"I come from a family of journalers and letter-writers. One year I tried quiting the practice but I found my thoughts became boring and repetitive." So said Dalva, lead of a novel by Jim Harrison. Mr. Harrison is a moving novelist of the rural experience in the norther Plains and the Upper midwest; I don't know what he'd think of applying those words to blogging. But a few farming friends (Thanks P!) planted the idea of this web log in my mind, where the soil was already rich from exemplary blogs kept by friends (see the sidebar. Also, soil/plant metaphor count: 1).
After working as a day laborer for two summers at a farm in Paradise Valley, Marin, I am now the hired hand on a one-and-a-half acre plot of land in Nambé, New Mexico. This farm (garden?) is a side project of a couple who work full time, so I am here to do whatever I can to make the soil more healthy and grow some food. An inexperienced farmer -- never managed a farm, only ever done what I was told on a given day -- I now get a birds-eye view, thinking about this plot of land in time as well as space I count myself very lucky and blessed for the opportunity.
So this blog a place for ruminating, gestating; chewing cud or the fat; composting things (thought that's just about the most overused simile in the whole food discourse. I'll put up the epic Gary Snyder passage that actually does it justice). A place for applying those good Wesleyan critical faculties to lived life, and for comparing and contrasting a new place with other homes I've had.
The first night I spent here I felt very lonely, but the more I have worked and thought here, the more connected I feel: to home, to history, and to people important to me. This is a way of sharing those connections.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Water
In 1848, the U.S. appropriated from Mexico the lands that would become all or parts of present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. Agriculture and cattle ranching continued in “occupied” Mexico under a race-based caste labor system — Anglo owners, managers, and foremen; Mexican cowhands, miners, and manual laborers. One of the most important “Mexican jobs” was digging irrigation ditches, “bringing water from rivers and streams to parched areas. Some of the irrigation methods had originally been developed by the Moors in Africa before the tenth century and had been brought to the Southwest by the Spanish. Other techniques had come from the Pueblo Indians, who had developed irrigation systems in the region long before the arrival of the first Spaniards. Mexican laborers would level the land, then divide the fields into squares with low embankments to hold the water. After soaking a block, they would make a hole in one of the walls, permitting water to flow into the next square. This method of irrigation came to be know as ‘the Mexican system’” (Takaki, A Different Mirror, 176-185).
Here at Nambe we irrigate our fields with the same system: the photo at top is of the acequia, the communal canal that J’s ownership of the land gives him the right to use. The acequia is a tool, a way of watering to complement the well and the rains. It is an idea, reaching across at least 50 generations and three continents. And it is further evidence of how we are connected, through our histories and through the land.
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