Now that the pilgrimage season is ended, our world here gets down to work anew.
The dominant culture calls this Labor Day, but in this place, the work is constant. Here, late summer’s labor is the most intensive of the year, disparate tasks from many worlds compressed into a small space of time. In this place, September is a month of work.
It comes, in large part, from the calendar, or rather, the seasons: We are entering the final weeks of summer, the last chance to enjoy the warmth even as we make ready for winter’s arrival. At this elevation, winter often makes its first pass in October, two months or more before the solstice. And this year, the signs point to a winter both early and hard.
If we are lucky, such signs will be accurate. After a summer of drought, hard on the heels of cold dry spring and equally drought-ridden winter just past, the need for snow is far past critical. But it makes, as always, for more work at this time of year.
It’s complicated, too, by the fact that we must always walk in at least two worlds. The annual pilgrimage season begins now some two to three weeks after the start of the new school year, and so the ceremonial and cultural labor involved must share time with the work of getting children ready to return to their lessons. It’s an expensive time of year, not just in time spent but in financial costs, too.
But now that the last couple of weeks are done, the workload grows heavier as time grows short, and the labor ramps up hard and fast. At the end of this month — now fewer than four weeks away — is the Feast of San Geronimo, the Pueblo’s largest and most public feast day. It’s actually spread over two days, the last two of the month, and involves cultural and spiritual traditions, in addition to the feeding and singing and dancing that occurs in the public view.
All summer long, the fiscales have been working on the annual restoration of the church, making sure that the surfaces are floated cleanly and that any wayward masonry has been shored up and replastered. The same is true of some of the old village homes; those in need of such repair are rebricked and remortared, remudded and replastered by family members, all done in the old way, with clay and water and straw. Now, with the countdown to San Geronimo on, such heavy physical labor intensifies as the people work to have the village in good repair for the feast day.
There are other forms of labor, too, much of which takes place outside of the public eye. The one very visible task involves the pole, shown in the image above: During the Feast of San Geronimo, expert climbers will ascend the pole and jump off. It’s a fantastic sight in the best sense of the word, one that leaves observers breathless. It also requires a great deal of skill and practice, and a great deal of preparation that never occurs to the outside world. The tree must be chosen carefully, stripped of branches bark and left to dry; several men will haul it down the mountain by hand. It’s put up by hand, too — no cranes and pulleys here — seated firmly in the earth in one corner of the plaza to await its purpose.
Meanwhile, there is other work to be done besides the more obviously physical kind. It’s physical, too, and no mistake, but less urgently, actively so: cleaning and cooking, making homes ready to receive guests and regalia ready for dancing, making dough and baking bread and the thousand and one other tasks that go into preparation for upcoming feast days. Then, too, there is the preparation for harvest itself, which is, of course, the root of the day itself, one that became intertwined with the name of the patron saint of librarians and archivists once the invading Spanish forced their imprint upon it in public.
And that will be no small task this year, or at least coping with it will not be: In the face of such deadly drought, there will not be much to harvest, for most. Those few fortunate enough to have crops that survived the terrible heat and near-complete lack of a rainy season will do their utmost to get them in on time, lest an early freeze destroy what remains. We knew that we would have no water, and so apart from a few surviving cornstalks, we have no harvest of our own this year. That means additional labor in other ways, since this winter we will have to buy that which we would otherwise have grown.
Meanwhile, this year, the earth labors, too: This is a world stricken and scorched and seared hot and bone-dry. The few small rains in recent weeks merely settle the dust; they don’t have the ability to replenish the soil, much less the watersheds. The land strains under the weight of its burden, as wild creatures appear out of season in search of the food and water denied them where the drought is worse yet. During the day, there is a sense of the whole world holding its breath, waiting for dusk: a time when cooling shadows fall, when the blue of the sky can at last fade to black, when Father Sun lowers his gaze and glare alike, when, if not snow on the peaks, we have at least lately been given the chance of a little late rain overnight.
There will be no rest for us for a while yet. Summer has been too fierce and too short; winter looms too close on the horizon.
But in a place beyond the structures of the dominant culture, where “labor” is unfettered and unconstrained by colonial strictures, the work is always worth it.
~ Aji
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