Water, and Lots of It

Today would be a good day for sipping hot tea and baking scones. The skies are battle-ship grey, and the cold rain is coming down in horizontal sheets. Mother Nature decided to take care of the drought. Unfortunately, she procrastinated to the point of having to give us all the rain at once. The parched earth just cannot absorb the rain quickly enough. The pasture in front of our house is now crisscrossed with rivulets of fast moving water. The pond, in which the water had been steadily receding to the point of the banks almost caving in, is now overflowing out to the driveway, which just may be impassable by our car.

We would have had those scones and tea I mentioned, but had to mop the laundry room floor instead – with an inch of water. We thought it had come in from a window which we had forgotten was open, but noticed as we mopped that the water level would just rise again. Our Sisyphean task was the result of not just the window, but water seeping in from below as well.

Side view of driveway.

Already wet, Cesar and I donned our rain coats (and little else – bare skin dries so much easier than clothes) and had a very wet walk-about. We found white water gurgling into the pond via the formerly dry streambeds which feed it. We began to walk through the shin-deep water of the lowest part of the driveway but remembered the shoddily buried electrical wires there and thought better of it. After our little tour of the property, we came back in and had some hot cocoa and listened to the plop plop plop of water droplets falling from the ceiling.

Water flowing out of pond overflow drainage.

I am not complaining. We are wearing our big fluffy bathrobes and just chilling out. The cows will be happy, the grass will be a brilliant green tomorrow, and the frogs are chirping and squeaking and blurping away having their little Dionysian amphibious orgies. The rain has stopped, probably just for a brief respite, the water has receded slightly and the winds have really begun.

Blood Sucking Devils

I think if given the choice, I would trade vampire bats for mosquitoes. Even though the vampire bat takes about two teaspoons of blood for its meal, and a mosquito takes five microliters (5 millionths of a liter), I would rather play host to a blood sucking mammal right now than suffer the incessant irritation of the plague of mosquitoes we are currently experiencing. Why there are so many, I do not know. Perhaps it is the time of year, recent relief from the drought, or just the normal state of things where we live. Whatever the case, we find them in every room of the house and I am usually greeted by a small swarm of them whenever I open the back door. Our sleep is interrupted every night by their bites and our groggy slaps and involuntary scratching in response.

Short of burning cow dung (which I plan to try this evening), we have pretty much exhausted our options of controlling the little bastards. We have tried a bed net, citronella candles, mosquito incense coils, a wall outlet device that looks like an air freshener plug-in, and various chemical sprays in increasing degrees of toxicity. And still I slap and scratch at myself.

I like to know my enemy, so after reading a bit about mosquitoes, I am not surprised they are such a successful species and impossible to get rid of. Craig Childes describes the mosquito thusly in The Animal Dialogues:

“a nightmare insect that will find you anywhere you hide. Of any creature this size, the mosquito has the most complex mechanical wiring known. Fifteen thousand sensory neurons reside in the antennae region alone. The sensory organs of the head are arranged like clockwork. Electron-microscope examination reveals interconnected rods and chambers, pleated dishes and prongs and plates. It looks like a science-fiction world of satellite dishes and receiver towers. These take the mechanical and chemical environment and translate it into a tactical array of electrical impulses to the mosquito’s brain, a brain the size of a pinprick on a piece of paper.”

The mosquito just goes to show that nature is stranger than fiction.

Through trial and error, we have developed a multi-faceted approach to control the mosquitoes. I can’t say we are bite free now, but this approach gives us some relief. For starters, we keep the doors closed at dusk, which seems to be when the hovering blood suckers are most active. Every few days, I apply a repellent spray inside and around the house. I alternate spraying with a chemical called Stockade (active ingredient is cypermethrine) and a stronger one that is still safe for pets, called Derribador (active ingredient is deltametrina). My goal here is to keep the mosquitoes and flies away while mitigating harm to other insects, if possible. Then, as a final low tech option, we sleep under a mosquito net. This sounds romantic, but try it for a while and it becomes annoying.

The mosquitoes have driven me to these steps. Until moving here, I was very much anti-chemical. Uruguayans have a chemical for everything though. Almost half an aisle at the grocery store is devoted to various insecticides and repellents. I guess I am just fitting in.

Know thine enemy. A few interesting facts about mosquitoes.

• Only female mosquitoes bite. They require your blood for egg production.


• If a mosquito is released in still air, it will come directly to the nearest host, even if it is one hundred feet away.


• A mosquito locates you by sensing the carbon dioxide of your breath, lactic acid from your skin, traces of acids released by the bacteria living on your skin and the moisture and heat emitted by your body.


• Even mosquitoes have a purpose. In addition to feeding on you, they also serve as pollinators, feeding on the nectar of flowers.


• One female mosquito may lay 100 to 300 eggs at a time and may average 1,000 to 3,000 offspring during her life span.

Wild Skies

Evening view from the front of La Gaia.

La Gaia is situated in a little valley at the beginning of the sierras. Whoever built this house laid it out very nicely. It faces North exactly, so we have lovely sunrises to our right and mesmerizing sunsets to our left. Being at the edge of the sierras, we also have a nearly constant dry wind that drops down from the hills. I think it is due to that wind that we have such impressive skies here.

Sorry, Montana, but this is big sky country. This evening we were working in the back field and I noticed that suddenly, the light seemed different. Huge clouds had rolled in and there was an opening of clear blue sky right over our heads. The effect was that of a huge but soft spotlight shining down. Everything looked more crisp and defined. Glancing up, I saw part of a large rainbow in the east. Behind me, big dark clouds were rolling in, making the sunset monochromatic and eerily impressive in shades of steel blue, with brilliant patches of light shining through in shimmering metallic shades impossible to describe or reproduce. Big alto-stratus clouds in the north reflected light from the setting sun in shades of pink and purple. Cesar and I just stood there for a while, enjoying the break from our work, and pointed out the various features of the sky to each other. It was nearly 9:00pm and the moon was bright through a thin veil of clouds, but there was still plenty of daylight. These skies are too special for me to waste a moment by running inside to fetch my camera, so I hope that by my description you can paint your own mental picture of the scene.

The sky is something that modern people forget to pay attention to in their hurried lives. I can see how ancient peoples who lived much closer to nature than we do were so aware of their natural environment, especially the movements of the sun and stars. I noticed last night that Orion is slightly more westward than it was when we arrived. That is something I never would have noticed at home since we can barely see the stars there for all of the light pollution.

As I type, the wind is blowing quite briskly. I can hear it moving through the trees and around the house. I think we will have an interesting sky in the morning. We always do.

Mom, look what I brought you!

I have found a few things around the house which gave me a momentary shock. Finding some kind of animal in an unexpected place, like a frog in the toilet or a bat hanging from a door frame gives me a quick little jolt every now and then. There is a split second where every nerve becomes alert, then immediately back to normal when my brain processes that it’s only a bat, a frog, a big hairy spider or a snake. This morning we had come home from grocery shopping and the dogs were ecstatic to see us as usual. I decided to unlock the back door instead of the front, turned the corner to the back porch and got one of those little jolts I just described. Then I started laughing as Cesar came around the corner, concerned about what had made me emit that little involuntary shriek.

With three dogs around, it had to happen eventually - a little bit of the dead cow from next door made it to our house. For days, we had been finding what I thought were sheep hooves. I would hear the dogs snarling and play fighting like they do when they have a special toy and would inevitably find the fought over object to be a black hoof. With so many sheep about, I just assumed that maybe they shed hooves occasionally and the dogs were finding these little treasures in the field. Little did I know they had been visiting the dead cow and pulling off its hooves. But this time they got lucky and the lower leg came away with the hoof. I don’t think they really knew what to do with it, but they did bring their trophy home. So it turned up like some kind of sick mafia warning on our back porch.



Curious now about hooves, and the difference between cow and sheep feet – cloven, one, two, or three toes? I Googled “cow hooves” and was surprised to see that nine out of the first ten results were for mail order cow hooves. Who knew? And here we get them for free!

The Obligatory Mate Post

No, not “mate” as in Aussie speak or your partner – it is pronounced MA-tay and is the official beverage of Uruguay and Argentina. Just as many people in the US walk around with Starbucks cups glued to their hands, you couldn’t throw your half caf decaf with a twist (anyone get the movie reference? Post a comment if you do) and not hit an Uruguayo with a mate gourd in his hand – that is if you could get your half caf decaf with a twist… more on the sorry coffee situation here in a later post. I’m still too depressed to write about that one.

Remy likes mate too.

So, back to mate: Mate is an herbal infusion made from the yerba mate plant, which grows in Paraguay, and drunk in huge quantities in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and parts of Brazil. It is an acquired taste. People unaccustomed to it describe it variously as grassy, like green tea, bitter or just plain awful. I happen to like it. The really cool and unusual thing about mate is that it is drunk from a gourd, not a cup, and you sip it through a metal straw called a bombilla. The bombilla is tapered at the end which goes into your mouth and the other end is spoon shaped with tiny holes to act as a sieve to keep the mate bits out of your mouth. Some uppity Argentines use tea bags instead, but that practice is met with scorn here.

Noah does not like mate.

My first experimentation with mate was not good. I did not realize there was a process one must follow to get drinkable mate. I ended up with a strongly bitter beverage and lots of powdery mate bits coming up through the straw. The result was quite unpleasant. Happily, I was inducted into the tradition of mate by true Uruguayos. Our dear friend Susana taught me that I must first soak the mate with cold water and push it down into the side of the gourd. Once it is good and packed, I then pour hot, not boiling water into the gourd. Once the straw is set in the packed mate, don’t move it or you will screw up the nice packing job you did when you poured in the cold water. From there, you can replenish the hot water whenever necessary. The mate can be used over and over again through out the day. There are all sorts of subtle variation on the process, and they are as individual as the drinker. I now have a fond memory of whiling away an hour before lunch sipping mate with Susana, her husband Jorge, Cesar and Tita, who showed me how to fill the gourd properly so as not to disturb the mate and how to pass it to my left to my friend. When the gourd made its way back to Tita, she would fill it, drink and pass it on. You can drink mate alone or with friends. Uruguayans are very sociable and usually a small group of friends will share a mate gourd.

Mate is every where here. At some gas stations you will even see vending machines that provide hot water for your thermos. Mate drinkers carry around thermoses (the preferred brand is Stanley) full of hot water so they can continually refill their gourds. Many people carry a specialized leather container just the right size for a thermos, bag of dry mate and the gourd. It is not uncommon to see people on mopeds, mate paraphernalia bag hanging from their shoulder and the mate gourd in one hand, leaving the other hand for the slightly less important job of steering the moped. The very adept mate drinkers can even hold the gourd with one hand and pour hot water from the thermos held under the armpit of the same arm, leaving their other arm completely free. If you see a lot of Uruguayos with burn marks on one hand, now you know why.

Snickers says "screw mate, I am an American cat, give me the tootsie pops!"

Murciélagos

Murciélagos is the Spanish word for bats. I estimate that we live with about a hundred of them, maybe more. That’s right, 1-0-0. Curious about our little winged furry friends, I sat down in a corner of the back porch at dusk and watched as the bats came out of the house to start their nocturnal bug gorging fest. I stopped counting at fifty because by then it was too dark for me to see. They popped out of the tiny entrance to their roost in groups of two or three. Then they swooped low to clear the roof of the porch and fluttered right over my head into the night sky.

This would be a good time to dispel some myths and misunderstandings about bats. First of all, they do not get tangled in your hair. I don’t know where this silly myth came from, but bats want nothing to do with your head. It may be their seemingly erratic flight patterns that brought about this myth. Secondly, though they can have rabies and other sorts of nasty pathogens, only half a percent of bats carry the disease. It is extremely rare for humans or domestic animals to get rabies from a bat. Another myth is that they suck blood. True, there are three species that feed on the blood of cattle or other animals, but they do not harm their host and they do not usually feed on humans. The three types that do feed on blood use their scalpel sharp teeth to make a tiny incision, then lap up the blood that flows out. Their saliva contains a special anticoagulant that keeps the blood flowing as long as they are feeding. A meal would be just a couple of teaspoons of blood. Finally, the expression “blind as a bat” notwithstanding, they are not blind. There are two orders of bats – megachiroptera and microchiroptera. The mega bats have large eyes and use their excellent eye sight to find fruit and flowers for pollen and nectar. The micro bats feed mainly on insects, and use echolocation to find their prey. Their eyesight is poorly developed, but they are not blind.

I have had several opportunities to observe them up close. Unfortunately, most of these were not good for the bat. One morning, I found a bat treading water in the dogs’ water bowl. I put on the leather gloves I always wear when handling the bats and wrapped it up in a washcloth and put it in a warm place in the laundry room until dusk. That night I released it. It seemed groggy at first, but flew off. That story had a happy ending. Others did not. There was the bat I found with torn wings – maybe a near miss by an owl. That one did not survive. Then there was the stiff as a board bat I found in the laundry room. It had crawled out of the wrong hole in the roof and got stuck in there and died, still hanging upside down on the wall.

Our bats are not the blood drinking sort; rather they consume probably thousands of insects a night. Mosquitoes here are bad enough even with the bats, I don’t want to think about what their numbers would be without their bat predators. For this reason, and because I think they are cute, and because of our live and let live attitude towards wildlife (which makes exceptions for any centipedes I find in the house) we let them be, even though they make noise all night and their guano stinks. Stinky droppings aside, they are clean animals, spending hours each day grooming themselves and their roost mates.

The Best Birthday Present - My New Butch Bike

As I mentioned in my first post about biking in Uruguay, to ride our road bikes, we must first pack them into the car and drive somewhere with paved roads. That small inconvenience aside, Uruguay presents many great biking opportunities, from coastal rides with fantastic sea views to rolling pasture on dirt roads with no cars in sight. My creamsicle-pearl-orange custom I.F. Factory Lightweight will always be my pride and joy – my main squeeze, I like to say – but since we have been here I have been jonesing for a mountain bike. So, for my birthday, I had a choice of motorcycle or horse as a present, but instead I confessed my desire for a mountain bike, and off to the Trek store we went.

Neither of us expected to find a quality bike shop here. But after noticing the many hard-core roadies hammering down the highways, we knew there had to be something. Trek’s store here, well located in an upscale area, is gleaming perfection inside. High end components are lacking, but they have a nice selection of Trek, Lemond and Gary Fisher bicycles. The service was top notch. I was pleasantly surprised by the thorough fitting I received by an extremely helpful Chilean racer named Claudio, fresh from his daily ride, still in bike shorts, jersey and bike shoes.

We came home later that day with a hard-tail Trek 4500 WSD, my first mountain bike. I had Cesar drop me off at the main road to our house so I could ride in. Riding a mountain bike is a different world from the road bike. For starters, I am not used to being so high up. Also, it is truly liberating to cruise over rough terrain or potholes without fear of damaging my bike. Bombing downhill on a gravel road is exhilarating. In all, a LOT of fun. For a while, I am going to be something of a sissy until I get used to this bike. I could use some pointers on just how to ride a mountain bike (comments, anyone?). Cesar’s only advice is “whatever happens, don’t stop”. Um, that helps…

Maybe we will still get a horse someday. I even have a name picked out for when we do. But for now it’s nice to have an aluminum horse that doesn’t eat and that I don’t have to saddle up before riding.