Jane Underwood at the Writing Salon in San Francisco sent this writing exercise out to her writing teachers. She asked us to write a short piece about a potato, and wanted us to read them at her next Salon. It is a fun exercise that got me to write out of the box and had unexpected results as I found out when I discovered that -- by George! -- I did have a potato story to tell.

The Pivotal Potato

I was traveling over the altiplano on a road that circles around Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The Indians there are very poor and the environment harsh (16,000 feet elevation and freezing). There are no tourist facilities so I spent the night in an Aymara Indian family's hut. I was hungry, and they invited me to dine with them.

They were eating what they ate every day of the year--small freeze-dried potatoes in weird mottled colors -- purple, green, and red. The potato originated in South America and there are more varieties in Bolivia and Peru than any other part of the world. The ones we were eating had been reconstituted with boiling water. No salt. No flavor. My hosts savored them. Obviously, these puny potatoes were a main part of their existence. When they weren't eating them, they were cultivating them. "How were they grown?" I asked to spark conversation among this very reticent and superstitious family with whom I was renting dirt floor space for the night and sharing a meal.  

The mother, whose mahogany face was cracked and polished from exposure to extreme weather, told me, "We dig them up when they are ready and leave them on the hard ground to freeze. Then we go through the field in our bare feet and roll each one under our feet to remove the skin. Then we store them in baskets and they last a year."

"Oh," was my only comment. I looked down at her feet. They were blackened and cracked and had calluses as thick as history books.

Maybe I did detect some flavor in my meal after all...