror! Unless we mean it in some figurative sense like the “War on Breast Cancer”. But it is a means to get the herd to follow; keep them scared and riled up and they will vote for the scaremongers.
We all accept that Dubbya is so stupid that he couldn’t have come up with much of this himself. I think he exhibits early symptoms of dementia. Praise the Lord that he can’t run again. Perhaps he will return to the well-deserved obscurity whence he came. But who’s next? Is it going to get even worse? As China and Europe and others take up blocking positions, is the U.S.A. going to try to John-Wayne its way through one crisis of its own making after another?
I wonder who the Republicans will put up in 2008. Another Bush? Guliani? Pray not the Gray Eminence! Dick Cheney; he looks evil to me. Will that pack of running dogs that includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfsonn, Crystal, Pearle, Rove, Bolton, et alia still be running the show?
And have the Democrats anybody at all to lead the resistance at present? John Kerry was and is a broken straw. Hillary Clinton? She voted for the Iraq War and has had nearly nothing to say about anything of importance. She would be no different than John Kerry. Howard Dean and Dennis Kuchinich are considered too far left by the party leaders. John Edwards has a nice smile but can’t find Iraq on the map or his arse in the dark.
How abysmal does it have to get internationally for American voters to reject the bully’s role? How many of their kids have to come home in black body bags? How many Iraqis have to die? How unpleasant does it have to get at home for the voters to swing to progressive candidates and renew the social contract? So far they seem to prefer swagger and smirk; jingoism abroad and Social Darwinism at home.
How long, Oh Lord?
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
DUTCH’S LEARNING EXPERIENCES; LAUNDRY AT RANCHO EL NOGAL; THE LAUNDRY PROCESS; POEM FOR ELI
Tuesday, 20 September 2005
Kathleen and I stayed around the ranch yesterday, Monday. Kathleen was finding spending a day alone with Eli a little stressful and asked if I would stick around too. I spent the morning writing, while Eli, surprisingly for a kid as physically active as he is, spent his morning dragging out all his books and going through them, humming to himself and chortling over some picture or other. Dutch gave him a Donald Duck comic book in Nederlands. Eli enjoyed it thoroughly. We keep adding German words to Eli’s vocabulary and are always amazed at how well he picks things up. He can even handle the Umlauts (i.e. ü, ä, ö) in German. In the afternoon he played around outside on his own and then helped in the kitchen.
In the afternoon I baked two apple pies and one pie and some tarts made from half of a large squash. There has been a large crate of apples in the kitchen corner from someone’s tree. But they needed to be used quickly. I sat outside at the picnic table and peeled and sliced. The only two general cookbooks were missing the pages concerning pie crusts so Kathleen looked up a recipe and instructions on the internet. In giving her own instructions, one lady spent about five pages describing the steps. It sounded more complicated than getting a man on the moon! I finally stopped reading and started making pastry. Use lard and flour and little bit of cold water. Mix the lard into the flour using two knives. Roll it out on a cold surface, no problem. The apple pies were delicious but the squash pie was duller than Bob Dole. Maybe I forgot the sugar. Today someone is going to have to make bread again.
Dutch’s Learning Experiences
Just before dark large dark clouds and plenty of thunder and lightning show up. We only have a few drops of rain but, with the heavy cloud, it gets dark earlier. Just before pitch darkness sets in, the little dogs all begin to bark and run out to the corral. Dutch and Simon left at midmorning on horseback to round up cattle. This was Dutch’s first day completely on horseback. Simon was supposed to instruct him but there was obviously going to be a language gap. Greta, Cody and Phil, three of the bigger dogs, went with them. The Chihuahuas are all yapping at the return of riders and dogs.
Eventually Dutch comes into the house where Kathleen is reading a bedtime story to Eli. Dutch collapses on a sofa. After over nine hours in the saddle in very rough country, he is exhausted and sore. It is already strenuous enough chasing cattle up and down very steep hills and driving them to better pasture. I know from my own experience in the last two weeks that those hills are killers - for the horse especially but for the rider too. On top of this Dutch has a few unique and special learning experiences. The catalogue goes something like this:
Learning experience # 1:
His horse, a large and beautiful Appaloosa, tends to take him under overhanging branches. One of the branches sweeps Dutch right off his horse and drops him on the rocky hillside;
Learning Experience # 2:
His horse walks too close to a big cactus and Dutch winds up with five big needles stuck in his right knee. He spends a few minutes pulling the stickers out of his flesh while Simon watches with an expressionless face. This morning the holes are a little inflamed.
Learning Experience # 3:
Not all rivers can be walked through. Dutch starts to cross one river to round up some cows. The river turns out to be very deep and horse and rider are soon swimming. This means of course that the horse’s body is underwater and Dutch is wet up to his arse and beyond. On the other side he stops, pulls off his boots one at a time and pours out the river water. I wonder why Simon let him go in that deep. Dutch’s clothes have to dry on him while he rides-- this is nothing to a real cowboy.
Learning Experience # 4:
Don’t believe that just because a Pima-Apache Indian rides out in late morning without taking water or food with him that he will be coming back in for lunch. So far I have never seen Simon take any food or water on the trail. When Bob and I rode out with Simon on Mexican Independence Day, Bob had a plastic water bottle which we refilled several times from flowing streams. Simon never drank all day. Bob says the Indian workers eat only two meals a day and live almost entirely on frijoles (pinto beans) and tortillas.
As I said, these learning experiences are in addition to hours in the saddle. Dutch sprawls on the couch. When dinner is served he doesn’t eat much. Kathleen is reading The Valiant Little Tailor to Eli. Dutch listens for a while but soon announces soon that he is going to take an aspirin and go to bed.
Laundry Day At Rancho el Nogal
This morning he is much more lively. I thought Simon was going to ride out again this morning. And so he did, but without Dutch. That’s fine, I guess, because Dutch has a long list of repair and construction projects to work on. To add to his day, the washing machine starts to act up. First it wouldn’t agitate. Then the gasoline generator conks out; no more fuel. Then we accidentally add fuel that has oil in it and then have to drain all the gasoline out and put clean gas in. Since we are filtering all the gasoline through a paper coffee filter to make sure it is clean of dirt, this is messy and takes some time. Then Dutch gets to work on the washing machine itself. The wiring is bad and he rewires a lot of it. Of course, we don’t know where the electrician’s tape might be kept so he has to improvise. It takes him about two hours to finally get the whole generator-agitator system running again. But in the meantime we have used up all the water in the tank. We had filled rinsing tubs and agitator a few times; we have had to throw out water so we could upend the agitator to look at the motor. The temporary solution to this problem is to use buckets to move clean water from the rinsing tub to the agitator. There is only a trickle coming from the water tank now so it will be a while before the next load can be rinsed. I just checked, however, and most of the clothes that we washed this morning are nearly dry.
Man! This is almost as complicated as living on a boat at anchor! Dutch says he can hardly remember that he started off this morning to repair the picnic table and make a new kitchen door.
The Laundry Process
Laundry is done in an old agitator-type electric washing machine that stands outside in all weathers. The 120-volt power necessary to run it comes from a gasoline-powered generator. The water comes by a long length of hose from the normal water tanks out near the corral; the real source of water is, of course, a freshwater spring about half a mile away towards the hills behind the ranchhouse. A buried water hose runs downhill from there to the tanks. The whole waterworks system works on gravity.
First, we fill the agitator with cold spring water, add the detergent and dirty clothes. Then we fill two rinsing tubs with clear water as well, start the generator, run the agitator for half an hour of washing, wring out the sopping clothes either by hand or using a mop-squeegee (this washing machine doesn’t have an electric wringer attached to it: that would be a great addition), drop them into the first rinsing tub, swish them around for a while, wring them out again and drop them into a second rinsing tub to get the last of the soap out (one hopes), and then string them out on one of the clothes-lines that crisscross the grassy area between the walkway and the house. The days are usually sunny and the relative humidity quite low. In addition, up here on the bluff above the river we usually catch at least a little breeze. So, it takes only a few hours to dry even blue jeans.
I decided last night that I would attack the big pile of laundry that has built up in the two weeks. It is not because we have actually used many clothes; we tend to wear things for a few days at least unless we have been battling runaway pigs or have slipped and fallen in the corral. But our clothing had gasoline spilled on them from jerry jugs on the washed-out and therefore rough ranch road on the way in here two weeks ago and stink terribly of gasoline. We also told Dutch that he could throw his laundry in with ours too.
What with the breakdown first of the agitator and then of the generator, we are still not finished with laundry. But we are getting there. That guy Dutch is a worker! He knows a lot, is very handy with tools and pitches right in. With two more like him we could run all of Mexico.
Poem for Eli
I remembered this poem from grade school. William Henry Drummond was a Scotsman who travelled a lot in Canada in the late nineteenth century. His poems are considered a little patronising of French Canadians. But they show an affection for the people as well. Dealing with six-year-old Eli reminds me of Little Bateese and his grandpere.
Little Bateese
You bad leetle boy, not moche you care
How busy you 're kipin' your poor gran'pere
Tryin' to stop you ev'ry day
Chasin' de hen aroun' de hay--
W'y don't you geev' dem a chance to lay?
Leetle Bateese!
Off on de fiel' you foller de plough
Den w'en you 're tire you scare the cow
Sickin' de dog till dey jomp the wall
So de milk ain't good for not'ing at all--
An' you 're only five an' a half dis fall,
Leetle Bateese!
Too sleepy for sayin' de prayer to-night?
Never min' I s'pose it'll be all right
Say dem to-morrow--ah! dere he go!
Fas' asleep in a minute or so--
An' he'll stay lak dat till de rooster crow,
Leetle Bateese!
Den wake us up right away toute suite
Lookin' for somet'ing more to eat,
Makin' me t'ink of dem long leg crane
Soon as dey swaller, dey start again,
I wonder your stomach don't get no pain,
Leetle Bateese!
But see heem now lyin' dere in bed,
Look at de arm onderneat' hees head;
If he grow lak dat till he's twenty year
I bet he'll be stronger dan Louis Cyr
An' beat all de voyageurs leevin' here,
Leetle Bateese!
Jus' feel de muscle along hees back,
Won't geev' heem moche bodder for carry pack
On de long portage, any size canoe,
Dere 's not many t'ing dat boy won't do
For he's got double-joint on hees body too,
Leetle Bateese!
But leetle Bateese! please don't forget
We rader you 're stayin' de small boy yet,
So chase de chicken an' mak' dem scare
An' do w'at you lak wit' your ole gran'pere
For w'en you're beeg feller he won't be dere--
Leetle Bateese!
William Henry Drummond
Monday, September 19, 2005
KICKING BACK ON THE RANCH; A WALK BY THE RIVER; CHICKEN DINNER; WHOLE-WHEAT BREAD
Monday, 19 September 2005
A relaxed Sunday on the ranch. In the morning we get the pigs moved to the new quarters. We also select the cock that we intend to eat. Dutch not only gets the chicken ready (beheading, plucking, gutting, scalding, cleaning) but makes a great chicken soup as well. The rooster had not exactly led a long and arduous life. But he was not that plump and tender either. And, since we were half-expecting to have to feed quite a number of mouths (there was a chance that some people might be coming over from another ranch for a visit), chicken soup seemed like the way to go. While it is simmering, like The Three Bears, we decide to go for a walk along the Tutuaca River, which from the big windows of the high ranchhouse we can see S-curving its way across the valley floor in the middle distance. Originally Bob had proposed that we ride out. But Simon was not around to bring in the horses and, anyway, Bob’s tail end is still so sore from our long cross-country ride three days ago that he can still not sit a saddle.
It is bright and sunny, the air completely pure after the big rain and hail storm on Saturday night. But, to be honest, around here the air is always clean and fresh. This morning it is scented with the grasses, shrubs and trees along the way. The mountains to the south of us stand out clearly before us in the late-morning intense light. High overhead a large group of turkey vultures hang on the thermal currents while near the ground songbirds and doves spring up from the grass as we approach. Meadow flowers carpet the river pastures. The river itself is up after the rain, murky with the churned up sand from farther upstream. This silt will eventually wind up in the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific Ocean for it is rushing down the western side of the nearby Continental Divide. Down near the ford a mare and a “mula” each with a colt watch us approach. At some point the mule decides that five strange humans heading her way can only mean trouble and starts hurriedly for the higher ground and the trees, the other animals following in a mini-stampede. Warily, they watch us pass from the safety of the pine trees to our left.
After twenty-five minutes of walking down the hill from the ranchhouse and then along the river flats, we come to an adobe bunkhouse situated just back above the high-water mark. This is relatively new house and has its own solar power though not yet its own cooking facilities. Bob tells us that it was built partly with the assistance of university students learning techniques of eco-construction. It is locked and Bob has not brought the key with us. But we look through the window and see a hammock slung and various beds and gear around. It looks roomy and inviting.
Not far beyond, the river flat is squeezed down to the water and we can go no farther without wading to the other side. There doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm to hike in wet boots this morning. But Bob tells us we should check out the left bank of the Tutuaca River as there is a really interesting camping spot farther along. He also points out the swimming hole just there near where we are standing. The current has scoured the bottom around a big rock on the outside of a curve in the river to a depth of eight to ten feet. An hour and a half later we are back home and sitting at the table a exclaiming over the chicken and dumplings.
The day passes with reading and little chores. At one point the alarm is put up when we find that Porky and Schnautze have managed to get out of their new sty and have got into the feed bags in the walkway. We do not manage to get them back in before nightfall. It will be interesting to see if they come back to the Ramada Pig Sty or to their old pen. Return they always have so far; a night in the woods is not that interesting I guess.
The feedbags in the walkway however are an attraction for other animals too. About 0300 in the night I hear sounds of footsteps and munching and the moving around of storage bins. I finally come to full consciousness and eventually convince myself that it is not just Tank, the big old blind mastiff getting into the dog food. I get up in the light of the full moon to investigate. I find three or four Shetland ponies busy stuffing themselves on cattle feed, the bags broken open and the contents scattered on the concrete floor. I flash my pocket LED flashlight at them. They scurry to get back out through the little gate near the house, their hooves clattering on the concrete kicking over several metal objects on their way out and making a huge racket. I am trying to get everyone to remember to keep that gate closed since in the two weeks since we have been here, not only these ponies have entered through there but two or three big mules, a horse, the pigs several times and who knows what other animals that I didn’t spot as well. Unfortunately, since I was the last one to go to bed last night, I probably left the darned thing open myself.
Whole-wheat Bread
Late in the day I decide to bake yeast bread instead of the quick breads that I have always made up until now. I find a recipe for whole-wheat loaves in a paperback edition of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook on a shelf with some other cookbooks in the kitchen. Eli and I enjoy ourselves slapping the dough around and punching it down when it rises. At first the dough will not rise at all and I fear I have somehow misused the yeast. I finally catch on to using the “cold” oven as a warm spot; the pilot light seems to provide just the right amount of heat. When the two loaves finally come out of the oven, though, it is already nearly 2130 and only Bob, Kathleen and I are still up. We fall greedily upon the bread and devour half a loaf while it is still warm, the slices steaming and running in butter and/or jam. Delicious! Simple pleasures.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
MOUNTAIN STORM; PIGS TO LIVE IN NEW LUXURY; FRESH CHICKEN FOR SUNDAY DINNER; INDIAN BURIAL GROUND
Sunday, 18 September 2005
Mountain Storm
Simon has been saying for several days now that, when it gets this hot (around here “hot” means, let’s say, 80°F) then there is bound to be rain within in a couple of days. “Rain” around here means that, during August and September (the remainder of the year is basically dry), tall cumulus clouds begin to build over the mountain ranges, the skies cloud over and turn dark and, after a play of thunder and lightning, a deluge hits in late afternoon or early evening lasting for either just a few minutes or several hours. It hasn’t rained now for ten days or so. Two days ago when Bob, Simon and I took our long ride, however, the skies clouded up late in the afternoon and we had a show of thunder and lightning and a few big drops of rain. This is the tail-end of the rainy season and the downpours will become less frequent and finally taper off altogether in the next few weeks.
Yesterday, Saturday, we get a real blow. The timing is typical but the intensity is the strongest I have seen so far since we have been at Rancho el Nogal (a little over two weeks ago). First the dark clouds and then the thunder and lightning come first from behind a mountain range and then from right overhead. When the rain comes it is intense and accompanied by Chubasco-type high winds, first from the south and then from the north while the lightning and thunder seem to be right over the house. Sebastiaan Pluijmen (aka “Dutch” Pluijmen) starts out into the field on some errand just as the clouds approach but turns around suddenly and dashes back into the covered walkway when he sees a bolt of lightening strike the far end of the pasture. He is barely under cover when the rain hits.
Instantly all the eaves are running heavy water, the older shingled rooves dripping through. The wind is also tearing at the sheets of corrugated iron on the rooves and some of the sheets began to flap as if a hidden hand were trying to yank them off. As the wind and rain intensify I see from the guesthouse window where I have been reading one sheet over the covered breezeway on Simon’s log cabin bend back completely flat. The rain drums on the tin roof over my head and I see water begin to drip down the inside wall on the river side as the wind drives rain against the window panes. As the wind shifts water start pooling below the windows on the corral side.
If the rain seems loud and the thunder close, the advent of hail sets up a drumming on every tin rooftop and on the pickup truck parked just outside the guesthouse. The wind shifts suddenly to the north, back to the south and then to the north again. The hailstones are not large, fortunately, but there are enough of them that the ground in front of the corral is becoming whiter by the minute.
The deluge and the wind lasts for a good half an hour before it begins to slacken, before the lightning bolts and peals of thunder begin to move away to the south and west leaving a sodden ranchhouse complex and, as we experienced in the heavy rains two weeks ago, water running down the walls of the ranchhouse itself. With every rain the roofing project gets moved farther up Bob’s “To-Do” list.
Pigs to Live in New Luxury
Porky, the cute little white boar with the curly tail, and Schnautze, the larger grey-brown and hairy sow, have been living temporarily in the dog run just over the hill behind the ranchhouse. The pen is not totally secure and we have spent a lot of time chasing them around when they escape. I suggest to Bob that Dutch Pluijmen, who is still not fully employed as he works his way into rancho life, build us a new pigsty out behind the main corral and near the chicken coop. This would move the smell farther away, make feeding activities more efficient since the swine would be near the chickens, and we could possibly built a shelter to store the feeds out there.
Near the chicken coop there is an old unused pole barn that will probably one day be torn down. It still has a serviceable roof over part of it and we could convert it to a sty. After walking the proposed site together, Bob gives the go-ahead, and Dutch, Eli and I start picking up the old wood, logs, old metal and wire, and years of other trash, and start separating them into separate piles. For a future bonfire, we stack the useless wood in a big pile in an open space; the metal bits will be taken to the dump way in the far back pasture.
With the site cleared, Dutch goes to work with a peck basket of old long nails, a hammer, a pair of pliers and a power chainsaw, which Bob brought out of one of the storerooms. Clearly Dutch knows what he is doing. He handles the tools with experience and vigour. Leaving Dutch alone I return to the guesthouse to write. Dutch comes in occasionally for a glass of water or some other tool. After five or six hours he announces that we should take a look at the pigs’ new luxurious quarters. And fine they are too! He has renovated the old stable so that the pigs have shade and a wooden platform to lie on as well as mud to play in. Feeding and watering can be done without actually having to go into the sty. It is at right angles and 100 feet from the chicken coop and there is enough roofed-over area so that we can probably store feedstuffs out there as well.
We decide to wait until feeding time to move Porky and Schnautze so we can entice them over. This plan is postponed because of the heavy rains; nobody wants to wade around in pig manure and mud. The ground dries quickly and we might be able to do it on Sunday or Monday. But the pigsty is a big improvement. Dutch is a real worker and has a lot of really useful skills for a ranch. He ought soon to be getting thank you notes from Porky and Schnautze.
Later on Sunday
We just finished convinced Schnautze to vacate his old quarters and move to the new Ramada Pig Sty. We thought we could entice both him and Porky with kitchen slops. But as soon as we dropped a lasso around his neck she broke into a panic and no amount of grub was going to get her out of there. Kind of like some die-hards in Hurricane Katrina-flooded New Orleans. We wound up dragging her with Eli shouting and smacking her bottom, Dutch dragging on the lasso and Bob holding Schnautze by her right hind leg. I dumped the bucket of slops into the new pen. Once Schnautze was in her new quarters she was sceptical about things and refused to try the scraps. Meanwhile Porky has run down to the arroyo; we hope that Schnautze will entice him back with calls. I sure wish we had had a film camera to document us “cowboys” dragging a squealing pig across the corral.
Fresh Chicken for Sunday Dinner
With a surplus of cocks in the chicken coop, Bob decides to dedicate one of the four or five roosters to our Sunday culinary enjoyment. Bob has had lots of experience growing up in a big family in the country; his family kept some 300 cocks for eating purposes and the family had a real assembly line approach to catching, killing, cleaning and gutting chickens.
It turns out that Dutch, who has a formal agricultural education, also knows how to go about it. Yours Truly actually beheaded a chicken years ago but can hardly claim to be an expert. The hardest part seems to be picking out a rooster from amongst the hens. The one we think is the fattest we are not completely sure is male. He is nevertheless doomed. Dutch corners him and carries him by the feet to the yard near the water tanks while I get the hatchet. This instrument is a little dull so we don’t get a clean cut and wind up hacking off his head. To do so, Dutch asks me to hold the head while he holds the feet and wields the blade. I am not sure that I want to have my fingers near the neck but I still have all my digits when the rooster’s ordeal is over.
While we turned to making pancakes with Eli, Dutch sets himself down with a bucket of boiling water at the picnic table behind the kitchen to pluck the chicken and gut it. By the time we finish breakfast the chicken is in the pot and Dutch is making a soup big enough to feed us all later today after we come back from a walk Bob is proposing.
An Indian Burial Ground
Kathleen and I wondered about the circular, three-foot high pile of rocks in the middle of corral yard. Today Bob told us that he had Simon erect it over a spot where, after heavy rains, human bones and skulls still appear along with cut-bone beads, etc. According to Simon, who he told us was part Apache and part Pima, this was an Apache encampment and/or burial ground overlooking the river where they could spot any approaching enemies. Bob has picked up quite a few shaped-stone instruments from around the site here.
Apaches were a Spartan people who were ferocious in battle and raiding. Their legendary leader in the late nineteenth century was Geronimo and they tended to hole up in these mountains and come into conflict with both the Mexican and the US Army. In their burial practices, Apaches would bury their dead in the ground and secure the sites with rocks to prevent scavenging by animals. Exceptions were babies who, if they died, were hung in their papoose boards in trees (Sioux buried everybody in trees) and the very elderly who were left to die on their own. This was a tough practice. But in a nomadic people who were always close to the existence minimum, useless mouths were, by common consent even of the elderly themselves, an intolerable burden on the clan. Since the Apaches had many enemies and frequently had to move fast and far, the elderly were an additional burden. Even before they died or were abandoned, the elderly were expected to take a distinct background role in the clan. They wore the oldest clothing and ate last and least. Political power went largely to the young war leaders, although a medicine man might retain influence beyond his years. When someone died and was buried, either his personal effects were buried with him or her or burned immediately. For a notable warrior who died, his horse or his best horse was killed and buried or burned. The bereft had a fear that the spirit of the dead would linger on in artefacts and haunt the living; the Apaches had a distinct fear of the dead and of ghosts and of night-time as well. They almost without exception did their ambushing and raiding in daylight.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
AN INDEPENDENCE-DAY PATROL
Saturday, 17 September 2005
Yesterday, on Mexican Independence Day, Bob on Gus, Simon on his “mula” and I on Alazan leave on a mounted patrol through “El Magre”, a particular corner of the ranch. We are checking on livestock, on general conditions and are making sure that no one is growing “weed” on the spread. This is harvest time and the Mexican Army is out in strength to search and destroy. Bob and Simon have heard here and there that someone might be using remote acreage for a private grow operation. Whenever these exist, even the livestock is threatened since cattle are butchered to feed the harvest workers. It is just good business-operating procedure: keep expenses down by stealing a cow or two to feed the workers.
Bob thinks that most levels of the judicial system are corrupted in Mexico: drugs mean big money and therefore even more corruption. The only element that everyone is really afraid of is the Mexican Army, which Bob thinks is tough but straight. Bob is not about to have the Army find a secret marijuana plantation on his ranch, confiscate his property and throw him in the calaboose. He runs a clean ship and wants it kept that way. I looked up “marijuana” and found that it the word originated in Mexico in the thirties and is just a slang term, though why it should be called “Marie & John” is still a puzzle to me.
Simon has re-shod all the horses. After two days on patrol like this or even only one if they are scouring the hills to round up cattle, the horses need to be re-shod. It is a skill that all the cowboys seem to have. They have a big supply of horseshoe nails on the ranch. Once he is sporting new “zapatos” (shoes), I bridle and saddle Alazan.
To get the patrol started I provide a little rural amusement for the crowd. Once all the riders are ready, I put my foot in the stirrup and swing up just as Alazan starts to walk forward. For some reason I do not land squarely in the saddle and, in one smooth and impressive motion, I keep right on rolling over the saddle and fall off onto the ground on my back on the other side. Gasps all round. Never one to ignore collecting kudos, I dust myself off and try mounting again. This time Alazan decides not to walk so I am unable to prove to the bystanders that falling off had been my intention the whole time. Darn that horse anyway!
The ride turns out to be a rather exhausting 8.5 hours. The sun is hot for most of the day; horses, especially, but riders too are sweating and thirsty until late in the day when, for the first time in a week, dark clouds start building.
At the beginning, though, it is not too bad since most of the route is downhill into the valley of the Tutuaca River. It is the same river that is so wonderfully visible from the ranchhouse window (and on the opening page of www.tutuaca.org, the ranch’s website. Just for the record, it looks a hundredfold more beautiful in real life).
Rancho el Nogal is 17,000 acres (7,000 hectares), a mountain ranch situated high (2,000 – 2,500 metres*) in the Sierra Madre Tarahumara range and therefore most of it steeply sloping. This means that for any given horizontal mile there is a lot of sloping land. Bob tells me that the ranch has many, many, many gulches, arroyos, canyons, draws - call them what you may. But there are at least 29 streams and rivers carrying year-round water. The rivers are the Tutuaca itself and the Pescado. The ranch lies relatively close to the Continental Divide and the rivers here all run to the Pacific; first to a big dam near Hermosillo, thence to another dam near Obregon where the water is used to irrigate the grain-basket farms near that latter city. (In the U.S.A. the border between New Mexico and Arizona is a surveyor’s straight line. But it runs generally along the Continental Divide too. The region was once all part of “New Mexico” but after the Gadsden Purchase, which came shortly after the US-Mexican War in the mid-to-late 1840’s, Arizona was hived off into a separate state.)
The 17,000-acre ranch will sustain about 700-800 head of cattle (each cow therefore need over 20 acres to graze on). Since there has been a BSE scare in the U.S.A., Mexico recently banned the import of beef, the price of beef shot up in Mexico and this has presented Bob with a good opportunity to sell beef cows. At present, therefore, there are only about 350 head on the ranch. There are also about 30 horses and mules.
At first we ride over hillcrests to meet the river on it next twist through the gorge. The meadows are full of bright yellow flowers, Yerbanis, Eli tells me later. Eventually we follow the river more closely, weaving and wading back and forth across it, the occasional deeper waters forcing us to pull our feet up to avoid getting them wet, the horses stopping occasionally to drink. Simon leads us and Bob brings up the rear mainly because Alazan likes to walk slowly and Bob likes to give him a smack on his hindquarters with the end of his lasso from time to time if the horse dawdles too much.
The river gorges are beautiful and waters are musical as they gurgle and bubble over the loose rocks and smoothly polished rocks. The horses’ hooves as they pick their way over the underwater stones take on a deeper, faintly echoing sound. The light coming into the valley has an Umbrian purity to it. Bob tells me that one can often spot javelina (wild pigs) in family groups on the heights above. Occasionally, to avoid a deep and narrow portion of water, we urge the mounts straight up from the river, climbing nearly vertically to some 100 feet and then later coming back down to the water.
Eventually, after two or three hours, we leave the river and work our way “inland” to look at a narrow, tree-filled arroyo that Bob had never visited before. Leaving the horses in some shade on high rocks, we clamber down into the gorge, sliding on the seats of our trousers at times. My legs seem rubbery from the hours in the saddle so far. We hit the valley floor about mid-way up the stream. The high waters of late have scoured the gorge of debris; the water-course is basically over bare, smoothly polished rock. We hop back and forth over the water, working our way first upstream and then down. The walls of the draw are steep and the gorge narrow; the water is clear enough to drink straight and for us to fill up our water bottle.
At one spot we find a large horizontal cave, perhaps 150 feet across that has been used over the many years by the Indians for shelter. At the higher end the roof is black from many campfires. A small clearing in front would have provided a shady garden and the Indians would hunt and gather from the surrounding countryside.
On the climb back out to the horses, I feel very weak and dizzy. Am I suffering from the mile-high altitude? Or am I just sorely (sic) out of shape? I make it, puffing and steaming. It is early afternoon and the heat is definitely noticeable.
In addition to my leather hiking boots and my straw “Borsalino” hat, I am wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and long “cargo” trousers. The trousers now have a huge rip from the waist vertically down the side where the horse got too close to a tree, a branch hooked a fold in the cloth, and tore it for 6-8 inches. Underneath the skin begins to darken in black and blue. In the course of the day, in addition to rolling right over the saddle in trying to get on back at the ranch and thereby sustaining a bruise (to my pride and) my elbow, which is beginning to ache, I am also brushed hard by an overhead branch that gives me a skin abrasion even through my straw hat and am scrubbed hard across the left shoulder by another branch on the way up the side of a mountain. The trees are not closely spaced for the most part and there is plenty of room to get through the many live oaks, occasional mountain ash and scotch pines, and the flat plate-type cacti, which at present often have a peach-sized fruit growing on them (at one stop I pick one; it is very tender and a beautiful dark blue or purple inside though without a strong flavour; lemon juice and sugar would no doubt help. The Apaches, I know, used to make a sticky fruity candy out of these. There are a lot of very fine needles on the outside so one needs to be careful how one handles them.)
Bob and Simon have decided to pay a visit to a ranch on the other side of the mountain. Rather than ride all the way back and then up a parallel arroyo, it is decided simply to climb over this mountain. Simply! We start up, no real trail visible. Simon, more or less born on this ranch, knows nearly every crevice. We keep climbing, doubling back on occasion to find a way through a copse or to overcome a ridge or fence. It is frequently so steep that even Simon dismounts from his mula and we all lead our mounts, all of us struggling to climb. My weak feeling is intensifying and I occasionally have to ban the thought of sitting down with a cold beer from my mind in order to keep going. Slipping and sliding we go ever higher.
Eventually, exhausted and sore, we stop for a break. Bob and Simon decide that, since both Bob and I are nearly played out, Simon should go on to the other ranch alone while Bob and I start back. Simon, still fresh it seems, climbs aboard and continues over the lip of the hill. After a few more minutes of rest, Bob and I tighten the saddle girths and strike off in the opposite direction to find the faint path that will lead us past the high mesa and back to the ranch. Do the horses realise this? Are they walking more quickly and climbing more energetically?
We pick up the path after a couple of false starts and head up a long arroyo. We have first to cross the stream and then to find our way up it. Farther along, two trees have been blown down across the narrow water. We can’t get over them. The sides of the stream are muddy and slippery and the horses cannot seem to get over. We get off and find ourselves slipping and sliding as we pull the horses behind us. Once, just as the horse is leaping up to clear the log, I slip down the bank, find my boots in the water and the horse about to step on me as he comes over the log. I scramble out of the way and see that Bob is struggling as well. Gus, his horse, is balking at the second log and I smack him hard on his hindquarters with the reins of my horse. Gus leaps forward and they are over. I follow after a little persuasion to Alazan. Played out, I can hardly get myself back into the saddle.
On we go, up, down, across, the horses picking their way across the bad footing. My pelvic girdle is beginning to hurt badly despite the aspirin I have taken prophylactically. Eventually I begin to recognise spots on the trail from last Sunday: a dead tree picked over by woodpeckers; an Orange-Crush bottle; a turn in the trail; some oddly-shaped rocks. There are no manmade markings whatsoever: you just have to ride the trails and remember how to get home. Local knowledge.
At one point before we start the last very steep trail, Bob dismounts and decides to walk. At first I think it is because it is so steep and he is favouring the horse. But in reality his back and bum hurt so badly he needs a break from the saddle. He is anyway no slower on foot than I am on Alazan who is careful picking his way down the narrow trail.
Bob asks if we want to take a swim in a swimming hole on the Pescado River, at the bottom of a very steep canyon a half hour short of the ranchhouse. Definitely! As we proceed, the sky to the north begins to boil up with dark towering clouds. We hear rolling thunder and, from the high ground, see bolts of lightning slashing from on high down into distant valleys. We hesitate about the swim but decide to have a quick one anyway.
At dusk we drop the horses’ reins next to the swimming hole, strip off and walk into the six-foot-deep flowing stream waters just before they go over a little waterfall. Pretty. The water is cold at first but, after adjusting to it, it is the perfect refresher.
After five minutes, with large drops of rain beginning to fall and the light nearly gone, we scramble into our clothing and boots, climb into the saddles again and start up the far side of the arroyo on the way home. The horses know the way now. Good, because, although it is not totally black and I can see the path if it is primarily of rock, I cannot make out the footing. Alazan goes carefully as usual, sticking now rigidly to the beaten path, twisting back and forth and dropping down stepped rocks or small rocky gullies. Sometimes he has to turn within his own length. I am sore but even in the light rain and darkness I do not feel afraid. I was far more apprehensive on my first ride out last Sunday.
As we come over the last hill we see a faint light in the distance that must be the ranchhouse. On the flat, the horses break into a trot. They are ready for anything but we are careful to ride faster only in open areas since the horses make no allowances for low branches or high wires. Down into the gulch and into the stream that runs behind the ranchhouse, up the steep incline and through the open gate into the corral yard. We’re back.
With an effort, our bodies stiff and our legs rubbery, we step down, loosen the saddle girths, and put the heavy saddles into the walkway between the house and the corral yard where they live on a railing when not in use. Bob leads Alazan and Gus through the outside gates, slips their bridles off and turns them out into the pasture. There are no stables at Rancho el Nogal: animals live outside. It’s 2030.
Inside, where they are wondering why a three hour cakewalk should take eight hours, we find Kathleen reading a bedtime story to Eli, the six-year-old, and Sebastiaan, the new cowboy from the Netherlands. I get a beer from the storeroom. I am too tired to eat. Bob swallows a mouthful of aspirin for his low-back pain. I drink my beer. An hour later I am in bed.
Website Counter
This website created by
Gwendolyn Holbrow
All copyrights reserved
