High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [48]
La Gomera’s farmland brought to mind my grandfather’s tales of farming the hills of Kentucky: planting potatoes on ground so steep, he liked to say, you could lop off the ends of the rows and let the potatoes roll into a basket. But here the farmers mostly grow grapevines, on narrow, stone-banked terraces that rise one after another in steep green stairways from coastline to clouds. Hawks wheeled in the air currents rising from the gorges.
I stopped for coffee in a country restaurant that by chance was hosting a family reunion. Unwilling to leave me out, the waiter brought me watercress soup and the country staple known as “wrinkled potatoes.” The spicy cilantro sauce had personality. So did the waiter. I told him I’d heard rumors of a village where they make pottery the way the Guanches did. (I was making this up, wholesale.) “Go to Chipude,” he said, startling me. “That’s not where they make it. The town where they make it doesn’t have a name, but you can see it from Chipude.”
I followed his advice—how could I not?—and at Chipude they waved me down the road to a place unmarked on my map, but whose residents insist it does have a name: Cercado (meaning, approximately, “Hidden inside its walls”). I spotted a group of white-aproned women sitting in an open doorway, surrounded by red clay vessels. One woman wore a beaten straw hat and held a sphere of clay against herself, carving it with a knife. She was not making coils or, technically speaking, building the pot; she was sculpting it, exactly as the Guanches are said to have done. When she tilted up her straw hat, her gold earring glinted and I saw that her eyes were Guanche blue. I asked her where the clay comes from. She pointed with her knife: “That barranco,” the gorge at the end of the village. Another woman was painting a dried pot with reddish clay slip: mud from that other barranco, she pointed. After a pot dries, they explained, and is painted with slip and dries again, its surface is rubbed smooth with a beach rock. Finally, the finished pot is polished to the deep, shiny luster of cherry wood. This last was the task of an old woman with the demeanor of a very old tree, who sat in the corner. She showed me her polishing stick: the worn-down plastic handle of a toothbrush. “What did the Guanches use?” I asked, and she gave me a smile as silent as the gardener’s and the parrots.
The youngest of the women, a teenager named Yaiza, was about to carry a load of finished pots to the kiln. She offered to show me. We walked together through the village, past two girls sitting on the roadside stringing red chilies, down a precarious goat path, into a grassy gorge. The kiln was a mud hut with a tin roof and a serious fire inside. Yaiza adjusted pots on the scorching tin roof, explaining that each one must spend half a day there upside down, half a day right side up, and then it’s ready to go into the fire, where it stays another full day. If the weather is right, it comes out without breaking. After this amount of art and labor, the women were prepared to sell one of these pots for about $13. I told Yaiza she should charge ten times that much. She laughed. I asked her if she had ever left La Gomera, and she laughed again, as if the idea were ludicrous. I asked her if a lot of people knew how to make this pottery, and she replied, “Oh, sure. Fourteen or fifteen.” All of them belonged to two families, and all lived in this village.
We returned to the pottery house, and I bought a pair of clay bowls. I packed them into my car with enormous care. I had the strange feeling that a few days from now, back at my apartment in Santa Cruz, when I opened these boxes and took out the crumpled newspapers I would possess only air and dust.
The green heart of La Gomera is the Garajonay National Park, a central plateau of ancient laurel forest. On an otherwise dry island, the lush vegetation here drinks from a mantle of perpetual fog. At some point between the dinosaur