PAIN VERSUS GAIN; DOZER DOLDRUMS; COWBOY’S LIFE NOT ALWAYS WHAT IT SEEMS;
Saturday, 15 October 2005

Pain versus Gain

I am hurting! I don’t think anything is broken. Where my right arm bone connects to the collar bone (“And your collar bone connects to your head bone; Oh, hear the word of the Lord!”), it is extremely sensitive to the touch. From the ribs under my right arm through the shoulder to my neck behind the ear, I have aching bones. The muscles are becoming very stiff. As long as I remain still I only have a dull ache from ear to belly button down the right side. But if I move at all, even to stand up or sit down, to lift my coffee cup, I get an ARGH!-inducing stab of pain. Cindy, our Ranchera, is a professional athlete, rock-climber and mountaineer; she thinks that probably nothing is broken but that it is all going to take quite a while o heal. After falling off a bicycle a few times (correction: thrown), I have some idea about how long this cold all take.

The problem is getting back to Vilisar and all the physical work involved with operating a traditional sailboat. It only just begins with rowing out o her from the dinghy dock. And what about getting up sail and pulling up the anchor. As the psycho-therapists say, “Well, just put into the third space and let it float around for a while.” Cindy and Bob have both urged us to stay longer, permanently even. But, although we still have some sailing to do in our lives, we might consider staying till mid-week. We want to meet Bob, my friend from Kingston, Ontario, at the end of the month in La Paz. But we could still do that if we left the rancho next week.

Bob, the Ranchero, asked me if I would like to ride out to one of the more beautiful corners of Rancho el Nogal with him today. We are having wonderful early autumn weather with very cool nights and bright sunny days. I initially said yes if he would saddle a quite horse for me. Alazan, the beautiful sorrel or chestnut stallion is slow and comfortable to ride; Spot the big and tame Appaloosa would be fine too; we would be walking the mounts the whole way anyway given the rough ground. Bob saddles Spot. But I am unable even to get my bots on without help so I decide to take a pass and just stick around here today, taking it easy.

The big cattle drive to which I had been so looking forward is to take place tomorrow. We shall be driving some 17 head of cattle about 15 miles down the ranch road to Yepachic where the cattle trailer is parked o take them on to Chihuahua and the cattle market on Tuesday. It would be better for me to ride a quite horse than ride in the pickup. On the other hand, the least pain would be if I just stayed at the ranch and chewed aspirin. Third-space stuff.

Dozer doldrums

The dozer monster just sits at the bottom of the ravine. The ranch road is still in bad shape. To get the cattle to market, Bob has to be able to drive the Ford diesel out from here to Yepachic where the cattle trailer is parked. There are three very bad spots and Simon and Dutch have gone out with picks and shovels to get them ready by this evening.

So why isn’t the dozer doing the road-grading? I won’t go into the gory details, but there has been a major Knartsch between the Wiggins and the Rancheros. Of course, a lot of it has to do with money and who owes what to whom. In the end the differences could not be resolved and Bill dropped his tools and left with his family. To be fair, he waited until the dozer was down in the ravine and he worked on it so it is now ready to drive again. The family also left the bunkhouse down on the river meadow clean and tidy before they left.

Kathleen and I shall miss them. The children from the two families had become friends during the several weeks that they were at the ranch. We wish them all the best. “Maybe we’ll see you again downwind,” as the bluewater voyagers like to say.

Someone else will now have to be found to get the dozer out of the ravine via the streambed and to grade the road. Bob however thinks that he can inch the Ford diesel out if the three bad spots have been repaired. Tomorrow the big day. The cattle markets are attractive and, of course, in an asset-intensive operation like a ranch (lots of money tied up in land and livestock), it is important also to have a regular stream of cash coming in to pay for help, buy feeds and equipment, etc.

A cowboy’s life not always what it seems

A cowboy’s life is apparently not all, or even mainly, about cattle and horses. Only recently has Dutch been doing more typically cowboy things like riding the ranges and checking fences, counting cattle, checking on their wellbeing. For the next couple of nights while the moon is full and the cattle prone to acting a little loco, he will actually be staying out overnight on the ranges.

Dutch has also done a lot of carpentry work around the ranchhouse complex including building a new “Dutch” door for the kitchen, preparing a new pigsty, building fed bins and mangers, etc. And he has spent hours repairing farm machinery. The intention, for example, is to plough some of the river-meadows and sew them with grass seed for winter silage. But so far the ancient Allis Chalmers tractor has resisted all attempts to make her work smoothly. The gas tank has rust in it and this gets all through the engine. Dutch has pulled apart the fuel lines, carburettor, fuel filters, etc. to come to this conclusion. Oh yes, the tractor has a flat tire as well. He hasn’t even looked at the plough and harrow yet. He may have to spend some time on that.

Did I mention that Dutch also spent a week near Creel with Cindy, the Ranchera, and Alex and Simon building a car-tire house. When he is here he has become the chief “chicken-plucker” as well; when we are to eat one of the henhouse roosters, it is usually Dutch who gets the job - catching, beheading, plucking, gutting, cleaning, and cooking his delicious soup (we tried roasting one of these birds once; let me be the first to tell you: Rancho el Nogal cocks are as tough as leather. Totally inedible!) And of course, a cowboy has to do his own housekeeping: doing his laundry, cleaning his bunkhouse, repairing his boots, mending his shirts and jeans.

Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys

Cowboys ain’t easy to love & they’re harder to hold
They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold
Lone star belt buckles & old faded Levis
and each night begins a new day
If you don’t understand him & he don’t die young
he’ll probably just ride away

Refrain:
Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don’t let ‘em pick guitars & drive them old trucks
let ‘em be doctors & lawyers & such
Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
They’ll never stay home & they’re always alone
even with someone they love.


GENTLEMEN NEVER FALL FROM HORSES; THEY ARE THROWN!
Friday, 14 October 2005

Well, I suppose it had to happen sometime. But after many times of riding different horses on some of the roughest that the ranch has to offer, today I lost an argument with Snip about what direction we were going to be riding.

Tanner, 10, has a black pony or mini-horse called Ginger; if you have ever read Black Beauty you will know where the name comes from. Now that Ginger works so well towing the sulky, T. is also training Ginger to the saddle. Next week she will be showing Ginger and her skills at an agricultural fair in Chihuahua. She asks me if I want to ride out with her into the large open meadow behind the corral. Approaching the final days of our stay at Rancho el Nogal, I am looking for opportunity to ride and agree readily.

Snip, a black stallion, has the reputation, I later hear, of being rather stubborn. Dutch rode him early on during his stay at the ranch and wound up walking back to the corral. I rode Snip out to the dozer site earlier this week but had no trouble.

Snip stands saddled and tied near the corral and I reckon on no problems. But, he is difficult about going through the gate and even tries to buck a few times. Why didn’t I get off then? At nearly every turn he tires to head back to the corral. He clearly thinks he is on a union contract! Only constant kicking and whacks with the end of the lasso keep him moving.

The major psychological problem here is that the corral is clearly visible from anywhere in the meadow. If the horse thinks it can head for the barn, it is going to try it whenever it can. Snip is a tough horse and fights me at every step.

Eli, 6, has decided to follow his sister out and around the meadow. He is walking barefoot without complaint, as he usually does. But at some point I ask him if he wants to ride behind me on Snip. He thinks this is a good idea; I help him up and point Snip away from the corral.

Snip has decided he has had plenty of this and is going home no matter what. We struggle. Snip begins to buck. After three or four good bucks I fly over his right shoulder, landing hard on my right shoulder. The wind is knocked out of me and I feel nothing. Nor can I seem to get any breath. I roll onto my back and see Snip, still bucking, moving away from me with Eli still hanging on to the saddle for dear life. I close my eyes involuntarily and feel the pain ooze into my shoulder and ribs.

When I open my eyes, I look up to the blue sky and see two small children and a black pony looking down at me.
“Are you all right?” T. asks.
“Not really,” I reply. “I hurt.”
After a minute or two I suggest she go and fetch Snip who is now eating grass about 100 yards off. T. returns leading Snip.
“Maybe you should walk her home,” she says.
“There’s no way I am walking back unless I kill that damned beast first!” I say.
T. giggles. I struggle to get up and feel less woozy on my feet. Nothing seems to be broken but my shoulder aches. When T. brings Snip back I can see that the horse is ready for more fighting; she has her ears back and her forefeet planted wide apart. I ask T. to hold his bridle while I climb aboard. Pulling myself up with my right arm hurts like the very devil. I am clearly going to be in pain for a few days.

We walk slowly back to the corral. The pain is there in my shoulder and upper chest. But Snip’s gait is relatively smooth and I am doing all right. I stop once to let T., Ginger and Eli catch up; Snip is still in a feisty mood, still determined to get back to the corral as quickly as possible. He does not like stopping here and paws at the ground with his right forefoot.

Eventually we pull into the corral area. Climbing down is fraught with pain. I notice that the Tanner and Eli have headed out to find Kathleen who is reading while sitting on a log overlooking the river valley at some distance from the ranchhouse complex. I open the corral gate. Agh! Mensch! Scheisse! I tie up Snip and loosen the saddle girth – darn, that hurts! - before walking over to the nearby guesthouse where we sleep to swallow four aspirin and get a head start on the stiffness.

Bob and Cindy come along and the kids are all too eager to tell the whole gruesome, not to mention embarrassing story.
“Snip is a tough horse to fall off of,” Bob says, trying to be consoling.
“Oh, I don’t know. I found it pretty easy,” I say.
What he means is that Snip is tall and you fall a long way. Apparently he has fallen - correction: “been thrown” - several times from Snip. The last time he broke his arm.

Trying not to show my distress, I head into the ranchhouse to doctor the abrasions on my arm.


THE FINALE OF THE BULLDOZER SAGA
Thursday, 13 October 2005

It is evening, nearly dark. I sit in the guest house typing. I am tired. I have been awake since well before dawn, constantly checking if it is yet 0630 so I can get up to put the water on for breakfast coffee. I was in bed shortly after dark last evening and it looks like it might be early again tonight.

I have been riding each late afternoon out to the ravine where the dozer has been hanging on the side of the steep slope waiting for the time when the trees between it and the streambed have been cut and a pathway made for the wheeled dozer to race its final journey down. Bill, his son Joe along with occasional other helpers like Dutch and Alex have been working every day to build rock berms, chainsaw the moderately sized but very hard oak trees. Joe says himself that he is no spring chicken any more. The physically demanding work is exhausting. He looks gaunt, his eyes sunk into his skull. There is a lot on the line for Bill; he was driving the bulldozer when it slid sideways off the road. Since it was nearly the first thing he did after arriving with his family on the ranch, his shares are not going at an all-time high. The dozer is urgently needed to grade the whole ranch road so that two-wheel vehicles can get in and cattle carriers can get out. The ranch lives from cattle and from educational tourism, i.e. climbers, hikers, university courses in ecological subjects, etc. The heavy rains of last winter and the recent rainy season have played havoc with the ranch road, which of course is why the 60,000-pound, four- wheeled bull-dozer went off the road at a spot which cuts diagonally along the sides of a ravine. The soil there is very soft.

As part of the rescue attempt, last week the dozer was allowed to slide downwards into the sixty-foot ravine in two stages, each time at considerable risk of rolling the dozer. The betting odds amongst the gang were definitely indicating that they thought the dozer could roll at any time even after it came to a rest against an oak tree. It certainly looked precarious.

Every step of the rescue attempt had been plagued. The ranch ran out of gasoline for the chain saws, for example. This was after many hours were put in by Bill and his son Joe in cleaning them and getting the two machines operational. Then it was discovered that the spark plugs were actually broken. When high water caused the starter motor on the little pickup that the work team (usually just Joe and his father) to fail to start and then o run out of gas after several days, the men were obliged to ford the river on foot and walk the better part of an hour out to the site. Finally, the rains came back and made the ground under the dozer so soft that it was treacherous to even be near it.

But today it was going to be dropped into the stream bed so that it could be driven downstream to where the stream crossed and then back onto the road. There were some problems with this too since the stream bed, though more open and level than the ravine sides, was still littered with large boulders and oak trees growing out of the middle. It was hoped that the dozer could barge its way through.

Dutch rides out there in the afternoon to help and I go along to take photographs for the blog. We tie the horses in a shady spot in the woods and walk the last one hundred yards. Arriving, Bill tells us that since the vehicle has been at such an angle for so long, the engine will not start. The rains have also loosened the soil so much that the upright oak tree that the dozer was hung up on is now parallel to the ground. But the vehicle has settled somewhat and at a more propitious angle.

Without the dozer’s own engine power available to him, Bill has decided to pull the vehicle off its berm using a come-along. (A come-along is a chain rig that increases the leverage of a pull.) If everything works as planned – which nothing has up until now -, the dozer should roll backwards down the steep embankment and come to rest right-side up in the stream bed.

It takes some time to rig the heavy come-along. One-inch chain weighs over two pounds per foot of length and the blocks and hooks are heavy as well. The first attempt to use another oak tree as an anchor for the come-along fails because the tree-root systems are so shallow in these soils. As the chain comes under tension, instead of moving the behemoth vehicle, it pulls the tree out by the roots.

Bill, Joe and Dutch sweat to move the whole set up to a freshly-cut tree stump directly behind the dozer. The work on the dozer is complicated by the soft footing. The come-along is rigged at last and Dutch and Bill pump the handle to exert pull on the dozer.

Once the chain is off the ground, Bill climbs onto the dozer to release the brakes and put the transmission in neutral. The dozer remains somnolent though it seems to quiver as Bill leaps down.

To work the come-along, Dutch and Bill now have to stand directly between the tree stump and the dozer with their backs to the dozer. Dutch turns to Joe who is up the hill a bit and says, “You are my eyes now. If it starts to roll warn me in time!” Then he starts pumping.

As the chain hooked to the dozer’s trailer-hitch comes under increasing stress, we hear the dozer creaking and vibrating. Occasionally, from under the left rear tire, stones pop out of the built-up berm and roll bouncing down to the bottom of the arroyo. At some point everyone begins to shout that the dozer is starting to move under the pull of gravity. Dutch and Bill take off at a run in the loose gravel along pre-agreed pathways. The giant machine rolls up over the berm, the rear end tilts even further down, and the whole thirty-ton monster crashes backwards down the steep slope into the streambed in a cloud of dust.

The whole downhill dash takes about five seconds. Followed by silence. Then a cheer goes up from all present. The dozer is still upright and has landed exactly where Bill had said it would. And nobody is hurt.
Scrabbling down the hill, Bill climbs up on the dozer to set the brakes. H tries to start it but the battery does not have enough juice. Bill thinks that, lying for so long at an angle, the battery has lost fluid and probably exposed the plates to air and reduced their efficacy. With the dozer how nearly perfectly level, all the fluids in the machine – oil, hydraulic, battery - should settle back after an overnight stand. Bill plans to start it up the next morning and start to work his way, bulldozing, down the arroyo streambed. We return to the ranchhouse feeling very satisfied.

A RIDE TO THE DOZER RAVINE
Monday, 10 October 2005

Rode out on horseback this afternoon to the dozer site in expectation of seeing the final moves into the ravine. After hours of chain-sawing however, Bill, Joe and two Mexican lads – both called Jesus - who had been hired for the occasion, were getting close to moving the machine but were not quite ready to go. Eventually, they ran out of gasoline for the chainsaws and the light began to fail in the ravine. They gathered up their tools and slung them into the truck. Maybe tomorrow will work. This project is really important to the ranch both for the ranching and the tourism aspects.

It is fun to ride again. Cindy suggests I saddle Gus, Bob’s horse, and give him some exercise by riding out to the dozer site. She tells me that Bob has raised Gus from a colt, that the horse is soft-mouthed and if I jerk on his reins too much he will get obstreperous. Otherwise, although he will occasionally try to assert himself, he is a wonderful horse.

After saddling him, I ride him down the steep embankment below the house to the river, wade across and start up the road on the other side. I am enjoying the warm autumn-afternoon sunshine. Gus constantly tries to break into a fast trot or a canter especially when he sees a hill ahead of him. Since I have not ridden now for a couple of weeks and want to enjoy the tranquillity I keep him reined in and we trot or walk to the spot on the road where the chainsaw noise is coming from. I tie Gus to a tree a little distance away so he won’t be startled by the noises and walk down into the ravine.

The work is progressing. The oaks that stand between the dozer and the streambed have to be cut before the dozer can be moved. But they are hard-woods and in awkward positions. Smoke is coming from the saw blade as the men work at the logs. About an hour after I arrive, the sun sinks behind the ridge and the ravine starts to darken. At about the same time the gasoline for the saws runs out.

The ride back is just as enjoyable, the late sun golden on the distant yellow flower-covered hills. Gus again storms as every hill. He’s strong and enthusiastic. Cindy tells me that he is basically a cutting horse, trained to cut cattle out of herd and is used to short spurts of speed. Certainly Gus is a bigger horse than Alazan, which I have been riding up until now. Gus alsol has a much harder gait but is much spunkier as well. He likes action! The slightest word or noise from me and he breaks into a trot. At the bottom of the road we wade back into the river. As soon as Gus steps out onto the mudbank on the ranchhouse side, he breaks into an uphill gallop and storms the hill, taking the steep ravine in leaps and bounds, even navigating the tight curves on the goat-path at speed and only slowing down when he reaches the top of the hill. He is blowing a bit when he reaches the top but decides to prance into the corral in front of the other horses at a show-offy trot. He stands quietly with the reins dropped to the ground while I unsaddle him, slip a lasso over his head, unbridle him, give him a handful of choice horse feed, and turn him into the corral.

Cindy has done the cooking this afternoon: beef chile and pork chile. Bill, Joe and Alex are tired and hungry from the heavy work in the ravine. Dutch, on his uppers over the last couple of days from drinking bad water, seems to be back in good shape. Before I left for the ravine, Cindy told him to saddle up Snip, the stubborn bay horse that sent Dutch home in ignominy a week or so ago. Then Cindy and Dutch went out into the meadow behind the corral and Cindy gave Dutch a riding lesson on a Western horse. Then Dutch rode off to bring in mules and horses for the cattle drive that we will be attempting this week.

Back from the dozer site, Gus put up into the corral, I strip off near the water tank and have a good, though somewhat chilly, shower. The spot is rather exposed, of course. The trick is to pick a time when there is not a dozen people moving back and forth to the ranchhouse.


RETURN OF THE TIRE HOUSE GANG; RESTLESS NIGHT; TORRENTIAL RAIN STOP WORK ON DOZER; DUTCH TAKES SICK
Sunday, 09 October 2005

Return of the Planet Earth House Gang

Along about late afternoon we hear Bob’s white pickup truck grinding away, still out of sight on the other side of the river. Soon it appears, the open back filled with people. He fords the river and passes the stranded car from Rancho el Pescado on this side. (The three guys that we pulled out of the river two days ago show up on horseback yesterday to load up the huge sacks of beans and corn flour and other food for their ranch. For the moment at least, they are leaving the car locked up tight; that should guarantee mould and mildew build-up inside the vehicle. Later Bob told me that he has more or less given up on pulling Pescado cars out of the drink. Last year he did it at least six times. The Pescado people are anyway not wonderful neighbours: they don’t contribute to keeping the road up as they are legally obliged to do; they borrow things and don’t bring them back; etc. Our ranchero is a little tired of it all.)

Eventually the pickup truck pulls into the corral area with much waving and babbling. The little boys, Eli (6) and Levi (4), are full of excitement; T (for Tanner, 10) is quieter but apparently also glad to be back; Dutch has a million things to tell us about the camp over near Creel where they have just spent nearly a week building a house made of used car tires with the pupils of an American Christian school and the Tarahumara Indians. The camp was 500 metres higher and much colder at night than here; the river water gave everyone diarrhoea; the food was monotonous; Dutch thinks this morning that he is coming down with a virus brought to the site by the Christian students.

With so many people showing up tonight at the last moment, evening-meal planning goes out the window. There is already a pot of beans on the stove. Fortunately, Bob has brought some fresh provisions with him (most importantly onions and potatoes; can you imagine cooking on a daily basis without onions?), and we go to work to make a frittata, which though it doesn’t hit the table until well after dark (now occurring before 1900 hours) is consumed with great relish. As the meal finishes, the Wiggins Family file out and down to their house on the river meadow, the rest of us sing cowboy songs with the kids for a while in the living room before Bob begins to round up the little boys for bed and the ranchhouse quiets down for the night.

With the boys in bed, a domestic debate ensues between father and daughter about whether the Chihuahua dogs are to be inside or outside for the night. Unfortunately, I probably provoked this discussion since I announced that I was going on strike as far as cleaning up dog mess in the mornings inside the house is concerned. The dogs are put outside over T’s vehement protests. (This morning Dutch is dragging out the dogs’ travelling cage as a future night-time home for the Chihuahuas; he is also treating all the household animals, dogs and cats, for fleas.)

Restless night

For some reason all the animals are restless in the night. Even the Wiggins report that their Guinea pig keeps everyone awake in the night. How many times do I get up when the dogs all start barking and howling, joined by the Chihuahuas now too. They specifically seem to have taken up barking stations right outside our screen door? Is there a wild animal near the ranch; or are horses and mules coming up from the river meadows? Getting up to check, I see nothing in the pitch dark of a cloudy night. Between periods of barking and howling, the Chihuahuas scratch and whimper at our cabin door, keeping us awake. I hurl epithets at them from under the blanket only because I am too lazy to get up and hurl anything else. Sometime during the night there is a downpour; it must have occurred between barkings because we don’t hear it; this morning the ground is heavily soaked.

I am up and in the kitchen by 0630 to set the water boiling for breakfast coffee and tea and to get the beans heated up. Bob has decreed that the daily menu is henceforth to be mashed beans, one egg apiece, a tortilla and a coffee or tea. Bob and Cindy say that this is standard Mexican ranch fare and we should all get used to it. I’m all for authenticity but I suspect this might get old soon. Oh well, I guess with enough salsa anything can taste all right. I shall have to try some experimental things with beans.

We are having some complications in our meal planning. The Wiggins Family are used to eating a lot of meat but, following a Biblical injunction, do not eat either pork or any pork by-products (including lard, sausage, etc.). For health reasons they also do not eat any sugar, using honey for sweetening instead. Their dietary rules exclude sausage, bacon, a lot of tinned fruit, vegetables, sauces, etc. They carefully scan the labels for taboo contents. We have bacon and pork sausage but Kathleen and I have not wanted to cook two separate menus each day so we have been living on what is essentially a vegetarian diet. That’s fine. In fact, although we would like to have more meat, that’s the way we live on the boat since we cannot keep meat without refrigeration. But now Bob has returned with some pork roast, which we would all like to eat but the Wiggins Family will not touch. This is as much fairness and diplomatic issues as it a culinary problem. What to do?

TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS STOP WORK ON THE DOZER

Today reminds me of rainy and cool weather in the Austrian Alps. The kind of weather where, after three days of sitting on the edge of your bed in the Pension waiting for grey skies to clear, after three days of reading John Grisham novels, you are either going to go crazy or pack your bags and head for home. In between drizzle and distant thunder, we have had torrential downpours lasting for thirty minutes or more.

Bob, the Ranchero, Bill and Joe were all ready to undertake the final chapter of the dozer saga. Bill and Joe actually drove out there to at least have a look. But the rains, they said when the returned, had turned the hillside into a waterfall and the filled the arroyo streambed with rushing dirty water. The earth under the dozer was even more unstable than ever. The project has been postponed again.

Dutch takes sick

Dutch has really caught something while he was away. While the adults sit around this morning with wilderness medical books, Dutch sits slumped, wan and pale, on the sofa. Not only was the water at the planet-earth house this past week not good and gave him severe diarrhoea but this morning he is running a fever as well. The students at the project were also carrying viruses and maybe he has come down with that. Various treatments are discussed and discarded. In the end Dutch goes to bed after taking some homeopathic stuff. This afternoon he doesn’t look much better but he is getting bored lying in his bunk and is up and walking around.


BREAKING A MULE TO THE SADDLE; MARITIME DISASTER; GROUND DRIVING
Saturday, 08 October 2005

Under an azure blue sky with huge puffy clouds, Bill and his kids head out before lunch on Friday to bring in a red mule that’s to be broken to the saddle. She normally hangs out with a dun-coloured mule, a big sorrel mare, and her recent colt down in the river meadow or in the back pasture and wooded hillsides. Each time the guys drive them down close to the corral the animals bolt for the meadows again. After an hour of chasing them, we finally get them into the corral on the third roundup try.

Later, after lunch, I sit on the eight-foot high rail corral fence while Bill starts to work. The idea is to spend enough time in the corral for the animal, first, to get used to you and, second, for the horse or mule to accept you – of course, as a non-threat, but, more importantly, as the boss too.

At first all the animals are together. Bill starts to circle the horses and mules around the corral, trying to get them a little tired out. Eventually, however, he allows them to stop and he approaches the mare, first speaking gently to her as he gets close enough to touch her, rub his hands lightly around the face, neck, withers, back and flank, all the while talking to her quietly. The colt stays close but out of range and behind the mare. It’s clear that the mare has been broken before and is just being reminded about what she is supposed to do. Bill easily slips a loose rope halter around her neck and then around her muzzle and leads her around for fifteen minutes. The colt follows as do the two mules, but always keeping the mare between them and Bill. With time the mare and colt are led out and chased back out into the pasture.

The two mules are circling around the corral now until they are getting a little sweated and tired. The dun mule is shod so obviously she has been broken before. Their circuit is initially as far away as they can get from Bill in the centre. But, as they get tired the circle gets smaller. The goal is now to separate the two mules, to get the dun out of the corral without letting the red bolt out of the open gate at the same time. This takes another fifteen minutes of so. The dun is getting tired and mildly sweated; she wants a way out and keeps looking longingly at the three closed gates and licking her lips. Terry tells me that that is an important sign that the horse or mule is ready to submit and is looking for an opportunity to please the “boss”.

The red mule is untrained and not at all happy about having somebody with his eye on her. She is skittish and trots rapidly around the corral keeping the dun between her and the trainer. Bill is able eventually to separate them but only after they are puffing and sweating. They are ready to concede authority to Bill, Terry tells me, when they start licking their lips. They are soon going to come up to the trainer or let him approach them closely. The dun seems eager to submit now and even seems to be trying to get shot of her red shadow. After more running around, the dun changes direction, abandoning the red mule, someone opens the gate a crack, and the dun mule slip out. The red mule is alone in the corral at last. Bill decides to give her an hour to think things over and calm down and we go to lunch.

During our meal Bill and Terry explain their approach to making useful animals out of wild ones. The old “cowboy way”, as they call it, was to tie the horse, somehow throw a saddle onto her, climb aboard and keep riding it until the horse gave up in exhaustion. Often there was a lot brutal handling of the horse, long sharp spurs, whips, beatings, swearing and anger. The beast is in a turmoil of fear. Everyone, both horse and broncobuster, knows that a horse is afraid of anything on its back and, if it cannot use its natural speed to get away from danger, it will try to buck off anything on its back. In this process the horse is brutalised. It becomes either “broken” completely or, more likely, half-broken; it remains semi-wild, suspicious and contentious.

Bill and Terry subscribe to a more modern method and they have the practical experience to know that it works. There is an excellent discussion of it in a book called The Complete Training of Horse and Rider in the Art of Classical Horsemanship by Alois Podhaussky; he was the head of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. (The film, The Horse-whisperer also deals with this newer type of horse-“breaking” though not in their opinion very well.) The more modern system takes a little longer, usually two or three weeks at the most. The horse is broken first to driving (i.e. pulling a wagon) and therefore to “mouth reining” (my term). Then it is trained to the saddle and “neck reining”.

Bill and Terry, as I understand it, are trying to win the horse over rather than conquer it, to co-opt its spirit rather than break it, to make a partner out of it rather than a slave. A horse, by nature a herd animal, is normally predisposed to recognise a leader. Since it will have to submit to a human being rather than another horse, it will of course be suspicious, afraid of being hurt or devoured by this strange animal. It may in fact have been brutalised or hurt in the past and be angry or over frightened now. One doesn’t know this going into the corral.

Step one is to make the animal start circling the corral to tire it out and to assert mastery over it. Round and round goes the red mule. She is a high stepper with a long smooth trot. In fact her gait is quite impressive and she is fast. At first she steps high and keeps to the outside of the corral. Bill has a lasso coiled in his left hand. If the mule starts to slow down he waves at her from behind to keep her going (not in her face, which might maker her stop). After a while, the mule begins to breath a little more heavily, sweat begins to break out on her withers, her high stepping disappears and her hooves stay closer to the ground as she runs, and the circle gets smaller as she circles around Bill; she is getting a little tired.

She is also getting tired of this game and would like to get it over with. Once or twice she breaks her stride and heads one after the other straight towards the three gates in a vain hope of escaping this guy with the lasso. Bill is not threatening her. But every time she tries to stop at a distance to him, he clucks to her, raises his coiled lasso behind her and makes her go around and around some more. Finally, when it is clear that the mule is almost asking for permission to stop, Bill allows her to stop and says “whoa” to her.

Each time she turns to face Bill in the centre of the corral. Bill wants her to come to him or at least allow him to approach her. All the while talking gently to her, he turns his back on her or in any case avoids looking her in the eye. Then he will take a step towards her but obliquely and not straight at her. Most horses will very soon either come forward to the new “boss” or let themselves be approached. If the mule turns away when Bill tries to approach it, which is it always does, Bill immediately clucks to it, raise his lasso in his hand to make the horse do a few more rounds, not letting her stop just any old time she wants but only when Bill himself decides the horse can halt.

The red mule proves to be very slow to get the point. Of course, as both Terry and Bill point out, the mule doesn’t know exactly what is expected of it and the animal must first hit on it on its own so it can then be rewarded. “Red” hasn’t got it figured out yet. After several hours of circling, however, it seems to want to do something submissive; we can see her licking her lips. But every time she is allowed to stop and every time Bill tries to approach she turns slowly and walks away and Bill immediately puts her into a trot again. It could be that she thinks Bill actually wants her to keep trotting around the corral, Terry thinks. The mule has not yet figured it out that it can avoid all this running by letting Bill come closer or by approaching Bill itself.

After several hours both Terry and Bill say they have seldom experienced an animal that takes so long to give up and give in. The day is getting on. A lively discussion then ensues between the two trainers: Terry is stoutly of the opinion that it would be wrong to give up now; the circles and stopping and starting should go on until the mule submits even if it takes all night. Bill thinks it is possible to stop now and start again in the morning. Since it is his animal to break, he prevails.

In the middle of all this, Bill asks someone to take over for a few minutes so he can make a pit stop and I ask if I can try it. To my surprise, Bill agrees and I climb down off the corral and into the ring. He stays with me for a minute or two and both he and then Terry from the sidelines give me tips on how to carry on: just keep the mule moving but don’t try to frighten him into running; be calm; at a point of my choosing allow the mule, which is anyway wanting to stop, to come to a halt; talk to it quietly; don’t look it in the eye; take an oblique step towards it; if it turns away at any time, get it moving again as if it were my idea.

I wish I could say that, while Bill was in the outhouse, the red mule accepted me as the new boss and was eating out of my hand. That doesn’t happen but I am starting to get the hang of it. Bill gets back to work and I climb back up on my perch. The decision about whether to carry on without interruption or to wait for another day is in a sense taken out of our hands by the excitement down at the river ford.

Maritime disaster

Around here the only sounds you hear in the background are the river rushing over its rocky bed and/or the wind in the trees. It is not hard, therefore, to pick up the sound of a vehicle long before you see it in the river flats heading for the ford. With the heavy rains in the last few days, the river, although it is down from its maximum early this morning, is still quite high. We wonder as we see the van come into the open if the driver will attempt a crossing. We are all watching when we see it push into the water. In a moment or so the water is up over the tires and the vehicle comes to a stop in mid-river. We watch as we see figures crawl out of the windows onto the hood of the car. One person tries to leap from the hood to the far shore, not even getting close and landing in the water. He slogs to shore and starts walking up to the ranch.

Meanwhile, we all decide we need to go down and pull the van out. A heavy chain and some rope are loaded into the back and we roll-start the red pickup down the hill. This vehicle will not start by itself since the starter also got wet a few days ago when crossing when the water was too high; the pickup made it but the starter is soaked.

There are three young guys with the car. Two of them are called Jesus and one is not. Non-Jesus lives I think at Rancho el Pescado; just over the pass into the next arroyo; his father at any case is over at the ranch and there is no other vehicle over there. Jesus 1 is from Phoenix and speaks good English; Jesus 2 is a playful young man but the ranch boy is withdrawn and will not look me in the eye. He may be worried about how his father is going to greet the news that his van was stuck in the river. The van is loaded with large sacks of pinto beans, corn flour and various other comestibles as well as a large heavy-duty tire.

They fasten the chain around a bumper strut and we pull them slowly out of the water and up onto the bank. When they open the door, water pours out both sides like waterfalls. It must have been up over the transmission mound inside.

They try, but the vehicle will obviously not start; the marcha (the starter) has been soaked and the water is diffusing the battery’s electrical charge. We push them back out of the way so that other vehicles can get through on the road while they debate what they should do. There is obviously a road over to Rancho el Pescado; it runs across the open meadow behind the corral and then up the yoke between two hills to the north. I have ridden it twice with Simon and Bob. Unfortunately, the ranch is out of gasoline until Bob returns from the “outside”. We can’t drive them over to Pescado and we certainly wouldn’t attempt to tow them anyway; the red pickup gets really hot and starts steaming.

We offer them a lift as far as our corral; they will have to hoof it after that. They reluctantly close up the car and, empty-handed, climb into the pickup. From the ranchhouse complex they strike off in their wet boots and shoes to slog the steep hill to Pescado. We turn back to the house for supper.

Those who till now have thought that nothing much happens on a remote cattle ranch in the Tarahumara Mountains of Northern Mexico will now have to confess that we are kept busy from morning to night with one exciting event after another. Over supper, after our heartbeats have slowed from the excitement, we all wonder how people in suburban America can survive without dying of boredom. It must be that TV is their only diversion. In the old days they made babies. But since they are not making many babies these days, that must be it: work; commute; watch TV.

Ground driving

After dinner, in the gloaming, Jeannie and Terry harness Ginger, the miniature black horse, and hitch her to her sulky. Ginger is not only pretty, she is very patient and very well trained now. Since she is likely pregnant, the sulky shafts are getting a little tight. But soon Jeannie is trotting her along the ranch road. After a while they come back, we unhitch the buggy and I get the opportunity to “ground drive” her. “Ground drives”, it must be said, has nothing whatsoever to do with baseball or even with pile-driving; it involves walking behind, actual next to, the horse with both reins in one’s hand(s) and guiding the horse.

Ginger is beautifully responsive: if you say “walk on” she will start immediately even before you touch the whip gently to her hind quarters; if you say “whoa” and tug very gently on the reins, she will stop on the spot; if you tug her reins a few times and say “back”, she will back up a few steps. Jeannie even has Ginger to where she will almost take a bow on her own.

This whole family are experienced horse trainers. Tanner, Bob and Cindy’s ten-year-old daughter, will be driving Ginger in a competition at a fiesta in a week or two. Jeannie has been working with her to get horse and driver ready.

As night falls and the stars come out, the Wiggins head off down to their quarters near the river and we reckon we have had another exciting day.




NEW LOOK TO THE BOGSITE; JOHNNY IDENTIFIES NEW LIZARD SPECIES; SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT RETURNING TO GUAYMAS; LOOKING FOR WATER
Friday, 07 October 2005

New look to the blogsite

Thanks to Gwen who designed the original site and has now worked tirelessly to get the blogsite up to speed. The archived texts are available and recent photographs are also here on the left-hand side. I hope to get more photographs posted in the next few weeks but this will depend upon space.

Johnny Wiggins identifies new lizard species

Let me tell you about Johnny Wiggins. He is the youngest (15) of the Wiggins clan that arrived recently at Rancho el Nogal from the U.S.A. The family includes Bill and Terry, his parents, and Johnny’s older siblings, Joe (19) and Jeannie (17). A really nice family. Bill is a trained electrician and is handy with machinery of all types. And the whole family is involved with horses, including coach and saddle horses. Despite his young years, Joe is an inventor with lots of ideas. I’ll write more about Joe another time.

Johnny’s consuming passion, on the other hand, is reptiles. He is a fountain of information about them. Not only are reptiles Johnny’s consuming passion, they are close to being his main topic of conversation.
“Lovely day to-day, Johnny!”
“Speaking of lovely day, did I tell you about the blue spiny lizard that I caught just this very day?”
or
“I read on the net today that American bombs are destroying Fallujah.”
“Speaking of war in the Middle East, did you know that there are fourteen types of poisonous vipers in Iraq, the largest being 2.5 kilometres long?”

You get the picture. He’s a great kid and has obviously got something that interests him. His knowledge of the subject would put a graduate student in biology to shame.

Half the time, when he comes into the ranchhouse, Johnny has a lizard in his hand. I was hoping as an experiment to get a flock (herd?) of them inside to help keep the house flies under control. The reptiles did not do too badly. But unfortunately, or not depending upon your point-of-view, the house-lizards have turned into MRE’s (Meals Ready-to-Eat) for the striped cat who, it develops, is quicker at catching lizards than lizards are at catching flies (or escaping cats, obviously). But I digress

Yesterday Johnny announces that he has discovered what he thinks is a new species of lizard: it's clearly of the Spiny Lizard family, he says. But these ones have very spiny scales on the neck that grow smaller as they run towards the tail (this is the opposite of normal spiny lizards). The points of the spines all have little holes in them; this is also unusual. The juvenile male he actually captured has a green head and neck and a blue patch that fades toward white in the centre. The adult he saw but didn't capture had more blue but Johnny couldn't tell how far back it went; the female he also captured has blue all the way to the tail and split down the centre.

I tried looking up the Latin for John but none of the online English-Latin dictionaries would translate Johnny’s name. So I am guessing: I think we should call this "scelopores ioniensis" and he should report it to whomever one reports these things to. (If anyone knows how to translate John’s name into Latin, please email me.)

Second thoughts about returning to Guaymas

We are having second thoughts about leaving the ranch at the end of next week. Temperatures in Guaymas this week have topped 100 ° F every day (CNN weather) and it is wonderfully cool up here. We want to be in La Paz to meet Bob Ferguson, my Canadian friend who is coming down on a motor vessel from Seattle by the end of this month. We thought we might go to San Carlos on 15Oct05, ready Vilisar for sea and sail across to Sta. Rosalia on the Baja-California peninsula and dally down to La Paz to arrive in time to meet Bob.

One of the main reasons impelling us to take the crap shoot of leaving Vilisar on a mooring buoy during the hurricane season was the intense heat in the Sea of Cortés in the summer. The water temperature in Bahia San Carlos was 90 ° F when we left and the air temperatures were in excess of that. Only the southerly afternoon breezes made life tolerable. At night, the wind died and it was hot and sticky and uncomfortable. Returning to that is not an attractive option but we don’t want to miss Bob in La Paz. Maybe we will stay on another week here and then sail directly from San Carlos to La Paz without exploring the Baja coast going south.

Yesterday was a perfect day. Around 1830, the Wiggins came in for dinner and we sat down to a meal. As night fell, the sky became dark and there was lots of lightning and thunder in the distant. It had already started to splash rain when they headed off to their bunkhouse about half an hour away up the meadows along the river. They had just got under cover when it began to pour. Although the sky cleared during the night and the sun came up into blue skies, the river is very high this morning thanks to the heavy rains upriver. The temperatures in the night were probably down in the fifties and there were thick banks of clouds over the distant mountains before sunrise. They are all burnt off now and the day is warming up. Last night was the first time the dogs did not bark or some animal cause commotion in the breezeway where the feeds are kept.

Looking for water

Late yesterday afternoon, having finished their list of projects and come to halt on the dozer waiting for machine parts and gasoline, Bill and family head off with shovels to dig out a potential spring as a water supply for their house. At present they are carrying water back and forth from the ranchhouse reservoirs (actually, plastic tanks supplied from a spring about a half mile away in the hills). The water source is only about 150 yards from their accommodation so would be ideal. At dinner, however, they had to report that the “spring” looks more like simply water rain runoff and would likely dry up after the rainy season. They will continue looking but sources farther away will mean buying more ¾-inch water pipe.

There are lots of water sources on the ranch. Bob, the ranchero, told me once that on this 7,000 hectare (17,000 acres) ranch, he has 27 all-weather flowing streams and two rivers, one being the Tutuaca River right in front of the house. Even the Tutuaca tested clean enough to drink though, at present, it is rather murky from the sand and silt being carried down by the heavy runoff. But not all sources are close to where you need the water. By the way, some of the springs are actually warm (not hot) springs. Could for soaking in!

BLOGSITE SPACE LIMITATIONS; ON DOZERS, WATCHDOGS AND OTHER MATTERS
Thursday, 06 October 2005

Blogsite space limitations

I have just heard from our dear friend, Gwen, in Boston who hosts this website that the reason we have no archives and no photos at present is because she does not have enough space. We are working on this and hope to have a reasonable solution soon. Unfortunately, I am pretty ignorant about websites so it could be longer than I expect. Be patient and stay tuned.

On dozers, watchdogs and other matters

Things are still quiet here. There are so many people away that the main activities around here are getting the dozer ready to complete its (one hopes) controlled slide into the arroyo and working on the ranchhouse complex’s 12-volt electrical system. With the tranquillity I suddenly become aware of the wonderful scent of the yellow flowers now blanketing every hill. When the breeze comes up from the river valley, it wafts up this sweet perfume. In the quiet then you hear the wind blowing through the live oaks near the house and the buzzing of the bees in the meadows on the slope below us. Makes me want to take up beekeeping and honey-making. It is so quiet and somnolent in the afternoon that, should a vehicle approach either from over the pass from Rancho el Pescado to the north or on the road in from Yepachic on the other side of the river, we can hear the distance growling of 4-wheel-drive and walk out to check.

Bill and his son Joe have been working in the ravine to clear a path for the dozer to slide and propping it up so it doesn’t roll over and crush them when they use the chainsaw to cut both the logs underneath on which the machine is resting, albeit precariously and the tree against which the rear trailer-hitch on the dozer is hooked. Since axes and handsaws cannot be used on the final stage (can’t get them in under the machine) and the chainsaws cannot be used until gasoline and new spark plugs arrive from the outside world, work is at a halt for the moment. Bob is expected back tonight but predictions about arrivals from the outside are always tenuous. It might actually be another couple of days before he returns. Meanwhile, Bill and Joe work on the machinery and the electricals where they can.

Without Simon, Dutch and Alex gone, and no other cowboys around there are no ranch animals around the corral either. Normally somebody is saddling up or returning from distant ranges or bringing in cattle or horses to cull them or handle them. Now, however, the corral is empty, the saddle horses and mules are somewhere out to pasture and we are left with chickens, the nanny goat, the lamb and, of course, a plethora of dogs.

The dogs are characters themselves. Except for Cody who is actually a herd dog, the rest are either pets (the two Chihuahuas, Sparkle and Moonface), watch dogs (Greta), or supernumeraries (ancient old Tank, the mastiff, and Phil, the, um, whatever). Any alarms are usually started by Greta. She is the most reliable guard. Immediately she starts, however, the rest also all start barking. The din is terrific if they near the house. If we are inside the ranchhouse or guest house, we always go out to check if the racket continues for more than ten seconds. Somebody’s coming. If the pack is barking to the north a horseman is likely heading down into the last ravine before climbing up to the corral area. If the dogs are facing east, somebody is coming along the approach road from the ford. Strangers and Pima Indians nearly always stop at a gate and wait for a while for the dogs to calm and to be invited in. Cindy told me that Indians are terrified of dogs and especially of old Tank.

The big dogs usually settle down if they see us accept the approaching horsemen or hikers. The Chihuahuas, however, not only have a shrill, unpleasant, yappy-type of bark they are also still very young and have had no obedience training. They just go on and on yapping and running around and getting underfoot. Any conversation with the visitor has to be put off for a while till the dogs cool off. One thing you can say for them, though: they are not afraid of anything bigger than they are. Of course everything is bigger than they are! They self-importantly bark at Cody who likes to sneak into the house if he can do so undetected or Tank who lumbers slowly around in his blind senility. Or they will suddenly take off running and yapping after chickens if, in the dogs’ opinion, the birds are too close to the house. The chickens scrabble indignantly away, squawking and screeching, some flapping up onto the top bar of the corral. The Chihuahuas come prancing back feeling more important than ever. Last week they became very perturbed when a mule found its way into the area just around the ranchhouse to enjoy the sweet grass there. Sparkle and Moonface become apoplexic. Off they dash, nipping and yapping at the mule’s rear hooves. Except for the occasional swish at them with a hind hoof, the mule largely ignores them and keeps grazing. At least the noise drives me out to close the little foot-gate into the breezeway where the feedbags are stacked. A few weeks ago that same mule got in there; no doubt he thought it was Christmas, Easter and his birthday all rolled into one until I shooed him out.

Sometimes at night the dogs will set up a real hullabaloo, barking and howling endlessly. When I get up to check, the bigger dogs (the Chihuahuas sleep in the ranchhouse) are out in the corral area, just sitting back on their haunches, their heads extended, and howling like wolves. They have heard coyotes calling and are joining in. The Call of the Wild, I guess.

I don’t know what else can be found around here that is wild. We hear the coyotes but don’t see them. And there are also javelinas (i.e. either native wild pigs but sometimes feral domestic pigs) and some sort of deer; we have seen does and fawns on occasion. Bill said his family has seen big cougar footprints near the ranchhouse; I wonder if these are really actually Tank’s paw-prints. In any case, what with chickens and pigs to attract the attention of predators (not to mention little yappy dogs), I am glad to have the hounds around. Now if we could only train the Chihuahuas to stop chasing the chickens!

If it stays warm this afternoon, I’m heading down to the river for a swim.

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE RANCH; BUILDING WITH ADOBE
Wednesday, 05 October 2005

With the ranch’s normal “population” thinned out by “outbounds” (Cindy with kids, Dutch and Alex all gone to Cindy’s “Planet Earth Project”; Bob gone to town on business; Simon on vacation at a fiesta), things remain pretty quiet at Rancho el Nogal. The river was high for a few days after the heavy Hurricane Otis-spawned thunder storms. Despite some cloud, however, no rain last night and today’s internet satellite picture shows no cloud at all around the whole of northern Mexico and southwestern U.S.A. Kathleen and I have been doing small household jobs, preparing meals, and writing.

The new ranch family headed by Bill and Terry have fit right in and keep busy all day. Terry and Jeannie have been working with Tanner on her pony & sulky training and, in Tanner’s absence this week, have been working on the harness and sulky as well as training the pony. Progress is good and the pony is really good at obeying voice commands.

The big job at present, of course, is to get the bulldozer dug out and back on the road. At present it is hung up precariously on trees, logs and rocks some two-thirds of the way down the 60-foot (roughly 20 metres) steep ravine. Bill and Joe are working on it. The first job is to prop up the dozer using logs so they can get underneath it and dig without the machine rolling over onto them. The props are to be made of logs from nearby trees.

A lot of time is wasted because the small pickups are either out of gas, have no batteries, are flat tires, or cannot cross the river at the ford without getting the starter or carburettor wet. This means a lot of hiking back and forth. Then the two chainsaws here refuse to work probably because, in the past, the wrong fuel-to-oil mixture has been used and the spark plugs and ignition system are now totally gummed up. Moreover, we are out of gasoline. Bill spent several hours late yesterday trying to get the chainsaws going. He finally gave up and this morning he and Joe took an axe out with them. Of course, it needed sharpening first.

At present we are waiting for Bob to return from town with jerry cans of fresh, clean gasoline along with a backup tank of propane, drums of diesel fuel for the machinery, spark plugs, carburettor cleaner, and some more food and provisions.

He was expected back last night. But around noon yesterday a horseman rides up from about three hours away with a written message that Bob and Simon have to be in Guerrera tomorrow (06Sep05). Since Simon has the week off and has disappeared to a fiesta in Maycoba, I think, assuming of course that Bob actually received the message I emailed to him, he will have an interesting time rounding up Simon, who may be letting his hair down quite thoroughly. Ah, life on a remote ranch!

Bill is a trained electrician and has passed on lot of his knowledge to his 19-year-old son, Joe. In addition to the heavy dozer work, t he two of them have been working to rewire the solar electrical system. The 12-volt lights inside the ranchhouse are now much, much brighter.

Since the typical building material around this part of rural (and often urban as well) Mexico is adobe I have been doing a little research on the subject. There are a lot of sites where you can get information – and thank goodness for internet access at the ranch! This quote comes from http://www.greenhousbuilding.com/.

Adobe
Adobe is one of the oldest building materials in use. It is basically just dirt that has been moistened with water, sometimes with chopped straw or other fibers added for strength, and then allowed to dry in the desired shape. Commonly adobe is shaped into uniform blocks that can be stacked like bricks to form walls, but it can also be simply piled up over time to create a structure. The best adobe soil will have between 15% and 30% clay in it to bind the material together, with the rest being mostly sand or larger aggregate. Too much clay will shrink and crack excessively; too little will allow fragmentation. Sometimes adobe is stabilized with a small amount of cement or asphalt emulsion added to keep it intact where it will be subject to excessive weather. Adobe blocks can be formed either by pouring it into molds and allowing it to dry or it can be pressed into blocks with a hydraulic or leverage press. Adobe can also be used for floors that have resilience and beauty, colored with a thin slip of clay and polished with natural oil.
Adobe buildings that have substantial eaves to protect the walls and foundations to keep the adobe off the ground will require less maintenance than if the walls are left unprotected. Some adobe buildings have been plastered with Portland cement on the outside in an attempt to protect the adobe, but this practice has led to failures when moisture finds a way through a crack in the cement and then can't readily evaporate. When adobe is used as an exterior plaster it is either stabilized or replastered on a regular basis.
Adobe is a good thermal mass material, holding heat and cool well. It does not insulate very well, so walls made of adobe need some means of providing insulation to maintain comfort in the building. Sometimes this is accomplished by creating a double wall, with an air space, or some other insulation in between. Another approach is placing insulating materials on the outside.
Every building at the ranch but the log cabin where Simon, the hired cowboy lives, and the sheet-metal outhouse are built of adobe. The ranch has been settled for over 100 years but I am not sure how old the hacienda is. The big ranchhouse is much bigger. The newest buildings are the guest house, where Kathleen and I live, and two houses about 30 minutes from here up river. One is a bunkhouse that is currently occupied by the new ranch family, and a house that Bob’s daughter is building.

Once one has decided on adobe and found a site with the right mix of clay and sand, the actual process is fairly easy. Working steadily, you can make between 300 and 500 bricks a day, depending upon how experienced you are. Windows, doors, floors and roofing all have to be decided upon. Windows and doors can be as many or few as you wish and either industrially made or fashioned of un-planed planks, as most of them are here at Rancho el Nogal. Around here it is not as cold as farther north but well-fitting doors and windows will keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. Having lots of windows on the south side means better solar warming in the winter. There are still some split-shingle rooves on the original hacienda building. But corrugated metal over pine pole rafters seem to be the roofing material of choice here. The newer stuff works quite well, some of the older corrugated iron is pretty rusty and probably in need of replacement. Certainly the high winds in the recent rain squalls were trying to rip the older roofs off.

I think it would be great fun to design and build an adobe house on Rancho el Nogal. In quiet moments I am mentally working through some ideas. It would be small to start with and have southern exposure to catch the warm rays and to take advantage of the view across the river valley. The roof might be corrugated iron but would have some sort of insulation. The walls would also be insulated somehow. If the north side was without windows, that would be all right too. The foundation would be stone and the floor would be adobe with a coat of cement and oiled with boiled linseed oil. A lot of things would be built in of adobe, like a window bench, perhaps a bed. We are used to oil lamps on the boat and we are also used to going to bed when it gets dark or reading by flashlight. Eventually one could have solar power; we bought used ones from E-Bay for about 1US$ 180 each last year for the boat. The solar power is necessary so we can operate the computer and the wifi system. Internet access definitely makes Rancho el Nogal seem much, much less remote. The furnishing would be “southwestern”, i.e. Indian blankets, baskets, etc. These are just play ideas. But you never know.


HURRICANE OTIS DOWNGRADED TO “TROPICAL STORM”; QUIET AT THE RANCH
Tuesday, 04 October 2005

Thank goodness! Hurricane Otis has been downgraded to a Tropical Storm and will likely pass well to the west of San Carlos, Sonora. We are able from here to take a look at Vilisar once in a while via a live web-cam overlooking Bahia San Carlos. (http://cybercosecurity.viewnetcam.com/; move the camera around by remote control till you spot Vilisar.) Judging by the palm trees in the picture, it was fairly windy. There were clouds around and it was raining but the boat seems to be all right.

Although we had threats of rain in the afternoon, we are able to get plenty of sunshine today and the batteries, which had become depleted through a combination of cloudy skies and a lot of people using their laptops here. At one point there were three of us, Cindy, Tanner and I, sitting in a row on the sofa with laptops going. In the evening we had to sit by candlelight because there was not enough power left in the batteries. I was able to get a lot of writing done. The only hindrance is the plethora of houseflies. Darn them anyway! I wish they would die and go to their own place!

After working around the dozer with Bill, Joe and Simon this morning, Bob collected up Simon this afternoon and drove off for Cuauhtémoc. Simon is supposed to be enjoying a one-week holiday and attending a fiesta. But so far, what with the dozer, etc., he has not been able to get away. Cindy left yesterday with the two kids, Dutch and Alex. Everything is very quiet. Only the droning of flies. Kathleen works on “consolidating” in the kitchen

HURRICANE OTIS; BURSTING AT THE SEAMS; “THE DOZER”; SOME PICTURES FROM RANCHO EL NOGAL

Sunday, 02 October 2005

Mid-afternoon and it’s really starting to rain again. Tropical Storm Otis has been upgraded to a Category 3 Hurricane. Since yesterday we have been feeling its effects. Even though the storm centre is still south of Cabo San Lucas at the southern top of Baja California Sur, the larger pattern of warm air producing clouds and rain is being felt all over northern Mexico. For us in the Tutuaca Mountains it’s humid and warm, it begins to cloud up by late morning or early afternoon and, sometime well before dark, we get an intense tropical squall, which sometimes includes hail and gusty winds. It’s like having the rainy season back again just when we thought it was over and when the grass and meadow flowers were beginning to turn brown. Now every meadow is covered in tall yellow flowers.

The metal for the roof over the front half of the ranchhouse is still on order. So now, within a few minutes, rain is dripping from the big stripped-pine rafters and running down the adobe walls. Clearly there is not much that can be done about the drips until a roof is completed over the front half of the house. But a pity about the walls that were painted such a lovely baroque ochre. After several rains earlier in our stay here, the paint has now fallen away to reveal the wet mud walls. Then the mud begins to run down to the floor as well. In the kitchen and dining areas, we put pots and pans around to catch the drips.

Vilisar is tied to a mooring buoy San Carlos, Sonora, i.e. closer to the main path of Hurricane Otis. The storm is heading straight up the Sea of Cortés with winds predicted to be 85 mph with gusts of 105 mph. I sent a message to Alex, our neighbour in the anchorage at San Carlos, asking him what he intends to do and if he would please check Vilisar’s mooring lines and, especially, the chafing gear. Back in Washington State a few years ago when we left the boat on a state marine-park buoy, we returned to find that one of the lines had leapt out of the bronze chock during a storm, the chafing gear had slid down, and the rope had chafed through completely, leaving the only back-up line to keep the boat from drifting away or washing up on a reef. Alex wrote back that the marina staff had been around to check everybody’s mooring.

We shall see. Certainly there is nothing to do from this distance and I can’t get back before the hurricane comes. And what would I do if I did go back? I could, I suppose, run the boat’s engine to take the pressure off the mooring. But that means staying on Vilisar during the hurricane. Do I really want to be doing that? I guess if I were on the scene and Vilisar were to be washed up on the beach I could prevent the vessel’s being plundered. Well, watch and pray. The brunt of the storm should pass through tomorrow.

Rancho el Nogal bursting at the seams

A day or so before I left the ranch with Bob for (as it turned out) a week in Chihuahua, a family of five arrived at the ranch from Florida. Bill and Terry, the parents, along with Joe (19), Jeannie (17) and John (15) have a lot of ranch and farm and especially horse experience. They also know a lot about off-grid electricity including solar and other eco-friendly power generating systems. They are really nice and pitch right in. John is a walking encyclopaedia about reptiles; Jeanie is helping Tanner (10) to prepare her driving miniature pony for the upcoming show in a nearby town. And Joe, the eldest, is quite an expert on solar power and electrical power. He and his Dad are working to rewire the 12-volt system that supplies power to the ranchhouse complex. I am scheming to get Joe to improve the setup in the guest house so we can read in bed at night and charge my laptop there.

At present they are eating ranch-style with everybody else here at the ranchhouse. Cooking at present therefore means feeding fifteen mouths at each sitting. After weeks of just a few of us, the pandemonium can be a bit much; screaming kids; several adults in the kitchen trying to be helpful, lots of people talking at once, uncertainty about who is supposed to be cooking and cleaning up.

We have however now developed a kitchen rota (which I call the Kitchen Patrol or KP) whereby each family unit takes a whole day: breakfast is ready by 0700, dinner at 1900, and some grazing-type lunch at 1300. The cooks put out a big basin of washing up water and everyone is now expected, encouraged, cajoled, nagged, or ordered to wash up their own dishes in hot soapy water and rinse them under the tap. The cooks are left with cleaning the pots and pans, washing off tables and leaving a clean kitchen for the early-rising KP the next morning. This has taken a little of the confusion and even tension out of so many new people getting along.

The amount of comestibles consumed by fifteen people is pretty amazing so we are having to go for giant packages of everything. At present there is no vegetable garden at Rancho el Nogal. Until there is – and I have no idea whether it is already too late to plant one –shopping involves not just soap, toothpaste, cooking oils, butter, and canned goods, it also means picking up fruit and vegetables as well. There are some special dietary requirements in our expanded group but so far we have been able to work around them and everybody gets fed. Bob and Cindy push beans and tortillas pretty heavily, but Norteamericanos don’t really fancy a steady and monotonous diet of beans. At least the KP rota means that you get a couple of days off so the duty doesn’t seem that onerous any more.

Bob wants to wait until the weather gets cooler before butchering the mean-tempered bull, one of the pigs or the lamb. For one thing a few cold days will kill the flies, which can be a real nuisance. (As an aside, we don’t really have many mosquitoes here because of the very porous and rocky ground, not to mention the steep and mountainous terrain; there is therefore very little standing water for mosquitoes to breed in.) The colder weather also means that the cool rooms are more effective. (While Bob and I were a week away in Chihuahua, Dutch cleared out both of the storage rooms in the old house and sorted out the tools, equipment, harness, parts, oils, and food storage. I am secretly glad I was not around to have to help! But what a difference it has made.) (An interesting project the new family are talking about, by the way, is installing a hydroelectric generating plant in the Tutuaca River below the house. This could eventually mean real refrigeration.

“THE DOZER”

“The Dozer” is a 60-tonne monster with four huge rubber tires, a huge diesel engine, and a big dozer blade. Ranchero Bob bought it cheap at auction a few years ago in the U.S.A. and brought it down by truck to Yepachic and drove it in from there. The idea is to use it to keep the ranch road passable. Goodness knows the road needs lots of work.

The first job that Bill took on after arriving last week was to get the road in shape. Nothing had been done to it for a year and the past twelve months have seen plenty of heavy rain.

About a mile from the ranch while traversing a cut that runs across a hill about sixty feet above an arroyo with a stream, the monster slipped down sideways off the road. The right two balloon tires were still on the road; the left two were off. The whole dozer would have rolled down the roughly twenty-metre slope into the stream bed below had not the machine come up against a road-side tree. We can thank the tree for preventing the dozer from rolling and Bill being catapulted out of the driver’s seat and probably killed or injured. As it was, his heartbeat was probably at an all-time high.
For several days, the hands try building up the road, hoping that they can drive the dozer backwards back up onto the road. Unfortunately, the ground is basically just loose gravel and sand. Since this approach seems to be taking too long, however, it is decided to rig heavy cables to the blade of the dozer, let the rear end swing downhill and then let the whole dozer drop down backwards into the streambed. From there, it is believed, the dozer can be driven downstream and eventually out where the stream meets the road. The risk is high that the big Michigan dozer will roll and cause major damage to the machine. This risk is contemplated and accepted.

A lot of hours are spent rigging heavy cables from the dozer-blade up to trees farther up the slope. Since the topsoil is so thin here in the mountains, these scrub trees (live oaks, arbutus, etc.) therefore have no real root systems and are unlikely to resist any real pull. The heavy rain last night has made the ground even more unstable; just standing on the edge of the road you can feel the ground slipping away beneath your feet. Nevertheless, the thinking is that, even if the trees pull out they might actually feather the dozer’s fall and keep the front of the behemoth pointing up the hill.

The heavy cables are affixed to the blade. A come-along is attached to a huge boulder underneath the dozer; Dutch and Simon are underneath the machine working the boulder loose. Parallel to this, Ranchero Bob finally cuts away a log that is contributing to holding the machine up. Then finally, Bill and Joe attach separate lines to the steering wheel and the throttle, Bob climbs up near the driver seat to start the engine. He is wearing a mountaineer’s harness and Axel and Dutch are holding the safety line ready to yank him free if the dozer starts to roll. The clutch is engaged in forward, the engine revs up with a throaty roar, along with huge amounts of smoky diesel exhaust from the stack. The wheels, spinning, try ineffectually to push the vehicle uphill but, when the throttle is cut back, the vehicle, now pointing up hill as planned, begins to churn in the loose gravel and sink backwards and then sideways again down the hill coming to rest a couple of yards down the steep slope. As it goes, the cables fastened to the trees up the slope pull out and a big rock or two plunge down onto the road right next to where Bill and others are standing. I hear people shouting warnings. The rocks hit the road, shatter into pieces and keep on over the edge of the road into the ravine followed by a lot of other debris. Nobody hurt and no damage done. The engine stalls and the silence is strong. We run forward to inspect the situation.

The fact that the dozer has not rolled can be considered a major achievement. I have been taking odds that it would. But now what? It has not slid that far, in fact. After deliberation, it is decided to try again but this time simply to let the engine try to swing the vehicle so it can fall directly downhill. Bob gets up there again, the engine roars, the remote steering and the throttle are engaged and the wheels churn again. The dozer begins to slide rapidly downhill and only comes to a halt when the rear end catches a bigger tree about two-thirds of the way down.

It is still sideways but this time the tires have really bedded into the soft ground and a couple of logs have jammed under the chassis. There is no weight on either the right front or the rear left tires; the whole machine is tipped at a very precarious angle. The risk that it will roll if the tree gives way is great. By this time it is 1430 and Bob decides that it is time to head back to the ranchhouse for lunch and to ponder what to do next. Bob is on an adrenaline high from the danger of crawling onto a dangerously tilting machine.

It was interesting to watch. It was a real guy thing. Everyone focussing on the technical problem at hand, playing with big machines, handling heavy hand tools and equipment, dealing with physical danger. The group leaders were talking well to each other. No arguing. Nobody trying to push his weight around.

Now they shall have to work to get the bulldozer the final third of the hill down to the stream bed. Stay tuned.

Some pictures from Rancho el Nogal

I have been promising to get some photographs of the ranch on this blogsite. Our own camera got a saltwater shower last summer before we came up to the ranch and refuses to work. Fortunately, Ranchera Cindy loaned us hers. The first photographs are of the bulldozer dilemma.

BACK AT RANCHO EL NOGAL FROM CHIHUAHUA; MAKING CONTACT (OR NOT) WITH MENNONITES IN CUAUHTÉMOC; SOME CASUAL OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LIFE IN MEXICO; TROPICAL STORM OTIS
Friday, 30 September 2005

Finally arrived back at Rancho el Nogal about mid-morning today. It was late in the day before we could leave Chihuahua. With four adults and two little girls in the front two rows of seats, I jumped into the back of the open pickup, found some soft things to lie on, and enjoyed the fabulous scenery in the run up to the Tarahumara Mountains and the ranch. As the sun went down and wearing only shorts and a light summer shirt, I began to feel cold. At the first pit stop we dug around to find a sleeping bag and a fleece skiing toque. After that I was comfy and warm and watched the sky fill up with stars, the Milky Way gain in intensity, and an electrical storm show off way down and below our altitude to the south near the Sea of Cortés.

Chihuahua lies at an altitude of about 1700 metres; Cuauhtémoc, about 100 Km farther east on Highway #16, is about 400 metres higher and therefore at about the same height as the ranch itself. You are aware that you are steadily climbing from Chihuahua to Cuauhtémoc; there is this wonderful moment when you somehow come out of various valleys and highway cuts suddenly onto a broad open grassy prairie and you realise with a sigh of instinctive that you are, at last, OUT OF THE CITY! Your gaze is immediately drawn to the far distance. Where the four-lane motorway coasts along the side of a hill and you can look far across and down into the valley, everything looks green and lush in the afternoon sun. Typical daytime temperatures around Chihuahua and Cuauhtémoc are in the mid to high seventies (Fahrenheit; approx. mid-20’s Celsius) and the skies are clear with only puffy white clouds hanging around purely for decoration. The wind is quite tolerable even in the open truck, at least as long as the sun is shining. The air is pure and clean. The view is fantastic.

Making contact (or not) with Mennonites in Cuauhtémoc

Ninety minutes later we arrive in Cuauhtémoc. Bob and Cindy have a little flat that they rent for when they have to be in town. While the other passengers wait at the flat, I take a drive out to “The Mennonites” to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, in ten miles of driving I only find two places selling fruits and veggies; one is really just a small country grocery store; and, the other, depending upon your point of view, is either a large frutería or a small supermarket. The former is triste and expensive and the second is just expensive. The larger one did have locally grown apples but the general food store only has Washington State red “Delicious” apples. I reckoned that there would be lots of local apples; that was my first illusion gone.

But I did have a chance to see some of the Mennonite territory. The road is as straight as in Manitoba, whence many Mennonites came starting back in the 1920’s when the Manitoba School Act forbade teaching in any language except English (the Act was actually aimed at French Canadians by bigoted Orangemen from Ontario but German schools got caught in the machinery as well). Also, in World War I, conscription had been introduced in Canada for the battlefields of France, the memory of which was still fresh in Mennonite minds. Mennonites are pacifists.

At Penner’s fruteria there are a couple of older gents talking with the young man behind the cash register. The older men are uniformly dressed in bluejeans bib-overalls, white Mexican Stetsons, work boots and long-sleeved shirts. The farm clothing looks as if it has never been worn before, so I guess this is their go-to-town clothing. During the day I am to see Mennonite women as well, whereby the very elderly amongst them wear dark blue conservative dresses with a Babushka (never a hat) over their heads and the young girls, with one exception, wear modern hip-hugger jeans, blouses exposing their midriffs, and tennis sneakers.

I try talking to them all in Hochdeutsch but get only uncomprehending stares in return. The young man speaks only Plattdeutsch (Low German, sometimes referred hereabouts as Plautdeutsch) and Spanish. The older guys speak no Hochdeutsch and hardly any English. Another illusion gone.

While I am sitting in the car outside later eating my (very boring Washington) apple, a very blond man in his early twenties sticks his head through the passenger window and asks me where I am from. The car has South Dakota plates on it and is therefore of interest. He has been up to Manitoba to visit family. Every one speaks Plattdeutsch around here as the first language, he tells me, and Spanish or English as the second or third language. Often teenagers are sent up to Canada or the U.S.A. to learn English (and perhaps to find a wife too).

Spaced all along this long straight road are farm-implement dealers, metalworking shops, irrigation companies, car dealers, and a myriad of other farming and rural services. Interspersed amongst the industrial buildings are single-family dwellings. And some of them are more in the category of “trophy homes”. I see frequent billboards advertising (in Spanish) high-priced American pickup Ford, Chrysler, or Chevrolet trucks with 8-cylinder engines). Cuauhtémoc must be a very prosperous town indeed since I never see this kind of advertising elsewhere in Mexico.

The signs along the road remind me of my own youth in the Niagara Peninsula and my time as a young Canadian-Army officer in Manitoba; both areas have strong Mennonite communities. On the signs are familiar names like Penner, Pendergast, Prendergast, Dyck, Schmidt, Schmitt, Manitoba, Canada, etc.

At lunchtime I stop at a steakhouse for lunch. The parking lot is full of expensive vehicles, half of them big pickup trucks, all of them spotlessly clean. Inside the restaurant I note the same high standard of cleanliness and efficiency and the same lack of style and flair as any good restaurant in Manitoba or Nebraska. The flatter the land, the less the flair, perhaps. The hamburger is clean and well-engineered and otherwise unremarkable. There is no apple pie; only pecan. So, what do they do with the apples around here? Half of the clientele appears to be Mexican men, the other half Mennonite couples or families. The waitresses, teenagers, speak only English and Spanish. No Hochdeutsch and no Plattdeutsch. One teenage waitress told me she learned English in Kansas.

It is an interesting drive. I stop at the big fruteria and stock up for the ranch. When I go to the big Soriana supermarket, a leading food retailing chain in Mexico, for some other things later, I find that fresh produce is cheaper and better here than at the big fruit store surrounded by farm land. A third illusion gone.

Darkness hits us on the road, me in the back of the pickup. Since Bob, the ranchero, has been unable to get the 4-wheel drive repaired in Chihuahua over the past week, we drive only as far as Yepachic, where the unpaved roads into the ranch begin. While Bob and I find accommodation at the two-room-inn called Lucy’s, Simon and the others put up with relatives in the primarily Indian village. The town is off the electricity grid and the houses are all dark when we arrive about 2100. Raoul, the innkeeper, opens the door to us and shows us to one of the spotlessly clean rooms. It is totally dark outside and very quiet except when a huge 18-wheel juggernaut goes through on the mountain highway, splitting the silence like a lion’s roar. It is still dark when the cocks in the village begin to crow and a lone donkey or mule begins to heehaw, sound directly from Hades.

Some casual observations about Mexico after spending a week in Chihuahua

A week in a bustling Mexican provincial city (pop. approx. 1,000,000) permits me the following superficial observations:

As a rule Mexican women wear their medium or long hair pulled back from the forehead and tied in a bun or ponytail. They do not generally wear permanently-waved hair or bangs and consequently you get a good view of their faces.
The women here often tattoo eyebrows; however, this and other facial tattooing (lips, eyelids, etc.) are far more common in Los Angeles than here.
Mexican women are very fashion conscious. But everybody seems to be wearing only hip-hugger jeans and short, belly-exposing blouses. No matter what the clothing, high-heeled (even extra-high-heeled) shoes are very common. Skirts are not as usual as trousers. At least half and maybe more of the women I saw dressed in this fashion should consider something more flattering.
In public, Mexicans are quiet and well-behaved. You very seldom see anyone smoking in the street. In fact, smoking anywhere is not so common. You certainly do not see people swigging from water bottles, pop bottles or cans and alcohol.
Chihuahua is the market town and state capital for a large ranching state (Chihuahua is Mexico’s largest state). You really notice this downtown where we stay; there is street after street of cowboy-boot stores (mainly flash alligator or snake skins tinted in wild colours), cowboy-hat stores, saddle and harness shops, farming pharmacies, etc. And you see lots of rural people or recently-rural people, mainly men, in white Stetsons, colourful cowboy boots, wide belts with flashy buckles, and of course blue jeans. Out in the suburbs where the Big Boxes live, you also see cowboys or drugstore cowboys although you see many other types of people too. The city cowboys wear cellphones too.
There are a lot of sexy lingerie shops, no doubt to balance the plethora of cowboy apparel shops.
Rural Mexican men, at least, don’t wear underwear under their jeans. Don’t ask me how I know. Poorer cowboys sleep in their clothes.
A variety of housing materials is used for housing: adobe and plaster for the cheaper and older houses; concrete block and plaster for the next up; and, red brick for the top people with more or less ornamentation added. Rooves are normally slightly canted around here (they do have a rainy season) and consist mainly of corrugated iron sheets fastened to wooden beams. I don’t count the huge trophy houses of bygone eras or the gaudy trophy houses of the newly rich.
At the mall and along the periphery highway you will find all the same boring retail enterprises you find in the U.S.A., Canada and Europe, led of course by Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, KFC, McDonald’s, Cineplex, etc., etc. The interior and the exterior of the main mall are indistinguishable from their brethren in every other country. Meanwhile, the downtown is emptying and crumbling.
Mexicans around here are polite drivers.

Hurricane Otis

Hurricane Otis, recently upgraded from a Tropical Storm, is headed this weekend toward Baja California with winds of 65 mph and gusts of about 85 mph. I need to contact Alex in Guaymas and ask him what he is doing and if he would please check Vilisar’s mooring lines and especially the chafing gear.


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 dykes (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 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. 20°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).


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 no 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 http://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.



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.

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?


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 careHow busy you 're kipin' your poor gran'pereTryin' to stop you ev'ry dayChasin' 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 ploughDen w'en you 're tire you scare the cowSickin' de dog till dey jomp the wallSo 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 suiteLookin' for somet'ing more to eat, Makin' me t'ink of dem long leg craneSoon 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 yearI bet he'll be stronger dan Louis CyrAn' beat all de voyageurs leevin' here,Leetle Bateese! Jus' feel de muscle along hees back, Won't geev' heem moche bodder for carry packOn de long portage, any size canoe, Dere 's not many t'ing dat boy won't doFor he's got double-joint on hees body too,Leetle Bateese! But leetle Bateese! please don't forgetWe rader you 're stayin' de small boy yet, So chase de chicken an' mak' dem scareAn' do w'at you lak wit' your ole gran'pereFor w'en you're beeg feller he won't be dere--Leetle Bateese! William Henry Drummond


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.


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.

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.


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. Whatever opinion Bob might harbour about legalising soft drugs, he 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 “Zapata’s” (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 http://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.

EVERYTHING’S OFF. SQUAD OF MEXICAN SOLDIERS LOOKING FOR MARIJUANA. ARE ALL SIX-YEAR-OLDS THIS ENERGETIC?
Thursday, 15 September 2005

Well, the anticipated ride out with Simon to see if we can find the marijuana grow operation is called off. Fortunately I waited before I started novocaine injections into my bum. I can’t say that hours and hours on horseback over very rough country is worse than a trans-Pacific airline flight. But it’s definitely close. Nevertheless, Simon said he would bring in a horse to ride; there are about thirty head of horses on the ranch, of which about 20 are suitable for horse-trekkers to ride. I think Simon is bringing in the big appaloosa that I have been admiring down on the river pasture.

Yesterday from the house I spied some men walking single file along the river bank down by the ford. I grabbed a pair of binoculars from the house. There shouldn’t actually be anybody around except the perimeter cowboys and Simon. Dressed in olive drab and carrying rifles, I saw that they were soldiers and they were heading this way. Up on the heights above the river I identify a few more. Eventually, they appear hot and sweaty at the corral fence, preceded by a major barking campaign by all the dogs. Even Tank, the very old, near-blind mastiff sets off his aged woofing though he is only half-aware of what’s going on. The noisiest are the two little Chihuahua pups. The soldiers stay carefully behind the fence until I calm the hounds and the hullabaloo dies away.

In the end there are eight soldiers with light combat gear and weapons. The corporal speaks a little English but he’s the only one. He asks if the ranchero is at home but I tell him in my broken español that only Kathleen and I are at present at home, that the little boy is the ranchero’s son, that the ranchero and the ranchera are away for a day or two and we are just temporary visitors. Even Simon, the Vaquero, is out in the mountains working. They are not very inquisitive. We offer them a drink of water. One of the privates ask if we have “una trucka”; it takes me a while to realise that he means a truck, and would we please drive them back to their bivouac twenty minutes away. Well, of course there are trucks around the ranch. But at present only one has a battery in it and that one is still down at the ford in case the rancher has to wade the river because it is too deep to drive through. I tell them “Hoy, non.” Not today. I have to stay at the ranchhouse. This doesn’t upset them and the squad leader asks if there is a good river crossing nearby. Just yesterday Bob pointed out where he came across on foot in high water last week. It is actually just below the house. I point it out to the corporal and off they all go in single file again. A few minutes later I see them scouting out a crossing somewhere else along the river bank. Three guys head straight into the river, get into knee-deep water, cross quickly, emerge on the other side and head up the gravel road into the woods on the way back to their bivouac. The other five sit down to take off their boots and then wade across in bare feet. By the time they take off their boots, wade gingerly through river while almost falling in because of the rocks underfoot, and finally sit down on the other side, dry their feet and pull their socks and boots back on, they are at least a half-hour behind the first three. Not sure if the corporal was in the second group or not.

The last group moves off in single file. I notice that one soldier is adjusting his rifle. A shot rings out and the man a few yards in front of him cowers. I guess the soldier inadvertently loosed off a round. He spends some time searching for the spent cartridge. He will have to account for all the ammunition when he gets back.

After that the ranch returns to silence except for the buzzing of bees and flies. Oh yes, and Eli. Eli is six. A very bright and interested kid. He is the middle of three children living on the ranch. The youngest, Levi, 4, is with Cindy in the States. Cindy’s daughter, Tanner, 10, is also at a school for a few weeks in Arizona with her dad. Cindy will be bringing all the children back next week. We are looking after Eli for a day or two while Bob is doing business in town.

Eli is pretty good about keeping himself busy; that’s uncommon for his age. But of course there is no TV on the ranch so he is used actively to doing things himself. We have never heard him say to us, “I’m bored.” He always finds something to do though sometimes we have to change some of the game rules. Like, certain things (throwing, pounding, kicking, etc.) are outside things; it’s all right to play with the house pets (the two kittens and the two Chihuahua pets) but don’t get too rough with them (things get boy-rough at times but we have never seen him ever intentionally inflict pain on the little animals); etc.

At that age he is very interested in what he is interested in. So this morning Kathy spent an hour or so with him on the internet Asking Jeeves about bees and honey, Chihuahua dogs, various other insects, how to catch mice, how to catch electric eels, how to get rid of flies.

That concluded, off he goes to busy himself outside while Kathleen and I do other things. He runs barefoot and shirtless most of the time. Yesterday Kathy introduced him to the keyboard; he’s a little young perhaps for real piano lessons. But he played with the keyboard and sang for another hour or so and this morning he pulls the keyboard out on his own initiative.

At the moment he is running in and out from the picnic table behind the kitchen where he has placed the school-supplies water colours and is painting himself in various patterns. It all started out to be war paint but the result is more like modern art. Each time he comes in to where I am writing this blog more and more of his upper body has been painted fire-engine red. He looks like he has been flayed and is bleeding. When he smiles, his teeth, gapped in the uppers because he is losing his baby teeth, show startlingly white against his totally bright-red face. When he decides he has had enough of this activity, he wonders how to get the paint off. I suggest he do what we do: just strip off and stand under the spigot at the water tank near the corral. He runs off and comes back dripping and exclaiming that it has been the best bath he has ever had in his life. People! Throw out your televisions! Liberate yourselves to life!

Last night at bedtime we asked him if he wanted something to be read to him. He thought that was a great idea, pulled out a children’s book, and curled up on the sofa with us. How was he going to deal with getting to sleep when his parents and siblings were nowhere around, we wondered. This proved to be no problem at all. We told him where we ourselves would be sleeping (in the guest house at the end of the walkway; just come over if you need us). He chose to sleep on the sofa in the living room where we continued reading for a while before retiring. The Chihuahuas slipped under the blanket with Eli. He was dead to the world in five minutes and was just waking up when I got up to do the morning chores around 0700.

Just now he harvested a couple of tomatoes off the vine next to the door, discussed how best to eat them, cut them open and salted them and declared them delicious. His enthusiasm is infectious. I think I will go and eat one too.


CRIMINAL ACTIVITY; ANOTHER LONG RIDE COMING UP
Wednesday, 14 September 2005

Bob and his son Eli arrive back yesterday after ten days away selling cattle and doing business in Chihuahua and Cuauhtémoc. I hear the white 4-wheel-drive pickup in the afternoon grinding down the road across the river, fording the water, and grinding up the bank on this side to the ranchhouse. They bring back groceries so we are all set for a while. Getting groceries is like Christmas: fresh fruits and vegetables, chorizo, etc. Bob leaves again this morning because he has appointments “outside”. He is a really interesting fellow so I shall be glad when we can have more time to talk. He said he grew up on a reservation in the Dakotas and spent his whole life involved with native peoples in his law practice.

Today he is also picking up a 25-year-old man from The Netherlands from Chihuahua Airport who wants to learn to be a cowboy. He approached Bob through the internet. He’ll be turned over to Simon for his apprenticeship and share the log bunkhouse. It is going to get more crowded around here soon: the Dutchman: Alex, the American from Texas A&M; and the eco-gardener all arriving in the next few days. The last two will sleep in another bunkhouse farther up river and just out of sight from here. Cindy, her ten-year-old daughter Tanner, and her four-year-old son Levi will be back on Tuesday.

The big news is that we have an indication that someone is growing marijuana on Bob’s property. This is serious since, if the police find it themselves, Bob’s ranch could be confiscated. It is harvest time for marijuana at the moment. The growers also prey on local beef cattle to feed the harvest gangs so rustling is involved as well.

The Mexican Army is out patrolling and setting up roadblocks on back roads. In fact, Bob said, he passed an Army checkpoint on the extremely washed-out ranch road coming in yesterday (still no sign that the mining company has started to improve the road). Simon and I are going to return on horseback to the mesa north of here this afternoon to see if we can find the grow site so we can report it. It occurs to me as I write that, since we brought our handheld GPS from the boat, I can take it with me and note the exact coordinates.

It’s going to be another long ride over the same rough country. I shall also try to get the digital camera functioning to take the pictures that I wished I had snapped on our last ride. Fortunately the weather has turned dry though we may be coming back at least part of the route in darkness. I hope not. Bob, by the way, says the rainy season is definitely tapering off. It rained daily and hard when we first got here but there has been nothing but clouds and distant thunder and lightning to the south behind some mountains to the south since last Friday. Bob says we will get occasional showers now for a few more weeks and then perhaps once a month till November and then nothing more till next year. Late in the year it gets down into the low-20’s Fahrenheit at night in the extreme. “Winter” nights might bring frost starting in late November or early December but the days are sunny and warm up into the high 50’s and low 60’s every day. Sounds all right to me.

Eli, a very energetic and alert six-year-old, has been travelling with Bob, his dad, for ten days now, i.e. basically ever since we arrived here. They came back late one night and left again before dawn the next morning. Bob hinted and Eli stated that it has not been exactly easy for either of them. As Bob was getting ready to leave this morning Eli asked him point-blank if he might stay at the ranch. I was standing there and indicated to Bob that it would be fine for a couple of days. (It could, I guess, be a problem if I get a translation today: there is one in the offing. It would also mean I couldn’t go with Simon to the grow-site. The burden will fall then mainly on Kathleen, who after a summer of kids fulltime is enjoying the quiet.)

Eli is pretty rambunctious but we are beginning to talk German to him; he already speaks Spanish well, Simon tells us, and of course English. He and his little brother and older sister are home-schooled. At the moment he is chasing the two small cats, carrying one in a plastic bucket and swinging it around. Like most little boys of that age, he likes to smash things up, cut them with knives, and generally be destructive (Bob was relieved when I told him that my two boys were the same way at that age; William at age seven used his newly acquired pocket knife to cut up the headliner and arm rests in the back seat of a friend’s car on our way back from Vienna. It was pure boredom at that age. And no sense of property at that age. We were recalling it this past summer with William who had entirely forgotten the incident. I remember when I scolded him that he pulled the pocket knife out and handed it to me. “I guess you’ll be wanting this.”)

The other interesting and rather startling thing is that Bob said that, if we wanted to stay, we could have a piece of land to build a house for ourselves. Building materials are available locally in the form of adobe for bricks. The Pima Indians know how to find the materials; adobe requires 30% clay and 70% sand mixed with water, formed by hand into bricks and left to dry in the sun. We could pick almost any site we wanted but it would be better to build near the other ranch buildings since isolated houses left unattended are likely to get broken into.

THIS AND THAT
Tuesday, 13 September 2005

Being forced to speak Spanish with Simon, who is patience itself with our struggles with the language, is good for us. But it can be problematical when there is something important to impart. I thought yesterday, for example, that somebody is going to ride here today to talk to Roberto. I am sure I got that straight from Simon yesterday. This morning Simon says, no, the person is coming by horseback tomorrow! I have already imparted this to Roberto who was coming back here today anyway, I guess. Since it’s a three-hour ride over here and another three hours back through the mountains, I hope the visitor is not coming in vain. Good that Roberto is coming today anyway. I assume he will be staying tomorrow so I guess everything will work out.

We have been expecting Roberto since last Tuesday. He did in fact pay a brief visit, arriving after dark last Thursday night, after driving the washed-out ranch road in the dark, wading the river with Eli, his six-year-old, on his back, walking the last half mile up the hill to the house, and arriving wet and tired about 2200. (See blog for 09Sep2005.) He left again before sun-up with Eli and Simon. So, strangely, he has not seen the ranch in daylight for a couple of weeks. He has been off in Chihuahua and Cuauhtémoc selling cattle and generally taking care of business. (Cindy, his wife, has been travelling in the U.S.A. with Levi, their four-year-old, and won’t be back for another week. At the moment she is snowed-in in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Man! These people sure get around! She will be in Salt Lake City in a few days.

It would be good if Bob arrived soon since we have no more fresh foods and even some other items like powdered milk are just about out. We drafted a grocery list for him but are a little unsure how many mouths we shall need to provide for (the ranchers and their children? hired hands? The only ones we know for sure are Simon and ourselves) and we don’t know for how long we need to provision since we don’t know when the next shopping expedition will be. And every attempt at shopping has to be regarded as an expedition given the condition of the roads and our remoteness.

Remote though it is, the ranch, of course, is not self-sufficient. We could start using the wood-burning range and slaughtering the animals for food, I guess. (I know where I would start too! The first to go would be Macbeth, the orange rooster that starts voice exercises about two hours before first light. The early bird gets the burn!) Cooking is normally done using propane brought in from outside and most fresh vegetables are bought at a store. I wonder about making beer on the ranch. I notice amongst the cookbooks in the kitchen a book about home-brewing. Must check it out.

There is a huge garden but, except for a few tomato plants near the house, not at present enough manpower to keep it going. It’s pretty much overgrown. For somebody with ambition, however, gardening here would be great. A friend of Cindy and Bob’s is an expert in sustainable gardening. He is expected in a few days for an extended visit and to set up a garden that will be sustainable in these climes. That would be fantastic. Sounds pretty interesting and I’m eager to meet him. They are even thinking of planting a vineyard. Since the Romans planted vineyards in cold Germany and England, which is much farther north than here, it should be practicable at Rancho el Nogal. The garden is on the south-facing slope running from the ranchhouse to the river. The soil looks well-drained since the soil here is very porous. The rock and gravel should retain the sun’s heat early and late in the year. Not sure how fertile the soil is, however. The steep banks of the Rhine, the Moselle, the Main and the Ahr are basically shale, and vintners on the Moselle and the Rhine add a lot to enrich the soils and grow grapes for some of the world’s best wines.

I just heard a loud squeak from the WC in the ranchhouse. The regular toilet has at some time been replaced with a composting toilet (see blog from 04Sep05 for a wonderful treatise, if not treatment, of sewage at Rancho el Nogal). Kathleen was just reaching into the bag of sawdust, which is thrown into the toilet when you are finished. Apparently there was something alive in there. A bright green toad jumped out over her hand and onto the wall and stopped to stare at her.


SEVEN HOURS ON HORSEBACK THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS
Monday, 12 September 2005

Ever since my first attempt a few days ago I had wanted to do more riding while I’m at Rancho el Nogal. When I heard that the rancher, Bob, had asked Simon to deliver some important document to a neighbour yesterday, and when I discovered that he would be going there on horseback, I asked Simon if I could accompany him. He said the journey would take about 3 or 4 hours.

(As Simon and I are getting ready to go, Kathy is trying to get the electric agitator washing machine working. Eager to be off, I help get the gasoline-powered generator fuelled and started, to connect the water hoses to bring cold spring water from the tanks near the corral to near the ranchhouse and to dig out detergent and bleach, etc. The washing machine is 120 volts; after agitating the clothes in cold water, you wring them out either by hand or using a mop squeezer and dump them in a galvanised tub of spring water, wring out the rinse water, and finally, hang them out on the line. You don’t have to scrub the clothes on a scrubbing board but everything else is pretty much as our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did it. Oh, yes! And pray that the horses and mules that sometimes come into the yard to graze on the grass don’t brush the clothes off the line when the dogs try to chase them out.)

For the trip Simon brings in a brown mule and Alazan, the same large sorel (i.e. reddish; “Alazan” means sorrel in Spanish) horse that I rode last week. He and Israel, one of the other hands, show me how to catch the horse once it is corralled. Simon having instructed me how the last time, I saddle and bridle Alazan myself. At 1130 we climb into the saddle and start off out through the swinging gate onto the open meadows behind the corral, trailed by three dogs.




Bridles and Saddles

Stock or western saddles differ markedly from “English” saddles. The latter are flatter and use iron stirrups shortened up so that the knees are bent. Stock or Western saddles are much heavier, have a seat with a back (like a knight’s saddle only not quite so pronounced), and have a pommel so the cowboy has something to tie his lasso or lariat to when handling livestock. The stirrups are usually made of wood and much larger than English saddles. Cowboys also use boots with large heels; they don’t just toe the stirrup, they often shove the boot into the stirrup right through to the heel. The stirrups are adjusted so that the rider’s legs are at nearly full stretch. Simon doesn’t, but I have noticed that several other hands wear spurs (and, yes, they do jingle when they walk.) Cool!

On the way up to Yepachic on the bus we saw quite a few cowboys on horseback. All of them wore leather chaps and the stirrups were covered by leather hoods. I asked Cindy about why the cowboys here don’t wear them. She said that farther south there is a lot of chaparral, meaning I think, underbrush of thorn-bearing plants including plenty of cacti. The chaps and stirrup guards are part of the cowboys armour-plating. Sometimes, I guess even the horses get leather aprons.)

Although the bridles look similar the whole steering system for a western pony is different from that found in traditional European riding. In the latter case there are two reins, usually brought together to be a circular, but attached to the bridle at the horse’s mouth. The rider guides the horse by pulling the rein on the side he wants the horse to turn toward. A metal bit inside the horse’s mouth allows the rider to keep control over a much more powerful beast than the human himself is. The horse soon learns that he will experience pain around his mouth, a very sensitive area, if he does not turn. Western horses are also steered by two reins leading to horse’s mouth and attached to the bridle. But traditionally there is no bit and, when the rider wants to turn left, he lifts the reins and lays the right rein alongside the right side of the horse’s neck. Only if the horse is very recalcitrant will a bit be used and sometimes a kerb will be placed on the bit, i.e. instead of a straight piece of metal from one side of the horse’s mouth to the other, the metal has a large loop in the middle. If the horse does not stop when the rein is pulled gently or does not turn as commanded using the above system, a jerk on the reins will lift the kerb so it presses on the top of the horse’s mouth. That hurts.

Western horses don’t normally need to be hitched to anything. If a cowboy has to leap off his mount to deal with a calf at the other end of the lasso, he can’t have to be looking around for some place to tie the horse. Instead, the rider dismounts and drops one or both reins on the ground; the horse will stand there as if tied to something. Stock horses are also trained to back up and keep a steady tension on a lasso tied to something.


Although at first I had not even noticed the workmanship, I have since come to admire the tooled-leather stock saddles that are used around the ranch. Simon has two, possibly his own property, and there must be another half-dozen straddling a railing in the covered walkway between the house and the corral area. The leather on the one I am using has been tooled all over in a kind of woven-basket design. It must have taken weeks. The pommel is leather-covered but I have seen stock saddles here with brass ones. The leather is drawn over a wooden frame. The metal snaffles, rings, etc., mostly invisible under the leather, are nowadays mostly stainless steel. On Simon’s saddle however, I notice, they are bronze. He also carries a lasso tied next to the pommel of his saddle the long end of which he uses as a quirt and constantly gave the mule gentle swats with it as we go forward.

While the bridle on Alazan is the standard leather type with a metal bit, I notice that Simon’s mule has a hand-braided bridle made of string with the loose ends made into interesting tassles. Considering that these mules are tough beasts, the little decoration looks a little anachronistic. When he wants the mule to stay, he also ties his mule rather than just letting the reins drop, which I can do with Alazan. I guess this mule or maybe all mules are a little more bloody-minded than horses.

Mules

Mules are produced by cross-breeding a horse (caballo) and a donkey (burro). A mule can be a male (mulo) or a female (mula). More so than horses they like to work in packs, which is one reason they are used in mule trains. If the father is a horse, the mule is actually a “hinney” but the expression is rarely used. Mules are smaller than most horses but bigger than donkeys. Their legs and hooves are not only smaller, they are disproportionately smaller than a horse. But they are more sure-footed than a horse and can carry a greater amount of weight proportionate to their size.

There are as many and perhaps even more mules on this ranch than horses.



It is Sunday and Simon has pulled on all new clothes. For one thing he is wearing black cowboy boots (most of the Pimas here just wear heavy shoes even if wearing spurs; this may be an economic issue for all I know). He has on his white straw Stetson, new black jeans and a leather belt with a big metal cowboy buckle, and an olive-gold long-sleeved shirt. I tease him about dressing up for Sunday and going on a visit. He smiles, embarrassed.

We both tie a rain jacket to the saddle behind the seat. I have no western gear. I am wearing just long cargo trousers and a long-sleeved jersey as well the Borsalino straw hat that I bought for US$ 1.50 at a thrift shop in Dallas last July. Except that it is yellow straw, it looks kind of like the felt hat that Harrison Ford wears in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a kind of Twenties Look. I have on my Swiss hiking boots since the only other footwear I have at the ranch are my sandals.

Even though it is almost noon, the air is a pleasant mid-70’s, the sky is azure blue with large puffy white clouds that will probably bring rain later in the day. But for the moment the weather is nearly perfect. Three of the ranchhouse six dogs are along for the day: Greta, the springer; Cody the tail-less, herd-dog; and Phil, walker and runner (that’s all he done so far except to eat and sleep). Even following the mule, Alazan pulls gently but determinedly to the left at first to head back to the corral. A working horse on a working ranch, he probably knows better than I do what to expect today. The mule takes the lead. Simon is whistling.

Both Kathleen and I understood Simon to say that the whole journey will last three to four hours. In the end it is seven hours by the time we come down the last steep slope to the ranch shortly before the sun goes behind the mountain range to the west, the mounts beginning to pick up a little speed from their slow, exhausted, head-drooping plodding.

My saddle and the horse’s action today are as comfortable as anything I could have desired. In past rides years ago, I recall, I often came back with skin rubbed raw around my ankles, knees or seat because the saddle was too small or improperly adjusted or my clothes were not fitting. None of that today. But I am definitely fatigado and my leg and pelvic muscles very sore. I actually expected this and started taking aspirin before we left. Despite the aspirin, however, by the time I climb down in the evening I feel like I gave birth yesterday to elephant triplets. Had I known how long and rough the day’s ride would turn out to be, I might have waited for something less ambitious. This just goes to show that it’s not always good to know the future.

Fifteen minutes on, we pass through the first of some eight barbed wire or log gates, leaving the open plateau behind us, dropping down into a small stream bed, the first of many, and then beginning to climb. Our path leads up through woods and into the open. Before we drop over the pass, the view back into the valley to the river, the ranch buildings and corrals, all set about with rich green grass, is stunning. The path however, while broad enough, is rough and the mounts walk carefully. As suspected, once past the first gate, Alazan stops trying to circle back to the corral. He has, I hope, accepted his fate for the day.

Over the first pass the trail heads down into the next canyon, at the bottom of which is another rushing stream. We splash through it and find that the path going up the other side narrows significantly. The horses begin to climb, and by climb I mean nearly steeply upward. They are straining and puffing to get up the path which is strewn with rocks ranging in size from baseballs to soccer balls, making the footing very unstable indeed. Sometimes they almost have to spring up onto a ledge. I did not know at this point that this was what nearly the whole journey would be like: steep, slow, unstable, narrow.

Way off to our left, though I do not know it yet since I have no detailed map of the area, lies one of the main canyons of the Copper-Canyon system. What we are in fact traversing are the upper reaches of tributaries to that main canyon. While we might be riding parallel to the main canyon, we are actually crossing across the grain of tributary arroyos, climbing up to the interstices between one arroyo after another and then dropping into another deep canyon, usually fairly narrow this far up from where the streams flow into the river.

Invariably there is a river or a stream at the bottom of the canyon, each in full spate after the rain of recent days. It is precisely these streams that have cut the canyons over the millennia through the soft rock. So far up, the streams are not usually very wide. But sometimes the canyon is so steep and narrow that we do not hear the rushing water until we are almost on top of it. The dogs usually have to swim for it. Wading the creeks, the water sometimes reaches up to Alazan’s belly and the bottoms of my boots. He picks his way gingerly across the deeper waters because the footing is rough, loose, washed-down rock and usually out of sight beneath the murky surface. Greta always and Cody sometimes lie down in the stream, floating if it’s deep enough, lapping up water at the same time from the surface. On the way back the horses stop frequently to drink, though we do not let them drink deeply; we keep them moving.

The continued climbing up and down very steep canyon walls makes both mount and dogs hot. But the horses never stop in the three hours on the way over. After several arroyos and successive steep descents and climbs up wooded slopes, each pathway more narrow, each pathway, it seems, more steep, each pathway more strewn with loose rock, we finally reach a high plateau, a mesa, between two table-top mountains. As we come out of the woods from the climb, suddenly it opens up into one of the most dramatic views I have ever seen. Under a blue sky with puffy clouds the pasture directly in front of me is heavily carpeted with yellow meadow flowers. To my immediate right and straight ahead of me are two tabletop mountains; the mesa is actually a pass between them created by the erosion of rock and debris from the tabletops. The tabletops themselves are what is left of the high plateau. Millions of years of rain and wind-erosion have cut the deep canyons into the high plateau leaving isolated towers like in Monument Valley. Raising my eyes I can see for probably fifty miles to the west or northwest and, to my left to the south as we ride out onto the plateau, dwarfed by the tabletops, and the huge sky, I see the upper regions of the main canyon.
I see cattle grazing here and there around me. The silence is as enormous as the natural phenomena around us; I hear only the wind and the horses on the sandy and grassy ground. Off toward the butte, a young mule comes loping to see what’s what. He’s playful and dances around Alazan to get his attention, cutting closely back and forth in front of him but eventually just following him within a couple of inches. After a few minutes a whole herd of eight or nine mules arrive on the scene, summoned no doubt by the colt’s early calls. Half of them, Simon says, bear el Nogal brands marks, which I think is a heart with a bar underneath. Eventually the loose animals go honking and frolicking off into the woods again leaving only the young mule to follow us right to the barbed-wire gate where we start down off the mesa and then gazing forlornly after us.

One of the things I can see so clearly through the pure air from the top of the plateau was several maize fields. These are I estimate to be about five miles away as the crow flies. Eventually we reach them but it takes another hour or more of hard descending and climbing. Sometimes I see no path at all. Other times the route is basically a small channel for rain runoff and therefore fetlock-deep mud. Elsewhere, usually on the high land, we traverse bare rock, the horses’ hooves clopping like on a city street. The path across the bare rock is only about twelve inches wide and worn white against the grey of the bedrock. At places animal hooves had even cut away the slope into a ledge. I wonder for how many centuries riders and other animals have been using these paths. Perhaps the Pima and Tarahumara Indians were the ones who first initiated them when they fled to the mountains to escape the Apache, the Yumas and the Spaniards, the latter of whom had wanted to enslave the women into textile mills and the men into silver mines.

Eventually, after two and one-half hours or so and a last steep decline, we came to another stream and some loose buildings. “Rancho Agua Caliente,” Simon says. Alazan thinks a visit would be in order, tries to head there and had to be convinced otherwise as we skirt the ranch buildings, passing through several gates to do so, and riding past the maize fields that I had seen from the mesa. The ranchers have been cutting and stripping logs for a new log corral, which looks as if it might now be finished.

After another fifteen or twenty minutes and some light climbing and descending, we cross a last creak with a small waterfall and arrive at another collection of buildings: a typical rectangular Mexican adobe house with a beamed ceiling, a corrugated tin roof, and a covered porch at the front, a litter of three or four pickup trucks in various stages of cannibalization, a flock of chickens scratching in the grass and sand. Simon called it Rancho “Margate”, though of course it couldn’t have been that.

Three little-girl faces suddenly appear at the window. Without dismounting, Simon asks if their Mama is at home. A few minutes later a pretty woman, perhaps no longer quite young, also appears, the little girls in their spotless play clothes gathering around her legs. After a little introduction, we are invited to dismount. We loosen the saddle girths. Simon acts a little shy and, standing there in the warm sunshine the whole time, the two persons never get closer than about three yards. In fact, for the most part, Simon keeps the mule between him and the woman, talking over the saddle with her. I wonder if this is his shyness or if it is the accepted politeness around women here. I lead Alazan into the shade of a nearby willow tree, the only such tree I have seen since I arrived in the area, drop his reins and, when I see that this conversation is going to take a while, find a railing to sit on. Alazan stands relaxed and appears to be dozing off. The little girls bring yellow apples for him, and sneak up to pat the three dogs, now collapsed panting in the shade as well.

I have only a very vague idea what it was all about. We are offered a coffee early on but Simon declines. Shortly before we leave we get a glass of water each. In between I get snatches of the conversation. Some of it has to do with the urgent message that Simon has brought; he hands her a letter. Some of it though is I am sure just country people bringing each other up to date with the local gossip. The conversation is generally light-hearted; it’s nice to get a visitor once in a while. In fact, until we got past Rancho Agua Caliente, we had not seen a single person or building, never heard a human sound, and except once for a very high-flying jet plane, never heard or saw anything except what nature had to offer: cattle and mules, songbirds, rushing water, the wind on the high mesa, the horses’ hooves, meadow and woodland flowers. In fact, what we heard behind those sounds was an almost palpable silence.

After what I estimate is about forty-five minutes, Simon tightens the saddle girth on the mule and I get up to do the same. We mount and, after a bit more talk, we head out. The little girls wave. Alazan thinks he might like to stay but I talk him out of it. We head back over the stream by the waterfall, along the maize fields and start to climb the mountain path again.

The return journey seems to be faster perhaps because I recognise things. The sun is getting lower and the light is warmer. In the distance the hillsides look like the landscaped parks around stately English homes. The grass is so green and the trees spaced apart in just the right amount. It’s deceptive because what I am seeing is not an English lawn or meadow; up close it’s all broken rocks and stones with just enough grass to give an impression from distance of solid green. In fact it’s exactly what we have now underfoot.

The mounts are tired now. Alazan plods even on the level and stone-free ground. But he seems to be struggling on the climbs and the descents, the latter of which are perhaps even more strenuous, since the horse has to take all the weight of himself and me onto his forelegs, sometimes even having to make a little leap down. On the smooth rock I wonder his shod forefeet don’t slip. Other times when the path is rock-strewn and barely hanging on the side of a steep canyon where a misstep will send us tumbling down several hundred feet and hurt us badly, I hold my breath. There is no way I would have come along such a path alone; I would have regarded it as totally unsuitable for a horse and rider. But I am following Simon who does not seem to mind at all. After all, he does this nearly every day of his cowboy existence. And this is his home territory. He knows the way. There is no way I could have found even my way home let alone to Rancho Margate. Everything here is local knowledge.

For some time I realise that he knows he’s on the way home and at one point Alazan wants to take a path to the left. But Simon has decided to take a different route home for the final third. This is even rougher and steeper than the way out. On the way up, the mounts have to scramble up. Coming down, Alazan is frequently either slipping on smooth rock or ever-so-carefully picking his path down. For me as rider, the upward part involves hanging on with my knees and encouraging the horse with gentle kicks with my heels. Both on the way up and on the way down I try to let the horse pick its own path provided it is not too devious. Although Alazan almost invariably makes allowances for the rider’s legs when passing a tree or gate; he never, for example, like some horses I have ridden, seems to be trying to brush me off. Once or twice, however, I am nearly impaled by a low limb pointed in my direction or nearly brushed off by low branches. I lie flat on the horse’s withers. After an hour so of very, very steep descent, I catch up to Simon at a gate. He points out that my saddle and saddle blankets have all shifted forward on the horse’s neck. I dismount and re-saddle before passing the gate, dropping down into the stream where Greta is lying in the water to cool off. A brief drink for the horse and then it’s climbing again up the other side to the next gate.

“Media ora,” Simon announces. Half an hour. I am tired and sore and will be happy to see the home valley from the pass. This is the roughest territory I have ever been on. It would be exhausting even to hike it given the steepness and the loose rocks. I realise that I wish it were over now but push the thought out of my mind. Most of a cowboy’s life, I guess, is just endurance. Simon is whistling and asks if I don’t have a song to sing. I try but my throat is dry. I also realise that Simon has no sense of time; he has told me “media ora” twice already. And wasn’t he the one who said this morning that it would only be one and one-half hours over there and the same back.

But we do finally come over the last pass and spy the ranchhouse in the distant warm evening light. We are going to make it before dark and before rain comes on us. Thank God for that, at least! The thought of descending those slopes at night and/or in rain doesn’t bear contemplation! A few hundred yards out Alazan shows a little spunk before the finish lines and breaks into a slow trot. I see Kathy sitting at the picnic table behind the kitchen and yodel to get her attention. As we pull into the corral area it is just 1830; seven hours gone. I dismount onto my stiff and unsteady legs and pull the saddle and bridle off the horse. I am sore but, thanks to the aspirin I took during the day, I am not in any great pain.

What a day! I have seen some fantastic scenery and had to work hard to get there. I have experienced nature untouched except perhaps for some grazing domesticated animals and the odd perhaps manmade trail. I can hardly believe that people like Simon ride this country every day. And women too; the lady we delivered the message to is riding over to visit with the Bob (or Roberto, as he is known around here) on Tuesday.

I am full of amazement too for the working animals. There is no babying these mounts. They either cut it or they are out. There’s no place on a working ranch for useless mouths. They have walked and climbed for seven hours over brutally tough terrain and may have to exactly the same tomorrow. They must have been crossed with mountain goats. The dogs throw themselves down around the yard and fall instantly asleep. While I slump exhausted and sore on the sofa and wait for dinner, Alazan is grazing on the grass with the other horses and mules near the ranchhouse. He comes up to me when I go out and gives me a nuzzle.



A QUIET DAY ON A RANCH
Saturday, 10 September 2005

After heavy rains again last night and plenty of water pouring down the adobe walls and dripping off the log ceiling the morning dawned sunny. This is patter nearly every day: sunny till late afternoon when big black cumulo-nimbus clouds begin to gather threateningly over the mountains. First there’s plenty of distant thunder that may go on for hours before the sky over Ranch el Nogal itself clouds over. Eventually, in late afternoon, it begins to rain and sometimes it rains in a deluge. The new roof over the front half of the ranch house is not finished, unfortunately, and water seeps in.

Since the whole house is made of adobe bricks, the building materials are actually being returned to their original state. It is not a big problem to repair adobe. But, of course, it is one more thing that will need doing on a ranch where everybody is already busy. And there is no point in making repairs to adobe unless a new roof is put on first.

Roofing material around here has traditionally been split wooden shingle and many of the buildings on the ranch still have shingled roofs. But much more common are corrugated iron roofs. The rear half of the main house and the guest house have iron roofs and are watertight. The front half of the ranch house looks like it might have been intended as a terrace. Certainly the view is spectacular. But it is impossible to keep the adobe roof from leaking.

With the sky blue, the sun shining and temperatures in the mid-70s and the ground dry again after the rain last night, Kathleen and I drew on our hiking boots and headed down the steep path used by the cow ponies toward the river. Cindy had told us that she has a swimming hole down there and we thought we would try it out. Unfortunately, the river was well up, running fast and murky from the heavy rains. We were never sure where the hole might be and gave up the in favour of a nice walk along the river.

When we came back, I struck off on foot with a lasso to the back pasture where I had spotted Alazan. I suspected that he might not simply let me walk up to him in the open. After a long walk I caught up to him. And I was right. Alazan watched me until I was within a couple of yards of him and then walked away. The sly old thing never let me get any closer and led me a mild chase until, after fifteen minutes, I gave the whole thing up and walked back to the ranch. The whole time the three larger dogs, Greta, Cody and Phil, followed along, happy to be out on an outing. In fact, Greta showed her genetic background by swimming the river over and across despite the strong current while Kathleen and I were out.

Told to expect Bob, Eli and Simon back today, we were keeping an eye on the river levels as it began to rain in late afternoon. The other night Bob had not wanted to ford the river in his 4-wheel drive in the dark with the current running. He wound up leaving the pickup on the other side and wading across with Eli on his back before walking in wet clothes up the hill to the ranch house. I decided that, if they were not back by late afternoon, I would drive one of the several trucks down and leave it on this side of the ford for them to drive up. This was the origin of a lot of experimentation with various car and truck keys until I finally got the big red Ford diesel started. All the vehicles around here are four-wheel drive at least. The Ford was the most powerful for getting back up in the night.

Before leaving the vehicle at the crossing with the key in it, I drove through pastureland alongside the river for another mile, perhaps until the track petered out and I drove back. This was my first time so far down on these river meadows where cattle, horses, and mules grazed. The three dogs followed me on this drive too and accompanied my on my return walk. It was fun to be out and stretching my legs.

By dark we had finished the chores and warmed up some soup to eat with the fresh bread we had baked. Still no sign of Bob et alia. Suddenly, at about 2100 the door opened and in walked Simon. But no Bob and no Eli. It took us a while to understand that, after appearing in court, Bob and son had driven back as far as Cuauhtémoc (halfway to Chihuahua). Simon had taken a bus back to Yepachic and from there had walked the fifteen miles in about five hours, waded the river to arrive back at Rancho el Nogal. He said he really enjoyed the hike and was smiling broadly. He was hungry, though, and even put up with our type of bread and soup when he would surely have preferred something more Mexican.


STRANGE VISITORS IN THE NIGHT
Friday, 09 September 2005

Bob and Eli, his six-year-old son, showed up unexpectedly about 2230 last night. Cindy drove to Colorado with Eli (four years old) and will pick up Tanner, her 10-year-old daughter, in Phoenix on the way back in a couple of weeks. In addition to Eli, Bob also had the two Chihuahua dogs with him.
Kathy has already gone to bed in the guest house last night while I had stay up to read in the living room of the ranch house. About 2230 I finally close my book (“Stiffed; The Betrayal of American Man” by Susan Faludi. Great read!) and put out the lights. While crossing the small open space toward the roofed walkway to the guest house, I stop in the fathomless darkness to look at the stars. Well, it’s not completely dark; although the moon has already set I can actually just make out the curve of the river and the black outlines of the mountains in the distance. The constellations are easily picked out and many a star shines or planet winks down at me. There is not a single artificial light anywhere around the huge, mountain-encircled valley. I contemplate just how far away the rest of the world is, how immense our isolation is here. Not just the stars so far away but the whole of humanity. This is not a frightening at all. Just a meditative thought.
Suddenly I see a flashlight, maybe two - there along the road that comes up from the river-ford! My hair stands on end. There shouldn’t be anyone at all here. Simon went to bed long ago in the bunkhouse. Then I hear voices as well, one seems to be a female. The flashlight or flashlights seem to be moving through the trees and approaching the guesthouse and corral. Without turning on my own flashlight I hurry to the end of the walkway where there is a big slatted gate to bar the ranch animals from getting into the feed stores. I wait and hear the voices drawing nearer but at present out of sight from me behind the guest house. When the light comes into view again they are only about twenty-five yards away from me on the other side of the gate. The darkness is palpable.
I call out, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Bob, with Eli.”
I am relieved and feel a little embarrassed.
“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” I say, relieved, as they come closer and are illuminated by their own light.
“I had to come back tonight to pick up Simon. He has to appear in court as a witness tomorrow morning at 1000 in Chihuahua. We’ll have to leave by 0400 or even earlier.”
I notice that Bob’s blue jeans are soaked from about the hips down. Eli, six years old, is in shorts and sandals. He looks pretty wet too.
“What happened to you guys?” I ask.
“The river is up pretty high and I didn’t fancy trying it in the pickup and finding myself stuck in the middle in the dark. So we waded across. I carried Eli.”
We move inside the ranch house and I offer to make some tea for them. Neither Bob nor Eli seem particularly excited or find it in any way unusual that they should drive that atrocious fifteen-mile road in the dark, ford a river, and walk a mile in the darkness. Bob has some sort of criminal case going on in court having to do with rustling (really!) and he only just found out that Simon has to be there in the morning as a witness or the case against the accused will be dismissed. Chihuahua is a few hundred kilometres from Yepachic and Yepachic, as loyal readers will already know, is almost two hours away on a miserable and currently almost impassable, washed-out gravel road.
Bob starts looking for some documents that he needs for the case. Eli meanwhile is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of questions about this and that around the house. My ant-repellent efforts – “peacekeeping” as they are now called in Iraq interests Eli avidly (I spread black pepper around the area where I saw them). He finds the fly-traps I made by putting a little honey and an apple core in one bottle and some sugar water in another pretty riveting as well; I poked holes in the tops so the flies can get in but cannot get back out again. Finally, I say goodnight to the two of them and leave them to go to bed in the guest house. Eli is still going strong.
In the darkness shortly before 0500, when Macbeth the orange rooster is well into his pre-dawn recital under our window, I hear Bob, Eli and now Simon getting ready to leave. Simon must have been surprised to be dragged out of his sleep to face fording the river and being jarred for two hours on the washed-out road and all before breakfast. But a cowboy is a cowboy and off they go.
“When will you be back?” I call after them. “Can you buy groceries?”
“Back tomorrow, Saturday,” Bob returns. “I’ll buy the groceries. Just email the list. I’ll pick up the message in town.”
I remember that I had wanted to tell him that the phone is not working in case he needs to call through. But they are out of range. I watch the lights bobbing through the trees for a while and then go back to bed. I think about staying up to see if I can spot them and their lights when they are crossing the river. But I fall asleep and only wake up when Macbeth is getting into full stride. In the distance I hear the pickup growling up the first hill away from the ford so they are already across and starting the slow drive out.
I asked Bob last night if as everyone had been expecting there were any signs that the mining company had begun to build a proper road. That was supposed to have begun this week. But he said there weren’t even any signs of heavy road-grading equipment let alone actual work being done.
“In all the six years we’ve been here I have never seen the road in worse condition than it is now. We had a lot of rain last winter, in January and February. So the road was a mess even before the rainy season started this summer. It’s really bad!”
I drift off to sleep again, waking to the realisation that we were alone on the ranch.

ANOTHER VISITOR, ANOTHER HORSEMAN
Friday, 09 September 2005

Well, not quite alone. Between 1600 and 1700, as dark rain clouds were forming up over the mountains to the south and east of us, the dogs set up a hullabaloo. They are great distant early-warning systems (actually, when I think about it, they didn’t let out a peep last night when Bob and Eli showed up. Were they even around? Or did they just recognise them and then remain quiet?) If they hear or smell somebody coming, they all start in. Greta, the Springer spaniel (I think), is usually the first. The others just start barking even without knowing what’s going on yet. I have come to realise that there must be someone coming if they start barking and keep it up for more than 15 seconds. I always head out to the corral area to check.
This time it’s one of the Pima cowboys, Israel. We met him earlier this week so we know him. He is just sitting on his horse and has not advanced through the metal gate into the open area between the buildings and the corral. I wonder to myself if he is afraid of the dogs; Cindy said that most of the Pima Indians are terrified of dogs, Tank especially because he is so big and looks so ferocious.
I greet Israel and ask him to ride on in. We have some difficulty communicating. He asks if Simon is around but I tell him he is away until tomorrow at the earliest. He tells me he is looking for some food for himself and the team (Jose-Luis and Roberto besides Israel himself) who are riding the perimeter, preparing the mesa upland pasture to receive cattle and living “campamento (camped out)”. We invite him in and load him up with dried-pinto beans, apples, coffee, peanut butter, cheese, eggs, a cabbage, and a loaf of bread that we had just baked. Everything gets loaded into a gunny sack. I follow him, his spurs jingling, down the covered walkway and out to his horse where I hand up the gunny sack once he has mounted.
“It’s going to rain hard,” he says in Spanish and waves southwards to the mountains as he rides out the gate and down toward the river past the pigsty.
I spent a lot of time getting blogs ready. Kathleen proofread. Since we had given away some of our food, I scout through cookbooks to see if we can make good use of what food we have left, mainly cabbage and apples. I come up with sweet & sour Asian soup made of cabbage and apples and a carrot. While it was cooking we drag the Indian rug out of the living room and out onto the grass where we try to shake out the sand and dust. It looks like Lawrence of Arabia. When we take it back in we leave it rolled up to the side, thinking maybe it should stay there until the rainy weather is over and we won’t be tracking in so much mud onto it. The 12 x 12-inch clay floor tiles, colorado in colour, look really good bare and are much easier to clean than a muddy rug. They just have to be swept occasionally.
After dark it begins to rain and the water starts dripping in again. What I don’t get is why it drips in different places on different days. As the wind blows the rain against the house, I suddenly realise that Cody, the herd dog, has sneaked in at some point during the evening and is lying in a corner behind a rocking chair. I shoo him out. Cody goes around the house to the screen door in the kitchen and whimpers to come in. Why doesn’t he just go to the covered walkway like the rest of the dogs? Suddenly, while I am sitting on the sofa reading, Phil, the newest dog on the ranch, slinks in from the back room into the living room, also heading to get behind some furniture. I leap up and Phil streaks back whence he came with his tail between his leg and looking guilty. The outside door in the office has been left ajar. He must have come in that way. I look under all the furniture to make sure he is not actually hiding somewhere in the house (one time I found him snoozing under the bed. Cody has a few regular hiding places; a favourite is behind the cooking range. Once I found Tank behind our bed in the guest house; he gave himself away because of his pong). I feel like Clyde Beatty, the animal tamer, around here! The two Chihuahuas, dry inside, yap at the bigger dogs outside in the damp. Building up diplomatic brownie points, no doubt. The cats have learned to find shelter at night when they get tossed out of the house. Now, if they would only catch mice.

Thursday, 08 September 2005
We are finally getting the hang of blogger.com. Thanks to Gwen Holbrow who designed it four years ago and has been waiting for me to start blogging. There are still a lot of technical things we are learning about using the site. And we are having trouble getting photos on the website. However, we hope to solve these problems soon. (Of course, it would help if we had a digital camera too. We’re workin’ on it!)
There was a lot going on around here yesterday. First, about mid-afternoon, Simon and I saddled a large reddish-brown stallion called, I think, Alazan. Simon told me that he was well-behaved and didn’t buck. I hadn’t saddled or ridden for years. After that little refresher lesson I think I can now saddle the horse myself. Of course, capturing it might be more of a challenge. I asked Simon to give me a refresher in lasso-throwing. He laughed.
I used to ride a lot when I was a young subaltern stationed at the Artillery School in Camp Shilo, Manitoba (25 miles from Brandon) back in the mid-1960’s. A coupe of retired warrant officers, both of them old sodbusters, had set up a livery stable. They made most of their money, I recall, by collecting the urine from pregnant mares that in turn was used to produce oestrogen for birth-control pills. At first just a customer, I got to ride for free when I offered to exercise strings of quarter horses every morning, especially in the winter when there were no drop-in customers and no teenage girls to do all the grunge work gratis.
I would saddle a palomino quarter horse called, I think, Sally; she stood stock still until you put one foot in the stirrup to mount at which point she would begin to canter on the spot. This made getting aboard interesting. She continued to canter on the spot until you touched her with your heels. Then her wish was to streak off out of the corral towards the horizon. She just loved to run and had lots of pent-up energy.
I tried riding a stallion for a few days. But he and I were apparently at odds about who was in overall command of the string of six to 12 mares and he would reach around to bite me. We tied a rope so that he couldn’t quite reach around. But riding him was anyway like riding a rock compared to almost any mare I have ever ridden. A hard ride and a constant fight! I gave up on him after a few days and left him whinnying in a separate corral as we disappeared down a sandy road through a forest of small alders or Manitoba maples.
I used to do the exercising of the horses in the early morning before I had to be on parade at 0800. That far north summer days begin very early and it was not so difficult to get back in time. But in the winter it is still dark at 0800. The exercise ride took place anyway. Manitoba in the winter has to be the coldest place in all of Canada. Warm Pacific air drops all its rain on Prince Rupert and Vancouver in order to be able to rise over the Coastal Mountains. After descending the eastern side of the Rockies near Calgary and Edmonton, also cold, cold cities, the dry air masses are trying to pick up water all across the semi-arid prairies or high plains. In the summer the weather is sunny and dry and quite hot. In the winter it is sunny and dry and damned cold. Riding out in the winter meant layering up and wearing something to keep your feet from freezing. On top of everything I wore a long cavalry greatcoat that one of the warrant officers still had from his days as a Boy Soldier in the Horse Artillery before the Second World War. It was large enough to be pulled over my anorak.
Off we would go, the horses plodding along in the darkness, their breath streaming out around them in the frozen stillness of the forest. Although still night, it was bright enough to see easily because of the snow everywhere; the trees were not closely packed together either. Even the cold was tolerable too because there was no wind once we got inside the woods. We never galloped or cantered because the air was too frigid to be sucked into lungs without being first warmed. That could only happen when we walked. Also, a basic rule of survival in the Arctic is never to get overheated, not to sweat: “You’ve got to be cool to be warm”; sweating cools you down too much when it evaporates and your body temperature is lowered. So, I never wanted to overheat the horses and have to spend hours walking them cool when I got back. It had to be a nice balance between exercise and overheating.
Nevertheless, when we arrived back at the log stables on those dark winter mornings, every horse including Sally looked like a ghost. Breath vapour was frozen all around the head of each horse and back along its neck as far as the withers. Actual icicles dangled from their nostrils. I even had little icicles hanging from my Army moustache. Fortunately, since there was no wind, neither the horses nor I ever got frostbite.
So, when I finally get into the saddle aboard Alazan here at Rancho el Nogal, I am not a complete novice. But it has been a long, long time. I climb carefully into the heavy stock saddle and start off on a nice quiet ride out into the large open area behind the corral. As that open space gets close to the mountainside, there are more trees. But although the trees look like a forest from a distance, when you get into them are by no means closely spaced. It is easy to ride among them.
Alazan is obedient but keeps trying to turn left and circle back to the corral. I decide that, for this ride, I would not dismount to open barbed-wired fences but would patrol only around the big fenced-in area. I am out for a total of about ninety minutes and cover everything including riding up into the wooded areas and along sometimes quite deep arroyos. I suspect that, if I had just keep heading away from the ranch-house complex, Alazan would eventually have settled down. But I just walk the horse and enjoy the surroundings, watching the cattle staring at me as we go by, noting interesting and colourful songbirds that pop up out of the trees or grass, and soak up the sun in the mid-70’s air temperatures. Unless you compare it with a city, this is about as far as you can get from a sailboat and bluewater cruising as you can get. And, whereas down in San Carlos we did everything we could to avoid the direct rays of the sun, with the temperatures here a mile high in the mid-seventies, I am happy to be in them. We do break briefly into a canter once or twice; it’s easy enough if in any way we start heading for home. But I do not on this first outing want to get too rambunctious, get Alazan -or me for that matter- all lathered up, and I know that I will be stiff enough anyway from the unaccustomed exercise without overdoing things. As you get older, after all, you get more cautious.
The horse and I come back after having enjoyed a little mild exercise. I arrive back pleased that I had not forgotten everything about western-style riding and that I am only mildly stiff. I would like to be out there every day if I can and at some point ride out for a few hours with Simon when he is working livestock on horseback.
As darkness approaches, Kathleen goes out to do the evening chores. Suddenly she is back to say that there is a strange horseman at the corral gate, and, Oh, yes! Schnautze and Porky are out of the pigpen again. I rush out to help. It is rather difficult to talk to Jose-Luis while simultaneously trying to shoo pigs back into a pen. He is trying not to smile. We can’t entice the pigs with a bucket of food because they have already been fed and are ready for some out-of-pen action. Jose Luis watches with, I think, suppressed amusement but little facial expression on his dark Indian face under his Stetson as we circle the pigs waving our arms to drive them towards the sty. Are there such people as “pigboys” there way there are “cowboys”? Too bad Cody is out with Simon; he would have nipped at their heels and driven them along in the right direction. Eventually, as darkness falls, Schnautze and Porky settle the whole matter by finally disappearing over the steep drop into the underbrush heading towards the river. They will just have to make it on their own tonight and we can only hope that they show up in the morning. (Which they do; Schnautze is the first back this morning and goes into the sty to get at the food there; Porky shows up later - like the last time, tired and footsore. I spend some time making the gate more swine-proof. Pig-chases are not my thing! Pigboy, indeed!)
Jose Luis, we decipher, has been hired by Bob (Roberto) to work on the ranch to ride fence in order to get the big mesa pasture prepared to receive cattle. He has ridden over from San Antonio in about six hours and was expecting to find Roberto here. We ourselves have been expecting Bob back since Tuesday at the latest. Maybe the road is now so badly washed out by the heavy rains that he can’t drive it. The telephone doesn’t work here at the moment although we have email.
Having established his bona fides, we invite Jose Luis in for coffee and something to eat. With a little luck Simon will not be so late this evening. Before coming inside, Jose Luis unsaddles his horse and hobbles it by tying the two forefeet together with a simple rope. The animal can get to grass but can only do so by hopping forward. It won’t go far during the night and can easily be captured in the morning. We drink coffee and eat together and struggle with our Spanish to make conversation. We find out that Jose Luis, perhaps about 50 years old, is a full-blooded Pima Indian and one of the few dozen that still speak the language. He is also a Pentecostal minister in San Antonio. Like Simon, he is very mild-mannered. Unlike Simon, who can joke around, Jose Luis is more serious; he smiles but doesn’t laugh and chortle the way Simon does.
Eventually Simon arrives back way after dark. After putting up his mule, he comes in for dinner. He is pleased to see another man here as the work is getting to be too much for him alone. We get some bedding for Jose Luis and eventually the two men go off to the cowboy bunkhouse.
This morning about 0800, to my surprise, another cowboy shows up at the corral. This place is becoming like Grand Central Station! I thought it was supposed to be remote. This is Roberto, a much younger and taller man with a friendly smile full of good white teeth and a white straw Stetson. Roberto apparently also works riding fence. Who knew? He has come in to pick up a gasoline-powered chain saw for use, I think, to make fence-posts on the spot. The engine however refuses to work properly. Before he can go back out again he has to pull the engine apart and get it working. The other men have to stand around and wait, not knowing how long this is going to take and therefore not really able to start anything else.
When I was out for my ride yesterday, I notice that there are lots of branches and even whole trees lying on the ground. Most of them have been cut but some have been blown down. The trees are not really very tall or thick in the semi-arid climate here, and I wonder if some of this can’t be recovered for use in the fireplaces and cooking ranges. It would just have to be cut up and stacked. Looking around the complex I don’t see any stacks of wood. Maybe I should offer to do that. It would be good exercise and useful work. Of course, bringing in bottles of propane, the current cooking fuel, is a lot easier and cheaper probably than paying somebody to fetch, cut and stack firewood. But there are three power saws around here in one storeroom or another. So maybe I shall take on the job. I’ll discuss it with Bob when he eventually shows up.
While I am puttering about the place Greta and the other dogs start barking and looking out to the north. I wander over to the ravine and see an elderly man riding slowly across the little creek and point his grey horse’s head up the step hill towards me. Eventually he arrives accompanied by two dogs. We talk for a minute while he sits in the saddle, his woven-leather quirt in his right hand, his hands folded over each other and resting on the brass pommel of his stock saddle. He must be well over seventy and exudes a certain calm dignity. His skin is dark from years in the sun, one eye has an incipient cataract and he has only a few teeth left in his lower jaw. He is wearing a black baseball cap, a black t-shirt and dark blue-jeans darned visibly at one knee. Like all the other cowboys I have seen here, he is not wearing cowboy boots but only crepe-soled work shoes. Only Roberto wears spurs that I have seen so far; only Roberto and Israel have been wearing Stetson hats, the white straw variety you see so often in Mexico.
I offer him my hand, invite him to dismount and offer to get him some water to drink. He dismounts and drapes the two reins of his horse’s bridle over something; the horse will stand as if tied firmly. He sits down on under the eaves in the Herraria (smithy) in the shade while I get some cold water. As far as I understood him, he has ridden over to Rancho el Nogal from somewhere north of here, and that he worked for nine years (or did he say ninety) on this ranch, riding the perimeter and doing all the cowpunchers normal tasks on a working cattle ranch. Gesturing to all the hills around he seems to be saying that he knows them all from his work here. He seems just to want to say hello to Señor Roberto (Bob); this is a courtesy call, I gather. I explain that Roberto is coming mañana o mas tarde. (I don’t really know when he is coming but I am trying to be polite in my limited Spanish). It could be that, like Jose-Luis, Bob has hired him to work here. He is old but he’s probably tough enough still. I listen while he talks about his past here. Of course I only get some of it but I can now guess at a lot. When he finishes one part and I stay silent, he begins to sing under his breath, a sort of little Indian-sounding chant that perhaps is meant to fill in the conversational spaces. After chanting quietly for a while he would pick up another topic to do with his life here. Eventually he stands and says something that might mean that he has to go and moves to his horse. I wave to him as he rides through the fence and out of sight over the lip of the arroyo.
So far the only persons we have met on the ranch other than Cindy and Bob and their two boys have been Pima Indians. They have without exception been reserved, soft-spoken, polite and friendly, clean though wearing old work clothes. I had of course heard of Apaches and Yumas; they were both from around here too. In fact, the name of the village of Yepachic nearby is the Spanish way of spelling Apache. But I had never heard of the Pima Indians before. So I looked for some information about them on the internet. Since all up and down the coast of Alaska, British Columbia (including the Queen Charlotte Islands), and Washington State we had many encounters with native peoples (called First Nations in Canada) and had become intensely interested in their histories and cultures and especially by the history of the encounters between whites and natives. This story of the Pima Indians is different in that they were an agricultural and not a warrior people. Nevertheless, they were as badly treated as every other aboriginal group, their land grabbed, their language and culture suppressed, the people themselves brought close to extermination in what was basically an attempted and almost completely successful genocide.
Pima Indians
An important tribe of Southern Arizona, centering along the middle Gila and its affluent, the Salt River. Linguistically they belong to the Piman branch of the widely extended Shoshonean stock, and their language, with dialectic variation, is the same as that spoken also by the Pápago and extinct Sobaipuri of southern Arizona, and by the Navome of Sonora, Mexico. In Spanish times the tribes of the Arizona group were known collectively as Pimas Altos (Upper Pima), while those of Senora were distinguished as Pimas Bajos (Lower Pima), the whole territory being known as the Pimería. The tribal name Pima is a corruption of their own word for "no", mistaken by the early missionaries for a proper name. They call themselves simply 'Aàtam, "people", or sometimes for distinction 'Aàtam-akimûlt, "river people". Notwithstanding their importance as a tribe, the Pima have not been prominent in history, owing to their remoteness from military and missionary activity during the Spanish period, and to their almost unbroken peaceable attitude towards the whites. It was at one time claimed that they were the authors of the ruined pueblos in their country, notably the celebrated Casa Grande, but later investigation confirms the statement recorded by Father Garcés as early as 1780 that they were built by a previous people connected with the Hopi.
The real history of the Pima may be said to begin with the German Jesuit missionary explorer, Father Eusebio Keno (Kühn), who in 1687 established a missionary headquarters at Dolores, near the present Cucurpe, northern Senora, Mexico, from which point until his death in 1711 he covered the whole Pimería in his missionary labours. In 1694, led by Indian reports of massive ruins in the far north, he penetrated along the Gila, and said Mass in the Casa Grande. In 1697 he accompanied a military exploration of the Pima country, under Lieutenant Bernal, and Captain Mange, baptizing nearly a hundred Indians. In 1701 he made the earliest map of the Gila region. He found the Pima and their cousins the Pápago most anxious for teachers. "They were, above all, desirous of being formed into regular mission communities, with resident padres of their own; and at many rancherías they built rude but neatly cared-for churches, planted fields, and tended herds of livestock in patient waiting for the missionaries, who, in most cases, never came " (Bancroft). From 1736 to 1750 Fathers Keller and Sedelmair several times visited the Pima, but no missions were established in their country, although a number of the tribe attached themselves to the Pápago missions. The revolt of the southern tribes in 1750 caused a suspension of the work, but the missions were resumed some years later and continued under increasing difficulties until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, at which time the whole number of neophytes in Arizona, chiefly Pápago, was about 1200. In the next year the Arizona missions were turned over to Franciscans of the College of Queretaro, who continued the work with some success in spite of constant inroads of the Apache. Although details are wanting, it is probable that the number of neophytes increased. The most noted of these latter workers was Father Francisco Garcés, in charge of the Pápago at San Xavier del Bac (1768-76). In 1828, by decree of the revolutionary government of Mexico, all the missions were confiscated, the Spanish priests expelled, and all Christianizing effort came to an end.
About 1840 the Pima were strengthened by the Maricopa from the lower Gila, who moved up to escape the attacks of the Yuma, the common enemy of both. Both tribes continue to live in close alliance, although of entirely different language and origin. Their relations with the United States Government began in 1846, when General Kearney's expedition entered their territory, and met with a friendly reception. Other expeditions stopped at their villages within the next few years, all meeting with kind treatment. With the influx of the California gold hunters about 1850, there set in a long period of demoralization, with frequent outrages by the whites which several times almost provoked an outbreak. In 1850 and 1857 the hostile Yuma were defeated. The Apache raids were constant and destructive until the final subjugation of that tribe by the Government. In all the Apache campaigns since 1864 the Pima have served as willing and efficient scouts. In 1857 a non-resident agent was appointed, and in 1859 a reservation was surveyed for the two tribes, and $10,000 in goods distributed among them as a recognition of past services. In 1870 the agency was established at Sacaton on the reservation, since which time they have been regularly under government supervision. The important problem of irrigation, upon which the future prosperity of the tribes depends, is now in process of satisfactory solution by the Government. As a body the Indians are now civilized, industrious as farmers and labourers, and largely Christian, divided between Presbyterian and Catholic. Presbyterian work was begun in 1870. The Catholics re-entered the field shortly afterwards, and have now a flourishing mission school, St. John the Baptist, at Gila Crossing, built in 1899, in charge of Franciscan Fathers, with several small chapels, and total Catholic population of 600 in the two tribes, including fifty Maricopa. The 5000 or more Pápago attached to the same agency have been practically all Catholic from the Jesuit period.
In their primitive condition the Pima were agricultural and sedentary, living in villages of lightly-built dome-shaped houses, occupied usually by a single family each, and cultivating by the help of irrigation large crops of corn, beans, pumpkins and native cotton, from which the women spun the simple clothing, consisting of a breech-cloth and head-band for the man, and a short skirt for the women, with sandals or moccasin for special occasion and a buckskin shirt in extreme cold weather. They also prepared clothing fabrics from the inner bark of the willow. The heavier labour of cultivation was assumed by the men. Besides their cultivated foods, they made use of the fruits of the saguaro cactus, from which they prepared the intoxicating tizwin, and mesquite bean, besides the ordinary game of the country. They painted and tattooed their faces and wore their hair at full length. Their women were not good potters, but they excelled as basket makers. Their arms were the bow, the club, and the shield, fighting always on foot. Their allies were the Pápago and Maricopa, their enemies the Apache and Yuma. The killing of an enemy was followed by an elaborate purification ceremony, closing with a victory dance. There was a head tribunal chief, with subordinate village chiefs. Polygamy was allowed, but not frequent. Descent was in the male line. Unlike Indians generally, they had large families and welcomed twins. And unlike their neighbours, they buried in the ground instead of cremating their dead. Deformed infants were killed at birth, as were at later times the infants born of white or Mexican fathers. They had, and still retain, many songs of ceremony, war, hunting, gaming, love, medicine, and of childhood.
According to their elaborate genesis myth, the earth was formed by "Earth Doctor", who himself evolved from a dense cloud of darkness. He made the plants and animals, and a race of never-dying humans, who by their increase so crowded the earth that he destroyed his whole creation and made a new world with a new race subject to thinning out by death. Another hero god is "Elder Brother", and prominent place is assigned to Sun, Moon, Night, and Coyote. The myth also includes a deluge story. Although the linguistic relations of the Oima are well known, all that is recorded in the language is comprised chiefly in a few vocabularies, none exceeding two hundred words, several of which in manuscript are in the keeping of the Bureau of American Ethnology (See KINO; PÁPAGO INDIANS.)
This write-up came from the Catholic Encyclopaedia so might be a little slanted towards church history. Cindy Tolle told me that the Pimas came here as scouts and auxiliaries for the US Army when they were fighting the Apaches and Yumas in the mid-1850’s. Pimas were an agricultural and peaceful people, always got along well with the white man and were eager to help the US Army defeat the warring tribes. The Pimas share a reservation in Southern Arizona with the Maricopa Indian, who although they were only distantly related, were also being harassed by the Apaches and Yumas. Of course, their support for the US did not protect them from depredations by the incoming settlers and betrayal by every level of government. Treaties signed even by a US president were often breached within six months. A type of genocide was initiated when the water the Pimas required for their crops was siphoned off upstream by white settlers. According to Simon, only a few dozen now still speak the Pima language.
I wanted to find some information from the Pima Indians themselves that might give me some indication about how they saw themselves. The following came from the Pima Indian Reservation website in Southern Arizona:
A Pima Past
by Anne Moore Shaw
Archaeology reveals that around the year 300 B.C. a group of Indian people migrated to the Gila River Valley of Arizona. They settled near the ever-flowing Gila, which shimmered and meandered through the dry desert land. They were fanners and found ways and means to irrigate their crops by diverting water from the river with an elaborate irrigation system that featured hundreds of miles of canals. Most of these canals were about ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. They were dug with wood and stone implements, and the dirt and debris were carried away in large baskets by the women.
A thriving civilization farmed the desert along the canals until around A.D. 1200, when they vanished with no trace or explanation of their disappearance. Old Pima legends say they were driven away by enemy tribes from the east.
As you glance at many areas along the Salt and Gila valleys near the junction of the two rivers, some parts of the canals are still visible. Potsherds can be found lying on top of mounds where once a proud race had its dwellings. Excavations have brought to light basketry, stone axes, seashells, grinding stones, pit houses, and ramadas that attest to open-air living. From these findings, the theory has developed that the Pima and Papago tribes are descendants of these people, whom the Pimas call Huhugam (Those Who Are Gone). That the two tribes have common ancestors may be correct: it is true that they speak the same language with only a slight difference in the Papago dialect.
The famous Casa Grande ruins, still shrouded in mystery, were built sometime in the thirteenth century by a small ancient band sometime called the Salado, who drifted into the region and mixed with the Huhugam. They stayed only until about 1400, and then they too moved away.
According to Pima legends, Siwani Wa!akih, an ancient wise man, lived in the Big House. Its walls were four stories high and built from caliche that hardened like cement. Once it was surrounded by a city of considerable size. Ruins of houses are still visible around the famous Casa Grande, now a national monument. Modern generations call this amazing structure the first skyscraper.
When the first Christian missionary to the Pimas and Papagos came to the Southwest, the native Pima guides told him about the Casa Grande ruins near the Gila River. In 1694 Father Eusebio Francisco Kino, Keno or Kuehn, a German Jesuit) rode a dusty trail to visit the Big House. What a great surprise awaited Padre Kino! The Indians were nearly naked, wearing only breech cloths, and they had long hair and tattooed faces. The gentle padre asked them, "Who built the Case Grande?"
"Huhugam," the Pimas must have answered.
Padre Kino held mass inside the old Casa Grande walls. His joy was complete when he noticed the Pimas imitating the sign of the cross. The docile Pimas of the Gila Valley readily accepted Father Kino and his Christian teachings. They came to love him and his gentle ways.
When Father Kino came again, he brought seeds of vegetables and fruit. These took their places among the favorite foods of the Papago, Pima and Maricopa tribes. But the main little seed was wheat. As soon as the padre introduced it, wheat became an important part of the Indian economy. During the time of the pioneer, it saved the life of many a white tenderfoot and soldier.
Father Kino also introduced horses and cattle and helped the Indians to become better farmers. But as in the days of the Huhugam, the Gila River continued to play an important part in the lives of the natives, who were so dependent on water. Like the Nile, the Gila and Salt rivers used to overflow their banks, depositing rich loam. Men and women cooperated and went to the farms to plant seeds. A wooden gihk, or shovel, with a sharp end, was used to dig holes. When the tiny seed was thrown in the hole, bare heels were ready to shove the dirt over the seed.
This method of planting also was used by the Egyptians in the Nile Valley. And once a maize basket similar to those used by the Pimas was found on the island of Crete. Could it have belonged to the beautiful goddess of Pima legend, the White Clay-Eater, who left the Gila Valley to mourn for her departed twin sons and lived on an island in a distant land? The Pimas have cause to wonder if their ancestors might have wandered from Southeast Asia. Could the Pimas be the lost tribe of Israel?
After Padre Kino set his feet on the Pima desert soil, a wide door was opened for the Mexicans and Europeans. "Now the peaceful Pimas will protect us from the Apaches," they thought. Some came on foot, others on horseback and in ox carts, through southern Arizona, and then a part of Mexico. This first group of settlers had little effect on the primitive Pima way of life. It is true that many Indians now had a Spanish name as well as an Indian name, but the Pimas clung to their ancient values and legends. They continued to live in their brush round houses, called olas kih. People helped each other and worked together in harmony. The land belonged to everyone: a man could farm as much as he could clear and work. To keep things going smoothly, each village had a chief, who allied himself under a head chief when enemies were threatening.
In 1854 the Gadsden Purchase made southern Arizona an American territory. Now a new group of strangers came to the desert country of the Pimas: white soldiers and traders and Indian agents. The rich Pima farms provided these newcomers with food, and soon the growing Pima villages formed themselves into a pattern similar to that of today.
Here a word should be said about the Pimas' friends, the Maricopas. Sometime in the 1700's the Maricopas fought with the other Colorado River tribes. They kept moving eastward until the middle of the nineteenth century, when they settled with the peaceful Pimas along the Gila. But the Yumas of the Colorado River region still bore a grudge against the Maricopas. They came to Pima land to attack their old enemies in 1857. Unfortunately for them, they had not counted on the valor of the Maricopas' new allies. The Pimas and Maricopas thoroughly vanquished the Yumas, leaving almost no survivors.
After the battle, a group of Maricopas came to Pima Chief Antonio Azul and requested a small piece of land on which to build their homes. The chief went into consultation with his counselors and sub-chiefs. It was agreed that the Maricopas could live two miles west on the Sacaton Agency. But they had to promise to help the Pimas in the wars with the Apaches and other enemy tribes. Since then the Pimas and the Maricopas have been loyal allies, friends and neighbors. They still live side by side.
After all that roaming, one would expect the Maricopas to settle down for good. However, in 1877 a murder within the tribe caused a division. One group of dissenters moved to a spot near the junction of the Salt and Gila rivers, while another contingent joined the Mormons at their new colony Lehi, near Mesa. The Mormons were delighted with their Indian neighbors, for they knew that they would help protect them from the marauding Apaches. Thus it was that the Pimas, Maricopa, and Papagos helped the white man to settle the Southwest. Besides providing the newcomers with food and water, they acted as guides, soldiers, and allies to help break the threat of Apache terrorism.
Once the Apaches were conquered, the settlers were free to arrive in great numbers. Over the prairies they came, and it was not long before the old Pima way of life was deeply affected by the white man's ideas and material culture. Some of the new ways were good and the Pimas were glad for them. Blankets, calico, and new foods, tools, and medicines made the hard lives our ancestors had lived a bit easier for us. And of course there was the Christian religion, which became so dear to the Pimas and lightened their sorrows.
But the white man brought bad things too. Liquor has broken up families, and Indian morality has conspicuously declined. Indian values have been abandoned by some of the younger generation, and they are no longer satisfied to stay at home. Many of our arts and traditions have been lost because the white man insisted that we indiscriminately abandon all our Indian ways.
Thus as our old ones have died off the arts of cloth weaving and pottery-making have gone with them. Our children are no longer interested in the ancient legends and ceremonies and songs, so many of these treasures have been lost forever. Diseases which the Pima had never known before came with the white man; tuberculosis struck down many of us because the Indian agents insisted that we live in poorly ventilated adobe houses instead of our airy olas kih. Many of our rich farms along the Gila and Salt Rivers, which supported our ancestors for centuries, have become dry and deserted as the white man has taken the water for his own purpose.
But now we old ones are seeing the completing of the circle. Instead of insisting that we abandon our Indian ways, the white man now asks us to try to recapture our rich culture before it has completely passed away. I am telling the children on the reservation about the Huhugam; I teach them the Pima language and legends.
We women get together to weave baskets in the old designs, and we have started a museum where everyone can see the beautiful artifacts of our proud Pima-Maricopa heritage. But we can never go back to the old way of life. The white man and his cities surround us--we must embrace those of his ways which are good while keeping our pride in being Indians.
Life For Indians Changed As White Men Moved In by Diane Enos
"And they will do it,they will kill the staying earth.But you must not help them,you will just be feeling fine,and you will see it,you will see it."
Thus Elder Brother, culture hero of the Pima Indians, prophesied the destruction of the world in his farewell speech. It might be said that this prophecy has already come to pass.
The world of the indigenous peoples, the Pima and the Maricopa, has in some sense been destroyed in the last hundred years. From all sociological, political and spiritual perspectives that world has unequivocally been altered forever, as the people were forever to adapt to changes wrought by the intrusion of the white man in the Salt River Valley.
Archaeological evidence such as village sites and ancient irrigation systems indicate that the area along the Salt and Gila rivers has been inhabited by humans since at least 300 B.C. Modern-day Pimas, anthropologists say, may be descended from those ancient farmers, the "huhu-kam" which means "those who are gone".
In villages along the Gila River, the Pima and Maricopa grew crops of corn, several types of beans, tobacco and squash, as well as cotton that was woven into cloth. The two tribes had allied themselves against others such as the Apache and Quechan after the 18th century when the Maricopa sought and received asylum with the Pimas.
White military expeditions passing through Pima land found hospitable and industrious villagers who traded wheat, syrup, melons, corn and other surplus crops for needles, buttons, beads, clothes and thread. Lt. Col. Phillip St. George Cooke with the "Mormon Battalion" remarked in his journal on "eating watermelon on Christmas," which the Pimas offered from their storage piles. Another chronicler noted fields "as far as the eye can see" of irrigated, productive land along the Gila River. In 1876, the Pimas sold a surplus of 2 million pounds of wheat.
But by 1871 the Gila was drying up. White settlers upstream around Florence were diverting all of the water, leaving the fields of the Pimas and Maricopas to wither and dry up. Also at this time a drought was beginning.
Stories are told in the Salt River community of this time, when men would run the 30 or so miles up from the Gila, tend their fields and run back at evening. Soon, whole families relocated to the lush edges of the Salt River, where they cleared fields, refilled ancient ditches and began tilling the soil around their new settlements. By 1878, Indian Agent J.H. Stout counted 600 to 700 people living at Salt River.
White settlers were displeased. The Pima and Maricopas "were denounced for this by the committee of the Maricopa Grand Jury and are termed renegades and savage intruders," according to a letter written by Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, for whom Fort McDowell is named. Agent Stout also noted that the "number of whites who want farms of the lands occupied by the Indians has increased to 16", and that they had held a meeting demanding that the Indians be forced back to the Gila.
But Stout, along with others, petitioned the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to add Salt River to the then-existing reservation, citing the Indians' buffering effect against the Apaches, as well as their right to farm the land. Pima and Maricopa had served commendably as scouts for the army.
On January 10, 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes enlarged the reservation to include the "Salt River on the west, the San Carlos Reservation on the east." Less than six months later, that executive order was revoked and the current Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation (which is now east of Scottsdale) was established, roughly the size it is today.
The people maintained a village system of agriculture, where family homes were located relatively close together for protection from raiding Apaches. They maintained an economic and political system based on mutual help in the production of crops.
Although she was born about 1907, "Nanny" Howard's recollection of community life reflects a continuum of that period. She recalls how families used to help each other at planting. "They'd all go - the women to cook and feed everybody And when it came time to harvest the wheat, some families had Papagos come stay and help for some of the crop because they didn't have any fields down there."
Harvesting the wheat involved the use of horses to trample the stalks, after which women would winnow out the chaff with large woven baskets, according to Howard. "People really helped each other then, not like now," she said.
The governing body was that of a council of "chiefs" and a hereditary "head chief." Decisions were arrived at by consensus, with discussion continuing until everyone agreed. According to Josiah King, now deceased, "the system was more democratic than making decisions by a majority vote, but had the disadvantage of being slow when there were strong opposing opinions."
King had noted that during the early 20th century "strong differences of opinion" created two political factions, the Progressives and the Conservatives. "Meetings in the large council house often ending in fights between the Progressives and Conservatives," he said. "The Progressives were known as Montezuma's Gang after Dr. Carlos Montezuma, a Yavapai who campaigned for Indian rights and urged Indians to become educated, learn from the white man and adopt what was beneficial. The Conservatives favored keeping the Pima way, and at one point the Conservatives tried to kill Chief Hiv Qua."
When Chief Hiv Qua died in 1933, he was about 80 years old. Upon his death, Jose King became the last Pima chief, but according to his son Josiah, by that time the system had broken down.
"The chief's power had been taken away by the government and many people no longer believed in the chief but followed the Indian agent, " said Josiah King.
By 1940, the tribe had elected by popular vote its first president and adopted a constitution and bylaws under the provisions of the federal Indian Reorganization Act, a system in effect today.
Also, at the beginning of this century, the enactment of two major legislative actions involving land and water, central to the Pima and Maricopa, were to unilaterally transform that way of life.
The Dawes Act of 1887, applied at Salt River about 1910 had allowed for the division of land into individual "allotments" of 10 acres below the Arizona Canal, and 20 acres of secondary land above the canal, which had no rights to irrigation water from the canal.
The well-meaning intent of the Dawes Act was to create "family farms", but instead the "resulting land use and settlement pattern led to the destruction of village structure and cooperative modes of farming which had enabled villagers to pool their labor and resources," wrote Billman Hayes, Sr., a former chairman of the tribal Land Board several years ago.
White homesteaders in the Salt River Valley had noticed the ancient Huhu-kam canals. Reclearing and use of these canals proved to be profitable. By 1888, they had cultivated 100,000 acres and began to seek more water.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Irrigation Act, which paved the way for the construction of dams on the Salt and Verde Rivers and the subsequent diversion of water below the Granite Reef Dam into canals. The Salt River began to dry up.
Though a child at the time, Florence Howard, now near 80, remembers that the "people were kind of scared" when the river stopped. Like other elders she saw the river's green edges of reeds, willow, cottonwood and mesquite slowly shrivel and fade.
The songs of the people began to fade also, says Howard. She spoke of when the all-night circle dances would bring "lots of people, and my father would sing with them 'to make the people dance' and celebrate." Major celebrations such as the "burning of the witch" to mark the historic killing of a child-stealing sorceress, later merged with the Mormon Pioneer Days or various saints’ days as the Pima and Maricopa embraced Christianity.
"Vashi soovak", or the place where a sweet-smelling grass grew abundantly and now is Scottsdale, was mostly chaparral with a few farms about 73 years ago. "Nanny" Howard was a child then, and she remembers that Mr. (Verner) Vanderhoof farmed near Indian School and Pima Roads.
"The Indians would go and work for him, harvesting in wagons," she recalls, "and he would grow a special kind of pumpkin that he knew the Indians liked, the kind that you could cut into strips and dry. He was good to us, when he was through getting what they needed from the fields, he'd let the Indians take what was left."
Then, education of reservation children was required by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Boarding schools like the Phoenix Indian School were the rule of the day since the early 1900's.
Leo Schurz recalls that the military structure of the school required uniforms, drilling and the learning of a trade. He says, "we grew our own vegetables, baked bread for the whole school, raised stock and were trained to be able to get a job doing those things." As part of the training, children were strictly forbidden to speak their tribal languages.
Like most Salt River seniors, Naomi Enos is fluent in her native language. She can recite family kin-ships and anecdotes about earlier tribal members. People like her have seen in their lifetime a total restructuring of the old economy from agricultural self-sufficiency to the mainstream American economy. "We grew everything that we ate," she said. "There was no welfare then, people didn't have a choice, you had to work." When they could no longer grow enough to be self-sustaining, she said people sold wood and women took jobs as domestic help in white homes.
Acculturation through education also brought about a change from the diet of desert and cultivated indigenous crops. Florence Howard laments the loss of such foods as "hunum" or cholla buds, berries and mesquite pods. She says of the past, "they didn't get sick then, it's because of the food they ate, no sugar."
Today, although Pima and Maricopa shoppers favor [the local supermarket] to the field and desert, there are still some gardens of corn, beans and squash seen at Salt River. The old, non–hybrid seeds, like the languages, have survived to some extent and may represent as a symbol those tangible parts of culture persisting in a modern, technological world.
Even so, the water to sprout those seeds and irrigate miles of arable land of the Salt River Reservation remains at issue. A historic water settlement now under negotiation, could resolve several suits bought by the tribe against the government, Valley cities including Scottsdale, the Salt River Project and others. The suits were filed to assert court-determined water rights of the Pima and Maricopa based on prior or first use.
* Quote from ritual oratory collected by George Herzog from Gila River Piman in the 1920s. Piman Texts (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Library, Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguists), ms. 269.


Wednesday, 07 2005
Simon arrived back in heavy rain about 2200 last night, cheerful and smiling. He ate the quesadillas that we had prepared for him earlier, thanked us, chatted for a while before wishing us Buenos Noches and heading off to bed. This morning he was a little slow getting started and sat with us around the table drinking coffee and patiently correcting our Spanish until about 0930 before getting to whatever he was doing today.
I asked him if he would help me saddle a horse for riding around the immediate ranch-house area. He said he would.
The orange rooster had me awake with his off-key crowing this morning well before dawn. I kept turning over to go back to sleep the whole time also thinking that the cock could definitely use some voice lessons; he has some pitch problems. His crowing doesn’t stay quite on key, rising a half tone at the beginning of his final note and then dropping (no doubt for lack of abdominal support) a whole tone. His song is precisely the same every time. There are fourteen chickens and four roosters in the hen house. We have named the orange rooster Macbeth (“Macbeth murders sleep” Shakespeare). Macbeth is a new bird at the ranch, Cindy told us. Macbeth stays over here near the ranch house because there are already too many cocks in the flock. But he keeps calling in the mornings over to the roosters in the coop on the other side of the corral about two hundred metres away. At first they answer him. But, after a little while, they simply ignore him, leaving him to squawk (under our window) in vain.
Until this morning there was also another new bird on the ranch: a little, white, half-grown chicken that normally slept right on top of old Tank, the huge but feeble and half-blind dark-grey mastiff dog that grew up on the ranch. This morning when I was walking under the covered walkway between the guest house and the ranch house, I saw the chick lying dead near where Tank had been sleeping last night. The bird did not look like it had been savaged. In fact, it looked just flat. Could Tank have rolled over in his sleep and smothered the chick?
I am trying to get myself back on schedule of rising early when I can be alone to write. I do the morning chores (chickens, pigs, dogs, cats, and goat), make coffee and turn on my computer to check my email and whatever news of fresh disaster has come up overnight; with George Bush in the White House you can count on a new one every couple of weeks; my head has shaken so much and so often over the last few years that I am sometimes inclined not to bother checking the news at all because it just upsets me. (How did such a spoiled, rich, addled, posturing, empty vessel ever get to be president?) I check regularly on progress and situations in Mississippi and Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. I am glad to know that the kids are safe but want to see what is happening next. And finally I take a look at the 5-day weather forecasts for Guaymas and San Carlos, Sonora, (where Vilisar is on a mooring buoy) to see if anything horrible is on the way north. At present there is no sign of a tropical disturbance at all for the Eastern Pacific (http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/76255.html ).
I am going to have to isolate myself more however since both Simon and Kathleen come into the ranch house just as I am getting started. Frustrated, I decide to give up writing till Simon has left. I grab a broom and started sweeping, picking things up and sweeping again. Simon eventually leaves for work and Kathy helps me re-arrange some of the heavy wooden furniture to get the pieces away from the wet adobe walls (last night’s rain soaked a lot of wall and dripped in on upholstered and wooden furniture), to clean behind furniture and to make the room a little friendlier. Today when the grass outside has dried I want to roll up the large Navajo rug on the floor which has become filthy from the dirty shoes tracking through: I intend take it outside and shake it out. It’s too big to hang up and too much work at this point to beat the dust out of it. There doesn’t seem to be a vacuum cleaner around the house. Just turning it upside down on the grass should get a lot of rough dirt out of it. It’s a really pretty rug.
My unremitting battle against house flies is more or less like the U.S. Army trying to subdue Iraq; it’s showing no sign of being successful. I am not so cynical to try to make myself or others believe that my real intent is to bring democracy to the flies. The matamosca (fly swat) is falling apart. From where I sit to write I see a gecko over near the window. He is pretty successful at catching flies. I read once of a cruising couple who had inadvertently picked up a gecko in the tropics; it kept their boat free of bugs, insects, cockroaches, etc. Every outdoor wall has a gecko around here, some as long as four or five inches. So, I wonder if I couldn’t get a few more in here.
On top of everything, as the rainwater dripped down the walls last night, legions of big red ants could be seen marching across the wet yellow walls carrying what looked like kernels of rice but may actually have been larvae they were trying to rescue from the water. And, from near the top of the adobe fireplace in the corner, closely-ranked lines of very small red ants were marching down the corner of the wall and being passed by the same formations heading back up. This morning neither type of ants is visible at all. I checked the internet to find home remedies to deal with ants, methods that were also ecologically sound. Apparently, ants don’t like items with strong smells. Since I have only a limited number of stinky shoes with me, I decided to try recommendations like spreading black pepper or shredded mint or bay leaves, spraying with diluted Simple Green, or even slopping caliente hot sauce around. Planting aromatic herbs like mint or even planting marigolds all around your house helps to keep them away. My researches on geckoes for use in the house have not progressed very far yet.

Tuesday, 06 September 2005

We heard yesterday from the children by email. Antonia and William were driven down to Corpus Christi, Texas, (I guess by Elizabeth, their mother) to stay indefinitely with Elizabeth’s sister and her family. Elizabeth was born and brought up there so she has a network of friends there. Her father also lives in Corpus Christi. Elizabeth is a social worker at a state men’s prison in Mississippi and, according to the kids, has returned to her job and to keep an eye on the house. My daughter, Antonia, said Andrew was working with the disaster-cleanup crews. Things are obviously up in the air for everybody. Antonia thought they would be staying in Corpus Christi at least until the end of the school semester but I do not know if they will actually be attending school there. I regard all this as good news that they are out of harm’s way and safe from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The second good news is that I picked up some translating business from the London office of a New York translating agency. It was an issuing prospectus for a hedge fund so therefore more than a little technical. A few hundred dollars comes in really handy right at this point since my two small pensions leave no money over after deductions and child support. I hope I can get some more business while I am stationary here at Rancho el Nogal.
Yesterday, for the first time since we arrived, we had no daily downpour. That’s good since the roof over the big room and kitchen at the ranch house is not at all waterproof. Since the walls are essentially made of mud (adobe), when they get saturated from rainwater seeping inside they begin to disintegrate. Part of the house, the after portion, has a slanted roof that seems to be pretty watertight and so does our guest house. Most of the barns also are also badly in need of new roofing (they appear to be mainly of wooden shingles and corrugated iron. It’s the flat roof over the kitchen and living room of the main house that is leaking so badly. No doubt, since it is dry most of the year, they are like the Arkansas Traveller who didn’t want to get up on the roof in the rain because it’s too dangerous and, when it’s not raining, it doesn’t bother him much that there’s a hole in the roof. Bob and Cindy are usually very busy and can hardly deal with everything.
Both Cindy and Bob are delightful and engaging people who seem very intelligent. The ranch would be totally overwhelming considering that it’s 17,000 acres already and may be expanded at some point. Cindy also runs a school (university credits) for environmental projects, sets up and runs eco-projects (e.g. currently counting trout in the streams) in the region, together with Bob operates the business side of the ranch (like, what animals to raise, when and at what price to sell them, etc.), home-schools three small children, travels to the U.S.A. and all over Latin America to mountaineer and rock-climb as well as to engage in eco-projects. Spring semester will be taken up with university courses here. Cindy hires a teacher for the kids when there are students here. She also hires a cook. A cleaner comes in every few weeks during the year to try to keep the chaos of a ranch house with three small children and busy parents under control. Any single one of the adults’ lives would overwhelm me.
Simon, for his part, says he cannot handle all the work here alone. The goat went un-milked while Cindy was away and has almost stopped lactating. There are gardens that are left untended. The chickens have more or less stopped laying in the hen house since nobody is here in the evening to put them away. Then there are all the other jobs from shoeing horse, to culling cattle, to moving horses and cows from one pasture to another, etc., etc, etc. Not to mention work on the buildings and outhouses and corrals. A cowboy’s work is never done. Simon talked like maybe there was an extra hand coming but, “Where is he?”
However, we can assist: in exchange for room and board we can watch the house and yard and do a few light chores, e.g. take care of the chickens, goats, pigs, dogs and cats, keep ahead of the dirt in the house and maybe take on other light jobs. At the same time we can have the wilderness ranch experience. So far, I find it great. The simplicity, even the primitiveness in general doesn’t bother me. A boater, however, is easily shocked by any dilapidation. He is used to keeping ahead of things so the rain stays out his berth and the boat says looking good and operating well. I really object to dirt and flies. Well, I can’t go too much about the second, i.e. the flies, though I have become a major threat to them with the matamosca (fly swat). (Fortunately, we don’t seem to have them in the guest house much. No food there I guess.) Kathleen and I have been sweeping and cleaning in the main house and things are already looking like we are catching up. I hope they are pleased at our efforts when they finally get back.
This morning I get up early to make coffee and write. Simon is slow to get up today and Kathleen even slower. Simon at least has the excuse that he was in the saddle all day yesterday and didn’t get home until several hours after dark. Cindy said that meals on the ranch are 7-1-7, so we waited well past seven in the evening to see if Simon would come. We promised him spaghetti with tomato sauce and Kathleen baked a great loaf of Damper bread. It was probably 2200 before Simon finally came in. He is smiling but fatigado (tired). He wished me a happy birthday and admired the glass jar of meadow flowers on the table. We asked him how he could find his way home in the pitch dark last night. I think he said that his caballo (mulo, actually) knows the camino a casa. Luckily it did not rain though I know he had his rain cape with him. He ate his dinner, said Buenos Noches, and left for the bunkhouse.
This morning he makes a batch of tortillas and a pot of refried beans first thing. He makes great tortillas! He sits patiently mixing the dough, setting little dough balls to rise, rolling them out with a small, one-inch-thick rolling pin and frying them on a piece off flat metal on the propane range until he has the woven covered basket full. He has tried Kathleen’s damper bread, which we both think is great. But he doesn’t much care for it, I suspect. Did he say in Spanish that it tastes too much like sawdust? Maybe he doesn’t like the whole wheat flour that was also in the dough. “And anyway you have to saw it off to eat it.” He has a point there.
Later, while are drinking the first coffee, another cowboy shows up. I saw him from a distance at the corral on Sunday but did not get to meet him then. His name is Israel and he works here too. Like Simon he is a Pima Indian. He goes out alone for days at a time to ride fence, i.e. patrol on horseback along the barbed wire fences and repair them when necessary so one’s own cattle don’t get out and strange cattle don’t get in. Simon says he sleeps, “in el campo” so I guess he camps out, though I didn’t notice that he had a bedroll. But maybe too the ranch has some cabins out there in the 17,000 acres. Simon fixes breakfast for him after first making the tortillas. No doubt too he is pleased to have company where he doesn’t have to listen to broken Spanish (actually, our Spanish isn’t yet even that good). Soon afterwards, Simon fills up a couple of plastic bags with food for three days: coffee, beans, apples, etc. It didn’t seem like much, though. On the other hand, even Simon doesn’t eat that much considering the heavy work he does every day. Neither one of them is overweight, that’s for sure.
The refried beans for breakfast come from a bag, are in powdered form, and are already spiced. You simply pour hot water over the amount you desire and heat it gently for 25 minutes. Delicious and a lot easier than making your own or even buying and schlepping canned beans. Must get some of these bags for the boat.
While the beans are steeping for breakfast, Israel sits on a fence rail looking like the Marlboro man and watches Simon re-shoe his mule and then put a new hoof on Israel’s horse. There is a little outdoor smithy under the overhanging eaves just opposite the door to our sleeping accommodation. Later, I wish I had asked Simon to show me how to shoe (herraria) a horse. But before I could get up the nerve to ask him, he is finishing his work, saddling the big black mule he normally rides, handing up the food supplies in plastic shopping bags along with an enamelled coffee cup to Israel who in turn festoons his saddle with them, sticks his foot in the stirrup, swings up into the saddle. The two of them start out the open gate leading to the steep path down to the river. We watch them disappear nearly straight down until they disappear around a bend and into the trees and we are masters of the place again.

Later on Sunday, 04 September 05

It is a quiet Sunday on “the ranch”. After drinking coffee around 0700 Kathleen washes up the dirty dishes from the last two days. Cindy cooked pinto beans in a huge pressure cooker before she left. These are to be used as the basis for soups or stews or refried beans, I guess. I make a bean soup by adding onions and garlic and carrots and seasonings; even Simon, who drifts in to eat what’s available or make his own meal, says it’s good. There is some washing up from this as well.
In the meantime, I busy myself with the chores: letting the chickens out; bringing the scraps to the pigs; pegging the goat where it can eat the flowering thistle but not the tomato-plant leaves (deadly nightshade family). Later I also spend more time tidying up in the ranch house and sweeping, sweeping, sweeping. The heavy and prolonged rain of yesterday has left a lot of puddles and dampness around outside. Today began mild but slightly overcast. As the morning progressed the sun came out brightly and the river level, swollen after each rain, has fallen again. Simon goes off on horseback after breakfast to round up some horses and cattle somewhere on the ranch. I see him fording the river in the distance and, around five, returning with the animals. The river levels have indeed fallen, but at the ford a couple of cattle miss their footing where it is deeper near a big boulder and I watch as they are swept downstream some one hundred metres or so before they can scramble back out and get ashore on the other side. The calf leaps and springs through the water to the shore.
The soil dries up very quickly here leading me to believe that it is very porous. It’s basically washed-down lava and fine gravel from the rocky mountains that ring our green valley. In the warm sunshine I leave Kathleen surfing the net and strike out back along the road we arrived by. I am accompanied by three of the dogs: Greta, a largish Springer-spaniel type and a good watchdog; Cody, a medium-sized short-haired brown-black-white dog with a docked tail who is also a herd dog; and small, black-brown-patched Phil, a recent arrival on the ranch. Cindy, the ranch-owner who named Phil when he showed up here as a stray, has not been impressed by Phil. “He doesn’t contribute anything to a ranch.” And, it’s true; this smallish dog looks like he ought to have some border collie or something similar in him. He’s very quiet, makes no effort to help in any way and is totally non-plussed by the horses and cattle. Phil drew an attack from Cody yesterday who gave Phil a real bite. He was obviously hurt. He didn’t reply to the attack, however. I think Cody is savaging Phil every once in a while to let him know who’s the boss. Only Tank, the ancient mastiff, stays back at the ranch house. He can hardly see or walk and sleeps most of the time.
But I get a surprise on my walk. Out about half a mile from the house the road curves along the river bluff before it descends. I am standing overlooking the river and back at the house when Phil lets out a sharp bark and takes off back the way we came and out across the distant broad meadow. The other two dogs leap up and follow him, all at high speed, everyone barking to beat the band. I get a glimpse of some mid-sized tawny animal with a longish neck. A deer, an antelope, a big dog? Not, I think a coyote, as it was too big. I saw two such animals across the river yesterday when I just happened to have the binoculars in my hands. But even then I got only a fleeting look at them and could not identify them. I never get another look today either because the live-oak trees block my view. When I get to where I can view across the open plain, I see only the three dogs, running at high speed into the distance until they disappear into the woods nearly a mile away. Ten minutes later Cody returns first, limping slightly; I think he suffers a bit from arthritis. After a while the other two come prancing back as well, totally winded and sopping in sweat. I have never seen Phil move faster than a slow walk and am absolutely astonished at the speed that he was able to muster up and sustain. I am so proud of Phil who has shown at least one outstanding capability. I try to explain the animal I glimpsed to Simon later but my Spanish is too limited and I only get blank looks.
The warm afternoon is spent writing and reading, sometimes indoors and sometimes outdoors. At one point Kathleen walks with me and the dogs to the same spot and we gather meadow flowers and put them in a Mason jar back at the ranch house.
At one point during the warm afternoon, I find a way to take my first bath. There is no bathroom and no shower stall here. Nothing at all. Cindy had said before we came that there is a solar shower and both Kathleen and I envisaged solar-heated hot-water showers like we encountered at the National Park on the Queen Charlotte Islands. These were of log construction and really super. But the solar shower here is exactly like the solar bag we lay out on deck aboard Vilisar and then hang up for a shower on the foredeck or in the cockpit. It works but it is really primitive. After we got here Cindy said she usually just goes down to the river and bathes or takes a 25-minute walk to the warm (not hot) spring that comes out of the side of the cliff.
I am not yet ready to sweat it down to the river and back up on a hot day. So I cast around for another, closer solution. There is a big tin washtub standing near the house for use with the outdoor washing machine. It has partially filled with rainwater over the past few days and is delightfully warm from the sunshine. I strip off, stand on the grass next to the tub and pour the water over me several times and dry off in the sunshine. I feel like a new man. Standing naked in the wilderness while the wind dries me off is, as William after his first skinny dip, very “liberating”. And no bathroom to clean up! No towels hang out to dry! Me, the noble savage. Rousseau would approve. Perhaps I shall add this to my list of honorifics: Ronnie Bird: Boy Spot-Welding King of the World; Captain Epoxy; Nobel Savage.
Late in the afternoon it clouds up and rains hard for an hour. The roof begins to leak even more than yesterday. I want to start dinner but the propane picks this moment to run out. I guess it will be a cold meal tonight. That’s all right; we have plenty of tomatoes for a salad. As I am pondering the situation, the sun comes out again, providing Kathleen and me with a giant, coast-to-coast, double rainbow. At one end it arches right down into the river. Kathleen is in the guest house reading when I first see it; I run calling to her to come quickly to see the nature show. Really incredibly splendiferous! It even beats the one we saw one late winter’s afternoon in Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands.
We decide to do the chores together and walk around in the wet grass and mud to collect up the chickens (we got them all but the guinea hen tonight), feed the pigs (both in their pen tonight), put out feed for the dogs, and bring the nanny-goat back under the eaves of the barn. The dogs follow us around. We stop regularly to gape at the rainbow that last for half an hour at least. Small subsidiary rainbows appear from the river bottom.
Simon spends all day in the saddle rounding up cattle and driving them back across the river. When he brings them up the steep slope his mule looks is working hard, like a bird dog back and forth. He also brings up two other mules and a larger horse. He turns the mule he has been riding out into the pasture. After a quick bite to eat in the kitchen, he saddles the white mule, swings aboard and is gone again. Later I see him way down in the river meadow rounding up cattle again. If he has to change horses, he too must be really tired. I watch him come up again with the cows; the white mule has to dart back and forth and up and down the steep rocky hill to keep the cows moving in the right direction. He has taken Cody with him and the dog is nipping at the cows’ heels. Nevertheless it is Simon and his mule that have been doing the real work. Those working animals must be very, very tough indeed to be able to do what they do all day.
Simon seems a little overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done. But he worked today so I assume he is working seven days a week. He rather implied to Kathleen that he felt he had far too much to do. He did not seem to know how long Cindy and Bob would be away or just what our role here was to be. I guess the best thing for us to do is to keep the house clean, get some meals on the table, look after the barnyard animals and help Simon whenever we can. He was implying yesterday that he could use some help with the round up. I am glad to get involved provided the horse is quiet; it has been quite a while since I have ridden. But, years ago, I was once involved with a week-long horse roundup in Manitoba; I am not sure that I am up to the pure physical exertion of days and days in the saddle at my age. But it would be fun to try it.

Later on Sunday, 04 September 2005

Kathleen and I sit around in the “office”, i.e. the room in the ranch house where the printer and the wireless internet live, until about 2230. The rain has stopped. The cats, kittens actually, which we have repeatedly driven out of the house into the storage rooms and roofed over areas, look bedraggled and are mewling to get inside. They are young but are supposed to become mousers and live outside. The bigger dogs are not allowed in the house though they try at every opportunity. The two little Chihuahuas (at home in here the State of Chihuahua) went on the truck trip to the outside world with Cindy and Bob and the boys. Just as well since both Chihuahuas are in heat and driving the other dogs crazy.
I am already awake when the visually beautiful and operatic-calibre orange rooster lets go way before dawn. The cows and calves have bawled all night and wakened me early anyway. Lying in our cosy bed in the predawn I contemplate our first full day as caretakers. So far we have lost a pig and two fowl. Tank, the huge and hugely-old, blind and lame Mastiff dog found his way into one of the storage rooms yesterday and trashed it. This happened even before Cindy and Bob left. What if Tank is dead in there? I can hear the baby swallows under the eaves of the covered area chirping for food.
I get up quietly, dress and head for the outhouse. I have been using the composting toilet in the ranch house until now. The sheet metal outhouse – looks brand new! - stands between the corral and the bunkhouse. Cindy said Simon and Bob refuse to use the composting toilet, which she cannot understand. Inside the structure are lots of old magazines. How interesting. Just like a doctor’s office. Then I realised these represent an ecological solution for recycling paper. I remember how people where I grew up in Canada used to joke about how a big family could be through the harness section of Eaton’s Fall-Winter mail-order catalogue by Christmas. What else are you going to do with old El Paso/Juarez telephone books? I have to admit that using the outdoor privy seems less messy than the untidy bathroom in the ranch house, which has a leaky roof and the floors are messy with wet sawdust. I might try it again when the dry season arrives or the roof is renewed.
The good news is that “Porky”, the little white pig, is back this morning. I spot him when I go to let out the chickens. He is standing outside the pigpen. He takes off again when I make a move to let him into the pen. I head back to the kitchen to get the kitchen slops bucket but of course he is nowhere to be seen when I come back outside. The Mysterious Vanishing Pig. I throw some scraps inside the pen for the brown pig, who I have named “Schnautze” because he has a long nose. Maybe Porky is nearby and will hang around. Later, after feeding the chickens, there’s Porky again. He might actually be a little near-sighted. I try enticing him with the remaining slops in the pail but he doesn’t seem to get the message or just doesn’t trust me. He is limping a bit after his Saturday night in the bush and looks tired to me, at least to the degree that I can judge whether a pig is tired or not. I dump more scraps over the fence into the pen to keep Schnautze busy, open the gate a crack, and make a big circle to get behind Porky so I can shoo him (her?) around towards it. Porky finally gets the message, shoots through that little crack like a rat into a storeroom and is soon en-grossed (sic) in gobbling up the slops. Another job well done by Ronnie Bird, Boy Spot-Welding King of the World; Captain Epoxy! Oh yes, the errant chicken and the guinea fowl were hanging around the coop when I got there. As the others were slowly coming out, they shot past them into the coop to get food. Now all I have to do is milk the nanny-goat. I’ll wait till Kathleen gets up; she can hold the horns while I milk. I must get Simon to show me how to hobble the goat so one of can milk her alone.
Everything is sopping wet and muddy this morning. My feet are wet and dirty from doing my “chores”, the accomplishment of which requires me to walk through wet grass and mud. I need some rubber boots. With my flat arches I don’t do well being on my feet in sandals all day. But boots might perhaps be a nuisance and too hot. Wooden clogs like in Holland would be great and could be stepped out of at the door to the ranch house. I wear shorts and a T-shirt; at least I don’t have to worry about getting trouser legs wet and dirty; my legs are drip dry and I wash my feet and legs before crawling into bed. I shall soon have to figure out how to have a shower around here without having to walk half and hour to the warm springs down by the river.
Cindy and Bob, a former professor and a former solicitor, not to mention the two small sons (4 and 6) and the somewhat elder daughter (10; she is away visiting in the U.S.A. at present), and Simon, are essentially outdoor people. The kids were basically born here. But they are all even more outdoorsy than any farmers I ever met back in Canada growing up. There is no mudroom here, for example. No farmer’s wife back home would ever have allowed someone into her kitchen in barnyard gum-wellies. But here, everyone goes in and out tracking dirt and mud through the house and across the adobe tile floors. No one seems to mind or even notice. Most of the year, of course, it is dry and this is all not much of a problem. Now with the rains the living room is getting more than a little dirty.
The furniture is an eclectic mixture of styles. The ranch people are far too busy to spend much time sipping Sherries in the drawing room. It’s a roof over your head. Too bad because it could be really wonderfully comfortable and attractive. The walls are adobe brick and have been painted yellow in the large living/dining room. The roof, alas, is in serious need of repair and the adobe walls are now during the rains getting daily soakings causing huge brown mud blisters to appear and the paint to hang down in strips. Yesterday during the night a big chunk of mud fell off the wall near the “dining table”. While we were cooking supper last night, we were dodging drips that came in at one spot, ran along the lovely logs of the ceiling until they found a low spot, and then lurked until one of us was standing directly beneath. No boater would put up with this.
Whatever the apprenticeship trials of being caretakers on a very remote ranch however, and whatever the different standards of housekeeping might be, they are for the moment at least more than compensated for by the view into the river valley. The waters are up from the heavy rains and flowing swiftly and noisily over the large gravel on the river bottom. Clouds of mist hang around the higher hills and I see some of the cattle we culled yesterday down in the deep green, withers-high grass of the river-bottom pastures. There are some puffy white clouds higher up in the blue sky. The air is scented with a mixture of meadow grasses and the mint in the garden just down the slope. What a picture! I can’t stop staring at it. If you visit http://www.tutuaca.org/, the photograph on the opening page is the view from the living room of the ranch house. It doesn’t begin to capture the awesomeness of it all.
We spent part of yesterday settling into our guest house. I don’t know what it was used for before – a schoolroom, perhaps, judging by the small desks and chairs that are shoved back under a table, or a bunkhouse. There is a double mattress laid out on a rough-hewn moveable wooden platform, two old wooden tables, a settee made out of logs (probably meant for outdoors but surprisingly comfortable), a woodstove in the corner on a raised concrete platform (the chimney on the outside is hanging down and will have to be repaired before it gets colder; Simon says there is hielo / ice in October already!), and one folding chair. There is a large grey-green and dusty rug on the floor as well as a million pistachio shells. During a sunny and dry period we roll up the rug and take it outside for a shake before finding a broom and dustpan and giving the room a good sweep. We sweep the cobwebs out of the windows and the dirt from the window ledges of the painted adobe building. We rearrange the furniture to suit us, throw two colourful Indian blankets, which we find in the main house, over the tables, roll up the carpet again and stack it in the corner. We put fresh sheets and a blanket on the bed. There is a separate deep-cycle battery and a solar panel for the guest house and one 12-volt halogen light hangs over one of the tables. Obviously we should have brought more flashlights. The room is now clean and inviting. I want to collect some meadow flowers and grasses and put them in a jug on the table. Move over van Gogh!


Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico, 04Sep05

While we were preparing to leave San Carlos for Rancho el Nogal, the National Hurricane Weather Centre was issuing urgent warnings about Hurricane Katrina, which had already passed over Florida as a Category 1 storm, was increasing intensity over the 90°F waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and was expected to hit New Orleans on Sunday, 28 August 2005 as a Category 5 hurricane. They were already predicting that this could be the biggest storm in history. Emergency preparedness authorities were telling people to leave the city and all the interstate highways had been made one-way to the north. An extremely strong tidal surge of twenty feet or more was expected and heavy rain with winds gusting to 175 mph.
We were able to reach our children by telephone on Saturday (the day before Katrina was to come ashore) at their house in Picayune, MS, a small town about 35 miles north along the Pearl River. They had moved there several years ago from New Orleans itself. After the hurricane went through we had been trying to get through on the phone and sending out repeated emails. Finally we received a response from Andrew, our eldest. When the storm came through he was home from Hattiesburg, MS, where he is a freshman at college. He sent us an email that we could forward to the many friends and family members from around the world who had contacted us to hear any news.

From: "Ronald Bird"
Subject: diverse
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:31:19 -0700

S/V Vilisar, in transit at, San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico, Thursday,
01 September 2005

For those of you who have been asking and worrying about Andrew, Antonia, William and Elizabeth near New Orleans, we last talked to them on Saturday i.e. before Hurricane Katrina blew through. Since then the phone lines have been down. But we have just heard from Andrew:

QUOTE
Hi. We are fine. The eye of the storm came right through Picayune, but luckily our house was not hit. All of the trees around our house were knocked over, but none hit the house. I slept through the whole thing, but I heard that it was quite a sight. It will be weeks before the power in Picayune comes up. Hattiesburg is completely without telephone or electricity as well. The roads and highways are littered with trees and power lines. I am able to write to you because I am in Mobile, AL with my friend Hiep. After the storm, I left Picayune and slowly made my way up to Hattiesburg. I thought that perhaps there would be power on the college campus. I turned out that Hattiesburg was in worse shape than Picayune. There were people who stayed in the dorms, but there was no hot water, or telephone, or anything. I met up with my roommate, Hiep, and the next morning, we drove to Mobile, AL so he could make sure that his girlfriend was alright. We also figured that they had power and telephones in Mobile.
We are staying with Hiep's girlfriend. The power was not on when we arrived yesterday, but it came on just a few hours ago. But we are safe. Mom, William, and Antonia are fine. They have hot water, and food, and a sound shelter.
I must say, I am not so upset about the move to Picayune from New Orleans now, ha ha.

Thanks for your email, Love

Andrew.
UNQUOTE
I am sure they are even more relieved than we are. Nevertheless! Not sure what the next steps are for them in the aftermath of the hurricane.
The Sea of Cortés (Golfo de California) is plenty hot. But there have been hardly any strong tropical storms on the Pacific Coast of Mexico this year. This could change of course since the season does not really end until the end of October and September can, indeed, be very bad. Both Kathleen and I are just fine and get through each day by diving off the boat at regular intervals (water temp about 90 F) and letting the hot sea breezes cool us off. At night we sleep on deck (unless there is a deluge). You sure don’t need blankets. You don’t even need clothes.
Sick of the heat and humidity here in San Carlos, Senora, we are putting Vilisar on a mooring buoy at the local marina and taking a bus from Guaymas to Ciudad Obregon to start a 7-9 bus ride up into the Tutuaca Mountains to stay at a remote wilderness ranch in the Sierras. We will be acting as caretakers for the ranch house and feeding the chickens in exchange for room and board. The ranch is 2,000 high. Besides being a working ranch, it also has a school (university course) and is mountaineering or climbing centre. You can visit the ranch’s website at www.tutuaca.org. We will come back in mid-October, ready the Vilisar for sailing (always assuming she has not been pounded to smithereens by a hurricane here in our absence) and start sailing back to Baja and on south along the Mexican coast.
I hope finally to start blogging regularly at www.vilisar.com. We will have internet access at the ranch so just write to us at my email address.

As ever,
Ronald


As of today, Sunday, 04 September 2005, we have heard no more from Mississippi but on the presumption that bad news travels fast, are assuming that the children and Elizabeth, their mother, are all right.
Many people have been asking us about the ranch as well.

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 very comfortable and air conditioned bus to overtake everything he came up behind!) The owner of the ranch met us when the bus let us down in a tiny village and drove us in her 4-wheel drive pickup truck to the ranch - 90 minutes on the worst and most washed out gravel road I have seen and, being from Canada, I have seen some really bad ones. My kidneys are still aching. But this 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. Imagine me slipping around in cows shit and chasing longhorns through a gate. Kathleen wisely acted as tallyman only occasionally and genteelly shooing the unwanted away from the gate where she stood with her pen and pad. 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 and 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).

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 them as I was heading out to coop up the chickens. 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 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 that 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 alone is 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 back up 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 work 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 gather 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 and we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, who is meeting us, once she has started her journey.

Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our on-tickets, 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); the driver was already backing out of the slot. 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 del Oueste.

The bus ride north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, a secondary road running east from Hermosillo, Sonora, to the state capital of Chihuahua province and passing just over the border from Sonora to Chihuahua states through 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 up to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it.

We are both exhausted from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part 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.

Because Alex had brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown, which had done nothing for our heads when we got up, Kathleen gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep on the bus. 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.

The area around 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 dwindles abates somewhat as we pull off 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 have made it!

Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone), 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 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 stops at the edge wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning, then guns the engine and wades in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river and climb a very rough last hill. I think 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.