ABOUT THE SIERRA: Bio-cultural RESEARCH:
Field Notes: Choreachi (Pino Gordo)

by Andrew Miller - February, 2003

Pedro Peña Ramos and Victor Ayala Ramos had come over from Pino Gordo with four burros. They stood around the store in the cold in their thin shirts and sandals watching us get ready. I bought them tortillas and tomatoes and a slice of salchicha at the store. Pedro took my change before I could and bought himself five pesos worth of lime—for nixtamal? soaking corn to soften it. Counting myself, there were four biologists: Javier Cruz from Pronatura, Mauro Ramos from Consejo EcoRegional Sierra Tarahumara A.C., Dane Spingmeyer, a pre-graduate student exploring likely places to do his work on migrant use of traditional agricultural fields. Our two mule drivers were Manuel García and Ismael Anaya. Fiona Land, a young woman from the Netherlands who intended to go over to Pino Gordo to learn Rarámuri and study agriculture and medicinal plants, brought our total to nine people.

We attracted spectators from the big ranch at the Cumbres as we unloaded our gear and fourteen days of food and began getting it into burlap sacks to tie on the beasts (bestias) for our trip down. Pedro and Victor’s sole luggage, their blankets, were folded and placed on the burros’ backs as saddle blankets. Dark clouds and wind: turkey vultures flew fast from the south out over the canyon. Across the canyon, the mountains and forests of Pino Gordo were already indistinct behind falling rain. Not great weather for the first day of a two-week trip to collect data on winter birds from the tropical canyon bottom five thousand feet below the rim.

I had brought along some fleece and nylon jackets. These they readily accepted by Pedro and Victor in typical low-key fashion. New blue jackets: they could be ready to ski but for the cowboy hats and patched pants. They seemed less sure about the sack of Payless shoes that Randy had sent with us. Pedro wrapped the leather thongs around his tire tread sandals, stuck them in his pocket, and took a pair of hiking shoes and pronounced them good. Victor said he’d get some “ahorita,” in a little bit. Despite the cold and the rocky trail ahead, he didn’t seem to see any advantage to closed toe shoes over his huaraches. They went back into the truck without him taking any.

One burro was required to carry just the forty kilos of cornmeal for tortillas. Ismael and Manuel rode and the biologists ranged ahead with their daypacks and binoculars. Learning to manage the mules and burros. They plod down the trail under their burdens until they get to a corner where they can step off the trail. I ran straight down the slope between the switchbacks to stand in these corners ahead of them to keep them from taking off across the slopes. They are forced to carry our gear but they don’t have to make it easy.

Birds of Note:

Painted Redstart

Ruby-crowned Kinglet (a migrant – common as dirt now, but they will all go back north in just a few weeks. Perhaps as far as Alaska, maybe just as far as New Mexico. We don’t know.)

Bridled Titmouse, scolding and buzzing

Rufous-backed Robin – runs on the ground. Dane thought it was a mouse in the leaves and underbrush. He is just coming from Panama where the bird is very common. Here it is not. I was happy to hear about it. And in the oaks, too!

Six Hooded Grosbeaks eating flowers from a leafless tree tucked back into a chute of vegetation that drops over the saddle where the oaks abruptly end and the tropical forest begins. Two males, the rest females. Very clean – white crowns, yellow heads and black and white wings.

The trail down to the river from the Cumbres passes below La Cueva de los Monos (the Cave of Drawings). Red ochre figures of three horsemen, a lone horse, and several crosses float on the white cliff face, looking down from the last of the oaks down the steep slope into the tropical lower canyon of the Barranca Sinforosa. They are outside of time. How old could they be? The first Jesuit report of the area, from Tonachí, is from 1752. They cannot be older than that but could be considerably younger. The late Eighteenth Century would’ve coincided with the height of Jesuit activity and the missionization of the Tarahumara – the first time the people of the Barranca would’ve seen men on horseback. Did Father Lorenzo Gera, founder of the mission at Tonachí, or Father Joaquín Trujillo, who succeeded him, reach the Barranca Sinforosa and look to the far side? He would’ve looked across the divide where no white man had ever entered.

The People of Pino Gordo are Gentiles, Who Have Not Accepted Baptism

The Barranca remains an edge. The church never reached Pino Gordo on the far side in any lasting way. The people of Pino Gordo have not accepted baptism. They are Gentiles. The drawings mark the entrance of these two forces that forever reshaped the life of the canyon people – the white man with the horse and new beliefs of God and Hell. Did one of the newly baptized paint the cliff to mark the frontier? To show the people from beyond the forces now abroad in the land above the Cumbres? There is, of course, no way of telling.

Departures are never early enough in the day and we had to reach the river before it got dark, so we pushed on quickly.

We reached the bottom just after dark and established camp in the sand near what Manuel and Ismael call the Rincón, the Corner. We were zombie-like after the five-hour descent and it was easy not to set up tents until the clouds suddenly opened and it began to rain. We scurried to put up tents and to cover the saddles and food with tarps. We ran around putting things in what order we could. Victor stood with his back to the fire, laughed and went and got a liter of soda to share with Pedro. They didn’t seem to mind the rain in the slightest. Down in the canyon bottom it was warm.

In the dark they take the animals across a shallow gravel ford to a steep slope bounded on the other three sides by cliff. The animals will be able to graze on winter foliage and grass but won’t be able to wander.

The camp is quiet. I share a tent with Pedro and Victor. Rain is quietly falling. From the remains of the fire I hear Manuel say to Ismael, “So what do you think? They say water sleeps. You wake up in the middle of the night and it is running very quietly. I think so. Who knows?” Ismael agrees. Sounds of the river, of rain on the nylon tent overhead, and sleep.

February 3. First day of exploration: looking for transects. We follow the river upstream at the base of cliffs. A fig grows out of a high crack, sending pale grey-yellow roots flowing like a trickle of liquid across the stone. Our shelf of rock three feet above the water ends in a giant boulder leaning against the cliff. For a moment we are stumped till we notice that the crawl space between boulder and cliff turns into a chimney to the top. A log has been jammed into it to make a ladder. We squeeze in, wriggle up, pass our packs over the boulder face, and keep moving upstream.

The river margin widens. Bamboo-like stands of cane (carrizo) among the boulders. The mesa above is full of spiney, drooping, vinelike plants. Vinoro (Celtis iguanae). Felger’s Trees of Sonora describes it as “armed with wicked, rigid, stout, recurved axillary thorns up to two inches long.” Mezquite dulce, sweet fragrant yellow puff flowers and thorns that leave only scratches rather than gouge flesh. We climb the trailless gravel shelf to the mesa above, trying to keep our clothes and faces from getting shredded as we struggle under and around the low dense thicket of thorns. Rocks like bowling balls.

Birds of Note:

Rufous-crowned Warbler
Broad-billed Hummingbird
White-eared Hummingbird
Northern Cardinal
Ash-throated Flycatcher
Northern Flicker
American Kestrel
Great Blue Heron
Turkey Vulture
Bushtit
Greater Peewee

In the space of one hundred yards, we find four species of wrens. Rock Wren (“t –cheering” and giving its bobbing dance on a stone wall overgrown with cactus. Smoke stains in the hollow beneath a nearby boulder. Leaves and debris around the mano, the hand grinding stone left on the grinding surface. (“T- cheeer! T – cheer!”); House Wren, scratchy and scolding call; Sinaloa Wren, sharp and buzzy; Canyon Wren, omnipresent cascading whistle of rocky places.

The Bird Who Decided Who Should Be Rich and Who Should Be Poor

Canyon Wren (Certhia mexicanus): Ripíliwi. It is the bird that gave salt to the people. Perhaps because it lives in the riverside rocks where evaporation leaves a white ring of dissolved salts. It is also the bird that decided who should be rich in the world and who should be poor. Tata Dioshi (God) could not decide. Ripíliwi asked to be able to decide. He presented the Rarámuri man and the Mexican with two plates of mucous and told them, “The one who can finish his plate of mucous first will be the rich one. The one who is last will forever be poor.”

“Andrés, once in Ciudad Obregón, they had a turtle with a woman’s head. What would that be? They say that they had a lizard with a man’s head, too.” We are all laughing, not sure whether Ismael is telling us some weird joke. “My cousin paid to see it. And they spoke!” We are waiting for a punch line. It’s strangely disturbing, but…“Well, he saw it!” “Oh, yeah? What did they tell you, Ismael?” “Quién sabe—who knows, I wasn’t there. They just say it was. Who knows how that thing could be. I think maybe they just had some kind of doll’s head with batteries so it could speak.”

Endangered Fish

While we birded, Manuel, Pedro and Ismael fished in the river. Tossing lines and bobbers from the rocks into the eddies for sardinas (Gila robusta), matalote (Catastoma bernardini), and bagre (a blue-flanked catfish). The Rarámuri called the cat “chabochi,” bearded, the same name for Mexicans, for its barbles. They caught eighteen of the sardinas (eighteen to thirty cm. long). They slit the back beside the dorsal fin to gut them. (Victor laughed at Mauro cutting the belly. Their way, the back meat gets more air and the fish dries in the sun. It lasts longer. If you don’t dry it, it falls apart when you skewer it over the fire.) We left them on a rock to dry. Many of them were full of eggs. I wish I could tell them apart so I could tell them to throw back the females. They already think I’m crazy for taking two of the larger fish to put in a bottle of formol for identification.

It is hard to know how endangered or threatened the fish are. We are one thousand miles south of the international border and the diversity patterns of fish of the Sierra have yet to appear in published form. The work has yet to be done to quantify the threats. Best guesses by Texas Memorial Museum of History and Science Curator of Ichthyology, Dr. Dean Hendrickson, are that the drainages of Río Sinforosa have six species of native fish. Locals put it at seven.

The native fish of the canyon still appear to be quite common. Fishing with hooks and lines is not the source of endangerment. Stupid human tricks like fishing with dynamite, contamination from sawmills, and treating streams like waste disposal systems for whatever noxious chemical happens to need disposal are far more detrimental to the natives. Introduction of nonnative fish may be their greatest threat. Four species, rainbow trout, carp, tilapia and “black bass,” all escapees and intentional transplants from fish tanks in the upper elevations, are possible.

Between spring 1998 and 1999, Campostoma ornata, the Mexican Stoneroller, disappeared from the Arroyo Natahuachi. Summer monsoons had flushed sawdust from the mill in Agua Azul down the arroyo, creating drifts six inches deep more than two miles downstream. Fish don’t cross ridge lines to reestablish themselves in places where they have been wiped out. In steep canyons, the tropical lower reaches are ecologically very different from the temperate upper watershed, making reestablishment from below by another population equally unlikely.

Buzzards were soon circling camp and landing on the far bank for the fish guts. Fiona and Manuel made tortillas on the fire to accompany our first fish feast of the trip.

At the Arroyo San Ignacio we met Antonio ________. His oxblood red-stained hands tell us he had been collecting ari from the branches of Corsetia glandulosa. The branches of this legume can become infected with a scale insect (fam: Tarchardiella) and produce a bright orange lac of hardened sap. Its bitter tart taste and its supposed ability to treat hangovers gives it a high price (a dollar for two spoonfuls) in Guachochi. Antonio had several cups full in his bag to turn over to his wife to grind up with chilies and nopales to make yuriqui.

Above the mouth of the Arroyo San Ignacio, rocks separate the slower moving waters along the north bank from the rushing gravel strainers on the south. As we accompanied Antonio back towards the bridge, he told me that last year they had gotten two full feed sacks of fish by throwing amole into the water to stupefy the fish. How is that different from throwing a stick of dynamite into a pool? There is definitely a different aesthetic involved. Gracias a Dios, dynamite is not widely available now that mining in Guadalupe y Calvo is on the wane. Mostly it is available to mestizos who come down from Guachochi or from Coloradas.

The fish they stun with a stick of dynamite tossed into a pool are more likely to end up in the market than those taken through several days of hard work by several community members. They wade the river, piling rocks, patching the leaks with leaves of Ricinus comunis, castor bean, to retain water to allow the rotenone-like chemicals in the mashed leaf bases to prohibit oxygen absorption in the fishes’ gills and to suffocate the fish. But how does the result differ? Further downstream we found a crude wooden cross near a different sort of weir that strained the stunned fish out of a faster, deeper stretch of stream using straight branches woven together with palm fibers.
My friend Primitivo Cruz from Cabórachi told me about a community dance and drinking party that accompanies fishing. The fish are placed in pots before two wooden crosses. Participants dedicate the fish to God, ask for the continued favor of rains, and for good health for afflicted people and animals in the community. They pray to cure fields that last year didn’t produce. Corn beer, tesgüino, is served from big clay ollas and a dance is held. Two costales of fish could sure feed a lot of people for a long time whether you hang them in your barn or you feed a community.

The whole panorama of relationships and responsibilities to the resource and to one another is different and affects how the fish are used. Primitivo had drawn me pictures of the three species of fish that are no longer present in the Arroyo Cabórachi. A combination of overgrazing, loss of streamside willows, and an ejido road that ran right down the streambed to get to the good timber downstream have eroded the banks horribly and lowered the water table.

As it got dark we moved the fish from the rock to the branches of a tree over our camp. We didn’t have a dog, but we hoped that the ringtailed cats wouldn’t be too brave.

February 4. At 6:20 a.m., the shifts change. The Great Horned Owl on the mesa above and Pygmy Owl in the thornscrub upstream sing their last and the Canyon Wrens start their liquid cascade of songs in the growing light. Victor, Ismael and Javier have already collected more driftwood and built the fire back up. They stand around talking while they wait for their enameled cups in the fire to heat up so they can make instant coffee. One of the dried fish is on the coals.

La Puente de la Muerte

The suspension bridge over the Sinforosa is more than one hundred meters long and thirty meters over the gravel banks and gray-green channel. During the rainy season, the river rises and crossing from Pino Gordo is impossible except via the bridge. People, mules and burros pass over it continually despite its battered and downright dangerous appearance. It hangs from asymmetrical wires anchored to either side on huge boulders. Victor remembers that they built the bridge when he was a little boy, so the boards may be ten to fifteen years old. Some look like they could break apart and fall through on their own.

We have renamed it “el puente de la muerte,” the bridge of death. Below it, the stabilizing wires to keep it from swaying back and forth have given way on one side. As we walk the bridge, the wave sent out to the far side rolls back like ripples hitting a bank returning to where a pebble hit the water. Walk quickly and lightly with feet overlapping several boards to distribute the weight. Try to think light thoughts. The worst is that at its highest point, several boards have cracked in the centers, some you can see through for the rot, others are entirely missing and have been replaced by wrist-sized trunks of tropical trees, which I don’t trust a damn. Tropical woods can be light and flimsy when dry. Your steps across this section are predetermined. They fall on that board, there and no other. Boards flex like sponges.

Someday, a week, a month, or a year from now, somebody (or their mule) is going to go through it. The fall might not be great enough to kill you, but the water even at its deepest is not deep enough to keep a body intact either. Hopefully, it won’t be today.