Popayan, Columbia March 16, 1979
Last night in San Andreas, our hotel owner’s son, Marcos – who prefers to be called Mark – invited us to come with him to visit his friend Leonardo, and Leonardo’s mother, who runs a bakery frequented only by locals – mostly because it’s so far out of town, and difficult to find. Once out of town we hiked on an uncertain path, one we might not have found if not for Mark. After almost an hour we arrived at Leonardo’s place – a small, white adobe house with a patchwork roof of tin and tile. Leonardo greeted us warmly – he had a beautiful smile and lovely deep dark eyes. Mark made the introductions and told him we’d like to meet his mother and see the bakery.
Leonardo led us around to the back of the house, to an outdoor ‘kitchen’ that shared a wall with the house, where his mother, Anamaria, was busy doing her daily baking. She’d finished making the dough, and was shaping it into little loaves – about a dozen of them – which she carefully arranged on a large metal tray, and set on the counter by the wall to rise. She was happy to show us around and talk to us about her baking as she worked. She said she has been baking bread like this, in her large, old, domed, brick oven, since she was very young, first helping her mother, who also was a baker. She makes brown bread, not because it’s healthier, although she knows it is, but because the whole wheat flour is cheaper and easier to get, and because it’s what she knows. She bakes every day, and people come from all around for her bread – even from town!
Anamaria’s baking is a family venture. Her ‘assistants’ include her two beautiful daughters, who like her are learning the art of bread-making from their mother, and another woman who was clearly older, perhaps 40 o4 45 years of age, but very child-like in both her appearance and her manner. Anamaria told us that this woman was ‘found’ as a child, living ‘like an animal’, in the mountains. No one seemed to know, or cared to say, how she came to be that way. All Anamaria said is that her parents decided to adopt this child, and she has been with them ever since. She was very small, perhaps a dwarf, and did not speak. Apparently she had always been mute, although she did hear, and loved music. She seemed happy in her work, and her smile, which often graced her lovely face, was positively beatific. I thought how lucky not only she, but the entire family, was to have found one another.
While one batch of bread baked and the other was rising, Anamaria invited us in to see her ‘inside kitchen’. She particularly wanted to show us her ‘new’ electric stove. And boy was it NEW! Just two years old and absolutely spotless. Everything in Anamaria’s kitchen was spotless – pots, pans, bowls, utensils – and everything was neatly in place – in cupboards or drawers, or on hooks on the wall. But she still uses the old brick oven for her bread, because ‘it makes the best bread’, and ‘it’s what I’ve always done’. (The stove was so spotless I wondered if it ever got used... maybe it was just for show.)
We managed to stay at Leonardo’s long enough to watch the perfect little brown loaves emerge from the brick oven, to smell that intoxicating aroma of fresh-baked bread, and to tear into loaves with our hands, dipping the chunks into a bowl of local honey, and washing it all down with a local brew of ‘beer’. Before we left, quite happy (that ‘beer’ was strong) and very full, Anamaria gave us a regalito (little gift) of a couple more loaves of bread ‘for the road’.
This morning I said good-bye to Jeff and headed by bus back to Popayan. It was a long but spectacular drive through a very steep mountainous landscape, with narrow winding valley so far, so far below us. I still I can’t believe, as I look down, just how high I am. And yet, here are banana trees! And everything so green and lush. Here even the trees are growing trees. Great big healthy plants growing out of the limbs of dead and dying deciduous trees. Lichen-covered limbs. One of the richest, most fecund landscapes I have ever seen. Every mountain face covered with grass or corn, verdant shades of green, so lush. And the flowers! What is also interesting is how distinct the mountains’ formations are – every wrinkle, every ridge. So unlike the Rockies, where the tall coniferous trees tend to hide the contours, mask the formations. Here you can see every little water course, every crevice, as it winds its way down the patch work fields that reach so high up the mountains. We passed through a somewhat lower and broader valley where the more typically tropical plants – orange and banana trees, palms – have a chance to show themselves. Then back up into the green-green hills to Popayan.
Now I’m just back from a walk into the hills around Popayan. Indescribably beautiful. The mountains feel somehow friendly; when you’re in a little pocket valley you can’t see out – but you feel somehow safe, secure. It’s a very intimate, tactile, loving landscape – it’s hard to imagine anything except a beautiful life here. Everywhere lovely little streams and rivers, rushing now, in the semi-rainy season, over rocks. People out in the fields with their tin buckets, gathering milk from the cows. Cows everywhere – along the roadside, keeping the grass clipped short, up on the hills high high above, and down in the valleys. Horses and pigs ambling happily along the roads, undisturbed by passers-by. So lovely, so idyllic. This is my idea of paradise; this is where I feel ‘god’s presence’. And just being here, treasuring this indescribably beautiful, peaceful, place, is as close to praying as I may ever be.
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