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On the morning of Palm Sunday, groups of men from neighboring villages set forth from shore in balsas. They assemble out in the lake close to the boundary between their respective reed beds. Organizing themselves into small groups, they hunt coots and other waterfowl with the liwi. The competition at times is friendly, though it can be accompanied by a certain amount of animosity as they shout insults to each other. Fights occasionally break out, though most villagers are eager to return to shore and to prepare for the feasting that always follows this hunt.
Should the visitor have missed this festival, there is still a good deal that can be seen any time between March and June, late in rains and early in dry season. This is the peak of the harvest season. The main tool for this task is a simple one, a long pole at one end of which a knife has been tied. A villager can use the knifeless end to push a boat or raft through the channels out to a plot of reeds. Standing at one end, with feet firmly planted, he or she-both males and females carry out this work-inverts the pole. It now serves as a scythe. The villager thrusts it into the water, and swings it to slice off several reeds. These actions require some strength, considerable coordination and a good sense of balance. Moreover, these movements must be performed rapidly, or else the blade will just push the reeds, rather than cut them. For the sweep of the knife to cut a number of reeds, the lower hand on the pole must describe a slightly larger curve than the upper hand. An experienced cutter also puts some strength of the back and abdominal muscles into the operation by rotating the shoulders and twisting the waist.. The lower body plays a part as well: at the same moment that the cutter swings the scythe, he or she must bend the knees--kept slightly flexed to permit this action--in order to compensate for the tendency of the sudden jerk of the heavy tool to make the balsa rock excessively. This work requires not only strength and skill but also patience, since the cutter must repeat the motions again and again, stopping only to retrieve the felled reeds that float on the surface and to propel the balsa through the water to a new spot. Depending on the quantity that has been harvested, the reeds can be loaded into the balsa, or massed into a raft of floating reeds that can be tied to it. The sense of witnessing living history continues even in the months after the totora has been harvested. During the dry season, the villagers lay out the totora on meadows and on the stubble of recently harvested fields. Broad fans of totora stems are a common sight along the lakeshore in these months. Other than drying, the reeds require little processing, since there are no leaves to strip off the stems. Though the totora loses a great deal of its weight as it dries, it does not shrink in volume. The pithy tissues of the inner portion of the stem turn into a firm mass, quite like styrofoam, while the outer layers of cells retain their tautness. When pressure is applied to dried reeds, they can bend, but it is difficult to break them, or even to split the outer layer of cells. This strength is a second advantage of the absence of leaves: totora lacks the remnant bud-scars that weaken the other species of reed that do have leaves. The villagers make good use of these light strong water-repellent stems. If tied at one end, bundles of reeds can be used, like shingles, to thatch roofs. If tied at both ends, these bundles can be lashed together to form rectangular mats, which often serve as mattresses. These mats are so strong that they can be rolled into cylinders for storing grain or potatoes. Small bundles of reeds can be gathered into large cigar-shaped bundles, three or four meters long and a bit under a meter wide; four of these large bundles can be tied with rope to make balsas. The visitors in search of finding the past alive in the present would be delighted by the bustle of activity at a roofing party, in which a few men venture out onto the framework of poles and sticks to arrange the reeds and tie them down with twine--itself another craft item, made from the tough bunch-grasses that grow on hillsides. They would also be charmed by the slower, steadier efforts of a balsa-maker, who passes twine around the bundles and laboriously tightens it, pressing one foot against the balsa and pulling up with a simple wooden hook, until the reeds are bound so tightly that no water can enter. These visitors, though, would be most impressed by another use of the reeds, the construction of floating islands. Some villagers cut reeds in the large totora beds in Puno Bay and make them into enormous mats, hundreds of square meters in area and a meter or so thick. Once or twice a year, the residents of these islands place freshly cut reeds on the top surface of these islands, to compensate for the gradual rotting of the waterlogged reeds on the bottom. The one-room houses are identical in shape to the rectangular, gable-roofed houses on land, with the single striking difference that they are made from reed mats. Several hundred households live in a dozen or so communities on these floating islands. The tourists that travel from the city of Puno to the floating islands have a strong sense of this living history, even if they have not seen totora being planted or harvested or worked. As they step off the motorboats onto slightly springy surface of the islands, they feel as if they are stepping as well out of the present into a remote unchanged past.
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