Sunday Dinner at the Gormans, Again

Well, I wrote my column for Skunk today--you research for three weeks, pull the best stories on the drug war, fact check to make sure you have the whole story and then write the damned column. BUTTTTT....today, after doing all that, I tossed the column and wrote a Drug War Follies about the idiocy of the zealots who are waging war on the new healthcare law in the US, about the unimaginable idiocy of the people waging a war on women and then put in one drug war horror story that made my freaking hair curl. That story was this: In February, police in upper Michigan were called regarding a domestic dispute at the home of a guy who has a three year old son. On arriving, the policeman saw that no one was hurt and no one wanted to press charges, so no arrests. The officer left. Newspaper accounts didn't explain it very well but I gathered that the dispute was between the child's father and mother.

But the officer thought he'd smelled marijuana and called Child Protective Services to report that he thought the father, whose house he'd visited, had been smoking. In an extravagant effort to protect the child from, god forbid, pot smoking, CPS got a court order to immediately remove the child from the premises based on the father having smoked pot in front of the child, thereby endangering him, despite that not having been reported by the officer.

A couple of hours later the police arrived with two CPS officers and the CPS officers tell the dad they're taking his child away because of marijuana. The father said--and I'm only guessing here--fat freaking chance.

The police reported that in the next few minutes the father took out a small pocket knife and lunged at them, forcing one of the officers to shoot him in the chest and kill him. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But damned sure that that father, when alive, even if he smoked pot in front of his kid was less likely to cause the three-year-old trauma than watching the police kill his dad right in front of him.

And then, of course, the autopsy showed no marijuana in the dead dad's system. None. And the police could find none in the house. Damn, well, the officer didn't say he'd seen anything, just that he'd thought he'd smelled marijuana.

So dad's dead and now the child will live in foster care for 15 years. Yeah, great solution.

Well, that was a very depressing story. But by luck, a friend called and said he was covering a story for the NY Times not far from here and wondered if he could stop by on his way back to Austin to take a driving break at dinner time.

I said sure.

So this is what I'm making:

Roasted Chicken Thighs with a touch of garlic;

Sauteed swordfish, fresh, in garlic, olive oil and capers on a bed of asparagus;

Basmati Rice;

Spaghetti squash with red pepper, garlic butter and basil;

A salad of red onion, fresh corn cut from the cob with red bell peppers in white vinegar;

Small portabella's stuffed with walnuts, celery and bluecheese.

That is one dandy feast. I think Chepa and the kids will come over, and maybe Italo and Sara and Taylor Rain, and maybe even Marco. If they do I'll have to add some steamed broccoli and cauliflower in place of their share of the asparagus since they don't like asparagus.

Here's how I make the stuff for anyone who wants a recipe:

Roast Chicken Thighs:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Wash thighs, slice open the meat on either side of the thigh bone.

Place in a hot saute' pan, meat down.

Put a bit of sea salt and cracked black pepper on the skin.

Turn after five minutes. Put a bit of olive oil that's infused with fresh garlic on the meat side.

Turn the chicken, remove from saute' pan and put in oven baking dish. Pour the pan juice over it and cook, uncovered, in the oven for an hour or until done. If you like, put a bit of parmesan cheese on the skin when nearly finished and baste with pan juices.

Swordfish:

Place swordfish steak(s) in very hot saute' pan that has a bit of oil in it. Sea salt and cracked black pepper on top side.

Turn after about 7 minutes, when underside is a nice brown.

Salt and Pepper the brown side, now up, and in three minutes put a tablespoon of diced garlic in olive oil on each steak. When that starts to fall off the steak into the pan, add 1/4 diced red onion (per steak) to pan. Make sure to stir onion and garlic so they don't burn.

Add diced red pepper to cooking garlic and onion.

Remove cooked swordfish from pan to plate, place on freshly steamed asparagus.

Add 1/2 small jar of capers, with juice, to pan veggies, cook 30 seconds, add a teaspoon of butter for each swordfish steak, pour sauce over swordfish, serve.

Spaghetti Squash:

Cut spaghetti squash in half, lengthwise. Remove seeds with spoon.

Score the spaghetti squash with a knife lengthwise five or six times.

Put dabs of butter, unsalted, around upper edge of squash. Put a touch of salt and pepper on the squash. Bake for 45 minutes or so at 350 F, or until squash is beginning to brown.

Carefully scrape squash (cause it's very freaking hot) into a saute' hot saute pan in which there is minced fresh garlic and a little olive oil. Add finely diced red pepper to pan juices with squash. Add freshly minced parsley, stir for two minutes and season to taste.

Stuffed Shrooms, Tonight's Way:

Take 8 small/medium portabellas. Pull stems and save. Wash shrooms, then dry with paper towel. Set in small baking dish.

Mince the shroom stems after washing. Mince one celery stalk. Mince 4 tablespoons of walnuts.

Put the minced shrrom stems, celery and walnuts in a hot saute' pan that has a bit of minced garlic and olive oil. Sautee till the celery is nearly see-through. Remove and put cooked things in a small bowl.

When cooked things have cooled a bit, add 4 generous table spoons of good crumbled blue cheese (pepper and lime if you like as well) and mix well. Stuff mushrooms with the mix, tossing any extra mix into the small baking dish around the shrooms.

Dab stuffed mushrooms with butter and bake for 17 minutes at 350 F.

Remove from heat, put stuffed shrooms on serving dish, perhaps on a bed of fresh basil or sauteed spinach or fresh radish slices, and put extra stuffing mix generously around the shrooms on the serving dish.

Red Onion, Red Pepper, Corn Salad:

Cook two or three ears of fresh corn. When done, pull from water and cut the kernels off the cob. Break up the kernel sections.

Slice one medium red onion in half. Slice lengthwise several times. Slice sideways once, so that your onion is now cut in thin slices, half a length each.

Place onions in a bowl with the corn kernels.

Slice a raw red bell pepper lengthwise, finely. Cut lengths in half. Add to onion/corn mix.

Add good white vinegar to cover, sea salt and cracked black pepper to taste.

This one will last a few days whether refrigerated or not. Just make sure it's covered.

I will leave the basmati rice and the asparagus to you.

Enjoy!

PS: Madeleina notes: And if it all sucks, go out and buy a pizza.

ME: Yeah, girl, like in Texas the pizza sucks. That's why I was cooking the feast...

Her: I know it sucks, Dad, but blue cheese? That sucks as bad as Texas pizza!

ME: Madeleina! You don't have permission to talk like that! You're a young lady, not a young hooligan...

Her: Right, old man. Whatever you say...

Quite a Week

Well, it's been quite a week. Good but hard.

I finished the cover story I was having a hard time doing and I think it came out okay. It is at fwweekly.com and the title is "Your Land is My Land" and I think it's worth a read for those of you who only know me via my blog or book. Though it was rushed at least two weeks before it might have been all that I wanted it to be, the story is still strong--in part due to my fantastic, if difficult editor, Gayle R. She's got a right. She's won both a Polk and a Pulitzer.

So that was good. I put it to bed Tuesday night.

Wednesday evening I fell asleep answering emails at 7 PM and unless Madeleina woke me I would have slept till 9 AM right there on the keyboard with keys embedded into my face. But she did and I went to sleep on the couch in my office and didn't wake till about 8 AM.

Thursday I worked on the new cover story due on Friday--at least in draft--and began to clean the house because a former guest was coming over Friday. I also spent an hour learning how to do a webinar because I had a 2 1/2 hour web cast to do today. And I never did one before.

Friday morning I scrubbed, vacuumed the house, washed the kitchen, laundry room and bathroom floors, scrubbed the cabinets in the kitchen, polished the wood furniture, then did a webinar sound check, then raced to Arlington to pick up an award at the Society of Professional Journalists (Fort Worth Chapter) annual dinner with Madeleina, which was very cool, then raced home to meet the former Amazon guest who came in for the night from Mexico on his way to Nashville.

We stayed up late drinking from a bottle of Mescal he brought me--nobody drunk, just having a few drinks--then got up this morning, made a ham/three cheese/onion/garlic/red pepper egg souffle for my guest, chatted, put him on his way and then did the webinar.

Along the way Chepa, the wife/ex-wife made off with a credit card of mine to buy a new tree for her yard, and I organized dinner for everybody.

Whew! I'm still pooped.

But it's been a cool week. I like it when I'm jammed and fight through the maze.

And I especially like it when my house is clean, smells clean, and the old stuff is polished to a bright sheen.

Have a great Saturday night, everybody! I'm gonna hit that couch and don't expect to be up for eight good hours.

PS: Oh, and Sierra painted one of my legs blue night before last. It's still blue, so I guess that means I've forgotten to shower.

I'll squeeze it in.

Ain't life and the living something grand???

I think so. And if I'm allowed, I'm asking for another 20 years. Yeah, or another 50. It can only get better and it's already there.

Now Madeleina is 15

Well, today is my daughter Madeleina's 15th. She's more like 35 but at the same time she's sometimes 10.

I never wanted kids. I worked hard to avoid them. But my life would not have been as rich as it has been without Italo, Marco and Madeleina. And without Sierra and Alexa, Chepa's new babies, who this minute are clamoring for new paint because they've gone through the good water colors I've given them. Twice. I'll pause for a second to replenish the colors.

Done. So really, my life would not be as rich. I might be better read, might quote a few people with a bit more statesmanship than I can, but I'll take changing diapers for their lessons over Byron anytime, and I like/admire Byron. Not sure I'd trade what I learned changing diapers over having read Beaudelaire in the original, but it's sure close.

None of that matters really. Tonight I celebrate my daughter Madeleina's entre' into her 16th year, having finished 15 of them to get here. So she's 15 now. And I'm proud of her as can be. She's out playing with Minute, the remaining goat, now, on the newly mowed lawn I've been working for days.

Ribs and chicken are in the oven. Asparagus are ready to plunge into steaming water and they've agreed to give up their spirit to her. Good rice with better garlic is nearly done. Madeleina's brothers will be here in an hour, after work. Someone will wrap the presents. Chepa will bring the cake, I hope. We'll sing a song of celebration. Madeleina, 15 today, will behave like a good 15 year old and resent it all.

Inside she'll love the celebration. Inside she'll revel. But 15 is a tender age: Not a child, not an adult. Delicate age.

Happy Birthday, Madeleina! We love you having come into our lives. You enrich us and I hope that at least some of what we, your family, and particularly your dad, does, enriches you as well.

Well, I'm Pooped

Well, it's Saturday, Holy Saturday, the night before the biggest day in all of Catholicism. In my house, growing up, while Christmas was more spectacular, the Resurrection was the deal that set everything apart, made man God with a capital G and all that jazz.

Been a long time since I was active in that faith. I've spent more time active in the Human Condition over the last 45 years than any organized religion, though, as I've said before, where I grew up being a catholic kid and an altar boy meant feeding old people, taking them for walks, painting houses the church was giving to poor families. And my mom always said, Ignore the ignorant in the church and just do good. That's what it's about, not the damned rules and all the other nonsense.

Mom was very cool. Devout, but cool.

Anyway, so it's the Saturday evening before Easter and I'm pooped. I have been working on a complex cover story for a couple of weeks now, and I promised it to my boss today. I knew I was lying when I made the promise. I'll have it for her Monday, about noon. We go to press Tuesday evening. Gonna be close, but some stories just need some time to steep a little. Too many ideas, too much interplay among the people you're quoting and then that desire to write a piece that will have a chance to send some ripples out to change the world a little. Not so much ego as demanding of myself that I do work worthy of the scope of the story.

So while I've gotten all the dozen interviews done, and while I've read hundreds of pages of court testimony from maybe 5 story-related trials, and while I have maybe seven years of background on the subject, it's still not ready to come out. It's like an egg in the huevera of a chicken. I don't know if you ever saw a laying chicken cut open, but she'll have one egg ready to drop, another behind it that's about three days from dropping, another behind that which won't be an egg for a week, another behind that.....it's a procession of maybe 1o things that are pretty likely to become eggs in various stages of growth, but only one is developed and is an egg and is ready to go. (I'm tempted to get political here and tell the people who think a fertilized egg is a human to go look at the insides of a laying chicken and then report back, but I'll stay away from anything so clear and to the point here...).

Anyway, so my egg, my story, isn't a story yet. It's a very complex zygote but won't have a life of its own till it comes on out tomorrow. If it does. I mean, if I pop an aneurism tonight, well, that story will never be born and that's all there is to it. So long as it depends on me it's not a person, I mean story, yet. And even then I wouldn't call it a person, I mean completed story, for at least a couple of years, until it's standing on its own without any of my help.

Let's get off the politics and back to the pooped. I've been trying to work the story idea into a story and the way I do that is with physical work: Wash kitchen floors, wash windows, cut lawn. Problem is, with all the rain we've had, the lawn, in large places, was maybe up to my knee. That's like what? A foot-and-a-half? More?

And I was not going to have anybody mow it with the riding mower because then it would need to be raked. So I did a couple of the sections Wednesday, Thursday, yesterday and today: two 80' by 50' sections, a 40' by 40' section, three or four 20' by 20' sections with the electric push mower. I was having to do maybe 10 feet at a time, back and forth three or four times, then empty the bag. And the bag was filled with maybe 35-40 pounds from each little 10 foot by 2 foot section. Know how much that weight came to? As Madeleina would say on YouTube: Do your homework! Do your homework!

Yes, if you do the math it works out to be several tons of cuttings/rain/dirt and maybe 12 hours to do those little patches. And there is another acre to go--though the riding mower will be fine for that as my wife/ex-wife Chepa says she loves to rake and has volunteered to do it. HA! It's another Lucy/Charlie Brown deal about to go down, I'm sure. She will never be here for the raking.

So now I'm sitting here stalling. I ought to do one more section, not as high, that's 90' by 60'. But I'm not looking forward to it. It's not as high but still gonna be a pain in the neck, back and everywhere else.

Screw me. Grow up, Gorman.

Okay, okay. I get your point. But how old do I have to be to get to have some (misogynist comment coming here) good looking woman in a bikini walking around in front of me while I mow, you know, to keep me interested? Does anybody ever get that? (Could be cute guys for the girls as well, and cute guys for the guys for gays and cute girls for the girls for the gay girls and so forth for the transsexual community and any group I've left out). I mean, wouldn't we all do better work if someone put that carrot on the proverbial stick? Why doesn't someone have an agency with a name like: Enthusiastic Work Help! or Work Can Be Fun.com, or whatever. Maybe a dog with a good cheese cake running in front of a person trying to lose weight to keep them running long enough to earn it. Or whatever.

But no! That would be too fun. Instead you just get editors who are gonna scream at you because the story is late. Or you eat the cheesecake and gain 10 pounds and don't bother to run at all. Or you just look at the lawn and think: God damn. Now that's a creation worthy of the Creator of Everything! I mean he/she put it there, so who am I to cut it?

I told you I was pooped. Forgive the wild ride/rant.

Have a wonderful Easter/Passover/holiday. I hope you all get 100 times the love that you put out and that the whole world feels the ripple effect from all that love.

Dinner Spoiler Alert: Burrito Recipe

Okay, in the spirit of sharing recipes, I'm having a burrito tonight.

First thing to do was roast a chicken. Cut it in half, put olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper on both sides, cook skin side up in an oven at 350 F, about an hour.

While that's cooking, make your pico de gallo: Dice a red onion, two or three Roma tomatoes, depending on size, three or four good scallions and 1/4 of a bunch of cilantro, well washed. Add all ingredients together and sprinkle with olive oil infused with fresh garlic--which, as you know if you read this blog, you should always have in the kitchen and on hand. Good fresh garlic, minced by hand, not garlic press and not pre-chopped at the supermarket. Nice stuff, chopped and put into olive oil. Do three or four heads of garlic every three days or so and you will never run out, even though you need it for everything you do other than pancakes or banana bread or basic scrambled eggs--though it adds something to that as well. To the garlic oil, cilantro, tomato, scallions and red onion add enough fresh squeezed lime juice to moisten well, or even cover, maybe the juice of two/three ripe limes. Put in a bit of pink sea salt and cracked black pepper.

When the chicken is done, pull some out and put it in your burrito/wrap. Add jalepenos if you like it hot. Add a couple of slices of fresh avocado or jungle guacamole if you have it. Add good tart beans (black beans, red beans, whatever beans you like). Add pico de gallo, without too much lemon juice. Add no-fat sour cream. Add freshly shredded sharp cheddar cheese.

Fold burrito skin so that it's closed. Put a paper towel around it (doubled over) to keep it from opening. Put a second paper towel around it to keep your hands from melting with the heat.

Place in a 350 F degree oven for 5-6 minutes, until cheese is bubbling.

Eat.

Whole thing comes to 600 calories and will fill you up for a dinner alone.

For a treat, I always steam spinach, then saute it in garlic/olive oil and add that. Just to make sure I've got some leafy green.

So the whole thing takes an hour, if you're starting with fresh chicken. If you're starting with left over cooked chicken, it takes about 15 minutes from start to clean up--and you have time to clean up while it cools off enough for you to eat it.

Which ain't bad for a basically very healthy meal. I mean, you can even skip the chicken, but if you include it you've got maybe 2-3 ounces of skinless chicken, two tablespoons of beans, two tablespoons of no-fat sour cream, , a tablespoon each of fresh tomato, scallion, red onion, cilantro and lime, two thin slices of fresh avocado, three ounces of steamed spinach in olive oil and garlic and two ounces of good cheddar in a 140 calorie piece of bread.

Eating good can be quick. And if you add a side of steamed broccoli or cauliflower or zucchini or yellow squash, well, you've got maybe three servings of veggies at one meal. And that's a good thing. Particularly if at least some of them are organic.

Manga!

PS: And if my friend Morgan, who doesn't eat meat unless he's in the jungle, was here, I'd probably put some hummus in the burrito instead of chicken.

And if my friend Emily (glucose Intolerant) was here, I'd probably use a corn burrito instead of a wheat one.

And if Sky Saxon, former lead singer of the Seeds ("You're Pushin' Too Hard" from a million years ago) who's a fructarian was here, I'd probably substitute organic apples, strawberries, peach slices and tangerine sections for everything and then wrap it in a fruit rollup!

See how easy it is to accommodate people?

Have a good night everyone. I'm having a blast.

P

Something I Told Morgan About Spirit Interaction

Okay, so my friend Morgan Maher, who illustrated my book and has put together the upcoming Evolver Series on Visionary Nutrition, asked me something in an email recently about how I felt about something or other. I forget how it happened but I answered him and forgot about it. Then today he surprised me by posting my response on Facebook. And I have to say I sounded like a decent and intelligent person in my response to the forgotten question. So here it is and I'm proud I said it because I believe it.

Visionary Nutrition - Essential Elements:

“I think that once a person is aware of the life in everything, they can begin to access the spirit of everything. And once they can do that they can interact with those spirits. I'm talking about the spirit of the creek, the bricks in your house, the hundreds of spirits roaming your kitchen. This universe is full full full of life and life force. The roll of shamanic knowledge for us westerners introduced to those spirits is to spread that knowledge, make communication easier.

And if we can do that--a big task, no doubt--then the way people interact with the world and the spirits of the world and universe will change, automatically, from one of dominance to one of cooperation. And when we, mankind, begin interacting with the world, rather than trying to dominate it, well, I think mankind will be better off. The world and its spirits don't really care if we do, for the most part. Trees will be here long after we're gone, and so will stones and bricks and clouds and the moon. So it's really up to us to take an interest if we are to make the friendship of those spirits. And thus far, for most of us throughout mankind's short history on this planet, that effort has not been made. Which has left us losing out on so much we might have learned. Who knows what we have missed simply by not asking a plant what benefit it might have for mankind, rather than saying "tree, chop it and burn it for fire."

I think the universe has all the secrets of the universe. And our arrogance in trying to continually conquer the universe rather than communicate with it, has kept us from being taught those secrets. And how delicious they might be!”

Upcoming - Visionary Nutrition: Enhancing Your Health in a Psychedelic World

Another Ayahuasca Question I Tried to Answer

Someone wrote me today saying that he/she was suffering very bad pain in their solar plexus for a full day or two following the drinking of ayahuasca. I don't know the person and don't even know if they are drinking traditional ayahuasca or some syrian rue analogue. Still, I tried to come up with a reason they might be suffering so deeply following medicine sessions. Here's what I wrote:

Hello. First off, are you drinking traditional ayahuasca or something else? If it's traditional, do you know what any admixtures are, like lupuna negro, chiric sanango, catawa or what have you? Now, you say you get sick after eating food. How long after ceremony do you eat? I'm assuming your stomach is empty for at least say, 8 hours before ceremony--except for some simple sugarless tea perhaps. I let my guests eat after ceremony but limit it to a couple of small slices of fresh papaya with lime juice and maybe two or three bland crackers, nothing more. If you are eating something else, that might be the cause. Now, if it's traditional medicine, it will have some basic woody residue in it. Even if you don't vomit during ceremony you need to eliminate that before going to bed. You can't digest it, so puke it up with fingers down your throat. Also, in the AM after a ceremony, it's very important, in my world, anyway, to get to a stream or river and get your head under it three distinct times to close up your corona--which prohibits unwanted spirits from seeing the opening and coming inside. All that aside: The key think will probably be that your solar plexus is where you store your pent up pain, anguish, fear, desires and so forth. It holds things we don't know we're holding--like the time (and pardon me but this is an example that works for most people) when your mother cut you off from breast feeding. For the first few days/months you were alive there was this beautiful creature near you who nurtured you warmly. And then one day she said "no more" and never again nurtured you that way. You don't think most of us humans suffered from that? Got confused by that absolute rejection? Worse, we couldn't put it into words, and anything we couldn't put into words as a baby, we cannot put into words as an adult. But we were freaking rejected. That's the sort of pain we hold in our solar plexus and need to eliminate by vomiting it up on ayahuasca. That pain serves no purpose for who we are as adults. And since we can't even explain it and don't even know we have it, it's just dead weight. So the pain in your solar plexus might be from the need to eliminate some serious pain/dashed dreams/guilt over things you've done to people but which you have not vomited up. Now there is no blame in not vomiting. Not everyone does it, so no sweat. But you should know that an awful lot of people do not allow themselves to eliminate those pains. They hold them closely as if they remain important to us. I don't know you so I certainly am not suggesting you are doing that. But check in with yourself to see if you might be doing that. Because if for one reason or another there is bile in your life that you need to eliminate and that is not being eliminated, if there is bile that is coming up to the forefront and not leaving for one reason or another, well, that could well be a cause of the pain following the medicine. Does any of this make sense or resonate? I hope it does, even if it doesn't directly apply. I hope it suggests something to you to look into and that on subsequent visits with the medicine you can avoid prolonged physical pain afterward. Peter G

Ayahuasca Question I Answered for Someone

This morning on a forum where I occasionally post, someone posed the question of what ayahuasca--the remarkable medicine of the Amazon--was cooked in prior to the introduction of metal pots in that part of the world. So here was my answer, to which I added in a second post. Might be of interest. Hope so.

AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY CLAUDIA!!!!!! I hope it's a great year!

I can't swear that ayahuasca was cooked in them, but certainly clay pots were a standard in Amazonia for cooking until quite recently. The Auchiño (spelling) still use black clay "pans" over fire to cook their ibu coca; the Matses used--and some still do--clay pots over fire to cook down the inner bark of the macambo tree to make their nu-nu; my ex-wife always preferred black clay pots to cook rice in--over a gas fire in New York--to stainless steel. They crack and don't last long, but it only takes a few minutes for people like the Matses or my ex to make a new one--and a bit of time to get it sun-fired to be able to withstand the heat from fire--so I imagine that those same clay pots would have been utilized for making ayahuasca. The trick with clay pots, when I've seen them used, is that they are generally raised a few inches above direct contact with the flames to prevent cracking during cooking. And they last longest when cooked over red hot coals rather than actual flame.

TO THAT, I added this in a second post:

Just a side note: There is very little evidence of anything historical in a place like northwest Amazonia because there really is no stone on the Ucayali or upper Amazon. Even the stones used to sharpen machetes on the river come down from Yurimaguas and the Andean foothills on large rafts to be sold on the river. And while snuff materials in the mountains may last, traditionally for the Matses you just hollow out a reed, use it for a day or two; it cracks, you toss it and hollow out another.
For Westerners with a sense of permanence that might seem like a pain in the neck--having to replace everything from clay pots to houses to bows/arrows/blowguns/rafts/canoes with regularity, but in a place like much of the Amazon, it really gave people the freedom to move about to look for better hunting areas, more arable areas and so forth. When Papa Viejo and his several wives moved off the Aucayacu maybe 20 years ago, he simply set fire to his houses, left everything but a couple of machetes, an axe, his shotgun, a few metal pots and some clothing, and he and his wives and kids walked back to the Brazilian side to build a new camp. These days, with too many permanent and semi-permanent goods like lots of metal pots, small motors, gas cans, sometimes radios and even occasional television sets with satellite reception, well, those people cannot just pick up and leave anymore. The things they've come to accept and depend on have become an anchor and have forced many people, both mestizos and indigenous alike, to settle down and become dependent on an agrarian lifestyle, rather than a lifestyle that might have included some hunting/fishing/gathering and movement when the time was right.