Sitting on the porch of el Tul y Sol, a delightful French restaurant on the shore of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, I enjoy a cup of coffee roasted by the owner. The view might be right out of National Geographic. The water glistens sparkling clear. The large high altitude lake remains trapped between volcanoes just behind the coastal range. The deep clean water invites swimming and a water taxi ride to the few villages that shadow the shoreline. Tall water grass lines the shore where I am sitting, separated by an old wooden dock and a small beach. Shade trees frame the view. This area delineates the roadways and Antigua to the south from Mayan people and mountainous country to the north. Native dress is the rule among the women, with colors characteristic of their village.
The sun warms the well-kept lawn and reflects off the trees, the tall grass and the water. A breeze cools the air and rustles the leaves. A young woman in clean bright native dress walks onto the lawn below carrying a very large bag in a woven basket balanced on her head. I am surprised when she stops right there. Putting down her load, which is obviously heavy, she spreads out a canvas about six feet square. She opens the bag and fills the intricately woven basket with linen or silken colored beans. She then holds the basket over her head pouring the beans into the wind so that they fall at her feet on the canvas. The most amazing and colorful sight unfolds as the silken chaff blows away from the beans igniting the air in a cloud of reflected sunshine. The golden brown beans pile up at her feet while the silk piles up several feet away. Amazingly, this goes on all morning in a graceful and untiring ballet danced to a distant glare of village music and the chirp of nearby tree frogs.
The choice coffee beans, now in the gold, provide our hosts with quality beans for their roasting. These beans come from higher on the volcanic mountainside from patches that belong by tradition to various families. At harvest, time buyers ride the water taxi buying hundred pound bags from the dock. The color and the haggling can be imagined. This setting with distant volcanoes forming the head of an imagined elephant was the front cover of Antoine De Saint Exupéry’s book, The Prince.
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