A Massive Missive from Mangoland
I meant to post this sooner. Our former beloved staff writer Kia Momtazi left us for hippie camp followed by a romp through organic farms in Mexico. Here’s her most recent report:
The first day I used the machete I took a small chunk out of my thumb. It healed nicely under a drop of neosporin and a Hello Kitty band-aid, but it put an abrupt end to the cocky swagger I’d picked up while hacking back mango branches that morning. Still, a few days later I found myself weilding the piratish weapon once again, carving paths through jungle vegetation that, during the fall rainy season, had grown to almost twice my height. The jagged vines tore across my arms, leaving their spines buried in my skin. Trails of blood smeared on my wrists as hand over hand I tugged the vines down from the tops of the trees. Sweat soaked my bandana, my baseball cap, the thin t-shirt under my overalls. The irony wasn’t lost on me that just over a month ago I was kissing the broken ends of trees, and here I was now, violently whacking them apart, ripping them from the earth and severing their limbs.
The truth is I’ve never in my life felt so badass as I do with a machete clutched in my sweaty fist. Still, I’m happy I have plenty of other chores to indulge my nurturing side. In the garden, where I work most mornings and some afternoons, tropical-colored butterflies flit by overhead by the dozens, their shadows dancing across the hot, baked earth beneath me. A soft breeze ruffles the palms, roosters warble and other barnyard noises erupt occasionally from neighboring farms. When my gaze rises from the ground, I see lazy plumes of smoke drifting from piles of burning grass on the surrounding mango-covered hills, tiny fishing boats on the sea and small waves cresting on the beach of the village below. This view is constantly punctuated by brilliant bursts of flowers: crimson hibiscus, magenta bogunvellias and scarlet coxcombs. Yesterday I trimmed a badly overgrown bed of Japanese mustard greens, first unburdening the plants of their yellowed, dying leaves, then harvesting all the older, heavy leaves for us to eat. (Some will be cooked immediately, but the majority will be blanched and frozen, preserved for less fruitful seasons.) When I finally finished, the plants were standing up straight once again, bursting with energy and growth potential. I strolled through the clean, walkable rows I’d resurrected in between them, thrilled to have discovered a productive outlet for my obsessive/compulsive urge to clear and organize.
Since I’m working on private land and not for a commercial farm, my jobs are relatively small in scope. I help tend the vegetable garden, mend the deluxe chicken coop–home to fifteen chickens, two ducks, a rooster named Big Bird and two geese, Helena and Hiromi–and maintain the surrounding acreage owned by an American couple, Wally and Amaranth, who live here full time. My daily duties involve harvesting the constant explosion of string beans, picking arugula for salad, and rotating the sprinklers on the vegetable beds in the evenings as I sit under the sprawling branches of a nanchee tree, sipping cerveza, scribbling in my journal and watching the sun sink into the ocean behind a riot of hibiscus blossoms, fully conscious of how lucky I am.
Wally and Amaranth are both in their mid 50s, have been married for four years and are still charmingly smitten with each other. They live with their seven dogs–Doopie, Winky, Penny, Emily, Lucy, Sparky, and the lame-legged Opie–at the crest of a hill, behind a thick curtain of bamboo trees, in a tiny tropical palace drenched in flowering bouganvellia vines. Many panels of the exterior are painted hot pink, apparently Wally’s favorite color. Wally is a jujitsu-trained ex hippie whose hooded blue eyes shift their hue to match the denim shades of his overalls. He loves to spend mornings in the chicken coop cuddling his geese, listen to American news on satellite radio and gripe about the current political climate, and make fun of the resident volunteers (us). A handyman who prizes resourcefulness and ingenuity, he’s transformed his orange ’79 Porsche into a tiny raised pickup truck. The gearshift has been replaced with a thigh bone that looks to be mammalian; Wally feigns innocence about it’s origin.
His wife, Amaranth, is Japanese-American, tiny, and has the body of a person half her age. She’s less chatty than Wally, is fanatically tidy and is often the more serious of the two, but is still warm and welcoming. She wears bright colors that make her look like a little tropical bird and has filled the cool interior rooms of her home with her own pantings, murals, and a sweet little library. When she’s not giving salad-picking lessons or hoovering up dog hair, Amaranth can usually be found in the kitchen, which is located on the top level of their house and opens onto a shaded deck that overlooks both the mango-covered hills to the east and the village and the ocean to the west. The view from the kitchen sink is equally breathaking, but far and away the coolest thing about her kitchen is the Compost Window. Wally has designed this space so that whoever’s cooking can wash their farm-fresh organic veggies in the sink, rotate ninety degrees and chop them on the windowsill, then simply push them off the edge, where they fall to the ground and land in a tidy fenced in area that I’ve still not witnessed anybody do anything with. (Hippie note: as far as sustainiability goes, “burnables” are allegedly burnt in a metal trash can down by the sweet potato bed, and the remaining non-compostable items are casually tossed behind a tall palapa fence on the corner of the property. No more questions are asked.)
My own living space doesn’t come with a compost window, but it’s pretty fucking incredible on its own. “The Cono,” as Wally and Amaranth call it, is a cone-shaped dwelling right next to the garden. Airy, spacious and clean, it’s got windows all around, a special window up top that lets in the sunset, as well as the luxury of a full working kitchen, running filtered water, a warm shower, and my own bedroom loft, which is situated directly under a reproduction of the part of the Sistine Chapel where Adam’s pointer finger is a mere inch from the hand of God. Still, the best thing about the cono is that, unlike “The Casita”–a hollowed out minivan down the hill that’s home to newer, less fortunate volunteers–when the shower drain is covered with the trashcan, the place is 90% scorpion free. In three weeks we’ve only had four scorpions; the least mangled one was placed in an oyster shell on the little altar we’ve been creating, to soothe the scorpion gods and keep their minions away. It appears to be working.
(Incidentally, I’m well aware that despite my moving to Aticama, otherwise known as the-back-end-of-nowhere-Mexico-by-the-sea, I’ve managed to maintain a standard of living vastly higher than most of the Mexicans down in the village below. I’m still grappling with this conundrum, but have been operating under this new philosophy in the meantime: when life doesn’t hand me lemons, I don’t needn’t necessarily insist on picking them.)
After three weeks on the farm, I’ve pretty much fully adapted to the rhythm of life here. Everything feels somewhat slower and more deliberate. The seventy-year-old granny inside me rejoices every time I’m in bed with a book by nine, which is most nights. Someone else inside me I’ve never met before manages to spring out of bed at first light, rested and ready to stretch her way into the day for at least a half hour. My own cranky self is getting a little rankled from all the time I’m forced to spend cooking things from scratch and then having to do ALL the washing up immediately after each meal, but the food I’ve been cooking is healthy and tasty. I fear to jinx myself, but I can’t ignore the wonderful fact that my chin is suddenly and remarkably free of pimples. Tra-la-la, life is grand in Mexico.
Still, loneliness and isolation have begun creeping in, providing an emotional balance for my frequent surges of wonder, gratitude and inspiration. The phone cards in Aticama are shockingly expensive, hopelessly beyond my budget, though I´m currently investigating other means of communication. There’s internet in Wally and Amaranth’s house, but it’s dial-up, devastatingly slow and the computer’s right in the middle of their kitchen. The closest internet cafe is a twenty-minute bus ride away. Homesickness for my comfortable, stable life and many dear friends in San Diego has found me at last, and I’m having recurring dreams about the people I met and the life I’d begun at Esalen. Know this, my people: I am missing all of you, on a daily basis, and as I watch the sun set every night into the ocean I think about how it’s the same sunset many of you are seeing at the very same time.
Besos,
Kia
