April 21, 2008...11:52 pm
How green was my valley
My dad says that when he was young, it took just over an hour to jog-walk from their house, which faces down into this valley, to the house where we are staying now. That may be, but in terms of atmosphere they are worlds apart. While the city has become congested, polluted, and gray, the outlying farms have so far managed to escape. The valleys west of the city are still mostly quiet, unspoiled, and a lush green that I haven’t seen anywhere else than in the rainforests of my home in B.C.
Instead of walking up the hill like last time we took a taxi up to the ridge then along it for about 10 minutes to an unmarked road that branched off abruptly. The neighbours along the road are no longer relatives, but strangers. Though some are there as caretakers for our cousins who are absent or aren’t interested in farming.
It took us about forty minutes to make our way down the road to where the house of my cousin Paz is situated on the lot that was our old homestead. Her back yard is a terraced garden that drops about 30 feet to the road, and across the road is the view into the valley that leads off this post.
There are a number of different crops being grown now on our lot. My cousin has peppers, strawberries, cassava, and tsayote planted in the areas immediately around the house. Apparently there are flowers in the valley bottom, but we didn’t go down to see them.
There’s a creek that you can’t quite see that runs through that green belt in the lower left of the photo. My dad says he borrowed their “carbine” one day as a boy because he just had to fire a gun. Well, he fired it off and as the gunshot echoed around the ravine, the bullet riccocheted off the rock he shot at and whistled by just over his head. He put the gun back right away after that.
I’m so very glad that I came with my dad on this trip. Just being here in the places where so much of my family’s history was situated has brought stories out of my dad that I’ve never heard before. And the geography is helping me understand how some of these stories are woven in with those of cousins I have only met in North America. It’s easier to see now how their roots and mine are twined in this context instead of just being told, “oh, we’re distant relatives.”
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