The inner dialogue takes a break
to be at peace with the wild world

By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

At daybreak we load the bed of the truck with the generator, gas can, extension cords, submersible pumps, hoses, buckets, pool skimmers, water jugs, an old broom, and wide, flat shovels. The morning is gloriously fresh. The sweetness of bird calls and the damp waft of dewfall across the monte offer no hint of the long, searing day ahead or that perhaps I have bitten off more than I can chew in the way of work.
We're headed for slime. By day's end we will have emptied and cleaned the largest of the built-in-place concrete troughs that water our cattle. We leave the generator and the pumps to work effortlessly to empty the tank of water while we move on to another chore on another part of the ranch. The equipment sits in a small corral adjacent to the tank so that the cattle won't munch on the plastic or copper of the pumps or the extension cords.
It's the algae and scum that become our work when we return to the tank. One of us scrubs the concrete walls with the coarse, long handled brush and the other starts lifting out skimmers full of algae that can be, depending on shoulder strength, hurled a good far distance. A couple of hours pass, and somewhere along the way I've traded the skimmer for a flat bottomed grain shovel. Another hour and we can see dry patches of the trough's floor. There's a mindlessness to the work, the inner dialogue taking a break to be at peace with the wild world so deep in the brush and so removed from noise and human schemes.
We take a break to darle la vuelta al rancho and to make tracks along the property's easternmost fenceline. The ambient temperature of the cab of the truck is 35° cooler than the fry pan of the trough. We come in for lunch and a longer break out of the heat, and even knowing we are more finished with the cleaning chore than not, we make an argument for finishing in full in the cool of the next morning. Having chilled a little and now feeling the work in my arms and my legs, the remaining work seems interminable. There's still a good bit of algae to scrape and move. Prudence wins the argument. I just want the work to be over, and I don't want to leave the generator and tools in the brush overnight.
By late afternoon the unrelenting sun has turned the algae into a dry, dull green substance that can be swept into a pile and onto the grain shovel we are using for a dust pan. How different, my sun-baked psyche wonders, is this dried pond scum from the Spirulina tablets I ingest daily? In ni modo mode we finish the job and load the generator up the ramp with far less spry in our steps than we had this morning in the barn. Once we return to the barn, we still have to hose the algae and quickly drying slime off the tools before putting them away.
Long, very long after I imagined the work would be done, I limp into my house, understanding how satisfying the day's work was and realizing our clothes remained remarkably clean for so nasty a job.