As one should expect from a partially constructed organic house, the adobe was rustic. The building lacked windows, a proper floor, a bathroom (this would not have made much of a difference, but I will get into that later), or a kitchen. It did have a temporary gas stove, electricity, a mat for me to share with Dan the man, and a whole lot of dust. I was to live inside the house with Emile, and Dan—a Swedish video-game designer.
There were five other people at the chacra. Three French backpackers who had dropped out of college to live as far out of the system as possible, a plastic art/movie maker name Mate—he dropped out of college because the art critics at his school were hacks, and finally Bruno ‘Mono’ Mendoza—who got his nickname for being born on the day of the mono entonada in the Mayan calendar.
Food was interesting on the chacra, and the characters had an interesting relationship with it. Mostly one of hate, I think. We more or less ate vegan camping food. This is to say we had one stove and few pots, Accordingly, we used the big pot to boil potatoes, rice, or pasta, and then let that sit while we cooked some sort of seasoning (if we were lucky). We always had salad made with fresh produce from the garden, and as many apples and oranges as we could muster. In general the idea was to remain as self sufficient as possible.
I don’t think people actually hated food in Bolson, in fact many, including myself, enjoyed to cook. I think people simply felt superior to the majority of humanity by eating vegan food and living without products made by the man. This being said, work was hard, and every person was willing to cave, drink a beer on occasion, or maybe (maybe) some butter.
Emile had a particularly interesting relationship with his food. He ate cruda. That is to say he refused to eat anything (except for the time he had home made pizza, lol) that had been cooked above 40 Celsius. His diet mostly consisted of a small mountain of apples at 11 am, a salad at 1pm, and then oranges at 6pm. He refused to eat in the mornings or at night, and fasted 2 days a week. His rational for fasting was that all great thinkers fasted. He felt closer to his thoughts and a better at meditating when famished. So he abstained from the act of eating.
Emile would go on about the merits of not eating and how he was tracking the movement of the moon in order to paint a better picture of it than anyone else in the world. In his previous life, Emile was a theoretical physicist from Switzerland. A daily ritual of his was arguing about spirituality and the merits, or lack there of, of movies, books, and all things not spiritual. Another was discussing the merits of vida cruda. I am not quite sure what to make of Emile, his character should be in a movie at some point though. I am not sure if he was a genius, or is going to be the next ghandi, but he certainly looked he could be.
Dan the man was way into the work on the farm. He liked the ‘structure’—effing overachiever. He graduated from high school and then made an interesting career choice. Instead of going to college decided to go work full time as a video game developer. He actually got paid 20 euros an hour to design levels for first person shooters. I really can’t think of a cooler job. As you know all good things can’t last, and after 3 years of mismanagement by his bosses, he was out of a job, and the company out of business. He decided to go to South America to find himself, decide if college was right for him, and landed on the chacra. Three years of the ‘real world’ job of video game design had given Dan a love for authority. He was tired of the all-nighters and pizza at work, and was ready for some good old-fashioned manual labor. You know, real man stuff, organic style.
The work we did was needlessly difficult due to the lack of ‘non-essential’ tools. We mostly were plastering the walls of two different adobe houses. Adobes are wooden framed houses with reboke—a natural cement mixture (two buckets of clay, 6 buckets of sand, and 1 bucket of finely cut up hay). Before plastering we had to prepare the reboke. This consisted of chopping up hay with a machete—could have been easier with a grinder, preparing clay—we had to take it from its dry form, add water, and mix it to a milkshake consistency with our feet. After those ingredients were prepared, we threw them into a concrete mixer and added the sand. After a few minutes.. Reboke!
Once the mixture was made, each person would fill a bucket, take a large cement knife and have at the walls. The first few days of this work was difficult, but after a little practice, it turned out to be pretty pleasant. This being said, I was not eager to do extra work, unlike some people, and took the first opportunity I could (without slacking of course) to take a break or end work.
