In the near four months that Leigh and I have been abroad I think I have seen most in terms of animal life than I will for the rest of my animal life. In India, at first you are excited to see monkeys on the roofs of buildings, but you learn to hate and fear them after one of them practically snatches an orange from you hand or tries to get away with the spoon to your oatmeal. Cows are the cause of traffic congestion, and often you have to find a new ally to get to your hotel, as the cow that is blocking your usual route refuses to budge as he swings his huge horns unpredictably. In Varanasi, I discovered that the ugly, desiccated version of a cow is- in fact- a water buffalo, and that baby goats are so cute that abandoning that delicious mutton dinner seems like the best course of action. In Morocco you can feed a camel spaghetti and then ride him over a sand dune. Or you can realize that a full grown man is almost as big as a full grown donkey and therefore, perhaps, should not be riding one around town if dignity has anything to do with it.
Further North, the animal life is back where we are accustomed to it, fashionable middle aged ladies parade their fashionable little dogs down the fashionable streets on fashionable leashes. I´ve never felt like more of a hippie, simply for wearing Keens and a dirty pair of jeans. So four days later Leigh and I jettison ourselves back to the dirty world we are accustomed to- choosing to volunteer with wwoof, an organization that connects willing volunteers with organic farms in exchange for housing and food. Naturally, out of all the vegan, raw food, veg farms available, we decided that the only dairy farm on the list might suit our interests a little better, especially one where we might have the opportunity to make cheese. It´s a foodie wet dream, eat your heart out (or don´t) Andre.
The unmistakable smell of animal surprises me every morning as I hobble out of our bedroom. If it has been raining, and usually it has, the cows have spent the night in the barn directly under my feet. Sometimes you can catch a view of one in the huge canyons between the ancient floorboards of the farmhouse. We have stumbled into some sort of Catalan dream. The farm house would look like something you could rent for a wedding, if it weren´t for all the tools, hay, various animal feed and cow shit strewn about. Every morning and every night we milk the 29 female cows while trying to avoid the very frightening, and very lucky, single male. The Torro looks like a pale version of the Minotour- a myth that never stirred my guts until just now.
As he shuffles from cow to cow, caressing utters with the familiarity that a father should have with the body of his child, Josep asks us forced questions about the United States. Or we try and awkwardly make conversation. Josep is presumably in charge of the farm, which has been in the family for 300 years, he tells us. Both of his parents, and his aunt all still live and work in a sort of slow motion version of what they must have done in their youth. We are surrounded by characters so close to imaginary that they must be real, or so real and human that they seem imaginary, I do not know which.
I was never able to fully imagine what a furrowed brow might look like until I met Josep, his forehead folds in ripples from him eyebrows, giving him the constant look of worry. When he is muttering indecipherable over a fence post or a somewhat misshapen block of cheese I have no idea if he is speaking Spanish or Catalan, to me or to himself. His movements are often nervously frantic, jittering. We are only half joking when, after following him into the woods with a giant pair of clippers, a razor tooth saw, an axe and a chainsaw, we laugh about how he is taking us into a secluded spot to hack us to bits and bury our various limbs under the shed. Especially as he stands in the middle of a field, hand on chin, looking around nervously, shifting a few steps to the left, looking around again and muttering to himself, as if trying to decide what spot muffles sound the best. No, we really are there just to repair an electric fence, one that I will enviably shock myself on later. He is anxious around people, the kind of nervousness developed from a lifetime of talking mostly with animal, or torturing them. It is definitely the former, he is gentle even as he is yelling at the cow who daily trys to sneak into the shed where the cereals are kept.
Jaime is his father, whom old age and hard work have folded slightly at the waist. Only slightly, as if he was going from sitting to standing and got stuck just before he was fully upright. This does not stop him from working most of the day, hauling hay across the farm with a basket half his height in a slow toddering manner. With the basket slung over his shoulder, he moves from one barn to the other with an odd grace for someone who seems like they need to keep their legs straight at all times or risk crumbling. He drinks a glass of red wine at every meal, including breakfast and talks to us all the time, although not in the tone he uses for the animals, which is so different that it sounds more like a made up language than baby talk.
Florinida is so tiny that most 12 year old American kids could probably fit into her jumper. She is plugged in, and by this I mean that she drags a long hose behind her, a blue oxygen tube taped together in parts. It reminds one of the cord to a vacuum that constantly has to be gathered up, de-tangled or detached from whatever piece of odd furniture it has gotten caught on. Despite the inconvience it seems that pulling the tube (which I assume is attached to a tank somewhere upstairs, although I have never seen it, the cord simply seems to disappear into the ceiling) behind her is infinitely preferable to dragging around an oxygen tank around like a piece of permanently luggage. I am horrified for the day when I trip over the cord, tugging it out of her nose and accidentally strangling her. Everyday after lunch she stuffs as many cookies into her tea as possible, making it into a sort of sweat gruel that she consumes with a spoon.
Then there is Tia, whose name isn´t Tia but we call her that anyway. She was never married, never had kids and has lived on the farm all of her life. I will ask her questions in my fledgling Spanish, ¨clean here?" which she will almost always answer in a story, even though I think she knows that I have no idea what she is saying. She just likes to talk anyway, which is perfect because I love to listen to her. It rains here daily and she has mastered getting things done regardless, using whatever is available. With the white caps of plastic bags peaking out of the tips of her boots, a shower cap holding her minimal hair, which she dyes black despite its lack of abundance, she´ll brave the rain with the skeleton of what used to be an umbrella. Sometimes she´ll drape a giant brown bag over her like a cape, go out with a hoe and tackle the vicious weeds that she wont let us go near, worried they might hurt us. It seems culturally out of place, but there is nothing that captures her so well as the term "bad ass."
As he shuffles from cow to cow, caressing utters with the familiarity that a father should have with the body of his child, Josep asks us forced questions about the United States. Or we try and awkwardly make conversation. Josep is presumably in charge of the farm, which has been in the family for 300 years, he tells us. Both of his parents, and his aunt all still live and work in a sort of slow motion version of what they must have done in their youth. We are surrounded by characters so close to imaginary that they must be real, or so real and human that they seem imaginary, I do not know which.
I was never able to fully imagine what a furrowed brow might look like until I met Josep, his forehead folds in ripples from him eyebrows, giving him the constant look of worry. When he is muttering indecipherable over a fence post or a somewhat misshapen block of cheese I have no idea if he is speaking Spanish or Catalan, to me or to himself. His movements are often nervously frantic, jittering. We are only half joking when, after following him into the woods with a giant pair of clippers, a razor tooth saw, an axe and a chainsaw, we laugh about how he is taking us into a secluded spot to hack us to bits and bury our various limbs under the shed. Especially as he stands in the middle of a field, hand on chin, looking around nervously, shifting a few steps to the left, looking around again and muttering to himself, as if trying to decide what spot muffles sound the best. No, we really are there just to repair an electric fence, one that I will enviably shock myself on later. He is anxious around people, the kind of nervousness developed from a lifetime of talking mostly with animal, or torturing them. It is definitely the former, he is gentle even as he is yelling at the cow who daily trys to sneak into the shed where the cereals are kept.
Jaime is his father, whom old age and hard work have folded slightly at the waist. Only slightly, as if he was going from sitting to standing and got stuck just before he was fully upright. This does not stop him from working most of the day, hauling hay across the farm with a basket half his height in a slow toddering manner. With the basket slung over his shoulder, he moves from one barn to the other with an odd grace for someone who seems like they need to keep their legs straight at all times or risk crumbling. He drinks a glass of red wine at every meal, including breakfast and talks to us all the time, although not in the tone he uses for the animals, which is so different that it sounds more like a made up language than baby talk.
Florinida is so tiny that most 12 year old American kids could probably fit into her jumper. She is plugged in, and by this I mean that she drags a long hose behind her, a blue oxygen tube taped together in parts. It reminds one of the cord to a vacuum that constantly has to be gathered up, de-tangled or detached from whatever piece of odd furniture it has gotten caught on. Despite the inconvience it seems that pulling the tube (which I assume is attached to a tank somewhere upstairs, although I have never seen it, the cord simply seems to disappear into the ceiling) behind her is infinitely preferable to dragging around an oxygen tank around like a piece of permanently luggage. I am horrified for the day when I trip over the cord, tugging it out of her nose and accidentally strangling her. Everyday after lunch she stuffs as many cookies into her tea as possible, making it into a sort of sweat gruel that she consumes with a spoon.
Then there is Tia, whose name isn´t Tia but we call her that anyway. She was never married, never had kids and has lived on the farm all of her life. I will ask her questions in my fledgling Spanish, ¨clean here?" which she will almost always answer in a story, even though I think she knows that I have no idea what she is saying. She just likes to talk anyway, which is perfect because I love to listen to her. It rains here daily and she has mastered getting things done regardless, using whatever is available. With the white caps of plastic bags peaking out of the tips of her boots, a shower cap holding her minimal hair, which she dyes black despite its lack of abundance, she´ll brave the rain with the skeleton of what used to be an umbrella. Sometimes she´ll drape a giant brown bag over her like a cape, go out with a hoe and tackle the vicious weeds that she wont let us go near, worried they might hurt us. It seems culturally out of place, but there is nothing that captures her so well as the term "bad ass."
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