Day 9 or God Bless Immodium

Notes on Saturday June, 27, 2009

If it is possible to have a full-on beef hangover, I had one this morning. Last night's beef and beer binge has left a large food baby in my stomach which necessitaed a morning long camp out in the bathroom.

Problem. In Brazil you don't flush your toilet paper. You put it in a trash bin right next to the toilet. True, this concept was pretty gross and inexplicable at first, but as long as you have the vacation constipation and you are just peeing all the time, it's really NBD. But then the Amazonian fruits and the indigenous vegetables do their thing, and needless to say the vacation constipation has come to an earth shattering end. And then you are mortified about your horrifically skid marked toilet paper decorating the top of the trash bin and you spend fifteen minutes arranging a layer of clean paper on top so the poor maid who has to empty it doesn't look at the remnants your intestinal discards and say to herself in Portuguese, "Damn girl, what did you eat?"

I don't know what it is. Is my body rejecting the hormone and antibotic free meat? Is it rebelling against the unprocessed carbohydrates and preservative free vitamin laden fruits and veg? Is it protesting the free range chicken? the fresh milk? the organic coffee? the fresh squeezed juices? Are my intestines screaming, "I want my high fructose corn syrup back!"? What gives? How much more of this can I take? And it's even more embarrassing because today everyone was waiting for me downstairs to go on an excursion. When I finally escaped the bathroom I found everyone outside already with the cars out waiting to go. I didn't know how to say, "I was upstairs shitting my intestines out my ass" in Portuguese, so I just shrugged and said "desculpe" (sorry) and got in the car three shades of red.

They say one of the hallmarks of an old person is if you sit around with your other old people friends and discuss the nature and frequency of your bowel movements. I guess Rachel and I qualify. We look at each other, shake our heads in disbelief and say "Jesus girl, what did we eat?" Then we go pop and Immodium. I am not sure what's preferable, the vacation constipation or the vacation constipation liberation. One thing is for sure, my poor butt is endlessly on fire.

When I did finally leave the bathroom we piled into a couple of car's and headed out of town, up into the mountains. Rodrigo's parents are buying a farm. The Godfather, Ze, is an agronomist by trade. He helps farmers get loans from the Brazilian government by signing off on their farm projects. Basically, Ze gets paid to spend the government's money. Pretty good deal. But now Ze wants his own farm, his own little piece of paradise where he can build a farm house with an enormous kitchen and an even better restaurant.

The farm he has his eye on is six or seven km from town. We bounce over unpaved red dirt roads, we kick up a clouds of orange dust, we rumble across more wood plank bridges that don't look strong enough to hold the weight of a cat, let alone a car, and we pass other farms with coffee beans spread out on wide flat pavements drying in the sun. When we arrive and THE farm, my jaw drops in the dirt. This ain't Anutie Em's farm, Dorothy. This is a coffee farm, high and verdent and lush. It looks like what I think Hawaii might look like having never been there.

We spent the day wending through the dense coffee bushes, eating citrus straight from the tree, admiring the papaya, pineapple, apple, banana, orange trees. We found mandioca root (the staple of the diet) peppers, herbs, avocados, raspberries. I ate a ripe coffee bean (it tasted like persimmon). Diego took a machete to a sugar cane stalk. He hacked it down, whittled the outer husk away, and cut a chunk for each of us. You are supposed to wedge the chunk into your back teeth and bite down, letting the sweet juice explode over your tongue. I liked it, even though the cane was fibrous and hard and I had little sugar cane splinters in my mouth I had to keep spitting out. We drank mineral water from a spring. I pointed to a colorful rooster and said "Chupa cabra" to Ze and he chuckled and shook his head.

Then we climbed a hillside to the site where Ze and Mariza want to build the new farm house (a.k.a. the future vacation spot of yours truly if I can manage to get adopted as the long lost white cousin, or I can just wrangle another invitation). The view from the hillside was made by God herself and Rachel and I salivated over the notion of waking up to that outside your window every morning. From that spot on the hillside you could see all of the valley and the mountains beyond, the coffee bushes draping the hillsides like those netted Christmas lights, the mist shrouding the highest peaks.

Rodrigo mentioned that this part of Espirito Santo is so overlooked that scientists discovered three new species of plant and animal here in the last few years. And Rachel and I marveled that we are very likely the first outsiders to set foot on this land since the Portuguese moved through. (Seriously, the majority of the people in Iuna have never seen a foreigner). It makes me feel like an explorer, like a pioneer, like a brave adventuress off scouting unknown, unseen lands and I get giddy with the idea of it.

But thank God I get to climb back into a Fiat and not a conestoga wagon and ride back to town in relative comfort and sit on a real toilet for the rest of the day with my intestinal affliction where I don't have to wipe with banana leaves. This is mercy indeed.