Giant oaks all dressed up in red and green epiphytes hover over a graveyard of their ancestors in various stages of decay. Everything in the cloud forest is green and slippery with different species of moss. Young vines stretch up out of the ground, seeking a host. Mushrooms poke their vulnerable heads out of a blanket of damp leaves. This is a comfortable forest; you could bed down on some sphagnum moss for a nap.
Never before have my arms ached after a hike. That’s what happens when you set off up a steep trail-less mountain led by a former soldier, and a handful of fit farmers and park rangers. We ventured into the Erapuca Wildlife Refuge, first winding through pastureland, then young regenerating forest, and dodging hidden holes and scaling steep mucky slopes in the older cloud forest. We wound through the “midget forest” where you have to crouch to get through the maze of lichen-draped trees, stopping a few times to motivate those in our party who didn’t want to go on. We finally emerged above the clouds to a view of the whole valley and a lunch of veggies and pasta that tasted like pure bliss in Tupperware. Then we monkeyed our way down, swinging on the reliable trunks and slipping on the misleading terrain back to the truck. I’m left with good memories, complaining muscles, a pound of forest mud in my clothes, a bottle-full of mountain spring water, an urge to sleep for three days, and a bottomless hunger. This is my first trip to this wildlife refuge, and many who are working to manage it have never entered. It is nice to know what we’re trying to protect.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Ranchera Mornings
It’s another bouncing ranchera music morning in my kitchen, complete with sugary coffee and pale tortillas streaked with black patterns from being warmed on the crackling fire. It’s another morning of gathering the machetes, the donkey and the hoes to be taken out to the farm. It’s my host mother sternly, lovingly calling people in from morning chores to take their turns fueling up for the day’s work.
It’s her low “let’s just keep this between you and me” voice, confiding in me about worries with her family, health troubles, the latest news on the disappearance of the town’s token insane woman.
It’s my gentle old host father and his brother unraveling the secrets of the coffee farms and Honduran politics for me, celebrating the outcome of yesterday’s soccer game, reminding me proudly that Spanish has at least three different words for every object. It’s my host brother and his son hauling in red buckets of milk to be turned into four different types of cream and cheese. It’s the 2-year-old, seeing me with my backpack, asking me if I’m going off to kindergarten.
Through it all it’s the classic old-timey Mexican ranchera soundtrack on the radio which seems to have been written to accompany just this type of morning.
The World Needs More Weird People
Let’s take a putrid-smelling liquid from cow intestines and mix it into some perfectly good milk. Let’s take some ripe-looking berries, remove the fruit from the seed, dry them, pound them to remove the remaining skin, roast them, grind them up, boil them in water, and, after all that, throw them away. Let’s take some sedimentary rocks and chuck them in the pot with the dry corn to boil. Thanks to some weirdos a long time ago, we now have cheese, coffee, and tortilla flour. So if you get the urge to stir hair clippings into your oatmeal, or fry up your toothpaste with seeds of baby African-Violets, I say go for it! I’m sure when someone suggested grinding up horse bones and adding sugar, the last thing his friends were expecting was to be served Jell-o. We need to encourage creativity. Creativity, and the acquisition of very gullible sidekicks who will ingest or slather on your products.
If your invention doesn’t end up being appealing enough to make it in mainstream Western society, there’s always a market for witch-doctor potions, as long as they are backed up with a couple of convincing anecdotes. “That woman you saw walk out was here just last week with a similar rash, but after 12 bowls of this oatmeal (only $13.95 each) they disappeared in a flash! Of course she had to come back for a special follow-up hairball treatment, but doesn’t her skin just shine?” You can also demand livestock for payment if you like—you will seem more authentic. And if your cures don’t work, of course you can just shake your head and say you’re onto the person, and he’d best leave and never come back or you’ll tell his neighbors the truth about him (he’s a witch).
That was just a little bit of advice inspired by being involved in the bizarre processes that produce my food in Honduras, and witch-doctor mentality I encountered in Tanzania.
It’s her low “let’s just keep this between you and me” voice, confiding in me about worries with her family, health troubles, the latest news on the disappearance of the town’s token insane woman.
It’s my gentle old host father and his brother unraveling the secrets of the coffee farms and Honduran politics for me, celebrating the outcome of yesterday’s soccer game, reminding me proudly that Spanish has at least three different words for every object. It’s my host brother and his son hauling in red buckets of milk to be turned into four different types of cream and cheese. It’s the 2-year-old, seeing me with my backpack, asking me if I’m going off to kindergarten.
Through it all it’s the classic old-timey Mexican ranchera soundtrack on the radio which seems to have been written to accompany just this type of morning.
The World Needs More Weird People
Let’s take a putrid-smelling liquid from cow intestines and mix it into some perfectly good milk. Let’s take some ripe-looking berries, remove the fruit from the seed, dry them, pound them to remove the remaining skin, roast them, grind them up, boil them in water, and, after all that, throw them away. Let’s take some sedimentary rocks and chuck them in the pot with the dry corn to boil. Thanks to some weirdos a long time ago, we now have cheese, coffee, and tortilla flour. So if you get the urge to stir hair clippings into your oatmeal, or fry up your toothpaste with seeds of baby African-Violets, I say go for it! I’m sure when someone suggested grinding up horse bones and adding sugar, the last thing his friends were expecting was to be served Jell-o. We need to encourage creativity. Creativity, and the acquisition of very gullible sidekicks who will ingest or slather on your products.
If your invention doesn’t end up being appealing enough to make it in mainstream Western society, there’s always a market for witch-doctor potions, as long as they are backed up with a couple of convincing anecdotes. “That woman you saw walk out was here just last week with a similar rash, but after 12 bowls of this oatmeal (only $13.95 each) they disappeared in a flash! Of course she had to come back for a special follow-up hairball treatment, but doesn’t her skin just shine?” You can also demand livestock for payment if you like—you will seem more authentic. And if your cures don’t work, of course you can just shake your head and say you’re onto the person, and he’d best leave and never come back or you’ll tell his neighbors the truth about him (he’s a witch).
That was just a little bit of advice inspired by being involved in the bizarre processes that produce my food in Honduras, and witch-doctor mentality I encountered in Tanzania.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Honduran History: The Untold Story
Honduras is the little rumpled-underwear-shaped country in Central America with El Salvador and Guatemala sticking out the western leg-hole, and the fat thigh of Nicaragua stuffed in the other.
The piece of land that is Honduras and Nicaragua didn’t finish swinging into its current place until 22 million years ago—pretty recently. While the continents were bumping around the globe, getting acquainted at the geological party known as Pangea, Honduras wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. While the dinosaurs were roaming around, the pre-Honduras chunk of land was hanging out in southern Mexico (can you blame it?), and slowly broke away and rotated into place, all the while acquiring some sedimentary deposits that would come in very handy later on. It’s these deposits that make Honduras the proud owner of cement, ice cream, sheet rock, tortillas, pesticides and caves. Let me explain.
Shallow seas covered the pre-Honduras piece of land during the Cretaceous up until about 90 million years ago, very conveniently depositing evaporites like gypsum and limestone. Gypsum is added to ice cream for texture or something like that, and is the main ingredient in everyone’s favorite building material, gypsum board.
Lime is used for everything here: throw it in with corn and it dissolves the outer bran (so it can be used for tortillas), it’s painted on the bases of trees to prevent certain pests, and sprinkled on your farm it raises the pH of your soil. Limestone also dissolves readily in water which results in some awesome caves.
Throughout history, there has been a lot of pushing and shoving of different plates in Central America, which continues today. And this type of tension tends to produce faults and volcanoes. Honduras doesn’t currently have any active volcanoes, but it’s not jealous of its neighbors and their smoking mountain-tops because it has a bunch of mountains, a lake and some hot springs. But holy cow, 19 million years ago there was all kinds of volcanic action in Honduras which covered the eastern part with ash. This is responsible for the abundance of exfoliation-stones that make this great country what it is today. The most dramatic part of the national anthem brags about a volcano, but I think it just fits in the song better than the word lake.
Stay tuned for more exciting installments of Honduran history, the untold story…
The piece of land that is Honduras and Nicaragua didn’t finish swinging into its current place until 22 million years ago—pretty recently. While the continents were bumping around the globe, getting acquainted at the geological party known as Pangea, Honduras wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. While the dinosaurs were roaming around, the pre-Honduras chunk of land was hanging out in southern Mexico (can you blame it?), and slowly broke away and rotated into place, all the while acquiring some sedimentary deposits that would come in very handy later on. It’s these deposits that make Honduras the proud owner of cement, ice cream, sheet rock, tortillas, pesticides and caves. Let me explain.
Shallow seas covered the pre-Honduras piece of land during the Cretaceous up until about 90 million years ago, very conveniently depositing evaporites like gypsum and limestone. Gypsum is added to ice cream for texture or something like that, and is the main ingredient in everyone’s favorite building material, gypsum board.
Lime is used for everything here: throw it in with corn and it dissolves the outer bran (so it can be used for tortillas), it’s painted on the bases of trees to prevent certain pests, and sprinkled on your farm it raises the pH of your soil. Limestone also dissolves readily in water which results in some awesome caves.
Throughout history, there has been a lot of pushing and shoving of different plates in Central America, which continues today. And this type of tension tends to produce faults and volcanoes. Honduras doesn’t currently have any active volcanoes, but it’s not jealous of its neighbors and their smoking mountain-tops because it has a bunch of mountains, a lake and some hot springs. But holy cow, 19 million years ago there was all kinds of volcanic action in Honduras which covered the eastern part with ash. This is responsible for the abundance of exfoliation-stones that make this great country what it is today. The most dramatic part of the national anthem brags about a volcano, but I think it just fits in the song better than the word lake.
Stay tuned for more exciting installments of Honduran history, the untold story…
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