The Year of Harvests

I heard somewhere that the Year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac calendar is a year of harvest. Through labor and dedication, the Ox helps the land bear fruit. This second year in the 12 year Chinese cycle, our third year in the forest, has pushed us toward the harvesting of various resources in Los Brujos: drinking water from our stream at the end of January, honey from our bees in March, the first eggs from our chickens in April, and now in the budding spring of October, enough solar energy to recharge a computer to connect our patch of forest to the digital age. It may seem odd to place basic water and food achievements on equal footing with something so seemingly mundane as internet communication, but if we can not share our journey, how can we inspire others to dream and seek and imagine into being their own adventures?

We have spent so much time and energy in just establishing our presence and ensuring our comfortable survival in Los Brujos over the past two years that communicating the experience, demonstrating the transformation in words and images and dialogue has been an afterthought or something scribbled in the night into a journal and not shared beyond the forest’s borders. It is my hope the our launching some of the stories from Los Brujos into the ethers of the digital internet will reconnect us, will help to inspire us and expand our dreams as well as those of others. I have come to understand in my few years of technological hiatus that the worldwide web is exactly that: a channeling of a modern consciousness, training wheels for a telepathic mind. It is that imaginative inspiration I next wish to harvest…. But in the meantime, a special note about how we harvested our drinking water:

The Atlas Ram Pump is an ingenious invention which pumps water without the use of external energy sources, only the kinetic energy of falling water. We used the design outlined by Don Wilson in his book All About Hydraulic Ram Pumps and have had amazing success, even through a severe summer drought which limited our water pumping to only an hour a day. Nearly all visitors to Los Brujos at the end of January this year actively helped assemble our system, whether by hauling water tanks, gathering stones and running pipe, or by building platforms and piecing together the pump itself, altered check-valves and tightened fittings. All the pieces are common items found in any hardware store (the pressure tank is actually just a bicycle tire inflated inside a confining PVC tube) and can be assembled without the use of power tools. It is an ideal way to pump water from a stream or spring source, using gentle slopes to create the funnel of pressure necessary to run the pump, and best of all, by assembling it ourselves we know exactly how to maintain or trouble-shoot the system. Our Atlas system utilizes a 1000 liter cistern that collects the water from our spring source through a filter and then water falling about 3 meters from the cistern through a 15 meter drive pipe to the Atlas pump is pumped vertically 30 meters over the distance of approximately 100 meters to the water tank above our cabins, supplying fresh drinking water to our home. The Atlas is only about 10-15% efficient in pumping water since most of the water that descends the drive pipe is used as kinetic energy to make the pump function so that, in our case, we pump approximately 100 liters in an hour. This sounds like very little, but it really adds up, especially since the past two years of water trials have ingrained in us a new appreciation for water scarcity. We are very conscious of our water use and needs and regularly consume our harvested rainwater for whatever cleaning or flushing or watering needs as appropriate and available. I hope to build a second Atlas pump further down our stream where we have greater water flow; animal and forest traffic may not warrant this water useful for drinking purposes, but it's a perfect source for agricultural water needs in the summer months. May the harvest continue.