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Easements and Entanglements

Michel Di Capua

Early last year, it occurred to me that I had quite possibly become a decent horseman. The thought struck me on a car ride from Cartagena to Sincelejo, in the northern region of  Colombia, on my way to see a plot of land for an energy project, which is part of what I do for a living. Since moving to Colombia nine years ago, I have been horseback riding plenty of times, mostly on work-related site visits like this one, but the farmworkers who saddle up the horses usually sniff out that I’m a newcomer (to the country, and to farm life) and tend to award me the gentlest ones in the stable. This time, I thought, I’ve done this enough. I was determined to fit in—no special treatment.


In Sincelejo, the foreman, Rafael, offered me a horse (indiscriminately as far as I could tell),  and I mounted and began to trek. And that rousing feeling—of indomitability astride a domesticated animal, of having gone native and at last exuding an autochthony beyond reproach—that feeling lasted perhaps all of seven minutes, which is about the time it took for me to mistakenly guide my horse into a live wire and electrocute us both. The horse didn't have a name, so after that incident, Rafael christened him "Alto Voltage” (high voltage).


The farm belongs to Jorge, a stout, voluble man with a long trajectory in Colombian agriculture (cattle, yucca) and agro-politics, and who traffics with equal frequency between levity and indignation, the latter chiefly directed at the gas company that negotiated a lease with Jorge’s father long ago, allowing a pipeline to run through their land. Jorge claims they never updated the lease terms to reflect the correct breadth of the line.


Jorge spends a few months a year in Sincelejo but mostly lives in Bogota. For several months prior to my visit to his farm, he and I had been negotiating a land rental contract. At his insistence, our meetings always took place at a restaurant in Bogota called Andres Carne de Res—a peculiar choice, given that the restaurant is better known for drinking, dancing, and kids’ activities like face painting and puppet shows. This didn’t seem to matter to Jorge, who treated a corner of the restaurant as if it were his personal co-working space. The oddest aspect of these meetings was that he never ordered anything.  A glass of soda water, at most. The first time we met, I ordered a slice of Oreo cheesecake and found myself eating alone as he and I talked. After that, I aspired in our meetings to be as abstemious as he.


On the ride to Jorge's farm in Sincelejo, I had been reading (I should clarify that I was being driven) Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and sifted through the part at the beginning where the Joads start making their way out of Oklahoma. I would read, then occasionally look out the window, then return to the book, and, gradually, unexpectedly, as both the Joads and I traversed westward, the worlds of fiction and fact—1930s American Dust Bowl and post-pandemic pastoral Colombia—began to co-mingle, confusingly but pleasantly,  in my mind. “The motor droned along steadily… Tom pulled his cap over his eyes to shut out the blinding sun. Paden to Meeker is thirteen miles; Meeker to Harrah is fourteen miles;  and then Oklahoma City.” I glanced up, the roadside signs pointing the way to Coveñas, Tolu, Tolu Viejo, Corozal. “… And this day the cars crawled on and on, through the Panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and Alanreed, Groom and Yarnell.”


That night, after the visit to Jorge’s farm, I arrived back in Cartagena, where my family was staying, just in time to put my daughters to sleep. First, my younger daughter, P. My starkly blond “young engineer,” a secret nickname I have for her, and not because she’s demonstrated any kind of technical precocity. A while ago, our older daughter, D, had been  complaining about her after-school “Young Engineers” activity; I had been trying to convince D not to quit, and P had interjected, “Dad, if D doesn’t want to do Young Engineers, don’t make her do it.” She had said it all in Spanish, except for the words “young engineers” (the actual name for the program). The way she said those two words, pronounced as if she were almost North Dakotan, was so irresistibly endearing that I cannot forget it.


And after P had fallen asleep, I went to tend to D. “Me puedes consentir?” she asked, a strangely untranslatable verb—strange because it’s so basic and pervasive—but which essentially means to pamper and caress. The way that I “consentir” the two girls is by tracing my finger across their backs, counting aloud to one hundred but out of order (for example, in multiples of seven and then filling in the rest backwards, because—well, because God forbid their dad be normal), until they finally doze off.


I think about moments in D’s life, or, more self-servingly, moments of her in my life. Eating rice and lentils with sauteed onions when she was one year old. She would first eat all the onions, and ask for more, which annoyed me because the rice and lentils would go untouched until she had finished all the onions, even though the ingredients were meant to be eaten together. At age four, on the day she graduated pre-kindergarten, she put on a fancy dress for a friend’s birthday and sang Pedro Capo’s “Calma” song into a microphone at the party; she is far from an extrovert, but something about the pride of having finished school must have led her to open up that way that day. On Halloween, she dressed up as a witch. I pretended not to have deciphered the costume and told her that I liked her baseball-player outfit. She scowled at me, annoyed. “Does a baseball player wear a hat?” she shook her head. “And a belt? and wear black make-up? and walk around with a stick?”


Me: “Umm, actually, yeah, he does.”


It's not just the girls who are growing up; I’ve also naturally grown since arriving in Colombia.


Take for example, how I feel about the institution of notaries. When I first arrived here, I  didn't understand what they did or why I found myself in their presence so often. Now, almost a decade later, the question is no longer what’s the point, but which of Bogota’s notaries is my favorite? Luz Estela at Carlos Bitar’s Notary #66? Tanya and Leidy at Notary  #65?


What’s not to like about notaries? I’ve now come to learn that all the good stuff of life is consummated there: the land rental contract with Jorge. My kids’ birth certificates. Official documents to be sent abroad that are, deliciously, doubly apostilled, once for the document itself, and then again for the authentication of the translation of the document. Powers of attorney that entrust my responsibilities to my colleagues, allowing me to feel like I’m everywhere, doing everything, all at once, like a many-handed Hindu god.


I’ve left for last, as if for dessert, the most treasured notarized document of them all: a right of way. This document grants permission for an energy project to extend an electrical line through a landowner’s property in exchange for compensation to the landowner. The technical word for this is “easement”—a misnomer in my book, for whatever an easement may be, it is rarely easy, and on occasion, nightmare-inducing.


I sometimes think about easements as a metaphor. (I think a lot about easements, in realms ranging from the mundane to the metaphysical.) You conceive a project, become enamored with it, dive in, only to realize you’re in a mess as you struggle through the permitting process (including obtaining the easements). You need to get out of the mess,  and the project’s energy also needs to get out. The electrical line and its corresponding easements are part of the mess. They are also its lifeline.


During the pandemic, I read a book about easements, about an American entrepreneur who tried to build a transmission line for renewable energy across the southeastern US (the same starting point as Steinbeck’s Joads, but in the opposite direction—east rather than west). I  then gifted the book to my business partner, Andres, in a quasi-celebration after we had completed our first project. Little did we know that just a few months after this gift exchange, we would discover that what we thought had been a completed project was not. The easement the municipality had granted us was illegitimate. Landowners emerged with shotguns as the electrical line began to be constructed on their property without their consent.


For the record, and since it seems I’ve begged the question, easements don’t always require consent; they may also be obtained through a court order, especially if the project serves a public good. For another project, we had been awaiting an easement from a judge who seemed to be moving too slowly. I grew anxious. One day, I began to investigate what I could about the judge. To my surprise, he was all over the Internet—not as a legal professional qua judge, but as a professor at a local law university, a bona fide expert on the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.


This was unexpected, but also something I could work with. I reckoned I could learn a bit about this historical figure, drop an email to the judge mentioning an interest in the topic, and see if I could corral a meeting. (I was desperate.) One thing was for sure, though: I did not have time to read original texts by Walter Benjamin. If I was going to learn anything, I would need to do it quickly and superficially. I would need the Cliff Notes version of Walter  Benjamin. So, over the course of three days, I binged on a profusion of Benjamin-related meta-content (articles, podcasts). I even ended up, despite my initial conviction to avoid the primary texts, reading two of the man’s essays. And when all this was done, I realized only this: you know who would’ve been utterly fascinated—and also appalled—by my insane, multi-modal, utterly perfunctory bender of trivia consumption about Walter Benjamin? Walter Benjamin.


There’s a saying that my wife’s father once uttered in passing, talking about work, that I think about all the time. “Sometimes,” he said, “you need to get entangled in order to get  disentangled.” In my case, the projects are the entanglements. The easements are too, until they become the mechanisms for the disentanglements.


This story began in early 2023 with my trip to Sincelejo. But by now, as I sit down to write,  a year has passed. El Nino has arrived, rain has been scarce, the mountains that surround  Bogota are in flames, and helicopters dash back and forth across the sky, carrying 600-gallon buckets of water to douse the fires. The country appears as if it could be headed toward energy scarcity, as new projects are not getting built fast enough, and spot-market power prices have jumped three-fold over the past year.


The project on Jorge’s land is on ice for now, as we have not yet received approval for an electrical interconnection to the nearby substation. The last time I met with Jorge in person, he was irate. We were having lunch at an Italian restaurant (he had caught me off guard with that invitation, and I was flabbergasted to see the man consuming food). It was just after the famous festival that Sincelejo hosts every year on the twentieth of January. He couldn’t believe that Sincelejo’s poohbahs had spent eighteen hundred million pesos to sponsor the celebrations—though I couldn’t tell if he was angry because the sum was too large or too small. On the paper placemats, as I awaited my plate of pasta and he his fish with heat-gun-blasted blue cheese sauce, he furiously scrawled out the calculations for the economics of the festival: this amount for tickets, that much for the orchestra, this much for the bullfighting spectacle. He wrote too quickly and verbalized with too much vehemence for me to keep track of whether his calculations netted a positive or negative number in the end.


On Father’s Day last year, the girls gave me a handwritten card. The card was in the shape of a necktie, and they had written the nickname they use for me. I told them I loved the card. “But,” I said, “I can’t accept it.”


“What? What do you mean?” they asked. “It’s for you.”


“I know it’s for me. But I can’t accept it. It’s not valid.”


“What does that mean; that a card we made for you isn’t valid?”


I looked at my xanthic-haired Engineer and at my Spooky Major Leaguer. There they were, my life’s Ultimate Entanglements, from whom I hope to never be disentangled. Their eyes were curious and melancholic. And here I had to level with them. I hunched down to see them squarely.


“The thing is,” I said, “The card isn’t valid. It’s not valid until it’s been notarized.”




Michel Di Capua lives in Bogota with his wife and children, and works in the Colombian energy industry. He has a masters degree in literature and has written freelance for publications including the Harvard Review of Latin America, The Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina, Papercuts Magazine, and the Business Standard in India.

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