Morning Coffee

RTGFKAR returns with this entry:


Coffee. You know, that brown ubiquitous liquid found all over America in cafes, restaurants, Starbucks and Peabodys everywhere. Probably not a home in a thousand doesn’t have a Mr Coffee or a Braun coffeemaker at the least, these days maybe more likely a cappuccino maker with steam doohickeys and milk scalders and cinnamon infusers galore.

Coffee here in Panama is everywhere. At least in the mountain region around Boquete. The most recent crop of Geisha coffee sold for $130 a pound at auction, other Panamanian coffee goes for a mere $7 a pound. Doc buys our Ruiz coffee at about half that, direct from the coffee plant. By which I mean the coffee processing place, not the actual plant. The actual plant is everywhere here. If there’s a piece of land bigger than six square inches, someone has planted coffee on it. And it doesn’t even have to be level! There is coffee growing on land nearly vertical. The pickers must start at the top and freefall through the plants, grasping at what they can as they fall by.

Our property has coffee galore. The half acre was 90% coffee. A few plaintains and bananas and the odd limon (lime) tree completed the inventory. The builder sliced a notch into the hillside to level a place for the house, leaving a plateau overlooking the remaining quarter acre of coffee.

Coffee plants are OK. They have pretty, glossy leaves and I hear they have fragrant, orangeish-smelling blossoms before the coffee bean berries come out. But our soon-to-be patio looks out over the lower half of the property, which is a sea of coffee trees. I would like a little variety. Especially after seeing several friends’ landscaping on similar pieces of land.

Garden design was in order. We were supplied with the land plot, which showed nicely drawn lines with neat numbers attached to them, but looking out over the jungle of coffee, they meant little. A bit of hands-on was called for.

So, last Sunday, being an off day for the house laborers and having the site all to myself, I procured the household machete and a sharpener and wandered off to the site. Now, in Denver or Brooklyn perhaps, walking along the street carrying a sixteen inch wickedly sharpened blade might draw more attention than the occasional “Hola” or “Bueno”, but not here in Boquete.

Reaching the property, I elected to start from the bottom up, clearing a way from the driveway to the plateau to get an idea of the lay of the land. I hadn’t taken machete 101, but how hard could it be?

If you remember the old Juan Valdez commercials, Juan walked his burro through neat rows of shoulder-high coffee plants, picking only the finest, ripest beans for the best Columbian blend. Juan was nowhere to be found. Nor were neat rows of shoulder-high bushes. These plants had been planted years ago and the thick, rich volcanic soil had been very very good to them. Many towered over my head and joined together into bowers of impenetrable greenery.

Now, in a battle of machete vs. coffee plant the machete is hands down the favorite. Singing steel, flashing blade in the morning sun, a storm of flying slivers of leaf and limb of rubiaceae arabica everywhere. Within minutes I was lost. Sure I was only fifty feet away from the road and probably less to the plateau, but the clever coffee had cunningly closed in behind me and cut me off.

I didn’t know if I was on my land or the neighboring Indian’s or our landlord’s acres, destroying his $7 a pound crop with every swing. I stopped and let the flying flora settle around me and became aware of another factor that I might have taken into account had I thought about it. Friction. The machete fits nicely into one’s hand and each satisfying “Thwack!” clears a limb or two away, but the wooden handle also rubs a little on your skin with each swing.

I retraced my steps through the debris, nursing the small blisters that I knew would break and annoy me for the next week or so. “I demand a rematch!” I snarled at the unaffected wall of greenery. Suitably chastised, the plants knew better than to answer. I went home for a cup of tea.