At the Foot of the Mountain

When I was 23, I embarked on my first major traveling experience. It had only been one year prior that my best friend, Lisa, and I had become obsessed with the movie version of Piers Paul Read's book Alive, the harrowing account of the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes and survived against all odds. Understandably, most people were morbidly fascinated by the survivors' necessity of eating their dead. For Lisa and myself, it was the spirit and will to survive that captivated us. The survivors, especially the idea of Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa who literally walked out of the Andes, became mythic heroes and symbols for what was humanly possible. In a manner that was reminiscent of the girlhood fan worship that we'd not completely left behind despite our fast-approaching college graduation, we decided that we would travel to South America--Uruguay if we could manage it. I don't know what we thought we would do once we got there but we knew we were going. I scrimped and saved money for the better part of a year after having discovered that one of the school's professors was coordinating a trip to Brazil. I'd never traveled further than my family's annual coastal vacations or to visit another friend up in Dallas, but I was ready to take a detour from this group trip and head down to Montevideo with Lisa. When we were two months short of departure, Lisa's commitment to the journey fell through. My courage wavered enough for me to abandon any solo travel to Uruguay, but I felt safe enough traveling with the rest of the group through Brazil. What an amazing trip that was! It was a pivotal moment in my life when I'd had more adventure compressed into a two week period than I'd ever experienced in my life. We began in Manaus, 1000 miles inland on the Amazon, visiting tiny villages accessible only by boat. I swam foolishly in the coffee waters of the Rio Negro, ignorant to the threat of the nightmarish candiru fish, a parasitic catfish known to swim up the urethra of unwary swimmers and lock it's fins in place. I only knew about the snakes at the time, a huge one of which the villagers had just killed prior to our swim! We swam anyway. The focus of our trip was the church-based communities, liberation theology and social justice movements of Brazil. We met a priest up there in the Amazon whose name I forget but who made me my first caipirinha and gave each girl in the group a ride around town on the back of his motorcycle. He was young and handsome and obviously a hunk to the town's women. I don't know how that priesthood thing worked out. As only a 23 yr old can do, I met a Brazilian on the flight from Manaus to Sao Paulo who would change the course of my life. He spoke no English and I spoke no Portuguese but we each had Japanese speakers in our groups so we commenced with three-way translation for that hours long flight over the Amazon rain forest. I can still remember seeing the fires from the plane. I remember the enormity of the Amazon and inability to wrap my brain around the idea of something of this magnitude ever disappearing. Plenty more adventure followed, mostly of a personal nature. As fate would have it, I fell in love with this Brazilian man I could not talk to without a dictionary. The next two years of my life I spent learning his language and going back and forth to the tiny town in Sao Paulo state where he lived. During all my time in Brazil, I came to understand the reality of several things I'd never seen in the U.S.--what it means to be really poor, what it means to live simply, and what sacrifices must be made for economic necessity. I was prepared to see the differences in their culture but I did not experience culture shock until I returned and suddenly could see the stark contrast of American over-abundance and over-consumption. I had been working for an inventory service at the time and sitting in the middle of a grocery store or a big box store counting merchandise left me feeling terribly queasy. Our sheer number of choices felt stifling. What had been normal for me all my life now felt like a complete aberration. However, at the time, though I was aware of the very real differences between life here and life in Brazil, I chalked it up to being in love and missing "him". Saudade--a Portuguese word I learned quickly and which became a part of me. It means to have an intense longing for someone or thing as if you are watching your best friend leave and know that you will never see him again. I learned other words, though I suspect I never sounded like more than a 5 or 6 yr old to my Brazilian hosts. I fell in love with one particular word and that love out-lasted by many years this brief love affair of my youth. It is the name of this blog--"beija-flor". In Brazilian Portuguese you would pronounce this "bay zsha floor"and it means "flower kisser". It refers to the hummingbird. I was always so tickled by this apt description of the tiny nectar-drinking bird. It seems perfect to my ears and sensibilities. "Flower kisser". The years have taken me on one long serendipitous journey and I'd never seen any clear connection to Now with my Brazilian past. But I've enough life experience to know that eventually the connections emerge. I've suddenly found myself in the unexpected role of budding environmental activist. It is not something I set my sights on. I, like most people, have been asleep for most of my life when it came to my own contributions to this crisis. Generation X--I grew up beyond the stage of denial. In school, we were all made aware of Earth Day and the ozone depletion, global warming. It was never a question of "whether" as it might have been for older generations. Our collective guilt resides in a conditioned expectation that "someone" will come along just in time to solve our problem. Technology always prevails. Greatest Generation--pooey! Who needs to be a greatest generation when we have technology to save us? In the years in between Brazil and now, I've moved to New York City, become a pastry chef, ridden that wave until my enthusiasm for it morphed into curiosity about food production in general. Books like Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma kept me searching for more and more information and before I knew it, I was knee-deep in books and issues. Now I find myself going to Peak Oil meetings and venturing to urban gardening classes, reading about our impending water shortages and how I might become a community organizer. I'm not out of my depth but I do suffer from thoughts going in several directions at once and a confident knowledge that I don't really know how I'll do whatever I'm going to do, but I'm going to do it. I don't think there is anything shameful about ignorance if you strive to learn. I'm busy meeting people who can shed some light. I've become something of a doomsayer among my friends, who are really not ready for any of this. People have their personal mountains to climb. I don't feel down about anything. I'm optimistic about the tremendous opportunity that we have even if I know all the very grim projections about several converging disasters. I want to be prepared. I want to help my loved ones be prepared. I want to find a way to help my community be prepared. Those are my mountains to climb. And so I look all the way back to what felt like a silly girlhood fascination with a movie, and I suddenly see so clearly that the example of Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa climbing out of the Andes is exactly what we are all facing. I'm joining a lot of other people already in the midst of that climb and there will be many more after me until we are a critical mass. And ultimately, if all goes a little right, we might one day call ourselves "Flower Kissers" as the perfect description of how we embrace the planet.