INTERIOR BRAND
You will not find a better acquaintance in the National Park Service than Bill Halainen, editor of the NPS Morning Report. Halainen is good humored, easygoing, wise, intelligent, straightforward and true.The last word "true" is what you want in an editor. You don't always get that in a newspaper editor. Not always. Not even in such prestigious titles as THE NEW YORK TIMES or THE WASHINGTON POST.
Truth is a little thing, but sometimes it's important.
I refer to the word "king pin".
King pin has various technical definitions but it generally means a key part of any organization, arrangement, or machine, the removal of which will cause the whole thing to fall apart.
You see, for 87 years since the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1915, American police have been capturing what newspaper editors have called "drug king pins" for the same 87 years.
Despite the capture of all these "king pins", after all these years, nothing has fallen apart and the War on Drugs rages on.
"King pin" however, is still the sturdiest cliche in American journalism (I should think that feminist editors would insist on the use of "Queen pin" now and then for political correctness.) As remarked, all major newspapers and magazines use "king pin" regarding the dope trade. It is entirely possible that the word may be on some kind of computer software to help a busy reporter or editor write a dope story.
There is one exception, however, and that is the NPS MORNING REPORT. In all my years of reading THE MORNING REPORT, I have never noticed that Halainen ever used the term "king pin" in a drug bust story and there is usually a drug bust in every issue. Halainen is an editor, honest and true. He simply reports the nuts and bolts of a dope bust. He has never suggested that as a result of a cocaine seizure in Yosemite, that the head of the Cali cartel has clapped hand to forehead and shouted in despair "Caramba! The NPS has got our king pin! We are undone! We must start selling empanadas on the street corner!"
Like the rest of the federal state and local law enforcement agencies, the NPS grimly (and often gallantly) soldiers on in this unwinnable war. Why? Well police are an absolute necessity for a successful dope industry. Not because the police are corrupt (very few of them are, contrary to liberal thought) but rather because they are brave, efficient, and occasionally successful.
Dope crops such as opium poppies, Cannabis, and coca are remarkably sturdy, disease and insect resistant, can be grown by illiterates and thus are cheap to produce. Unlike the Canadian grain crop which requires that you charter 100 huge bulk carriers to transport it, across the ocean, the entire world's production of cocaine, legal and illegal, could be air freighted in two Galaxy transports to any place in the world.
Thus with ease of production and transport, you have products that are basically cheaper than Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
In order to turn them into gold, you are going to require a healthy subsidy. You get it in the form of police persecution which will create an artificial scarcity and make dope worth more than platinum, let alone gold.
Without a doubt, the dope dealers would be willing to pay some of most of the cost of the government's efforts at drug interdiction in order to keep the price up simply as a cost of doing business. If there was such a thing as a philosophical dope "king pin", he would be continually shaking his head at our willingness to provide a subsidy in the form of police action, so he could keep his profits high.
The National Parks and the National Park Service, like most everyone else, are innocent bystanders in this 87 year old war. The effect on the ecosystems of the parks range from minuscule to tragic depending on the level of activity of dope producer in trying to transport or even grow dope in national parks.
For example, John Cook sent me a note while he was superintendent of Great Smoky National Park. It seems that his resource managers had been doing a bear study using radio collars on the bears. One bear's activity suddenly stopped and it was feared he might have been poached. Rangers were dispatched and they found the bear dead beside a half eaten bag of cocaine that had been jettisoned over the park by a dope plane.
According to Chief Ranger Dale Thompson of Organ Pipe National Monument, reporting in the March 15, 2002 issue of MORNING REPORT, dope smugglers have created 12 miles of actively used new roads in the park's wilderness area, where even the NPS is not supposed to go in a wheeled vehicle.
More than a thousand miles to the north, our gentle Canadian neighbors are brushing out new trail systems in North Cascade National Park to pack down the potent weed from neighboring British Columbia.
Enterprising dope growers have impudently tapped into Yosemite park's water line to irrigate a sizable crop of marijuana in a remote area of the park.
National Park staff is stretched thin and scarce resources are allocated to fight the dope war rather than concentrate on the resources and the parks are militarized psychologically if not literally.
So what to do?
As a Republican, it hurts me to say this, but the time has come to nationalize the production and distribution ends of the American dope industry.
Why? Because with a real war on our hands, we don't have the luxury of fighting a phony (if expensive) one. Interestingly enough, calls for the abandonment of the drug war have come from such conservative sources as the Cato Institute and William F. Buckley's NATIONAL REVIEW as well as the predictable liberal sources.
How? Fortunately the solution to the dope problem is quite simple. The production of dope would be a domestic American monopoly (As lovable as they are, for national security reasons, we can no longer permit Afghani war lords, Columbian narco-guerillas, and the Mexican Mafia to be the source of our dope.
Marijuana and opium poppies are both temperate region crops. Marijuana is an incredibly enthusiastic plant and will grow from Florida to Alaska and all points in between. (One reason they call it "weed") Coco (cocaine) is a tropical mountain crop and the range of possible growing sites in the US. Is much more limited, but cultivation is quite possible, as we shall see.
Dope production in the U.S. would be a monopoly of Native Americans under the indirect supervision of the Department of Interior (more specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs) Native Americans lost out on revenue from that premier American addictive drug, tobacco, so it is only fair that we make up for 300 years of lost royalties by providing them with a sure fire cash crop
Aside from wealth, a dope monopoly should bring Native American unemployment down from the present 65 to 85% to around 4%, somewhat below the national average in that there would be jobs in the growing and harvesting of the various drugs as well as the refining and processing of raw opium into morphine and heroin.
As for coco, it could be grown on abandoned sugar cane land in Hawaii by that other disadvantaged native American group, the Native Hawaiians and processed into cocaine at a refinery operated by Native Hawaiians.
The distribution of the dope (now politely transmogrified into drugs) would be handled by the U.S. Department of Health, which would have a clinic in every city and would treat the addiction as a disease, not a crime. The clinics would provide state of the art addiction treatment options in addition to selling the drug of choice.
Every effort will be made to encourage the addict to get off the drug, but in the end, it will be up to the addict. If he/she chooses to dedicate his/her life to heroin, that is the final, terrible choice in a free society. (This may sound cruel or irresponsible, but consider this, your friendly liquor store or supermarket will sell fortified wine to an alcoholic until his liver gives out, without even a thought of a treatment program.)
Addiction administered by the U.S. Public Health would at least give the poor addict a fighting chance.
Dope would not be legalized, it would simply be decriminalized. Dope would be a Native American monopoly and jealously guarded. There would be draconian fines and jail terms for the possession of non-native American dope. (A trace element or dye could be included in the native American dope that would show up in a simple field test by an officer to determine if the product was domestic or alien. The dope would not be free, but would cover costs and make a modest profit the producers and cover some of the cost of the drug rehab program. (The rest of the cost would come from appropriations saved from the enormously expensive and ineffective War on Drugs
In addition to getting us out of a war we can't afford and can't win, there would be some side effects that would please goody-two shoes liberals. No longer would America's lust for foreign dope distort the lives and economies of poor people around the world, no longer would we spray poor people's crops (and poor people themselves) with Agent Orange type herbicides. No longer would we give arms and training to shady dictators who have a plan to wipe out drugs. No longer would the scum of poor countries have more money and political clout than the honest and hard working citizens.
Finally the fabric of America's national parks and forests would no longer be shredded by the dope war.
Now you may have a better plan. In which case, you should share it with your congressperson. If your plan involves more guns, planes, dogs, and agents, I would suspect that it will follow the track of other plans in this 87 years old war. If not, then best of luck to it.
Myself, I think I'll send this along to Bill Buckley and see what he has to say.
SNAKE IN THE GARDEN
(Readers will recall from issue #244, that we were visiting the Red Rocks Canyon Country, around Sedona, Arizona, once proposed as a national park or monument, but now "preserved" under the Multiple Use dictum of Coconino National Forest.)
The Sedona-Oak Creek Canyon country is some of the most spectacular red rocks country in the Southwest and there are many contenders for the title. There are bigger red rocks elsewhere, but Oak Creek Canyon's subtle mix of shape, color, vegetation take the prize for a desert Garden of Eden.
Alas! There is a snake in this garden and it is the U.S. Forest Service.
Joan and I were motoring down highway 89 A from Flagstaff, trusting tourists from back East. We were unaware that a snake lurked among the rocks.
We came to a trail head that was described in the guide book as providing a spectacular and representative hike along one of the forks of Oak Creek. We pulled in. There was a kiosk with a uniformed person inside. It was not a US Forest Service Uniform but that of a private contractor who would extract $5.00 from us and divvy it up with the Forest Service.
I was a bit dubious of this un-Golden Eagle marketing of trail heads, but as Coconino National Forest was a large one, sort of like a good sized national park, I could see the logic of an entrance fee for the forest.
The trail was indeed beautiful, but due to the narrow canyon walls, early January was probably not the best time to do it, so we soon turned back. I asked the kiosk person how long my permit was good for, and she said just for that one day and moreover, if I wanted to stop off and look at any other rocks, I was going to have to go to the Chamber of Commerce and buy what was called a "Red Rocks Pass". This would allow me to stop on the shoulder of the road and not get ticketed.
Shoulder of the road? Yup. You couldn't just pull over and enjoy the view without some enforcer coming along and demanding to see your pass. The Forest Service had all the road shoulders as well as the trail heads posted! The climax came several days later when we found that the Forest Service had found a way to market the sunset.
Near Sedona is a six mile stretch of highway 179 that like Mallory Square in Key West, Florida, is world famous for its sunsets. Every evening, locals as well as tourists come out to see the incredible way the buttes turn rose, burnt sienna and golden in the alpen glow. However, while Key West does not charge you for the sunset, the U.S. Forest Service does. There are signs every few hundred feet saying you must have your Red Rocks Permit or be fined.
After two days in Sedona, I was beside myself with Forest Service money grubbing. It was like being nibbled to death by ducks! We had not bought another pass since the first day (You are supposed to hang it on your rear view mirror. If I got a citation, I would mail it to my Bullmoose Republican Congresswoman, Connie Morella, and together we would fight this penny ante racket.
Did any of the local citizenry object to this rip off?
Well yes, quite a few. Smokey Bear seems to have few admirers among the taxpaying proles of Sedona. One waitress we talked to remarked that even with tips, she and her children couldn't afford to hike in the forest that surrounds them. She allowed as how that was proving to be a transitory problem as the patch of National Forest near her home had suddenly turned into a golf course due to a land "swap" with a developer. As an added lagniappe for "progress", not only was she forbidden to trespass on the new golf course, but her well dried up as well. (Desert golf courses do require a lot of water.)
I talked to the manager of one of Sedona's many, many art galleries. She was spitting mad on the subject of "fee demonstration" (Which seems to indicate that bureaucrats are still able to demonstrate fathomless ability to tick off the American taxpayer. The gallery manager gave me the e-mail address of a chap by the name of Scott Silver, who heads an organization, Wild Wilderness, aimed at defeating Fee Demonstration. The website is www.wildwilderness.org. Silver himself can be reached at ssilver@wildwilderness.org.
The aim of Silver's organization seems to be to put the "Wild" back into Wilderness. A look at the website might lead one to the conclusion that Silver is some kind of liberal, maybe even a Sierra Club member for all I know (though I will be glad to print a correction if this is not the case) He is a biochemist who lives in Oregon and is sort of an Edward Abbey style crank on the subject of industrial tourism and the development of wilderness.
Silver's quirky website is polemical, often wrong (in your editor's opinion, but always interesting). He does dredge up some interesting quotes from anti-fee demonstration environmentalists.
Among these is an interesting article by Mike Lee, a retired superintendent in the Alaska State Park System. Writing in the March 18th issue of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Lee has this to say:
"How would you feel about paying to hunt, fish, or even walk on public lands in Alaska? Do you think it can't happen? It is happening all over America, fees are being initiated for the privilege of being on public lands. Not just for camping or going into Denali National Park, but all entries on public lands.In Alaska and elsewhere, higher and higher fees are being charged and many areas are being concessioned to private operators who must make a profit from your visit. In many cases, a private company now controls your access to public land or water. Denali National Park, for instance had a small gate fee for many years. Then a bus system on which nearly everyone must ride in order to visit the park was started. It was initially run by the Park Service and was nearly free. But, now, this avenue of visiting the park has been privatized and the fee increased by 10 times. A family of fours spends about $120 for a 12 hour visit to the park. How often can you afford to visit?
Elected officials have decided that it makes no sense to charge loggers to log, ranchers to graze cattle, and miners to dig and not charge the public to recreate on the same lands. The U.S. Forest Service still hasn't instituted as many fees in Alaska as it has Outside, but it will come. A program called "Fee Demo" is affixing user fees to recreational activities. In Colorado, one must pay $10 per person to drive up either Pikes Peak or Mt. Evans. Hiking above 10,000 feet, parking, walking a nature trail cost money now. Driving up to Mt. St. Helens costs about $10 per person.
Agencies tell you the money is going to be used in the area where it is collected to fix a backlog of maintenance needs. But why are there maintenance backlogs on federal lands when the federal government is sending surplus money back to taxpayers? It's because government officials have decided to underfund maintenance of public facilities to stimulate support for user fees. And get this, the area doesn't really get to keep the money because as fees increase congress/legislature decreases the amount of money that goes to that area. In many cases, the overall maintenance money still declines.
The issue isn't really a backlog of maintenance needs, and the fight is not between"We the people" and the managing agencies like the Forest Service, state parks, or the Bureau of Land Management. The issue is between the people and their elected government and it is this: Do we want to fund government services with user fees as well as fund them with taxes?
Supporting public recreation through user fees is expensive, intrusive, and discriminatory. You must hire people in remote places to collect the money, process it, and get it to government treasuries miles away. You must hire police, build entry stations, buy safes, computers, and vehicles. Fees discriminate because they keep some families from visiting their public lands.
Then there is the change in perception. In the past, if there was any notification that you were entering public lands, it was a sign saying "Welcome", and naming the managing agency. You rightly felt like an owner. Now with the introduction of user fees, one must pass through some type of gate or station. it's more like going to Disneyland or Wild Kingdom. The experience is greatly diminished..."
Now neighbors, I realize that the NPS has often charged an admission fee from time immemorial, but with the exception of camping, you were not nickel and dimed to death for every "activity" short of breathing that you choose to undertake (On the negative side, the NPS was always careful to keep the taxpayer in his place, relentlessly referring to him/her as a "visitor" and never letting on that these "visitors" might just own the place.)
We shall continue our discussion of fee demonstration on public lands in the next issue of THUNDERBEAR.
THE TEQUILA EXPRESS
Getting drunk and getting an education are usually considered mutually exclusive enterprises.
This is not true as George Bush Jr and hordes of other Yale alumni have demonstrated over the ages.
However, a drunken learning experience is usually considered to be on the negative side of the learning curve. An example is showing up before a judge after a night on the town in which you apparently had much more fun than the black robed sourpuss glaring down at you. As a result of your experience, you promise never, ever to do whatever it was ever again.
This is not true of the Tequila Express learning experience.
The Tequila Express is a one day seminar in which you learn the history, romance, and manufacture of Tequila, Mexico's signature alcoholic beverage.
You also get all the Tequila you can drink. It's part of the education..
What happens is that you go down to the Guadalajara, Mexico train station and ask for the "Tequila Express" This is not going to cause any brain strain on the part of the Mexican National Railroad employees as Mexico has only one passenger train and that is the Tequila Express. (Actually, this is not entirely true. Mexico does have one other passenger train. That is the famous train that runs through the majestic copper canyon in northern Mexico and that friends, is just about it, train buff wise.)
Facts like these always tick off the Sierra Club and other environmental wowsers who never quite got over their Lionel train sets and want everybody and every thing to ride the rails as trains can haul more folks and goods with less pollution that cars buses and trucks.
This is true, but trains rarely haul you and your goods exactly where you want to go. You are imperiously dropped off at some 19th century train depot and the rest is up to you. (Environmentalists always forget about human desires). Mexico, a poor country whose people should be grateful to travel on a state owned railway, prefer cars, buses and trucks. I can't say I blame them.
On the other hand, trains are a wonderful tourist toy, even if like passengers ships, they are no longer a viable means of transportation.
When you arrive at the Guadalajara train station, you pay the Tequila Express people $64 US for the 100 km round trip to and from the little town of Tequila in the state of Jalisco. (Hey! Nobody said a Yale education was cheap either!) The ticket entitles you to all the lectures, tours, dancing, music, entertainment and tequila you can handle.
You will be given bright colored cards to wear around your neck. This is your car assignment and your team assignment as every color is to vie for prizes in dancing, talent, or just being loud)
The Tequila Express is a four passenger car train pulled by a modern diesel locomotive (Steam locomotives are quaint, but inefficient and a bear on the budget as the US National Park Service continues to find out in its Steamtown USA experiment.. The Tequila Express is a private operation and they would prefer not to go broke)
The cars are well appointed with the exterior painted in impressionistic blue agaves. Each car has Tequila Express painted on it in those big bold Victorian letters that one associates with Wells Fargo and the Wild West. Naturally every couple has to be photographed in front of the signs.
Mexicans are great tourists and love visiting different 'parts of their native land, particularly if they get a chance to do things in groups. A train, bus, or boat ride is Seventh heaven to these extroverted people. Thus, about two thirds of our train were made up Mexicans, with the final third consisting of the usual mix of French, English, Germans, and Japanese and a relative handful of Gringos. (Americans, contrary to our self image, are not very adventurous travelers)
The Tequila Express pulled out of Guadalajara station to the trumpet blare of the on board mariachi band . Tequila and mariachi music are the two main contribution of the state of Jalisco to the cultural patrimony of Mexico. and indeed where you find one you will usually find the other.
Sure enough, once underway, waiters brought trays of diluted tequila in the form of endless huge margaritas. The Margarita, a sugar, fruit juice, and Tequila concoction is just another famous drink in what might be called the distillation paradox. We humans, being somewhat perverse, found that naturally produced alcohol in beer and wine is too dilute to get us real drunk, real fast. Some humanitarian gave us the distillation process where the alcohol from natural fermentation could be concentrated in almost pure form.
Having discovered a way to concentrate alcohol, we then found that in order to avoid going blind, killing our relatives, or collapsing after the first drink, that it was necessary to dilute the ethyl alcohol. This is the distiller's paradox and the source of the Margarita and thousands of other mixed drinks designed to get alcohol past the gag reflex designed to protect us against poisonous substances.
Tequila in its pure form is a particularly vile form of radiator flush with a nasty bite to it that no amount of aging seems to smooth. It is distilled from blue agave, an angry looking plant that is not a cactus but rather an unusually ugly member of the lily family., Pure Tequila tastes like Agave looks.
The margaritas (quite good) flowed and the mariachis played (also quite good and getting better by the minute) and the Jalisco country side scrolled by as we rolled along at an easy 25 mph. Soon we were in the agave fields. Neat rows of bluish green, Martian looking plants, leaves a foot wide at the base, about four feet long at maturity and curving gracefully to a sword's point, sort of like a pineapple on steroids.
The rows of agave climbed up the hill side, struck a spikey pose on the horizon line and (presumably) marched down the other side. The general effect was to give the country side a corrugated, barbed wire look.
A simpering liberal might ask that would it not be best if the agave land be planted in maize by the campesinos so they could practice subsistence agriculture and make tortillas like their ancestors. The answer is that subsistence agriculture is hard on the environment and campesino alike and the campesino would rather go to Los Angeles and make money rather than tortillas. And I don't blame them.
The truth is that agave (or rather its end product, tequila) is a cash crop and a guaranteed sure fire one at that. That is a combination that is pretty hard to beat as any farmer will tell you.
The reason is that most of the world's signature alcoholic drinks are made from fairly normal ingredients, grain, rice, potatoes, sugar cane or sugar beets, stuff that you can pick up most anywhere. This means that "most anywhere" can and does make imitations of your product.
Not so Tequila. You would be hard pressed to find a more abnormal source of commercial alcohol than agave. By custom and by law,commercial blue agave grows only in Mexico and there only in the five states of Nayarit, Michoacan, Guanajuato,, Tamaulipas, and of course, Jalisco., In order to be called "tequila", your particular brain solvent must contain at least 51% blue agave. In addition Mexico has gotten the European economic union to declare "Tequila" a proprietary Mexican product. (This is quite an achievement as the sparkling wine producers in the Champagne region of France were not able to get a similar lock on the word "Champagne" and the product.) Thus you are able to toast your daughters wedding with California Andre's at $4.99 a bottle rather than pay through the nose for the French stuff.
Basing the alcohol source of Tequila on something as exotic as agave makes legal foreign knock offs of Tequila just about impossible, but it leads to other problems.
According the Agricultural statistics, there are upwards of 150 million agaves growing in Mexico at any given time. That does not seem to be enough.
The problem is, that unlike rice, wheat, maize, or potatoes, which are annual crops, you can't simply plant more, or failing that, buy on the world market to take advantage of an increasing market. Agave is a slow crop and its patrons must be patient. It takes 8-10 years for an agave to reach maturity and be ready for harvesting and transformation into Tequila. It is a long time between drinks.
Meanwhile, the Mexican government and the Tequila producers had contracted with a Madison Avenue type advertising firm to sell the idea of Tequila to the American, European and Japanese drinking public. The campaign was wildly successful and now there is a serious shortage of tequila.
Naturally, the Mexican agronomists are trying to come up with a "miracle" fast growing agave to meet the demand and naturally, other less scientific Mexicans have leaped into the breach with fake tequila made from sugar cane alcohol (The Mexican government indignantly seized and destroyed 700,000 liters of this slur on the national patrimony before it reached Europe.)
After a leisurely and well lubricated hour and a half journey through the agave armored countryside, we arrived at the little town of Tequila. (Is there a town called "Bourbon" in Kentucky?)
Here we boarded buses for the tour of the Heritiera distillery. (Herrradura is "horseshoe" in Spanish) The Herrradura distillery is not the largest in Tequila but is certainly one of the most historical, as much for what didn't happen as for what did.
The interesting thing is that the distillery and hacienda are still owned by the Pena family, whose ancestor bought the land in 1870 and family ownership survived the Mixmaster of the Mexican Revolution which lasted from 1910 to 1930. It is totally amazing the Penas, let alone their property survived through 20 violent years of Mexican history.
The Penas and their Hacienda are a sort of Living History rendition of what used to be the norm in rural Mexico before 1910.
The Hacendados ruled rural Mexico from Spanish colonial times right up to 1910 (and in some states, considerably beyond). The Hacienda system has been compared to the ante bellum plantation system of the American South, but the comparison is inexact as we Americans were comparatively primitive. Slavery had been abolished in Mexico in 1820, forty years before we bloodily started getting around to the chore.
Although the Mexican campesinos were technically free and often owned or had access to their own communal lands, they were just as often bound to the service of the local Hacendado or large land owner through a system of debt peonage (The old company store trick)
There were hundreds, even thousands of these Haciendas scattered across Mexico. They primarily produced cash crops for export: cattle in the north, cacao (chocolate), sugar cane and coffee in the south, along with hemp, sisal, and Heineken (big ticket fiber and cordage items in the days before nylon)
The haciendas varied in size from a few thousand acres to immense.
One of the legendary Hacendados was Don Luis Terranzas of Chihuahua, Mexico' s largest state. Someone asked Don Luis if it was true that he had the largest cattle ranch in Chihuahua. Don Luis replied "No, Chihuahua is my ranch!" (Don Luis was not far off in bragging rights, he owned upwards of 14.000 square kilometers of the state) Don Luis had his own telegraph office on his hacienda. One day Chicago called and asked if he could supply 5,000 cattle in three weeks time.
Don Luis blandly wired back "What color?
Now neighbors, you and I could have gotten used to the Hacienda life (The Hacendado part, not the peon part. to paraphrase Ronald Reagan "Once you've chopped one stalk of sugar cane, you've chopped 'em all." You definitely wanted to stay away from the peon part). However, as owner, you rose early, were served a cup of strong black coffee while you conferred with your head peon about what needed to be done. You strapped on your pistol (because you never can tell) mounted your horse and spent a long, happy day telling other people what to do. (In some respects, it was sort of like being a park superintendent. (Only better, because the peons did as they were told.)
The Hacienda was its own little world. It tried to be as self sufficient as possible as distances were great and transport poor. Many trades and crafts were practiced with that goal in mind. The Hacienda house itself was generally a huge, sprawling one or two story adobe or stone affair and almost invariably, quite beautiful, with the various flowering trees and shrubs around it and often a fountain in the court yard. The hacendado had certain responsibilities to his peons. He should guarantee that they had food, medical attention, religion, clothing and adequate housing, and work (work was one guarantee that was kept in spades)
English and American visitors to Haciendas back in the good old pre 1910 days were usually charmed by the hacienda life and felt that it was the best possible life for the simple, child-like Mexicans(but then the Americans weren't turned out of their beds at three in the morning to harvest the sisal crop) These musty 19th century naive recollections that I've read have an eerie resemblance to those of American fellow travelers such as Henry Wallace, who visited the Soviet Russian version of the Hacienda -- the collective farm and found it to be full of happy, folk dancing peasants who wouldn't dream of being anywhere else.
The Mexican revolution of 1910 came like a thunderstorm with lightning strikes of revolt across the nation, In normal times If its peons were loyal, the fortress like haciendas could hold out against bandit attack or small guerilla bands for a time until help arrived in the form of the rurales or federales, These were not normal times. The rurales and federales found themselves engaged in fire fights from one end of the country to the other and soon began to disintegrate. President Diaz fled. The Mexican revolution was logically over in two months. It was time to divvy up the Hacienda land and for everyone to home. Logic does not always prevail, however, and nobody went home for 10 years. About 2 million Mexicans died before all scores were settled.
And through all this, the Pena family managed to to hang on to its hacienda and its tequila distillery. How the hell did they do it ? Clearly, I would have to talk to the present senor Pena about this matter as the family certainly had lessons in survival and diplomacy worth passing on to the rest of the human race.
Our tour was shown around the lovely grounds of the hacienda and the outside of the handsome hacienda (We didn't get inside, because, well, the Penas were inside) We then toured the tequila distillery itself where the stuff is made.
It is a fairly straight forward process, although as always in the production of ethyl alcohol, whether it is German beer, French wine, Japanese sake, or Scotch whiskey, there is a great deal of superstitious jiggery-pokery, designed to convince the buyer that this particular form of nerve poison is something special.
The Jefe goes out to the agave fields and, based on his experience and lore decides if it is time. If it is, then a worker comes along with a sort of half moon spade, cuts off the leaves and then uproots the remaining heart of the plant which contains all the sugar. It is a round ball a bit larger than a volley ball, The hearts are then loaded into a trailer and trucked to a concrete apron outside the distillery where they are split in half and thrown by hand into huge furnace like ovens. There they are cooked for 24 hours to release the sugar. We were handed a piece of cooked agave to sample. It was dark orange like a sweet potato and much sweeter.
The cooked agave then goes into stainless steel fermenting tanks where it produces as much alcohol as the little yeast cells can stand. And then it goes into the stainless steel stills where the alcohol is boiled off. The end product looks like any White lightning brewed from chicken feed and sugar up in the hills of West Virginia.
Unlike the West Virginia stuff, the Mexican product is remarkably expensive. A bottle of Herrradura Œs best, 100% blue agave and aged 5 years costs $250 American and that's at the distillery.
We were not allowed to photograph the modern stainless steel process, why I am not sure. Possibly because it resembled a refinery producing jet fuel. (Indeed most people are not aware that a modern petroleum refinery can produce ethyl alcohol on demand from oil. (Drink EXXON'S "Old Valdez" straight or on the rocks!".)
We then toured the historic distillery complete with photogenic wooden vats, oak barrels, copper stills, old ovens, and a crushing pit in which a mule would walk in a circle around the pit, turning a stone that crushed the agave. As the mule would occasionally have to take a piss, there might be some truth in old timers claims that modern tequila just doesn't taste the same.
Next was a Jalisco style picnic on the lawn behind the hacienda with a buffet of some 20 regional dishes most of which had something to do with maize, cheese, chicken and chiles, washed down with more complementary beer and margaritas.
Next came the entertainment, a sort of mini-ballet folklorico. Good looking young people in good looking charro costumes performing the standards of Mexican folk dancing, including of course what Mexicans call the Jarabe Tapatio and we gringos call the Mexican hat dance. There was a female singer of ranchero love songs who was easy to listen to and easy to look at as her smile and Jalisco regional costume became her mightily.
This was followed by a father and son charro rope spinning act. Not as good as Will Rogers in his prime, but very good for a back yard picnic.
Then there was the comedy routine. The charro is the sort of upper class Mexican gentleman cowboy that Mexicans both aspire to and ridicule. Mexico is a very macho society and homosexuality and effeminacy are subject of much broad teasing and ridicule. Put these two elements together and you have that staple of Mexican country entertainment, The Gay Caballero. He is dressed in a charro costume, is usually a bit overweight and swishes and prances around the stage and through the audience, telling double entendre jokes and ogling the male members of the audience and making comments, which bring down the house, particularly the female members.
All in all, it was great entertainment and it was rumored that several of the performers were indeed alumni of THE ballet folklorico of Mexico City.
Then it was our turn. Each car had to perform in a dance competition, both couples and enmasse. Our team, the Rojas, composed mainly of Mexican college kids on spring break who act much like American college kids on spring break, lost the contest due to a crucial lack of coordination caused by alcohol, but we did win the loudness prize. The prizes were of course, bottles of the less expensive tequila.
We boarded the buses and returned to the Tequila Express for the raucous train ride back to Guadalajara, secure in the knowledge that we had done our bit to celebrate a unique bit of Mexican culture.