Found in 1955 (standard:travel stories, 542 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 12 2009	Views/Reads: 3300/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Where sugar cane meets wealth, 54 years ago!

FOUND -- in 1955 

Long ago I wandered to Colombia, candy-sweet land of tan skin and red
berry.  Its goat-grass slopes were tumbled with broken rock flung from 
the old volcanoes.  Each beetle crawling the cement-tile floor reminded 
me how intensely life thrived in Paradise.  I was a Conquistador, 
cantering through Palmira's cobbled alleys, savoring the perfume of its 
sugar-cane breweries, the compelling rut of Mother Earth drawing me to 
plow her streams deeply for the treasure they conceal.  My hoof beats 
echoed from the mud brick walls;  the hollow echo resounded from the 
new bank facade.  The driver of a horse-drawn hack dipped his coach 
whip to me. 

Hunched crones, virgins beyond remedy, fluttered across the main square,
converging on the Church, whose bell above tolled the Angelus.  Only 
blocks away lay the cane fields, lush and swampy, murmuring gently, 
"Here are your snakes, your toads, your slime and quicksand, all your 
nourishment".  And I knew that the jewels of Palmira came from an army 
of white-clothed barefoot field-workers who made the cane grow and cut 
it when it was ripe.  They slashed the cane with bolos and machetes, 
then loaded the stalks onto tumbrel carts.  Horses drew the tumbrels 
along a track through the fields to the mill, where cruel serrated 
rolls squeezed the cane between them, chewed it up and filtered out its 
nectar.  Within the mill, great furnaces fire the boilers to make 
steam, which heats the shallow pans of cane-juice, thickening it into 
syrup.  The syrup fills great crocks which are sealed and connected to 
a vacuum-pump.  Soon, each crock holds a mass of sugar-crystals frozen 
in a brown viscous mass of molasses.  Under the spray, molasses washes 
away, leaving the sparkling crystals free -- to tumble through a dryer 
into shipping bags. 

Yes, cane was the wealth of Palmira.  And its black-skirted women were
proud of it, flouncing the red-and-yellow bands at their hems.  Rich 
soup of yucca, a good grass mat on the dirt floor, two-three babies in 
the crib -- yes, that was wealth, too. 

In Palmira, wealth was a fat pig with a deep grunt.  It was an ornate
wrought iron grating, well set in bricked-over cement before the house. 
 Wealth was an orange tree with purple vine-flowers among its leaves.  
The wealthiest Palmirans had one son in the ministry, another in 
Medical School and a daughter who wasn't pregnant yet.  But on the 
plantations, wealth was a machete that never got dull, a blade that 
would remain stiff and sharp for generations.  Wealth was so much rice 
and dry corn that you had no more bowls to store them.  Wealth was that 
moment after dusk, when the fire had just been lit and you joined all 
the others around it, melting into the uplifting spirit of 
togetherness, the joy of being and touching, loving and being loved.  
Wealth is a harvest so fat, the Patron comes down to your village and 
sits on a barrel and drinks a whole gallon of beer while praising each 
and every one of us, even the children.  -- yes, that was the true 
wealth of Palmira. 

And when I found Palmira, that wealth found me. 

Seattle, December 1989 - Gerald X. Diamond - All rights reserved 


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