Finally the weather realized that it has been in southwest Texas for the past couple of days and managed to stay relatively cloudless and in the upper 70s and 80s. It was bright enough yesterday afternoon for me to lay aside my brown, billed cap (which I do not wear with the bill askew or backwards) and don instead the broad-brim that resembles one issued for safari work. I had to toss it aside though in the middle of the adobe demonstration.
Yes, it was Saturday again and time to show visitors how to make sun-baked brick. The sun-baked part had good evidence from last week's specimen standing there, on its side, having been turned a couple of times to allow it to dry well enough for picking up and stacking.
A phone call right after we opened the Visitor Center at 9:30am had alerted me to anticipate a Ranger family with a 6 year old and her 4 year old brother in my audience. Knowing for certain that I'd have kids to mess in the mud with me actually made me eager for the demonstration. So, as soon as Jane was comfortable with a half hour or so of lone duty, I drove the Fire Blue F-150 to the corral for the bucket-full of horse apples and then on to the abandoned road to the river, three-quarters of a mile from the corral, for the tub of clay-silt. This time I had sense enough to leave the tub in the back of the pick-up where I loaded it by shovelful instead of trying to heft a hundred-weight of damp clay into the truck. You are right, I am not as dumb as I look. (You needn't say, 'You couldn't be,' as I've already heard that.)
Just before the Ranger family arrived, two white vans pulled into the parking lot and out tumbled about ten elementary-age boys. The boys raced to the picnic tables and claimed places well before their four male advisors got there to signal the time for opening knapsacks for lunch. Seeing that my anticipated audience had not arrived, I walked to the far end of the ramada (that's what a roofed shelter/porch is called here) and told the advisors that if the lunch ended in 15 minutes, they had arrived just in time for an adobe brick-making demo.
Just before the 1:30pm demo start-time, 6 year old, Lucy, and 4 year old, Isaiah arrived with their Ranger dad, mom and tiny baby brother, Samuel. I later learned that the Ranger family outing had been eagerly looked forward to by the children as it was a reward for especially good behavior and smiley faces on the behavior chart the past week; a chiminea fire with s'mores was to climax the occasion when they got back home in the evening.
So with a dozen kids, horse manure, a tub full of silt-clay and a hose without a nozzle on its business end, my boringly dry lecture about a building process with minimum impact upon the environment in arid climates became a party. I had only to ask once for help to have twenty bare hands and arms plunge with mine into the mixture. One boy watched, at first expressing disgust at getting his hands in horse poop, but within a moment there were a dozen hands-on, or hand-in, the project. Lucy elbowed boys aside so she could plunge in too.
I did have to express and enforce the only rule of the afternoon, "No throwing the mud on each other," even before all the clay was even moist. That was when I had to toss my safari hat aside too, as the adobe masons beside me became more and more excited about the process. All of us really got into it.
Over the giggles and chatter of my fellow adobe experts, I had no trouble explaining the tensile strength of this home-made construction material and the arcane origin of the word 'adobe' from the Arabic and Coptic to the adults in the gathering. By having no trouble, I mean that I was not gasping for breath like last week with mortar hoe in hand shoving the heavy mud in the wheelbarrow. The kids made my day! The 'Building Green' demonstration by Volunteer R.Payne, as described in the Park's weekly announcement, had become an event to rival celebrating a birthday at "Chuck-E-Cheese."
As the boys helped me lift the mold from the wet brick, they wanted to imprint it with their hand prints. One boy said, "Let's mark it with 'BC' for Baptist Church." That's when one of the adults introduced himself as pastor from Marathon Baptist Church. When one of the Anglo boys inscribe the 'BC,' it occurred to me to say, "How about 'IB' too, for Iglesia Bautista de Marathon!" Immediately one of the Hispanic boys incised that proud identity.
Lucy and Isaiah had brought along re-cycled plastic containers to mold their own brick for taking home for drying. The boys from the Baptist Church at Marathon, Texas, seventy miles north of the Park, took home some new knowledge and a healthy measure of ethnic pride. These kids did indeed make my day.
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