Community and Zip Lines

Community is having your next door neighbor come over and try to explain to you in campasino Spanish (like English with a southern dialect...aka...hard to understand) that the coconuts you cut down off the tree for breakfast in the morning can stain your shirt. So the woman of the house shows you how to properly use the machete so as not to ruin one of your three shirts.

Community is sitting at the table of your home with the windows open reading about how to sustainably garden in a tropical area and having your next door neighbor come over and ask for help with his new garden patch.
Community is drying off after the shower you took following helping your neighbor with his new garden to find his wife standing at the door with a tasty bowl of food for lunch with a smile on her face that in all languages means thank you.

Community is walking home across the common yard you and your neighbor share and being presented with a bowl of tasty fresh cooked black beans that you helped pull out of the ground from his farm across the river the day before.

Community is having dinner together with your neighbors, playing with their children and joking until it is time to go to bed.

Community is taking the time to interact with those around you, even when you are busy, because you are never really ¨not busy¨and now...well now is as good a time as any.
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Zip Lines. Zip lines are not really like community. They are more like large metal cables tied from one tree 150 feet above the ground to another tree 300 feet away. Zip lines are a little more scary then community, but just as fun in their own way. Some friends of Travis came down to visit him and raved about a zip line tour in a national park north of him named Manuel Antonio. A zip line tour had been on my agenda from the start and with an invitation to return with them to the park and stay in their amazingly beautiful boutique hotel on the ocean I decided now was the time.

I was picked up from the hotel and driven on a tour bus with 13 other Americans deep into the jungle a good 45 minutes away. Our tour guides were hilarious and extremely informative and I bonded with them pretty quick. On a side note, do you know how high 150 feet is. Ok, well think about the 15th floor of a building. Now imagine that gandalf just turned that building to a 3 ft wide platform that wraps around a tree 15 stories up. Now imagine strapping your self to a pulley jiggermathing that allows you to fly across the jungle at speeds that far exceed speeds humans should ever reach. In addition we also got to repel from 100 feet in the air and swing from platform to platform on a ¨Tarzan swing¨120 feet up.

Shortly after this picture was taken I flipped myself upside down to ride as that was my preferred method of zip lining on the twelve or so cables we did.

The entire endeavour was extremely safe despite my various attempts to make it sound scary. The staff was professional and extremely witty. The other gringos were fun and the food after was amazing. Just thought I would update you on my terrible life here in Costa Rica.

Monkeys Mountains Rats and shit

I once again woke up to the sound of the alarm, however this time the mechanical nag was signaling that it was time to wake up and surf. So at 6’oclock Travis and I loped the 12 minutes to the beach. When I say that I went surfing it is not as you might imagine and I am not interested in leading you astray. You probably have visions of me crouched low on a sleek board, weaving in an out of a beautiful wave. I truly would like to leave you with that image. However the truth is far less glorious. It looks more like this. A wave comes….I paddle like a mad man trying to figure out if I am in the right position so as to catch said wave and not get smashed. Then after the amazement sets in that I have sequestered enough inertia from said wave to move forward I “pop up” to stand on the board. I have yet to master “popping up” in such a fashion as to position myself in line with what physics dictates is needed to remain standing on top of an 8ft long piece of fiber glass that is moving quickly in the direction of shore at such a speed as the gravity of the moons pull dictates. However rides of 4 to 5 seconds have been known to happen before I lose balance and make an exaggerated jump off in an attempt to reclaim some dignity that I look like one uncoordinated gringo.

Despite my logistical issues with physics, sitting on a board in the ocean in the early morning with a close friend staring at the glassy ocean in front of us and an expansive palm tree lined jungle behind us is an experience that is truly amazing. Following our walk back and some skypige (Internet chatting) with the wife I set out with Travis’ next door neighbor to his farm that was southeast of Bahia. One car ride and two bus rides later we (Ronald and I) found ourselves at a bus stop in a town with two stores. An important side note here is the fact that Ronald’s English is a tad bit better then my Spanish, which is to say….not all that good. However between us we usually can communicate fairly well.

It was at this moment that Ronald informed me his farm was up on that mountain. Yes the one separated by the second largest river in Costa Rica. How do you cross the second largest river in Costa Rica? Well by hired boatman you silly bitch. That guy there….yeah….he sits on the other side of the river and waits to take people across the river for around 70 cents. So the answer to your life long question; do boatmen exist in real life other then in Greek fables is, yes. After crossing the river we began walking up the mountain. I wasn’t really sure what the full scope of that truly meant until he identified the speck on the mountain above the purples flowered trees which was his house.

Not that I could see the speck…but it was the general speckish area to which I was referring. An hour and a half later, a good three liters of sweat, the spotting of several monkeys, toucan’s butterflies and various trees of the jungle we arrived to the house in which Ronald was raised.

At the peak of it’s glory, and before the death of Ronald’s father, the house was a beautiful tribute to self reliance and tropical construction. However it has been many years since Ronald’s father’s death and so it has fallen into a state of disrepair. After the father’s death the 6 brothers who spent all their life on a completely self sustaining farm in the jungle in Costa Rica dispersed to live their lives in different locations. It is only within the last year that they have started getting involved in the land management again.

As I entered into the house I met two of his brothers, one of their wives and a father in law. The father in law was engaged in the cleaning of a delicacy here in Costa Rica which whose name I forgot along with 73 other Spanish words I learned that day, but which strongly resembled a huge cousin of a rat. Here's the picture. You make the call. However it was actually pretty good.

However before dinner the brothers took me around to show me all the various crops on their farm. It was truly amazing. As young boys they had planted a veritable food forest made up of, guava, mango, papaya, avocado, cacao (chocolate), and the most delicious lemons and limes I have ever had. In addition the brothers planted beans this season for themselves as well as for them to sell. It was truly a garden of Eden. I was amazed and excited and they were just as excited to show it all to me making every effort to communicate every tree and plant and history despite our language barrier. However matters of the heart are much easier to communicate without words and for all of this there, this was a matter of the heart.


Following dinner I took a shower. The shower consisted of a plastic pipe that carried water from the spring above the house. The shower was constructed of tin and the door was prevented from swinging open with a piece of rope. The light, a candle in the corner bouncing shadows of the tin landscape. As I was washing I heard what to my ears was an electric guitar. An electric guitar in a wood house up in the jungle, which technically was possible as they did have power, because of an arrangement with the national utility which allowed power lines across their farm and provided them with free power in the process. As I dried off and walked out of the shower the father in law was playing the electric guitar. You can check the video here.

The next day I woke up at 4Am to the smooth sounds of mariachi music blasting from the kitchen. The day had begun. We ate some breakfast and headed out to the upland fields that held the recently planted bean crop. We pulled huge bushels of beans by hand at 5:45 in the morning for about an hour and 45 minutes when Ronald asked me if I wanted to go on a hike around the perimeter of the farm. We headed out for what turned out to be a 2 hour trek through the jungle and up to the very top of the mountain. Once again we saw a huge variety of wildlife and plants. I offered up a good 7 liters of sweat to the gods while Ronald seemed to give up only a few ounces.

Upon returning we had lunch and gathered ourselves for a trek back down the mountain. His two brothers were waiting outside with their small horse and a very homemade looking saddle on it. They asked me if I would ride it down. Now here is the thing, culturally it would be offensive for me to say no. However I felt strange riding while we all walked down the mountain, not to mention the fact that we were going down a mountain....a steep mountain, and riding a horse I didn't know. However they all assured me she was muy tranquila....so I hopped upon that pony and rode her down the hill. I didn't carry that gun the whole way, but I felt it was necessary for the picture. (The guys carry rifles everywhere in case they see dinner)

So we get to the bottom of the mountain. I asked them to ride a while too so as to not feel to much like a privileged gringo, and I get another surprise. The boatman wasn't working so we were going to take a gondola across the river. You can check this video out to see what i am talking about. 40 feet above the river and I'm thinking no regular inspection. Ronald tells me he takes his entire family over in this regularly and trusts it. So I hop in and we go. Only to get to the other side just in time to run up the side of another huge tree covered hill to the road to catch a bus back home. Twenty ant bites later I was back home at Travis' and with one of the more unique adventures and set of stories in my life behind me.

The beach is calling me now and I hope to write again soon. It's hard to covey all the content and experience, but I'm trying the best my attention span will let me. Miss you all.

Cheers

Me likey Jungle

At 6AM on Saturday morning the Alarm clock in Pilar's room woke up as it was supposed to and woke me up along with it. Groggy from lack of sleep due to staying up skyping (Internet phone call) with Krista (the woman I am dating who lives in Georgia) until the wee hours I rolled off my inflatable mattress and grunted at travis through the fog of my brain as he walked by to the bathroom. It was moving day. Pilar and Travis were moving back to Bahia on the south pacific coast of Costa Rica where Travis spent two years with the peace corps and now works for a non-profit that helps set up local community micro credit institutions. After packing the car a moving truck and giving besos and abrazos to the familia we were out that biatch.

With a sigh of relief I looked back at San Jose as we climbed up the mountains in Pilars Chevrolet Tracker. The sigh emanating from the desire to get out of the city and plop myself in the jungle on the beach so as to leave a permanent indentation in the sand from my hindquarters. We stopped at the top of the mountain whose name loosely translated is something like motha fuckers have died up here Mountain so that we could have a traditional Costa Rican dish of black beans, rice and some other shit that made it spicy.

We then continued down into a cloud forest and brokethrough to the coast line of a tropical paradise. Huge palm tree lined shores of bright blue waters rushed passed as we headed south along the coast to Bahia. Upon turning on the road the led us to his house and into the heart of bahia (small heart...a hundred houses maybe) the pavement turned to prohibitive dirt covered with rocky stones and the car was basically getting crunk the whole way to the house. We arrived at a little sleepy 3 bedroom house recently constructed out of light airy materials.

After spending the next fours hours unpacking Travis and I made it to the beach to take a sunset swim. It was unfortunate that the water was 70 degrees and the jungle was everywhere but we managed to enjoy ourselves anyway. I felt like I was on the set of LOST. It is pretty much like that.

Everyone in the town knows Travis and a good portion of them now know me as well as a result. His next door neighbor is amazingly kind with a wife and three beautiful children. He and I had a conversation in Spanish for 45 minutes last night and he spoke slowly and simply so I could understand. His name is Ronald and grew up on a farm with his 6 brothers where they grew all their own food until his father passed. He is taking me to the farm tomorrow where his family has just begun farming again.

As I look out the window of the Rain forest cafe the sun is setting so I am going to sign off and write you again later.....

Besos y elephantes

Cockroaches, The Peace Corps, Parrots that speak Spanish, earthquakes, and people stealing shit

(Above:Where I will be living in Bahia)

It has been a good while since I last posted anything. As it turned out I became very busy there at the farm and helped to produce a documentary for an amazing event held in town so my time became re-prioritized. Now I realize this might have been hard for you all as you likely are still checking my blog daily for updates and each day walk away disappointed. However I am trying to relax down here in Costa Rica so I´m hoping for more time to communicate.


(A shot of the beach that will be in front of our House)

So I came into San Jose, Costa Rica on Tuesday the 6th and am leaving here for a beautiful town on the south pacific coast called Bahia. I´m staying with my good friend from college, Travis and his girlfriend Pilar. We are now in San Jose, but will be leaving for Bahia which is close to a more well known town named Uvita. Travis works for an orgainization there that creates local community banks all over Costa Rica. I have spent my last three days here in the capital city in various ways and would like to list a few observations I have made thus far regarding the surrounding area. (It should also be noted that I cannot find various punctuation marks on this keyboard as it is a English keyboard, but programed for Spanish. Communists)

Cockroaches - They´re here they´re queer and they´re big as fuck. They are also named fred. I cannot figure out for the life of me why a spanish speaking cockroache is named fred...but that is what they go by. Who am I to judge?

Earthquakes - They have them here. 6.4 on scale de rickter. I was drinking coffee reading subversive literature when it hit. I stood up, waited for stuff to start falling as a cue to run out of the building....it didn´t, I sat down and finished my cafe con leche. Then they overcharged me.

Parrots speak Spanish - I´m staying with my good friend Travis and his girlfriend at her mothers house. His girlfriend (Pilar) and her mother are wonderful. The house is very nice with a cute little backyard. The next door neighbors have a parrot in a tree that overlooks said backyard. It speaks Spanish. This was weird for me....thought they only speak English. Did any of you know about this?

People stealing shit - Modernization has had benefits for Costa Rica, but it has also had some serious drawbacks. One of which are the slums that result when folks move from the countryside to the city to engage in the "modern economy." The first night I was there we went to visit a friend of Pilar´s and our things were in the car. We were only inside for 10 minutes when a car pulled up and broke the window and stole Travis´ work briefcase. They left all of my things sitting neatly in the back covered by my sweater. I did just like my mother taught me and covered my stuff up. It should be noted that Travis has lived here for 3 years and that was the first time he ever had anything stolen.

The Peace Corps - Travis took me to a Peace Corps training and I was able to meet some amazing folks. I learned a lot about agriculture in the surrounding area and found out that there are some wonderful sustainable agriculture movements in going on here. I made some great connections and received wonderful information on where to find research for starting gardens here in Costa Rica. When I get down to Bahia I will be doing just that so it was very useful information.

I will update you all when I get down to Bahia

- Love, Ja Boy

Alabama, raising trees, and beyond:

I do so so so so damn many things every day that the shear volume of them all keeps me from blogging as regularly as I'd like to. However I will once again attempt to cherry pick various events and activities to share. A little over a week ago we went off to Alabama again to do the post raising of the natural building we began work on about a month ago. During our last trip to the house in Alabama we stripped the bark off the trees we cut down so that we could use them for posts, beams and the like in the overall structure of the house. We now had to raise them so that they could have concrete poured around their base to keep them in place.

It is worth noting here that each post is around 14 feet long and weighs over 450 pounds. We had to put up over twenty five of them in a few days. They all to be at exact angles and around a third of them were not vertical posts but had to be at 45 degree angles.

The picture you see here is taken before many of the angled posts, or y braces, had been put in. It is hard to balance 450 pound trees at various angles all in a small space, but we did it and I learned quite a bit in the process. We had to make individual braces for each and every post and make sure that they were braced exactly right so that when the concrete was poured it was all kosher.

The house it self is sort of a mix between a natural building and a conventional one, noting that concrete is not usually considered a natural material. October marks my transition into the natural building apprenticeship although I have been spending time with the builders unofficially already. However this new status of officialness has led me to reading quite a bit not only about the practical how to of the natural building practice, but also the history and theory of it as well. Natural building is interesting in that it is obviously nothing new, it is a rediscovery of techniques have been used since humans began housing themselves. Only within the last couple hundred years have we started swaying from intelligent design methods.

It seems funny to think of indigenous folks or old villages around the world as having more intelligent design then our contemporary buildings, but when you compare the two, that seemingly is the reality. That is not to say that we are not currently capable of intelligent design....it's just to say it is usually not used and almost never used in new residential homes. We don't build considering how to use such things as our house's orientation to the sun to our advantage. We park houses whenever we think they should be and spend a ton of energy and money to heat them up and cool them down.

The good news is that you can heat and cool your house in almost all cases without using any electrical energy. You just have to take advantage of the natural landscape in order to achieve such a result. Indigenous folks have been doing it for thousands of years. In fact a lot of American architecture used to consider the site location and intelligent design principles before the rush to house all the folks that needed houses post world war two. It also should be noted that houses that take advantage of the natural landscape are usually much more beautiful then the conventional houses that have been built over the last half century.

Anyhoo there are tons of resources for learning more about natural building and you can start with this super basic wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_building

In addition to all the natural building I have been doing a bit of gardening as well. Most recently we experimented with a German method of making wonderful loamy soil called Hugelkulture. Hugelkulture is basically layering material to create an in place compost pile you can plant on. The recipe is sort of like baking a cake. You start by stripping the area you want to use of it's top soil (to be replaced later). You then break up the soil with a digging fork. Following that break up you place down tree branches, logs or other woody material. On top of that layer you place less woody material that has more nitrogen content. We used spent Jerusalem artichoke flowers which have the consistency of sunflowers. On top of that you place a much higher nitrogen plant source. We used all the plants that had been on top of the soil we stripped off. Following that layer you place on a layer of compost and then, finally the top soil you removed earlier.

Why in the hell would you do all this you ask...I'm wondering that as I write this and realize that I am giving way to damn much detail, but alas we are already knee deep in this shit and if you haven't clicked over to the comedy central website in order to watch the daily show then you are likely to stick with me the rest of the way. So woodier materials are higher in carbon and need nitrogen materials to decompose and make the organic matter that is important for plant growth. In addition the woodier material an hold a lot of water below ground and make it available to whatever you plant on top of the pile. Berries, squash or any water loving plants really flourish using this method. The best part is that when the pile breaks down you have created over a foot of beautiful new soil.

So ok.....that was a big post and despite my best intentions laden with a ton of shit that may or may not be interesting to read when you are at work....I'll try and post more often with smaller entries....but I can't make any promises.

Word....Ja boy

Grow some fuckin plants

Hey, So I just realized that you all have been leaving comments on my blog. I feel much more loved now as I wondered where many of you were. Keep them coming as they mean a lot to a guy who is the boonies and gets lonely at times. Sheep, what..ok. In addition, the reason there was such a break in the frequency of my posts was because there were two classes back to back at the ETC. The classes were outside of the regular curriculum of our apprenticeship and it was great to be able to take them. My last post was about the earthworks and dam building part of the course. The second weekend of the course was in forest gardening and orchard remediation. What in the hell is forest gardening and orchard remediation you ask? I have no fuckin idea, but I got like 33 chigger bites on my left forearm and that shit hurts. This is not my forearm, but this is a chicks foot who got the chiggers. Gross....we will not be making out anytime soon....probably....

I lied, I know what orchard remediation and forest gardening are and I will share. Forest gardening is a type of gardening system based on mimicking woodland ecosystems. It is a garden you have usually in addition to your vegetable garden which requires more attention and should be placed closer to your house then the forest garden. While you do mimic the forest using this system, you use plants such as fruit or nut trees, edible and medicinal shrubs, herbs and bushes that can give you a food yield. You place plants on multiple levels as in this drawing to take advantage of three dimensional space.

These plants are intermixed to grow on multiple levels in the same area, just like plants in a forest. It is a pretty amazing system and you don't need to live in or near a forest to have a forest garden.

We conducted the course at the previous natural building coordinator's house. He and his wife have been working on their house for four years and it is pretty amazing. They bought 90 acres of clearcut land and have been restoring it all the while. These are some pics of the inside of the place. The walls were made from cob, which is an old English building technique that uses clay, sand, straw and water to make an earthen wall. As you build it you can place glass bottles in the wall to make designs such as these.

While we were there we helped with another building technique called light clay straw which is a mix of clay, water and straw that one can use for insulation. It is about a gillion times faster then cob, which is pretty labor intensive. It is great for places like the pacific north west that doesn't require as much insulation as say Alaska.(Picture Left: Me in the big ass hat and yellow shirt mixing a batch of light clay straw. Picture Right: The wall after light claw straw was stuffed in, it still needs a coat of earthen plaster, but it will keep you warm!)










So orchard remediation. Basically we learned how to prune an ailing orchard to help it get back some of it's gusto. At it's most basic you are trying to trim the tree in such a way that all the leaves are able to collect light and contribute to the energy the tree derives from the sun. It gets complicated, but I'll spare you the details as I'm sure you are actively fighting the urge to click on to internet porn instead of this boring ass blog. Plus I forgot half of what I learned already, so I can just blame my lack of description on your despicable habit. Seriously....porn is gross. And you know who you are.

It was a wonderful 10 days. Side note: It has been great to be in a place where almost everyone knows more about a subject area you are studying together as group then you do. Not only has it been humbling, it has been a growth experience. So often when one asks a question, others answer without truly understanding the question that was asked. This seems to make sense though, as much of the time people are as excited to share what they know as they are to help another. But I think much of the time people who answer questions are more concerned with being able to talk about something they know about then truly shedding light on another's question. A bit more ego then empathy. Maybe I'm projecting here a bit as I feel like I am guilty of this. So I wanted to note that my experience of being in the un-know has left me more sensitive to how I engage with people who ask questions. I often find myself getting so excited about the chance to convey all the information I have jammed in my brain that the other person becomes talked at, instead of to. It is hard to figure out where to draw the lines between the excitement of communication of ideas, ego and empathy. Point being....I'm trying to draw new ones....in erasable ink of course. Until Later Youts.

Ja Boy