write one page summery

a sense of place

To be rooted is perhaps the most important but least understood need of the human soul.

— Simone Weil

Of all the memberships we identify ourselves by (racial, ethnic, sexual, national, class, age,

religious, occupational), the one that is most forgotten, and that has the greatest potential for

healing, is place. We must learn to know, love, and join our place even more than we love our own ideas. People

who can agree that they share a commitment to the landscape/cityscape — even if they are otherwise locked in

struggle with each other — have at least one deep thing to share.

— Gary Snyder

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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E Session 1/A Sense of Place

Session 1/A Sense of Place N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E Session 1/A Sense of Place

Goals of the session

· To get acquainted during the introduction; to observe a class “opening.”

· To establish a schedule for future meeting dates for the class and identify two volunteers for each session: (1) someone to lead the opening and (2) a facilitator.

· To introduce the concepts of a sense of place and a bioregion.

· To widen our perception of “place” beyond a geographic site or political subdivision; to explore what it means to belong to a place.

BackGround

The notion of a “sense of place” finds its roots in human awareness and consciousness. In indigenous societies, the individual and place have no separate identity because they define each other.

In North American culture, we view ourselves as separate from our land, and land is a commodity in a world defined by economic value. Maps of land delineate political boundaries and road systems. In western North America, we have a tradition of using land and moving on. Knowing our place is not part of our tradition.

The American bioregional movement takes a radically different view of land. Bioregions are geographic areas defined

by natural features like watersheds, landforms, vegetation, animal life, and indigenous cultures. Wisdom comes from truly knowing the place we live.

Bioregionalists seek to create lifestyles and social institutions in harmony with their unique place, fitting culture to nature rather than the reverse. This means providing for energy, food, shelter, and transportation in a manner that promotes local selfreliance and long-term sustainability.

This session begins with an introduction to the concept of bioregionalism by Hannah Holmes. In “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner comments on rootlessness and notes what must happen to develop a sense of place. Robert Pyle tells how everyone has a connection to nature in “Everybody’s Ditch.”

In “The Spirit of Place,” Wade Davis describes native people who are intimately connected to their place and the traditions and rituals that cement that relationship. Mary Pipher describes her deep appreciation and loyalty to the place she calls home in her

essay “In Praise of Hometowns.”

“My Empty Lot” focuses on a type of place that is common but that most people ignore — a vacant lot. In his article, Joseph Kastner describes how he came to appreciate the richness of an undeveloped patch of New York City.

PossiBle discussion Questions

1. Simone Weil is quoted, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important but least understood need of the human soul.”

· Do you feel this need? If so, is the feeling pronounced or something that comes up from time to time?

· Is Weil’s statement relevant in a modern society?

2. Wendell Berry says, “If you don’t know where you are, youdon’t know who you are.” Has a place helped to shape your personal identity?

3. Stegner says we have tendencies to be a “placed” person(like Thoreau) and a “displaced” person (like Daniel Boone). (p. I-3) Which tendency is the strongest in you?

4. Do people in the U.S. tend to be more restless and rootlessthan those in other societies? If so, why? Have you been influenced by these forces?

5. What are your feelings about living in one place for the restof your life?

6. For your next vacation (if cost were not an issue), would youchoose to spend time in a foreign country of your choice, or time in your bioregion? Why?

7. Davis suggests that indigenous people possess a unique spiritualconnection with the place they inhabit. What does he mean? Can a non-indigenous person hope to achieve such a connection?

8. Davis describes rituals of the Quechua (in southern Andes) honoring their connection with place through ritual. What are your thoughts about such ritual? Has ritual been part of your experience of place?

9. Mary Pipher writes "with our state, the trick is knowing howto find its beauty." Describe a special place near you that a visitor might overlook.

PuttinG into Practice

· If you made an annual run around your village (neighborhood) as the Chinchero Indians did, consider the route you would take. Walk or run that route.

· Establish a new ritual that reminds you of your connection to your natural surroundings. You might trace the source of your food before starting the evening meal, or go outside each morning to hear which birds are singing or to see what the clouds are doing.

· Walk to the store instead of driving. What do you see, feel, hear, and smell that you didn’t notice before?

· Choose a spot in nature to sit for one hour. Record your observations.

excerpt from livinG Where you live

By Hannah Holmes

I live on a granite substratum, topped with sandy soil, formed into a ridge by heavy glacial traffic, and located in the Gulf of Maine bioregion, which is distinguished by a watershed that empties into the Atlantic and which is populated by mixed hardwoods and evergreens — but you can send my mail to Portland.

Bioregionalists, a breed of environmentalists who live the “Think globally, act locally” bumper sticker, hold that the state and city lines by which we normally locate ourselves are about as silly as the SaladShooter. Nature has its own systems of boundaries and divisions, and we’d do well to understand it and fit in unobtrusively.

Bioregionalists don’t agree on how to divide up the map — nor need they. All their methods respect natural divisions, not the arbitrary straight lines that political boundaries often observe. Some advocate bioregions defined by species — grasslands or evergreen forests, for instance. The Ozark Area Community Congress holds the oak tree near and dear. Others organize regions around major formations, like a big mountain or a lake — hence the Shasta Bioregion in California. Most common is the watershed approach, defining a bioregion by a system of streams and rivers that drain a particular patch of earth. Among the areas organized on this model are the Kansas Area Watershed and the Ish River subregion of the Cascadia Bioregion in British Columbia.

Much more important than making maps, though, is the ethic of living in the land, not on it. The first order of bioregional business is to learn so much about your habitat that you can live within its seasons and its soil conditions, and with its other species — not in spite of them. This living in the land might take the form of planting trees to counteract erosion and restore wildlife habitats in your area. Or you might be digging in the garden, coaxing your own food from the native soil, thwarting the global network of trucks and airplanes and agribiz. In the evening you might go to the local planning board meeting, to be sure that the needs of the environment are considered. While this is easiest in rural areas, even in the city you can tune into which way the wind blows, when the first frost comes, which species of trees in the park are native to your area, and where you can find locally grown produce.

“Home” is a key word in the movement. “Find your home,” bioregionalists advise. “Go home and stay there.” This means that you need to study one place. You need to learn the ecological history of your place and know its rhythms and its weaknesses, its wounds and its strengths. Only by becoming intimate with the species and natural conditions that share your patch of ground will you be able to make decisions that truly benefit your part of the planet.

— This article appeared in Ms., Sept/Oct. 1993. Ms. Holmes is the author of Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn.

the SenSe of place

From Where the Bluebird Sings, by Wallace Stegner

If you don’t know where you are, says Wendell Berry, you don’t know who you are. Berry is a writer, one of our best, who after some circling has settled on the bank of the Kentucky River, where he grew up and where his family has lived for many generations. He conducts his literary explorations inward, toward the core of what supports him physically and spiritually. He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck — lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a “placed” person.

But if every American is several people, and one of them is or would like to be a placed person, another is the opposite, the displaced person, cousin not to Thoreau but to Daniel Boone, dreamer not of Walden Ponds but of far horizons, traveler not in Concord but in wild unsettled places, explorer not inward but outward. Adventurous, restless, seeking, asocial or antisocial, the displaced American persists by the million long after the frontier has vanished. He exists to some extent in all of us, the inevitable by-product of our history: the New World transient. He is commoner in the newer parts of America — the West, Alaska — than in the older parts, but he occurs everywhere, always in motion.

To the placed person he seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and an inch deep. As a species, he is nonterritorial, he lacks a stamping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellegra of the soul.

Migratoriness has its dangers, unless it is the traditional, seasonal, social migratoriness of shepherd tribes, or of the academic tribes who every June leave Cambridge or New Haven for summer places in Vermont, and every September return to their winter range. Complete independence, absolute freedom of movement, are exhilarating for a time but may not wear well. That romantic atavist we sometimes dream of being, who lives alone in a western or arctic wilderness, playing Natty Bumppo and listening to the loons and living on moose meat and moving on if people come within a hundred miles, is a very American figure but he is not a full human being. He is a wild man of the woods, a Sasquatch.

He has many relatives who are organized as families — migrant families that would once have followed the frontier but that now follow construction booms from Rock Springs to Prudhoe Bay, or pursue the hope of better times from Michigan to Texas, or retire from the midwestern farm to St. Petersburg or Sunshine City, or still hunt the hippie heaven from Sedona to Telluride to Sand Point. These migrants drag their exposed roots and have trouble putting them down in new places. Some don’t want to put them down, but at retirement climb into their RVs and move with the seasons from national park to national park, creating a roadside society out of perpetual motion. The American home is often a mobile home.

I know about this. I was born on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but I also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a chance of being anything unless we could live together for a while. I spent my youth envying people who had lived all their lives in the houses they were born in, and had attics full of proof that they had lived.

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that it wasn’t created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

Once, as George Stewart reminded us in Names on the Land, the continent stretched away westward without names. It had no places in it until people had named them, and worn the names smooth with use. The fact that Daniel Boone killed a bear at a certain spot in Kentucky did not make it a place. It began to be one, though, when he remembered the spot as Bear Run, and other people picked up the name and called their settlement by it, and when the settlement became a landmark or destination for travelers, and when children had worn paths through its woods to schoolhouse or swimming hole. The very fact that people remembered Boone’s bear-killing, and told about it, added something of placeness.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts. Rip Van Winkle, though a fiction, enriches the Catskills. Real-life Mississippi spreads across unmarked boundaries into Yoknapatawpha County. Every one of the six hundred rocks from which the Indian maiden jumped to escape her pursuers grows by the legend, and people’s lives get lived around and into it. It attracts family picnics and lovers’ trysts. There are names carved in the trees there. Just as surely as do the quiet meadows and stone walls of Gettysburg, or the grassy hillside above the Little Big Horn where the Seventh Cavalry died, even a “phoney” place like the Indian maiden’s rock grows by human association.

In America the process of cumulative association has gone a good way by now in stable, settled, and especially rural areas — New England, the Midwest, the South — but hardly anyway at all in the raw, migrant West. For one thing, the West has been raided more often than settled, and raiders move on when they have got what they came for. Many western towns never lasted a single human lifetime. Many others have changed so fast that memory cannot cling to them; they are unrecognizable to anyone who knew them twenty years ago. And as they change, they may fall into the hands of planners and corporations, so that they tend to become more and more alike. Change too often means stereotype. Try Gillette, Wyoming, not too long ago a sleepy cowtown on the verge of becoming a real place, now a coal boomtown that will never be a place.

Changing everywhere, America changes fastest west of the 100th meridian. Mining booms, oil booms, irrigation booms, tourist booms, culture booms as at Aspen and Sun Valley, crowd out older populations and bring in new ones. Communities lose their memory along with their character. For some, the memory can over time be reinstated. For many, the memory too will be a transient, for irrigation agribusiness from California and Arizona to Idaho has by now created a whole permanent underclass of the migrant and dispossessed, totally placeless people who will never have a chance to settle down anywhere, who will know a place briefly during the potato or cantaloupe or grape harvest, and then move on.

As with life, so with literature. Except in northern California, the West has never had a real literary outpouring, a flowering of the sort that marked New England, the Midwest, and the South. As I have noted elsewhere, a lot of what has been written is a literature of motion, not of place. There is a whole tradition of it, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It to Kerouac’s On the Road. Occasionally we get loving place-oriented books such as Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, but even while we applaud them we note that they are memorials to places that used to be, not celebrations of ongoing places. They are nostalgic before history has taken its second step, as much a looking-back as Huckleberry Finn was for Mark Twain.

And that is a curious phenomenon, that nostalgia that has marked American writing ever since Irving and Cooper. From our very beginnings, and in the midst of our perpetual motion, we have been homesick for the old folks at home and the old oaken bucket. We have been forever bidding farewell to the last of the Mohicans, or the last of the old-time cattlemen, or the last of the pioneers with the bark on, or the vanishing wilderness. Just at random, read Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady or Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass or Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By, or even William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, with its portrait of a businessman possessed of an antique and doomed integrity. We have made a tradition out of mourning the passing of things we never had time really to know, just as we have made a culture out of the open road, out of movement without place.

Freedom, especially free land, has been largely responsible. Nothing in our history has bound us to a plot of ground as feudalism once bound Europeans. In older, smaller, more homogeneous and traditional countries, life was always more centripetal, held in tight upon its center. In Ireland, for example, Yeats tells us, “there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend. . . . I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts,

so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away, would still be in their own country.”

in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot

noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

It is only a step from his pronouncement to another: that no place is a place until it has had a poet. And that is about what Yeats was saying only a moment ago.

No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell

Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own.

American society rooted in richly remembered places, that led Washington Irving to transplant European legends to the Catskills, and Hawthorne to labor at creating what he called a usable past. The same lacks drove Henry James, later, to exploit his countrymen not as dwellers in their own country but more often as pilgrims and tourists abroad, hunting what their own country did not provide. When native themes, characters, and places did emerge, they were likely to be local-colorish, exploiting the local picturesque and probably mourning its passing, or expressions of our national restlessness, part of the literature of the road.

Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it. In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless man that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He . . . lives a life of his own, sunk of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn. But after all, in a few months it will be half a millennium since Europeans first laid eyes on this continent. At least in geographical terms, the frontiers have been explored and crossed. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business, any longer, in being impatient with history. We need to know our history in much greater depth, even back into the geology, which, as Henry Adams said, is only history projected a little way back from Mr. Jefferson.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.

— Wallace Stegner was a well known author of numerous books including Angle of Repose and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

everybody’S ditch

From The Thunder Tree by Robert Michael Pyle

A green ravine creases northeast Seattle, draining into Lake Union near the University of Washington. My mother grew up in a white shingle house beside this ravine and it became her constant haunt. Whenever she was able to return to Seattle, Mother’s first impulse was to visit “her” ravine. On one of these pilgrimages she took me along, and I saw in her face the meaning of place. At Ravenna Park she made a personal connection that transformed the way she looked at the land for the rest of her life.

When people connect with nature, it happens somewhere. Almost everyone who cares deeply about the outdoors can identify a particular place where contact occurred. This may have been a wilderness, a national park, or a stretch of unbounded countryside, but more often the place that makes a difference is unspectacular: a vacant lot, a scruffy patch of woods, a weedy field, a stream, a green ravine like Ravenna — or a ditch.

My own point of intimate contact with the land was a ditch. Growing up on the wrong side of Denver to reach the mountains easily or often, I resorted to the tattered edges of the Great Plains on the back side of town. There I encountered a century-old irrigation channel known as the High Line Canal. Without a doubt, most of the elements of my life flowed from that canal.

From the time I was six, this weedy watercourse had been my sanctuary, playground, and sulking walk. It was also my imaginary wilderness, escape hatch, and birthplace as a naturalist. Later the canal served as lover’s lane, research site, and holy ground of solace. Over the years I studied its natural history, explored much of its length, watched its habitats shrink as the suburbs grew up around it, and tried to help save some of its best bits. Despite the losses, the High Line remained a place to which I would often return. Even when living in national parks, in exotic lands, in truly rural countryside, and in Seattle near Mother’s ravine, I’ve hankered to get back to the old ditch whenever I could.

Around dry Denver, of course, the canal has many adherents. Since the public trail along the canal service road was opened in the seventies, tens of thousands have taken their pleasure there. But even before that, in the days of its unofficial access,

I was not alone in finding it. A young woman named Laura Corliss wrote her “Study of the High Line Canal” for school in 1975, telling of her family’s longtime dependence on the ditch for recreation. The Corlisses lived along the canal in Denver, between Eisenhower and Bible parks. Laura’s dad, Charles, rafted significant portions of the canal, and his children tubed, biked, chased frogs and crawdads, swung, dived, and swam all summer long. It was all against water department rules, but “without the canal I don’t know what I would have done,” Laura

The General Situation of the High Line Canal in Colorado (with kind permission of the Denver Board of Water Commissioners). The Front Range of the Rocky Mountains lies to the left, the western edge of the Great Plains to the right. X marks the Thunder Tree.

told me, “or what growing up would have been like.” She spoke for many kids and many ditches when she wrote, “During those hot and long summer days, I would have been bored stiff if it weren’t for that High Line Canal.”

It isn’t difficult to find lovers of the High Line around Denver, but I’ve been surprised by the number of people from elsewhere who care for this particular ditch. Three women I’ve met in the Pacific Northwest exemplify this phenomenon. Evelyn Iritani, a Seattle journalist whose father spent a lot of his time on the ditch when he lived near it in the forties, knows it through

a common affection for the High Line Canal.

Even if they don’t know “my” ditch, most people I speak with seem to have a ditch somewhere — or a creek, meadow, wood-lot, or marsh — that they hold in similar regard. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin. They are the secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have to look hard to find something to love.

This book is my love song to damaged lands, a serenade for all such places. I want to ask: What do shreds and scraps of the natural scene mean, after all, in the shadow of the citified whole? What can one patch of leftover land mean to one person’s life, or to the lives of all who dwell in the postindustrial wasteland? In the end, this is not a book about a ditch. It is a book about everybody’s ditch, and what Kim Stafford calls “weaving a rooted

companionship with home ground.”

Nearly forty years have elapsed since I first saw the High Line Canal. The landscape that so touched me has changed almost beyond recognition in those years — until I get down inside the ditch. Except for the proliferation of plastic among the flotsam in the bottom, the scene between the bank grass and the cottonwoods remains much the same as that which first enchanted me so long ago. As a ditchwalker in that silty bed, I have had none of the rights enjoyed by the farmers, no responsibilities such as the ditchriders bear — just the exercise of my free senses in company with the wind, the rain, and the place.

It is through close and intimate contact with a particular patch of ground that we learn to respond to the earth, to see that it really matters. We need to recognize the humble places where this alchemy occurs, and treat them as well as we treat our parks and preserves — or better, with less interference.

Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches — and the fields, the woods, the ravines — can teach us to care enough for all the land.

— Robert Michael Pyle is a distinguished nature writer. He has penned over a dozen books amd is currently working on a book about his home in Southwestern Washington.

the Spirit of place

By Wade Davis

One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live among peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in the stones polished by rain, recognize its taste in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that nomadic hunters existed, that jaguar shamans yet journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Athabaskan elders still resonate with meaning, is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the wondering holy men of the Sahara teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This idea has always filled me with hope.

Yet the very ease with which we move about this small planet confronts us with a terrible irony. We journey to learn, yet in travelling grow each day further and further from where we began. When the American poet Gary Snyder was once asked to discuss at length how individuals could best help resolve the environmental crisis, he responded with two words: “Stay put.” Only by rediscovering a sense of place, he suggested, a commitment to a particular piece of ground, will we be able to redefine our relationship to the planet.

For many people around the world, particularly those few still living in small communities unaffected by the frenzy and disappointments of the industrial age, this notion of belonging has never been forsaken. Indigenous cultures, though neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia, have forged a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land, but on far more subtle intuition — the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by consciousness. Mountains, rivers, and forests are not perceived as inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force that is embraced and transformed by the human imagination. Whether this is true in some absolute sense is not the point. Rather the significance lies in the manner in which the conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people. A Canadian child brought up to believe that a mountain is a pile of rocks will be a fundamentally different person than a Quechua Indian youth raised to revere a mountain as the incarnation of a god.

In the winter of 1982 I was fortunate to live among the Quechua while engaged in ethno-botanical research in the small village of Chinchero in the southern Andes of Peru. Though the highland flora was spectacular and the agricultural skills of these descendants of the Inca nothing short of genius, what impressed me most was the daily round, the accumulation of gestures that together spoke of an intimate and profound reverence for the very soil upon which the village lay. The village, of course, was not merely the warren of adobe and thatch houses clustered around the small church. It was the totality of the existence of the people — the ancient ruins that ran away from the village and hung like memories to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the river, the fields cut into the precipitous slopes of the sacred mountain Antakillqa, the lakes on the pampa where the sedges grow, and the waterfall where no one went for fear of meeting Sirena, the malevolent spirit of the forest.

For the people of the village, every activity was an affirmation of continuity. In the morning, before the labor in the fields began, there were always prayers and offerings of coca leaves for Pachamama, the Great Mother. The men worked together in teams forged not only by blood but by reciprocal bonds of obligation and loyalty, social and ritual debts accumulated over lifetimes and generations, never spoken about and never forgotten. Sometime around midday, the women and children would arrive with great steaming cauldrons of soup, baskets of