Point Pedro Physical and Social

The lane we're staying on, First Cross Street, is a swayback downhill from the beach, which we're close to, to a midpoint between here and the bus stand. After its lowest point it moves uphill past the Fish Market and a few small stores, one of which blares music all morning, on to the Central Bus Station, called the "bus stand" here. 

The bus stand is not a perfect square but streets radiate off it as if it were. The Bank of Ceylon is through a gate like portal on one corner. At the far corner from our entry into the bus stand and market is Pathrakali Kovil Lane, which dips straight down into the curved narrow streets of the old city. 

All I saw at the entrance to this lane was the kovil itself but Janet, who has been noticing the many open-air tailors, noticed that there were several tailors just inside the lane. 

Was old Point Pedro walked and gated? The entry to Pathrakali Kovil Lane is so narrow and curved you might think so. Another street, along the library, has a well-constructed portal, maybe built by the Dutch, that suggests an urban composition that's not so obvious in other Sri Lankan towns. 

Point Pedro was hard hit by the. 2004 tsunami. It's not difficult to see that the central market, around which streets radiate, was built higher than the rest of town and some distance from the sea. It's basically on a hill. Was this where the ancient settlement was established? How long ago?

We walked out of town on the main road headed south-southwest. It was an interesting amalgam of shops and buildings until the road widened and started roaring with trucks. We backtracked a bit and turned east on an unmarked road. 

It felt like we had gone far enough, and Janet felt fresh in the not-too-harsh sun, for us to go a bit farther. We were on a very quiet country lane in the far suburbs of Point Pedro and the road was easy to take. As we pushed east I decided to try for Vallipuram, 5km southeast of town, where a large kovil complex provided a good goal. 

Believe it or not we made it there, first stopping at a crossroads once marked but now unintelligible. Up there (and this was high ground again) was a kovil devoted to Hanuman, the monkey god. At least out in front there he was, caged in two different cages, regally covered with rolled betel leaves. Is he the mens' god?

Here we turned south again, clueless except that the signpost had indicated, weakly, that Point Pedro was in the opposite direction. Past plantations of same-age palmyras, past sand dunes and scrub on our left, with the sea just the other side of their golden tops, past low-lying rice fields, fallow now. Finally a sign indicated the way to the kovil, one of whose structures we could just make out at the top of the trees. 

A week of celebrations ended a few days ago and the grounds were covered in trash. Flies everywhere made the idea of stopping for a drink at one of the two or three tiny stands less than exciting. At the kovil entrance a beggar accosted us. The "grounds" themselves, fenced in, did not reveal any exciting structures. And we had used up our exploration energy on the walk over. So we decided to wait for a bus. We had seen a few on the road heading in the opposite direction to Point Pedro. 

The air grew still and thick, the flies worse than ever. The stifling sky was neither bright nor dark but there were no shadows. A drop or two of rain fell. A shopkeeper invited is in for shelter. He told us a bus would come at 11:30. We waited until almost noon and there was the bus. Practically empty where others had been full. 

We each got a window seat as the bus roared past sights we had taken in on our walk. No more passengers got on or off. Almost into town, across from a hardware store, the bus stopped and the conductor got out. That was about a ten minute wait, with only one other passenger and the driver on board. As we rolled into town at the bus stand I offered the conductor payment, which he hadn't collected. He nodded that the ride was free so we got down into town. 

After buying water and some snacks we started down the First Cross Street, where rain was picking up. Just passing our hosts' place they waved and smiled, probably relieved that the foreigners were accounted for and safe from the rain. 

Imagine thousands of people without air conditioning!

We found ourselves in Point Pedro in Sri Lanka's far north, a place which, if it has air conditioning, I haven't seen it. As a matter of fact we were in Jaffna just before this, a boiling hot place that even I had trouble coping with. (I chose Sri Lanka for my Fulbright partly because I wanted to be free of the cold for a year. So far it's worked). 

Our place in Jaffna had AC but we never felt the need to turn it on. Could be the way our guesthouse was constructed, kind of like a tube that pulls breezes through it. 

Come to think of it we've noticed the same thing in Point Pedro. We have breakfast and dinner at our hosts' place and the great Sri Lankan food is the only thing that's fiery. Their house is also shaped like a tube, with lots of spaces for air circulation. 

I think people in Sri Lanka have already forgotten what we'll never learn in the West. Our house on Boston, true blue Yankee vernacular architecture, pulls heat up from the ground floor straight to the top of the house. Can't keep the place warm enough. At least not on our budget. I guess in the days of "unlimited" wood or coal or oil you could heat a place like ours, only at the cost of incredible waste. Same thing goes for the place my parents lived in in Arizona. Solar panels might as well have been outlawed. Maybe they were. Only way to keep a place cool was to air condition it. Unlimited electricity anyone? What is it about Americans that we build our spaces so wastefully?

Here in Sri Lanka, a poor country, people are rich with vernacular building conditions that simply work. And work simply. Let the air in. Let it circulate. To us, a ceiling fan is a great luxury. But I think these places worked before electricity became available. 

Yes houses here are built in the shade of trees. But don't try to tell me that's a rule of thumb we should use in New England. My neighbor, an urban designer yet, keeps two huge overages Norway spruce that abut our property. They drip sap on our house, drop their cones, twigs, and needles into our gutter, and act as a squirrel highway, encouraging the critters to dig and delve in our roof. Oh they do shade that part of the house. So much so that we have to keep a dehumidifier running there since it never dries out. I have a running email correspondence recorded for the day one of Ross's trees blows into our place in a storm. The insurance lawyers will be able to see how many times I asked him nicely to take down these aging, wholly inappropriate trees. 

I guess that's one more thing about American "neighborliness." It ends where you want it to. So our other next door neighbor, whose house was horribly designed to soak up the sun on a summer afternoon, simply "has" to run her AC when the thermometer creeps above 75. Speaking of '75 that's about the time her place was built and her AC units installed. Every single nice day of summer we are in the direct line of their sound exhaust. Maybe she could take a little more responsibility for her space and put a central AC unit in her back yard, joining the world of 2015 Instead of making the rest of the world suffer so she can stay cool.

Oh no you've started me on my usual diatribe. But like it or not, it's prompted by what I've seen here in Sri Lanka. A harsh climate, relatively poor resources, and architectural innovations that are hundreds of years old used in a sustainable, balanced way that spares the neighbors and the environment.  

It's not that there aren't problems. It's appalling how much burning goes on here in the countryside. Garbage burning, brush burning, agricultural burning, and who knows what else. People all around me are coughing and hacking and sneezing. And it's not pleasant at all for us to breathe it in. It's something of a public health problem and it would be nice to moderate the fires, something we did accomplish in the States some time in the '70s when we came to understand "air pollution." 

Still, the vents and hallways and windows open to the breeze are something to be celebrated here. In our unsustainable "developed" world, which will have to come crashing down one of these days, we can learn a huge amount from our poorer, but dare I say, wiser neighbors. 

The Step Tanks of Point Pedro and People who Act Like Fish

So many details in a day, visual, auditory, olfactory. Clouds, kovils, intense heat, smothering humidity, the blue of the ocean, a found shell, sharp barks of dogs, bicycles whooshing past, scooters with their message, grandparents with a child in tow and a basket of fish. A man with identical twins, a woman putting a bag of fish in another's sack. The fish market thick like flies, bargaining, touching, recording, feeling, looking, holding fish, placing fish, turning fish, arguing over fish. In fact it seemed to me they were acting like fish!

A short walk in early morning and a longer walk after breakfast both ending at the same point. One straight and noisy one meandering and quiet but threatened by clouds that build and build and build. 

The later walk and a few steps from our guesthouse bingo! Behold! A handsome step tank. Unmentioned in guide books. A step back to the ancient. To a landscape forgotten but still lived. These rural precincts, now suburban, each held a kovil. And the kovil held its tank. Did kulams spring where springs once flowed and so became revered spots in a dry but fertile landscape? Who built the tanks? Who cut the stones and placed them?

Who measured and how did they do it? By what prescription did they lay the stones? By what orientation did they trend their micro landscapes?  

The step tanks and their grounds are miraculously pretty. Even the garbage bags inside resemble lotuses. They must still be in use. The first tank we visited had nails stuck at intervals into the rock, vertical. What's tied to these? Floats? Garlands?

With channeled water all over town I could see no inlet or outlet to the tanks. Are they only ground- and rain-fed? 

Their reflecting is a kind of Darshan, gaining spirituality or merit just by looking upon them. They are in turn symmetric and off-center, their natural surroundings part of this pseudo-garden, a mythic filthy paradise, the sparkle of heaven's eye in the murky not murky water. 

Janet asks are they private? Are they public? Are they neither? Are they civic? Religious? All of these? What about their upkeep? 

How many ways can we look at water beyond the scientific? An aesthetic exploration affords one layer. There are landscape considerations, social, structural, religious, ecological, imaginary, imagined, and unimagined. 

In this corner of Sri Lanka more unexpected and surprising. More country more seeing. More transparency more turbidity. More function more fantasy. More details more dread more downpours.  

Walking On: Many Steps in Sri Lanka

The verge tidy and swept

The verge muddy and worn

The verge raked and designed

The verge covered with shit

The verge sandy and shorn

The verge littered and grey

The road asphalted

The road pitted

The road dusty 

The road hot

The road puddled

The road spreading

The road smoky

The road promised

The fence woven

The fence hammered

The fence knotted

The fence corrugated 

The fence living

The fence cinder block

The fence painted

The fence curving

The fence plastered

The fence painted

The verge graveled

The road blaring

The fence hiding

Some Perfect Morning

Some perfect morning you will sit on the side porch of a house on the First Cross Street of a village far, far in the North. 

English will have been forgotten there along with Portuguese and all you will see is the steady rattle of an orthography you don't understand. 

And hear the fast and peppery staccato speech of a people you haven't known. And watch drops of morning rain become puddle. And spy the turn of a chameleon's head, its tail as pale as a leaf. 

You will imagine the contours of the Indian Ocean and you will feel the contours of wet orange roof tile. Crows will hawk in the gray morning light and the gray sky will hawk back at them. 

Leaves and fronds will stay as still as day while gathering moisture or retreating moisture provides an invisible shield until later when the sun will burn and make this moment forgotten. 

The stillness will be underlain by an hour of human activity but fires will not have been started but lights are out and distant motors on the distant road remind of isolation not complete. 

Unraveling of night complete with the last rooster call and flies awake before the fishermen undo their bundles of drying catch. The powerful still air will make you languid. You will want to drink more of it to prove you are alive. 

Drops will drip from leaves and vines will tether and sounds of metal doors opening like boards on pipes will verberate and resound. A tiny trail of airborne jasmine will make its hint at your nostrils. 

First Impressions of Point Pedro

If ever a place was undersold in the guidebooks it's Point Pedro, Sri Lanka's farthest north point on the gorgeous Jaffna Peninsula. Janet found us an Airbnb place here that's part of an economic development scheme called "Nevermore," which markets out of the way lodgings for independent travelers who are not looking for luxe. 

But luxe there is here in Point Pedro (the Tamil name is nothing like this strange amalgam of Portuguese and British colonialism ). Luxe alplenty in the light as day comes to an end, the sounds of birds as the day begins, views of the tropical ocean and an ancient quarter just down from the bus stand which is not to be believed. Kovils and ocean breezes abound, quiet lanes and rustling palms. 

Point Pedro must have been a sad town, like so many places in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, still in the throes of civil war that affected people up here in Jaffna with special severity. But in these first hours here (we have four blessed days ahead of us) we don't see the sadness, or even the destruction. If Sri Lanka is a society in the process of rebuilding then Point Pedro is doubly so. Every kid on a bike reaches out to us with a "hi" or "howyadoin?" We are more than foreigners here. Our rarity only adds to the spectacle. 

A beneficial mosaic

Deeply ensconced in Jaffna right now I still don't want to let go of the lessons I learned in Anuradhapura. One of those lessons involved tank vegetation. And the weeks building up to the beginning of my Fulbright in Sri Lanka I had read everything I could about the tank ecosystems. After all, my first stop after couple of days in Colombo would be Rajarata University, where I was slated to do fieldwork with colleagues and students as well to give a lecture. I hoped I wouldn't go in completely clueless. 

Well completely clueless is one thing and just plain old clueless another. Having diligently memorized the terms and relative placement in the tank of vegetative features like gasgommana and perehana I kind of thought I was prepared. And I was kind of prepared. Except that there are probably about a dozen other terms that are relevant to the micro ecosystem of the village tank. One of these is the catchment area upstram of the tank, pronounced "touweleh," very much like our word towel but with a softening umlaut or two. Like a towel, the touweleh absorbs and holds moisture. The soil samples I took last week with my friend Dr. Nimal Abeysingha will in part measure how effective the absorptive capabilities of the touweleh at Ulankulama are. 

It didn't take long in the field to realize that that gasgommana (protective girdle of trees that grows inside the tanks) and the perehana (grasses and reeds that filter water coming into the tank) are part of the touweleh. In fact, I soon realized that there were stands of trees interspersed with grass and reeds, so that vegetative components of the tank were neither distinct nor separate. 

Since my work here in Sri Lanka is in cultural landscape ecology it only made sense that I should come to realize a finer grained picture of the vegetative parts of the tanks I walked through. I also came to realize that cattle grazing, which is at once a common practice and also a potentially destructive practice, is part of what the villagers typically do in the catchment area. So animals it would seem, both wild and domesticated, are part of the biotic features of a tank. Accommodating them and embracing their presence is part of how the village tank system functions. 

I could have read about these things for another several months or even years without realizing the relationships among them. It kind of goes back to my grand philosophy of teaching and learning, in which I see rote learning, even the most ardent kind, as ultimately less than productive. So learning to practice what I preach is part of the exciting growth potential of this nine month Fulbright in Sri Lanka. Coming to grips with the complex, for example the complex interactions of the village tank system, is something I need to have more practice with. Thinking about complexity, something I'm always preaching to my students, is something I can improve upon too. As a matter of fact there's nothing we've observed here, no matter how simple it seems, that is not deeply complex. So it would seem that a simple island and its gracious people present more than the eye can see at a glance.