The Hearth

My first day of interviews at my second field site, a valley of about 1500 people with some 30 herding households.  The sky is grey and low with clouds covering the high peaks of the Pyrenees and mist hanging in the valleys.  The pine-covered mountain ridges that ring the valley are frosted in snow.  Though the trees in the valley bottoms are bare now, the grass in the meadows is still green from the winter rains.  Here in the valley bottom the cattle, sheep and horses graze throughout much of the winter, though they are also provided with supplemental feed in the form of hay cut from these same meadows in June and August, and purchased grain.  Just visible under the cloud cover at the head of the valley are the lower reaches of the high peaks, blanketed in snow.  In the morning I speak with a recently retired cattle herder, who takes me to his sister’s kitchen for our talk.  His brother in law, also a retired herder, joins us for a while.  The room feels warm when I come in from the damp grey weather outside, but as the hour passes, it feels cooler and cooler.  Like many of the old stone houses in these villages, this one likely has no central heating, only an old wood cook stove to heat the kitchen (in addition to an electric range to cook on) and plug-in electric heaters that are only plugged in when absolutely necessary to spare the expense.  The cook stove is unlit this day.  Over the past month I have sat in quite a few different kitchens for interviews, many made over with modern conveniences, but most still retain the a cook stove with a wood-burning compartment. 

The last interview of the day takes place in the late afternoon.  The herder finds me waiting at our appointed meeting spot near the lone gas station in the valley, and I follow his truck in mine to the outskirts of the village where smoke curled up from the chimney of an outbuilding beside an old farmhouse.  “You can talk with me and another boy here,” he says, “We both received your letter.”  I send out a letter to all the livestock producers on the official town list in order to introduce the project and invite their participation.  The “other boy” turns out to be a retired sheepman well into his 6^th decade of life.  The building is his—an old kitchen with an open hearth and a long table pushed against the far wall.  A few plastic chairs and some wooden stools are arranged in front of an open fireplace and we sat in a semicircle around the hearth.  Soon after we settle into our chat we are joined by a third herder, who had seen the smoke from the chimney and come to investigate.  He is a cattleman, a bit younger than the other two.  Usually my interviews for this project are one-on-one, but this small group works well, and for two hours we have a lively discussion about the changes in the valley’s vegetation and herders’ management practices, and the possible future of livestock husbandry in the valley.  There are two sheepmen and one cattle herder, which makes for an interesting discussion and diversity of viewpoints, as cattle and sheep herders have not always gotten along here, use different summer pasture areas, and differ in some of their management practices.  Although they insist that there is generally little cooperation and collective action among livestock owners in the valley, and that livestock producers here tend to be individualistic, these men seem quite comfortable exchanging ideas and expressing opinions in each other’s presence.  They all agree that cooperation is the only way for them to overcome the current challenges faced by mountain livestock producers—stagnant prices and soaring costs, an indifferent government administration, mountains of paperwork and crushing regulations, and the environmental changes that are reducing the quality and quantity of pastures yearly—yet they are equally convinced that their community of herders is incapable of the level or type of cooperation needed.  When I mention at the end of the interview that I will be presenting a preliminary report of the results of our project in a community meeting later in the winter, they seem interested.  When I ask if they think that the results could be helpful to them at all in addressing the issues they face, to my surprise they are quite adamant that research indeed could be useful to them.  The government, they believed will pay more attention to their concerns if they are presented as the result of a scientific investigation. 

By the end of the afternoon dusk has fallen.  I call home to ask my older child to pick up the younger one from school.  After the formal tape recorded part of the interview ends, we continue to chat for a while in front of the fire, which crackles in the open hearth before us.  The rafters of this one-room kitchen are hung with sheep and goat bells—several dozen smaller bells (esquilas) for the sheep and two enormous cañones worn by the lead goats in a herd.  On the rafter behind the equilas hang different sized pots of the sort that herders once used to cook on an open fire in the mountain pastures.  The most typical food were migas, bread crumbs fried in fat and adorned with bits ham or mutton.  Village people used to bake enormous loaves weighing several kilograms in communal ovens, to keep the bread from going stale over many days in the mountains.  Each day the shepherd would cut a hunk off the loaf and break it into smaller chunks to prepare the meal of migas.  Herders often gathered together to eat their ¨crumbs¨ from a single pot over the fire—pots like those dandling from the rafters.  When I admire these artifacts of the herding profession the older man takes down his zamarro and buckles it on.  The zamarro is a tanned goat-skin cloak which is worn hair-side out as the shepherd´s protective garment.  I experienced a time-warp then, to think that in this lifetime, in fact not very many years ago, a herder dressed in a goatskin to keep off the mountain rain and sleet.  And he stands before me now, in the firelight, with the skin wrapped around him and the tools of his livelihood arrayed on the rafters above—bells, pots, branding iron—proclaiming that sheep herding would soon be no more.  There is a moment of disbelief on my part.  How could a way of living so well adapted to this environment, so much a part of this landscape and culture that a very similar cloak could have kept a shepherd dry in the year 836, or even a millennium before, vanish over the course of a few decades? The question lingers while the fire summons memories of my own days as a sheepherder, lying on a pile of horse blankets under a canvas tarp in Wyoming´s Salt River Range, fighting off sleep after a long day´s ride and listening to the Basque men I worked with speaking in the soft syllables of their native tongue as they cooked supper on the campfire.  Those men have gone home now.  The herds they tended have been sold.  And in Mongolia, falling asleep in a ger (yurt) on a mid-winter night, sharing the space warmed by the dung-fire with a family of 5 or 6 or 8 people, listening to the night sounds of animals breathing, snuffling, suckling.  In Mongolia, another hard winter is coming now, and many animals could perish.  Pastoralism is an elemental way of life, animals kept by people to make a living from landscapes that are otherwise too dry, too steep, or too remote to make a living from.  These are social-ecological systems simultaneously simple and complex, ancient and actual, always evolving yet seemingly timeless.  The old man removes his goatskin cloak and stokes the fire.  I pick up my digital audio-recorder, beep open the doors of my truck with the keyless entry system, and drive 30 minutes through the rainy darkness towards my rented apartment lit by compact fluorescent light bulbs.