Chitra Ganesh, The Condition of Womanhood (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist and Durham Press.
Juino
Founded in 1523 with the flashy name of Santiago de los Caballeros
About like Saint James of the Dudes
Those andaluz colonizers must have been so full of themselves, fresh off their galleons and caravels only a couple of years after Cortés
Santiago de los Caballeros is called Colima now
Its aching poverty is isolated by—but is cheek by jowl with—big, wealthy Jalisco
Colima’s young venturers have struck out for California del Norte since even before the early days of pachuco LA
Life out in the sun-field bleachers
Like Cape Breton Acadians to Massachusetts
Turks into Germany
Like Filipinos and Bangladeshis to Saudi Arabia
Senegalese to France
Indians and Jamaicans to the UK
Colimotes arrive purposefully in the California del Norte wine country in considerable numbers to work 12/6 at nine dollars an hour
Vida: Rock picking with Colimotes in a new vineyard
They’re from San Miguel off the road through, south from Guadalajara
Soft Mexican Spanish barely carrying to the Douglas firs at the vineyard’s edge
Peculiar voice-dampering by the dry, loose well-turned earth so that words come in and out on approach as though bobbing down a stream
Unbroken by moving air
No breeze at all, mostly calm air on these high Spring Mountain slopes
Stones thump and drum on the vineyard tractor’s hardwood wagon bed, and then the sound of stones on stone well up the sideboards
There are breaks as the straw boss, Luis, drives off to the edge to dump full loads
Piles of California volcanic ridge stones and boulders that down the line may well be turned to dry vineyard walls or terraces, masonry buildings onsite
Or hauled off to fill erosion cuts or even to level-fill as yet unimagined freeways far down the valleys, or put to some unimaginable other use downslope far removed from now
Or just sit on Spring Mountain into the near eternity, in rock piles as shelter for western fence and sagebrush lizards always
In almost infinite numbers down through future centuries most animals probably will be the same as now
Sonoma chipmunks up on the stone piles for a view now and then, California ground squirrel burrows nearby
Foxes will trot past, once in a while a black bear will saunter through
But if the mammals are gone, buzztails will bask sun-warmed on these stones into perpetuity and on beyond any scan of time
When earthquakes and human fallibilities have severely changed the profiles and realities of Spring Mountain and the hills and canyons around it
The Mayacamas lifted grinding and temblor shifted
With it gone to something else, with San Francisco and its bay gone derelict and left somehow again to tidal flats
Whatever will be, insects and reptiles should still be as they are
Lizards have been on Spring Mountain almost since there have been small beings with eyes, toes and spines
Those magnificent blue-bellied male fence lizards and the skinny whiptails
With the Alameda whipsnakes, the Saint Helena mountain kingsnakes, the Pacific gopher snakes and the western rattlers, almost forever
Inside the Sonoma-Napa horizons, the vines grow venerable in their time that is absolutely nothing in earth life scale
They thicken through the seasons, scarred from pruning, swelling to gnarled and daedal live fence-walls on their horizontal wires, stakes and hangers
In late June, in the Mayacamas at two thousand feet the vines are beginning to fruit, tiny berries on the lacy armature
To bunch to full purple glaucoused lushness at the vendange
After the summer solstice, the duff beneath the Douglas firs, the madrone understory, Manzanita openings and grasses are fully drying out and last winter’s growth becomes the fire season’s fuel
The mountains bake, the vines’ roots tapping deeper and deeper into rubble-rock chaos beneath
The crumbly soil in the interstices sifting down, with every temblor the very understructure of the Mayacamas rearranged
The constant kinetics of the California faults
Beneath the Douglas firs and the chaparral
Late in June birds on the Mayacamas are still nesting, nervously this late in the warm months, the perils of late-brooding with July closing in when there will be no surface water at all
The black phoebes silently winging out carefully from their broods under the pole barn’s eves for insects
The Steller’s jays remarkably quiet, the bushtits and California towhees unusually unobtrusive
In the African savannah the dust smells of ancient remains with a lightness in hand of compressed dried organic leavings and random spoors and seeds that open with the rains
Traveling bush roads the dust in your face has that essence
You taste it when you tongue it off your teeth
California laurel-manzanita-chaparral dust is nearly as characteristic
Not as strong but more aromatic, from the oils of the chaparral
The smell of bay
The Spring Mountain vineyard dust has its admixture of needles from the Douglas firs
Lower Chilao, south in the San Gabriels under big ponderosas and Coulter pines at almost five thousand feet, has its own dust with even stronger sun and the essence of the resinous shiny leaves of mountain mahogany
The duff there thick with shiny Ponderosa needles and fragments of the great Ponderosa orange-russet bark plates
Longer Coulter pine needles and the Coulter foot-and-a-half by half a foot cones spread like small animals feeding in the moonlight on the soft silvery mat of needles
At five thousand feet, above the chaparral
In brush fires dust can mix with the smoke and then almost overwhelm so that there’s nothing left to do but pull back
Goggles down and bandanas against the dust especially when helicopters arrive and spot in
Always have extra socks in your fire bag, and on the second or third day of campaign fires paper underwear is issued in fire camp
Wine country fires of any size are rare
Plenty of access roads, people living on the land, a lot of cleared ground with a lot of bare earth, occasional fog in from the cold Pacific or up from San Pablo Bay
Ancestors of the Colimote vineyard crews mostly shipped out from Huelva and Cádiz
Campesinos down from Estramadura and the Sierra Moreno to become soldiers of the realm
In Mexico or the Caribbean, or Florida like Cabeza de Vaca, their real adventures began
In Cabeza de Vaca’s case, the slave of Texas Indians after a shipwreck on the Gulf Coast
He escaped with three other Spaniards and became the first European to go walkabout in North America, drifting from Texas across to the Pacific coast for eight years esteemed as a faith healer among the tribes whose languages he learned
These four, probably the first Europeans to see buffalo
Those with like faces, dispositions and cultural inclinations who lie behind the vineyard crew from Colima may have been soldiers of the conquest or may have settled down in central Mexico to farm or ply their trade
Generations of Hispanic-Mexican civilization since the 1520s and the 1530s known only to themselves, and records in Colima’s bishopric or the Archivo General de Indias in Seville
But the same idiom, the same faces, the same manner in the 2000s
Instead of picking rocks, men who could be on route march with lances, swords and crossbows behind a mounted priest or officers riding in chain mail and light greaves
But it’s a twenty-first century bunch, conversationally diverse, quips and questions, la economía, tractor caps and gauntlet work gloves, working toward the dusk
Down the mountain, white-tailed kites back and forth over the valley vineyards on their perpetual rodent hunt
Perch-hunting on Spring Mountain and down along the whole Myacamas it’s mostly buteos, red-shouldered, and red-tailed hawks
It’s quiet except for full conversation through a break until Luis brings the empty wagon back up along a row
Gloves back on, picking rocks again
Little talking with the empty wagon there to fill, helping each other with the big ones
Glancing around, everywhere but up, the scale and depth straight out
D. E. Steward is in his twenty-sixth year of months in the mode of his AGNI Online pieces “Maggiot,” “Juino,” and “Agosti.” Other months in this project have appeared in Conjunctions, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Written serially, month to month, many have autobiographical reference, but the project is not an extended Jahrbuch. It has affinity to Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, and Evan S. Connell’s two books of a similar kind. Well over half the 306 months in the project have been published in magazines. Another Mexican border month, “Avrila,” appears in Conjunctions 53. (updated 5/2012)