Mas Mescla!

Ten minutes west of town, of course along a precarious dirt road that seems in danger of being permanently washed out during high water, lies another lush green valley, called Rio Azul. We drove in last weekend as the setting sun cast an orange glow on the surrounding mountains, a pickup truck full of groceries and backpacks and tents. Ryan the American kid who aspires to be a natural farmer just about had a heart attack he was so in love with the place, and even my heart of concrete found it pretty magical. We followed the river through several fences to a wide plain, the future site of Pastor and Paz's third home.

Pastor and Paz, along with six others, purchased a bunch of land in Rio Azul. They have a whole plan for divvying up the land for houses and a shared community farm. For the moment, that's a ways off, as a lot of seeds need to be planted, the road in is unreliable in winter, there's no electricity, and there are few buildings save for a half-finished adobe kitchen. So far they do have the horse and cow and the giant turds that go with them.

Our work for the weekend was to work on the adobe kitchen. For those who have yet to experience the joy of adobe construction, there are two crucial parts: mix adobe and then stick it on the straw walls. I can go ahead and give you the entire patented recipe: one part clay, two parts sand, some water, some straw, and a whole lotta heart. Mixing adobe, which is essentially the closest natural thing we have to cement, looks so easy until you dig your hands in and find that they don`t really move. And where I had be looking forward to some physical labour for a while it didn´t take long to begin to dread the words ¨Mas mescla!¨ Putting the stuff on the walls was substantially more relaxing, especially if you like the feeling of dried cement on every part of your hands, and it was remarkable how much progress was possible in a day. It was a nice break to work with a big team and be part of a vision that would take years to complete.

On weekends a lot of volunteers congregate at this farm to help out: friends, volunteers of friends, and other farmers who have dedicated themselves to natural building. Meals are a whole ordeal due to the many mouths to feed with basically the same ingredients for every meal: veggies, fruit, and some sort of rice (this was a bit of a change from our meals at Las Golindrinas, where I was getting used to potatoes with a side of potatoes). We actually brought in a chicken for the first night; I didn`t see much hand washing after handling it raw but sometimes I miss things while cooking by candlelight. You sort of tenuously throw a few preconceptions about food out the window at a place like this: eggs don`t need to be refrigerated, rice can just be boiled again tomorrow, smelling is the best way to know if something is okay. I have yet to go for freshly squeezed milk but the opportunity has presented itself a number of times in the past few weeks.

We swam in the river, a mesmerizing azure blue that the sunlight dances off of. Frigid. Pastor jumped in buck naked, somehow swam around with a harpoon for about twenty minutes, emerged with a 16¨ wrigling trout, and promptly karate-chopped it across the head. Great eats that night. That was followed by a campfire of Spanish folksongs, each singer bringing a different melody from their homes of Spain, Chile, Argentina. When they requested a tune from the volunteers, I realized that save for Kumbaya, we don´t really have anything for such an occasion, though I had to strongly resist the urge to break into Leaving on a Jet Plane.

One of the highlights of the weekend was walking downriver to a local overpriced artisanal beer brewery, Ceveceria Kelly. The bridge across the river looked like something from an Indiana Jones film, and certainly felt like one. Nothing really appeals to a gringo from safety-conscious North American like a precarious wooden plank that looks like it could go at any moment. The beer was as cold as the river and delicious, but nothing to write home about (despite the fact that that is what I seem to be doing right now). Enter a new lesson learned: artisanal beer is not necessarily better beer.

The shower I took when we got back to the city was one of the most enjoyable of my entire life.