“Caray, that’s a good one.” Paco Ruiz Gonzales grinned as he squinted into the slip of early morning light. It was a couple of days before a mountain Christmas cold enough to show your breath. We turned to face a slice of the red disc growing above the distant southeastern horizon. It was a chill morning, but as soon as the sun crested the far Michoacan peaks, it began to change.
Paco and I had been throwing short stacks of bricks and roofing tile up to his 17-year-old son, Jorge. Some of them smelled faintly of last night’s skunk that had passed building materials piled just inside the corral gate. The characteristic olfactory evidence of his passage was blunted by the attractive aroma of horses.
“That skunk’s going to get himself killed, Paco said. “Coming down looking for water, chicken eggs, garbage ... whatever. All the fields have dried up here. No easy-picking nests of anything left. He got into Jose Navarro’s chicken coop the other night and took several pollitos. The dogs will get him pretty soon. He’s too bold and foolish.”
Paco grew up in a cerro (upland) family that farmed Mexico’s ancient trinity – corn, beans and squash – sold wild medicinal plants and hunted for a living. Most of that culture has disappeared, or gone underground. Though the novena season (celebrations leading to Christmas) was so filled with cohetes (sky rockets) and fireworks day and night that the sound of a pump 12-gauge shotgun roused no downhill attention. Both cotton-tail and jackrabbits at various times cautiously abound the mountains southwest of Guadalajara. Outside of making up the menu for Paco’s family now and then, they are also favorites of a list of predators: Hawks, eagles, owls, coyotes, foxes, weasels, bobcats. (I have two owls presently in my forested mountain back yard. But they’re dormant during the day, waiting for nightfall to go foraging. While daylight may foil owls, it’s prime time for hawks, weasels and wily foxes.)According to the electronic world hooked up around me, everyone for some time has intensely been involved with the end of the year. Meantime, Paco and I are working on things belonging to the “next year” category. At least we hope so – if we can get them done before next Tuesday, which is next year. The calendric year often baffles human beings, creeping up with stealthy silence and startling speed to deliver surprising “gifts.”
This month’s night-chill has prompted even the most tough-skinned, determinedly temperature-resistant of my rural friends to at last, and at least, patch their rainy-season storm-scuffed roofs. Paco is one of these. He’s become gimpy as he slides into the first taste of his fifties. His sprung back is the result of an old bus wreck. The home-made bus – an ancient Chrysler truck stretched to carry 20 passengers, and accompanying “luggage” (long lengths of steel pipe and re-bar, rolls of barbered wire, barrels, and often a pig, or a sheep, and always several live chickens bound together at the feet with twine). Patrons of such vehicles, which plied semi-regularly between small nearby pueblos and Guadalajara, were used to traveling with farm appurtenances and fragrant companions. Unfortunately, the 5 a.m. bus in which he was riding one rainy season morning slid off the highway. Paco ended up with fractured vertebrae. Once “healed,” that didn’t bother him until it showed up recently. His wife helps him rub a suspicious-looking greenish-brown homemade salve into the sorest spots morning and night.
The December chill and the results of a pounding late-season October rain storm prompted Paco to agree to lift up and clean the red-clay tile of his roof, replacing those tejas that were broken. And to cast off weather-torn, scorpion-ladened, worn-through sheets of lamina (tar paper) that lay beneath. Perched atop two ladders canted against the house wall, we were a couple of careful, dinged-up examples of the joys of rural life. Working with large, rambunctious livestock tends to leave its mark. Swollen knuckles from roping cattle and horses on the run. Old hard sprains – and broken bones – from riding ornery broncs that dote on going crazy every morning they’re saddled – and at other times, too. And chasing broke-loose herds of livestock across stone- and boulder-strewn mountainsides at top speed can lead to banging souvenirs you might not notice much for years.
We were laying tejas and lamina, flicking black widows and alacranes out of the way, as the electronic world echoed conflict and hysteria about a world it seemed sure was being jerked apart by unsolvable calamities: A Mayan prophesy oddly mixed with slain children in Connecticut and elsewhere, murdered firefighters and similar affronts to sanity, the NRA’s response to Newtown, which seems as bizarre as John Boehner’s to the devastation of a “fiscal cliff,” and what is known – and what is well-veiled – about both U.S. and Mexican politics. The list is long.
Our perch gave us a vast, 360-degree view of a local part of that world as we hung on to the top side of the house, the faint fog of our breath melting into the sun-struck day with a view of mountainside pasture, nearby woods and hills and harvest-cleared milpas (cornfields) stretching everywhere. And we stretched muscles that normally had less play in them than they once had, but now for some reason seemed to flex more easily.
Rural life presents its practitioners one important and instructive truth, an experienced writer\agriculturist once said. Ranching and farming are “about 20 percent agriculture and 80 percent mending something that has got busted.” It is, he added, “a sort of glorified repair job.”
My friend Paco, who is grumpy about the December weather – and probably will be just as discomfited by January – liked a quote I passed on to him, that, “A good (agriculturalist) is nothing more or less than a handy man with a sense of humus.”
Which is both amusingly put and true. (Humus is good dirt, which means, says my dictionary, “organic matter decayed to a relatively stable, amorphous state, making it an important component of soil. It affects physical properties such as water retention, and erosion retention.”)
Long stretches of time can go by when nothing is done on a ranch or farm but repair; repairing livestock, including chickens, hogs, watch dogs, mouse-hunting cats (very necessary), and people. Often the problem with such planning and organizing too often features the people performing who are supposed to carry all of it out. Someone of this persuasion once said long ago, “Anybody with brains enough to pound sand can successfully raise chickens.” And that thin capacity can be extrapolated, and with a tad of information, to raise cows, horses, etc,
As we climbed down our ladders, toting heavy sheets of unused lamina, Paco said that about 80 percent of life after a certain age seemed be turning into a “glorified repair job.”
But it was his muscle-flexing morning, coupled with rising sun and a vast, serene view, that prompted him to jump off his ladder and luxuriously swing out his arms and arch his entire body.
“Pos, esta reparacion feels good, yeh?” He squinted at the roof, slapped my shoulder and grinned.