How I Got My Butt Kicked by a 5'1 Taramuhara Women




My cabin above the Barranca de Urique.

 Barranca de Urique, Chihuahua, Mexico-- After Rancho Norte, I headed south to the Barranca del Cobre area, still in the Sierra Taramuhara. A friend of a friend has a little cabin and he let me stay there for as long as I wanted.  I was working to clean up the cabin to turn it into a bunk house and also preparing sites around the cabins for tourists to camp.

The cabin was perched on the edge of the 5,000 foot gorge called the Barranca de Urique, which is deeper than the Grand Canyon and part of a vast system of over a dozen canyons.  They were formed eons ago by volcanic explosions and lava flows so hot they cracked their crucible- the crust of the earth.  They are so deep that while the pine boughs on the rims bend with snow in winter, the trees in the valley floor are laden with grapefruits, lemons, avocados and bananas. Thousands of birds chime like silver clocks in the manzasnita and organos, and flash by with brilliant colors as if the bright clothing of the Taramuhara had been wafted up and given life by some spacious spirit.

The Taramuharas are the indigenous people that live in the canyons.  They live in the most remote enclaves of the gorges, growing corn, beans, and marijuana, and herding goats.  They still speak their native language although almost all of them speak Spanish as well.

I often hiked over the ridges to visit my Taramuhara neighbors, bringing them fruits or other food in exchange for conversation, corn tortillas, and beans (the corn grown, picked, shucked, ground, and cooked all right there by hand).

Victoriano, a Taramuhara friend.

One of my neighbors, Maria, was in her late 20s and especially liked my visits (and liked to ask me questions like: "So you´re not married, huh?" and "So you don´t have a girlfriend back in your country, huh?" and "What did you dream about last night?"). One day, after we talked and I ate, I asked if I could help with some of their chores. She looked me as if I probably couldn´t even lift a cup of water to my mouth if I was dying of thirst. Then she shrugged and told me I could cut firewood. Determined to disprove my gringo-ness, I told her I would love to and assured her that I had grown up with a wood stove and knew all about wood and axes and such masculine thing. I left out the part where we moved away from our wood stove house when I was age nine.



I fell to hacking at the logs with fury. Sweat poured down my face. Blisters beaded on my hands. The axe head flew off and I had to replace it. Finally I had one piece. Maria and her mother continued their business, graciously keeping their snickers to a minimum. Finally, seeing the oncoming darkness and my paltry pile, Maria came up and said, "I´ll teach you."

Maria is about 5'1". She never moves quickly. She always has a dress with full skirts. But she raised that axe and gave the log a blow such has not been seen since the days of King David fighting the Philistines. In about two minutes she had a pile twice the size of mine. Then, without saying a word, she handed me the axe, scooped up some wood, and went in to start dinner.



The house of my Taramuhara neighbors.