To arise in Ajoya in the morning and go to the river is to emerge from a cocoon. Life inside the village is so human, so animal, so much a thing of the soil, so full of suffering and of relief, But at the river life becomes magical, ethereal, enchanting.

This morning the river is rising after the rains. It has turned a yellow brown. It has long since risen above the spot where yesterday the women came to bale water from a hole dug among the rocks at the, river’s edge, and I wonder what the drinking water will be like during the days to come. Will it be the yellow, muddy water of the river? There is already so much sickness in the village, so much diarrhea. What will this water be like, washing over the very soil where the people go to defecate. In the night old Micaela, the abuela of the casa where I stay, put a bucket under the tile eves to catch the rain—good clean water from the sky—but it will never last until the river clears.

Now, upstream, I see two women, one with a square, gallon, metal drum, the other with two “ollas” wading out into the rushing yellow waters. There is a rocky bar still protruding from the center of the river, forming an island. They wade out onto the bar, letting their skirts drop. One of the women, about two feet from the edge of the bar, makes a hole by removing rocks and gravel and sand. Then. they stand, waiting. I look beyond the river, to the dark mountains.

At last it has stopped raining, and the clouds are beginning to break over the mountains. A few white puffs of lower clouds stand out like strips of cotton against the dark slopes.

In the stringy tree growing from the high bank on which I stand a chestnut colored titmouse alights, then flits to a lower branch in search of insects, his bright eye tipping this way and that. Beneath me, near the rushing water, a spotted sandpiper darts from one protruding mud bar to another.

One of the women, taking from her bucket a scoop made from half a gourd, carefully dips water from the hole in the rock bar. Little by little she fills the buckets and the drum. Each woman helps the other place the containers on their heads, and slowly they wade into the rushing water, barefooted, feeling their way for purchase on the rocky bottom, while the balanced buckets of water sway perilously but never fall. Reaching the near bank of the flooded river, the women have to pick their way through the thicket on the steep slope, for the rising waters have covered the path.

Behind me an old man, legs bowed from much riding of mules and burros, and perhaps from scarcity of milk in his childhood, approaches, eyeing me with curiosity, as I stand on my perch overlooking the river.

“Esta subiendo” I say, nodding to the river. The old man comes up to where I stand and looks down at the turbulent waters, then eyes the two women sorting their tray among the rocks and underbrush.

“Esta muy feo, el rio.” he says extending a dark, wrinkled hand.

“Sí,” I reply, and think to myself, “pero muy hermosa también.”

The women now pass us, winding their way up the steep path toward the village. The old man nods to the older woman, who, being the first to emerge from the brush onto the path, is now well ahead of the younger. “Muy feo, el rio,” he says.

The older woman, perhaps a little annoyed by so self-evident an observation, scarcely glances up from beneath her bucket and replies, “¡Pués claro!”

The half gourd floats on top of the full bucket. The water looks clear and clean.