Santa Alicia After Rain

Christopher Scheirer





My friend Christopher and I went motorcycle riding today. We have, over the past week, made excursions to areas that were inundated with rains from the tropical storm, Agatha. Today, a few few kilometers south of San Lucas Toliman, we spent time talking with local residents and photographing some of the most recent damage. The photographs that follow are from today's excursion. They hardly need explanation or commentary, but in a few instances that is done.

There were two deaths in in Santa Alicia, but all who lived there are now homeless. The most dramatically damaged area was at the Finca Patzibir.

As I sit writing this the rains, after a six day lull, have begun again. In my 16 years in Guatemala, without exception, I have never known such a tormenta.



The finca Patzibir: No homes remain. The landslide, water, mud, stones began about one-half mile away on volcano Toliman. The rubble followed a riverbed and covered the highway, washed out bridges, and completely covered all the small homes near the finca. Only the finca's coffee drying shed and a small church survived.





















This is all that remains of one of the larger and more beautiful pilas (pools for water collection and washing) that was an often visited feature of the finca. The pila was approximately 75 x 75 feet and four feet deep. It was the main water source for the aldea (small populated area). The sides are destroyed and what remains is filled with large stones, downed trees and mud.










































Don Pedro: His home, about a half-mile away, survived. Today he gathered wood and talked with two curious gringos.


Two young women in the bottom of a deep river bed are looking for a way to the top. They are carrying plastic containers for water.


This gentleman, with hammer and small chiesel says he will break this stone into smaller pieces; he thinks it will take him about six weeks.

Same optimistic man with stone.

"NEVER
have I witnessed such a storm as this. Tropical storm Agatha split a giant tree 35 feet away and buried a lot of people alive. That was about 10 days ago. But this storm - yowza. I heard a firecracker go off to see my metal framed door light up with Saint Elmos fire followed by a deafening crack that must have touched within half a mile."

(Sidney James Taylor, writing on Facebook during today's rain.)


It continues to rain.

Old Photos: Looking at "Boots"

This blog violates a principle that I hold close, that is, not to be overly personal -- this blog-site is supposed to be about photographs. This particular blog is, I think necessarily, more personal although it does pretend to be about photographs. Old ones. Family ones. The reader will find, worthy or not, that I interject myself often; these, after all, are photos that have helped me to to reexamine aspects of my father so are inherently personal. My thoughts may be distracting; if that is so the reader should just enjoy the photographs.





My father died in 1983 at age 72. Congestive heart failure got him after 38 years of smoking Camel cigarettes and working at International Paper Co. in carcinogenic air. His funeral wake was attended by many work friends (he was a welder until he retired) and family and other close friends . I heard many stories about him, most emphasizing that he was a good man and liked by all. There was the usual stuff: that he loved me, my mother. How much of this was true I'm not entirely sure, but I chose to believe it. After weeks of looking at old photographs of him and his friends I am more confident that he was a well-liked man, and one more complicated than I knew.

At the age of 18 do many young people know their parents in a meaningful way? Perhaps. As for myself at 18, and leaving home for university, I feel that much more could have been known. My mother died at age 52 while I was in graduate school thereby eliminating any chance to know her as a mature son might. My father I rarely saw after leaving home; sure there were the occasional weekends and holiday visits, but these, often as not, were spent with young friends not with parents. The deeper knowing that one might want as an adult falls short of its potential.

So, when I opened a box of old photographs a few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised, and gradually became enamored of its contents. The box had been a possession for years, but went unopened and neglected. It had been stored in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and then was shipped to me in Guatemala along with a collection of negatives and photo prints that I had made over two decades. The badly worn box hardly caught my attention initially, but once it was opened it opened a door on my family life.

My father was to me, in early years, an awesome figure. He was a large man, usually weighing about 190 pounds, sometimes as much as 210, and he was five-feet, 10-inches tall. He was called "Boots," a nickname he was given as a child, a child who only wanted to wear boots. He was much given to smiling, but had gruff manner as well. He was also given to foul language, particularly when working; a bent nail, a screw that would not turn, a miss-cut board and his profanity exploded. God-damned cheap nails, screws and screwdrivers made by sorry ass Japs, and lumber that was insufficiently dry or of poor quality were the principal recipients of his anger. He never cursed me. He never cursed my mother. He was prone to curse salesmen, in their absence,who were often sorry-assed humans whom he would plan to give hell at the first opportunity: that opportunity never came. At any encounter with a sorry-ass salesman, or other sorry-ass human, he became pure reason and politeness. Such was his character.




The eyes and the smile of this child never changed. Seeing my father with a small cloth doll and dressed in white finery and striped socks both shocks and moves me emotionally. I notice right away that he has fingers on his right hand, fingers, three of which, will be lost when he is a few years older. This photograph, obviously kept by his mother, is the treasure of my collection. Happy child, contented adult.



Boots (right) with his brother, Bill.

A close examination of the photograph above will show that my father has only two fingers on his right hand. Three fingers were mangled in a circular saw in my grandfather's lumber mill. A twelve hour winter-time trip across a frozen bay to find a doctor was definitive, he lost the fingers and their loss clearly had an impact on his life. However, he never complained and he never believed there was manual labor that he could not do and do well. This was a correct assessment. He was a first-class welder, plumber, carpenter, and much more. He was, in fact, proud that he was so entirely capable sans fingers. His grip in his right hand, he would happily demonstrate, was exceptionally powerful: I saw more than one man groan in agony when testing my father's handshake. I learned early on that when he put his two fingers around my arm that I was in for some pain.


Boots with his Stutz Bearcat


Boots told me, when I was a teenager and much interested in automobiles, that he had owned a Stutz Bearcat. He owned it as a young man and only reluctantly sold it, if my memory is correct. I have always had the impression that, though he owned five or six automobiles over the years, that the Stutz was his favorite. Not knowing what a Stutz was I was pleased to find photographs of him sitting or standing near his. In more than one instance with a pretty girl; hard to know which was more important, the car or the pretty girl. I made an effort to learn something about the Stutz. The most interesting fact was that it was an early sports car and was desirable in its time. Today one can be purchased for $250,000 and up; my father would be pleased with that fact.




Boots (left) with unknown girl and boy



Boots' favorite past-time was fishing. I recall many unpleasant hours sitting in a boat with him waiting for the fish to start biting as they were sure to do. Why do I say unpleasant? I don't think many seven and eight year-olds find sitting absolutely quiet in a wooden boat (any movement made thumping sounds that frightened away the fish) for hours on end holding a cane pole, watching still water, a quietude that many adults would find Zen-like, (who knew the word then?) inspirational. The photo here confirms his early love for the sport, one which he never relinquished.





With fishing came boat-building. Our back yard was the scene extraordinary construction projects. Small boats, large boats. Prior to Mardi Gras one year he agreed to help construct a parade float and he over-saw the construction in our side yard. Near to the construction "site" he thought it a good idea to build a storage and work building. This building, made of scrap lumber and used tin roofing was quickly cobbled together. Within a year it was full to the top with salvaged materials. Used railroad ties, buckets of rusting nails, huge rolls of craft paper brought home from the mill, broken -- but always fixable! -- electric motors, sheets of stainless steel. Nothing went unappreciated for its potential use at some indefinite time in the future: it was never used. Anything at the mill that could fit into a metal lunch pail was likely to find its way to our shed.

The work shed, as it was called, became so full that it was not possible to enter it. We would stand in the doorway while he tried to recall exactly where he had put the perfect broken water pump that "we" could refurbish and put to use: the smallest most agile person, namely me, would then crawl over the top of his treasures and dig down until it was, sometimes, found. My father's shed was a bitter pill for mother, but it endured. She, too.



Boots, me, mother

The boat shown above was just one of the boats that my father owned over the years. This one he built. It was transported, unfinished, to our fishing camp in Mississippi where he planned to finish its interior. It was meant to be used for fishing in the creeks and rivers nearby. It quickly became apparent that it was unwieldy in the extreme with the small 18 horsepower outboard motor that he bought. It sat beached for years, unfinished still, near our boat dock. It was never used after the first four outings. It became a play-boat for children and their secret gender discoveries which naturally led to "you children have to stay out of that boat."

Boats were not the only things that Boots built. I can recall no time when he didn't have something under construction, or planned. Plans, of course, out numbered actual finished projects by about ten to one. We built a camp. We built a small house for my grandmother behind our house; and had to walk around the shed to get to it. Of most interest to him were items that he could weld. My mother wanted two sizable pans for frying fish at the camp. Not one to waste money when he could make them he made two of heavy industrial stainless steel. One shallow and about two feet in diameter. The deeper one was of equal diameter but two feet deep. Each weighed nearly 12 pounds, used gallons of oil and couldn't be lifted by my mother from a stove without assistance. Not to worry. He built an out door cooker, again stainless and fired by a propane gas tank, all of which had to be hauled into place from the locked closet where it had to be stored. Because our camp was on a creek I thought I needed some sort of spear gun. Buying one was never considered, Boots made one. It had a hollow metal tube, and the necessary spear, also solid metal. The trigger mechanism was bent steel. Propulsion was by a length of surgical rubber which when expanded provided the force for the spear. It worked as planned except that the spear was so heavy that its effective range was about four feet. The combined weight of gun and spear was such that it pulled me quickly to the bottom of the creek and then came the struggle to get back to the surface. Like many brilliantly conceived things it went unused.


.
Boots and myself at the fishing camp in Mississippi. He is attempting to prime a hand pump on a well that we, with the help of friends, drove 60 feet deep using a heavy weight suspended from a cross beam and pulley.




Boots (right) with banjo. I'm puzzled that he was able to play with only two fingers on his right hand. Three fingers, as mentioned above, were lost during a childhood mishap.



Boots, I was told a few times by people who knew him in his youth, was a ladies-man. Not a Lothario, not a cad, not womanizer I was assured. Nonetheless, I found this description not to be credible. Perhaps it was due to my perceptions of him at home. A man who left early (5 am) to drive to work, who returned at 3:30 each afternoon and soon settled in front of the television. We ate as a family, watched television the same way, though what we watched was his choice. Almost without exception he would fall asleep in front of the TV about 7:00 and arouse himself to go to bed 10:00 pm. I had a difficult time imagining how someone with his lack of interest in social affairs and, it seemed to me then, sluggish and lethargic character could have ever been of interest to girls, or women.

Photographs, as some say, tell the truth (we can avoid, here, whether this is true) and, in the matter of my father, I think they do get to something significant about him. In my box of photographs the largest number of any person were of my father, no doubt saved by his mother, then by mine. Of those of him, many were of him with his arm around some beautiful girl, or with her arm around him. None of the photos of these beauties has a name or date on it. But in the context of other photos it would appear that these were all made sometime between the mid 1920s and 1930s. They are photos of a happy man with happy girl-friends. They confirm for the skeptical me that he was indeed a man who loved women. He must have been thought a "catch" -- as were the women that he was photographed with. Judge for yourself.

This part of Boot's life came to an end when he met my mother, a young woman of beauty herself, whose beauty clearly rivaled that of earlier women. Meeting and marrying Wilmoth Odom was the most important moment in his life. (Certainly in mine.) And while an earlier version of Boots seems to have disappeared he seems never lost his charm entirely.

After my mother's death at age 52 a number of his old flames began contacting him. (I know this because I was temporarily living with him.) They would drop by the house, bringing gifts of food and assurances that they were available if he needed a shoulder to lean on. He dated a few of these women: I recall him arriving home at 2 o'clock in the morning, then leaving again later to go to work. This went on for months. Nothing came of it. A few years later he married again, but not to an old flame. The new Mrs. Waters was a widow with a home, a daughter, and not the least needy, in the sense we use that word today. This new life, as far as I could tell, was unexceptional: he returned to his first-marriage-ways.































Below: photographs of my mother, my mother and me, Boots and her (to his right) at a gala, and her with a very mysterious smile.

Further Observations: Life in the Highlands

Text by: Vincent Stanzione






Happy girl, Happy doll, Happy life.

Sometimes just looking at a photograph can make you feel like the world is a perfect place to be human. Some photographs give you the sense that one can’t be grateful enough for all that one has in this lifetime. Some children just seem to have what it takes to make it on the face of the earth. You can see it in their smiles, the way they align their clothes, the way they present themselves, the way the position themselves for a portrait. The pride they have for who they are and where they are.

Some photos make you say, ‘I love this kid. This kid is how all human beings should be: grateful, alert, open, smart and proud to be who they are.’ I love this child for the sense of hope she emanates, for the innate intelligence she exudes, for the will to be happy that she manifests, for the care she takes to present herself and the doll.

This is a poor child who is wealthy. Over the years I have been blessed to come to know these kinds of people. They have something that people with "everything" don’t have: the spark of life and the inherent goodness of humanity. She dressed her doll like she dresses herself and she takes care of her doll as she does herself. She doesn’t know that other people would define her as poor and that doesn’t matter because the world is all hers.

She has deer eyes. A sign of the wild. She has the smile and nose of a baby jaguar. A sign of the divine. She has the face of the ancient ones. A sign that her life will be a blessed one. When I contemplate this photo I want to get down on my bended knees to ask the gods and goddesses to open this child’s road, to remove the obstacle and make her dreams come true. She has that look that makes you feel thankful every second of the day.









As precious as life can be

Photography when it is great is divine because it take possibility and makes it reality, it takes chance and turns it into an image. A true photographer can not leave the house without his camera because a true photographer knows that the crossroads of opportunity and improbability don’t form on an easily found grid that says this is the right time and right place to make a photo out of life’s constantly moving and changing forms and figures.

In a great photograph there is always the element that says this is an instant in the life of this being that is manifest for all time. And this is what one sees and experiences here in a picture as precious as life can be created in a precious instant of time and space.

The child holds a fluffy dog in one arm as if it weighed nothing and what looks like a marshmallow on a stick. She smiles at the camera as the puppy looks on as if to say ‘take the picture.’ It is the effortlessnes of life that sets my mind in motion asking why I try so hard when a baby child makes it all seem so easy. It is all heavy and light at once, meaningful and meaningless. An image of life in the normal time of normal lives of normal people and that is what is so priceless and unimaginably sacred about a photo that reveals the real in this world that is covered in unreal images of unreal lives. A shoeless child, as adorable as the puppy she holds as if weightless, and something sweet at the end of an ordinary stick; what more can the art of photography ask for in its search to create the perfect image of a precious life.

Who has who bound at the neck?

A lot of times we human beings take on the looks and expressions of those beings with whom we live. My next door neighbor turned into looking like her sheep. Up in the hills where I live the people are known for having the power of turning themselves into animals. In fact, they keep animals to hide their soul-anima when an enemy is after them. Unfortunately the place I live is forested with people whose ancestors were extremely rebellious types and part of that was what made them the tricksters they became. The other part came from all the trickster-like stories that make up the deep structure of their minds. It has been easy living around folks like that but it has made me strong in ways I could have never imagined.

All the women keep sheep, goats, cattle, hens, roosters and cats. All the men keep horses and dogs. I know you know that is a gross generalization but more or less life is like that up here around the house. The domestic animals are very useful for catching any bad vibes that one’s enemy or rival or envious friend might have for one or what one has. Better have one of the animals take it for you then one of your kids. Children are the vulnerable ones who pay debts of their parents so it is always wise to have animals around to pick up on anything that might be sent your way from the bad side of the Santo Mundo.

My next door neighbor kept just a few really ornery rams and sheep for as long as her children were young, just in case. She put so much thought into those animals as the protection of herself and her family that she pretty much became one with her animals and they with her. They both ran each other up and down the hills looking for safe places to graze while taking care of one another through the most vulnerable times of their lives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ V.S.


Photographs by Tom Waters

Highland Woman: Donna Leonara

Text by: Vincent Stanzione



Mother, Daughter and Son

The three of them lived together like the Earth, Moon and Star lived together in the Sky, house of the Sun. They took care of one another and themselves like the most independent people I have ever known. Maria Fidelia standing in the door didn’t live fully in this world and spent her life both extremely happy and intensely sad. She was truly a lunatic, she changed with the moon. Her mother sitting on the front porch was known to be a ‘transformer’ which is to say she could change into animal form and roam the world around her. She was born into the world with a destiny from ancient times, she was baptized Leonora Quiche. She and her husband were the caretakers of a large piece of forest, pasture and milpa. They were the last of the K’iche people on the frontier of Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil and K’iche land. I knew her but I can’t say too well. Xuan is still with us on this side of the two worlds while his mother and sister now reside in the Santo Mundo where all souls go to live out their eternity.






I like Xuan and try to make sure he has all the firewood he needs. He was trapped in his mother at birth and has been damaged from that birth to this day. He is the sweetest man, kindest man I have ever known but, no matter, people still make fun of him and make him mad. He doesn’t like that at all, I don’t like it either. He can’t talk but he can hear and he understands everything but people think just because he can’t speak well that he is some how not right in the head.

It was his sister Maria Fidelia who was touched, she was the one who carried a doll around with her wherever she went. But Xuan he is fine. He is just paralyzed in an odd way but he gets through it and does his best at whatever he is told to do. His favorite thing is to take a whip out that he made out of maguey fiber and he whip the world. He snaps his whip in late May and early June to make sure the maize stands up straight and the gophers run off back to the wild. He whips the earth and howls like a wild man knowing that it is he that makes the maize grow and he protects it from its enemies from above and below. He is there at dawn and again at dusk like Venus as morning and evening star.

Leona is gone after living a long life on earth. She worked doing something right up to her dying day. She never did much but she always did something while taking care of her son and daughter for as long as they lived. They took care of one another as best they could. Beyond that the people who lived around them helped them out but not too much to make them feel unable. Mother and Daughter never wore shoes on their feet and never went anywhere beyond the little hollow they lived in and the three closest villages. Xuan still lives next door. The rain is falling and pretty soon his work in the field and forest will end. It will be time to whip the world into order and call out to the Earth and Moon.



Doña Leonora Quiche
Some people get to be really old in this world. Other people die young. Some people have great things to do in their lives but destiny doesn’t give them the time. People live, people die, people live simple lives, others make it as hard on themselves as they possibly can. By the time I came to know Doña Leonora was as old as the last century and then she lived for another twenty years. She out lived two of her children as well as her husband and all her sisters and brothers. She was really very old.

I tried to get her grandson to ask her stories about the past but she said there was nothing to say and thinking about the past only made her sad. She had seen the enslavement of her people, forced labor laws. She had never seen a revolution or a dictatorship or coup d’etat or civil war but she lived through them all. Leona, as they called her, was a women who was both of this and the other world. That is why, the people say, that she lived so long and as simply as she did. She wasn’t a religious person but she was a spiritual person, she prayed all the time.

People said she could turn into whatever animal she chose to be to go walking around at night in the world. She was often tired in the daytime and a day-keeper priest said that was because she was always out at night walking around in the dark. I believed all that people said about her and what she said to me when I passed by her on the trail that went behind her house. She was just a nice old woman with nothing much to do other than survive, no ambition at all more than to take care of her old kids and herself.

She taught me that if you don’t ask from much on earth you will be pretty much assured a peaceful life. If you don’t complicate your existence life will work out, one way or another you will get by. If you pray everyday and tend your garden, make your own food and gather your own firewood you will survive. I have to live a little bit more like Leona lived, a day at a time with gratefulness in my heart, do less and sit more, just taking in life the way it is without asking for more. Maybe I might live longer or I might not .... at least I will have lived in both the light and the dark.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ V.S.

Chajul Trip With Jon K.

Jon Kaplan, friend and fellow photographer, and I recently visited Chajul, Guatemala for four days, during which it rained unrelentingly. We were able to photograph only a few hours for each of three days: the results of my excursions are shown below, mostly without comment. Some of the images are merely snapshots, others pretend a bit more to art, some are clearly documentary. The mixture can be confusing. Let's hope not too much so.

Chajul is a small pueblo. The population numbers in the few thousands. It was a focal point of much military action during the civil war (or insurrection, if you prefer) and today it still struggles to recover. It suffers, today, from poverty and a near-total lack of significant infrastructure. The modernization that is taking place there is of the most basic, and, in my view, the worst of modernity. True, there is electrification, paved streets (all concrete), and serious construction of new houses (also concrete and block -- with the ubiquitous tin roofs), so the argument can be made that there is progress, of a kind.

The tragic aspect of these changes, to my mind, is the huge loss of what must have once been a village of adobe casas with tiled roofs. And, insofar as local culture is concerned, the near complete adoption of western style clothing by the men-folk. Women, as in most other Highland pueblos have retained the use of traditional clothing -- and a beautiful costume it is.

All, then, is not well in Chajul. Each time that Jon and I have gone there over the past years (more than 20 for Jon, seven for myself) the pueblo seems a bit more grim. The older adobe homes are in miserable repair, paved streets seem to collect mud run-off, plastic trash, and animal dung. Older homes now abut new and functional concrete eye-sores. How is one to honestly complain, however, when people can live in presumably safer homes? For anyone who might ever be tempted to go there, a visit to the outer areas of Chajul do, still, provide amazing vistas and the best that remains of old Chajul. The pueblo is located in a magnificent valley and some views are breathtaking.

I complained in a recent Facebook profile posting, indirectly raising the question: how can one continue to love such a miserable place? I trust that the photographs below will provide a clue to that answer: they do for me. And they, along with the generous people there, insure that return visits will be made.

We arrived in Chajul in the late afternoon and stopped in for a visit with the Anna Lopez family who live a short walk from our hotel. Jon has been friends with the family for about 20 years and has visited regularly, usually once or twice each year. I on the other hand have known them for about seven years and have visited with them regularly with Jon. Interior photographs were mostly made in their modest but welcoming home.






When Jon and I began traveling to Chajul together we found only one hotel. Bad beyond belief. Then a stroke of good luck. We found a newly constructed one outside the pueblo and it had a kitchen, unstaffed, and we asked to use it in the future. We began bringing our own food supplies. The kitchen lacked most cooking implements. This meant purchasing and bringing these as well. An early addition was a shallow crepe pan. This trip we began to search the kitchen for it, without success. Awhile later Jon glanced out the window: "I think I found our pan," he said. Yes.... and here it is, to your left. A new use for a strange, unfamiliar tool.











































Anna Lopez and grandaughter







Preparing lunch for Jon and myself



















Portable game room used for fiestas