Wrong exit? From six smooth lanes to two rough ones, then a steep bend and a turn sharp right. The road did not quite end, but the track that went on mirrored the undulation of peaks, ridges, and a steep-sided canyon edging a small stream called Erosoleku, as though the route had been laid out by sure-footed donkeys. In late September, it turned suddenly cold in its shade. How could any town at all be in a place so tight, so precipitous, so barren? The road went on for six or seven miles, and we were about ready to decide we had gone wrong, when a square stone house appeared on the right, and then another. The land opened in front of us as though we were coming out of the neck of a funnel and into its cone.
A place was there indeed. The road wound into it. A right turn led up a steep hill to the church at the top of town. Above it stretched grass green pastures so steep that were you to fall from the top of them, you would likely roll straight to the bottom. And likely go on rolling. You would pass the old and much used battlemented church, lurch into the main plaza of Leitza, only distinguished from the rest of the town by the fact that it is almost flat and its tall walls have space for Basque graffiti; roll down around the bend past the village’s principal monument, the public laundry that has been there since time immemorial, and past one of the two hostals, run by the three generations of the family that live on the second floor; careen onto the main street again and carom off the bread and pastry shop with its fine handmade wooden clock showing a bear and a tree with the hour and second hands branches, a clock made by the owner of the store, who said he was a woodworker but got married, had kids, and, well, he needed a steady income. His chocolate rolls were big and sticky, and conversation at his place in the morning washed back and forth between Spanish and Basque. You could then barrel straight down the street keeping left, bounce off the jakatea, the restaurant where the wife ran the kitchen and husband did the waiting, past one hardware store, a furniture place, a post office, two cafés, two markets, two banks, another hostal at the crossroads, and land up at the bottom of town among the buildings of the factory where they turned plain paper into wallpaper and fine endpapers for books.
You have just rolled through all that there is of downtown Leitza. The whole township embraces about twenty-two square miles, or 14,000 acres, of which less than a tenth is the urban core. “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” said Professor Henry Higgins in the movie My Fair Lady, but that is a lie. The rain in Spain falls mainly in Leitza, about 2000 millimeters a year, or 79 inches. In late September, when most of Spain south of here is yellow and dry, Leitza is every shade of green. It rains without a moment’s notice, a little or a lot, and at any time at all, but seldom too much at once. At night rain pounds on the roof, with a sound like river rapids. In the morning, the sun rises. At ten a.m., a brief shower falls. If it is this steep and this wet, how come I see no gullies? How come so little erosion has occurred? One reason is that trees on the steep slopes were pollarded. Because the tree trunks and roots remained alive in the ground, resprouting, and because shepherds maintained unbroken pasture grass on the open lands, there is little or no soil erosion, even on the steepest slopes.
The town had been dying in the 1950s, when they talked the paper factory into opening here. There were a little more than fifteen hundred people left. Now there were more than three thousand. The schools were full of children, and so were the playgrounds. Every open space in town was laid out with a dense complicated vegetable garden, with several kinds of pole beans, many more of kale, and tomatoes and salad greens. It was autumn, and the late tomatoes were tented in hooped plastic covers. The walls of many houses were painted with whitewash, but the windows were all edged with quartered gray blocks of stone. From each balcony spilled a surprisingly orderly blanket of bright red, yellow, or blue pelargoniums and petunias. It was as if all the housekeepers in town had hung out their flower rugs to beat the dust from them. In disused corners and the back edges of buildings stood piles of logs, not cut wood, but whole tree trunks. Beside them were stacks of firewood split out of the balks. Oak, ash, beech, chestnut. What were they doing there?
There exists a fine map of the township of Leitza. It was researched, designed, laid out, and made by José Miguel Elosegui in 2014. It is as clean and detailed as a USDA quadrangle map, the sort that we used to carry to keep from getting lost in the backcountry. It’s an eight-fold map, about four feet high by three feet broad when fully open. It takes a dining room table to hold it. It is both an accurate topographical survey and a detailed road map. From its size, you would think it a map of Spain or at least of the whole Basque country, but it is simply a map of Leitza. The scale is about 3 inches to 1 kilometer.
The whole sheet is dense with names and symbols. It is a well of deep memory. Towers with twin feet are lime kilns. Tiny green phalli leaning to one side are hunting blinds. They are small elevated shacks that line all the hilltops and ridges, the favored place to hunt pigeons on their autumn migrations. There is a lottery to see who gets which blind, three hunters to a blind. There are more hunters than blinds, and everybody knows which are the best ones. (Prior to the lottery drawing, you may see an unusual number of men in church.) Accurately drawn steel-windmill forms are wind turbines. Red rectangles with a little black rectangle beside them are sheepfolds. Blue water drops are springs, blue rectangles water troughs. Lightning bolts in a circle are local electric-generating plants, many of which once supplied small-stream hydroelectric power to different parts of town, each serving a hillside. Black crosses in a circle mark sites that were iron forges. Warehouses are gray rectangles; houses and farmhouses are burnt-umber rectangles.
There are hundreds of names on the map. Ridges and peaks get names; creeks get names; hillsides and springs have names; valleys and passes have names. And almost every house or farm or borda (sheepfold) bears the name of the person who occupies it. There are eight ridges on the south edge of the township and each is named in its turn: Aldatzegi, Ipuru, Egiestu, Egimearra, Egiaundi, Isastiberde, Zurlandua, Egiluzea.
I had never met before a landscape so intimately known and named. Elosegui and his wife have known it a long time. When they first arrived in the 1950s, she had taught school in Gorriztaran, the prosperous farm valley in the southeast of town. The worthies had just installed an electric center, a water-powered generator in a shack about the size of a chicken coop, which gave the people on the hillside power enough to last until early evening. Then, they brought out the candles. A new school had also just opened, which meant that the kids of the district now had to walk only forty-five minutes each way to school rather than the two hours it took to go to school downtown.
Unfortunately, when the school had first opened, the Spanish government had sent teachers who spoke no Basque. (During the forty years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, it was officially illegal to speak Basque.) Imagine walking almost an hour to meet a teacher with whom you could exchange only a few intelligible words. José Miguel’s wife indeed spoke Basque, and she had a flair for communicating complex concepts to her young farm kids. To explain a thermometer, she boiled milk for them. They watched as the milk expanded, occupying more volume the hotter it got. “That is just like what happens inside a thermometer!” she explained. Of course, the children often came in tag teams, a boy one day and his big sister the next, their little brother the third. Things could get a little muddled. When she asked on a quiz how a thermometer worked, one bright lad wrote, “The thermometer is full of boiling milk.”
Leitza had the usual twentieth century: roads came, cars came, wars came, factories came. Once when I was there, a pan-European feminist bicycle tour roared through town to cheers in the public square. At that season of the year, you heard the chain saws in the woods all day long. But there is one thing that Leitza has not done. If you hold up the map of the township, almost three-quarters of what you see before you is owned in common by all the neighbors. Leitzalarrea (literally, the pasture of Leitza) and Haritzaunde (the garden of oaks), more than sixteen of the twenty-two square miles of the place, are bienes communes, or common goods.
No wonder there are so many names on the map, since each place has been lived in, polished, and passed on. In the map’s legend, the two smallest pica sets of names refer to “paraje” and to “lugar.” Both translate as “place,” but they are different. A paraje is bigger, explained José Miguel. “It contains at least a few lugares.” (Wanting to explain how out of the way and tiny our hero’s home was, Cervantes began Don Quixote with the words “En un lugar de La Mancha” or Somewhere in La Mancha.) On José Miguel´s map are noted two nested kinds of place in a space where we from another world would likely not put any name at all.
But much of what is best in our world comes from the one that persists in this mountain valley. The logs lying along the house walls in the middle of town are harvested from the commons by common right. A forester apportions what can be harvested each year. Each parcel amounts to five tons of wood. The rights are distributed in an annual lottery, and the winner of a section is responsible to cut and to remove the wood. When you enter the lottery, you pray to win a parcel uphill from the road, since it is easier to roll logs down than to drag them up. Where other towns make much of a soccer star or a battle fought nearby, Leitza remembers its laundry and its world-champion axe cutters. The woodland weaves the life of the town together, both in the present and in deep memory. The relationship between people and trees is intimate and active.
Right beside the square is the ancient laundry, the town’s one tourist attraction. The signage is attractive, and the accounts of the laundry’s use precise and detailed, a note of pride in each paragraph. It is a stone-walled enclosure, open to the air above, the walls pierced with large open windows. Inside is an elliptical basin punctuated on its raised edge with fifteen smooth, rectangular stone surfaces, each angled into the basin at a pitch that makes scrubbing easy. Beside each is a ledge for the wash bucket. The housewife put the dirtiest clothes—usually the sheets—into the bottom of the bucket, then the more lightly soiled things. On top of the clothes went a filter cloth. Onto the cloth she poured a few cups of ashes, made from the stems of pollarded beech and ash trees, sprinkling bay leaves on top. She poured hot water into the bucket through the ashes and the leaves. The ash created a slurry of potassium carbonate, the bay left a pest-repellent perfume. The hot solution soaked for hours, renewed once or twice with more hot water. Then, she released it into the common basin through holes in the bottom of the washtub. The wastewater would be either reused for someone else’s clothes or taken away for other housecleaning tasks. The clean sheets and clothes were set out on the grass of the steep pastures to dry and whiten in the sun.
By the old Plazaola railway station, right beside the paper plant, you could take a slight right turn onto a small dirt road that led out of town into Leitzalarrea. Almost immediately, pasture began. At the second hairpin turn lay the remains of a lime kiln. There oak and beech pollards had supplied the wood to turn limestone into quicklime. The kiln was a masonry structure with a chimney above and cooling chamber below. In the middle, you stacked a layer of stone, then a layer of wood, then a layer of stone, as many layers as could fit. Gorse and heather brands were used to start a slow fire. For five days, the fire had to burn slow and steady. The minders worked in shifts to keep it going. At the end, they began to clear out the ash and pull down the quicklime, cooling it and bagging it. It might be mixed with water and glue to make the whitewash for houses, or it might become a pH-raising fertilizer for farm fields. It was a cleaning agent and disinfectant. It went into the mix in the forge to make iron and the kiln to make glass.
Farther up the winding track, the verge was lined with young ash trees. All of them, when I was there, had just been pollarded. They were worked on a one- to two-year cycle, because the shepherd wanted their leaves for fodder more than their wood for heat. “You can always find a borda,” said José Miguel, “by looking for pollarded ash trees. Each one is surrounded by them.” The borda was the key to a way of life that has produced abundant sheep in northern Spain for at least three thousand years. It was a small stone barn built into a slope, so that you could access the top floor from the uphill side and the bottom floor from the downhill. It had a broad double door at either end. One end led into the enclosed winter pasture, the other into the larger landscape. Beside the borda was its hut, the chabola, where the shepherd stayed beside his sheep. This hut was a simple one-room rough-stone house, with a wooden door and a bench in front, but the roof was made out of broad flat stones. It could not be made with roof tiles like the borda itself. A tile roof on a human dwelling signifies ownership, and the chabola too was part of the commons, not a private holding. The shepherd and his family might say they owned the shack, but they did not own the land it sat on. They could not sell it or give it away. For nine months of the year, the sheep were at the borda, either in the fenced winter field or in the surrounding open pastures. They came down to the home farm in town at San José’s Day in March for the lambing, then climbed aloft again.
In much of Spain, even in other parts of Navarre, the flocks went a long distance to summer pastures, often on the limestone bowls of mountaintops, where the grass was fresh. The shift rested the home pastures and gave the sheep a cooler place to pass the warmest months. In Leitza, however, the heights were near the town, and the system so finely tuned that it was not necessary to go far away.
The rhythm of grazing and strict pollarding of ash trees kept the sheep lands of Leitzalarrea perennially productive. The preservation of thick-rooted native grasses on the hillsides—Agrostis capillaris, Agrostis curtisii, Festuca nigrescens, Potentilla erecta, Jasione laevis, Gentiana pneumonanthe, Danthonia decumbens, and Nardus stricta—prevented erosion. The very wet climate, with regular rain and fog, prospered the grasslands. The seasonal movement of sheep from one area to another and the limited number allowed on each pasture by the commons law gave the land regular rest.
Ash trees were the perennial fodder crop whose winter use further rested the grass. When you harvested the young stems, the trunk and branches of each tree survived, its roots holding the soil on the steep hills. Each tree might survive for hundreds of years. Whenever the shepherd needed a new ash, he rooted fresh twigs in spring.
Here was responsibility in the etymological sense. The word comes from the Latin responsum, meaning “answered” or “offered in return.” The system was not immune to abuse. Pastures might be periodically burned to keep off shrubs and thicken the grasses, but too much burning hurt the grasses, and erosion followed. Overgrazing had the same effect. Interestingly, efforts to improve the pasture by planting improved fodder, fertilizing, and watering it have also increased erosion. But when you followed the rules of the commons, the landscape remained intact, with its full productive capacity. The townspeople took from it, but at the same time offered in return. In the Ordenanza de comunales, the Law of the Commons, one provision states that in lieu of paying a fee to use the land, you might do auzolan, service for the common good. One form of auzolan was to manure the common pastures.
The one-year-old pollard stems of the ash trees were cut in October while they were still green and stored in the upper story of each borda. They were pushed down to feed the sheep from Christmas until March. When you see the one-year wood just before it is cut, there is a strange beauty to the attachment of each three- to five-foot-long sprout to its parent stem. Each rises from what looks like the nipple of a breast, and each can be imagined as a spurt of green milk, arrested in the moment of its emergence. A few sprouts may be left on the tree to reach two years of age. These grow to longer than six feet and are stiff enough to stand upright. In every vegetable garden in town, the poles support the beans.
Close-up of pollarded ash with one-year-old stems, ready to harvest for sheep fodder.
It was the season of fruit: apples, chestnuts, acorns, beechnuts. Sheep were on every hillside. Cattle grazed in a park among the picnic tables. Along a narrow stretch of twisting road, with steep drops to the west side, the cattle went in single file, picking up the fallen chestnuts. Uphill stretched a long green pasture, bordered by trees, mainly beeches, and all pollarded at about six feet high. The road wound up into a forest entirely of beech pollards. Here, Leitza got wood and charcoal for heating and for making glass and firing pots, but it also got the charcoal for a major medieval iron industry. By the thirteenth century, there were sixteen iron foundries in Leitzalarrea.
To have a foundry, you needed water, iron ore, and wood for charcoal, all in close proximity. Each foundry was located on the slopes of the commons to take advantage of this confluence of necessaries. The beech and oak pollards throughout Leitzalarrea yielded the wood, which was converted into charcoal. The ore was heated over the charcoal, until the slag separated from the iron, which fell into collecting tubs at the base of the foundry. The waterpower was harnessed with a waterwheel made from the wood of oak pollards, and used to drive hammers that shaped the molten mass. From this industry came nails, swords, knives, and axes.
In the Basque lands, the axe was a country man’s main tool. He used it for cutting, for hammering, for shaping, even for hoeing. Aiskolaris, the sport of axe cutting, in part kept the tradition alive.
It is a serious sport. In training, an axe cutters runs twenty or thirty miles per day, works out with weights, and spends the balance of the day practicing his cutting. He will do this for two or three months, seven days a week, leading up to the contest. Until the 1970s, the Basques were always world champions of this sport. They used axes made in Leitza or in nearby Urnieta. These had a carbon steel blade folded in the forge over a soft iron poll. In 1976, some Australians showed up with steel axes that had been industrially made in Manchester, England. They handily won the trophy. Not ones to stand for a pointless tradition, the Basques switched to the Manchester blades and won it back. The Urnieta maker studied the English tool, and he now makes an all-steel axe for the competition.
Way up on top of Leitzalarrea, you could look out west into the province of Guipuzcoa. It was the same country of mountains and steep slender valleys, but the change in the landscape over there was dramatic. The Guipuzcoans had adopted modern forestry in large parts of it, cutting out the native trees and substituting fast-growing conifers, a cash crop. There, 70 percent of the land was privately owned; here, 70 percent was owned in common. Those Guipuzcoan hillsides were furry with the even deep green of conifer plantation; the pastures were few and look barren. So it was not the uniqueness of place that made Leitza. It was the way that people treated the land. It was in large part the careful maintenance of the commons.
While José Miguel Elosegui and I were looking out, a pale green pickup truck rattled up behind us. Out climbed the brothers Esteban and Patxi. Both had the stocky build and broad chest that many Basque men share. One had thinning gray hair, the other was balding. They were both wearing rugby shirts—one striped green, one orange—with jeans and cross-track shoes. Each man was more than seventy years old, though neither would say just how much more. As younger men, they had been farmers and foresters. Patxi was an axe cutter who had won the world championship almost fifty years before. They had agreed to show me the speed and skill of competition axe cutting.
They pulled out a beech log from the truck, huffing and smiling. It was about twenty inches in diameter. Then they hoisted out a long box.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The axes,” Esteban replied.
He opened the box. Four axes were nested inside, each in its own niche. They then nailed four pieces of two-by-fours to the bottom side of the log, and set it in the levelest piece of ground they could find.
“How do you sharpen the axes,” I asked.
“With stones,” replied Esteban. “The blades must be sharp enough to shave with.”
To show that this was not a metaphor, Patxi held the axe he was hefting near the poll and gently ran the blade across his left forearm. One pass left it smooth, his gray-blond hair glistening as it fell.
Patxi jumped up on the stabilized log, spread his legs wide, and started to cut between them. He cut on the exhale. The huff of his breath and the whizzing of the axe head sounded together. The notch of the kerf was peculiarly made. One side was very steep, almost parallel to the log’s cross section, the other was at a very wide angle. I noticed that the effect of this shape was to launch the wood cut with each blow out of the kerf and onto the ground. That way, he wasted no time clearing the notch. He cut rapidly and steadily, but without hurry. In about a minute, he stopped, handed the axe to Esteban, and they changed places. The brother started the same rhythm. A minute later, Patxi was back in the saddle.
In under three minutes, the log fell neatly in two pieces. Watching this, I understood for the first time how it had been possible to make a world out of such hand tools. A small pollard cut would fall off in two blows. Even the rib of a ship, cut from a curved piece of oak twenty-four inches in diameter, might be reduced to its ship shape in a couple of hours.
Esteban showed me the line of the cuts in the kerf. There were only a pair of little ridges that showed how two cuts were made at a slightly different angle. “Those are the mistakes,” he said, with a smile. “Those are mine.” The rest looked as though it had been cut with a chain saw, two single smooth faces that were the result of maybe four hundred blows. This was skilled axe work. The two seventy-plus-year-old men were not even winded.
Few people were left to learn the skill now, but it has survived into the twenty-first century. When you looked across at Guipuzcoa and then back to the pollard mountain on which we stood, you could see that the modern change was not inevitable. One could choose relationship. One could choose responsibility. One could choose the commons. One could choose a life where head, heart, and hand might work in concert. It was not a Romantic or a nostalgic dream. It was an enterprise like any other, and maybe it was worth the hard work.