Christmas Past

Christmas 2015 was the first time we ever had Christmas on our own, without traveling (often to numerous locations) to be with family.  It was the first time Will ever had Christmas with just us, his mom and dad, in our own house.

It was wonderful, but lonely too.

We had decided to do this because we'd seen all our families in both August and late October.  And if we didn't go back "home" for Christmas, we could go to Arizona at the end of December and run Across The Years.  Which seemed like the thing to do.

There was a full moon on Christmas Eve, for the first time since 1977 apparently. (Photo by Rob)

Will was so excited about Christmas.  He spent the entire month of December giddy with anticipation.  On the big day, he managed to sleep until about 7 o'clock before woke me by zipping into our room and pressing his face against mine, asking to eat breakfast and open presents.

He got way too many presents.

He stripped down to his underpants when he opened the light saber.  I have no idea why.

The X-Wing suit was just what he always wanted.

Will gave me a Rey and BB-8 doll, because he thought I needed something to play with.

I wanted to keep things simple for Christmas dinner, so I had bought a Gardein brand "holiday roast."

Vegan "roast beast"

I bought an extra package of stuffing to go along with it, and I roasted some carrots, Brussel's sprouts, and onions.  Rob and Will had requested mashed potatoes, so I made those too, and because I thought we needed something else green, I decided to add green beans to the mix.  All of it was really simple and took me less than 2 hours to make, as light saber battles raged around me.

I was very pleased at how it all turned out, and really, how very easy it was.  Somebody remind me next year to just do this again and not try something fancy.

Oh, and the best part too, was what I created for dessert, which Rob named Peppermint Winter Cake.  It is really just my usual chocolate cake (the one I make for all celebrations: birthdays, graduations, weddings, etc), except instead of vanilla, I added peppermint extract, and I substituted some of the sugar for crushed candy canes.  I also melted chocolate chips on top for frosting and then sprinkled the remaining crushed candy canes on top of that.  It was good, very good.

However, once Christmas was out of the way, there was nothing to keep me from succumbing completely to taper madness and full-on panicking about Across The Years.  I'd been wandering around the house for days, making lists of things and doing some light packing, but I was nowhere near ready.  By the end of the day, I was a nervous wreck.  

In my mind, I knew what kind of abysmally pathetic training I'd had and that attempting Across The Years under these conditions was just about the stupidest thing I could do.  But in my heart I thought, of course you can.  And with that, it was time to go.

Thanks for reading.

High altitude vegan pizza dough

I haven’t had too much trouble with baking things since we moved to high altitude.  Boiling beans, that’s another story, but at least in terms of baking, I didn’t notice much of a difference.  The only thing that has caused a problem so far is pizza crust.  The kind I used to make back at sea level just didn’t work a mile in the sky.  The first time I tried it, it was doughy and gross.  It might have worked if I’d just baked it longer, but a quick Google search yielded another recipe that was delicious and turned out perfect every time.  The major drawback to it was that it took forever to make, what with the mixing and the kneading, and the several rounds of rising.  Something you kind of have to reserve for special occasions.  

I decided to make it again the other night near the end of Will’s spring break.  The recipe makes two pizzas, they freeze well, and Will likes to take a slice in his lunch.  I thought it would be nice to have a stock of pizza in the freezer for those days when I can come up with nothing else to put in Will’s lunch sack.

Unfortunately, when I went to the bookmarked website with the delicious pizza dough, it was gone.  Just gone.  The recipe had vanished.  I looked around for something similar but really couldn’t find anything that seemed as good.  So I did my best to re-create the recipe.  This is what I came up with (it takes about 1.5 to 2 hours from start to finish):  

Ingredients:

2 packets yeast
2 tsp sugar
2 cups warm water (110 degrees)

Mix yeast with sugar and warm water in a large bowl.  (The water needs to be the around the right temperature or it won’t work).  Let sit for approx. 10 minutes.  The yeast mixture will get foamy.  (If it doesn’t then you know you have a problem).

 

5-1/2 cups flour (plus more for kneading)
3 teaspoons sea salt 
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
1-2 tablespoons agave nectar

Cornmeal
Sauce
Toppings

Directions

Add the salt, olive oil, agave, and half the flour to the bowl of foamy yeast.  With dough hook attachment on mixer, mix for 2-3 minutes (i.e, until everything is well incorporated).  Then add the remaining flour and mix for another 5-7 minutes.  My mixer starts making a high pitched squealing sound after the first 30 seconds, so, this is fun.

(Actually no, it is annoying, and I should probably get a new mixer).

When everything is all mixed up, take the dough out of the bowl.  It will be a little bit shiny and sticky.  Put it onto a floured surface and knead for 5 minutes.

Put the dough into a greased bowl.  Cover with a cloth or piece of saran.  Let rise for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, punch dough down and divide in half (I use a serrated bread knife to do the dividing).  Cover again, this time with the cloth or saran separating the two halves.  Let rise for another 10 minutes.

While it is rising, pre-heat oven to 425 (all the internet says 450, but I’ve had many experiences of the smoke detector going off if the oven is too hot, so I’ve calculated that 425 is about the limit) and prepare whatever veggies you are using.

After the final 10 minutes of rising, take out one of the halves and roll into a circle with a rolling pin on a floured surface.  This makes for a fairly thick crust.  

Sprinkle cornmeal on a pizza stone.  Put the crust on the stone, top with sauce and whatever you like (I put on Dayia mozzarella, onions, peppers, mushrooms, and kalamata olives).

Bake for around 22 minutes (but you should start checking at around 18 minutes, just in case).

While the first pizza is baking, I roll out and prepare the other pizza.  Because I only have 1 pizza stone, I bake them one at a time.  I should probably just get another pizza stone—the second crust continues rising while the first crust is baking, so it always ends up a little bit more “deep dish” than the other.  I think you can freeze the dough as well (after the 30 minute rise, I would guess), but I prefer to just make a lot of pizza at a time and freeze what we don’t eat right away.  I wrap individual slices in foil before putting them in the freezer, and I can seriously just take out one of the foil wrapped pieces in the morning, put it in Will’s lunch sack, and he is perfectly happy to eat it at lunch time.

Thanks for reading.

You're Vegan What Do You Eat? Bowl of Stuff.

I feel like we generally eat pretty simply (you know: fruits, vegetables), but simplicity gets complicated when you’re traveling 1000 miles, and it’s the holidays, and you’re the only vegans.  No matter how anyone might sugar-coat it (about how being vegan is easy and the holidays are a snap), I am here to tell you that it is really hard.  It can be done though, with lots and lots of planning, lots and lots of packing questionably perishable produce, and a willingness to subsist on Clif Bars (or spoonfuls of peanut butter from the jar) if the going gets too rough.

We did pretty well on the first day of our drive, because I had packed us hummus/veggie wraps, apples, and baby carrots for lunch.  And for dinner, we found a Chipotle in Lincoln, NE that had vegan sofritas.  (It’s the one on campus. I kind of couldn’t believe our vegan luck in Nebraska!).

When we arrived in Illinois, Rob went to the grocery store to pick up a few things, and when he got back, I was faced with the task of finding my way around someone else’s kitchen and assembling these items into dinner.

The results were fantastic.

What we ate boiled down to this: a bowl of mixed greens with seasoned couscous, roasted brussels sprouts, and chickpeas. 

As soon as we got home, I tried to recreate our fantastic meal, while at the same time making it even more creative.

We now call this meal “Bowl of Stuff,” and we have eaten it probably at least once a day since we discovered it.  There are no rules with the Bowl of Stuff… you can add anything.  The red pepper that’s been in the fridge for a week and needs to be eaten soon or thrown out?  Dice it, toss it in.  The left over black beans from last night’s dinner?  Put that in the bowl.  Beyond Meat Chik’n Strips?  Yum.

Bowl of Stuff is obviously a dynamic, constantly evolving dish, but our latest favorite rendition tends to include the following items:

 His ’n Hers, Bowl of Stuff.  I recommend pairing it with an Odell’s seasonal ale.  Rob recommends water.

Bowl of Stuff

• Greens (can be mixed greens, spinach, kale, mustard greens, whatever)
• Roasted vegetable (Brussel sprouts, FTW)
• Cous cous (I’ve been using the Near East brand boxes, but only because I haven’t been to Whole Foods or Sprouts yet to buy it in bulk)
• Tofurky vegan kielbasa, sliced into rounds and browned in a skillet (Yes, this is a kind of weird ingredient, but it is super high in protein and very satisfying when you are trying to run a 170 mile month).
• Spicy sriracha dressing (basically, everything I eat is just a conduit for sriracha).

One thing about this meal is that it seems like it would be fast and easy, even though I would say it’s not, particularly when it comes to cleaning up.  I mean, you’ve got a lot of pots and pans going on, what with making the couscous, roasting the brussels, and browning the Tofurky slices.  Plus, it is kind of hard to have all these things ready at the same time.  I actually like to have all the Stuff cold on top of my salad greens; Rob prefers the Stuff to be warm, but he’ll eat it however.

Here’s another shot of that Bowl:

Will, of course, is difficult and he won’t eat this meal as is.  But he is getting braver, and he’ll eat the couscous and tofurky slices with a raw fruit and raw vegetable as a side.  He also says he wants to learn to clean up the kitchen so he can help me.  Love.

The beauty of this Bowl, and in general of being vegan, is that you can basically just throw a bunch of stuff together and it turns out amazing.  It is like a clearinghouse for whatever leftovers you want to get rid of in your fridge.  The possibilities are endless, but the basic pattern to the goodness appears to be:  

• A bed of greens
• A roasted vegetable
• A grain 
• A protein

Hearty, delicious.  I’m glad we accidentally stumbled upon this during our travels and that we’ve been eating it ever since.

Thanks for reading.

You're Vegan, What Do You Eat? Thanksgiving Redux

We stayed at home for Thanksgiving this year, which was nice.

Technically, this was our second Thanksgiving in Fort Collins.  Last year, we drove to Colorado in what was basically a panic, because I had to see this place one more time before I quit my job and we uprooted our lives to move here.  But now this is really where we live, and when I think about how far we have come and how much everything has changed since that terrible, terrible time one year ago, I still kind of can’t believe it.

My parents had been hoping to come out and visit us, but they ended up unable to make the trip, so it was just the three of us.  I tried to re-create the magical Thanksgiving dinner I made in St. Louis in 2012, though with much less success.  Mom, Dad, don’t feel bad about not joining us this time; you didn’t miss my best culinary endeavor.

The whole thing started out when William and I made a pumpkin pie on Wednesday (he is still a difficult eater, but he does love to help bake).  I used this recipe for crust and this recipe for the pie filling.  I chose these recipes because of their simplicity: instead of tofu and soy cream cheese (the latter of which I always forget to buy), the pie filling took coconut milk and cornstarch, which I already had on hand.  It all came together very easily.

On Thanksgiving morning, I got up early and ran at Horsetooth Mountain Open Space, something I sincerely hope becomes a tradition.

2.5 miles up this mountain (and back down again) was way, way better than choosing to do the local Turkey Trot.

Basically as soon as I got home and took a shower, I started cooking our Thanksgiving dinner.  Simplicity was the theme, so I really didn’t think it was going take that long to put together, but as these things often do, it took much longer than I was expecting.

I had bought a real, actual Tofurky because that was the only vegan, holiday kind of thing Whole Foods had when I went shopping, and at the time I was not feeling creative enough to come up with a fancy Thanksgiving dish on my own.  I figured it would be a lot like the “roast beast” we had 2 years ago when I did this in St. Louis, and that had been pretty good.

While the oven pre-heated, I sliced potatoes, purple sweet potatoes, carrots, and brussels sprouts to roast.  The Tofurky was a lot rounder than the “roast beast” of 2012, so not as many vegetables fit in the roasting pan with it.  I decided to roast the brussels sprouts separately.

Our internet randomly stopped working, so I couldn’t look up my blog to see how I had made the baste last time.  Winging it, I mixed together some melted Earth Balance, garlic powder, and a dash of soy sauce.  (**Note to self: for future reference, leave out the soy sauce.  Add fresh sage**).  I put the non-brussel sprout vegetables in with the (thawed) Tofurky and covered them with the baste so the whole thing could start cooking.  Then I made some gravy—also winging it, with no internet to look up a recipe.  I used vegetable broth, more garlic powder, nutritional yeast, and flour.  I may have added some corn starch (and possibly a few other things) too, I’m not sure.  

Then it was time to start the dinner rolls.  I had found this recipe a few days earlier, but totally didn’t realize it took an egg.  I usually use ground flax seeds as egg replacers; this works really well for things like brownies, but I did not know if it was the best option for dinner rolls.  It was my only option at the time, though, so I decided to try it.

While the dinner rolls were (hopefully) rising, I put the brussels sprouts in the oven and then began the stuffing.  The Tofurky actually had stuffing in the center, but I knew from 2012 that it wasn’t going to be very much, and Rob really likes stuffing, so I wanted to make sure we had enough to make this a celebration.  I had bought some packaged stuffing at Whole Foods.  It had the word “vegan” on the label and all you did was add water (and some oil) to it, so I figured how hard could it be.

The dinner rolls seemed to be rising quite fine, which was a relief considering 1) high altitude -and- 2) flax seed egg.  I put them in the oven and wondered how long it would take everything to finish cooking 1) at high altitude -and- 2) with 3 different things in the oven all at once.

I sort of managed to get the kitchen cleaned up, and then it was showtime.  Only about 45 minutes later than I’d estimated.

Deeply engrossed in some sort of train game, Rob and Will grudgingly came to the dinner table (mainly, it was Will who was grudging).  Will took one glance at the motley assortment of Thanksgiving dishes and said, “That looks disgusting, I don’t want to eat it.”  

Will eventually conceded to have a dinner roll and some raw broccoli, and I think I fixed him some apple slices too.

Rob and I sat down to the rest of the meal.  It was… meh.

The Tofurky was kind of tough and dry, despite all the basting I’d done, and the stuffing had weird tiny hard bits in it that I didn’t care for.  The vegetables were kind of bland, and I forgot, I still don’t like sweet potatoes (thanks, hyperemesis!) even if they’re purple.  The dinner rolls were a bit too sweet for my liking, and the gravy tasted like it was missing something.  The brussels sprouts were good though.

Rob said he liked the dinner, and he and Will were both big fans of the rolls, so maybe I will be making those again.  We didn’t actually have as many leftovers as I’d been expecting, but the next day when I ate some of the roasted vegetables, I thought they tasted even better than they had for our Thanksgiving dinner.  Maybe I had just been too tired from my jaunt up Horsetooth and the subsequent hours in the kitchen to enjoy it, although I'd have thought that would make me enjoy it more.  I don’t know.

We waited several hours before eating the pumpkin pie later in the day.  Will was actually pretty excited about this, I think because some of the kids at school had been talking about pumpkin pie and he got caught up in it.  Also, once when he was 2 he ate pumpkin pie at daycare and I was told he really liked it.

The pumpkin pie was… okay.  Rob and I are both not really “pie” people, but Rob bravely tried some and managed to get through a slice.  I do have a greater pie tolerance than Rob, but this pie was not my favorite.  It occurred to me as I took my first bite, that I do not really like coconut milk (the kind that comes in a can) and that was one of like 3 ingredients of the pie.  I had thought that the pumpkin and the spice would cover up the coconut flavor, but… you could definitely still taste coconut.  Which is great if you like coconut, I suppose.

On the bright side, Will did actually eat a piece of the pie.  With his hands.

Pro-tip: I discovered later that the pie becomes amazingly fantastic if you warm it up (12 seconds in the microwave for a slice) and then put (vegan) chocolate chips on top.  Chocolate makes everything better.

We finished out the weekend with some light bouldering...

… a few great sunrises...

… some movie watching...

 

… and a trip to get a Christmas tree at the unceremonious location of a Do-It Hardware store near our house.  

The proximity of the store did, however, allow us to revive a Ragfield Family Tradition that we haven’t done since sometime before Will was born, when we lived in Urbana.

 

Will and I decorated the tree together while Rob went running that evening.  It turned out pretty nice, I think.  And Will was a great help.

 

Next year, I promise I’ll get the Tofurky figured out, so hopefully you can enjoy it with us, Mom and Dad.

Thanks for reading.

A white butterfly for you, Jackson.  Love, Auntie M.

 

You're Vegan What Do You Eat: Roasted Vegetable Salad

I think I have discovered the secret to life, and it is this: roasted vegetables.

Ever since the temperatures started dropping, I have been eating roasted vegetables all the time.  Every day.  Generally I eat them in salad, but it started out in a way that initially did not involve roasted vegetables at all.

I got the idea from this restaurant in Fort Collins called Garbanzo where we've occasionally picked up lunch or dinner.  It’s the kind of place where you can “build” your own meal, in the form of a bowl, wrap, or pita.  Well, I’ve become less and less fond of “wraps” over the years (generally too much wrap, not enough veggie), and their pitas contain milk, so I’ve always opted for the bowl.  It kind of opened my eyes to what you can consider a “salad.”  They scoop in different stuff according to what you choose.  So I end up with hummus, baba ganoush, tabouli, shredded cabbage, falafel, turmeric rice, etc.  It is not a lettuce based salad, which was kind of a new concept for me.

 

One day I found pre-made falafel at the grocery store, and I decided to recreate a Garbanzo bowl at home that was even more to my specifications: mixed greens, onion, pepper, avocado, sautéed mushrooms, falafel, Dayia cheese, and my signature spicy sriracha dressing.  OMG, it was fantastic.

 

The idea continued to evolve on Tuesday nights, which have become designated as “Taco Tuesday”  by William.  The rest of the family likes to eat their tacos in shells, but I’m just not a huge fan of shells or tortillas these days.  One Tuesday I decided to mix all my ingredients together in a bowl: salad greens, Boca crumbles, roasted potatoes and sweet potatoes, avocados, crushed tortilla chips leftover in the bottom of the bag (Rob calls these “Melissa Chips”), and, wait for it, spicy sriracha dressing.  Divine.

It’s even better if you add Horsetooth Hotsauce and pair the dish with some kind of Fort Collins beer, served in a beer glass you won as an age group award in 30-mile trail run.

Experimenting with Taco Tuesday salads broke the ice, so to say, for adding roasted vegetables to salads.  Now I add all kinds of roasted vegetables to my salad.  Basically, if it is a vegetable, you can roast it, and you can eat it in a salad.  My favorite by far is Brussels sprouts, but I’ve also become quite fond of roasted cauliflower and red cabbage.  The red cabbage in particular looks kind of gross, but I promise, it tastes very good.

I’ve even occasionally used store-bought salad dressing.

My protocol for roasting vegetables is pretty simple.  I chop or slice the vegetables into bite size pieces (for brussels sprouts, I cut off the ends, then cut them in half).  Then I dump everything into a big mixing bowl and drizzle it with: olive oil, sea salt, pepper, garlic powder (this is a must), and turmeric (this is also a must).  Supposedly turmeric has all these health benefits; I don’t know if the amount I’m eating in roasted vegetables is actually beneficial, but it tastes good, so it’s got that going for it.

After preparing the vegetables, I put them on a cookie sheet and then roast them for some amount of time—usually 15 to 20 minutes.  If I think about it, I may stir them around about halfway through.  I’ve found that roasting works at pretty much any temperature from 375 to 425, and cooking time varies accordingly.

On days when it is colder, or when you’ve run up and down Horsetooth Mountain and really need something to stick to your ribs, you can add a variety of other stuff to it too.  This hearty salad has: mixed greens, lentils, edamame, roasted Brussel’s sprouts, roasted potatoes, and some variety of Annie’s dressing.

 

 

I feel like, unintentionally, eating roasted vegetables has drastically improved my diet.  Not like I really thought my diet needed much improving in the first place, but adding these daily salads means that now I eat a ton more greens.  The other thing about roasted vegetables is that they are just so satisfying, filling, and nutrient dense.  I no longer get that intense hunger and need to snack in the afternoons that I’d become accustomed to as part of long distance running.  Of course, that could be because this is sort of the “off season” right now, and I’m running less (heal tibia, heal) than I normally do.  So we’ll see.  But for now, I definitely feel fantastic about these roasted vegetable salads, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve stumbled upon the secret to life.

Thanks for reading.

Nicaragua 2014: I may be too old, too vegan for fieldwork

Of all the trips I have taken to Nicaragua in my lifetime, this one definitely ranks in the top 5 most stressful.  After several years away from doing field research, I wondered if I still had it in me.  The only way I could deal with it was to approach this project as though it were an ultra marathon.  Packing involved a mix of eppendorf tubes, pipettes, Clif Bars, Gu, and Tailwind.  I made sure to put everything essential in my carry-on.  You never know when your checked luggage just won’t make it to Managua.

I wore the hat I planned on giving to Eduardo.

TSA confiscated my jar of peanut butter—the thing I’d been planning on to sustain me for ~7 days in the jungle—but they failed to notice my Peanut Butter Gu, peanut-containing Clif Bars, and an actual peanut butter sandwich we had packed in Will’s carry-on for him to eat for lunch.  

We had a shitty 2 plane rides, an uncomfortable night in Managua, a frenetic taxi ride to Rivas the next morning, and a gut-wreching ferry ride with a bunch of loud, chain smoking French tourists.  Still green around the gills from the boat (it was a very windy day and the lake was rough), I climbed into another hot taxi for a ~2.5 hour drive to Mérida.  On the way, I saw Simeon in the back of a plantain truck and we waved at each other.  Good to know he was still in town.

We arrived in Merida about 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and pretty much immediately, I got my field gear ready and went out to the jungle.  My predecessor on this project had done most of the work on her own (and all of it without local help); I wanted to see how feasible it would be for me to work solo as well.

Start with the low-hanging fruit.  I went to the forest I knew well, the one where I had done my dissertation research and logged over 1300 hours with the monkeys.  It was weird and everything looked different.  The gringos who began building an eco-lodge in 2007 (recall: their endeavors inadvertently killed Scooby and his mom) have expanded.  My trails were of course all gone.  The forest has had 7 more years to regenerate.  Nothing seemed the same.  But.  I found the monkeys, and even though Uno has most likely left this world, I was as sure as anything that it was the South Group.

I watched the monkeys and waited.  The objective of this project is to investigate howler health and nutrition by looking at the composition of gut microflora in their fecal samples.  Yes, feces.  My job was to collect monkey poop.  In all honestly, I had thought that finding the monkeys in each of the 5 forest locations I was supposed to sample would be the hard part, and that collecting the poop would be easy.  Howlers poop, it’s what they do.  And typically the way they do it is that the entire group poops at the same time, and then they get up and move.  I had been confident that if I could only find the monkeys, the poop would come easily.

Not so.  The monkeys were incredibly spread out (like 1 or 2 monkeys every 20-50 meters), and that made collecting the necessary 6 poop samples per group difficult.  I could only watch a couple of monkeys at a time, and even if I managed to see them poop, I had no idea where the poop of the other group members went.

Plus, it was the rainy season.  The vegetation is dense.  The forest is full of vines.  I quickly observed that in the case of arboreal primates, their poop sometimes doesn’t even hit the ground but rather lands on mats of leaves several meters above my head.

I had a panic attack.  There was no way I was going to be able to do this.

I left the forest just before it got dark and scary, and I went to Simeon’s house.  I surprised myself with how well I could speak Spanish when I needed to.  I explained the project and that I needed his help and somehow arranged for him to come out with me at 5am the next morning.

Then I went back to the hacienda, and while we were eating dinner, I got a surprise visit from Eduardo.  He had ridden the bus from Altagracia (he lives there with his grandparents now and is finishing high school), and he came back to Mérida just to see us.  He had to catch a bus at 4am the next morning to make it back in time for his classes.

I couldn’t stop hugging him.

I gave him the hat.  We made plans for him to come back again on Friday evening, and then on Saturday he and I would get up early and go to the Cascada to find the monkeys up there.  I was so happy to see him.

 All of us were together, even if just for a little while.  Love you forever, Eduardo.

The next morning came early, and I walked to Simeon’s in the dark.  We went up the camino and found the monkeys near where I’d left them the evening before (I do love the way howlers are so predictable).  We got 2 poop samples by 6am.  I felt a little better about the feasibility of the project, but we still needed 4 more samples from this group.  All we could do was wait and wait and wait for the monkeys to eat and poop again.  

The group was so spread out, and visibility was poor.  We managed to get our 6 samples by about 3 in the afternoon (note, this is 10 hours out in the forest), but damn it was hard.  I realized that if it was this hard to get samples in the forest that I knew, it would be impossible for me to get samples, by myself, in the forests that I didn’t.  I couldn’t do this without Simeon.  I told him I’d pay him whatever his usual salary was (he’s a volcano guide) if he came out with me for the week.  He agreed.

I went back to the hacienda, exhausted and so hungry I couldn’t even feel it anymore (I’d only eaten a Mojo Bar and 200 calories of Tailwind all day), and then spent a precarious night worrying about whether or not we’d be successful at the Cascada the next morning.

 

Eduardo did not return to Mérida, and this concerned me.  That kid’s word is as good as gold.  I hoped it was just a misunderstanding about the date/time of our trip up to the waterfall and we’d get it all sorted out later.

I was at Simeon’s house by 4:30 in the morning, and we walked for an hour in the dark towards San Ramon (~5km away).  He was fascinated by my Petzl headlamp.  Just as the sun rose we began trekking up a little sendero towards the cascada.  We moved very quickly, and it was tough.  It felt like Towers.  I was acutely aware that I had eaten next to nothing for the last 3 days.

We found a small group of monkeys fairly early along the sendero.  They were eating jocote jobo (Spondias mombin) fruit, and they had just gone to the bathroom.  I was ecstatic.  I collected some samples; even though this was not the group we had been looking for, at least it was something, and now I knew we would not be going back empty handed from this forest location.

 Jocote jobo fruit.

We kept climbing and exactly at our target GPS point along the waterfall trail, we found 2 more monkeys.  Miraculously, I got a sample from each of them.  Then they leapt through the tree crowns and crossed over an impassible ravine.  There was no way we could go after them, and even if we had have tried, we didn’t know if there was an entire group over there or just the original two.

We wandered around the cascada forest for a while, and Simeon found this petroglyph.

Then I made an executive decision.  There was no point in waiting around this location and staring in the direction where the monkeys had just vanished.  It was only 8 in the morning, so we had plenty of daylight left.  I decided we would go down to a different forest in San Ramon, where I was also supposed to get samples.  If we found the monkeys there and got poop, great.  Maybe we wouldn’t have to have another 3:45am wake up call to come back to this area.  If not, oh well.  Better luck tomorrow.

It took us a while, but we did find some monkeys.  Super spread out.  Simeon left me with the 3 monkeys we found and he circled the area looking for the rest of the group.  They were scattered through the forest in little clusters of 2 or 3, maybe 50 meters away from each other.

Simeon conducted some kind of real estate deal (don’t know how he managed to get cell signal here) and then made a broom while we were waiting for the monkeys to poop.  Eventually they did, and we got some samples.  It was less than what we needed, but it was better than nothing.  We’d been out in the forest for around 10 hours at this point, and it was time to call it a day.

It was about an hour and a half or two hour walk back home.  Simeon stopped off at Chico’s and bought a can of Toña—and he doesn’t even drink.  As we walked, he asked me, “Meli, estas mas tranquila ahora?” — was I calmer now that we had samples from the groups that were the farthest away from Mérida, the groups I had been the most nervous about getting samples from.  

I was hesitant to reply.  In one sense, yes.  We had technically gotten samples from 3 groups that day, but we had not gotten enough samples from any of them.  It was better than nothing, but maybe only marginally so.  And more than that, I could feel myself fading fast.  I wasn’t sleeping at night (loud tourists), I was subsisting largely on Clif Mojo Bars and Tailwind.  Simeon and I had walked around 25 kilometers that day.  I desperately needed a good night’s sleep and a decent meal (or several).  I wondered how on earth I had done this kind of thing for an entire year.  I hoped I could power through to finish off the remainder of the project, but I was beginning to feel too old, too vegan for fieldwork.

 Wait for it...

… and there it is.

Stay tuned for Part 2.