Learning the Ways of Goats and Arepas
It’s a little after six in the evening, and the sun has gone down in its nightly show behind the opposite hills, remnants of a sunset in deep gray blue, streaks of pink. The heat of the day has dissipated, leaving behind it a cool and breezy night, the air soft on my skin. The goats have been put into their old ruin of a goat house by Drew and Anna with much bleating and resisting. I watched from the front porch here, Zombie the orange cat alongside me, the generally eventful goat show that takes place three times a day. Often I have a large supporting role in this spectacle, so it’s nice to be a passive observer. Anna got rammed in the thigh by Great Grandma and Reggie ran off. About par for the course.
Eleven days of farm life. Goats and cooking the hostal breakfasts, living alongside volunteers and guests. Hot days and cool nights. Swimming holes and fresh mandarin juice. Just had a long stretch of not writing, which seems to happen most when I’m in situated in one place. In Antigua and Xela when I was studying; working at the farm up north in Colombia. When each day is similar to the last, I often don’t find the impetus to write. Hence, the beauty of traveling. Most of my writing energy in this time went to writing and editing a blog post about Lake Atitlan, where I was four months ago.
When I think about my thirteen days here up on this little mountain, the goats are central. It’s the first time I have spent significant time with this species, and I find them interesting and also very difficult. They have four distinct personalities, these four generations of females, and I have different relationships with each of them. Great-Grandma, the alpha, is the most difficult, aggressive, and without question my least favorite. Sometimes I even hate her a little bit. Today she had gotten her legs completely tied up in her rope, loops around both ankles, and she was crying out for someone to come set her free. But when I came over to help, she couldn’t help herself and made a sudden move to head-butt me with her horns. She couldn’t actually move enough to reach me, but she damn well tried. Such fury and hatred in her eyes. I stepped back and shook my head at this malice, and immediately she started again with the bleating for me to help her.
Izzy, Grandma, is my favorite. She’s the most mellow of the group, slow-moving, peaceful. She’s the only one who comes up to me in a friendly way, and will put her head out for me to pet her. One day when Manon and I took them up the mountain to the mirador for our afternoon walk, while the rest of her family was eating, she came and sat down right next to me and just hung out for awhile. Like a dog or a cat, whenever I would stop petting her, she’d turn her head and glare at me like “did I say I was finished?” until I’d start again.
For a point of comparison, yesterday, moving them in the morning, Great Grandma tried several times to ram me, put her head down and charged from a few feet away, and I had to grab her by the horns. This for some reason stops the charge, even though she is a strong enough creature that she could just lift me with the strength in her neck. I’d just stand there holding on, yelling and cursing, until she’d calm down, and we’d go back to walking.
Reggie, Izzy’s daughter, is also difficult but not in an aggressive way, except for when she is trying to get at any available food. She’s unruly, temperamental, the most likely to run off. Baby, her daughter, attracts very little of her attention, but if they are separated, the maternal instinct kicks in and she gets very upset. Baby, the dumbest, which can be perhaps excused by her youth, is skittish and clumsy, and constantly gets herself tied up in her rope. She is cute, and playful with the other goats, but sadly none of them have any interest in playing with her.
A fairly dysfunctional family all around, little love lost between them, Great Grandma whipping everyone into shape with her horns, but if one of the four is taken away from the pack, even for a short time, they all become highly disturbed. At least half the time I spent with these animals was difficult and frustrating, even infuriating, but all in all I am glad to have gotten to know them.
Strange, mysterious creatures. There’s something elemental and deep-rooted about them. I’d always said I wanted to have goats someday, on the theoretical farm that I make no movement towards having, but if they’re all like this I’m not sure that I do anymore. It was satisfying to begin to solve their puzzles, of how to get these terribly headstrong animals to go where I wanted them to. First by using food, then learning how to get them to move without food, to use their pack mentality to keep them together. I feel a certain pride in my budding abilities as a goatherd. Maybe I’ll have goats on my imaginary farm after all.
I can feel in my body that I will soon be leaving, that I’m already starting to say goodbye. A lot of the work was frustrating, digging holes in hard ground, trying to fix badly designed broken things using old and broken tools. Digging up the blocked pee line from the composting toilet with Drew, trying not to gag on the fumes. Working in the hot sun, working early in the morning with Justin & Andrea micromanaging and critiquing my breakfast but offering little in the way of appreciation. There were some moments of satisfaction. Taking a broken thing and making it work again. Knowing that I’d made a killer breakfast for twelve people, whipping the chocolate caliente until it froths; learning how to make arepas so that the inside is soft and fluffy and the outside crisp and browned.
These Colombian/Venezuelan tortilla cakes are almost always made from the same ingredients, but there is a wide variety of how they actually come out. Sometimes they are thin and crispy, like a pita, other times they are thick and doughy, more like a pupusa, which is my preference. In my training as breakfast-maker, I was instructed to form them with this little heart-shaped cookie cutter. I suppose it’s cute, and Andrea considers it a signature touch of their hostal, but it’s too small for a proper arepa, and they come out too hard. When they were out of town, I had free rein, and made big irregular shaped melt-in-your-mouth arepas.
On the whole, I will think of this time and place in some kind of golden hue, much of it having to do with these evenings on the porch of the kitchen building, but also the color of this area, the dry grass, the quality of light and land. The great swimming holes scattered around the canyons, good times that I had with my volunteer crew: Anna and Manon and Drew, mostly, but good moments with some of the guests as well.
Daniela, the Argentine girl who’s been here the better part of a week, often comes out and sits with me in the shade of this porch in the afternoons, after I’ve finished the work of the day. She shares her bombilla of mate and rolls cigarettes and we talk for hours about traveling and relationships and language. Daniela was the first guest that I welcomed and showed around the place. Justin and Andrea were out of town for some days and so us inmates were in charge of the asylum, taking turns showing people around. It was my turn one night when the word came that there was a new guest. I came over, gave her the full tour in my halting Spanish, never even asking if she spoke English.
She had been studying film at university in Buenos Aires, so we have that in common, but is currently in the process of switching to be some kind of literary editor. Meanwhile she’s traveling around Colombia on her summer vacation. She, like me, is fascinated by language, so we are constantly comparing notes on idioms and expressions and grammar. Mostly we talk in English, as hers is significantly better than my Spanish, but she teaches me some of her language, too. I liked her right away, and when she started feeding me mate, which I had been out of for a couple months, I was her loyal friend for life.
She’s down to earth and funny in a dry way that makes me smile, and has basically become one of the volunteers, at least socially. Last night we stayed up drinking wine and playing Settlers of Catan til one, and Dani was right there with us. This has been our game of choice, this German strategy game, something like a cross between Monopoly and Risk. I always think I want to play, and then end up mad at someone. Usually Drew, who is the best player, coldly strategic. And I never, ever win. Cursed game.
The other guest who’s made an impression is Royal from LA, maybe in his early thirties. He had been a financial manager or broker of some kind, but after some kind of a mishap with company policy, has figured out a way to manage his own money for a living. And travel the world. He’s a good traveler, open eyes and even demeanor. He strikes me as very Californian, kind of an enlightened financier, passionate about street art and traveling.
We all, volunteers and most of the guests, went on a fantastic day trip maybe five days ago to Pescaderito, this series of gorgeous green-colored deep swimming holes running along a river. There was a place to swim down into a submerged cave, follow a little tunnel six feet or so, and then emerge out. We swam and dove in the cold water and lay out on big smooth rocks in the sun until we got hot again. Really quite idyllic. I walked down to the restaurant below the lowest pool, sat with forty Colombian families and got a Gallina Criollo, some kind of wild hen that is tough and gamey and delicious. Caught a bus back in the late afternoon and we almost all fell asleep on the ride.
But the person who I’ve gotten closest with is Anna, the first one I met. Which is totally understandable, given that she is bright and sweet and playful, a good flowing laugh, a curiosity about things. She is twenty and in some ways seems much older, definitely more independent, but in others seems exactly her age. We have been good companions, confiding and commiserating about the work, doing some of our tasks together, smoking spliffs at night, lying in our bunks talking in the after-lunch siesta hour, cooking food, walking down to the mandarina grove and making juice. I’ve become convinced that mandarin juice is the best kind of orange juice. Long talks about her small town, about travels, about Russia and the United States. She’s a fierce defender of her ancestral country, and insists that the whole election interference disinformation thing, and every bad thing I’ve ever read about Russia, is just U.S. propaganda. We get into it, and then we have to agree to disagree.
Often we help each other move the goats, partly because it’s better to have two people, but also for the company. One day we were up at the mirador above the farm, with the goats just grazing freely on the hillsides nearby. Deep in conversation, we stopped paying attention to them, but when we finally looked there were no goats in sight. Oh no. We had lost the herd. Hard to say how long it had been, but lucky for us we found them hanging around the top of the farm.
Early on she’d expressed interest in traveling with me when we left here, but as it turns out we’re going in different directions. I’m heading south, probably to the old town of Villa de Leyva, where I’ll hang out for a few days before I meet my friend Miles near Lago de Tota. Anna’s going west to Medellin, to her next volunteer spot. She did say she thinks she’ll see me again, and I think she’s right.
Made a pot of mint tea from leaves I picked in the garden, and it is slightly assuaging the headache I’ve got from staying up until one last night, and drinking quite a lot of cheap Chilean red wine. Shared a cup of tea with Anna, and she sat here with me as the last light faded, talking about leaving and having to say goodbye, following up on our ten conversations we’re in the midst of. About our annoyance with the new guests here, how we feel like it’s our place, being social vs. needing time alone. There are all of these things on the tip of my tongue to say to her, left unsaid.
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It’s two days later, my last day at La Pacha, and I’m stalling leaving. Part of this is due to the fact that I’m working on less than five hours sleep last night and another hangover, and partly because I’m not ready to leave, to say goodbye to Anna and Dani and Drew and this place where I actually have friends. This area of earth, from San Gil to Cabrera to Barichara to the Chicamocha and up the other side, over to Curiti in the east. A big oblong diamond on the map with La Pacha in the middle, on the side of a hill amidst dry grass cowfields and coffee plantations and hidden mandarin groves. Thirty two nights, I’ve found myself here in Santander, and it has been a rich and satisfying time of my journey. My friends will be leaving soon enough regardless, and I might as well be on my way. This is not the endpoint of my journey, and there are a lot more lands to see.
I’ve cooked my last hostel breakfast, not one of my best, but certainly good enough, my last responsibility as a volunteer, all before 8 in the morning. Half-packed my things, until the quiet room persuaded me it was a good idea to take a nap, while I still had a bed. So I did, and when I got up a couple hours later, time for my second cup of tea, I found Dani on the porch and she shared some of her mate and we talked quietly, slowly like tired people do. She’d been up late with us. It was Drew’s birthday and it was well celebrated. Turns out Dani and I are going to the same place, Villa de Leyva, another of these strikingly picturesque mountain towns, six hours south of here. And its in the vicinity of Lago de Tota, with its constellation of villages, where we’re both planning to go. So it seems like out of all these people I’d shared life with here at La Pacha, she’ll be the one I’ll see again.
Manon has already left with her little dog, heading north, up to the coast to meet her brother. Drew is talking about heading to Cocuy National Park, eight hours or so east of here, a remote area of the Andes with some of the highest mountains in Colombia. Anna is going to a place on a lake near Medellin called Guatape, which with its blue waters and a large monolithic hill is a hotspot on the Gringo trail. She’s going to be volunteering at some kind of anarchist spiritual coffeeshop art center.
It’s time, but still I linger a while longer. The sun is hot and there’s not that far to travel, maybe six hours door to door. I have time to reflect on yesterday, which is somehow both vivid and distant. After making the breakfast, washing the dishes from a meal for twelve, I finished the re-setting of a yurt on the other side of the goat house that we’ve been working on for a few days. The base of the yurts is dug into the ground, so we’d had to dig it out, and with eight people walk it around, so the entrance was facing the view down the mountain. Then re-bury it, fix the pathway so it went to the right place. Done. Anna fixed up the interior — that’s one of her jobs here, re-making all the hostel beds to Andrea’s exacting standards, cleaning between guests — so it’s ready to be stayed in again.
Walked the goats without incident to the other side of the farm, and it was time for Anna and I to go to town, in pursuit of a cake and a six-pack of beer for Drew’s birthday. Significant expenditures, these, for long-term travelers. We walked down to the main road, caught a bus, got off in what seemed to us country folk to be the metropolis of San Gil.
It was strange as we walked the streets down from the Terminalito to the plaza. I only knew her on the farm, in our separate world of living on the side of a mountain, maybe on a journey to some swimming place out on the mesa. I realized that despite having talked for what really amounts to days on end, the society part of us didn’t know each other. In civilization, the difference in our ages seemed more pronounced than when we were compañeros up at La Pacha, working side by side and eating meals, essentially at the same station of life. She seemed to me to be more of the twenty year old girl from a small town in northern Norway. I did my best to shake the feeling, and just enjoy my last hours with my friend.
We walked across the river on the Puente de los Candados de Amor Eterno with its sad old locks fastened to the railings, to the fancy Metro supermarket up on the hill. We acquired a six pack of Bogota Beer Company, the best beer for sale there, microbrews at a dear price. Traded out most of the beers from a six pack and filled it with other varieties of the same brand, so we could have options, but still pay at the six-pack rate. We paused for a little while on the terrace looking out over the Rio Fonce and its wooded green banks, the town climbing the hill on the other side, rows and rows of brick and concrete up to the scraggly green mountains above.
She wanted to keep moving, as we had things to do and the afternoon was getting on. Across the bridge we walked back across the plaza and to what we were told was the best pasteleria in town. After perusing all the options, we selected a small black and white layer cake filled with strawberries, for fifteen thousand pesos. Got some silly hats to top off the experience and split up, said goodbye in the busy street, knowing that this was just a precursor to the real goodbye we’d have the next day. Her to go back up to the farm, and me to get a cheap haircut and make an unplanned but predictable visit to one of the numerous little casinos.
In every town in Colombia, there is almost some kind of a casino, a machine-only casino room where you can gamble your pesos away. I don’t go for slot machines, though I will on occasion dabble in video poker, but at the decent-sized ones, they will have a roulette machine. It’s a machine where everyone has their own computer screen console to bet on, but there’s a real wheel that spins with colors and numbers, and a real ball that falls into its place at the end of each spin. It is difficult for me to walk past and not wager ten thousand pesos, not test my luck. It sounds like a lot but it’s really only a little more than three dollars, and you can get a lot of spins of the wheel on that. Played for forty minutes, was up eight thousand, and decided I would count my blessings and walk out. The gambling dream: you play awhile, get into the game, make a little money, leave before your luck turns.
At dusk we made a fire, Anna and Drew and I, sat out on logs and drank our good dark beers. We’d been a good team, handled much of the business of the hostel the last week when Justin and Andrea and their kids went to Bogota. They were good folks, and I’ll miss them. Soon the fire had attracted some guests, a new group of young Germans. This place was just off the beaten path enough to attract a different breed of traveler, people who actually wanted to be there, not check off their bucket lists. No buckets to be checked here, unless paying to milk goats and doing a goat cheese workshop is on your list.
The Germans were rolling up big joints and passing them around. I got out the beat up hostel guitar and played but didn’t sing much. Dani eventually joined us and somehow it happened that she fed me chicken and rice because my dried black beans were taking so long to cook. She’s an excellent cook, the daughter of a chef, with a generous heart. It ended up that I burned my beans, but just a little bit, and for our second course I fed her smoky beans and mushroom quesadillas and everyone was happy.
There was a moment later when Anna and I were standing outside the kitchen with the cake, trying to decide if we should take it out whole to present the cake, or bring out plates with slices. We were too stoned to effectively communicate, much less make a decision. We were so awkward standing there, like teenagers at some backyard birthday party, giggling, nervous, our plan in disarray. She’d gotten a bit dressed up for the occasion, looking very cute with her lip gloss on and hair all brushed and a clean going-out shirt.
Somehow we managed to present and deliver the cake around nine o’clock, and it was delicious and widely praised. Drew was clearly moved but didn’t have a whole lot to say except a lot of thank yous. At some point we realized that the sounds coming out of the woods were from some kind of a bizarre animal battle. Two of the farm dogs had treed a possum that was hissing and moaning like a cat. A bunch of us went out to watch and see if something should be done, but these animals were in such a wild and fierce state that none of us were going to get involved.
The possum was big and six feet up a tree and just high and scary enough that the dogs weren’t going to be able to do anything but bark and dance around. But clearly the possum felt trapped, and wasn’t comfortable staying up there, didn’t like all these people watching. It made a ferocious hiss and then a terribly misguided run for it. As soon as it was on the ground and had turned its back to the dogs, they had the advantage. They chased it down, and were mauling the poor animal when we decided we couldn’t watch anymore.
Somehow I was out there in the yard until two — once you get started watching a fire its hard to stop. For the last stretch it was just me and Anna, both exhausted, leaning up against logs, long long pauses, nodding off, too tired to talk but not ready to say goodnight.
It felt appropriate, all of it, a celebration of our time here, and this hangover is a small price to pay. It’s almost noon, time to get my things together, say my goodbyes. To put on my pack and walk out past where the goats are tied up, out of the gate and past the house where the very old people sit on the porch and wave, away from this place I’ve gotten to know, down to the main road where I’ll catch the bus to San Gil. And then a taxi to the real Terminal outside of town, to a bus for the state of Boyaca.
