El Camino de los Cayucos (Parte 2 de 2)

Dispatch from Iago

El Taller

Viewing it from the slope above, Mapash’s work site didn’t look like much.  Clearly, an enormous tree had been felled and bucked up into various lengths, each teeteringly secured with an array of ropes and wedges on an incline that was every bit of 45° from level.  Interesting, but not exactly what I was expecting in terms of a workshop (un taller).  We picked our way slowly (and carefully) down, and it became apparent that this huge cypress had been bucked up into four cayuco-sized (12’ plus) lengths, plus an enormous amount of other wood (higher trunk and limbs) that were in various states of processing into lumber, fire wood, and whatever else could be salvaged from them.

Looking up slope

Much to my relief, Mapash sat down in a little spot of shade beside the fallen cypress and brought out his bottle of water for a drink.  I did the same, very happy to sit down after the long hike in...but the respite did not last.  After no more than a minute or two, he was up again and descending further into the work area.  Momentarily, he emerged from under a bush with some tools, specifically: a machete; an axe (hacha); and a small agricultural hoe that had been sharpened to a razor edge to serve as an adze (which I believe he called a sueño, though that means “dream” as far as I know...??).  With no further ceremony, he grabbed the adze, stepped inside a length of cypress that already had some degree of cayuco shape to it, and began removing wood

I had thought I had come to work, or at least help out a bit – but there was clearly no other adze around aside from the one in his hands.  And even that one was not in the best of shape, requiring a firm re-seating of the head onto the handle every 10 or so strokes.  But honestly, I was just happy to sit there awhile and observe, there in the shade, as Mapash laid into the log in the open sun.  He made it look so easy.  Whack , whack, whack, see how the wood peels off, leaving a silky smooth surface behind?  Simple, right?

After 15 or 20 minutes of observing in this way, I was fairly sure I’d gotten the basic idea (The Idea: Hollow out Log with Adze) and thus summoned the nerve to interrupt him and ask if I could have a go at it.  He looked at me sideways and gave a strange smile...”all right.”  So I stepped into the log and into the sun and had a go.  A few things immediately became apparent to me: 1) Working on a 45° incline is harder than it looks; 2) The little adze is heavier than it looks; and 3) Perfect wood chips are not flying away as advertised.  The grain of the cypress undulates a great deal and in a way that is not obvious, so I was having a hard time finding a rhythm and consistently workable strategy...one stroke would remove wood somewhat nicely, but the next would result in my burying the adze deep in the floor of the cayuco, thereby creating a terrible gouge.  I have to hand it to Mapash, though – he didn’t yell or scream when I so clearly made such mistakes.  Partly, I think it was because I was working in a not-no-sensitive area (wise decision on his part), away from the sculpted front of the boat and in an area that still required a substantial amount of wood to be removed, so gouges probably didn’t matter too much.  But still, it was so ugly compared to what I had just seen.

I continued for about a half an hour, during which time I improved a smidge in my technique and was successful in deepening the dugout to its target depth (one-ish Mapash hand) over about a third of its length, and with no obvious gouges left.  Whether he was or not, I don’t know, but I had a sense that Mapash was tiring of my inefficiency (remember, there’s only one adze); so I handed it back to him and went to sit down a bit...and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t ready for a rest from standing in such an awkward position in the sun (a tarp for shade would do wonders!).  When he stepped back in, Mapash shifted his attention to the front of the boat, where he proceeded to remove wood with the same tool, leaving behind an incredibly smooth finished surface.  In general, the adze was the tool of choice, though he relied on the machete in tight spots and the axe in corners.

Aside from a hand-length assessment every now and then, the whole thing was done by eye.  The only actual measuring or non-by-eye-based-layout I observed was up at the front, where at one point Mapash half-sunk a much-reused nail in the boat’s foremost tip and used it as an anchor for a string that he pulled to either side to assess symmetry and project lines onto the hull.  From what I could tell, the string had been thoroughly rubbed with charcoal from a fire so that it could function as a chalk line.  The only other marks I saw Mapash make on the log were a few crude strokes with a hunk of charcoal.

Around 11 or so, he had finished with the interior front and shifted his attention, so it seemed to me, to the rather significant problem of the bottom of the boat.  A couple of words of explanation are in order.  If you’re like me (i.e. someone who has never really thought that much about dugout boats), your conception of how trees become dugouts may be something like this: Fell tree, split log, and dig out inside of said tree so that the natural curvature of the trunk serves as the naturally curved underside (hull) of the boat.  That may be how some are done (I don’t know) but not cayucos.

For these boats, the natural curvature of the trunk is at the TOP of the boat and the underside is some imaginary plane deep in the heart of the tree.  The section of the cypress we were working on was a good 3’ in diameter (or so) and a good 12’ in length (or so)...i.e. a huge hunk of wood.  All told, the dugout portion of a cayuco is maybe only a foot in height, which means that for all the work that had already been done, we still had the vast majority of the trunk to remove from this boat, and all that action was underneath, in places we couldn’t really access.  I admit it, I was stumped (ha ha) as to how he was going to make this happen.

A nice perspective, showing the location of the dugout within the trunk.  Notice the enormous amount of wood needing to be removed from the underside of the boat.

The first order of business seemed to be to get the section of log on a more level aspect, because even Mapash appeared to be tired of the 45° work situation.  He returned to the bush where his tools had been stowed and emerged with a sharp chainsaw sporting a ~24” bar.  I was struck at that moment by how this heavy tool had been carried up here on the same 2 hour path I had just taken...and not only that, but all the bar oil it requires, the fuel.  This was a precious thing using precious resources, and it was time to whip it out.

We struggled for an hour, the two of us, trying to create enough clearance between this section of trunk and the ones above and below it so that we could somehow free it enough to get some purchase on it and rotate it onto the keyline of the slope.  Wedges, levers, grunting, huge pieces of wood dangerously letting go...but all to no avail.  By noon, the section of trunk remained exactly where it had been and I had decided that moving it was impossible.  And this was with two of us working at it – how in the world does a single person, working alone (as Mapash always does), accomplish this sort of work?  I’m afraid I did not learn the answer to this question, because at noon Mapash declared it was time to clean up and eat a little before the long hike out, if we were to catch the last flete back to town (2:30 PM).

As we sat and ate Yalien’s tortillas and shared some scrambled eggs (Mapash’s) and black beans (mine), I gazed exhausted at this monolithic trunk in front of us and was overwhelmed with the insurmountably of the task, the sheer effort required for this work.  I tried to express my disbelief over the difficulty of it all, something I think Mapash appreciated – but he just shrugged and agreed, without drama, that it did indeed “cost a lot.”

Before leaving the workshop, Mapash was game for a couple of poses in the still-very-much-incomplete cayuco (the smallest of the four envisioned from this tree), and then we set off down the mountain.

It's steep -- we are holding on tight (hands and legs) so we don't go sliding down.

I won’t beat around the bush: the hike out destroyed me.  Those of you who know me know I am no iron man triathlete (or biathlete...or, well, athlete).  Neither, however, am I a stranger to hiking.  But the steep, relentless downhill was more than I could bear.  After one and a half hours, with another half hour to go, my knees were in such pain with every step that I sincerely thought I would not make it out.  Any thoughts of returning to the site again, not to mention the potentially dozens of times it would take to actually see a cayuco through to completion, were utterly dispelled from my mind.  Mapash, on the other hand, was flying down –he was so far ahead of me, almost as soon as we set out, that I could no longer see him.  Slowly hobbling and wincing along, I was left to my thoughts.

Downhill reflections

I remembered one of my professors in the IAD program at UC Davis, Paul Marcotte, once telling me about an assignment he gave to his freshmen in an introductory class on international development: Walk from your dorm room across campus to Putah Creek, fill up a 5 gallon bucket of water, carry it back to your dorm, and write about your experience.  Such a task of fetching water is a daily reality for untold numbers of people around the globe, and Paul’s assignment was a beautifully simple and powerful way for those of us with potable water gushing, at negligible cost, from our faucets (and, criminally, our toilets) to get an inkling of the physical toll exacted on so many.  According to Paul, the assignment reduced more than one student to tears.

Although I have traveled to many places and seen (very much from the outside and very much cursorily) poverty and hardship in many forms, I cannot claim to have any real sense of what it must feel like to toil so hard for so very little, and with no end in sight.  I don’t presume to have actually walked in Mapash’s shoes for a day, but my time with him on the mountain did afford me a glimpse and experience of his life.  Some numbers for your consideration: Depending on the cayuco (size, quality of wood, etc.), my understanding is that Mapash sells his completed boats for somewhere in the range of 1,500-2,000 Quetzales ($200-250 USD).  What does that come to?  Maybe 10 bucks a day?  The skill involved, the sheer physical effort, the danger, the fees (you have to pay for a license to cut down a huge cypress tree like that), the transport...how does this make sense?

On my way down, I was passed (!) by another man hauling lumber out of the forest.  The same path, the same tools – after my morning with Mapash, I had a much greater appreciation for the costliness of the stack of boards on his back and head, probably weighing a total of 100 lbs. or more.  Mapash told me that the man will be able to sell each of those 1”x12”x10’ boards, hewn by hand on the mountainside, walked out to the road, and transported into town, for about 32 Quetzales (about $4).

The hike out was also a full two hours long, getting us to the road a little after 2:30 (thanks to my slow, wincing pace).  Despite the majestic aspect of the mountain we just descended, I was feeling dispirited.  The descent had bested me, my knees were exploding, and I was simply awash with the arbitrary injustice and ease of my life.

Mapash decreed there would be no more fletes coming by this far up the road that afternoon, so we hustled down the road toward a nearby coffee plantation, in hopes of catching one of the fletes used by the workers there to return to town.  At 2:45, we caught sight of one and were able to signal it to wait for us.  Mapash got chatty with the other men as I settled in for the standing ride home.  The truck quickly filled with men and boys who had been either picking coffee all day or gathering firewood.  In both cases, the loads people were carrying on their backs (and heads, via straps) were staggering.  As we neared Santiago, the flete took a detour to a coffee buying and processing operation, where the men and boys in the truck dumped out their berries and got paid, to the tune of 190 Q (~$25) for a 140 lb bag, a day’s picking for 1-2 people.

When we finally made it back to the center of town and got out of the flete, Mapash paused not a moment before setting out to retrace the long walk from the morning back home.  I, however, cried uncle and hailed a tuk-tuk for us.  When we parted ways at his house at 4:00, Mapash wanted to set a time to meet me the next day to return and continue.  Ha ha!  Right.  I had learned my lesson – it turns out he was quite right to eye the whole endeavor with suspicion from the get-go.  I thanked him profusely for his time, paid him the agreed upon 250 Q for his time, and confessed I would not be continuing.

I told him I would, however, be interested in buying a cayuco from him and perhaps helping to finish it up (side planks, sealing, etc.), once it was off of the mountain, if that would work.  To my great surprise, he said he would have the one I saw today off the mountain by next week.  That sounded great; but I could not imagine, after what I had seen, how he would pull that off.

The usual situation: Mapash working alone.

Stay tuned to hear about the cayuco we finally got!

Also, for a well-documented glimpse into the hardship of cayuco-making in Atitlán,

check out the short video “A Day With Marvin” produced by Aldea Maya (link here).