by Liz Kirchner-Parr

At 3:30 in the morning under a half-full moon and dazzling stars, we were lopipng along pine-needley paths, three bobbing flashlights in the nighttime spruce forests of the Mexico’s Sierra Norte mountains. We had five miles, 2000 feet, and two hours to get to a particularly nice rock in time to see the sun come thundering up over this southern tail of the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca that are, they say, high enough to see the Citlaltépetl Mountain in the neighboring state of Veracruz . Evidently, though, we were running late. A few minutes later we were walking in the inky black woods.
Two days ago we made reservations for a cabin and Adelfo at the Ecoturismo Sierra Norte office in Oaxaca city, only an hour and a half away. Yesterday, we took the bus, La Flecha Zempoatepetl, the Arrow of Zempotepetl, a 50-year old International with plump and curving hood and roof, chrome, and jaunty teal stripes down her flanks. La Flecha serves all of the little towns in the Sierra Norte mountains, little towns so haughtily autonomous that they don’t recognize Mexican Daylight Savings Time. “We recognize God’s time,” says the ticket lady in her little booth, where, and on-board La Flecha, it is one hour later than everywhere else: an important thing to keep in mind if you need to catch the bus to or from these towns in the summer. We are going to Llano Grande, which means big field, but is actually a little group of wooden houses, a little restaurant, and incredibly cosy Ecoturismo cabins, in the shadow of the forest.
Legend, and the Ecoturismo brochure, hold that, on summer nights, jaguars have been spotted crossing the road: that a logging truck driver or driver with a bus full of sleeping passengers on the run up from the coast glimpses just a hint of a long, black form slinking over the verge. Adelfo just laughs at the idea.
I am gasping bent over with my hands on my knees and stagger across the gravel to keep up with Brian and Adelfo, who stride down the shoulder and dive into the woods. We charge off into the bracken down invisible paths, dashing up slopes, veering down goat paths. We skirt along mossy ledges our backs grating against granite and rare ferns. The dark was thinning and the woods were now full of long swaths of fog.
This path that wends along windy ridges and gurgling brooks is the same path through these mountains, more or less, that the Aztecs and Zapotecs trotted along the 150 miles to the Pacific for cacao and back again to market in the Oacaxa valley and beyond, as far as Tabasco on the Carribean.
Seven hundred years later, the trail, the market, and the people are all still here. This is a well-lived-in forest, but again and again we are surprised when, in what we took to be the middle of nowhere, a barbed wire fence or a gate appeared. Lickety split we clambered over fences on jagged stiles of made of half a pine log with notched steps hacked in the round face. Rail gates were made so the top rails slid handily out of the upright to let you but not the cows through. Adelfo vaulted rails, hauled them down, we hopped over, and he shoved them home. I got the feeling that if we’d paused, he would have flung us over like a porter with luggage. Then, abashed, we concentrated on the really amazing beauty of the temperate rainforest around us, smiled winningly at Adelfo, and hurried along because now the dark was really ebbing.
There are eight ancient and communally governed little towns that make up the Sierra Norte. Ten years ago, the trend in these hills was to mow down the woods, sell the lumber, pitch heritage and ancestral ties to family and land, and move to Mexico City or Chicago. Unhappy with the prospects, the town elders got together and decided they ought to figure out ways to manage the forests sustainably. First things first: they set up a web site and opened an office of Ecoturismo de Sierra Norte in Oaxaca City. They began bottling spring water, growing and collecting other non-timber forest products like mushrooms and walnuts, and they invited people up to take a look around. They were selling the forest, without selling the forest.
And it seems to be working. Vacationing botanists came and catalogued the ferns, mountain bikers came from Italy and Spain, hikers and birders roamed the piney trails and waved to surprised farmers weeding their potato fields on the hillsides. Foresters came and gave advice about tree care and harvesting and deer management; herbalists came and documented medicinal and culinary herbs; folklorists came to write down the stories people in the little towns tell about the forest. Eight towns make up Sierra Norte. They have been managing the forests communally since the 1300’s. They know a lot about their forest and one thing they know is, it’s fragile. Every visitor needs to sign up, usually at the office in Oaxaca city. For a guide like Adelfo, it’s $12.00 for the day and $5.00 extra to see the sun come up, and right that minute it was.
At that minute too, as if on cue, the path halted abruptly at the foot of a huge mossy karst tower that rocketed out of the forest like a barnacled whale. We were there. Clambering straight up its flanks the last hundred yards was a slope of a crunchy fern and bracken. In cloud, we scrambled and panted up through purple dahlias bobbing among ferns. A moss the color of limes splotched the sharp, porous rock and what appeared to be licheny, granitic knobs turned out to be little spiny cactuses.
And then the sun was up. There was the forest, rather battered in the light. Adelfo pointed out whole not-too-distant mountainsides swept by pine diseases, chawn by beetles, and blasted by forest fires. He said, too, that, as air pollution in the valley increased, the clouds bathing the trees were becoming more of a daily toxic drench than a cleansing primordial sluice. It was still beautiful.
We passed sunny little potato fields, clearings on the mountain slope, often with a little house made of split logs hewn thin like tongue depressors, even the roofs were wooden, made of long, thin slats. Adelfo, quite the outdoorsman, explained, “A farmer’s fields are scattered all over the mountains. He plows and plants his fields and stays a while and lives in the little house by the field. I do that every autumn.” “What do you eat?” we said. “Well,” he said, “squirrel is good. But you must prepare squirrel by first soaking it in lime and water.” That sounded o.k., we guessed. “What is also good,” he continued, “is a kind of rat that steals potatoes. He can also be prepared in this manner.” Adelfo seemed a little conflicted about eating the rat explaining, “It is an annoying rat, but admirable for its clever industry, working all night to stash whole fields full of potatoes in his den.” “How clever,” we said and Adelfo continued, “We killed him with a shovel and all his children. In the hole were thousands of potatoes.” There was a pause, then we all three laughed, probably for different reasons. Rat and potato recipes were an unexpected bonus to this trip. Adelfo showed us plants along the path that were good for hang-overs, dandruff, and to Brian he said, “And these are for passion! Heh heh heh.”
We then came onto a broad track. Cows belly deep in coreopsis and lupine nodded pleasantly at us from a meadow. A man came down the track with a DeWalt chainsaw on his shoulder, and we were back in Llano Grande at the little smoky comedor cabina for scrambled eggs, chicken stuffed tortillas, toast, apple marmalade, and hot chocolate in thick white bowls.