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13 Los Corrales and Los Dolores The bare-toed vaquero Cultivating the desert Palm logs for Chuy Campion The recent rains seem to have put everyone in an exceptionally good mood. At Los Corrales, José “Che” Martinez and his two older boys, Jorge and Alberto, were readying their gardens for planting. They were not in any particular hurry, as no one ever is, and were more than happy to drop what they were doing to talk and laugh and show me around. Jorge was planting onion seeds in small, earth-bermed plots remarkably similar to the waffle gardens of dryland Native American farmers in the southwestern United States. The ground within each plot was carefully leveled, and several thin, parallel lines had been scratched in the dirt traversing each. Jorge moved along these shallow furrows dropping tiny black onion seeds into them and then reversed his steps, brushing bone-dry soil over the seeds. As each row was covered, he walked over it, dropping seeds into the next as he proceeded row by row across the plot. Each bermed plot would be flooded once every seven or eight days. This was Jorge’s starter garden. The young onion plants would be cultivated here for six weeks or so until they were sturdy enough to remove and place out in the larger huerta. Che had not yet planted his garden, but he had recently finished installing a new drip-irrigation system. To his disappointment, however, the concrete cistern into which he pumped water didn’t have enough head to push water through the entire drip system, 3 14 Chapter 3 so Che was back to flooding his garden as he had always done. He had a twenty-foot well nearby, the water standing now a little over six feet deep, and he used a small gasolinepowered pump to distribute it. Finishing our garden tour, we ducked into the shade of Jorge and Oralia’s corredor, scooped a cup of cool water from the ever-present clay olla, and sat down to visit. Jorge and Oralia are newlyweds, Oralia from a neighboring ranch, and they had just finished building their house—a simple affair consisting of two rooms of adobe block made on the property , separated by a corredor of about twice the length of the rooms, open on two sides. Looking across the way to Che’s compound, Rosita remarked right away about his leaning cocina, a casualty of the September hurricane. Indeed, the cocina was listing about twenty degrees, though it didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of falling over, and Che just joked about it saying, “I’m waiting for the wind to blow in the other direction and straighten it back up.” Then he turned a little more serious and began to describe the night of the hurricane in some detail. Los Corrales is situated on top of a steep bank below the confluence of the Santa Rosa and Las Carretas arroyos. The water came uncomfortably close, but the scariest thing, Che said, was the noise it made. All night long rocks tumbled and boulders crashed against boulders as the entire canyon bottom was on the move. Arroyo channels that had been stable through many a flash flood from summer chubascos caved in to the floodwaters of John, and when the water finally subsided, the rancheros on the Santa Rosa found not a trace of their former arroyo crossings. What was left of their roads simply ended in massive heaps of boulders. It was three weeks before Che and his neighbors could get out. And in order to do so, they and other families in the area had to pry, lift, and roll boulders out of the way by hand—just enough to clear the narrowest passage for a vehicle. They worked on moving the biggest boulders and used the smaller ones to fill holes and create something of a rock pavement. The farther upstream, the more arroyo crossings and the longer it took to rebuild the roads. Immediately after the hurricane hit, emergency supplies were flown into San Javier and Los Dolores by helicopter and then distributed from there by mule or burro. The rancheros weren’t entirely without provisions while the roads were out, however, as most of them knew the hurricane was coming and had stocked up to the extent they could. All have batterypowered radios and listen to news regularly. Mensajero del Aire, broadcast daily out of Ciudad Constitución, is...

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