Mike Humfreville
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Thatch
Thatch
At our house in Bahia de Los Angeles we recently removed a second-story balcony cover of plastic. We replaced it with palm fronds. After the work
was done we left for LA to return to Bahia a month later. We found we were the friendly laughing stock of the bay. We had built the thatched balcony
cover next to our fireplace chimney. Not just that but it was opposed to the prevailing winds from the north. How stupid could I have been?
The old balcony cover was a plastic latticework. It threw little shade. Our house faces east and the early morning sun heats things up quickly and
brightens tiles and walls to the point of waking us up too early. I wanted the palm fronds to close the gaps in the lattice and to droop over the
east-facing balcony and prevent the early morning sun for creeping across our living area. It?s a small change, but meaningful.
Now in the mornings and afternoons and whenever the winds rise a bit I can listen to the rustlings of the individual spears of the fronds as they
brush each other. It?s a small noise and if anything else is going on, television, music, or whatever, I lose it. And when the sun works to invade
our space the shadows of the tips of thatch bounce in the breeze against the tiles and walls. It?s very tranquil. I?d be totally unaware of this in
LA.
The crows seem to like the thatch. They land and torment our dog Dito because they know he cannot reach them there, a foot out of his range. They
are smarter than he is as he keeps trying to get them and can?t. The crows caw at him just to provoke him. Maybe that?s why I don?t like crows. I
don?t like crows but my friend tells me they are intelligent. They must have evolved for some purpose?
So I?m thinking we will keep the thatch and just not use the fireplace. Maybe put a spark arrestor atop the chimney? Most likely I?ll just buy a
small propane space heater for the few times we?ll need it. I?m not a layered-clothing person but I can learn. And we can add another comforter to
the bed in winter; it?s not like it?s going to snow. It is Baja.
If we can live with it I?d prefer to have the natural aesthetics.
Of thatch.
(Author?s note: This story was provoked by George Bergin, Jorge de La Ribera, who sent me a short note on the natural surroundings where he lives. I
hope he posts it for us all).
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Santiago
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MH: a few years ago we spent a lazy morning fishing off the shore in front of what was to become your home. My friend commented that the second
floor needed a palapa roof over the balcony. Good choice for ambience. Spark arrestor might work but if it doesn't.......... By-the-way, I was at
Gecko 2 years ago in Feb and I woke up to snow on the ridge to the west!
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Osprey
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Location: Baja Ca. Sur
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Mike, Thanks. Here's the little piece you thought I should post.
The Gift
I never take for granted the fact that my little Mexican house is so close to the beach. It is my joy to take a small tin boat out for short fishing
trips along the shore. The winter winds are sometimes fierce so I have to stay alert for any break in the weather; times when the sea is calm all
night and at dawn. Since the beach is open to the sea, with no ramps or harbors, conditions have to be ?just right?.
My big bedroom window faces the sea and the view helps me plan when to go out. At night a huge flaming bougainvillea makes shadows on the wall
beside my bed ? silhouetted by a streetlamp, it is a perfect midnight wind vane.
The winter winds began to howl a couple of days ago. The silhouette of the long flowery branches was a frantic dance choreographed by a madman, the
wind, in a frenzied fantasy of motion. The movement defied meter, syncopation, order. Just before dawn I awoke to see the picture changed. The
unnaturally long and thin branches had been savaged and stripped by the wind, the leaves and blossoms lost in the darkness. Now the branches moved
like drunken sticks whipping and punishing each other in an endless game of tag.
There is small solace in the thing. When I cannot fish I can, at least, enjoy this mad theater of Mother Nature ? it is a gift ? an accident of
placement of the window, the bright, thorny bush and the street lamp. She gives me these small gifts all the time. Another pleasant little
coincidence -- I?m easy to please and She knows what I like.
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Mike Humfreville
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Osprey...
This is a great story. Your command of the language is superior and and the way you form structure with words, invoke images, keeps me waiting for
the next word to fall.
Thank you for sharing.
Write on!
Amigo Miguel.
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Skipjack Joe
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Location: Bahia Asuncion
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Mike Humfreville
Thatch
listen to the rustlings of the individual spears of the fronds as they brush each other. |
Mike,
That certainly is a baja sound. They say certain smells often bring back past events from your life more vividly than just about anything else. That's
how I feel about that sound you describe. You're sitting in the shade under a palapa scanning the water for working fish .... and then you hear that
rustling sound just above. Soooo baja. If I close my eyes I can feel being there.
skipjack
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Mike Humfreville
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Skipjack Joe,
While I don't know your age, when I was a young boy, in the '40's and 50's, we had floor furnaces. When you turned them on the small was unique and
intense. I rember also the smell in So Cal of the first rain hitting the earth and emitting a certain aroma, unmistakable from anything else. a
wondefful scent.
Additionally, and just for fun, why do you call yourself Skipjack Joe? If I remember correctly (and I don't fish a lot), skipjack are the red-fleshed
fish that I can't figure out what to do with.
Thanks for the warm words.
Mike
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Skipjack Joe
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origins and associations
| Quote: | Originally posted by Mike Humfreville
Additionally, and just for fun, why do you call yourself Skipjack Joe? If I remember correctly (and I don't fish a lot), skipjack are the red-fleshed
fish that I can't figure out what to do with.
Mike |
Well... let see. I came up with that back when the amigos was active. I wanted a pseudonym after a fish because (a) in the begining my primary
interest in the peninsula had to do with fishing (like Whistler, I dreamed, breathed, lived for fishing), (b) I have a background in marine biology
and love all things to do with the sea, (c) my forefathers were fishermen. As I searched I realized that some fish already had 'people' names -
(jack). Then I thought it would be humorous to add another name (joe) to a fish that already had a name (hence, jack joe).
Boring isn't it? Well, that's the way my mind works. But I do like the skipjack very much because they give a good account of themselves and they are
so readily available.
Regarding smells. I have this association with lilacs. Post WWII we lived in northern Italy. I remember these lilac bushes I would walk past on my way
to school on a rainy day. They were real tall and would extend over a rocky wall to the sidewalk. So there's the association: light rain, fragrant
lilacs and trudging off to class. I was 6 at the time. As a result lilacs in warm sunny weather do nothing for me.
But it's funny because you never seem to know what is going to stand out from an experience and stay with you in the long run. When I read about that
rustling, scratchy sound of palm fronds on the roof of a palapa it just brought a reaction. A small, seemingly insignificant sound that has registered
and is waiting dormantly for you to reactivate it. And when you do ... It brings on a flood of colors, memories, feelings, and adventures. Like an
old door being opened.
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Mike Humfreville
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Great Story!
May evolution or "Intellgent Design" continue to move us forward so we can pass these concepts on to our offspring. Hope we can meet someday beside a
small fire on a beach somewhere.
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Osprey
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Location: Baja Ca. Sur
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You guys are giving me inspiration. Here's my take on rain.
Tribunada
Squall
Rains sounds around here bear my own signature. They are tied to my lifestyle, my temperament. The range of the sounds is astounding because there
are so many kinds of rain, so many objects for the drops to hit. Rain sounds are different at your place than they are at mine. We have different
gardens, roofs, shades, patios.
My personal rains, the ones at my house hit the palm thatch roof of my living room ? my patio. They pelt the papayas, the arbol de fuego, the big
pistachios, the royal platano de gardin. They beat upon the adokin, the pavers that are my front drive, dirt yard, dirt street, the fountain in my
small garden. Each surface produces a slightly different sound, the slant, speed and volume of the rain differs from storm to storm, changes minute
by minute.
The rare summer showers that slowly creep down from the canyons in August begin with a hissing sound; barely audible at first because the droplets
are so small, dewlike, just barely visible. Then, as the clouds darken, the drops grow larger they begin to play their distinctive beat around the
place. The big leaves of the garden banana plant resonate under the pressure of the large drops while the fronds of thatch of the patio roof disperse
each drop, soften what could be a harsh pelting sound to almost a murmur.
As the huge anvil of water in the main part of the rainstorm becomes a dark dome above our village, the rain increases. The drops are huge and fall
with great force to make a mixing of all the sounds that preceded it, built up in volume to become another more powerful and furious white noise.
Perhaps my favorite sounds come just as the last drops fall and things begin to make rhythms as they drip. The dripping from the thatch hanging down
around the patio becomes a rough pattern, each droplet having its own place in the scale, the distance to the dirt marking the tone, the cadence with
more order and finally less sound. Then, when I?m sure I?ve heard the very last drop, a lonely silence falls upon the place that I don?t remember.
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vandenberg
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Registered: 6-21-2005
Location: Nopolo
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Mood: mellow
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Fishhawk
Your visions are very poetic and you have a command of the English language that puts most of our best seller novelists to shame.
For a Dutchman ,trying his best to be fluent in the language of his adopted country, your epistels are highly appreciated and I wish I could match
them.
Keep them coming.
You have an admirer.
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Mike Humfreville
Super Nomad
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Osprey,
A wonderful, poetic piece.
When I was a boy living in Cuernavaca on mainland Mexico during the summers the cumulous would build every afternoon and it would rain for an hour,
hard at times. There was a strand of banana trees behind our house and your words provoke my memory of the rain striking the broad, flat and thin
leaves. Every year, before the proposed harvest, someone in need would come along in the middle of the night and cut the banana stalks off the trees.
There was a baranca, a deep cut in the surface of the earth behind the trees. When the rains were heavy I could sleep listening to the sounds of
water rushing down the gulch. I have no idea now, nor did I wonder then where it was rushing to. But the sounds were as you describe, melodic and
almost orchestrated, although they couldn?t be. Or could they be?
Now I?m focused on an upturned and empty coffee can; droplets, condensation, runoff from the roof are falling individually and striking the bottom of
the voided can.
Plink?plink?plink.., in a mysterious, marvelous continuance of awareness of small issues I might otherwise have ignored.
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