El Injerto

Hacienda El Injerto

Beans in pergamino, drying in the sun on the patio.

The deep red clusters of the Bourbón varietal.

Its amazing what a person will do for a good cup of coffee.

On Tuesday the 17th, I began waiting at a bus stop in San Pedro Carchá near Cobán, Department of Alta Verapaz, at 3:00am. Three busses, one taxi, a pick-up truck, hundreds of kilometers and 16...and a half... HOURS... LATER, I arrived at Finca El Injerto. And the moment I did, I immediately knew that every minute on the bus and every kilometre was worth it. Let me try to explain...

Six Km from the border between Huehuetenango, Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico, there is a barely noticeable left hand turn onto a dirt road between a hotel and a hardware store. 8km of climbing up the road, around tight turns, over rocky mounds, between mountains in a narrow ravine, takes about 45 minutes and gains at least two thousand feet in altitude. I was let out of the back of the truck I hitched a ride in at an empty market plaza and followed the directions to the finca. "over the bridge," I was told, and was amused to find that this was a bouncy, rocking suspension bridge strung with cord and planks high above a river below, wide gaps between the boards and all. On the other side I climbed a rocky trail through branches of Bourbón and Catuaí coffee trees that reached eagerly into my path. On the branches were clustered the healthiest and most voluptuous bunches of coffee cherries that I have ever seen in my life. This, already, to me, is heaven. At the top of the trail, I finally meet Arturo Aguirre, son of the finca´s owner, Arturo Aguirre.

El Injerto was begun in 1874 by the great grandfather of the younger Arturo, and taken over by the third generation in 1956, at which time the farm produced only 300 Quintales of parchment coffee, or about 3,000 lbs. Today, nearly 500 acres of coffee surrounded by virgin rainforest produce over 6 containers of coffee per year at roughly 37,500 lbs each. El Injerto coffee is widely regarded as one of, if not the best coffee in all of Guatemala. The finca is the only one in the world to ever place first in two Cup of Excellence competitions, with two separate varietals no less. On site there is a significantly advanced wet-mill with a number of unique innovations in coffee processing, an 8,000 sq. meter drying patio and five enormous drying drums, a fully operational dry-mill for final processing and sorting, a roasting and cupping facility, vermiculture and composting, hydroelectric, water treatment, a tortilleria with a machine that cranks out 3,000 tortillas per hour to feed the 4-600 seasonal pickers, all of whom recieve higher than usual payment for their strict attention to detail in harvesting.

Me with the little babies. To replace trees that have outgrown their productive years, between 15,000 and 20,000 new ones are planted every year.

Only the reddest of the red cherries, the best ones at the peak of ripeness, are harvested.

After a long day in the fields, the pickers bring the cherries to the wet mill to begin processing the same day.

You can read books and cup coffees and peruse websites in the states, for sure. But I learned early on that the best way to learn about coffee is to go down and hang out with it. One of the things that I hoped to learn more about during my time in Guatemala is one of the more complex and specialized elements of specialty coffee: Varietals. I left the workshop over a week ago with a much better idea of the importance that varietals of coffee have on cultivation practices and cup qualities. Different sub-species and hybrids take to different altitudes, have different levels of productivity, are more or less disease resistant, and so on, and it is important for a farmer to know what he or she is working with. Here at El Injerto, I finally had the chance to walk the hillside with a knowledgable farmworker and be taught "That´s Catuaí," shorter plants, denser foliage, slightly smaller fruits packed closely together along the whole branch; very good productivity, and in the cup a nice acidity but less sweet, balanced and refined than Bourbon. "That´s Bourbon," Taller plants, lighter foliage on horizontal branches, deep red berries wrapped in seperate clusters around the branch, more disease prone and less productive but absolutely prized in the cup for sweetness, cleanliness, balance and complexity. "That´s Pacamara," broad leaves, large berries, mid-sized plants and one of the most notoriously amazing qualities of coffee in cultivation. "That´s Maragogype." woah. Trees more than twice my height with very sparse foliage and eNORmous cherries so few and far between it´s a wonder to me why anyone would bother farming a plant with such low yield - until I taste it, that is.

One last note before I move on. It´t interesting to me to find how refind cupping, or the systematic, methodical tasting of coffee, can get. You can start by cupping coffees from different countries. A sumatra and a kenya and a guatemala will all be remarkably different even to a first time cupper. Then you can cup different coffees from the same country. Ten Guatemalans, though all Guatemalans, will taste different depending on the farm where they were grown and the processing, altitude, etc...this I´ve known for some time but was reinforced earlier this week at a cupping I did with the master cupper at the regional office of ANAcafe, twelve different Guatemalan coffees, all from the same region of Guatemala, and twelve remarkably different coffees on the table. Now here, at El Injerto, I cupped seven coffees, all grown here at the same finca, within the same 400 or so acre area, and all distinct from one another in some way. Catuaí from Bourbón, well rested Bourbón from too fresh of a picking Bourbón, first quality Catuaí/Bourbón blend from beans of the same harvest that were sorted out as floaters. And so on. We get pretty geeky.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It´s incredible how different this trip has been compared to my first excursion to the coffeelands. There, in Mexico, I learned about worker´s struggles and indigenous resistance, stayed with a Maya family, slept on a dirt floor. Here, I have slept in the guest quarters of the Casa Patronál and shared the dinner-table with the landowning family while struggling through self-consciousness about this (and my spanish speaking abilities) to strike up conversations with the indigenous workers. While my research and reading about Guatemala has focused on the lives and the rights and struggles of peasant farmers in a strikingly segregated society, I can´t help but concern myself with the inevitable distinction of class in the patronal system of landownership. Before this, I have only spent time with indigenous campesinos who cultivate their own plots hundreds of times smaller than this property and operate as members of co-ops and farmers associations. At El Injerto, I walked the land with workers, had conversations with them at the wet-mill and learned of the ways that the Aguirre family re-invests the quality premiums their specialty coffee receives into the farm and community. While many questions go unanswered having had only two days to explore, I leave the farm with confidence that the owners of El Injerto truly concern themselves with the well-being of the people who work so hard there. They´ve invested in a tortilla factory to help feed every worker for free and distribute masa for making at home. There is a clinic on-site where workers can get medical assistance and prescriptions for free. Pickers are payed more here per quintale than any other farm in the area. Workers are continually educated in the art and craft of producing high quality coffee. Two months ago, they received the comprehensive social responsibility certification given after careful inspection by the Rainforest Alliance. While the complexities of such a worker-owner relationship certainly remain, It is clear that within this system, few if any fincas maintain such a high commitment to their workers as El Injerto. I will end these thoughts with the words I left in the guest book:

"Bummer for everywhere else that it will be difficult for me not to judge other coffee farms by El Injerto´s standards of quality, dedication, responsibility and hospitality. I wish I had the words - Spanish or English - to express the extent of my awe and gratitude."

Week 2 in Guatemala, Part 2

Part 2, 2/16/09 journal excerpt

Until last night, I hadn´t written anything in my journal for the past three days or so. But not for a lack of things to write about, Oh no. I´ve been too busy recording memories in my brain and my camera, collecting more experience in the past two days than any other two days in recent memory. Holy crap. And to really do it all any justice here would take days and days and pages and pages. So since it´s late and I´m tired I´ll have to settle for more of a list than a narrative, and maybe have more time to write tomorrow, but it doesn´t look like tomorrow´s shaping up that way, either. Wake up, meet Marvin, the manager of the APODIP coffee farmers´ association, do a cupping at ANACAFE, the Guatemalan national coffee association, tour finca santa margarita, consider renting a motorcycle, finalize travel plans to huehuetenango and pack to get ready to start making my way there around 3am Tuesday. Oh yeah, And finish Silence on the Mountain in time to donate it to the language school EcoCabaña. And write in my journal. sure.

So. Since Friday. This weekend. Toured a beneficio, got surrounded by coffee plants, met Romeo, who I´ve heard is one of the best cuppers in the business, cupped three coffeest from the association and community I visited last week, passed Romeo´s informal oral exam, went to a finca of friends of my hosts Sal and LIbby, hung by a river, climbed barefoot over moss covered rocks in the middle of a river to the mouth of a cave, explored in the cave, stalagtites and all, stuck my hand in some vampire bat guano climbing down, met two incredible people that I want to get to know much better, got harassed and nearly assaulted by a belligerent drunk at a beautiful restaurant, went clubbing and bar-crawled around downtown Cobán and slept in a hostel. Saturday. Sunday woke up, had brunch, walked around Cobán, did more research on the near impossibility of getting to Huehuetenango in one day without having a motorcycle or sprouting wings, stumbled upon the minutes-recent aftermath of a broad daylight downtown drive by murder, played a game of soccer with a 6 or 7 year old Guatemalan kid who totally rips it up, went to the farm, said bye to my friends, spent a couple hours talking around the kitchen table back at the house, wrote some epic emails, explored my route to Huehue on google earth and came upstairs to read, write and crash. Many single elements of my weekend could easily, with little more effort than the ability to stay awake, take up many pages alone. The experienes and imagery has been so dense that I feel like I am bursting at the fingernails to release the pressure of the words it would take to describe them. But alas, if I want to finish the book I´m reading about Guatemala´s culture, history and political violence in time to donate it, I need to make some progress tonight.

Allow me to at least try to finish this page by saying that I needed this trip and I´m thrilled that I took the steps to get myself here. Guatemala ain´t Brattleboro and winding around mountains at the edges of cliffs ain´t another day at the office. I can´t really thank myself until I´m back safely in the states but when I am, I will definitely treat myself to a beer. That is, if I have three dollars and fifty cents left to spend on one.

Week 2 in Guatemala, Part 1

Part 1You´ve never smelled coffee quite like this before. Pulp and skin from the cherries, used as organic fertilizer, smells ....pretty rich.

Coffee cherries in Paraiso Privado. It´s late in the harvest season here so the trees are a little bare.

Coffee drying in parchment On the ridge of the Sierra Las Minas mountain range, Paraiso Privado.

On Wednesday the 11th, I woke up at 4:30am in order to be ready for the three and a half hour drive on winding, bumpy dirt roads east to the municipality of La Tinta. At just after 5:10 I said farewell to my host, Sal, and climbed into what I would later come to understand is one of the toughest little pick-up trucks out there. I was making the ride with Glenda, assistant manager at the APODIP coffee farmers association in Cobán. As we pulled away from the curb I knew that would be my last chance for nearly three days to hear or be understood in my native language. With Glenda, who knew to speak slowly and clearly, I could communicate surprisingly well, holding a steady conversations the whole trip down. I realized as soon as we turned on the road to La Tinta that there would be no sleeping on this drive. When we arrived I was exhausted from waking so early, but soon felt ridiculous when we met Mario, who walked five hours beginning at 4am to attend the meeting we´d just drived to get to. The next day I would meet Miguel, who walked four hours beginning long before sunrise to attend another meeting. And prejudiced ladinos call indigenous people lazy? guess they haven´t met Americans.

After struggling to stay awake through a meeting held mostly in the native language of Q´eqchí (yes, I know how it´s spelled now), We wound up into the mountains on the most incredible and frightening road I´ve ever had the adventure of experiencing. Narrow, washed out, tucked against cliffsides like the road itself was pressing against the mountainside for fear of falling off, dried mud tracks, deep holes, huge rocks, hairpin switchbacks requiring five point turns reversing toward cliff edges, up and up and up. It´s strange to be so in remote a place and pass by cell towers and soft drink ads. when we finally arrived after an hour and a half of not looking down, we stepped out of the truck (resisting the urge to kneel and kiss the ground) in the community of Paraiso Privado - "Private Paradise."

Here I saw my first coffee plants of the trip, and toured the Beneficio, or processing plant. They had a set-up unlike anything I´ve seen before, with a ten foot tall drum drier that can handle 6,000 lbs of coffee beans in parchment and a dual-hopper, diesel powered depulping machine bigger than the living room of my last apartment. Here 40 indigenous farmers cultivate the mountainsides and process their coffee, hard bean and strictly hard bean qualities (SHB being the top of the top) of the varietals Bourbon, Typica, Catuaí and Maragogype. Four days later I would be surprised by the opportunity to cup these very coffees from this very community. I was pleased to find that the SHB Catuaí/Bourbón blend and the Margogype are both fantastic, scoring in the mid to high 80´s according to my pallete and that of Roméo, the cupper at a Beneficio in Coban and one of the best in the business.

The next day, down in the valley, I attended a day long workshop in four parts. One was on the importance of and methods toward increasing productivity, the second was on the characteristics of different varietals, sub-species and hybrids of Coffea Arabica each with unique growth habits, bean sizes and shapes, tendencies toward microclimates, altitudes and humidity levels, leaf shapes, fruit colors, plant sizes and flavor qualities in the cup. The third part of the day was spent discussing the method for selecting the best cherries for re-seeding and how to process them effectively to produce the healthiest plants possible. Part four was on early cultivation, replanting, soil care, seedling maintenance and nursery-level coffee plant health. I have 12 pages of notes from this day, all in spanish. I was disappointed that the following day, Friday, instead of following the agrarian technician from ANACAFE, Guatemala´s national coffee association, and the many indigenous farmers I´d met at the workshop up into the fields to dig in the dirt and practice what we´d learned via powerpoint on Thursday, Glenda and I along with the president of APODIP left that area, drove another hour and half into the mountains to attend a symbolic meeting of farmers, co-op representatives and NGO´s that, unlike the day before, I didn´t understand a single word of. Having not slept much at all the night before, I spent the first two hours of the meeting lost and exhausted, wishing I was out in the fields, and the last hour and a half asleep in the truck.

Guatemala: week One

It´s farther down than it looks. The road you see is the one I walked up to get here.

Monja Blanca - Guatemala´s national flower

Spanish isn´t a language for me yet. It´s still a code, a collection of words and sounds that it is my job to decipher, to change into my familiar english meanings before they are understood. Quiero means ´I want´, it doesn´t yet mean ´Quiero,´ itself, alone. But I am close. when I am having a conversation in Spanish my brain has to work twice as hard and fast. Hear the word or sentence, Decipher it into english, Formulate my english response, Change it into spanish, Speak it, Repeat. Somehow I manage to keep up. Mostly I feel like a semi-literate child when I speak in slow, broken half-spanish, asking at least once per sentence by way of raised inflection followed by a pause if the word I´m in the middle of guessing is actually correct . Sometimes I imagine what I would sound like to myself if I were just learning english and trying to make my way in the states. Earlier this week I was having a conversation with Doña Lila about the weather. I wanted to say that when the clouds are there, it gets really cold, but when they go away it gets very suddenly very hot. Unfortunately, I didn´t know the word for clouds so I found myself looking quizzically while pointing up and asking what is the word for the white things in the sky that make cold. heh. They are Nuves. Another student, Anna, and I were bouncing around the back seat of a little SUV on the rocky, washed out road through the mountains up to the school trying to think of the phrase for '4-wheel drive' and the best we could come up with was the equivelant of '4-tire-go.' Speaking with my teacher, Maria, and her husband, Alex, about my motorcycle I remarked that all the motorbikes I´ve seen here have only one cylinder. When I told them I once had a bike with 4 cylinders Alex remarked that it must be very big and strong. I wasn´t sure how to communicate that although the engine was 6 times the size most of those I´ve seen here, that it wasn´t the stongest bike out there. the conversation ended in laughs when I referred to the bike and communicated through body language that it wasn´t so strong. I hit my chest a couple times with my fist and made some rasping coughs before pantomiming death, lolling tongue and all. They understood. ¨your motorcyle had bronchitis?" asked Alex, laughing. Yeah, you could say that.....if you knew how.

The mornings at the farm are full of activity I miss most of it because it´s damn near impossible to drag myself out of bed before 7:40 for my 8am class. I get myself together, have a breath of fresh air on the balcony and am ready to face the morning already bustling noisily beneath me. Doña Lila is hurrying away at some essential task or another, Libby is entertaining and hosting whoever is awake at that point, by now Anna has been conscious for an hor at least and our teachers are sitting quietly patiently waiting in the living room for the gringos to shake the sleep out of their eyes and be ready for the class they travelled a half hour over barely existent roads to get to. Then we fan out. Maria and I at a whiteboard in the living room, Alex and Anna at a counter by the kitchen and Joé, the new guy, with his teacher Loreni at a table upstairs. For the next 4 hours it´s intently focused Spanish instruction in every room in the house, Señora Libby milling about some way, entertaining guests or preparing to leave, and Doña Lila preparing lunch, keeping the fire stoked, cleaning up from breakfast, sweeping and mopping all at the same time.

Anna, Joe and I have fallen pretty easily into a groove. After all, here we three are. Anna has been in the country for a few months and has much better spanish than the other two of us. Joe came just recently and is starting from scratch here. Left to our own around the house we share beers, spanish notes, cooking, cleaning, tea-water-heating, fire-stoking and daily life like we´ve been doing it seamlessly for years.

It´s very safe here. almost like a compound. I think that nobody here is fond of the idea of sleeping on just mats or, worse, earthen floors. Here we have outlets in the wall, two flush toilets, a fridge, gas stove and microwave. There is a gate at the end of the driveway, from the house you pass a citrus orchard to get to it. On the other side is a road that is necessary to have a car of 4-tire-go to traverse and a small collection of modest huts and humble indigenous folks and very many earthen floors and not another microwave within miles. It´s been amazing here but I´m looking forward to getting more experience outside the compound, staying with coffee farmers, digging in the dirt and, with pleasure, sleeping on some.

So this is what´s next. Sadly, tomorrow is my last class with Maria. Following class I´m going to head to Coban for a coffee cupping at the offices of APODIP with one of my wonderful hosts, Sal. I´m excited to finally cup coffee at origin again, it´s been more than two years. Then on wednesday morning I´ll head out around 5am to trek for a few hours into the mountains toward a small community of indigenous Kek'chi maya coffee farmers. I will be present at a meeting between the campesinos and a group of Belgian financiers as they discuss terms of pre-financing, I imagine, next years crop. This is a really important part of the fair trade coffee system and I hope I can learn, through the translations from kek'chi to spanish and back, a little bit about how it works. Then on Thursday and Friday, and this is really the good stuff I´ve been hoping for, I´ll be attending a two-day workshop with the farmers about early cultivation and planting seedlings in the fields and nurseries. YESS!!

Bienvenidos a Guatemala!

This is a photo of the small farm near San Juan Chamelco, outside of Coban, Guatemala where I have been taking spanish lessons for the past two days. My entry into Guatemala was almost too easy, getting picked up from the airport and brought to the guest house, then the next morning a taxi right to the bus to Coban where I was met immediately by my wonderful hosts from the EcoCabaña language school. my lessons are fast paced and the homework is intense. today I have to write about the entire process of coffee production, from the soil to the plant to the harvest to the processing to cupping and grading and roasting, packing and brewing. in spanish! today was my second day! oy. After this intensive week of schooling, I will be free to get up to the fields and stay with coffee farmers for a night or two, hopefully longer. The next step in the plan was to get to a finca where they produce some amazing coffee in Huehuetenango called El Injerto, but late rains have rendered the roads unpassable between Coban and huehue, so I´ll have to go through El Capital to get there, which will take days, and I foresee myself getting distracted in Xela or lago atitlan on the way from Guate to Huehue.

soon, it´ll be all about the coffee. right now it´s all about learning spanish.

COFFEE!!

New York City!? ...get a rope

Please forgive the above reference to an old salsa commercial.

Whose idea was it to start this trip in New York City!? They were right about the whole not sleeping thing. Yeah, I'll spend a few days in the craziest city in North America before I fly down to spend time in the wilderness with indigenous coffee farmers. And then come back here after two months! Hello culture shock, I'm looking forward to getting smacked in the face by you any day now.

Connections are falling into place for Guatemala and I'm very relieved to feel like things are coming together. Thank you Mel for the contacts, and thank you rad people and friends of friends for already being in Guatemala. It's all very exciting.

I owe a remarkable debt of gratitude to the wonderful folks from Royal Coffee, NY who I had the pleasure of visiting with on Friday, roasting and cupping coffee, eating pizza and geeking out on Lost, sample roasters and Kenyan micro-lots. Heaven. To know they got my back while I'm in Central America, even if moral support is all it is, feels like a net underneath me. Thanks y'all!

Last night, my world changed. for the first time ever in my life, I danced all night at a club in New York City. It was amazing. Remember that one movie with the scene in that packed club where music was really loud and lights were crazy and people were dancing all over the whole place and there was an attendant in the bathroom and everything? It was like that. All my gratitude to the proprieter of the establishment for his hospitality. And speaking of hospitality, my buddy Rich is a remarkable human being. He moved to NYC only three months ago to start acting and is already well on his way to a pretty sweet career in it. Go Rich.

Sadly, I missed all the incredible huge art pieces that have already been moved out, but earlier today I assisted in the evacuation of Alex Grey's studio. Ever seen Alex Grey's work? I'm sure you have. look it up, that is an order. it's amazing. Actually, just go here to www.Alexgrey.com. holy wow.

One last thought. In New York City, at least manhattan, there are almost no places to dip into to get a cup of coffee (disregarding bagel shops or deli's or whatever, I'm talking about an actual coffee centered coffee house with good coffee) that isn't a starbucks. I walked eight or so miles through the city yesterday and saw only one coffee shop that wasn't starbucks. entire neighborhoods with nothing at all. For shame, New York. It's almost tempting to consider opening a radical neighborhood specialty coffee shop up north on Broadway or something. Too bad about my three day limit in the City.

Stay tuned. next stop, a bookstore and then, Guatemala City!

1/22/09

For those of you still tuning in, I've been back in Brattleboro for a bit over a week now, and will only be in town for another week. I've been spending nearly all my time on my own which is totally awesome 95% of the time and we won't be discussing the other 5 here. If you're a friend I haven't seen since I got back, don't take it personally, I'm in full-on recharge mode, just gimme a call.

Doing lots of art, stretching and exercising, reading about Guatemala, studying spanish, snowshoeing, XC skiing, listening to the radio and reading the paper, preparing for my next trip mentally and materially, hanging out with the family, playing my drums, writing in my journal...that's what's been filling most days lately.

And I've been giving lots of thought to where I'll be in a week and a half, something I haven't really said much of anything about here. Why am I going to Central America? I sometimes feel like I should have a mission, a thesis, a hypothesis, more of an Idea that would justify my being there, more of a purpose than the one I've got. Maybe I'm just nervous because it's coming up quick and may be, aside from organizing activist campaigns or teaching a college course or managing a company, one of the bigger things I've done.

In Mexico, January of 2007, I spent some time with an indigenous coffee farming community, an experience that was completely mind blowing, entirely humbling, and sort of made my brain explode. I was face to face for the first time in such an intensely direct way with colonialism, my white privilege, the real-time effects of neo-liberal globalization and the stories of people who were struggling to survive with dignity in spite of it all. And we were there with the farmers and families of Yunquin for only one full day. Too short. This made me want to go back to Central America and really spend some time on a farm, put in work, learn the language, hear the stories, experience the daily life for longer than a day. So I got back to the US, put in almost two years at a coffee roasting company, a great majority of that as the business manager, and decided after that tenure, having learned much about coffee from the perspective of a North American specialty roaster, that it was time I got back down to where it comes from. So I booked a two-month round trip to Guatemala, contacted a language school, a medium-sized independent high-end socially responsible coffee estate and a co-op of small scale organic, fair trade indigenous farming communities. I intend to keep my ear to the ground when I get there for more contacts, but so far I've got the first two and a half weeks booked. With the rest of the time I'll either find more coffee farms, farmers, communities, estates to explore, carry on to Nicaragua, Costa Rica or Panama to visit some places I've had in my sights, or hang out on a beach or up a volcano.

I'm going to Central America...

...Because it's important for people to know where the goods they consume originate and under what circumstances.

...Because particularly in the case of coffee, first hand experience at those places of origin is by far more educational and illuminating than any book, article or video could ever be.

...Because when I went to Mexico I could feel my perspective shifting and ideas about what I want to do with my life changing before my eyes. I was more inspired by that trip than anything else I can remember, and I need some more of that.

...Because I believe strongly that it's the responsibility of North American roasters to work side by side and in support of coffee growing communities to work for quality of life as well as quality of coffee, and the best way to do that is to spend time with those communities, listen to them and form relationships directly.

...Because I'm eager to to find out how coffee markets and programs such as Organic, Fair Trade, Cup of Excellence or Rainforest Alliance work and don't work for farmers, communities and co-ops of different types and sizes.

...Because my goal is to never stop learning about coffee and its consequences, and I figure this is a good way to keep up on it.

...Because I want to share with and enrich my community and work in support of coffee farming communities with whatever knowledge and experience I gain.

...Because it's high time I learned some Spanish.

...Because it's really really cold in Vermont right now. really really really cold.

If you've got any insights or advice, I'm all ears.

Art

The following pictures are of pieces of art that I've done in the past little while. All are done using nothing but paper and x-acto knives, some also have lightbulbs in the photos. Many are works in progress and in most cases I'm not happy with the photo quality. Click on the images for bigger pictures.

If I remember correctly, this is one of the very first I ever made. Musculature of the back and shoulders. The black is all one piece of paper, cut out the inside and pasted on the red, then cut out around it and pasted it on the beige.

This is a tree from a photo I took near the coffee roasting company where I used to work.

This evergreen was a new challenge, I finished it yesterday. It's from a photo I took at Snoqualmie Falls in Washington state.

These two pieces are for my, sadly, now inactive band, Nepantla.
Find our recordings to listen to by clicking here.
I'm way into the shapes of skulls with antlers and have a pile more pieces like this but unfortunately don't have any photos of them and they're really far away now.

Click on this one for a bigger image and better detail!! Actual size is about 9"x20"
It is of the human central nervous system, taken from a totally sweet anatomy book. It took a very very long time and spent a huge number of blades. I built a light box for it. This is the piece I'm most excited about and so the image quality I'm most disappointed by. Someday I'll have a nice camera again.

Detail of the brain and head.

The first tree I cut, and idiotically glued to an opaque piece of paper. no backlighting here. Also from a photo taken near the old roasting shop.

I love birds and trees and birds in trees. This was cut from a photo I took in Ohio. It's a work in progress. The sweet blue textured effect is from hanging it on a white fridge and taking a picture with the flash on a weird color balance setting. It will look much different when it's done.

I've got folder full of 'em, thanks to many late nights and a good portion of ISIS's discography.

For good measure

A few more of the nearly 1200 photos taken during the recent road trip

The sun over Pittsburgh taken from Dan's rooftop.


Not the best photo but a pretty funny thing. Wandering the aisles of a local grocery store in Asheville, a bird swoops down and right past our heads and into the shelves, pausing long enough atop the salad dressings for me to snap this grainy photo before flying away. The bird, I mean.


Christy getting squished between the walls of an alleyway behind the Nashville Trader Joe's.


One of the thousands of windmills discussed in my earlier post from Sweetwater county, Texas


Just us and the road. Outside Clayton, NM.


Mountain landscape outside Graaaaaand Jnctshn, Coloraddy.


Sunset with a crappy camera.

Surveying the landscape outside Arches National Park, Moab, Utah.


Boxing in the new year on the magical Wii.

The ever stunning view from the shores of Lake Tahoe.

City nights in San Fransisco.

One of the many beautiful sculptures at the Albany Landfill site in the East Bay.


Sunset from the airplane on the flight back east.

Mark and Christy VT to Cali '08-'09 Road trip recap and stat sheet

Start - Brattleboro, VT
End - Oakland, California
Start date - 12/3/08
End date - 1/6/09
Long driving days - 15
Total days - 35
Miles Travelled - 6,139
States crossed - 16
Fuel stops - 39
Total $ spent on gas - $484.67
Total Gallons Consumed - 272.66
Average MPG - 22.5 (keeping in mind it was an all wheel drive car and heavily loaded down)
Average Price per Gallon - 1.777561799
Most Expensive gas - $2.25, Happy Texas
Least Expensive gas - 1.35, Sandy, UT

Cities stayed - 15
People stayed with -
Friends houses - 9
Family - 3
Motels - 3
New friends (previously unknown folks who kindly hosted us, of course we made about 1,000 new friends) - 2

Items left or lost along the way -
iPod
sweet pair of polarized singlasses (r.i.p)
Leatherman tool in holster (I got it back, Thanks, Tate!)

Most Awesome non-x-mas item acquired -
Thule roof rack assembly with correct towers and Q-clips for Subaru Legacy with no
window frames or rain gutters. what are the odds? Thanks Jenna and Karl!

Most highly recommended book read on the trip -
Flight by Sherman Alexie. I read it in one day, you can too. It's great.

Movies watched -
How to draw a bunny, Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk, Loose Change, Brain Candy, Elf,
Shrek, Iron Man, Hellboy, The Music Within, Planet Earth documentaries, an obscure british comedy I'll never remember the name of and a TON of Metalocalypse.

Sock hops - 1
Hot tubs - 2
Hot springs - 3
Canyons - 4
Mountain passes - 5
Dogs we met along the way - 21
Fights, disagreements, difficulties, etc. as one might expect when two people are stuck in a car together for over a month - 0

Idaho Vs. Vermont. Round 1. FIGHT!

There's one thing Idaho's got that vermont ain't got. Hot Springs. Burning hot mineral rich water that flows right out of the earth, down mountains into cold fresh creeks where people've built pools around where the hot pours in, so you can take off yer clothes and get in the hot rock pool in a creek in the middle of nowhere in the snowy woods.


And it's awesome.

But Vermont's got summer swimming holes alll frickin' over the place. Ponds and lakes and rivers and brooks, like you could pick a new one every week and not run out by the time it's too cold to swim anymore. Big quiet lakes, quick little rivers, rocks to jump from, places only you and your friends know about til some fool blows up the spot, then you find another place to make a secret dam and sweet new secret place to go. But I suppose Idaho's got tons of those too.

One thing idaho has that Vermont certainly does not have is canyons! great big huge rock cliffs directly facing great big huge rock cliffs with rivers running in between them way at the bottom. That, along with jagged snow-capped mountains, is one of the dramatic characteristics of the landscape out here that makes out here unique. unique from Vermont anyway, because they got canyons in Utah, too, and I think there's a pretty big one in Arizona somewhere. However, I'm considering now, do gorges count? Because Queechee has a gorge, and Queechee is in Vermont. It's sorta like a canyon, just not quite as big. if it counts, disregard this paragraph.





But you know one thing that Vermont has that's not out here? Sugar maples. The magical tree that bleeds sweet water that gets boiled down to a thing syrup of pure amber golden sugary goodness. If you don't understand the sorcery in that then I can't even begin to try to convince you. In other words, if you're not from around here you just don't know.
And, as I'm in Idaho as I write this, I'm not from around here, so where's no way that I can know for sure what it's like to be from here, because as I'm thinking of all the wonderful things that either place has or lacks, I keep coming back to Idaho might have rivers to swim in but it doesn't have the rock river, may have ponds but it doesn't have south pond. It might have beautiful trees to play in but not the ones I climbed when I was little. It might be a magical place for a million people who live here or lived here or visited and loved it but to me there's no place like the place that watched me grow up. Mountains might be bigger and canyons might be deeper elsewhere, but there's no place like Vermont. Not in Oregon across the continent or New Hampshire across the river. Because I was born there, I'll probably die there and the whole time in between it'll always be my home, no matter where I am.

Plus, there's way less strip malls and no sprawling sub-divisions. And not - this should have been the first sentence of this entry - not a single solitary goddamn billboard is displayed throughout the entire state. And we were the last of the lower 48, maybe all 50 states, to allow wal-mart to trespass within the boundaries, and the first to pass civil unions, and our senator is a socialist.

Beat that.

If there's one thing I've learned on this trip...

...It's that it's very difficult to keep a travel blog when your access to a good internet connection is very infrequent and the site you use to host the damn thing never lets you actually upload photos. Also, I'm pretty picky about what I put up, so I didn't really want to do a half-assed job with no photos all along the way. So I waited until I had time here to actually write stuff, until I could mess with photo files and actually upload them, until I had a solid enough connection to hang online long enough to compose. That's right, Compose.

So the last post was from Texas? Jesus. I hope I haven't completely lost your attention. And now to tell all the stories I should have been telling all along the way all at once would be far too long for the average contemporary american attention span. No offense, I'll just paraphrase and give some highlights since then. From Austin we've driven a few thousand miles up through Texas into New Mexico. Unfortunately we just cut across the top corner of that state and didn't have a chance to go to Albuquerque, which I've wanted to do for a long time now. But we did stay in beautiful sunny Clayton, NM where we ate at the historic Eklund Hotel - a very classy joint straight from the late 1800's. From there we took ... umm... Highway? 193? This is a highway in New Mexico:



Yeahhh. Twenty-odd miles of gravel, our bikes were not very happy on the back of the car, but we did see a pretty sweet herd of antelope and some incredibly gorgeous scenery. Not to mention a "town" called gladstone that, as far as we could see, consisted of a trading post and that's all. It was also my first experience ever in a snowy desert. Growing up in Vermont a kid could get to thinking that deserts are ALWAYS really really hot and snow in deserts couldn't ever exist. let this dispel that myth, that in a high New Mexico desert, we built an EIGHT FOOT TALL SNOWMAN!! Isn't it amazing!!?? it's HUGE!!


Then we stayed in Denver with Trevor AKA Twelve, Christy's old friend from Idaho. And it was Awesome!! I could totally live in Denver for a while.

And from Denver to Moab, Utah, home of Arches National Park. You may have heard of it in the news lately, it's one of the places that the Bush administration wants to open up to oil and natural gas exploration. Yup, including some of the land within park boundaries, even. National Park land, full of industrial equipment and the risk of environmental disasters. Oh right, it's safe, totally, just ask the Tennessee Valley Authority about the safety of natural resource extraction and energy production. Clean Coal my ass. Awesome guys, real cool guys. totally sweet.

Here's what Bush and the BLM want to fuck up:


Tons of big huge enormous red rock walls and crazy canyonlands and formations.


Balanced rock in the morning sunlight. And at maybe around ten degrees f.


Turret Arch. Photos do no justice. This thing towers probably seven stories up and had me choking on my tongue it was so awesome.


Christy being cute with Delicate Arch in the background.


Someday, this will ALL be OUUURRRSSS.... wait, it sorta already is. okay. Someday, This will all be littered with OIL WELLS!!!


Landscape Arch. 306 feet long, WAY WAY WAY bigger than any photo I'd ever seen made it look. It's HUGE, and way high up. definitely worth the hike.

AND!! ...a bunny.

Then we went to Salt Lake City. The record here of my thoughts on Salt Lake City have been censored by my better judgment. Mormons are completely insane and should keep their filthy paws off the California constitution. If you don't like gay marriage then don't $#*^!ng have one but don't go passing constitutional amendments limiting other people's civil rights. Ditto abortion, keep your religion to yourself. (jerks.) okay, partially censored.

Then to Idaho, then through Nevada to Lake Tahoe to Oakland. Now we're in Oakland. Told you I'd be summarizing. Do you have any idea how long I've been in front of this screen?

More later.