District Beginner

Potential Wildlife

2009-03-23T00:00:00.002+07:00

number 2009/??

We recently enjoyed a beautiful weekend visiting friends at Cát Tiên Natural Park, located about a hundred fifty kilometers north of Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam. 5,831 words.

Cát Tiên

[HCMC]—It’s Saturday morning, and we are preparing to hike into the Vietnam forest toward Crocodile Lake. The lake is a premier attraction of Cát Tiên National Park, where they release rescued Siamese crocodiles back into natural populations. We were driven ten kilometers to the trailhead in the back of a rustic Isuzu truck with two rickety wooden pews. Connected to this jury-rigged seating contraption are bars to hold onto as the truck pitches headlong over inconsistent dirt tracks. Everything creaks and rattles together, leans as one. We were sitting pretty high on the top of the truck bed, so besides the difficulties of keeping my ass on the plank—and absorbing each new pothole with my legs to keep that plank from actually harming me—we also had to duck a lot of overhanging flora. The track goes from one to another type of non-contiguous jungle canopy. Some hang lower than others. The drive was fun but hardly safe. Now we are at the posted trailhead; the sign says Crocodile Lake 5K. Sunshine has taken a seat on a concrete bench to remove her little green tennis shoes. She is putting on a pair of rented leech socks.

We’ve been up for hours already, even though it is still pretty early for me. Our room, catching a good deal of morning sun, was a lot more inviting today than it had been when we checked in last night. The curtains are blue and it gives the concrete cubicle a cool cast that the air conditioner doesn’t quite live up to. We ate breakfast in the cantina down the road from our room. It is being redecorated. Half of the walls are newly painted an earthy burnt-orange color. The other half are crawling with park wildlife. In the back room, a man works on a large green underwater mural featuring crocodiles, turtles, and duckweed. We took the preferred table, right beneath a rotary fan we had to plug in. My egg was pretty damn good, but there weren’t quite enough sub rolls to go around, so I split mine with one of our gracious hosts. Half an egg sandwich is more breakfast than I am used to getting, and I assume it’s enough for a ten kilometer hike. The iced coffee was fabulous.

Cát Tiên Natural Park about a hundred fifty kilometers north northeast of Hồ Chí Minh City. It is home to a pretty vast array of plants and animals, many of the latter endangered. Depending on who you ask, the list of fauna to be found at Cát Tiên is somewhat staggering: Javan rhinoceroses, Asiatic elephants and black bears, crab-eating and pig-tailed macaques, golden-cheeked gibbons, several types of langur, Indian muntjacks, sambar, leopards, palm civets, mouse deer, wild pigs, pangolins, fishing cats, guar, shrews, and wild buffalo. Ask some people and they’ll tell you there are Indochinese Tigers in there. It is a remarkable and diverse area of discontinuous bamboo forest tracts, wetlands, thick double-canopy deciduous woods, and other tropical forest lands. The certain wildlife population seems astoundingly dense to me, considering the confined area of the park is only about seven hundred twenty square kilometers. Some of the more breathless reports can be looked on with skepticism: populations of extremely rare clouded leopards and tigers, and even sun and moon bears, are difficult to verify. That’s not to say that these difficulties should be seen as conclusive. One camera trap set up to spot a possible area sun bear recently photographed a binturong by accident. As of this writing, the park’s official website doesn’t yet list binturong as an inhabitant of the park.

Public Transportation

The day before, we’d covered the distance to Cát Tiên Park from Hồ Chí Minh City primarily in a big green city bus with wooden floors. The windows were greasy but open, and while the bus was moving it was actually pretty comfortable. With no air conditioning, the temperature soared immediately every time we’d stop. The trip began with the vehicle at half capacity, a scooter loosely tied in the aisle, blocking off the four back row seats where we were sitting. We’d gotten lucky that our hosts for the weekend, friends who work at the park, were already in town this weekend. They’d been able to return to Cát Tiên with us. It is confusing trip. There are different destinations called Cát Tiên, and multiple ways to reach them. Since we had guides, we were spared much of the confusion and uncertainty here. We’ve never had the opportunity to become habituated to this type of public transportation in Vietnam.

And that’s a shame. It was much nicer seeing the landscape gradually trundle along past those open windows than to watch the globe shift anonymously beneath airplane portholes. We traveled through many different villages Friday, but they all muddled together to constitute one nearly consistent urban outskirt along the way. We stopped regularly, both to pick up passengers and to take on freight. Soon the motor-scooter in the aisle was joined by a refrigerator and a couple of dining room chairs. We stopped to load a huge tractor engine into the hold under the wooden floor; then to have a bunch of plastic conduit tied to the roof. Each stop was hot, as I’ve said, but old women in zipped-up hoodies, obscured behind surgical face masks from the cheeks down and leaf hats from the brow up, stepped aboard to sell water and off-brand cola from dripping wicker baskets filled with ice.

Near the end of our trip, already hours after dark, we were transferred to another, smaller bus which whisked us on to the Cát Tiên ferry. That last half hour should have taken longer. We were sped madly through the Vietnamese night, over pitch dark village roadways, dodging pedestrians and bicycle traffic as they appeared in the dim pool of our headlights. This was more like watching someone play a particularly intense video game than being a bus passenger. The benefit was that it was over quickly. Once we staggered from the bus there was only one more step to Cát Tiên: taking a small ferry five hundred feet over the slow-moving local neck of the Đồng Nai River. Our hosts are very friendly with the people at the little convenience snack bar cum ferry station. They were friendly with everybody. The ferry crew were lounging around and chatting after dinner, I guess, but didn’t seem to mind carting us across the river. This is the benefit of being guests. Though it is confusing to get there, tourists are welcome at Cát Tiên. Tourism is one of the ways the park raises money and awareness. But tourists face certain peculiar odds. Our bus from Hồ Chí Minh City took five hours to travel a hundred fifty kilometers. The ferry place has a sign saying it doesn’t run after dark, not without reservations. There was nobody in the tourism kiosk on this side of the river. I was glad, one more time, that we had been lucky enough to make this trip in the company of people who knew what they were doing. People who were friendly with the staff.

After checking-in at the main information desk we wandered along to our room. While the park encourages a certain amount of tourism, this is not a hotel. A tourist hotel is apparently being built somewhere down the road. Our block of rooms are considered guest quarters, though researches stay in these, too. They are predictably Spartan: a cinderblock square bathed in the lurid greenish fluorescence of its one flickering tube. The bed is pushed into the far corner, and has one nailed-on post for attaching the mosquito net. The other three corners of the net hook onto nails driven into the concrete wall. This was inconvenient, since it meant that the bed could not be pushed across the room to the wall with the air conditioner. No matter. I guess it’s better to be just a little bit hot than to have malaria.

Leech Socks

I see my first leech about halfway to Crocodile Lake. Leeches in the movies are greenish-black and about the size of a cigar butt, they live in and around brackish water and move sluggishly, relying on prey to all but spoon-feed themselves to the lazy bastards. But not these leeches. What I am shown is olive green, a little longer than an inch worm. It sits on a leaf waving its end around in the air to grab hold of passersby. Its mouth is its widest point, about the circumference of a pencil eraser. And it’s fast.

We were appraised of the availability of leech socks before we even left Hồ Chí Minh City. I’d had trouble understanding what they were for. It seemed to me that heavy pants and boots were good enough for those movie leeches. Could Vietnamese leeches bite through denim? To be safe, I have worn my combat boots, the old thick leather kind that lace midway up my calf. Sunshine has come hiking in cute brightly-colored trainers that don’t even protect her ankles. That’s okay, because our hosts, old hands at hiking here, are wearing little shoes, too. One is hiking in sandals. I am beginning to feel like my feet are overdressed, maybe. I do not think I need any leech socks. In any event, it’s difficult to take my shoes off and put them on again now that we are on the hike. Everyone else is wearing the socks, of course. They are tall sleeves of nylon that are worn under the shoes but over the pants legs. They protect up to the knees. They are not water-tight or particularly puncture resistant. I get assurances that we aren’t planning on investigating brackish areas, anyway. It has been at least a week since the last rain, and I can’t imagine where any leeches would be.

It’s pretty dry in the forest. It’s more humid here than in the compound area, possibly due to the low light and rotting vegetable matter; but it’s still dry. And beautiful: we are in an area of high foliage, and the woods are open around and above us. It’s all deeply green and brown, the spongy floor of the forest studded with volcanic stones covered in moss. The area around us is very quiet. We are looking out for animals as we go. There is virtually no chance we will see any. I am conscious of how very loudly I am moving through the jungle. I’m also pretty slow. I’d injured my ankle a couple of weeks before and, while it isn’t hurting me, I’m taking no chances on spraining it again on the path’s uneven stones and slick leaves. My loudness and slowness combine to protect park wildlife: anything living in the area will be well-hidden, or long gone, before I’ve gotten there. We do see a number of butterflies, however. They don’t seem to care how loud I am.

The path we are hiking is well-tended, and there is very little to duck under or push out of our way. Occasionally, we walk past deer and civet scat, the latter full of seeds and pods. Here and there are piles of figs fallen from tropical trees with buttress roots that form snaky, muscular walls through the porous igneous rock of the jungle floor. One particular Tetrameles nudiflora has a root system taller than me in places, and we sit here for a minute or two enjoying what scattered sunshine is allowed into the forest along its immense trunk. It’s here that I’m eagerly shown, by each of our hosts in turn, a leech. The first will not bite down on our host’s hand because of bug repellant, so he shows it to me up close. It whips around, stretching to find something to bite. I am a little bit impressed with leeches. The second I’m shown waves around in the middle of our trail, where it is nearly invisible in the in the fallen leaves carpeting everything.

Shortly before the five kilometer mark, we come across a weathered and possibly faltering structure that has been referred to as a boardwalk. It’s really a bridge. It runs about a hundred yards, maybe a little longer, across a low area I take to be a continuation of Crocodile Lake’s flood plain. We are almost there, assuming we live through crossing this bridge. It’s a little harrowing for me. Looking down, I can see right through the flat untreated wood slats into a weedy thicket thirty feet down. Sometimes I can see through gaps, sometimes through holes. Maybe it just seems like thirty feet. Each slat is attached to beams forming a spine down the length of the bridge by exactly one nail. I try to walk along the nails, which is not a straight line. The whole structure sways whenever two of us get a little too close together. I’m pretty certain I’m the heaviest person here, and so I try to keep ahead of the group, too. I am walking a crooked line, quickly. We reach the ranger station at Crocodile Lake none too soon. It is also on stilts, but it seems very solid. Since people live here, we have to take off our shoes to enter.

Blood in My Pants

Later, when I put my boots back on, I also put on my rented leech socks.

Berry Jam

Earlier that morning, after breakfast, we’d gone to visit the bear sanctuary. The Vietnam Bear Rescue Program’s first operational forest sanctuary is a result of the combined efforts of the Free the Bears fund and Wildlife at Risk, with support from Cát Tiên National Park. It is not yet accessible to tourists, but we are guests. We donate in the form of buying a couple of t-shirts.

The new sanctuary enclosure itself is huge, bordered by high chain-link and electrical fencing. The ultimate aim is to get rescued bears acclimated to one another and habituated to living there. The strategy is to confine them in a series of larger cages. Most of the bears there have been rescued from amusement parks or restaurants. Bear bile is a big and illegal business in Vietnam, considered to be medicine taken orally as a detoxifier. There are several ways to harvest bile. Some bears are slaughtered outright, some suffer crude surgeries to have their gall bladders removed. In some horrific cases, they are confined in restrictive cages and implanted with a tap so bile can be captured as the living gall bladder manufactures it. Federal support for conservation in Vietnam, in the form of applying measures enacted to illegalize trade in bile and other endangered animal products, as well as permissions for international wildlife conservation groups, is blossoming. But it’s an uphill battle against a population that reveres these practices as tradition. Even though it is illegal, bile can be found on many menus around the country where the practice is rarely even discouraged. To habituate these restaurant bears, rescuers first keep them in the smallest of the center’s cages, those most resembling their pens in the alleys behind illegal restaurants. They are then steadily introduced to larger and larger accommodation, closer and closer to other bears. Eventually, they are put into cages with others, with the ultimate goal being to release them into the large new enclosure out back. These bears are hopeless cases for ever being released into natural forest populations. Captured as cubs or born into captivity, they will never learn to hunt for food or avoid their predators in the wild.

Viewed as a zoo, the rescue center is a little dismal. Most of the bears, especially the bigger ones, have been hobbled in some way. They are missing claws or feet. They are not expected to survive through their natural life-spans due to bad surgery or other abuse. Still, they are happier than they’ve ever been in their lives, better fed, and their good mood is pretty infectious. They tussle with one another. They ferret food out of ingenious contraptions that have been made for them from rotating barrels or nets. As depressing as their stories are, it’s heartening that more and more animals are rescued every year.

I was just happy to be seeing bears. The park has both Asiatic black bears, called moon bears, and sun bears. Both have white or cream crescents on their chests. The moon bears are larger, shaggier medium-sized bears similar to black bears found in the USA. Sun bears are the smallest species of ursidae, and have short, soft fur and wide, bug-eyed faces with mildly stubby snouts. Most of the sun bears in the rescue center are little more than cubs, and live in side by side cages in the center’s one concrete building. While we were there they frolicked happily. Sunshine, who had gotten bread and berry jam for breakfast, was feeding her leftovers to the bears: holding each little dollop of preserves between the bars on the end of a stick. Bears like jam. Turns out, bears also like porridge. In a nearby concrete lean-to, several large cauldrons were already boiling away. These contained bear porridge, a concoction of whatever happens to be available: rice, grains, melons, occasionally liver or chicken. The bears like the porridge, we were told; but not the liver, which they pick out. This real-world connection between bears and porridge is my favorite new fact.

There are a few other animals in the rescue center besides bears. Two cages near the concrete building each hold a macaque. The pig-tail is nice enough, so we fed him rinds and seed pods through the bars. His neighbor, the long-tail, is a jerk who continuously caught our attention for threat displays. The threat displays were unintuitive, they looked like the macaque was yawning at us. These long-tails have pretty big canines, however, so even a bored-looking macaque seems fairly threatening. The monkeys begrudgingly put up with one another, but there is no love lost between them. Several doors down, past an impromptu garden, is an enclosure for rescued Siamese crocodiles. It is smallish, dominated by a crater-shaped cement pond. The water is mossy. When we walked up to the bars, one of the crocodiles was emerging from the water. Our host said it was the most he’d ever seen one move around. These crocs seem smallish, or perhaps the one we saw was pretty young. It was about four feet from nose to vent, twice that including the tail. Once he was out of the water, he stood absolutely still with his mouth open. He didn’t move again until after we were gone. Was this a threat display? Siamese crocodiles have pretty frightening teeth too. But with that moss all over his nose, he was pretty hard to see just several feet away. Somehow it seems more threatening that he was trying to be invisible. There was no sign of the other crocodile that is supposed to be in that cage.

Keeping this in mind, it is not all that surprising we never saw any of the namesakes in Crocodile Lake’s bright green waters. We didn’t exactly go looking for them. Directly below the ranger station there is a wooden plank leading through the marshy lakeside. At the end of this boardwalk two boats are tied. About midway, a rusting yellow sign asks visitors to please keep clear of the crocodiles. We are able to see this from the ranger’s observation deck, where we drink tea and take naps. Later, we walk five more kilometers back to where we are to meet up with the Isuzu. I suffer no more leech bites.

Tapetum Lucidum

Later on, Sunshine and I take a turn night spotting. Now we are tourists. This is another ride on the same wooden pews, but much slower. It’s some kind of night safari. We are driven slowly and quietly down the track, hunting for whatever living things can be seen from the road. To help with this, a guide rides in the front pew swinging a spotlight here and there into the night. He’s looking for eyes or antlers or movement. Meanwhile Sunshine and I, plus four other tourists, keep as quiet as possible. We assume that if the puttering Isuzu or the bright spotlight doesn’t scare wild things off, that our voices might.

It has been difficult to get seats on this truck. At some point earlier today, a corporate youth group has arrived. We were informed that two hundred tourists were staying in the park, but it seems more like eighty to me. Either way, these night spotting runs are booked. There’s no way even eighty people can hike to Crocodile Lake together. The boardwalk bridge would never take the weight. So they’ve all piled into a really large truck with maybe forty seats, and these are running every half hour or so till everyone gets to do something in Cát Tiên. We’ve lucked out finding available pews on the little Isuzu, but I’m still pessimistic. With all those scheduled trips, it seems unlikely we’ll get to see much of anything. There was no room left for our hosts for come along. The seats we’ve gotten required some haggling with the woman behind the desk. She still seemed pretty skeptical that we’d be able to get on the truck, even after I’d paid her. Maybe she was mad about the blood.

One of the leech bites is high on my thigh, just under the front pocket of my jeans. When a leech bites, its saliva anesthetizes the area. Vietnamese leeches make a circular wound the size of a cigarette burn. Then they suck, raising a purple blood blister within the circumference of the bite. I couldn’t feel any of this at the time. I think this leech had to suck extra hard to get capillary blood out of the pretty thin layer of subcutaneous material covering that big muscle. Of all my leech bites, this one took the longest to heal and turned the nastiest black-purple color. A leech also carries an anticoagulant in its saliva. This keeps the blood flowing freely through the tiny holes it’s made. Unlike a tick, who will eat himself to death, a leech will take what he wants and then abandon the host, balling up and dropping to the ground. I never saw any of the leeches that bit me. I detected their presence because of bites that kept bleeding and bleeding all afternoon. The bite on my thigh was the last discovered. Our host noticed the blood when it soaked through my pants. To do this, it had to soak not only through the thick layer of denim, but also through that front pocket. That’s where I’d stashed all the money we’d need for the day. In Vietnam, bigger bills are plastic and easy to wipe clean. But my smaller, paper denominations soaked a lot of that blood up. More blood than seems possible. Blood that would normally have dried into a crust, but now wouldn't coagulate. Later on, when we ate lunch, I was able to pick and choose bills that were minimally affected. But from that point on, I felt increasingly shy about paying for anything with pocket money that got more blood-soaked as the day progressed. The last thing I paid for was the night spotting safari. By then, all my bills were red, stiff, and felt slightly sweaty. But she took them anyway.

Since I assumed we’d see little on the safari, this is how I consoled myself: it was a beautiful night for what would amount to a hay ride. The stars were out and it was cool and breezy. Honestly, the bigger part of my excitement was this uncertainty about seeing any animals. It’s what made this more exciting than the zoo, where spotting an animal is expected. Not seeing anything seemed to be what we’d paid for, what would validate the chance we wanted to take.

We are driven in a new direction around the park. Here, the forest woodlands we’ve gotten used to give way to grasslands and even some cultivated farms. Soon enough we are under a close canopy of bamboo growing arched over the road. Then the skies are clear again. The four strangers in the car seem to be from New York City. They have never seen so many stars. I can sympathize, there are frequently no stars in the Hồ Chí Minh City skies, either. Tonight it’s clear enough for me to have some trouble identifying constellations. They are just too obscured with extraneous dots, the familiar nearly invisible in all the extra. I recognize Orion and the Big Dipper and Mars. The wind is exhilarating. At one point, passengers in a returning truck, the one thirty minutes ahead of us, point into a field and tell us there are wild pigs. “I’ve got it, I see it” our guide says, focusing his handheld floodlight at a patch of nearby grass. We sit frozen, excited, seeing nothing. “It’s right there,” he tells us. I can tell by the New York whispers around me that nobody else can see anything, either; but we all keep looking. Soon enough a tusk moves in the grass, and a whole damn pig becomes obvious around it. I have no idea how the guide has seen this thing. It’s much bigger than I’d expected. I’d been looking for a little dot out in that field. Later, when the pig begins to move off, the spotlight picks out another and another. It’s like they’re invisible until they move.

Throughout the drive we see bats. We see an endless supply of wheeling beetles who cannot seem to dodge the truck. These hit us and stick, so we flick them off again onto each other, the guide, the New Yorkers. The sambar we see is huge. I thought they were the size of little deer but he’s as big as a ram. The sambar stands in grass to his belly, grazing, when the guide spotlights him. Then he freezes with his eyes at the grass line. All I can see at first is the two reflected dots of the tapetum lucidum behind his retinas. But I can’t figure which parts of the surrounding darkness and vegetation go with those dots. Then he cocks his head and starts to shuffle off. At that point I realize everything I can see is part of the same sambar, his antlers looming like trees in the background. But the spotlight is resting only on him. We’ve turned around by now, our trip almost over. We pick up a little speed past landmarks I recognize from earlier. Beetles spang off our heads as we go. The wind has gotten chilly. My favorite moment of the whole night comes here, when we meet with the other truck coming down the road, the truck thirty minutes behind ours. Approaching one another, both vehicles slow down. Then I notice the bright eyes of some little animal in our truck’s headlights, its dark bump silhouetted by the oncoming vehicle. It gazes back and forth for a minute, eye dots flashing, and then scurries on off the road.

I have no idea what that little animal was. It seemed to be about raccoon-sized. And it was either stupid or crazy or brave. With all that night at its disposal, it managed to cross the street right front of the only two moving vehicles in the whole park.

Invisible Wildlife

I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep the night before we leave Cát Tiên National Park. It makes the car trip home a little more wearing. The youth group visiting from the city were having a bonfire in the field beside the compound’s reception building, so there as a loud emcee and drumming pretty late into the night. For a while we crashed this party. Musicians and drummers had come from a nearby village to perform traditional dances. They stepped in a snaking line around the fire, rhythmically beating shallow copper drums. They wore interesting traditional-style garments. The youths were dancing in line with them, led around the fire. Anyone could join in. We were welcomed to the table of food, too, welcome to share their booze. Two large vats of young red wine were being heated over orange coals. The vats were also stuffed with leaves and spices, maybe fruit. This worked sort of like a keg, but instead of a tap and plastic cups, people lined up again and again to suck warm herbal wine through long wooden straws. It tasted really complex and interesting the first time, but too sweet, with a cloyingly synthetic honey finish. The second time it wasn’t so good. As the wine was drunk, the vats were filled back up to level with warm water. It was a youth group, after all.

Back in our room, I’d laid under the netting trying to read a little bit in the hard glow from the florescent light. I was beginning to get a headache, but whether that was from the light or the weird honey wine I couldn’t know. Sometimes it’s hard for me to lay down with a headache. It’s always hard to read with one. The only room available for fidgeting around was the bathroom. Sunshine was asleep already. It was way too difficult to put on my boots just to pace around outside. The light in the bathroom is too bright also, also too green. Every surface in the bathroom tilts down, including the counter behind the sink. I kept my toothbrush in a plastic bag the ants can’t get into if it rolled off the counter. The toilet sits in the middle of the wall under a window, between the showerhead and its drain. The shower is perplexing, hoses spooling from an electric wall-mounted box with push-button controls. The directions for use are in English, but they are still mystifying. I suspect the box heats the water between the wall and the nozzle. There are pictographs illustrating the dangers of allowing the water from the nozzle to spray onto the box. In the close quarters of the bathroom, I didn’t see how that could be helped. Eventually my headache started to subside. I padded around, barefoot, quiet, turning out the lights, giving up on reading for the night. It was impossible for me to get into the mosquito net without waking Sunshine up.

It’s not just me. It’s difficult to get in and out of bed through the net. I was aware of Sunshine coming through the net in the dark, returning from the bathroom a little later. Perhaps with enough practice we would get more nimble about this. Light from the street cast a small glow into the room. I could barely see that the net was closed properly behind her. “Be careful” she told me. “I just killed a scorpion in the bathroom.” She held her fingers up, about two inches apart.

It does me no good to be sleepy for this bus ride home. The whole trip is aboard one of the smaller busses, like that second one we rode in on. These are really no more than large vans, with fifteen seats including the driver’s. We’re the first ones aboard, picking the bus up at the ferry quay on the far side of the river. We’ve already left Cát Tiên behind. Oddly, this daylight travel is slower than the travel we did the other night, the driver’s not nearly so reckless. I am concerned it will take us a long time to get home, as we comb the countryside for more and more travelers. But it doesn’t. Over the five-hour drive, the bus stops many times, picking up people, letting them off. It’s very crowded. At one point I am able to see twenty-nine people in the bus, standing, crouching, sitting on laps. There are two dozen green coconuts in the space between our seats and the back doors. There are five people back there too. I am so pressed in that my elbow sticks out the open window into the rain, but it’s the close traffic that worries me. Five hours.

I sit there thinking about our day today. We got up pretty early this morning, too. We ate the same breakfasts in the same cantina, and fed Sunshine’s jam to the baby sun bears. We watched adolescent sun bears tussle in the crater-shaped cement pool of the large enclosure. After, we went out on a short hike down a trail just behind the compound. I’d put on my leech socks before anyone else had. We were looking for monkeys, but I was never sure what kind. Our hosts study black-shanked doucs in the woods here, but I have the feeling those are usually found somewhat north or our location. According to our hosts, there is a group of pig-tailed macaques nearby. They occasionally visit the friendly caged macaque, coming almost all the way into the rescue center. Maybe it is these macaques we went looking for. We didn’t see any monkeys, which came as no real surprise. I hadn’t gotten any better at walking through the woods since yesterday.

The forest just behind the compound was very different from what we’d seen on the first day. Often close and dense bamboo and rattan thickets closed around us, choking out taller plants. These areas were interesting—so much brighter green and yellow, sunnier with far less room to maneuver around in, brighter with less direct sunlight. Just as often, we were in open areas with high ceilings dangling epiphytes and creeper vines with long thorns, darker but dappled with yellow rays. In the distance I was able to hear animals move through the woods, but I never saw anything except birds and butterflies. Some nearby huffing grunts alarmed me for awhile, reminding me of the three wild pigs we’d seen not too far away the night before, but then our hosts told me it was a squirrel. The loud barking we heard in the distance was apparently a deer. Soon we turned around and headed back to the compound again. It was almost time to catch the ferry and the bus.

If I learned anything about the jungle over the weekend, it’s about potential. In a zoo there are animals in labeled cages, just where you expect to see them. Mostly, this means that there are no animals to be found elsewhere. But in the jungle there is potential everywhere. Invisible wildlife can be anywhere; apparently they can sound like anything. They leave signs of their existence—dots in the night, some seedy scat, bloody circles—and sometimes they emerge immediately for their surroundings. But mostly they remain potential animals: invisible, everywhere, smaller or larger than reality, in the dark or behind the trees in the green.

Related pages of interest include:
The official site of Cat Tien National Park
The official site of the Free the Bears Fund
The official site of Wildlife at Risk

Photo © the author.

The Closed Umbrella

2008-07-27T21:00:00.004+07:00

number 2008/??

Friday we got the next long list of jobs opportunities available for our third international tour. That was the first of many opportunities presented to me in a night characterized by dubious choices. 3,223 words.

[HCMC]This is the life we lead: the people we meet when we arrive in a new place all leave before we do. Their tours end and they must go somewhere else. Or their spouses get good jobs at prestigious universities and they must relocate. Or, you know, it’s a tough life and they decide to just go home. One of these will apply to each and every one of Sunshine’s coworkers. They’ll be replaced, one by one, by new people while the overall population remains the same. It isn’t all about the job, of course. It’s the whole expatriate life: this cycle also effects the scholars and teachers and NGO aid workers we befriend, along with the reporters and musicians and dignitaries. We must make our new friends fast so we can get as much time as possible with them, knowing that we’ll feel a little sad whenever they, sooner or later, leave us for somewhere else. The replacements are the flip side. These are mostly those coworkers and cultural expatriates who arrive after us. Many of these replacements are the people we will have to leave behind when we go off to our next place. These thoughts were in my head on Friday during one of those little after work parties jauntily referred to as a Happy Hour. This gathering had been organized by a woman who would be leaving at the end of next week. This woman was the first person we met in Hồ Chí Minh City, our sponsor, the coworker who picked us up at the airport. That was over nine months ago now.

If this all seems particularly melancholy, well, we’ve gotten pretty used to it. This is just the way things are. Added to this, everyone is so busy doing what they do here that it’s pretty difficult to manage relationship-building things like dinners and double dates. So when I say we have to make friends fast, I should add that we also have to make this happen with little material and brief maturation. By the second time I see someone at a party we’re either already friends or not, and I already know it. There isn’t really enough time for much indecisiveness about this, and that time is ticking away. I know why I was thinking about this: we’d finally received the long list of possible jobs for our next tour. From this list, we will have to select a number of positions to bid on, one of which will end up being our two- or three-year third tour abroad. We were hoping to receive this list at the beginning of the week, right after we returned from watching the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant in Nha Trang, but they strung us along until Friday afternoon. Sunshine emailed me the list as soon as she had it. I’d planned on going to this Happy Hour party—one more chance to hang out with our sponsor—but the job postings drove all that out of my head. It arrived in my inbox as a jumble of unformatted text, pasted from a spreadsheet. At five o’clock I had barely looked over the thing. I’d been concentrating on reformatting it into something legible. I had a brand new plan: I was hoping to get to the point where I could actually read the thing by the time Sunshine came home from work. I got a phone call about the Happy Hour instead. It was frustrating: after waiting all week for this job list, I had to abandon it for the office party I’d also been waiting all week for.

I grabbed my favorite umbrella and made my way through the monsoon to Sunshine’s office. Outside it was thick and bright, breezeless and humid at that point perfectly between rainstorms when the water is being sucked back into the air. I never even opened my umbrella, no drop ever fell, but I was still trickling into my damp clothing by the time I arrived at the Happy Hour party. I hadn’t had the kind of weather I’d planned for; I’d had the kind an umbrella could not protect me against.

This was another “Hail and Farewell” party. That first friend we made, that woman who rescued us from Tân Sơn Nhất Airport during our first few minutes in town, was not the only coworker slated to depart. A handful people will be leaving over the next two months. That’s the farewell part. As for the hail, I met three new people at this very party. That’s just the way it is. In with the new and out with the old, mostly in that order. One of the women I met will be taking over Sunshine’s job in October oh-nine. How weird is that? And since the theme of this party was to meet new arrivals and catch some last moments with those nearly departed, well, I must apologize: it was a theme mostly preempted by that new list of next tour job positions finally becoming available. We spent a lot of Friday’s party talking to those who were just like us: here for another year and hypnotized by the eleven hundred and twenty job opportunities that had fallen into our laps earlier that afternoon. These new arrivals wouldn’t be bidding on another post for a year, those leaving had already done this bidding long ago. They could not be a part of our Christmas.

All of these Happy Hour parties take place in the office. One of the bosses was mixing up Dalat strawberries and rum in a blender. I discovered an almost half-full bottle of Irish whisky among the two dozen or so fifths of imported liquor sitting on a filing cabinet. I was really excited about this. I haven’t actually seen any Irish whisky in Vietnam. The few restaurants listing it on their menus invariably tell us they are out when we try to order it. From this moment on, I ignored the berry rum smoothies from the boss’ blender (and the weird Chinese beer in the office fridge). I concentrated on the Jamieson. It’s pretty strange to be drinking in someone else’s office. Parties seem a little more surreal among the fuzzy maze of movable cubicle walls and photocopiers. It always feels like a birthday or maybe the last day of school. Here and there the identical plastic desks were decorated with photos and vases and cups full of pens, along with whatever else might fend off the otherwise characterless and homogenized anonymity of a cubicle. Whisky went down well here, between those bulletproof interview windows and these perky little workstations.

Outside, it had begun to rain like hell: sheets and torrents were falling so loudly we could easily hear it through that thick security glass. It was difficult to imagine leaving. I still had an umbrella, but it just wasn’t that kind of rain. It was the kind that rises over the sewer grates, drops tree limbs along the streets, and blasts right up underneath umbrellas. That Happy Hour party lasted longer than anyone really planned because of the weather. We stayed on and on, cozy in those office spaces well away from the rain. When the weather finally let up and we left, we all felt like we should apologize to the guards on night duty. I had not sucked down the entire under half-full bottle of Irish whisky. And although I made the joke, I did not stuff the over one-fourth full bottle into my pocket.

Outside it was misty and cool, the new rains had left it breezy. There was a pervasive drizzle, but I never even opened my umbrella. The coolness felt good on my face and hands, and if I arrived damp it was at least something I was used to by now.

The rest of my night doesn’t begin to blur until well after dinner. Our friend from the first paragraph invited us over to her house for takeout. It was the first time I had seen a place in her apartment building; it is always a treat exploring the housing pool. She had done a really good job with the decorating. I was surprised that, with just a week left in Vietnam, she still had all her stuff. She was in that stage of moving when it becomes important to give or throw away whatever stuff possible. We got to rummage through her DVDs, her shelves. Open bottles needed to either be drunk or poured out down the sink. Movers will not ship opened bottles. We all decided to order Indian food, which arrived about a half an hour later. A half an hour after that, Sunshine declined to go out on the town. There were interesting things to do, looking over our new list of possible jobs, researching interesting new places on the internet. This was her plan, and had been my own plan before the strawberry smoothies and Jamieson and white wine and whatever that Vietnamese apple flavored stuff was. But my plans had changed with my loss of judgment. I did not decline to go out on the town. Sunshine went home and I went clubbing.

My memories are still not too blurry at this point: four of us hailed a cab right outside our sponsor’s apartment. There was some confusion as to where we’d decided to go. Someone asked the cab driver to take us to an Irish bar with a name rather like “Sheraton” while someone else, confused, gave him directions to the actual hotel. Once we’d realized our mistake, we cut our losses and ended up in third place, a trendy curvy wood-and-brick barroom hosting a loud multinational band. The lead singer was French, and sung many French and Spanish ballads at a whole new speed. He also covered the Ramones. The dreadlocked guy was probably a kiwi or a yank, and he covered Oasis and Nirvana and Green Day. Occasionally someone would dance up from the audience and sing a song: a Filipino karaoke star, a African American rapper. It was all too flat and archetypical (or just typical)—sitcom cameos dropping in on the Huxtable family, relying on creative shorthand: an appearance-driven dimensionality based in audience expectation. But the sound thumped, the band was energetic, and the crowd was more or less dancing happily in that restricted hopping and swaying type way fitting, I guess, the closed-in space.

The problem with Vietnamese bars really is my own problem: I do not speak Vietnamese. There are always English menus where drinks are helpfully listed. But there is no way a two-sided piece of folded cardstock can possibly be comprehensive. Predicting this, most bars also list their well and shelf liquors on the menu too. If you know how to mix your drink they will make it for you, just so long as you can explain how to do it in Vietnamese. I cannot. If the drink I want isn’t helpfully listed (remember? A manhattan with Irish whisky instead of bourbon, shaken, up), I must make do with what is available. Friday night, after everything else, I ordered a long island iced tea. Everything else was too sweet: mai tais and singapore slings and cuba libres. Since a friend and I had sprung for that first round, I was later treated to a second long island iced tea I hadn’t planned on having. Complicating this, that second round also included a surprise shot, supposedly a lemon drop. Imagine a lemon drop: one hundred proof vodka and lemon juice and sugar, so alcoholic they are frequently served on fire in their little shot glasses. One of the things I really love about Vietnamese bars is their tendency to pour really long drinks. At this loud, sweaty, hip bar they only charge an extra ten thousand đồng (about sixty cents) to keep pouring a whole drink instead of stopping at a little shot. Little, if any, attention is given to the complex system of comparative alcohol-by-volumes which usually dictate the relative sizes of large and small drinks. This is why we all ended up with our regular drinks in our left hands and lemon drops in our right. Everybody else had beers and I had a long island iced tea and we all had these economy-sized lemon drops served without ice in a sugar-encrusted martini glass the size of a goddamn party hat.

(At one point, trying to choke this volume of sickly sweet lemon stuff down, I sneezed. This also reminded me of a sitcom. Flammable lemon and sugar flew everywhere in a comical spray. This is about when things started to get sort of blurry.)

With both hands full, I had to hook my umbrella in the front of my pants. I should have sent the umbrella home with Sunshine, but I’d forgotten. I knew I wasn’t ever going to get around to opening it. I was actually relishing the thought of walking home in the rain by this point. It’s my favorite umbrella, but carrying the thing around had become sort of a pain in the ass.

After another couple of songs, we left. One of our party decided to call it a night right then, reducing our group to three. This had been my plan, too. Walk home in the rain. But it wasn’t raining and out on the sidewalk someone suggested a nearby club and a cab was hailed and fine, whatever, I was having fun. Whatever it was I’d had planned at that point finally gave in completely to the different story I’m telling. It happened right there in the cab on the way to that club.

If the last place had been trendy and hip, this new place was slick and tony. They even charged an entry fee which was paid for me. They took away my umbrella and put it in a locker for safekeeping. There was no dance floor, but there was a wide spiral stairway radiating from the circular bar where people danced dizzily. Lights flashed. For a long time we sat in a booth. For a while we stood on the stairs. I remember that I swayed and hopped a little. The colored lights flashed on my hands. Hey, they had manhattans here, but no Irish whisky. Concessions were made. We walked on up to the second floor. We talked about important things. The people above me were in the same light as I had on my hands. It was bouncing back and forth. Dancing is good exercise. The banisters were steel, and I could let go with one hand at a time occasionally. I tlked about voodoo. The people up there would wave back. The music never seemed to change. I was eventually helped, more than I’d really like to admit, outside and into a cab by my friends, one of which was the first person I’d even met in Hồ Chí Minh City. I was slowly becoming shocked over being so drunk. I knew I was failing to hide the fact anymore, but I kept wishing I was invisible, less obvious, alone. I do not know who went home first, but I suspect it was me.

By the time I was in our apartment, things were coming back into some focus again. It was probably another hour before I went to bed. In the meantime, I took a little walk upstairs to the roof just to clear my head a little. I checked my email. I drank a lot of water. I tried counting up the number of drinks I’d had throughout the night, tried to figure out what had happened to me as a sobering exercise. There were the small smoothie and Dixie cup whiskies at the office party, a glass of wine at dinner paired with some sips of weird apple aperitif. There were the two long island iced teas and the two manhattans (those were really small if I remember correctly—hell, I drank ‘em fast enough). And oh yeah, there was that goddamn lemon drop thing. I know this sounds like a lot, but I ingested all this, with Indian food, over ten long hours characterized by some low energy hopping and swaying. I do not drink all that often anymore. I was expecting to get drunk, but not as drunk as I got. It seemed unthinkable to me that I had nearly blacked out. That I’d needed help walking down the swank club stairs to the cab. I went to bed embarrassed and perplexed. I just couldn’t understand it.

I woke up five hours later, took a number of aspirin with a whole bottle of water, then carried another bottle into the shower with me. It was a very long shower, in which I probably fell asleep, my head resting on a rolled-up, soaking wet bath towel. I didn’t really recover all that day, but that’s okay. I was ready to accept my punishment. At some point during Saturday I realized what the hell had happened to me the night before. I was still counting my drinks, one two three, trying to figure it all out when it occurred to me. I really don’t drink very often here in Vietnam. Not enough to have learned my new limits, that new point in the evening to say when. I had been following old patterns. When drinking, once the judgment goes, I used to count on habits of expenditure and volume of intake to guide me. I used to go out very often, and mostly I’ve handled myself with composure. But right now I’m almost thirty pounds thinner than I was nine months ago. This means that all those old limits and habits must be scaled in comparison. This is the sort of thing I’d never manage to remember after my judgment has gone away and my blood has already gone toxic with last year’s alcohol levels. As hungover as I was, though, I was happy to see it this way: it gave me something to spend the weekend slapping my forehead over, but also maybe even something to pat myself on the back for—what better reason to make an ass out of myself than all this newfound health? But at the same time I still felt awfully humiliated.

But what became of the original, intended story of my Friday, those plans I made and kept revising? Did that story slowly corrupt in the same way I did that day? Did it go off and end on its on once my plans for it had irretrievably derailed? Is it waiting to be picked back up at some later point in the weekend? If so, can I still come to the same conclusions and insights I might have on Friday, once I pick that story’s trail back up again? And if not, is this a bad thing? Friday was obviously founded on ignorance and dubious judgment. In a way, I’m glad that we didn’t end up making any career decisions on that day. What about my favorite umbrella? That one I can answer: I accidentally left it in that locker at the club. Frankly, it wasn’t the kind of night that could have been saved by an umbrella in the end, not that I ever opened it at all anyway.

Primary photos © an unnamed source; collaged by the author.

Fatal Vanities

2008-05-30T23:59:00.003+07:00

number 2008/??

This is a story about ironic serendipity, or the misreading of self-selecting data, or possibly prescience. It is a confession of my baser vanities, or an accurate analysis of besotted failings, or perhaps just some run of the mill tongue-in-cheek aggrandizing cast in arch fatalism. It is also the story of one beautiful pair of sunglasses. It is not cautionary. 2,932 words.

Thursday Night at the Bar

[HCMC]—On the first Thursday in May, less than one week into a month-long international visit home to North Carolina, I found myself in my favorite bar in the world. It was the third time I’d found myself there in those first four days. We were all seated at the wooden standalone bar in the dining area. Thursdays have traditionally been my favorite night to go out drinking, a scheme I try to revive among the old crowd whenever I return. The crowd is less predictable than it used to be, however: so many of the usual suspects now have Friday morning work schedules. Because of that—and because this whole month of Thursdays have somewhat blurred together—I can’t remember precisely who was in the glasses conversation with me that night. Certainly there were several people listening when I started, for whatever reason, talking about my eyewear.

I wear glasses every day, I explained to anyone listing; but I do not, by the standard expectation, need to wear them. I have fairly sensitive eyes, that’s all. It can become very uncomfortable for me on sunny days or in brightly lit rooms. Because of my life-long tendency to compensate with sunglasses, this discomfort has never had a chance to grow less acute. Speaking of life-long tendencies, I continued, two more come into play here. The first is that I have always been the sort of person to get caught up in whatever I am doing, thus I lose things—hats, pens, telephones, keys, sunglasses—by leaving them laying around behind me. I remember them eventually, later on, but by then it’s often way too late to recover what I’ve left behind. I’ve developed a dopy lag whenever I do anything because of this; whenever I stand up to leave, I check my pockets several times. I look around. I drop my train of thought and conversation lapses. It’s a slow, nearly doddering, example of some absent-minded cliché. But it always takes a minute to surmount my constant suspicion that there’s one last thing I’m forgetting. Eventually, I can get on with my life. Mostly this process works, however awkward it feels. Mostly, I feel I’ve managed to limit the number of random things I’ve lost over my lifetime. But I have yet another loss prevention tactic related especially to sunglasses.

Why so careful with the glasses? I didn’t get into this at the bar that night. Obviously losing anything sucks. Everybody at a bar knows that already. Still, and this brings me to the second life-long mitigating factor mentioned above, for whatever reason sunglasses are special to me. I would rather lose my wallet than my glasses. Heck, the glasses are probably worth more. For whatever reason, I like pretty expensive sunglasses. It would be easy to say this is because I saw a pair I really loved in a movie one day, and I had to buy them. This is only partially true because, even by then, I’d already been indulging in costlier and costlier eyewear. But these movie glasses, the pair of Matusda model 2809s Linda Hamilton wore in Terminator 2, with detachable glass side-guards (in burnished gold instead of the antique silver color Sarah Connors’ wore—one doesn’t want to come over too terribly geeky), definitely represented a break from the midrange. When I finally located a pair of these things they turned out to be very expensive. But being young and saddled with few important bills, I bought them anyway. I lost them eventually, or course. But the damage was already done: I’d started a long-term relationship with the Matsuda label. I never bought another pair in that particular model again, out-of-print collectibles that they were. And while no other model ever aspired to the same price tag as my originals, all have ultimately fallen victim to that fatal sentence above: I lost them eventually, of course.

Instead of giving up on nice sunglasses altogether, I enacted this second loss-prevention tactic. I assumed the eventual loss of these possessions was due to fact that I needed to take the things off every time the sun sank or I walked indoors. To change this, I started purchasing regular frames instead of sunglasses, replacing their clear glass panes with non-prescription transition lenses. Presto: I had a pair of shades when I was out in the sun, and a pair of natural enough looking regular glasses indoors. I had eyewear I never had to take off until I was back home where it was perfectly safe to forget them now and again. And if I could be accused of indulging some affected silly poser vanity by wearing unnecessary glasses, well, no one would really know if I didn’t tell them, right?

Only I frequently told everyone. That’s what I was doing in the bar that night, I was telling whoever was listening all about how the cute pair of Matsudas I was wearing were really only sunglasses. “Because I never have to take them off, I don’t lose them” I said, or something to that effect. But then this sentence just hung in the air, dripped with fateful jinxy foreshadowing; so I went on to say something along the lines of “watch, now that I’ve said that, I’ll have lost them the next time I see you” just to cover my karmic ass. A sop to superstition engineered to defuse whatever accidental and ironic black magic my ill-conceived words might have instigated. Maybe I said it to be funny, but maybe I needed it to unjinx me, too. It wasn’t and it didn’t.

Election Night Under a Backhoe

Tuesday was the North Carolina Primary and the eighth day of my vacation home. I spent that evening at an election party in nearby Hillsboro. The event was engineered to make sure everyone had plenty of margaritas after the polls closed. We chewed over the various returns. This is what happens when a state plans its Primary for the day after Cinco de Mayo: parties get shuffled around and later I’m happy to report I had a pretty margarita-soaked week. Since it was a weekday night, we made the hour-long drive back to Greensboro fairly early. I was still wide awake, and since only fifty-odd percent of the polls were reporting, I decided to park it in a nearby bar for another hour or two just to see how things played out. One, Senator Obama won North Carolina handily. Two, I had about three more drinks. Wary of the typically cloying margaritas found in most US bars, I ordered manhattans. I ask for these to be made with Irish whisky because it is less sweet. I have them shaken and served “up” in a martini glass. I drink these pretending they’re actually in those deep and stocky glasses I only ever see in French noir. I don’t know what that model would be called. But my drinks are only every served in regular US martini glasses. The sad result is a good drink that looks just as pink and trendy as a candy appletini.

To my credit, I left the bar before it closed; but then I spent a couple hours hanging out on a friend’s couch, drinking his beers and watching his television. Sometime around four am I decided it was time to stagger back to my home base, a forty-minute walk along the cross street up at the light. Of course, it would only be thirty-five minutes if I were to cut through the UNCG campus. Saying my slurry goodbyes, I headed off down college hill on my shortcut.

I have a shameful history of drinking and trespassing. With the notable exception of the fraternity houses that dot the neighborhoods where I used to live, this has typically meant that I break into construction sites. It is hard for me to imagine myself clambering up vertiginous scaffolding, jamming myself into plywood crawlspaces, or combing gravelly rooftops for their trapdoors when I’m totally sober. But these things frequently happen when I’m left alone after drinking. This rarely requires me to go out of my way, either, as there always seems to be some major renovating going on nearby. On Tuesday night, it was only a matter of taking a shortcut home and thereby happening past the empty two-story hulk of the Forney building, surrounded by a chain link fence interwoven with green netting and running unfortunately adjacent to a convenient dumpster. I was up over that fence before sparing much of a thought about it, dodging off around shadowy construction equipment looking for an open window into the building. This was easy because the windows didn’t have any glass in them anymore.

The Forney building was originally the Carnegie Library, a thick two-story brick edifice crafted in a staid Italianate architecture commensurate, but less flamboyant, than the stone Romanesque of the older Foust Building around the corner. Nearly four-square, the façade juts into a false portico enclosed with decorative square columns up a few marble steps from the front walk. It was built 1905, the first library to grace the State Normal and Industrial College (for girls) just fifteen years after that institution’s beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. But things progress; the girls school joined the State University system in North Carolina, the library moved into a much larger pad across the street, and the old Carnegie building was renamed after Edward J. Forney, school treasurer and head of the commercial department. In the last decade it seems to have been used primarily by UNCGs School of Education, a graceful latter-day designation for one of the oldest buildings on campus, education being the initial mission of the Normal College way back when. Sometime during the last few months, Forney building was closed, more recently it had been gutted, its roof removed, and a trench dug around its foundations. Most recently, by five o’clock that morning, it had me crawling on my hands and knees through its sub-basement, over clods of fresh dirt lit by those hanging bulbs, in their handy little yellow mesh cages, that car mechanics use.

It is not a big building, and since all of the stuff had been scraped from its interior, including walls and windows and elevators, it was easy to get around in. Most of the incoming materials were still stacked and coiled outside waiting to be installed. There was very little left to see inside. I don’t know how I managed to play around in those remaining open spaces for so long that morning. By the time I was thinking about finding a convenient place to hop back over the green fence, the sky had already perceptibly lightened into that deeply bluish purple that passes for black in a painting. The stars were dimming. I knew dawn was not far off. I was a little spooked by a police cruiser that had just rolled slowly down the road. College Avenue is one way, and it had been going the other. I ducked quietly out of the building through one of the large window holes facing what used to be the quad opposite the one way street. I tiptoed around the corner away from the cruiser toward a cluster of construction stuff under a large tree.

I was almost there when I realized the fence was standing open where I’d come through it, beside my dumpster, and cars were beginning to park in the large grassy area adjacent to the gate. People were coming to work on Wednesday morning! They were maybe sixty feet away, between me and fence, getting out of their cars and unlocking doors and chatting. I hit the ground and rolled underneath the nearest cover I could find, a large yellow Caterpillar model 430E Backhoe Loader sunken into the wet dirt. If anything, the people seemed a lot closer and louder when I could no longer see them, so I crawled along beneath the vehicle’s axle to squat behind the large clawed bucket where I could keep watch. Headlights were swinging along the nearby wall of Forney building, casting my backhoe’s shadow behind me. It was all just amazingly adrenal. I was wearing a black leather jacket and now-muddy jeans, so I felt that I’d probably managed to fade pretty completely into the shadows. My face is still a pretty pale reflector, though, but probably unpredictable enough, stock-still near the ground beneath the large back wheels of that backhoe, to go unnoticed. I was very concerned about the reflection of those sweeping headlights glinting off my glasses though, so I took them off and shoved them in the hand-warmer pocket of my hoodie.

And that’s the last time I ever saw them.

It wasn’t too many seconds later when I made my move, though it seemed like longer. The sky was still dark. I decided to head for cover behind that tree, where a low six-foot brick wall led down a dark alley near the building. I imagine this wall originally served to obscure a service entrance into the first floor, but now that the yard had been excavated in a four-foot wide trench around the subbasement, the wall was perched on top a steep muddy slope running parallel to the wall. The remaining edge of ground along the wall was strewn with pipes and coiled cables. This seemed to be my best chance out: I knew I could climb the wall and I knew the workers wouldn’t be able to see me once I was around the corner of the building. I tried not to think about the cop I’d seen the last time I looked out at the street. Was that just a minute ago? With the noise of the morning crew close enough for me to eavesdrop on their conversations, I rose into a crouch and carefully loped off toward the slope at the corner. There was no way I could run—the ground was so dark I couldn’t see where I was putting my foot. The coils and pipes would rattle if I wasn’t pretty careful; the black eight-foot ditch at the perimeter would claim me if I slipped. I kept slowing myself down as I moved along the periphery of that little muddy ledge, just to be safer. I tried to keep the bulk of that backhoe between me and the first shift.

I practiced my excuse for whenever I finally got caught. All I’d done was trespass, right? I hadn’t broken or damaged anything. I’d seen a pair of keys had been left in that backhoe, and yet I’d just let it go. How mad could they really be at me? Eventually I was around that corner, in the pitch black space between the building and the wall, and I could pause for a minute. In that darkness, the sky had started looking really bright, but no one could see me anymore and I knew then that I’d somehow made it out.

That’s when I reached into my pocket for the Matsuda glasses that were no longer there. It certainly hadn’t been more than a hundred seconds since I’d taken them off, and I hadn’t covered more than sixty feet. If it had been a half hour earlier, I would have combed that dark litter-strewn alley for them and; but by then it was way too late. Popping over the brick wall was easy—the cop had disappeared—and the walk on home really did only take another thirty-five minutes. It was stark daylight when I reached the front porch of the house where I’d been staying. I was in a pretty fantastic mood: just elated that I’d had my very closest call ever, and by then more hung-over from the adrenalin than the booze. But it was too bright outside for sure, even at six fifteen in the morning.

Group Discussion and Epitaph

Did I lose my beloved sunglasses because I’d bragged about them in a bar one night? Did it happen because I tempted fate by explaining how rarely I lose things like sunglasses anymore? Did I simply lose them because I said I would? Perhaps I was paying the price for some egregious fault or moral slip-up? Maybe it is none of the above: it’s quite possible to imagine that these two events merely coincided, within five days, and are connected only by the fact that I have forced them together here. It is probably even easier to imagine that I happen to talk about my glasses all the time, incessantly, just waiting for that terrible day when their ultimate loss will constitute a punch line to the fact. This is the one final benefit they can provide me, then. One last protection against the specter of that unlucky jinx. This account is probably not very meaningful, but it does offer me something in exchange for my Matsudas.

On Monday, May twelfth, I ordered the replacements. The man at the little State Street optometrist’s remembered me from the last time I’d been there, in 2003, when I was buying the sunglasses I lost in the story above. He informed me that Matsuda, a Japanese optical design company, had abruptly gone out of business at the end of 2007. The twenty-odd models he had in his store might be my last opportunity to ever own a pair. I selected, with his help, the staid model number 10225 and the more flamboyant model number 10324, both of which were remaindered and going for deep discounts. I wonder what kind of story I will have when they are finally lost to me?

Linda Hamilton takes a hard look in Terminator 2.
What beautiful eyes you have.

Relativity

2007-10-20T11:00:00.000+07:00

number 01/2007

Before light dawned on the morning of October seventeenth, 2007, we began the relatively long and equally comfortable journey around the globe to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam via San Francisco and Hong Kong. 2,972 words.

Washington to San Francisco

[HCMC]—We arrived at Dulles shortly before four thirty in the morning. There were hardly any lines at the ticketing booth, which is just as well because we were too inexperienced to manage the automated machine: where was the keyboard? the passport reader? where could we tell the machine that international business-class passengers are allotted two checked bags apiece, and that those bags were allowed to be heavier? This was the first time either one of us had ever flown in a class better than economy, and the newness was immediate, a learning curve that started at the very front of the building. Automated ticketing kiosks are also a learning curve, of course. They are intended to assist experienced flyers streamline the otherwise predictable tediousness of routine travel management. But they are as varied as gasoline pumps, hotel shower fixtures, or snowflakes; these squat grey robots were science fiction compared to the old kiosks in Monterrey, México, and we stood for a few minutes with a finger on the touch screen, the helpful robot telling us to “swipe your passport now,” before a ticket agent saved us by moving us to a full service line. The business class line. It still took a few minutes to explain to her about how we did not have too many, too weighty bags.

Minutes later we were already processed, however. By then, our parents had parked the airport caravan in the short-term parking, and we all said goodbye to one another—one last hurtle after weeks of other goodbyes.

Then we were walking down the long, wide hallway to the checkpoint alongside the large crowd of a Taiwanese tour group we were allowed to pass at the executive rope stands. From here, we made our way through the priority express x-ray machines. We were carted from concourse to concourse by giant, crawling passenger transports akin to a doublewide trailer grafted onto a flatbed semi—a long way from the short red busses that drove us over the Monterrey airport’s tarmac. We walked down the C concourse past news sellers and full-on restaurants already open at five thirty in the morning. We had an hour to kill before our plane began boarding business class passengers first.

I had no idea what to expect, but it was nice. The seats were big and plush, with adjustable headrests, individual armrests, lumbar support. A flight attendant offered me orange juice, water, a mimosa as I stepped through a the cabin. The aisle was large enough to navigate around passengers who had stopped to stow their baggage. Sunshine had been unable to get us seats together on this leg, and she set in the row directly in front of me. It was very quiet in the cabin. I never expected an airplane to be more comfortable than a first-class Mexican bus. About the time we were supposed to be taking off, the standard safety instructions played on the retractable overhead televisions. The captain revved an engine. The plane taxied away from the gate. Soon, the captain announced the rather alarming new that half of the plane’s engines were not working. So we taxied back to the gate again.

Other travelers are crazy. Since whenever, I have a gradually eroding fear of flying. When I was younger, the only part of air travel that spooked me was the landing, when the ground came closer and closer and the plane made quick, sharp maneuvers to line up properly with the tiny rushing knife of asphalt. Now, and for some time, flying frightens me by default, and my favorite part is the landing: soon this will all be over. This is a digression meant to illustrate the tedium of waiting in the plane for an hour while they ascertained the problem. This is by way of explaining the incredulity I feel when I hear other travelers bitching that we hadn’t left already in a plane that can only fly in rapid, deadly circles.

As soon as the mechanic discovered the problem we were all ordered off the plane. We were asked to leave our luggage where it was. We waited for thirty minutes for them to make a decision about whether to cancel our flight. I couldn’t say what I hoped for, really. Maybe for someone to spontaneously invent a teleporter right there in concourse C. At eight forty or so the decision to go ahead and—why the heck not?—get on with the flight was announced to me, to Sunshine, to the large Taiwanese tour group, and we all shuffled back onto the plane, business class first. I was offered a mimosa, water, orange juice, we watched a safety movie, the pilot was apologetic. I crossed my fingers and it worked: the plane made it all the way into the sky and back out again on the other side of the country.

The stranger sitting beside me was polite, pleasant, and all about travel etiquette: he never spoke to me until breakfast was served, as the attendant spread a tablecloth over my telescoping tray table and poured coffee into my porcelain cup. Then we had a refined chat over our meal—some sausage something for him, fruit plate and cereal for me. He’s a CPA, he wore a nice suit. After breakfast, we both returned to reading and giving each other space. I fell asleep for almost two hours, my only sleep since Tuesday morning. I woke up on approach. I wasn’t very nervous anymore; this was almost over. We touched down in San Francisco only two hours into our three-hour layover.

San Francisco to Hong Kong

San Francisco International, at nine, was a lot more crowded than Dulles had been at seven. I changed my watch to local time while we double-timed it through the airport to the international gate. The gates here are numbered, but the concourses are not designated with a letter. We were at forty-something and needed to make it to somewhere in the hundreds, someplace labeled G. San Francisco’s airport is remarkably ramshackle, old, inconsistently signed. The sporadic maps indicated gates only up into the nineties. On the map, San Francisco International looks just like a stink bug. The departures board said our plane was on time. Our layover, which was to be so long before our breakdown in DC changed all that, was ticking away, almost over. Sunshine was our hero here. She somehow noticed the paper sign stuck to a wooden podium directing us down a flight of concrete stairs to the international gate. The man at the gate was wearing a maintenance uniform. The doorway looked like it would open onto a janitor’s closet, and was decorated with Do Not Enter Employees Only written beneath a steady red hand. But paper signs were taped to the cinder block walls, and these depicted a diagonal arrow and read International in an unsteady hand. We seemed to be the only people following this arrow, but okay. It led one floor down to a glassed-in hallway just off a mechanic’s bay in a crook of the tarmac. Towering above us was the right engine of a 727, some of its shell removed. The hallway terminated at an elevator where we were directed to press Floor Two International by another shaky paper sign. By this time we were surrounded by Japanese flight attendants who maxed-out the first elevator car. They had cute plush animals and stickers on their luggage, they had pop haircuts. There were no other passengers but us.

We eventually arrived on the second floor, just beside the sign directing us to our gate, for which we had to ride down one floor on an escalator. Back to floor one. While we were on the escalator, they called for the business and first class passengers to begin boarding. We walked right to the gate and got on the plane. I spent all of twenty-eight minutes on my feet in California.

Once on the plane, this one much bigger than the last, we were directed up the stairs to the business class cabin. Back to the second floor. This was a 777, and it had separate spaces for first, business, and economy class. I never even had to glimpse the latter, but the forward cabin of the first class passengers was eye-opening: instead of seats, they had kitty-corner pods which transformed into full single beds with dashing gimcrack headboard-desks consoles. Upstairs, the business class area was no less pleasant for all its unintimidating convention. We had the very same lounge chairs as the last flight, only they were positioned very far apart. Each had a television in the armrest. Each had a full keypad of control options. I was surprised to learn that my leather carry-on duffel was too round to fit in the overhead compartment, and had already given it to the prompt and businesslike attendant when I realized that there was a whole row of roomy trunks along the floor of the plane. I gladly received my fresh orange juice as I took my seat. I tried to touch the back of the chair in front of me with my toes and I could not.

The plane took off on schedule around one pm San Francisco time, the captain telling us that headwinds had convinced the controllers to dictate a longer, more southerly route than had been the plan. I changed my watch just after takeoff: fifteen hours forward to Hong Kong, even though we were going backwards over the Pacific. Our flight from California to Hong Kong lasted about seventeen hours, but we arrived twenty-nine hours later, eleven time zones and one adjustment for Daylight Saving Time later. Beneath the plane, it got earlier relative to our flight speed as we crossed the longitudes, then jumped forward a day relative to our departure hemisphere. After the sun had risen on us on the Dulles tarmac, it never set again until Hong Kong approach, making for one long day. Within the plane, things were as nice as they could be: glass glasses, silver silverware, champagne and delicate smoked salmon salad with challenging greens. I had a good but academically difficult book and crossword puzzles that were a little too easy for me. I had had almost two hours of sleep in the previous twenty-seven, and after the first hour, our well-mannered neighbors in the business class cabin shut all windows making it cozy and dark like a campsite. There was nothing but the sun-blasted ocean below us, anyway. I had a drink or two, I readied myself for sleep.

But that never came. It was a smooth enough flight. I didn’t get very nervous about it because the plane was so big, the bottom so far away, that I couldn’t really feel much of the flying. I am not scared of riding the elevator. I don’t know why I was unable to sleep. Maybe because I was in public. Maybe the noise. Maybe the jet lag. I tuned into the flight on TV. The little blue map flashes through practical information over a little GPS mock-up of the plane and the blue water below it. The view changes often, and the widest angle showed some land mass. We were going 579 miles per hour. Eventually there was nothing but a black cross over blue. I was too tired to read my book. We were 39,000 feet into the sky. The screen frequently repeated its information in Cantonese. Before long, I know what the fields meant, even in Hanzi. We’ve elapsed this much time, we have this many meters remaining. The opiate of the half light, the weary tiredness, the drinks and coffees and whispers, the crosshair focus of that achingly slow blue map, these cast an otherworldly aspect over the elongated day, I could do nothing but watch, haunted, as it progressed at half-speed but without changing. We crossed the date line shortly before eleven am somewhere, pm somewhere else. I am pretty sure I lived through every hour of that flight, even the ones that merely exist as the conjecture of relativity. Outside it was forty degrees below zero according to the map. Later in Chinese it was still forty below. This is neatly reveled: minus forty is the same in Celsius as it is in Fahrenheit: cold.

(Veracruz to Greensboro)

The longest bus ride I’ve taken in my life was from Veracruz, México to Greensboro, North Carolina, beginning the eighteenth of December just about twelve years ago. The entire trip, including layovers in Huston and New Orleans, took me fifty-two hours from start to finish. I crossed two time zones moving forward. There was a vast discrepancy between the charm and comfort of the Mexican busses versus the ones I had to use over the US border. I thought there was nothing more comfortable than these smooth, highly cooled land liners. They had more legroom than an airplane and cost less than a train. They were clean, their drivers were full of personality, they played movies. I thought that my fortunes would have been much improved had I been allowed to remain in Mexican busses the entire way across the US, too. But it wouldn’t have mattered: fifty-two hours is just too long to sit on any bus.

Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City

My spell broke over the Pacific Ocean, about ninety minutes before arriving in Hong Kong. A large lunch was served and the mood of the cabin seemed to wake along with me. Oddly, this virtual morning coincided with nightfall outside the plane, the opened windows finally and thoroughly lit the cabin with steadily deepening twilight. Soon, it was stone nighttime outside, and the plane was banking over the distinctive skyline of Hong Kong Island and landing at Chek Lap Kok Airport just off the north shore of Lantau. Here we gathered our carry-on bags and made our way through a thoroughly modern airport to board another plane just like the one we’d landed in. This walk did not pass through customs or immigration, we were merely traveling on through to Vietnam along controlled international spaces incidentally inside an award-winning building in one of the world’s greatest cities. Our bags were checked through security on the way off the plane, and then once again, for good measure, as we were boarding again about forty minutes later. In the plane we already knew where the stairs were, which seats were ours, where to put the bags. I suspected I might actually feel damned, faced with the very same landscape, same passengers even, on this new airplane. Like maybe time was looped up, repeating itself. But I didn’t, the business class cabin had finally become comfortable through familiarity.

This was the short leg of our trip. It was filled with nervous-excited chatter about Vietnam, filling out immigration paperwork, some murmured language practice, We gathered all of our documentation, made sure these things were replaced safely in spots that were easy to access. On the televised map between the seats, the plane remained firmly over recognizable bright green landscapes the whole way. Outside the world was moonless and black. The flight attendant tried to offer me food again, but I’d eaten less than two hours before, and couldn’t face the duplicate meal on this duplicate plane. After such a long second flight, the hour and a half between nose-up and nose-down on this third one went by in a flash: the seatbelt sign dinged on, the outside darkness resolved itself into a cloud cover we immediately left behind, my ears started up, and the pinpricks on light out in the void were Ho Chi Minh City.

What kind of first impression can be gleaned from an airplane? On a map, a city looks flattened and compartmentalized. Everything rendered in orderly uniform lines, everything can be seen. In reality, cities spring from the irregular ground and every nook is as isolated as it is accessible. Here was a number of lights, then a dozen, then a hundred, then a city. It spread from me to as far away as I could see out every window. A uniform pattern still: mostly low, cubic buildings punctuated sporadically with blinking skyscrapers. As we closed in my eyes adjusted, the maze of the city deepened. It was not lit up like Hong Kong, but lit from inside like a tent, the cracks in its shell revealing ghostly green flora, narrow fissures of streaming traffic, mystery. It grew more and more intricate before I really got a feeling, with no point of reference, for how close we were getting to the ground. It was fascinating, dystopian, both futuristic and developing. Enticing. Then every window in our air conditioned 777 fogged up and we could see nothing more until we were on the ground and hustled off the plane into Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport, where it was already almost nine thirty, Thursday night. I reset my watch one last time,

I was really tired by then. My lack of sleep made for an almost phantasmagorical trip here, but it also really helped keep my nerves in check for dealing with taciturn officials. Even the open, officious, knee-jerk animosity of immigration agents the world over could not penetrate my protective stupor. I was forced to stand in a different line from Sunshine because the man in the uniform didn’t like me. The next guy barely looked up when I stepped over the yellow line. “Robert” he seemed to yawn inside. I said I was, and he stamped me. Sunshine had actually had to talk. We were met at the baggage carousel by one of Sunshine’s coworkers who helped us on through the airport and on into the sultry slap of the southeast Asian evening.

Ho Chi Minh Cityscape photo © the Author

Butterflies

2006-07-18T05:37:00.000+07:00

number XX/2006

I have worked all week to rebuild my blog in this new and, one hopes, less restricted way. This is an explanation of sorts as to why I did it and what I hope to get out of it. 1,643 words.

[NL]—A style book is a resource publishing houses (like the New York Times, or Harper Collins) use to standardize formatting for the works they publish. It is a formal list of all the grammatical and typesetting answers to routine questions that pop up about preferential writing styles. There are as many different ways to write something as there are writers, and the style book offers guidance in tricky situations. It dictates house rules in the areas of formatting and the handling of verbal particulars. Ace reporters then know where to turn when trying to sort out material particulars such as: how do I go about inserting punctuation around quote mark? At what point is it appropriate to merely use numbers instead of spelling numbers out? Will the Washington Post let me print “asshole”? Will the editors at Penguin demand a certain endnote format? The list goes on and on because there are hundreds of standards. What is right for a doctoral thesis at Stanford and what is acceptable in the Boston Journal of Botany may vary by a little or a lot, but they do vary. One can assume there is a gulf of difference between the stylebooks of the Christian Science Monitor and Penthouse Forum.

This journal also has a style book, though it seems a little overblown to call it that. For formatting, I choose to copy incidental firsts: an illustration I whipped up of my Halloween mask (here) has been the antecedent for every other photo in this journal: I copy those unlikely parameters into every new file I post. The color of this blog’s background came about through accidental experimentation with the bizarre hexadecimal codes in the blog’s template. It was a pain to figure out how to replicate it in Photoshop, but I did it. Now it is saved for use on the borders of all of my Polaroid-looking frames. But or substantive issues, I keep a stylebook detailing the textual rules observed here. It is half a sheet of yellow legal paper, bulleted by handwritten five-pointed scribbles, and I know it is around here somewhere. Doesn’t much matter for today’s post if I find it, though.

That sheet of paper probably tells me the following: star: do not write in the second person. Star: do not reference the blog itself, it’s a platform, not a subject. Star: write about yourself not your friends. Star: be inclusive, explain things for a wider audience than expected. Star: don’t whine. Star: write sentences out; no bulleted lists, net jargon, or other irritating brevities. So look, the thing is only half a page, so it is far from comprehensive. If life gets too tricky, the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition) is on a shelf about four feet away from me. These tools help me keep a system imposing post consistency from one month to the next. They also to prevent me from posting tempting blog content like this:

“Damn, its been six months since you last heard from me. Good thing I have been writing those letters to each of you. Hey Chris, stop reading this blog and get back to work!” [Star: do not overuse exclamation points or other bizarre punctuation.]

All of this serves to make this project as tidy as possible. My desire is to work up to a writing discipline that will serve me in other areas, but also to keep the posts themselves from straying into ugly or bewildering territories. I also try to keep the content away from subjects off-topic or entirely pointless. There are certain style rules intended to keep these goals, too. There is no sheet for these: I tend to steer away from any daily journal or diary content, preferring to let experiences ripen in hindsight, connect thematically to other experiences, and formulate into a synthesis. I like the subjects of my posts to act as a springboard to research and learning more about the places I am interacting with. I try to write to the point, occurrences grouped by theme or time, which keeps me from dumping long lists of unrelated material together in one heap. Finally, I want to take my time and make something that I worked hard to make, spent some energy and mind on. Combine this with the fact that I work kind of slowly, and only pretend to work in chronological order, and the outcome is that my project is ever more divorced from the rapid timeline of its subject. Something new for the starred sheet, then: take notes, it’ll be six months before you finally tell Chris to get back to work.

So that was my simple plan until I began to stumble upon its problems: any consistency of style is very restricting; little, unripe and disconnected experiences were disappearing between the posts; and oh, that escaping timeline. The fact is that there are very few readers willing to check back once a day for the forty days between entries. Some entries (a long history of everything that has ever happened, for instance) tend to bottleneck the process, too: while I am putting the hard work off, I cannot actually post the easy and fun posts that come along directly after. Who would ever find all the back-dated commentary that I am posting if it is hidden under newer backdated content, born tucked into this blog’s archives? I didn’t mean to insinuate above, if I did, that my own delusions of magazine are the right way to make a nice web log. Indeed, they are probably less valuable to the world than the more traditional bulleted, listed, linked, spur-of-the-moment, and—most importantly—frequently-updated blogs out there. But in the long run, this is not the real reason why I decided to change everything last weekend. Frankly, I decided I really wanted to be able to include some of that traditional, lightweight, easy to make stuff on my space, too. It looked like fun.

That is why I’ve just spent something like fifty hours maddening myself with HTML and CSS to figure out how to include a second, smaller blog beside the longer standard content on this site. It just comes down to the fact that, like many bloggers, I would like to tell you all about the links that I visited this week, toss in a note about my upcoming vacation, or just tell you that nothing of any kind of importance has happened to me today. It could be a forum where I mention things that are happening in the Mexican news that have caught my eye. It might be a place where I can express an unsupported opinion. Mostly, it is a place where I can mention short little experiences that don’t resonate or change my life or teach me much, the disconnected things that were slipping by in the old standard. For example:

On Thursday, November fourth, while it was still daylight on Sunshine’s lone sick day of the year, we stood and watched hundreds and hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies tumble by level with our second floor windows. They were visible from blocks away, black dots that grew in the sky into a pair of spotted gold wings, spindly and random in the air, and then receded into dots again against Cerro de la Silla. The birds were going nuts, swooping to and fro and mostly missing; but occasionally disembodied wings would sprinkle by, leftovers like a stale fortune cookie crust. In the wind, the severed wings floated much the same way that the living butterflies did, dead but persevering.

Why should I have to do without that, just because it makes no difference to whatever else was happening that week? Just because I haven’t gotten around to writing that week yet? Jammed between our trip to Honduras and our friends Tony and Christene rotating back to the US, the butterflies were in danger of being forgotten simply because they were small and there was nowhere to fit them. Is there some reason I could not just impose the above, as is, into my journal? Yes: obsessive compulsion. I didn’t think it would look pretty to have long twenty-two hundred word posts clustered in with bulleted lists and three line sentences. I thought that would annoy me. Because of this, I created a whole new blog for that stuff, figured out how to make a new column for it to live in, and then I tried to figure out how to make it actually appear there to a greater or lesser extent. When all of this was done, I worried that the three column look would coop up longer content into a thin yardage of text scroll, making it harder than ever to read. I worried that the cluttered business of the new design would be confusing. I worried that readers might now know what the temperature was at the Monterrey airport (which is located in the mildly cooler town of Apodaca). The worries snowballed, and I attempted to solve every one of them.

Now it is next week somehow, and I can tell it is daytime because I have the screen tilted away from the window reflection. I am just about done with this. In preparation for the roll-out, the new build, the encroaching go-live date, I wanted to write this down in explanation, even if it varies form the strictest reading of the style book. I was worried that I was alienating my few readers through my inability to keep up with the old blog right. The answer to this problems seems to be to make a bigger blog—two blogs—this I should be able to keep up with no problem. But the answer is also to stay engaged by not restricting myself from sillier, easier content more enjoyable, at times, to both you and me. Star: be interesting.

Copious Notes © the Author

Wanders of the World

2006-03-04T14:09:00.000+07:00

number6/2006

The waiting was supposed to be the tricky part, but we made it. One week after submitting our bid list we know where Sunshine is to be posted in 2007. We are elated about it. 1,249 words.

[NL]—Friday we submitted our official bid proposal to the proper authorities, and sat back to wait. I very much handled this wait the way I predicted I would: I spent many hours a day cruising online photos of the places we’d included on our list while daydreaming about heading off to one or another of them. I worked my way slowly through the whole list (save one or two), and then started in at the beginning again. Sunshine has handled it more like we were told we would: she wants to know where the hell we are going and to get the suspense over with. I would imagine that this comes as no shock to anyone who has seen her on the days leading up to her birthday.

In the days between Friday and now, we have been studiously following the traffic on the bid computer to see what positions are garnering the most attention. Many of the posh posts we had assumed high equity bidders would go for remained unassigned but showed heavy traffic, indicating many interested parties had listed them. Places like Canberra, Australia and Montevideo, Paraguay were showing that as many as thirty or thirty five bidders. London and Amsterdam were getting equally fought over. We had included none of these destinations on our list for just this very reason, higher equity employees would get them all. Some of the posts that we had expected to be included in the list above were not so vied for, though. Island paradises like Praia, Cape Verde and Port Luis, Mauritius were seeing some interest, but nothing like Canada, or the Hague. I suspect it is because paradise is sometimes hard to access by direct flight to a major airport. Cape Verde had been on our list, and Mauritius had not. By Mardi Gras, all of the positions we were bidding on had at least five or six interested others.

By Wednesday, the post positions for the bidders with the highest equity were assigned, and since Sunshine was regularly checking the bid computer, we were watching positions disappear as they were given away. I got an update call late Monday afternoon letting me know that of all the posts granted that day, only four had been on our list. Coincidentally, they were my four least favorite positions we’d bid, and while I would have lived in any of them, I was happier that in this first round the list had narrowed to something more acutely desirable. Yesterday, Sunshine called me in the late afternoon again and told me of more positions snatched from our jaws. After that first day, this news was more upsetting: every new post dropped from possibility was a new post I had really secretly wanted to have most, and it hurt to lose it to someone else. Finally, early this afternoon, Sunshine called to let me know that she had gotten the official email that we were to be assigned Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, effective sometime around October 2007. This was incredible news since Vietnam had been our top choice; and, frankly, when we had watched the position disappear off the list yesterday afternoon, we assumed it was to a bidder with five percent more equity than we have. We’d given up on Ho Chi Minh. I suspect that it is possible we never did know what was going on as well as we thought we did.

This is great. Heading off to Vietnam for two years is a dream come true. I was at home bracing myself to be excited about Yekaterinburg, Russia or Skopje, Macedonia; but what I really wanted was Vietnam all along. I had actually started getting upset when I heard that Dar-Es-Salaam was going to another bidder, but now Vietnam is my favorite place in the world, again. And it is more than just Vietnam to get excited about (not that it would need to be, with Ho Chi Minh and Hanoi, Danang, China Beach the Mekong Delta and Halong Bay in Vietnam), but the entire region. I’ll get to go to Laos and Thailand while I am there, Myanmar and China and Malaysia and Cambodia. Flights we take are so long, that it is generally taken for granted that passengers will stop on the way for a day or two of rest before getting back on the plane. These places will be in Bangkok or Hong Kong or Singapore. Our R&R leave, when we get it about halfway through our tour, will be in Sydney, Australia. There is just no bad news.

We are going to the other side of the world.

Tonight we celebrated at our favorite little neighborhood half Spanish restaurant. We just kept saying, “Vietnam, man! Viet-fucking-nam!” Now that it is late and all of this has, to some degree, sunk in, I realize that I really know very little about Vietnam. I’ve known some people from there, and some more from the SE Asian region. I’ve eaten a lot of what we call “Vietnamese Food” in the US, but I know enough about the cultural and folkloric qualities of cuisine to be suspicious of this actually baring much resemblance to the food I will find in-country. I have seen a number of Vietnamese movies that I have loved, and my images and impressions and fantasies of life there come from these: lush and hot tropical green surroundings cut with teeming masses of rickshaws and pedestrians selling street corner things and monkeys and durian and pointy little hats. Many of the people I know, family and friends, I’m afraid have images from movies, too—or newsreels, or grainy black and white newspaper photos: olive drab Hueys with open doors settle near the plume of smoke and the POV jumps up and down while young men with rucksacks jump and run for the whipping trees. Vietnam will resist these preconceptions. I expect it to.

The minute I found out about Vietnam, I began downloading photos from the internet. I downloaded hundreds, some taken before I was born, others within the last few months. They are a confused array of wide streets and muddy rivers and French colonial architecture, low CC motor bikes and coffee shops and piles of mud and rain up to here for six months every year. But I have to wait for the real learning to begin. Our travel guides and written materials will show up mail-order, and we will get a glimpse of other westerners’ ideas about, and reactions to, and opinions of the country itself. Then, in early 2007, Sunshine will begin Vietnamese language and SE Asian Cultural classes in DC. Eventually, we will get on a plane and find ourselves in the hustle and bombast of downtown Saigon, and from that moment on we will not be able to throw a rock and hit something we could have reasonably prepared ourselves for. When Sunshine first was offered this job, and I first found out that this was what my future was going to be, I had big dreams of my life changing completely: the world around me going from pole to pole and changing extremely from one day to the next. This fantasy was left unfulfilled when we were put in Monterrey, no matter how much I have grown to like this place. Now I can see the kind of thing I was wanting there on the horizon, and I am just in love with it. I love it.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Ho Chi Minh City

Official tourism site for Ho Chi Minh City (in English)

Official tourism site for Vietnam (in English)

Here, here, here, or here for good Ho Chi Minh City photos

Southeast Asia photo illus. © the Author

Strange Advocates

2006-02-26T06:38:00.000+07:00

number 5/2006

For the majority of the last two months we have been wedging geographic information into and in between every other topic or activity. Our heads have become globes, and they are spinning. 2,172 words.

[NL]—In my opinion, the starting point for this new life was back on October 12th, 2004. That was the day that Sunshine was assigned to her first foreign post. The internal post ceremony, called Flag Day, is a time-honored culmination of several months worth of struggle and fuss to secure a decent starting point within Sunshine’s field of employment. The story of that day is here. On Flag Day, we discovered that we were to be moving to Monterrey, Mexico for two years beginning in February, 2005.

On January 17th 2006 I was working a crossword puzzle with my mother in a little deli in Greensboro, NC when this process started all over again. I got a call from Sunshine who was at work in Mexico; she had just received the new list of positions we were to be bidding for next. Back in 2004, the list of available positions had been tailored to her graduating class, and therefore consisted of only entry-level positions, sized to correspond with the number of people in Sunshine’s class. From these, we had carefully chosen a list of viable positions based on Sunshine’s desire to possibly learn a new language and get some of her career requirements completed. During this time, every other member of Sunshine’s class was doing the same. A whole community, for a month, stopped talking about anything else. The air was filled with department jargon referring to cities, positions, and equities; ranked by how, were and, most importantly, why. It was sometimes hard to hold all of this stuff in one head. Plus, it was impossible not to at least half-way keep up with the lists of other people, people who were ranking the exact same positions we were. On Flag Day, we were assigned to post in Monterrey, México, based on Sunshine’s ability to speak Spanish and the need to fill a position there immediately. During the Flag Day ceremony, of course, we also got to watch the rest of our list be assigned to other people. It was a relief to finally begin concentrating on one country, only; but it was bittersweet.

This new bidding process opened a bit differently. Gone was Sunshine’s requirement to work a specific type of job, for example, within a specific type of language. Gone were certain restrictions based on first-time bidders. Lastly, the list was much longer due to the simple fact that it was no longer tailored for a specific graduating class. It was chilly that day outside the deli; and while mom worked our crossword for us, I stood and listened to Sunshine rattle off most of three hundred and sixty-four available positions abroad. It seemed unbelievable that we were going to have to whittle this down to a ranked list of twenty positions by February. My head was already spinning.

“Abidjan-CON, Abidjan-CON, Abu Dhabi-POL, Addis Ababa-COL/POL…”

“Addis Ababa is Ethiopia?”

“Yes. Ait Taipei-CON, CON, Ankara-CON, CON, APAO, Ashgabat-CAO…”

First, it was necessary to crop this whole list down to something a little bit smaller. We were able to eliminate many of the jobs because Sunshine was no longer required to do them, in the language Sunshine was no longer required to bid on. There were many posts we could cross off because they were unaccompanied positions in conflict-stricken areas. This meant that we were not really looking at much of the Middle East, the entire western hemisphere, or many interesting places in between. Also, while Sunshine is still interested in learning another language, it would be better for her to learn a country specific language that does not typecast her too much in a certain area. We already have that going on a little in this hemisphere, and Sunshine’s Spanish proficiency will likely have us bouncing back to Latin America on and off throughout her career. If we were to go to an Arabic speaking country now, for example, that would be it: we’d spend the rest of our lives in one or the other kind of place. We would rather have a little more diversity than that, if possible.

“No: Bogotá Bogotá-POL/ECON, Bogotá, Bogotá, Bogotá, but: Bratislava-ECON”

“Brussels-GSO okay, Bucharest-CON-ECON damn, Bucharest-CON, Bucharest-CON, Bucharest-AGSO though, Budapest-CON-POL, damn.”

“That’s it for the B’s. Cairo, Cairo, Cairo-AIO, Canberra. Skip Caracas?”

Once we’d done away with the things we weren’t looking for, we could concentrate on the things we were. It was a goal to gear our list toward smaller areas where hopefully our two-year stay would be adequate to see much of the country. In this way we were able to eliminate large and interesting places, like India and China. Places we are very interested in living later when Sunshine is tenured and our stays there are longer. Another important factor: salary differentials for hardship or danger get combined and recorded as accrued job equity. This helps during the process of bidding for a new job. Hardship differentials can be based on the difficulty in achieving expected quality of life due to a number of possible factors. These can include, badly paved roads or difficulty in obtaining goods or services. It can also be based on more immediate hardships such as the prevalence of disease, street crime, or distance from home. Danger pay almost solely consists of the possibility of the employee’s life being threatened by wars or political factions targeting Americans. More realistic dangers (hurricanes, mosquitoes, bacteria, corrupt police with AK-47s) tend to fall under hardship pay instead of actual danger. In our case, there is a five percent equity attached to our position in Monterrey, probably because of the pollution. This means that we will be able to pick our next position over people who are currently working positions with zero equity, posts like Paris or London; but after people in higher equity posts like Kinshasa (twenty percent) or Baghdad (fifty percent). Sunshine was interested in getting a little more equity this time around, and was thus able to focus her attentions toward certain types of places. After Monterrey, I just wanted to go someplace that got cold. Eventually, we were able to look at this long list in a far more manageable way. We had cut it down to a list of fifty-some positions that were all in one way or another interesting to one or both of us.

“Dar-Es-Salaam, Praia, Maputo, Cape Verde, Kinshasa, Cairo, what am I missing?

“Djibouti?”

“No, Djer booty!”

This process above happened while we were in different countries during the end of January. There were long and strange international phone conversations back and forth. The two of us both worked with the list and independently, coming up with personal twenty-position lists picked in a vacuum. Sunshine did a major amount of internal research, learning about these jobs from the people who currently have them. She accrued facts about the housing, the distances necessary to walk or drive to get around in these actual city spaces abroad, and the consumer goods available at these posts. In other words, she learned useful things about the quality and cost of expatriate life in the cities we were considering. I did a little more “traveler’s fantasy” -type research, learning about the cultures, the architecture, the food. I looked up many photographs of interesting places in travel books and magazines, ruminated over the histories of seven hundred year old cities and important international regions. In this way, both of us managed to make personal bid lists that were wholly different from one another, using the same stock of about fifty positions. In some cases, it was because one or the other of us ignored the rules above for a really cool position (in my case, it was very hard to accept that we were not going to be bidding on Kathmandu, Nepal because Sunshine did not want to do the job that was available there). Mostly, our lists were different because we have different ideas about, and interests in, the world. By the time I came back to México at the beginning of February, we were ready to really wade into the thick of the process: from here on out we would become strange advocates for the places that had arbitrarily, over the previous two weeks, become very near and dear to our hearts. In this way we would try to percolate one final, two-person list from the two personal lists we had already made.

“Don’t think of it as a country, think of it as a city. Everything that ever happened in modern history happened here, first.”

“Is every known species of lemur indigenous there?”

“No, but it’s, like, a five-hour train ride to eight other places on this list.”

For those three weeks the odd conversations intensified. Each of us did a little giving-up on, and a little hard-selling for, our places of choice. There was never a sense that we were arriving at the final decisions we were making in any other way than harmonious and gracious discussion. Sunshine was interested in several places in Africa that I was less interested in. On the other hand, she had no idea originally what I found so alluring about many places in Eastern Europe. So we taught each other, and the final draft was tugged and nudged and finely-tuned until it was something very acceptable to us both. I was telling her all about the temperatures and the climates and colored houses and accessible canals, and she was telling me all about the price of cereal and the sitting rooms and the fact that there was going to be a new Embassy being built. In this way, our understanding of the actual fact of the new place, and the act of living and working there, was becoming far more well-rounded. We also discovered that we were very interested in places we had not thought about much before (Tbilisi, Georgia, for example), places we discovered an affinity for together. It was strange to watch my perception warp from the beginning of the process to the end of it. At the beginning, I would have been pretty happy to accept a position in any of the fifty-some places that became our master guideline, but by the end I was very much interested in the places I was advocating. The hardest stage for me ended up being the positioning of the list itself. Ranking these positions one through twenty was very difficult, and the prejudices I had to foster to keep it from seeming purely arbitrary made it more. It was obvious that on different days, for example, I was more interested in Chisinau, Moldova than Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania. The next day, I was unable to recapture what it was I had possibly been thinking, and these positions were reordered again. The strange conversations between Sunshine and me continued along these lines for days. On our final list of twenty one (we added one extra because we were worried that our first choice was scheduled too tightly), there were finally two places I was fairly uninterested in going. In at least one of these two cases, it was a place I had debated a week before to have higher on the list.

“Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, Chisinau, Bucharest, Dar-Es-Salaam, Maputo, then Hanoi again, then Antananarivo, then Ho Chi Minh again.”

“then Tbilisi, then Dar-Es-Salaam, then Maputo and Antananarivo before Hanoi again, then Djibouti…”

“I’ll move Tel Aviv to nineteen if Hanoi two can still be at seven.”

On the day we officially submitted out final bid proposal, February 24th, we had the only really tense moment we endured during the whole process. On the day we submitted, we discovered that one of our ranked positions had been closed. After having been very prepared for this deadline all week, we had to pick a replacement right then. Several harried phone calls later, our list was submitted to Sunshine’s career counselor. Sometime this week, he will sit down in a room with the career councilors of the other bidders and hash out, based on rank and equity and interest, which of Sunshine’s coworkers will get which position. I have heard that the waiting is the worst part of the process, but while I am certainly on the edge of my seat, I am glad that the choosing part is over. That part was grueling. By the time the results are in, I will have completely reverted back to my attitude at the beginning of this whole ordeal: there were twenty-one positions on that final list, and I would be happy to accept any of them. What was I thinking trying to decide between Antananarivo, Madagascar and Bratislava, Slovakia? How did I manage to do that? Maybe the very hardest part of the whole process is going to be the assigning itself. There is little danger of our getting posted to a place of tepid interest this time around, but once one position is chosen for us it will mean that we will have to mourn the loss of the other twenty possibilities.

photo © the Author

A Note Regarding Why

2006-02-18T05:47:00.000+07:00

number 4/2006

I was up pretty early this morning reading the news. Violence is still escalating between cartels vying for control of the northern border. Suddenly, I heard a knock at the door…. 2,896 words.

Crossroads Town

[NL]—The town of Laredo enjoys a sleepy history seemingly incommensurate with its current woes. Born alongside Spanish colonial expansion into northern territories in the eighteenth century, the area which is now Laredo was first discovered because it was an efficient place to cross the muddy Rio Grande. Soon, petitions were written, permissions granted, and a small huddle of adobe houses officially cropped up there. The residents of these houses watched as their Spanish flag was replaced by the Mexican flag after the war of independence, the Mexican then replaced with the Texan during the succession of the Lone Star Republic, and then, finally, as the Stars and Stripes were permanently hoisted at the end of the long “Mexican War,” a border dispute concerning much of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Between these milestones, forts and battalions sprung up on the banks of this crossroad, garrisons were stationed, and Santa Ana marched through on the way to the Alamo. The little village of Laredo even enjoyed a stint as the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande, a de facto no man’s land between the Rio Grande, America’s declared southern border, and the more northerly Nueces River, the northern border declared by Mexico. During all of this, dusty little Laredo abided as an important and all but unnoticed waypoint.

But then something fundamental happened again, making Laredo pretty much unique, and somewhat determining the constancy of its difficult future. When the US finally convinced Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the border between the two countries, little Laredo, sitting on the river’s fertile northern floodplain, with its Spanish then Mexican heritage, was left in the wrong country. In response, patriotic Mexicans moved south of the river to retain their Mexican citizenship, and a new dusty little settlement was born: Nuevo Laredo. Throughout the years, these two Laredos have been inextricably tied together—the archetypical border towns facing each other across federal checkpoints and an intermittent river, evincing the worst of two worlds as a sibling love/hate thing. Together, they’ve seen cattle booms and onion booms and oil booms and tourist booms. Both have grown into medium-sized cities, with populations in the hundreds of thousands. Each has played its part as the other city’s exotic wild frontier, while both have sought to attract international attention through urban beautification, commercial opportunity, and an environment of multi-nationalism.

Newest Boom

A quick summary of Mexican drug trafficking is a difficult undertaking because the illegal drug trade here has a long and varied history. Any attempt to pair that history into a meaningful brief is arbitrary and quixotic, picking and choosing from the daily struggles of hundreds of players over six decades of crime. Still, I will attempt to make some sense of the pertinent details of the last twelve years, starting in 1993 when there were still about eight major narcotics syndicates running things in the north of Mexico, smuggling drugs into the US at the behest of Colombian cartels. Colombian cartels had been having a tough time of it, with the US War on Drugs cracking down on production in Colombia and shutting down trade routes through the Caribbean. By 1993, Mexican syndicates were picking up the smuggling and distribution slack with Colombia’s blessing, widening land routes across the northern border. Three Mexican Syndicates emerged from this new situation dominating the drug smuggling scene: the Juarez Cartel lead by Amado Carillo Fuentes, the Gulf Cartel led by ex-Mexican State Policeman Osiel Cardinas, and the Tijuana Cartel led by the Arellano Felix brothers, Benjamin and Ramon.

This Tijuana Cartel controlled the shipping routes into Southern California and along the Pacific coast of Baja California. Vying for power in the states of Sinaloa and Sonora, and revolutionizing trafficking through the implementation of state-of-the-art tunnels into Arizona, is the so-called Sinaloa Cartel, run by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a former enforcer for the Juarez cartel, and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, his stepbrother. This makes for bitter enemies in the Mexican underworld, and the Arellano Felix brothers attempt to have El Chapo Guzman assassinated in Guadalajara in May 1993, accidentally killing a beloved catholic cardinal instead. This lead to both an enormous public outcry—prompting the Mexican government to put the screws on the northern ganglands—as well as the arrest and imprisonment of Sinaloa clan’s El Chapo.

By 1997 these federal crackdowns within Mexico had made things tougher for the local cartels. The corrupt head of Mexico's anti-drug agency, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, had been caught and jailed for allegedly being a cartel puppet. Federal agents and special forces were hampering trafficking across the border in strategic areas. Then, Juarez Cartel leader Amado Carillo Fuentes died during a botched attempt to change his appearance using plastic surgery, throwing the most powerful Mexican drug syndicate into supposed decline. Controlling the east coast syndicates, the Gulf Cartel honcho Osiel Cardinas was being harried by federal troops in his richest markets, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros (across the border form Brownsville, Texas). Unconcerned, Cardinas enticed a bunch of these federal crime fighters, all military special forces, to desert the government cause and hire on as his own personal army of elite narco-terrorists. Once recruited, these enforcers began to recruit and train new people, and they rechristened themselves Los Zetas after a Mexican Army radio call code for “commander.”

But the Juarez Cartel was just biding its time. While shopping around for a new boss, it was situating its own people in corrupt high places, and rebuilding itself to its former glory with acts of drug-trade espionage. During 1998-9, the ruling party in Mexico, the PRI, was gearing up for the first election it would lose in seventy years, and Mexico was seeing a time of municipal change. By the time the PAN’s Vicente Fox took the oath of office in 2000, the Juarez Cartel was back to being bigger, and better placed, than any two of its regional competitors, rivaled only by the Gulf Cartel on the other side of the country. President Fox, in a showy effort to continue Mexico’s fight against its crime-riddled north, and in a show of cooperation with certain international drug initiatives, commenced a campaign in conjunction with US anti-drug agents that landed hundreds of wanted smugglers in jail, many of them high-placed cartel leadership. Mysteriously, this federal onslaught was most effective against all but the Juarez Cartel which was able to grow in the face of its competitors’ bad luck. In 2001, post September 11th reforms at US entry points effectively ended any ability to smuggle southern narcotics into the country other than by land from México, putting northern Mexican cartels in a position to control much more of the drug trade than ever before. Mexican syndicates creep over the border to control distribution and further trade through the US; but the statistics of drug use below the border also rises, the bottlenecked supply finding the point of least resistance in Mexican markets. Also in 2001, with the aid of El Mayo Zambada, Sinaloa Cartel honcho El Chapo Guzman successfully conducts a sensational escape from La Palma maximum security prison, hiding in a laundry truck and being delivered through the gates.* Thirty of the guards at La Palma, as well as the prison’s warden, are arrested and indicted.

By the end of 2002, federal dragnets have paid off big: Ramon Arellano Felix has been killed and his brother Benjamin jailed. By March of 2003 even the head of the powerful Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardinas, has been arrested after a vicious shootout on the streets of Matamoros. This leaves a power vacuum that proves to be too tempting to both the re-emerging Juarez and the Sinaloan Cartels, and both seek to grab it from different directions. The Juarez Cartel makes a pact with El Mayo Zambada to attempt to gain control of the teetering and newly headless Tijuana Cartel to the west, while it directly attacks the lucrative trade routes of the newly headless Gulf Cartel in the east. The newly liberated El Chapo Guzman splinters off and, setting up shop in the state of Tamaulipas, begins a long and bloody campaign to flank these Gulf Cartel holdings from the east; attacking, primarily, Nuevo Laredo and its resident ex-military Zeta enforcers.

So the area is booming again. Big business for whoever ends up with control of America’s 165 million dollar a day drug habit, a vast majority of which is supplied to US distribution channels through the streets of Laredo. This former tough frontier-land joint and latter day revitalized shopping district is the most lucrative inroad to the US drug market, now handled primarily by Mexican Cartels on both sides of the border. Since 1935 the Pan American highway has connected it to the capital cities of Central America and Mexico, and just on the other side of the river US I-35 begins, a ribbon of asphalt that doesn’t stop until it reaches Lake Superior. Six thousand tractor trailers truck forty percent of Mexican exports over the three international bridges that connect the two Laredos every day. It is a drug smuggler’s paradise, and that is why El Chapo is fighting so hard to gain a territory that the imprisoned Osiel Cardinas and his autonomous gang of Zetas are tying so hard to keep. Caught in the crossfire, the people of Nuevo Laredo are grimly bearing witness to a staggering wave of violence. Charred bodies turn up in barrels on the sides of the highways weekly; firefights, between warring factions or police, take over busy streets in broad daylight. Reporters are threatened, kidnapped, even killed in retaliation for reporting these excesses to the rest of the world, newspaper offices are sprayed with bullets by the roving bands of enforcers. The Zetas roam the city in the backs of pickup trucks bristling with automatic weapons, strong-arming local businesses out of protection money, staging roadblocks, and in general running a lawless town their own way.

Things are similar in other border towns. Osiel Cardinas is apparently able to run his Gulf Cartel from his prison cell, as is Benjamin Arellano Felix. Their turf has not been left as unprotected as everyone originally assumed. In La Palma maximum security prison, after years of bitter rivalry, the two bosses were able to hash out an alliance to strengthen their respective syndicates; though they were separated after violence erupted in 2004, forcing the government to federalize the prison. Several of the most notorious prisoners were moved to a border prison in Matamoros where, a few days later, on New Year’s Eve 2004, El Chapo Guzman’s brother Arturo was murdered. There were more federal crackdowns there, of course, and twenty days later six prison guards were discovered a short distance from the jail tied up and shot in the back of a Ford four by four.

In 2005, Nuevo Laredo’s police chief quit and it took authorities until June to find someone brave enough to replace him. That man took office on the afternoon of the eighth and was gunned down in a parking lot less than eight hours later, so Nuevo Laredo was looking for yet another police chief. Federal agents involved in the inevitable crackdown, called “Operation Secure Mexico,” were fired on, with one agent wounded, by legitimate city police so confused and brutalized by two years of this conflict that they just shoot at any invading army. This prompted the government to suspend Nuevo Laredo’s entire police force of six hundred officers pending drug tests and criminal investigations. Six months later, less than half were allowed, or would volunteer, to return to the streets. By this writing, there is a new police chief who has remained alive in the position for seven months.

There is news of violence or brutal murder along the northeastern border daily. What is represented here is just a small sample, quixotically and arbitrarily plucked from the trove of available information. Mexico’s fight against the situation here, escalating to a fever-pitch in this election year, has come under proverbial fire for simply doing nothing but providing more troops for the mobsters in Nuevo Laredo to recruit. Violence from this territory war has spilled north into the US as far as Dallas, and south to all corners of Mexico, where secondary players are fighting for the jobs being left behind by the war’s casualties. Central American youth gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang are crossing the border to hire themselves out as Mexican cartel enforcement. So are members of elite Guatemalan military units. All over Latin America, this run for the border is causing ripples of violence within the world of illegal drugs. But in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, the violence has long spilled into the everyone’s world. There the police, the reporters, the citizens, the federal agents, the politicians, and the drug lords are all getting killed. There were about one hundred and seventy unsolved murders in Nuevo Laredo last year. There have been over fifty already this year.

Shorty and Me

So far this violence has only rarely made the 225 kilometer trip down the highway to Monterrey. Here, the city feels poised for this eventuality, but has remained relatively untouched. There have been a few shootouts here, one in a popular local seafood restaurant shortly before I arrived, and one in a Dave and Busters down the road, apparently connected to the killings in Dallas referred to above. Bodies have turned up in Guadalupe, a suburb located at the base of Monterrey’s most iconic mountain. Our local Police chief was killed in heavy traffic in February (on the same day another police chief was killed in another little town off the highway between here and the border), and raids on local residences have produced caches of military-style weapons and groups of reinforcements apparently stopping over in route to the war up the road. All of the instances of violence here have been very premeditated and very much focused on targets within the narcotics trade. There is currently very little feeling of danger on the streets of Monterrey.

Of course, we are all very much on alert. The State Department has issued advisory after advisory warning US citizens of the situation in Nuevo Laredo. The US Consulate there closed its doors for a week in August of last year after an afternoon shootout on a busy nearby street. In Monterrey, Sunshine’s employers have begun to implement a heightened security routine including check-ins whenever traveling out of town. For me, the sole effect of all this violence has been that for three days I have had to get up at seven in the morning because professionals from the alarm company have been in the house, eight hours a day, grinding holes through my walls and running brightly colored wires everywhere. The three-foot masonry drills they use scream from every room in the house, and occasionally they test something that howls like a monster version of some ray gun toy I might have annoyed my parents with when I was nine. There are tall piles of plaster dust everywhere and all of my closets have been emptied out onto the bed. The cat has been wedged tightly between the wooden slats beneath our futon for days, eyes shut, counting the years being scared off the end of her life.

I have been recruited to oversee this contracted labor, leaving me with plenty of time between curdlings of my nerves to ask, well, “why?”. It seems rather ridiculous to me, in this posh neighborhood, behind electric iron gates (which are situated on an incline and open inward like all the security books say the should) with a twenty-four hour guard, that I would also need a alarm system. It would be incredibly difficult to scale the sixteen-foot privacy wall in the back yard (assuming it is possible to break into the neighbor’s gated community). Anyone getting in here will have to hurdle some serious odds. I’m not saying it isn’t possible; but whomever makes it to my front door is going to be sufficiently sly, or sufficiently well-armed, to be unconcerned with the toy gun that will go off when a window breaks. No, more likely it’ll be me who trips the alarm through no more dastardly a crime than sleepily pressing the wrong code into the complicated wall interfaces that have cropped up here and there, and then I will have plenty of Español explaining to do when the police arrive. Still, I appreciate the spirit of concern for Sunshine’s and my security, and as soon as I am awake, I will certainly feel even more comfortable in my still very safe city due to this drilling. While I am still very sleepy, though, I felt the need to dig up a twenty-eight hundred word excuse for missing so much sleep.

Further Reading about the Mexican drug trade.

Fun interactive Mexican Drug information produced by PBS

*Interestingly, in Mexico there is no law against breaking, or attempting to break, out of prison. Other laws broken in the commission of a jailbreak can be charged when or if the fugitive comes to justice; but in Mexico personal freedom is deemed an attribute so worth fighting for that the law very romantically makes no provision against its being sought by the incarcerated.

Wanted Poster courtesey the US DEA

The Domestic Question

2006-02-10T12:41:00.000+07:00

number 2006/3

One of the things that happened while I was away on sabbatical: we employed a woman named Rosy to clean once a week on Wednesdays. I met her right before I left, but today was my first official Wednesday since then. 1,371 words.

[NL]—Back on December twenty-first, the day before Sunshine and I were set to come home for the holidays, we finally interviewed a maid. Not that “maid” is the word I think most people use for what we were hiring. In the expatriate community, people hired to come into a home to clean or cook tend to fall under the catchall label “domestic” as in “domestic help.” A gardener, for some reason, is still called a gardener, and a chauffer is called a driver, but a maid is called a “domestic.” I think it is a play on words, domestic also meaning “from around here;” most people avoid the bureaucratic hassle of importing their own household staff. At any rate, I don’t like any of these terms for the position. “Domestic” has, as illustrated above, a rather ugly-tasting afterthought; and, while there is nothing terribly wrong with the word “maid,” it evokes some sort of costumed flounce dusting about in my Hampstead summer place. To me, maids come with butlers and nannies, and live in a little room under the stairs so they can dart out and polish something when I ring a bell.

The thing of it is that I never really thought of myself as someone who should need to have a domestic help. It just seemed silly. I am home while Sunshine goes off to work, and it just felt like it should be my job to keep the house orderly and neat. I am rather orderly and neat anyway, and it did not fall outside of reason that I could keep a nice house while I was getting whatever it is that I do done on a day-to-day basis. Based on the prejudices admitted to above, in my mind maids were for rich people, and we are far from rich.

Apparently, this is the attitude of most newcomers to this domesticity abroad: no one thinks they are going to get a housecleaner, though supposedly everyone eventually does. The houses are just so large and ornamental the daily tasks tend to take up the days, and the larger, sporadic cleaning gets lost in the shuffle. Eventually, an epiphany sets in: we could be employing someone who needs a job in México, instead of selfishly DIY-ing our household needs. It did not take long for Sunshine and I to eventually and predictably cave in. We started looking in earnest for someone to come and clean the house one day a week. We tried to get the woman who had been employed by our friends Tony and Christene when they left for the US in November, but she was snagged by some other household. We talked with a number of people, failing a number of times to act quickly enough to secure an applicant. Finally, we heard about Rosy from no less than three other people who employ her, positive things, possibly the most positive being that it seemed like she still had a weekday free.

On the first day we met Rosy, we were packing to go off and celebrate Christmas. I was in the middle of my normal pre-vacation ritual: sweating and screaming curse words while I jogged around the house trying to clean it up before we left. Not only is it nice to come home to a clean house after traveling, but it is also nice to pick the place up a little for the Zix kids, Bonnie and Hannah, who come in every day to feed the cat and water the plants while we are gone. So, in the midst of locking all of the alcohol in the upstairs office and squeegee-ing soapy water off the stovetop, I needed to pause so I could tour a prospective maid around the house. It seemed a little ironic, at the time. Still, it set up a pattern, and I continue to feel like I have to clean the house up a little whenever the maid is supposed to show up. That day in December she toured around the house, and taken the job on the spot; possibly out of altruism. She even offered to help us pack.

We hired Rosy, who comes into the house on Wednesdays, to deep clean and do larger jobs than the day-to-day level stuff that I am able to keep up with. Take out the garbage, wash the dishes, water the plants and make the bed? I do that stuff every day (almost). Push all the furniture out of the way, and mop the marble floors with a vinegar solution? That’s Rosy stuff. Rosy also helps out with the laundry (by doing it all), vacuums, sprays the accumulated North Mexican dust off the patio and out of the car port, and stands on chairs to do the same for the floor-to-ceiling windows scattered here and there around the house. Rosy tends to arrive at the house sometime after Sunshine goes to work at seven thirty, and leave before Sunshine comes home between four thirty and seven. For the six weeks after she took us on I was in North Carolina and Rosy was coming and going without really being seen.

All that changed this week when I was finally home for my first ever maid. When I returned to Monterrey last weekend, I was surprised and pleased that the house was as nice, if not more nice, than it had been when I left it. Rosy and Sunshine and the Zix kids had done a good job with the place: the cat was fat, the plants bloomed, and the floors were shiny. A month and a half of other people deciding where things should go had taken its toll here and there—I spent the weekend identifying things that needed to be relocated for the sake of my obsessive compulsion—but the place was undeniably spotlessly clean. Even more clean that anyone expected, frankly: Sunshine has discovered that locking things away for us to do later doesn’t really work—Rosy will find the keys and fix it all while we are not looking. The only solution seems to be to leave the stuff we don’t want her messing with spotless before she arrives.

Finally, this Wednesday, man and maid came face to face for the first time on the wet expanse of my kitchen floor, me seeking some breakfast a little after noon, and she dust busting cat hair off the kitchen counters. We can’t talk to one another, Rosy and I, because we do not share a common language, so we just sort of half waved and got on with it.

Having this help is nice. I can never tell when the house is dirty anymore. As long as I keep up with the dishes and small things, the place always looks like we just moved in, and I like that. On Wednesdays I will, at least based on yesterday’s evidence, feel like I am in her way a little bit. I will wave and say good afternoon when I finally wake up and emerge from my locked bedroom. I will smile and nod when she tells me something about the room she has just worked on. Mostly, I will try to leave her alone and let her work. She writes notes to Sunshine about anything important; she tries to teach me the Spanish for “see you next week.” On Tuesday nights I will still feel like I need to pick the place up some because the maid is coming soon, and it turns out that this is less ridiculous as it sounds. I don’t want the woman to take on the little things that need to be done on the other six days of the week; these things I am willing to do. I want her to do the bigger things that I wont ever get around to. Dishes in the sink, clutter laying around; she would fix this stuff instead of doing something important, and she’d probably, based on the evidence, just put the stuff away in the wrong place, anyway. I don’t have the words to explain to her where things go, so I will be jogging around cleaning things up a little on Tuesdays. It makes sense.

Invasion of the Cleaning Agents photo © the Author

Friday Night Flights

2006-02-05T02:01:00.000+07:00

number 2006/2

Flying is still a little bit of a trial for me, especially when I am leaving one home for another, especially with a highly-breakable monkey. Plus, we are expecting visitors, so I thought I would detail the routine. 1,693 words.

[NL]—I returned to Sunshine and the Monterrey and San Pedro valleys yesterday evening; to an honest-to-god feeling of homecoming and a little bit of Fall. In the backyard the big tree is bare, surrounded by crispy fallen leaves, the yard is weedy and temperature is actually a little lower than it was in North Carolina. The autumnal feeling does not extend to the inside of the house, however, where the plants that Sunshine has been tending for me are in the middle of a record-setting bloom. The cat, who sounds like a duck at the best of times, only spent about a half an hour reproachfully holding my six-week abandonment of her against me. More recently, she follows me around from surface to surface quacking balefully when I don’t pick her up. Sunshine is acting much the same. Subjectivity prevents certainty, but I suspect I am somehow displaying, in turn, just how much I missed everyone while I was away.

Flying internationally always makes for a rather interesting travel day. On the trip to North Carolina in December, I had to carry five or six breakable ceramic animals in my carryon bag, as well as one life-sized, gaily painted clay monkey that was too fragile to pack. This I carried in my hands when allowed, and in a take out-bag from a defunct San Pedro restaurant beneath the seat in front of me when I wasn’t. I trapped that monkey in place with my feet while it was stowed, ever fearful that the tiniest little turbulence would snap its festive tail right off. This was a big switch for me, this worry about the monkey. It was not too many flights ago when I was nearly paralyzed with terror, and I was happy to see that my brief bout with flight anxiety had passed to the point where I could worry about something else entirely.

The flight from Greensboro to Monterrey is like international travel in a bubble. It comprises, one after another, all of the irritating steps of going from one country to another, while drastically boiling the process down to just few hours. I still walk into an airport an hour and a half before I take off (boarding is a half an hour before the plane taxies, if possible). I still have to quickly take off my shoes, my belt, my rings, and my watch, slipping them, along with everything in my pockets, into buckets and sliding these through the X-Ray machine with my carryon, my camera, and my jacket. I get waved through a metal detector, but rarely get frisked with the wand thing any more. I have to hurriedly rearrange all of my stuff after being released on the other side of the security station: I have to find a chair or something to prop awkwardly against to get my boots on and I feel like a pervert fiddling with my belt in the concourse. All the while, suspicious uniformed officials mark my every move. Going to Mexico, I only have to do this once, but coming from there I have to do it before each flight. This routine was unbelievably enriched by the addition of the brightly painted and highly breakable monkey.

The next step is to wait for a while in the plastic chairs, trying hard to concentrate on something besides the upcoming flight because I am worried that I will feel anxiety. Since my first terrifying flight, my flight nerves have mostly gone away, and my preflight fear centers around the discomfort of worrying that they will return. Twenty minutes into the ride, with the airline crossword in my lap and the nose beginning to level off, is when I realize, lately, that I am okay; and then there are no more problems until the next takeoff. I spend most flights working that crossword and trying to convince the attendant to give me the whole can of soft drink. I usually sit on the aisle, and in yesterday’s flight, there was no other passenger in my row. I keep the window closed until I am sure that I no longer need to ignore the fact that I am thirty thousand feet in the air. When I opened it yesterday, finally, somewhere over Arkansas maybe, or northern Texas, the first thing I saw was enormous striking lightening slashing through a tall swirl of black storm between me and the horizon. I sat mesmerized by this display, watching hundreds of bolts of brightness tear back and forth in the sky just over there out the right window. In the distance there were the little lights of other aircraft floating through the middle of this yawning display. It was amazing and beautiful and I felt so lucky to be present that it didn’t even dawn on me to be scared. I was glad I wasn’t riding in one of those little lights in its midst, though.

Approaching Houston and Greensboro from the south there are fairly hard descending turns that can feel a little harrowing. Flying into Greensboro this is pretty extreme nose-down right bank, but in December the sunset was lighting in each consecutive window of the plane as we turned, and it was dark enough on the ground to see all the Christmas lights on the houses through the leafless trees. I found this distracting enough. Flying into Houston from the north is just a straight line in, and took place for me about two and a half hours into the flight, an hour after the snack, and two-thirds through the puzzle. Then there was the usual scramble to locate my stowed luggage (which is not necessarily right above my seat in these tiny Embraer Expressjets) and move down the line to deplane.

In Houston things can be pretty simple on the outgoing leg of international travel day. My bags were checked all the way through to Monterrey in North Carolina, so I don’t have to worry about picking those up and rechecking them, and the gates are “close” to one another. Yesterday there was about ten minutes between getting off of, and then back onto, aircraft in Houston. All I had to do was walk the half mile between spoke-like concourses of B gates from 22 to 76. Incoming international travelers are treated to double the walk, once though baggage claim and then through immigration and customs (rife with friendly Department of Homeland Security officers), and then again between concourses which are sometimes a train ride away from one another. Yesterday’s layover was a lot easier, and I was able to misread a sign, walk far, far out of my way, and correct it all before the deadline to board.

The last flight of my day yesterday was the shortest. It is an hour and twenty minute hop from Houston to Monterrey International, located conveniently in the small industrial municipality of Apodaca, about twenty minutes north of Monterrey proper. The flight attendant called this a “nose up, ass up flight” which means that there is really never a point where the plane levels off between ascent and descent. In that time there is a snack, a drink, and the hassle of customary paperwork. The flight attendant ran, quite literally, up and down the aisle throughout the entire ordeal. I had the really interesting first-time experience of being at the very front of the plane, in the single-seat number 1 row beside the flight galley. In the momentary pauses between dashing around, I got to chat amiably with my flight attendant. She made snide asides while pantomiming the security bullet points to the recorded instructions. She gave me the whole can.

I am fairly practiced at filling out the customs and immigration paperwork by now, and it is not in any way tricky anymore. I had plenty of time to finish the crossword puzzle on this flight, and then watch the twinkle of Monterrey valley fill every window in the plane as we plummeted toward the runway lights. Several rows behind me a man complained of chest pains, and the flight attendant called down to have Monterrey EMS meet the plane, and we all sat there on the runway while the man was walked off first. In Monterrey, the smaller airplanes park on the tarmac, and busses drive passengers to the terminal. I had been allowed to stow my bag in the flight closet with all of the cockpit crew’s flight jackets and things because there is no overhead compartment above, or a “beneath the seat in front of” 1A. This would have worked out badly for the monkey I took in the other direction. I was able to deplane very quickly from this position, however, and made it to the passenger busses before everyone but the EMS patient, who waited patiently with me while all of the other passengers filed in and we were all driven to the lines at Mexican immigration.

Here I waited in line to present my paperwork to the bored immigration official. He proceeded to give the same three- to six-month tourist card they always do, even though I have a two-year temporary resident permit stuck right there in my passport. A lot more walking up slick marble ramps and I was able to pick up my luggage without waiting, and proceeded rapidly through customs. At the Mexican customs checkpoint, and this is pretty much the norm all over Latin America, they have a traffic light activated by a button. When I walked up to the desk they checked my passport and declarations forms and then directed me to press that button. Supposedly, the traffic light randomly selects which travelers are let right through (green light), and which are immediately searched (red light) at the adjacent, stainless steel inspection area. Either way, all luggage goes through the X-Ray conveyor one more time. I got a green light, and walked out into the busy terminal where my girlfriend waited to usher me into a well-heated cab, through the twinkling lights of Monterrey and San Pedro valleys, and eventually into our Mexican home, complete with flowering plants and a vociferously quacking cat.

Watch the Monkey, Por Favor photo © the Author

Christmas and a January

2006-02-05T02:00:00.000+07:00

number 2006/1

We both got to go home for the holidays, only we mostly went to different places. I decided I would stick around in Greensboro for six weeks because it had been eight months since I’d last been there. 1,440 words

[NL]—There was a little while where, being on a rather lower rung of the departmental ladder, Sunshine and I were concerned that we might not be able to spend this Christmas in the US with our families like we normally do. Or more specifically: Sunshine might not, and I might have to go home and leave her here alone. There are apparently many people willing to cover the work during the relatively quieter time around the holidays, however, and this did not turn out to be the case. So around November we became certain that we would be able to come home at the end of December. Various itineraries and schedules were bandied about, and we eventually settled on the following: Sunshine was going to visit the family farm for a week over the Christmas holidays, and I was gong to head back to my North Carolina home at the same time; but stay there until after the New Year’s celebration at Café Europa, with its oyster shots and champagne. Then, with an eye toward giving Sunshine some room to work on the book that is to be the culmination of her 2001 Fulbright scholarship to Venezuela, I would go ahead and stay in the US for the rest of the month of January. Sunshine decided that she really needed to come to the Café Europa party also, even though there were days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve that she would have to be back in Monterrey. We bought three round trip tickets, and the deal was done.

I was really excited about all of this. Sunshine had gotten to visit her Kentucky farm back in August for her birthday, but I had not seen the family and friends since the night I had hit the road for the border. That had been April. I was really missing all the people, the restaurants and shops, and other things about Greensboro. Honestly, I was really looking forward to maybe seeing a little winter, a little snow, while I was there.

It is not normal for me to break the fourth wall in this blog. My style book indicates that I should very infrequently write in the second person, rarely relate interpersonal content that would fit better into actual correspondence, and never reference the context of this journal itself, like I am doing now. One of the reasons for this is to format this journal more simply as a string of personal essays, not a direct communication, in the hopes that the things that I am doing are worth recording as much as they are worth communicating. This decision is in a way a nod to this being a public diary, where my improbable readership may contain both people who know me very well, and people who stumble here accidentally. This presents problems at times, when I am trying to decide how to address certain issues. In this case, the majority of my supposed audience was seeing me on a day-to-day basis while I was in Greensboro, NC for six weeks; those people know full well what it was that I did there. But there are other people who live in far-flung corners of this hemisphere without that first-hand knowledge, but with less than passing interest in this personal topic. Today’s blithe abandonment of this blog’s normal MO is inspired by this ambivalence. The people who care about this subject already know about it, those who don’t can’t be expected to care. Honestly, the facts below the fold are presented only to mark the occasion of this time in my life for completeness’ sake.

Christmas was nice, and though the yearly struggle to get back and forth to so many places has been intensified now with the addition of international travel, it is really nice to have some tradition to fall back on in the midst of all this newness. I packed numerous highly breakable Mexican ceramics in carryon baggage, through security checks and customs lines, without breaking one thing. Presents I received I shipped home. Later, Sunshine imported even more breakables for her visit on New Year’s Eve. Speaking of New Year’s Eve, it was a blast. The party at Café Europa gets better and better every year, and many of my friends we there.

During my time in Greensboro, I satisfied many desires I had accrued while away: I ate Indian food, seven or eight times, in three different restaurants. I enjoyed leisurely daily stops in local coffee shops and bars. I indulged, far to often for the comfort of my budget, in that traditional Tate Street-type Sushi 101 that I so missed in México (but was sadly unable to ever manage to eat the more traditional Japanese-type sushi of Arrigato or Asahi or Kuki, in Raleigh). I got to eat Korean once, Thai a couple of times, and deli food almost every day. I browsed new and used bookstores for hours on end. I bought several used books in English and many new DVDs in a number of languages. Mostly, though, I hung out with friends, staying up very late at night, sometimes. Sometimes getting drunk. The only thing about the trip that was less than marvelous for me was the weather: a Spring-like sunny temperance prevailed, with temperatures in the upper fifties or lower sixties most of the time I was home. It never did snow, though this balmy January was occasionally punctuated with sudden rains that heralded a short-lived dip in the temperature. I will have to wait for another year to enjoy some longed-for wintertime.

Early in the trip I became lass sure of my extensive schedule. I was concerned that I might become overbearing to the people I had thrust myself upon. Few had even been aware that I was coming to visit, and even less were aware of the sheer length of my home stay. I was worried that there was going to be no way for me to fill the time, that people who have to work sixty percent of the week were going to be frustrated by the prospect of entertaining me in the interstices. Honestly, I was worried that the world had moved along without me, and I was just putting people out by showing up on Greensboro’s doorstep unannounced, begging attention like distracting novelty. At the worst of my doubt, I felt like I was a prank I was playing on everyone.

It is a strange little trick that time plays when someone is away, though, and I forget every time I come back home. For those in Greensboro, the eight months I was away didn’t seem like such a long time as it did to me, stewing out here in all that aforementioned newness. I arrived in North Carolina on December the 22nd and didn’t leave again until February 3rd, and during that time I was made to feel welcome in every case. I was never lonely or bored, I got to spend time with most everyone, over and over again, and I had a specifically wonderful time on every single day I was there.

I mentioned completism above as the reason for writing this dry, fact-based entry; but that is not the only reason. I had a wonderful and comfortable stay, and feel this necessitates my breaking that last rule I usually keep when blogging. Thank you Ian and Phil and Heat and Ellie and Dan and Piper and Jeff and most especially Chris and Mark and Hannah and mom and Anne for opening your houses to me because I needed it and also because I just really wanted to be there with you. Thank you Anne, again, and Jenn. for allowing me the use of your cars while I was bopping around town; in addition thank you James and Greg and Flora and Mr. Beaver and John and Cynthia and Alice and Mary and Sarah and Lucy and another James and Jason and Leslie and Andrew and Blake and Meredith and Myra and the other Blake and Toune and Alex and Lisa and Jae and Jeana and Nina and Brian and Alan and Shake and Nix and Jakob and Tim and another Chris and Steve and Frank and Rachel and Rob and Erin and Matt and the Buckner and Tom and another Tom and Jerry and Joe and Julia and Bill and Melinda and Joshua and Maggie and Sandy and Chronis and that belly dancer and Scott and another John and even, by god, Lilly, for hours or minutes of great times and companionship and conversations while I was cast adrift at home. --Jeremy Cavin

Happy New Year 2006 photo © Chris Young

Weekend on the Altiplano

2005-09-06T15:21:00.000+07:00

number fifty-six

Our three and a half day vacation to Real de Catorce with one of Sunshine’s coworkers and her fiancé. I was impressed by the beauty of the place as much as the eerie strangeness of the ruins. 2,782 words.

[NL]—Real de Catorce is a little over four hours southwest of my house down Mexican highway 40 and then 57. The route skirts along the interior fringe of the eastern Sierra Madres, the sister to the western range which it meets in a volcanic Y-shape southeast of the capital city. South of the Y, México is low and fertile, giving way to the rainforests of the Yucatán basin. Heading south down the center of the country, the land rises steadily as the mountain ranges move together to form the fulcrum of the Y. Here are México’s many high plains regions, where towns nestled on plateaus are often located seven or eight thousand feet above sea level. Towns on the tops of mountains can exceed even this.

It wasn’t until last weekend that we finally managed to pick a time to drive to Real de Catorce. Sunshine’s American coworker Jen, and Jen’s Honduran fiancé Jack, had been recently reunited (their wedding is here in San Pedro later this month), and we thought it would be nice for the four of us to take a trip together. So at noon on Friday we loaded up Jen’s SUV and headed south out of town. Soon we were weaving through mountain passes steadily climbing toward the dry and unforgiving Altiplano Potosino, a high desert valley about a hundred kilometers northwest of the small waypoint of Matehuala. Matehuala is a gateway of sorts between northern and central México. A short way into this region there is a left turn onto a two-lane cobblestone road that snakes even higher up into the surrounding mountains. The valley floor in this place is already 5,250 feet above sea level. By the time we’d arrived in the Catorce Sierra we had gained an altitude of 9,042. Back in Monterrey the early September temperature had been holding in the lower thirties (the upper eighties, in F), driven down by the recent daily rains. Here the daytime temperatures seemed to fall into the teens at night (or the fifties in F). During the days it was clear and dry; but storms could be watched from miles out, speeding through the valley forty-eight hundred feet below.

We had driven through a number of these storms while making our way through the valley. We could see them coming over the mountains on the horizon: walls of black clouds tracking across the barren, Jurassic-looking landscape. By the time we got to the unmarked Real de Catorce turnoff, however, there was nothing in the sky but sun bludgeoning the baked valley and the cobblestone road. Despite the arid and blasted environment, the ride through this valley was intense with blooming desert flora: bursting red cacti and tiny yellow creosote and some type of fluted white flowers filled the sandy spaces between the shale and slate of mountain washes. The whole area reminded me of a desert terrarium, one I’d have assumed was unrealistic due to the variety and density of the life super-imposed on the yellow boulders and dry white gravel of the valley floor. No matter how close I held my face to the ground the view resolved itself into many disparate examples of exotic plant life. I cannot quite express how much I loved this part of the drive. The desert was like some science fiction fantasy: completely alien and surreal in the face of my experiences and expectations. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful and uncomfortably savage. It would not take too long to wilt and die while standing still in this place; the world dehumidifies and mummifies whatever finds it way here. But still the place is populated by blooming, and somehow immortal, plants.

The road next weaves its way up the mountain, past the plots of local gardens, the ruins of Spanish colonial silver rush communities, and the little settlement of La Luz which, like Real de Catorce, is stuck in an existence between the two. The two-lane road is narrow and made of rocks, but this is jarring enough to prevent traffic from speeding up much, and I somehow didn’t find the precipitous drop out my side of the window overly terrifying. In the US that drop would be on the other side of a guardrail, but here it was not, and the tires could feel uncomfortably close to nothing the few times other cars were met coming back down the mountain. The spectacular view as we climbed thousands of feet over the stone ghost towns nestled in the valley was enough to distract me from the height, however. Eventually, the road levels, and we found ourselves at the mouth of the Ogarrio tunnel (famous for starring in The Mexican alongside Brad Pitt) which would take us through the mountain and to the town on the other side.

At the beginning of the tunnel, a man charged us a small toll, gave us a ticket, and then called to the other side of the tunnel on a rotary-dial phone hanging on the wall beside his little chair. Traffic must be coordinated in this way because the mile-plus tunnel is only one lane. There was a minute long wait before we were given the go ahead to proceed. A really long traffic tunnel, begun by miners about a hundred and fifteen years ago, is a spooky and claustrophobic space. The tunnel is lit brightly by bare yellow bulbs every hundred feet or so, but my eyes still had to adjust to the dark to pick out the details there: a little shrine dedicated to safe travel, crosses placed in remembrance of past accidents, and little ventilation or flood runoff shafts cut into walls held up by thick wooden cross beams just like any mine from any movie I have ever seen. After about six minutes we were blinded again by the daylight on the other side.

On this side of the tunnel we were to give half of the ticket back, proving that we had paid. While Jen handled this, local children ran up to the windows asking us if they could help us to a hotel, a parking place, or a restaurant. The kids were just trying to make a living, but we didn’t need the pressure after the long drive. We pretty much knew where we were going so we waved them all off and began rolling slowly through the town. The road immediately becomes main street on this side of the tunnel, and cuts straight to the south of the zócalo about three blocks away. Lining those blocks were market stalls, shaded by the traditional blue tarps, which were selling food and religious souvenirs to the pilgrims here. Between these stalls there was hardly enough room for our SUV, so we had to detour down a spindly, almost vertical side street to find a parallel route. It took us a little over forty minutes to make it all the way to the hotel, but this is partially because we scouted ahead on foot at one point. In Real de Catorce there is really no predicting when the road being traveled will wilt away to nothing under your wheels, or incline so steeply that stairs have been carved into the stone. Turning around is pretty impossible too: the old stone buildings were built in many cases right at the road, without sidewalks, at times less than ten feet from one another. It was slow and interesting going, but eventually we were parked and checked into the hotel. I was really impressed with Jen’s driving all along. There were a couple of places where we had to talk her through some nerves, but she never did give up or start crying. Kudos.

There is not a whole lot to see in Real de Catorce. Or rather, there is not too much to relate. The center of the city is to a great extent restored and populated. Here is the imposing Templo de la Purísima Limpia, the parrish church dedicated to St. Francis. Two blocks west is the little terraced zócalo, Plaza Hidalgo (a story higher than the street at its southern border, and a story lower than the street at the northern one) with a lot of plants, wrought iron gates, and a large, festive gazebo. Situated on the steep street around this plaza are Italian and Regional restaurants, grocery and convenience stores, and artesanias selling primo Huichol Indian handicrafts. Here it’s also possible to rent a Jeep or horse tour of the surrounding countryside, get a guide or shoeshine, or just have a chat with any of the multinationals visiting or living here.

The church is impressive, its two-toned façade a by-product of multiple stages of construction and reconstruction, towers over the predominantly one- and two-story town. It is possible to see the stark white dome of the church from almost any point in the valley. Inside it boasts fine art and a floor made of casket lids. A large part of the walls are dedicated to the display of retablos, small works of devotion serving as a prayer of thanks to, or perhaps a favor of, St. Francis. These predominantly take the form of art printed or drawn on a small card with a written message. These are the postcards the tourists here send to god.

Straight up the western side of the plaza the road levels out after a block, and then rambles over an old bridge and away from town. Here we found the gate to the hill-top cemetery and the austere Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The cemetery is exceedingly beautiful and broken into two parts: a newer section in front of the church and an older section up the hillside behind. In the old area there is a particularly pristine and predictably fertile example of the rich plant diversity in the area. Alongside sage and globemallow and filaree storksbill; beaver tail, cholla, and prickly pear cacti; century plants, chuparosa and brittlebush; I saw my first peyote buttons. I didn’t even know what they were until later when I saw peyote depicted in a Huichol yarn picture in town. Peyote grows primarily right beneath the surface of the soil, so the tops of the buttons look like a cactus version of moss. The new area of the cemetery is cluttered with interesting graves, ornate with mosaics and wreaths and crosses and statues, rather serving as the final witness to the variety of people who have visited here and stayed. There are mestizo and Indio Mexican graves, Swedish and European graves, Asian and Middle Eastern graves, and even United States hippie graves. The graveyard is picturesque and calm, but it is difficult to walk around the tightly-fitted plots. Here and there little trees cast little shadows, and when we were there—in a sunny part of the day—there were people stretched out napping in them.

The inside of the church at the cemetery is in many ways as bleak as the outside. The walls are blue and water damaged, as if major restoration might not have made it quite this far down the road. The frescoes on the walls are faded and damaged, making them difficult to decipher. The floor here is stone, and the barren interior echoed with the click of my new boots. It is my favorite church in the world: in the apse, rising twenty feet in the air, the framed Virgin of Guadalupe stands in her brightly colored robes before her radiating halo. She is hung in a larger painting of columns and flanked by statues of angels. Across all of this is a net of Christmas lights, surrounded by sparkling garlands. Well-tended and marvelous, our Lady looks forever out the wide wooden arch of the doorway across the limitless blue valley almost five kilometers beneath her.

Heading back to the plaza we passed a new-looking hotel, made of cinder blocks instead of stones, whitewashed and gaily accented in typical Mexican pastels. Behind barbed wire in a shrine of its own are the framed photos of Brad Pitt, Julia Robert, and Gene Hackman—these are headshots and publicity photos, not local snapshots, but serve the purpose of commemorating the event of their stay here. The film production that took over the town at the turn of the century was a debatably positive thing at the time, and its effects on the town’s press and tourism may very well be debated still. But Real de Catorce remembers dozens of weird times and strange happenings; and like those other moments in history will claim these stars as its own.

On south of the plaza things quite literally go downhill. Traveling only a block or two, all roads come to the Arroyo de la Concepción, a dried-up mountain runoff filled with spiny cactus paddles. Here the central area of renovation also comes to an end, and it is possible to walk past a bewildering array of roofless, tumbled stone structures from the heyday of Catorce just on the other side of the arroyo across whitewashed, antique bridges. Archways remain, supporting little but debris and a tangle of cacti carved with graffiti. Old brown walls stand in a drift of broken terracotta. Chickens and cattle graze here and there; some are tied to a tire, some are not. Packed occasionally in and around the ruins we could see a cleared field sporting gamecock cages. Sometimes walking around a ruined building brought us face to face with a territorial dog in someone’s backyard. For a while, Sunshine and I were followed by a saddled horse who had taken an interest in us. The canyon goes on and on, down and down, with steep mountaintops all around, and the remains of this city’s long history strewn like an unraveled labyrinth that had slid down and come to rest there.

We stayed in Real de Catorce for two chilly nights and one, full, sun-roasted day. During this time what we mostly did was wander around and look at the marvelous place, drink plenty of fluids, and get a little sunburned. There is no place in town to exchange money, no ATMs or banks, and it is rare to find a place that will take a credit card. The people are gregarious and helped us in our discoveries of Indian art and interesting new food (cabuches are pickled biznaga cactus sprouts which look like the end of an asparagus and taste a little like an artichoke). I was simply not dressed well for climbing down through thistles and ruins: my new boots are not as adequately constructed for climbing as the old ones were, my pants were not rugged Levis but silly Dockers. Nor was there much time to wander without restraint. These frustrations cancelled each other out, and prompted my oath to soon return with a rope and a flashlight and some band-aids. In the evenings we ate good food and I watched the others play Uno while we all drank good Mexican rum. The room was cozy and orange and lit by provided candles and an overhead bulb with a tin shade that threw stars around the room like a disco ball.

On Sunday we headed home along the same route we’d taken to get there. The wait to exit the sierra through the one-way tunnel took about thirty minutes longer this time. We took the road a little slower, stopping occasionally for a quick walk through the amazing plants to take pictures, or to look out over the incredible views. We stopped in the little town of La Luz to see the ruined monastery, old church, and abandoned mine shaft there. In La Luz, enterprising people had turned a number of the old Spanish ruins into pig pens. The dirt road in front of the dilapidated church was strung with white paper banners. These were either leftovers from a party last weekend or decorations for the upcoming Independence Day celebrations. A group of children on bikes guarded the SUV cheaply while we were away.

Soon enough we were on the road again. On the mountain side of the road the trip was less frightening than the cliff side had been. The trip through the high valley was less riddled with racing thunderstorms today. All too soon the weekend was over. I really fell in love with Real de Catorce. The countryside is harrowing and hot and beautiful and terrible to behold. The remains of the mining town are a playground of hidden nooks awaiting discovery. The air is far cooler there than it is here. It’s like paradise.

More excellent photos here, here, and here.

Want to travel to Catorce Municipality cheaply, immerse yourself, and help people?

Click here for more Real de Catorce photos © the Author

A History of Tourism

2005-09-06T15:20:00.000+07:00

number fifty-five

While anticipating an upcoming weekend trip into the high deserts of San Luis Patosi, I did some research on our destination. Real de Catorce is a slowly repopulating abandoned silver mine and ghost town near sacred Huichol peyote grounds. 2,023 words.

Things I know about Real de Catorce

[NL]—It is a special place, Real de Catorce. “Magical” is the description I have turned up again and again in the resources I have gathered for this history; a breathless preciousness which is nonetheless evident even in the data. Long before Europeans set foot on this continent, the Huichol Indians lived on the harsh southwestern Sierra Madres in the neighborhood of México’s western central highlands (on the northern borders of Jalisco and Michoacán states). The Huichol people considered the mountains of the northern central highlands sacred and made seasonal pilgrimages there (after Spring and Summer rains) to gather the area’s bounty of peyote to use in ceremonies back home. As history progressed they would make this trek to the Catorce Sierra through the territories of rising Olmec and Aztec empires, but somehow escape being conquered and assimilated. When the Spanish eventually discovered them in their homelands they resisted New World assimilation as well, busily synchronizing their own religion with Catholicism to maintain the low profile that characterizes the tribe.

Probably inadvertently, the Huichol led the Spanish to Real de Catorce in the mid-seventeenth century. The Spanish, busily oppressing the northern indigenous peoples in the usual ways, set up camp here in this unlikely high mountain pass. Here they had numerous skirmishes with local Chichimecas (remember: the Náhuatl catchall name used by the Aztecs for derided northern border people, translating into “Dog People”) and some sources even cite Comanche raids. The settlement was recognized by the Spanish crown in 1638, and designated a official “Real,” which means “royal” and indicates the official blessing of the king. Events of the next hundred years of Catorce’s existence are murky. Sometime in the seventeen forties, an Indian raid reduced the town records to ashes and much of the first hundred years of Spanish Catorce’s history is no longer known. The little Spanish real was forced to persist under a multitude of hardships including the severe climate, Indian uprisings, and food shortages. But persist they did. The Spanish strongly suspected there was silver up there, and one suspects that throughout the years just enough was found to keep Catorce populated.

In 1772 the main silver vein was struck and the settlement boomed. The “real” gained the distinction of actual township, and was christened Villa Real de Minas de Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción de Guadelupe de los Álamos de Catorce, or Real de Catorce for short. What followed for a while mirrors the history of Guanajuato. The boom brought miners and magistrates to Catorce, and generated a surprising amount of wealth for everybody. During the heyday it was generating a significant portion of the world’s silver and operating as the number two mine in the nation. Construction was begun on parish church located in the center of town, with world-class neo-classical altars and frescoes decorating the opulent interior. Construction on the church finally ended in 1817. Troubles hit soon after, though, and by the time of the war of Mexican independence, in the eighteen teens, the mines had mostly flooded and silver production began to trail off. Spain was in no mood to lend assistance, but eventually in 1822 an Englishman by the name of Robert Phillips made the journey to Catorce with a patented “steam machine” and pumped the water back out, allowing the mine and town to continue another eighty years or so.

By the eighteen fifties the town was booming again, indeed at its golden age, producing millions of dollars worth of silver a year, and swollen to a population of forty thousand people. Cosmopolitan stone river walks and Spanish colonial plazas dotted this small, unlikely oasis teetering in the dry, thin air. Catorce boasted a world class theater where Caruso sang. In 1888 the plaza and central downtown were completely remodeled and a few years later construction began on a 2.3 kilometer tunnel through the mountain to make the sierra more accessible to the trade routes in the valley below. The parish church installed its iconic neo-classical altar of St. Francis, an incredible jointed wooden figure that could sit or stand. St. Francis had another big impact on the town's spiritual tourism: the installation inspired a tradition of annual pilgrimage to the site on St. Francis’ holy saint’s day, October the fourth. This tradition persists to this day. On the eve of Real de Catorce’s decline, the town experienced one last great moment: in 1895 the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz traveled here to inaugurate two new mine pumps purchased from California, and to gift the town with a clock for its church. His trip was accomplished by train from México City, mule-drawn cart from the valley town of Matehuala, and a horse to take him over the mountains because the tunnel was net yet completed.

Fifteen years later the bubble of Porfirio’s México finally burst, and the towns of the Catorce Sierra began to quickly decline. The Mexican revolution of 1910 spiraled the country into a new era of domestic change and made control of the badlands in northern Mexico—a hotbed of revolutionists and, incidentally, lawlessness—that much harder to control. This and slumping world silver prices signaled the end of the good times in Real de Catorce. The rich mine owners split, fearing Mexican social reform. Without work, many of the poor laboring class migrated elsewhere. The people in the middle drifted off to make a living wherever all the other people had gone. The lawlessness of the area found purchase in the empty homes and bars of the largely abandoned town and managed to mostly push away whomever still remained there. By the thirties and forties the feared social reforms were busily stabilizing northern México and even the lawless holdouts in the high mountain passes had to leave town. Until sometime in the 1970s Real de Catorce languished, eroding on the mountainside, with a population never higher than about three hundred farmers.

Except on sacred days, of course. Pilgrims still walked here to pay homage to St. Francis on his special October day, in the church famous for his altar. The Huichol still came here seasonally for their ritual peyote. Wanderers still made their way here, following the trail of these pilgrims. In the seventies some of these strays who found themselves here, stuck. Since then, Catorce has been enjoying something of a renaissance. Artsy and hippie type people have descended in relative droves, attracted by the ghost town atmosphere, the indigenous culture, and the abundant peyote. Affluent folks looking for a quiet, interesting location have bought and restored homes here. Restoration projects have rebuilt, to a degree, the center of the village, and continue to preserve the ruins of the Spanish towns on its outskirts.

The surrounding landscape of harsh rock and historical, abandoned ruins are appealing to the traveler looking for adventure; as is the quiet isolation. Global expatriates are opening shops and restaurants. The stunning Catorce Sierra backdrops appeal to movie producers, also. Today, so many tourists are sampling the peyote growing naturally across the hills that the powers that be fear for the Indian supply. The municipality has toyed with the idea of growing special crops just to assuage the demands of this non-traditional tourism. There are new cosmopolitan things happening in Real de Catorce, and the town is struggling to live again by capitalizing, finally, on the pilgrimages it has been inspiring for thousands of years.

Things I do not know about Real de Catorce

The name “Real de Catorce” translates into “Royal of Fourteen,” and it has become somewhat cosmopolitan to speculate as to why. No one really knows, but the same can be said of many place names in a country so filled with dramatically disparate etymologies. Explanations include stories of Spanish hardships (Indians may have killed fourteen early settlers, or maybe soldiers, on the hazardous altiplano passes near the towns inception), or odes to the location’s remoteness (fourteen bandits might have lived in a hideaway in the high valley in the town’s early years). More plausibly, It may have been the fourteenth silver strike in the area (the previous thirteen would have collected, with their equipment, at the site of the bonanza), or the fourteenth town in the northward expansion along the Sierra Madre range. Possibly is was named after thirteen other caravans had been less successful in discovering the high route through the mountains. Many other towns enjoy strange names decreed by the Spanish crown in the days of colonization. The long, official name of the town translates loosely to “royal village of the mines dedicated to our lady (of the immaculate conception) the Virgin of Guadalupe of the fourteen cotton trees.” Is that a clue? Or is it more accurately “… of the cotton trees of fourteen,” deepening the mystery? No one knows for sure, but in the case of Real de Catorce, everybody seems to be guessing.

Other mysteries about the town persist. Much of México is surrounded by folklore, and in a place with a history as haphazard as Catorce, fueled as it is by a hallucinogenic cactus, strange stories are prevalent. This might explain the rich conjecture around the village’s name. Or another example: it is hard to understand why the settlement persisted for the hundred and forty years between its beginning and the eventual discovery of the big silver vein that marked its success. Catorce Sierra is a lousy high mountain pass: it is almost impassible, for one thing, and so high up that it is much colder, dryer, and has thinner air than surrounding routes. It is far easier to simply walk around this high sierra. Local explanations insist that a vaquero, cooking by his campfire early in Catorce’s history, noticed the heat from his fire was melting the surrounding, silver-laden rocks. Apparently, this tiny amount of incidental silver sustained Real de Catorce for the better part of a century and a half, but this simplicity is unlikely. Perhaps the vaquero had noticed the peyote, and the “melting rocks” are only a sly allusion to his resultant chemical dependency. But is this a reason to doggedly raise generations of little Spaniards in the cold, the sun-bleached dessert? Fanciful explanations lead to more of the same, and they are also easy to invent.

Ghosts supposedly walk all of the mines, as well as the route leading into town (the Rag Man used to blow out the lights leading the way through the long Ogarrio tunnel). Goats are prevalent here, and so are Chupacabras, the nocturnal phantasms who prey on them, leaving behind a carcass drained of blood. At night, animals keep tourists awake: donkeys and horses bray loudly, dogs bark, and roosters crow. The sound is amplified by the barren vertical surroundings. It is known by the locals that at night animals talk to the ghosts living in the ruined towns surrounding the valley. Some nights it seems like they are having an argument.

To me, the most prevailing mystery is why this beautiful place is a ghost town at all. The facts listed in the history above in no way realistically account for the exodus of tens of thousands of people in less than three decades. There was no black plague, no volcano, nothing that would suggest the kind of cataclysm usually associated with a whole population picking up and disappearing all at once; and yet this has happened. There are very few records in other places to indicate an influx of Catorce immigrants in any great number at any time in history. The population of this prosperous town just up and vanished into destinations unknown between 1910 and the 1930s. By the time Franciscan restoration work, in the person of Father Albino Enríquez, began on the parish church in 1939, the only few families occupying the high Catorce Valley were farmers and goat herds. Why was the town so completely abandoned? This remains a much more compelling mystery that what the word fourteen is doing in the name.

Map: the state of San Luis Potosí.

An official website about Real de Catorce; includes some good photos.

View from Catorce Sierra © the Author

Weekend Funhouse

2005-08-27T14:34:00.000+07:00

number fifty-four

Hey, there is a surprise carnival spinning around in the street in front of our house. It just showed up out of nowhere and now it is all I can think about. 1,238 words.

[NL]—Three days ago the road in front of our house was blocked off and a crew of workers filled it from sidewalk to sidewalk with strange machinery under blue tarps. The road, a sort of east/west lane to the south of our house that loops from the larger road downhill to our immediate north, accesses various neighborhoods on the side of the mountain we live on. The closed section is hardly necessary: we can still get back and forth to the places we go; but we are cut off from many of the other neighborhoods, and one of the handier routes for returning from San Pedro’s central entertainment district in the valley west of us.

Day before yesterday the mystery was solved. The tarps had been taken off and underneath them were carnival rides. All that day and yesterday workers have been unloading, fitting together, and calibrating these rides. Stands have been set up and lights have been strung. Electricity has been wired to everything, confusingly crisscrossing the road everywhere before being covered over with mats and squares of outdoor carpet. After dark last night all of the switches were flipped on, and the little street carnival came to life. Empty rides swung and music blared long into the evening, even though the little amusement park wouldn’t be open for business until today. I am not sure those switches have been turned back off since then. Even now, as I type, it is to a soundtrack of horns, sirens, rock and roll radio, happily screaming children, and wonky melodies spilling out of the merry little street fair that has been erected in front of our house. Colored lights beam and radiate though our vertical blinds and at any given moment the house seems filled with artistically color-coded portent.

The house has become so enjoyably surreal that the little fair was sort of a disappointment when we finally walked out to take a look about an hour after dark tonight. It is a fundraiser for the church that has been being built across the road since before I arrived in San Pedro, and it seems to be primarily geared toward young kids. There is a little pet store set up in a tent on the church grounds selling chirpy little birds and wet turtles. They have some of the healthiest baby iguanas I have ever seen, all bright green and sturdy looking. Near this, many of the adult chaperones have congregated, sitting over Loteria boards and shouting back at the amplified announcer, or standing in line to pay for heaping plates of steaming tacos. The smell of food smoke is everywhere. The church courtyard is filled with white plastic tables. Outside of this court, adults are few and far between, standing in the darker outskirts and talking amongst themselves. Even the teenagers simply prowl to and fro under the dizzying noise and lights, lining up along the walls around the rides looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Younger children—the handful still allowed out this late—ride the little rides here and there; looping elliptically around some swinging device in a brightly colored plastic bucket. Many of these kids are the lone occupant on their ride, their parents talking to the operators while standing just outside of their charge’s wheeling orbit. Here and there little booths sell candy and chances to win light-up Virgen de Guadalupe mirrors by playing a complicated-looking game with marbles on a scored pegboard.

We wandered through the crowd, checked out the animals, and then continued to wander. Sunshine had picked up a sum of carnival funny money, and was interested in trying out the Loteria. I was unsure that we would manage to understand well enough, as semi-literate beginners, to really play without cheating off other people’s boards. In Loteria, the announcer picks a pictographic card from a bowl and then composes a cultural riddle or poem that needs to be deciphered in order to mark a corresponding pictograph on the player’s board. The rest shakes out like bingo, but the rules are set at the beginning whether the player is shooting for a row straight across the board, or some more advanced configuration. The game was moving pretty fast for a beginner, and I didn’t feel I was able to really keep up. I was feeling uneasy about the whole scene, as a matter of fact, and we ended up walking down to the little park about a block and a half away. It’s a really nice night in Monterrey, about thirty-two degrees C with a steady little wind. My feet are still getting used to my new boots, and I could tell coming back from the park that my pinky toes were going to look bright red tonight. On one steep part of the hill I found a hundred-pesos bill just lying in the road with no one even near it. I kept my eye out for people combing the ground all the way back to the fair, but never saw anything like that.

I guess that the most disappointing thing about the little street carnival was that we waited until too late to go, when the screaming crowds I had been hearing all day had boiled down into a few bleary children and a pack of disdainfully cool fifteen year olds. It was a little disappointing that all the rides were built for Mexican pre-teens, and would have tipped right over beneath the weight of even someone Sunshine’s size. Sunshine was happy enough spending her chits on flashing, light-up lollipops and things from the candy stands, but she’d have been happier if we’d been able to ride on one of those noisy, brightly-colored plastic rides. Secretly, I was a little relieved we couldn’t. Sometimes I feel a little awkward as it is, standing out like I do here: a foot taller and twenty-five percent more reflective than anyone around me. Irregularly, this makes me feel shy about seeking to draw even more attention to myself than I already have to, babbling and stuttering around trying to get normal things done. I don’t know why tonight was especially like this, but I was pretty relieved to be far too tall to ride these rides. To squeeze myself into a Mexican-sized plastic bucket and give my brooding and angst-filled teenage audience something to look at for three to five minutes riled me. I just wasn’t feeling like being gringo the clown tonight, so our otherwise inappropriate sizes were just fine by me.

Soon we walked the block back home (but only that far because we had to walk down to the electric gate and then back toward the fair to get to our door). We were quiet because the experience had been a little bit of a downer, in a way. I felt sheepish about feeling shy, and Sunshine was disappointed about her remaining carnival cash. I guess both of us were a little nostalgic about a time when Sunshine could have whirled around in all the cool flashing lights, and I’d have watched her out the corner of my eye, trying to act all cool and bored. But its twenty years later and the whole thing just looked better from a distance, somehow, than it did close up. And still, as I type this, the happy carnival music and colored lights bounce merrily around the house.

Mexican Food

2005-08-26T11:50:00.000+07:00

number fifty-three

One of the enjoyable aspects of any travel is the food, and México is especially attractive in this regard. Also it is just a tiny bit unexpected. 1,142 words.

[NL]—An interesting fact about México: it is very cosmopolitan about food. This is to be expected, sure, in a big city like Monterrey, but I have generally found it to be true in every place I have been. Costal towns sport dashing and exotic seafood cocktails cooked in citric acid at the table, markets griddle up cactus paddle tacos on steaming bar-side hotplates, and delicacies such as huitlacoche (corn smut), flor de calabaza (pumpkin flowers) and chapulines (crickets) permeate local menus from the most modest sidewalk food stalls to the finest dining rooms.

Meat, poultry, and fish can be ordered and prepared in an astounding variety of ways, many involving splitting the critter lengthwise and spitting it over glowing coals. To serve: carve off chunks until it has been whittled down to its revolving core. Apparently cabrito (young goat) and pollo (chicken) are the select objects of this gourmet attention. Beef and pork anatomy are cooked in many of the expected ways from tip to tip, including some traditional recipes for parts that the US diner is less likely to have experienced eating regularly: barbacoa (beef head and face), lengua (beef or pork tongue), and chicharron (boiled or roasted pork skin). What is left is dumped in many of the traditional Mexican soups: pozole, xóchitl, and tortilla. Fusion, sometimes accidentally achieved through the making of foreign foods with local products, also broadens the horizons of culinary possibility. Never more so than the naturalization of normal vegetarian fare through the application of healthy doses of local meat. Light pasta primavera leaden with regional bacon pretty much gives birth to a whole new dish. Same with cheese dip which happens to contain a sizable island of shredded, redly barbequed goat.

While there seems to be very little of the type of food cooked in United States Mexican restaurants, and sadly no Taco Bell among the usual list of successfully imported fast food brands, there is no lack of opportunities to eat ethnically diverse cuisine, including Korean, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, Hawaiian, Irish, US American, French, Argentinean, Cuban, Arabian, Lebanese, Italian, and et cetera, including a whole host of different Mexican regional restaurants usually labeled with words like “traditional,” “typical,” or “twenty pesos for five.”

There are also myriad crêpe places dotting the landscape, the number of which it would be impossible to exaggerate. Not only are there whole crêpe restaurants, but it is possible to get crêpes at many restaurants dedicated to other kinds of food. Crêpes may be purchased at all coffee shops, for example, or in the movie theaters, or most other places in between. I have grown really fond of these fluffy little French griddlecake wraps, whether filled with veggies-n-cheeses for dinner or fruits-n-crèmes for dessert.* One of my favorites is the Italian cheese and mushroom crêpe. With the observed lack of the standard burrito-type fare, we have grown to think of the crêpe as “Mexican food,” and are growing more and more suspicious of the authenticity of those places at home which neglect to include this menu item.

Other food items available at the movie theater include beer, nachos, and sushi. As a matter of fact, there is no scarcity of sushi anywhere in the city, and I should probably attempt to think of this as “Mexican food” as well. The problem is specifically in my own prejudices. Crêpes tend to lend themselves to all sorts of dramatic cultural tampering, as do omelets and dumplings, because they are fairly defined by the ingredients of their filling. Not so much so with sushi, which can be rendered unrecognizable as a result of too much tampering with the theme. I am certainly aware that sushi is a popular fusion cuisine, the traditions of which are often fogged by local ingredients or innovative chefs. Fine. I am also totally sure that what I basically define as sushi is the product of an Americanization of the traditional Japanese stuff, and thereby just as totally false as any other variation. Also fine. I can’t help it, though: strange sushi dishes, finely prepared and gastronomically enjoyable as they may be, still boggle my mind when sat on the table before me.

Thus, I am loathe to even refer to the crab-stuffed tempura fried poblano chilis I enjoyed on my first Monterrey outing under the heading of sushi, even though that was what the restaurant billed itself as. Same with the wonderful fried crabmeat blocks, called sushi cubes, that are available on a menu in central San Pedro. These are served as a pile of five large blocks with a side of tangy katsu sauce and a squirt of iridescent blue wasabi gel on the side of the plate. My fantasy is to get three or four orders one day and build a little house with them, seeing as how they are the Legos of the sort-of sushi world. Working down the list, the most traditional place we have eaten, a place that even served hot sake and lemon-fresh finger towels, included a soy sauce marinated jalapeño condiment on our table.

But my fragile, apparently very insular, world of sushi seems to have met its Mexican match today as we tried out a little place in a San Pedro strip mall. Here is where the destruction of my culinary assumptions and the helpful addition of Mexican livestock have come together to leave an indelible impression on my checklist of flamboyantly off-cultural cuisine. Ordering an otherwise pretty standard roll, I missed the three letter word in the menu that indicated it would be prepared with tender roasted sirloin. There was no danger of my accidentally eating this, however, as what was delivered to our table was, indeed, a roll of roast beef wrapped in rice and seaweed with a little poke of cucumber in the middle. This is such a little thing to fly off the handle about. Certainly there is nothing un-Japanese about thinly-sliced marinated beef. And yet this Arby’s roll, this meaty curl of east-meets-southwest, obviously achieved something wholly new, possibly unholy; and, frankly, I found it jarring. Sushi-n-Roast. All I could really do was stare at it and wonder what strange new escalation was to befall me the next time I ordered ostensible sushi at the next place down the list. Or if it was possible, that the lowest scientific point of troubling ersatz world cuisine had been observed, and it was all uphill from here.

Here is an excellent directory of the Monterrey metropolitan restaurant world. Includes San Pedro, referred to here as “Valle” (the Valley).

*Not all crêpe places cute-up their menus to the extent that I have satirized them here. Still, since the items appear in Spanish as “verduras y quesos” and “frutas y crema” it is easy to substitute that happy-go-lucky ampersand stand-in, the n, when ordering or translating.

Old Kentucky Home

2005-08-09T03:42:00.000+07:00

number fifty-two

This is an account of the first time I return to the US after several months living abroad. It is my first trip home after coming to think of Monterrey as my home. Actually, it is hard to decide what isn’t my home now, from minute to minute. 1,303 words.

[NL]—The last time I really thought much about rootlessness I was also in Kentucky. At the time I had just spent the previous day throwing out whatever still remained in my house. A long evening saying “so long” to everyone at my favorite bar, and then a long night on the toll road through West Virginia, brought me to that new day in rural Appalachia. This had been the first leg of the weeklong journey that ended here in San Pedro, Nuevo Leon. I was pretty tired after that first day, but I could not escape the exhilarating feeling that wherever I happened to be standing was, at that moment, where I actually lived.

In a smaller scheme it was possible to imagine that, as of leaving North Carolina, I had immediately slipped into a state of heading home again. I am certain that this is the way many people feel about pulling up roots and moving great distances. A baseball metaphor lends its cliché: start at home, hit that pop fly into the sun, and round the bases back to home. One moment I was standing on my doorstep, and the next I was twelve hundred miles away from a new doorstep and heading there for the first time. Except this doesn’t feel quite true. From the moment that I locked the doors in NC that last time and handed my keys to Phil, I became something more than homeless, or even homeward bound. At that moment I moved into the rather migratory state of some kind of meta-centric. Home followed me wherever I was. I was not walking around inside it, it was radiating from me. My cliché began to stretch into absurdity as I imagined myself someday passing fourth and fifth and sixth bases in a constantly expanding home-run in an increasingly ridiculous baseball analogy.

I know this is just a lot of words, but it was interesting for me to think about throughout the week. My stuff was either at my mom’s, or in Mexico, or hurtling just a tiny bit over the speed limit between the two. Other things that I used to own were now the possessions of other people. There was nowhere I could not stop and simply stay. I had no special claim to any place, really—no leases or binding documents—and it was fair to say that wherever I happened to be—in the car, say, or Kentucky, or a roofless rest area outside Dallas—was no more or less informed by my presence than the home I was heading to. There was no reason they could not all thought of as my home. Far from a scary feeling, this was a freedom; this rootlessness gave me an equal ownership in every place available to me: no strings attached. The whole world was just that sunny baseball field and I was just the man to haul ass around it.

Much time has passed, though, and we recently returned to Kentucky for Sunshine’s birthday. While it was hot in Northern Mexico in July, with temperatures regularly hitting the hundred and teens, I had been concerned about heading back into the humidity of the southern US. I had also been a little concerned about our flights, since the last time I had boarded a plane I had spent the fifty minutes between Monterrey and Mexico City in terror. This time around the fear of flying had lessened some. I armchair speculate that this sudden phobia is my working through post September eleventh issues, as asinine as that sounds; I am hoping that I will soon return to the hardened air traveler I once was. Stepping into the Kentucky weather was about as bad as I excepted, but after several hours I had mostly stopped noticing it.

Sunshine’s birthday was about the middle day of our vacation. I gave her cowboy boots wrapped in homemade “legal alien” wrapping paper that included our faces. A fantastic time was had by all.

I was incredibly excited to be back in the US for eight days. It was coming home, of course—what isn’t now? It was also a great opportunity to take advantage of the many comforts afforded me by my familiarity with the place. Sunshine’s parents are fun and relaxed, the farm is beautiful, and there’s little more to do all day long than sit on the porch looking out over the toy-studded landscape. That, and to do a heck of a lot of shopping. It is difficult for me to isolate the things that I miss from home (the US) when I am home (in Mexico), but it was very easy to find things I couldn’t live without while at home in Kentucky. Every store we happened to duck into sold some necessary item, the cultural exclusiveness of which had gone unnoticed until just then.

I was very happy to see my mother, who picked us up at the Lexington airport, and Sunshine’s father who was waiting for us at the farm. I was very happy to see our friend Ellie who happened to be in Lexington on business. Sunshine’s mother returned home from China about halfway through our visit, and I was very happy to see her. Sunshine’s extended family foliage of cousins and uncles and aunts and nieces and neighbors came regularly by, and I was happy to see each and every one of these people whose names I had still been struggling to sort out two years ago. The air was clear, the sky was starry, and the food was filled with comfortably predictable ingredients. The first night we were stateside we ate in a Mexican restaurant. We just can’t get food exactly like that anywhere in Mexico.

But in a used bookstore in Lexington I had the predictable emotional pang. We had returned to the United States exactly three months, almost to the hour, after I had crossed the border in the other direction in April. Sunshine had gotten to come to her childhood home and see her people. It was her birthday and she had been in Mexico almost twice as long as I had. Fair enough. As much as I love Kentucky, though, the majority of my people are elsewhere. The places and foods of my childhood homes are in little mill towns strung along I-85, long grown safely nostalgic. But this trip to the US, and Kentucky’s close proximity to North Carolina, has kindled a homesickness that has made me reevaluate my first superficial ruminations on my own rootlessness. I imagine the frustrations and fatigue as the sun sets on that endless baseball diamond, my multiplying team members strung along on the bases before and after me. So, there may be a scary side to this after all.

Currently, in Mexico, I am becoming attached to new people and new places. After we flew back here yesterday, and after customs and immigration, I was happily tucked into a cab whisking us through a city comfortably familiar. I probably even said something like “We’re home.” I was happy to be in the comfort of our house, in our neighborhood, surrounded by our things. I was happy to be greeted by our cat. Tonight or tomorrow night I will be happy to see our friends Christene and Tony, and to dine on excellent Mexican food with them. I am happy; but I am also still homesick, even though I am home right here. This, like the fear of flying, is something it is possible to imagine plaguing me throughout the foreseeable future. Is every base to be home plate? More or less. It may become very confusing to have so many homes to enjoy returning to. It may be bittersweet to always have to leave one to return to another.

Front Porch. Photo Illustration © El Joy

Hypothetically

2005-07-26T12:38:00.000+07:00

number fifty-one

Travel abroad, and especially living there, is always an experience rife with mystifying new complexities. Maybe he most mysterious part is that thin political line on the map between two countries. 1,658 words.

[NL]—Living abroad, especially in México, has given me a much more intricate view of the political boundary known as the border. At home, it was easy to think of the border in narrower terms than it is now. The border was ours; you know, American. On the other side, foreign nations went about their daily, foreign lives. To some, those nations represent a clandestine desire to cross that border and take up residency in the US, legally or otherwise, and the border is something primarily in need of control or defense. To others, México or Canada are places to escape or retire to, and the border is a gateway to home base. Still others concern themselves with products that might be imported over the border and then sold illegally. In the US, the border with México runs 1,951 miles along the southern edges of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Between México and Texas, the border is a partly muddy, partly dry half-baked river called the Rio Grande. This river is the busiest international border in the world.

But what the border now represents to me is a complicated and utterly necessary international line in the sand, replete with imponderable rules and regulations, international laws and confusion. It is owned by more than merely the US and México, and is used by nationals of many different countries. It is the source of custody disputes that are decided at the Hague, a critical market for multinational vendors, and a two-way trouble spot of bureaucratic documentation for anyone utilizing it in its capacity as a conduit. It is a swath of the best and worst of its two worlds, amalgamated and alchemized into a whole third world which can be confusing and familiar at one moment, and confused and overly familiar the next.

If I sound like I am complaining, I want to stress that I am not. As a US citizen, the border is mostly open to me. While it is difficult to get the type of visa I need to live here for two years—or to work, or to buy property—it has been very easy to get temporary ones that allow me to stay and travel. Plus, every time I cross that magical border again, these easy visas—really only tourist cards—are renewed. It is far more challenging for my counterparts to cross the river in the other direction, requiring vast documentation proving national ties, costing hundreds of dollars, and sometimes requiring US sponsorship. And if that weren’t enough, while the majority of the people I meet on this side of the border appreciate my business, interest, and presence; my counterparts might be met with paranoia, racism, and jingoism. These knee-jerk reactions in the US color the views of the physical border, and its users, for a far greater number of people than the radicals who write in the newspaper op-ed pages, rant on talk radio, and mobilize into a volunteer armies (who literally sit in state’s defense against the tide of illegal population daily threatening America’s terrestrial shores). Even moderate people might find themselves thinking in terms of the border as a doorway for an alien Them to use when desperate to make a new life, and We venture through to enrich the life we have. Reasonable people might conclude that the laws being broken at the border are primarily being broken by Them.

Living abroad can clear that attitude right up. In the expatriate community it is easy to come across the opposite type of story. Custody battles loom large, and it has become a very difficult paperwork hurdle for a single parent to bring a child across the border. Worse, foreign criminals have been known to kidnap, rob, or kill here. It is possible that kidnappers, robbers, and killers attempt occasionally to flee here, imagining that they might be safe outside of US jurisdiction (an idea so fundamentally wrongheaded that it takes but a few seconds of clear thought to see the lunacy in it). Runaways, joy riders, and underage drinkers cross the border regularly for an escape into the thrill of adventure. Interestingly, the unconscious misperception that the international border is somehow theirs, solely within the purview of the United States, adds to the possibility that perfectly innocent travelers might skip the small but legalizing step of actually getting proper documentation for the trip, adding to the problem. Others, hypothetically, are unable to get this documentation because they truly are entering the county illegally or for illicit reasons. Even the most innocent excursion, no harm intended, could represent both things.

A dad might take his son for a day trip into Mexico to see a relative, and do so without mom’s knowledge. A group of fourteen year olds could decide to take a road trip after school one afternoon to learn something about the world. It is very easy to enter México with benign intent and still be breaking the law. México doesn’t require much more than a driver’s license to visit border areas for a day or two. Tourist travel cards are required whenever a traveler ventures outside of México’s border zone, which extends approximately twenty-five kilometers into the interior, or stays for over three days. This assumes that other intents and purposes are legal. In the instances above, for personal reasons, people who don’t feel like they are doing anything morally wrong may still fail to do what is legally right, fearing exposure. In other instances, ignorance of the rules or how to go about actually following them, can be a culprit.

Ten years ago, I traveled all around México without the proper forms simply because I could not find the building in which I was supposed to get them. No one ever bothered to check until after midnight one night on a bus between Tulum and Veracruz, when armed men identified me as a traveler without legal documentation. I had not intended to do anything wrong; nor was I more than marginally aware that I had. I was not breaking any imperative laws. But I was, technically, an illegal alien.

Like many illegal aliens crossing into the US, most people traveling incorrectly in México are rarely identified, and are not considered too much of a threat to the nation, either. When they are caught, México seems to be overly gracious in handling them. Reading the newspaper, it is possible to find citations for travelers committing crimes and finding their way to Mexican prisons, or deportation back to home prisons. But the innocently guilty, like yours truly in Veracruz or these other standard, hypothetical lawbreakers (our runaways, for example), tend to be treated with kindness. At most they are asked nicely to leave. They can be detained in youth shelters until they are picked up by parents, or escorted back to their country of origin. In the case of teen runaways or thrill seekers, this means that they will be treated to a hot meal and some shelter after their money has run out. Runaways don’t tend to break many laws. Often, they are simply too young to be legal. Maybe they have traveled over the border with undeclared items, minor amounts of controlled substances, or pets that have not undergone quarantine. This might cause a little hitch in the friendly system México employs to deal with these kids. Now we are talking a little bit of extra crime, smuggling maybe, controlled substances; or perhaps merely the minor snag that the shelter just doesn’t allow pets. Our hypothetical runaways never thought of themselves as smugglers, surely; the pet was purely for personal use. In my own case, since I was not underage, carrying contraband, or otherwise illegal beyond the status of my travel papers, I was given the opportunity to belatedly obtain them several months into my trip. Our hypothetical runaways are in a little deeper. They must be supervised and then repatriated. The contraband pet must be quarantined or dealt with in some other way.

It is possible, then, to imagine that someone else might take the pet, if only to remove the obstacle. Maybe it is almost midnight, raining heavily, and the police are on their way. Whatever social worker, security agent, or Samaritan, seeing that the loved and un-quarantined animal presents a legal issue for México and the kids, a stumbling block to their shelter, and its own problem of repatriation, might take the pet temporarily until something can be worked out. This harmless act of kindness, to kid and animal nationals like, also falls on the other side of border legality. So, in this hypothetical way, the innocent fault can spread, accidentally turning more unsuspecting victims into international scofflaws. Plus, it is impossible to imagine that there will ever be a time when the pet and the kids would be able to be reunited, anyway. It is another wrongheaded idea cleared away with a little further speculation. The next day, or whenever the hurricane is over and the parents show up to drive the runaways home, the pet remains contraband. Smuggling back over the border would make it illegal in two countries. So, either the animal would have to permanently adopt the cover of Mexican pet, or expose the web of lies that its hypothetical presence outside of quarantine represents.

So, after so many stories and so much conjecture, I am getting to the point where the paranoia and suspicion I feel in regard to the border has nothing to do with those trying to use it for the usual illegal purposes of invasion or trafficking. Rather, I am concerned about what innocent lapse or overlooked detail will make me the next accidentally illegal alien abroad. In other news, today we finally found a permanent home for a sweet little gray Mexican kitten that we found on the street just before Hurricane Emily hit the Tamaulipas seaboard.

Emily's Last Day

2005-07-22T04:37:00.000+07:00

number fifty

Part three of my experience with Emily: today Hurricane Emily disappeared completely from the map, leaving only aftermath, her toll taken in more flooding and buildings and jobs than in lives. 563 words.

[NL]—The last thing that I did before going to bed last night was to change the towels we’ve had catching the water that has been seeping in around the windows and mopping up the puddles on the floor beneath them. Throughout the night, I was aware of the wind moving around the house, but not so much that the trees were whipped violently around. Just a spooky yawning sound. It rained most of the night. By the time I woke today, Emily was gone, all that was left of her was a sky full of gray streaks and a ghostly purple puff on the satellite images.

Well, and water. Monterrey is flooded in places, and there’s a Catarina River where there is usually merely a Catarina river bed. During the last day or two, all of the sports fields and tents that usually populate the dry bed had been removed, and the river managed to flow, full of not much more than run-off, much the way nature originally intended. Apparently, there are still places in town without power, and several roads are still closed because they are either under water, or too strewn with debris to travel on.

Overall, I have been very impressed with the way México handled the storm. Thousands of people were evacuated along the Mayan Riviera in the Yucatán before the first, category 4, hit; and then thousands more along the fishing villages on the Gulf Coast for the category 3 version that came at Monterrey. Many of these folks were picked up by army trucks as they walked along dragging their luggage. Many were put up for free in inland hotels and makeshift shelters. While a sadly large number of people lost their houses and their means of employment, it seems as if there were no casualties. I can’t stress this enough: none. Nobody died.*

Outside, the thick cloud cover is low enough to completely enshroud the surrounding mountains. The hill that separates San Pedro from Monterrey is completely visible, but the larger la Silla and los Mitras mountains are chopped off at the knees. This would be a striking day to go mountain climbing, if I was certain that I would not need a boat to get across the valley itself. The clouds are a dark color, but thinner areas are allowing light to penetrate in places, giving the environment a bright gray quality occasionally lined with golden sun. It is raining now, but these are gentle showers which are coming and going, totally different from the all day, from lesser- to greater-degree storms of yesterday. By the end of the weekend, I hear, the showers will have subsided, even, and then the occasional pocket of hurricane wreckage will be the only things left of Emily. And construction sites on the coast, of course. And a river.

*A small, sad note. Apparently, after all my lowered evaluation of the danger to the people who live here in San Pedro, the one recorded fatality of this storm, in either incarnation, was reportedly washed away in flood waters right near my house. I have no idea how—I never saw any amount of flooding on our side of the little ridge that separates us from Monterrey. Possibly she was somehow caught on the side of a mountain and was lost in the flash flooding of its sudden watershed.

Hurricane Emily, middle day

2005-07-21T13:56:00.000+07:00

number forty-nine

Part two of my experience with Emily: her category intensity has lessened but she continues to head right for our house. Break out the towels and candles (and bread and cheese). 894 words.

[NL]—7/20/05 10:35am EST—Good Morning. Some real rain started hitting the ground about ten minutes ago, seeming to fade in and out in intensity. There is still very little wind, but visibility is, like, nothing: I can maybe see a hundred yards. This place is surrounded by mountains (We are on one of them), and there is no way to tell. The temperature on the patio is 72 F, several degrees cooler than I keep the air conditioning in the house. Looks like Emily made landfall about 6:30am EST, and is trucking inland at ten miles an hour. Centrally, after several hours of being on land, her winds are still turning at right about 110mph. Brownsville, Texas has reported gusts of up to 63mph. Currently, I have no information on the storm surges (coastal México was supposed to endure tidal movement up to twelve feet higher than the norm). Nor can I seem to ferret up any information on exactly when Emily heaved ashore in Laguna Madre, about 90 kilometers south of the US/México border. She is still heading maybe a little north of where I am sitting.

As I have written this, the rain has eased up a little, and visibility had increased enough for me to barely make out some of the mountains around me. It is still pretty quiet out there.

7/20/05 2:45pm EST—Pitched and less-pitched rain all morning, but seems to have leveled off a little now, so I suspect that we are between the arms of Emily’s pinwheel. The wind has still not gotten dangerous here, while Matamoros (on the Texan border coast near Brownsville) is reporting gusts of almost 70mph. I can hear it at times howling around the house, but not terribly often or sustained. The temp has gone up some, but is still a freakishly cool 76 F. Visibility has improved over this morning, but the day remains hazy and dark. Emily is still headed right towards our neck of the woods, and after being land bound for nearly seven hours, is still turning at 85mph. She’s also speeding up, heading cross-country at 10mph.

7/20/05 5:19pm EST—There’s actually very little new to report. The rain is still happening, but it has settled into a easy pace unlike the gusty rain of this morning. Otherwise, it still looks very much like it did: cold (70’s F), gray, with low visibility. In Monterrey, the dry riverbed running through the south of Centro is raging with water, and there are multiple areas out of power. Several main roads near the riverfront have been closed. This is more of a way to limit people from driving around, probably, than any real concern that the usually non-existent river would be over spilling her banks or flooding out the raised roads around her. But Emily is almost here, and is still coming right for us at 12mph, and swirling at 70. We still have power (obviously), so I am going to go make a sandwich.

7/20/05 8:54pm EST—Emily's eye folded in and she became a tropical storm around 6:30 EST earlier today, and that tropical storm continues to move directly over our heads at 12mph, wind speeds are 50mph, just five miles per hour less than the hurricane category one. We are still not experiencing the kind of winds that have ravaged the Gulf Coast of México, but the gusts that we are getting don’t seem to be slowing down much. Local broadcasters are stating that the worst is yet to come. This worst will apparently be when the center of TS Emily passes overhead in about four hours or so. It has continued to rain non-stop, and portions of Monterrey seem to be enduring some pretty heavy flooding. Several airlines have discontinued service today already, and the airport is scheduled to close later on tonight. Sunshine's workday has been cancelled again for tomorow. A main bridge over Rio Santa Catarina has mostly washed away. Thousands have been evacuated from lowlands and poorer, surrounding neighborhoods. From where I sit, looking out the window, the visibility is lowering again. I can no longer see our neighborhood, just rain and clouds that reach all the way to the ground.

7/21/05 2:50am EST—Now the wind is getting gusty. Occasionally it howls around the house, and blows the rain straight at the windows. Visibility has become odd now that it is night. The lights of downtown San Pedro are very clear, but the giant, iconic mountains surrounding us are completely invisible in banks of clouds. This includes the top of the mountain my house is on. Tropical Storm Emily is pretty much overhead now, though she doesn’t necessarily have a defined center anymore. After about fifteen hours, the rain has again become intermittent, and right now seems to be taking a break. Sunshine’s employers made the decision several hours ago to close again tomorrow mostly taking into consideration that many would not be able to navigate to the building in the possibly increased overnight flooding. Since there has been little phenomena besides heavy rain, the cats haven't freaked out too much. Many of my windows are leaking, but nothing has broken, including the plants and things outside. I keep finding frogs clinging to the concrete walls around the yard. I’ll bet I don’t have to water that yard again until September.

Hurricane Emily, first day

2005-07-20T14:05:00.000+07:00

number forty-eight

Part one of my experience with Emily: this storm is crazy. It speeds up and slows down and gets bigger and smaller. This post covers the first days of sporadic updates to this blog as Hurricane Emily marched overland directly at Monterey. 1,006 words

[NL]—7/19/05 10:00am EST—Hurricane Emily lost a lot of speed over the Yucatán Peninsula, dropping to category two (barely: sustained winds a the eye were about 55mph) yesterday as she returned to the open sea in the gulf coast. Slowing a little, she also picked up a little more mass, widening considerably even as she dumped a lot of her rain on Cozumel and Cancún. Her pressure started to drop again over the gulf, and as of this writing, she is speeding back up: her winds are 90mph, and that number will probably rise. It is forecasted she’ll now be at a strong category three when she reaches the gulf coast about two hundred and fifty kilometers directly west of Monterrey.

And that’s kind of weird; I am not sure I have ever seen a hurricane shoot so levelly west before. She took a little of an upswing right before the Peninsula, and then only because of running aground. Since she has been in the Gulf, she seems to have been trying to correct her westerly bearing. Of course, I have been outside loudly calling her name.

Today is the day she’ll start to hit. The eye will hit sometime late tonight, or early tomorrow am. I am going to, at least temporarily, keep tabs on what is happening with the storm, as well as what is happening outside. When these two things come together, I will probably lose power for a while. We are on the side of the mountain, so while I suspect that any sustained accumulation of water due to torrential rains will indeed cause flooding, that flooding will be lower than our house. I hope. We’ll see. The emergency groceries were bought yesterday, and Sunshine’s employers have cancelled most of business tomorrow. Now I wait to see what happens.

7/19/05 10:30am EST—Weather clear with big puffy cumulous clouds. Very little breeze. Temperate eighty-six degrees, Fahrenheit, but humidity feels higher. Emily is threatening the coast with storm surges that should be hitting within the hour. I can not tell there is even a storm, much less anything like that, from here.

7/19/05 12:45pm EST—Weather here much the same as before. Some of the clouds getting a darker look to them, but still lazily hanging there. The ominous thing about them seems to be that they are losing definition. The edges are getting hazy. Temperature still pretty low at 92 F. Emily up to 95mph winds, traveling 14mph WNW. First buffeting of Gulf Coast about 45 minutes ago.

7/19/05 3:15pm EST—Still very much as it has been here, but all of the clouds have gone smeared across the skywith lowered visibility over Cerro de la Silla. Temp at 88 F, no breeze down here at all. Birds are all atwitter and everything. Looking at the Weather Channel satellite images to the left, it seems as if the coast is finally getting some of Emily’s rain. As for her, she's spinning at 100mph now, and slowing to 12mph WNW. Her eye is about 200 kilometers from landfall.

7/19/05 5:05pm EST—Okay, it’s cloudy now. Sometime in the last hour the sky got really dark and covered over by a continuous ceiling of level grey. The wind has not really picked up, though, and the temp has gone up to 92 F. 20-45mph winds, and lots of rain, are hitting the coast from Galveston to Veracruz. Looks like the front wall of the hurricane is just beginning to touch up against the coast to my east now, and Emily’s storm front has moved into Nuevo Leon.

7/19/05 8:01pm EST—It started raining about two hours ago. It started in with the wind a little, too. About an hour ago, the sun peeked under the flat disk of cloud cover for a little while. The rain comes in gusts like the wind, but neither are very dramatic yet. Emily has picked up speed again: swirling at 125mph, and coming ashore at 13. Several reports from Southern Texas mention winds nearing 50mph at the coast, where weather professionals predict 3-12 foot storm surges before the eye lands. Currently, it is dusk in Monterrey (even though there’s about ninety minutes until sunset), but there is no wind or rain. Just eeriness.

7/19/05 11:43pm EST—And it remains spooky out there. All of Monterrey and San Pedro feels hunkered down, but nothing is happening. There’s no rain, no wind, there are tiny little white puffball clouds in the air. Looking to the left you will notice that the eye of the hurricane is under fifty kilometers from the beach, and that there is clear sky here. I suppose this is predictable; “the calm before the storm” is a cliché for a reason. But the cliché seems unexpected somehow, tonight, when I know Emily’s landfall is just an hour or three away. Maybe more: she’s taking it at an easy seven miles an hour now, holding at a 125mph maintaining a category three status. She is holding her course for just north of us.

7/20/05 3:03am EST—The center of Emily will be running ashore two or three hours from now, apparently (she keeps slowing off the coast), and I’ll be asleep for that. There is a thrown- off part of her storm wall heading around her now, being aimed right at us. But the mountains here have been protecting us from much of what she can do from a distance, and probably will defeat this projectile cell, too. Contrary to expectation, Emily has sustained 125mph winds, even though the pressure in her eye is still dropping—one more little surprise for me. This means Emily is still powering up, and might possibly achieve category four by landfall. Outside in San Pedro, it has grown thickly clouded again, and rain is coming and going. Still not a lot of wind. By six am what is going to hit us should be hitting us, though. If it is loud enough, I’ll probably wake up and report it. Goodnight.

Like Dry Leaves

2005-07-18T09:35:00.000+07:00

number forty-seven

When I look into the sky over the parking lots and landscaping of San Pedro, I can just make out the storm clouds gathering. Hurricane Emily has already hit Mexico once, and now she is coming for us. 1,160 words.

[NL]—Today was a gorgeous day: cool, mostly cloudy with shockingly blue sky between ominously speedy gray clouds, a little blustery. I was somewhat surprised by this, owing to the Hurricane.

I was first alerted to Hurricane Emily two days ago when she was about sixty miles east of Jamaica, forecasted to travel a gentle, elliptical west-northwesterly curve, her eye churning over Kingston and heading ashore the following week in southern Texas. My own prediction, based, as always, on what it is I have seen in the past, had the hurricane making a sharper turn north during her Jamaican landfall; then savaging Cuba, losing a lot of strength over the Keys, and hitting the US mainland as a tropical storm on Florida’s left coast.

I was very wrong, of course. Emily was a wee lass of a category two hurricane back on Friday, advancing on Jamaica at a little over three miles an hour. The thing is, she never took that small turn the weather people predicted, nor the larger one I spent the majority of the weekend talking about. As she kept to the open water, passing beneath Jamaica, she strengthened into a category four storm of 155mph winds. She sucked up a considerable amount of water and picked up her momentum, speeding up to eighteen miles an hour. Late tonight or early tomorrow morning she will beach herself on the Yucatán Peninsula, just north of Tulum. But she won’t be stopping there. By Monday night she should be heading on through the gulf. Straight at Monterrey.

By last night it was raining wildly outside, though if I was reading the satellite right it is merely due to some westerly systems that are affiliated with Emily only because her high-pressure front wall is forcing them onto our mountain ranges. We went out on Friday night, but it just seemed too tedious to try to navigate around yesterday, especially with no end to the weather in sight. But once today dawned relatively clear and very nice, we decided to chance a trip to the mountain overlook of Obispado, located just west of central Monterrey. It might be the last time we get to leave the house for a while.

In the majority of Monterrey pictures I can find online there are one of two different landmarks. The vast majority of these photos, of course, include the Cerro de la Silla, our iconic Saddle Mountain. The other landmark is the little hillock of Obispado, rising shortly from the city center, dwarfed by the surrounding spectacle of the Sierra Madre Oriental, and flying one of the largest flags imaginable in atmospheric conditions. Pictures that do not include Obispado are often taken from the top of it. Obispado mountain, as short as it looks with its high-contrast background, is still tall enough to serve as an excellent lookout point for Monterrey, which turns out to be another strikingly large-looking city from this vantage. We parked about two thirds of the way up the hill, and walked to the top. Running along the switchback road a the base of the hill is a little civic museum and the eighteenth century Bishop’s Church that lends its name to the mountain. There is also, apparently, a convention center, fine dining restaurant, and gift shop. We walked right past all of this to get to the top of the mountain. And the top of this mountain, smallish in the pictures but large enough to see from the top of, is an enormous thing when hiking to the summit. We were both thanking our lucky stars that the temperature was no longer in the forties for this trip. I was also pretty happy about the constant driving wind which seemed to strengthen a little with every new foot we trudged up from street level.

The view was worth it. I was able to see almost all the way to the airport. It was easy to tell how different parts of the city are not as far away from each other as getting driven around has made them appear. Things that took twenty-five minutes to reach by cab were, in reality, just over there. Monterrey stretches, puddled in the flatness of this river valley, to the horizon in the places that the horizon is not populated by enormous mountains. We watched a train come in from the direction of Saltillo and the caves that riddle las Mitras. It was so windy up there that the birds were having trouble making it over the top, sliding sideways or backwards into a more navigable altitude. The thunderous den of the flapping Mexican flag, a football field over our heads, made it hard to even hear this wind. Sunshine wondered whether the flag would cause casualties if it ever flew from its pole out over the city. Yes, she concluded, that flag would kill some people. From the top of Obispado, I was able to finally locate the whereabouts of Monterrey’s huge central double cemeteries of Dolores and Carmen. There they widely sat, northeast of the mountain and west of the Alameda’s puff of green treetops. Maybe no one would have to die if the runaway flag landed there.

Heading back down the mountain to these cemeteries, we paused to take a look at the Templo Obispado. The church is very nice, a noted architectural example, and I thought that all of the cool cacti growing on the grounds were particularly interesting. It was a little tricky to get the car out of its parallel space and down the side of the mountain, but Sunshine managed it, and we found the cemeteries without much difficulty. The place was utterly beautiful, a vast metropolis of stone and concrete, crypts and above-ground plots, peopled by hundreds of angels and Christs and Virgins. We were only able to stay there for about twenty minutes before they closed, according to the posted hours, but we did get to wonder around for a while, looking at row upon row of quiet, scenic, and shady final resting places. The place was overgrown by giant shady trees, many of which were palm, and it just seemed like a nice place to be. From the cemetery it was possible to see Obispado’s three hundred and thirty foot flagpole rising from its silly stump of a hillock.

By the time we were heading back to the car there was a man with a bicycle who was fastening one of the two doorways into the front gate shut with a giant chain. He didn’t speak to us, but I am pretty sure that if we had not left when we did, we would have been locked inside the cemetery’s ten foot privacy wall overnight. While that would certainly have had its attractive aspects, I certainly think that there would be a much more appropriate time to try it than ground zero before the pending hurricane.

Flag versus coming storm. Photo © the Author

Fourths

2005-07-05T10:45:00.000+07:00

number forty-six

My first ever US Independence Day celebrated abroad is also celebrated millions of miles away from the planet at breakneck speeds. 828 words.

[NL]—I forgot to take my camera to the Fourth of July party. If I had, I would have had the digital technology to capture this moment of my international life: Dan still has wet hair from the cannonballs he was doing earlier as he lights off tubes of sparks that sail over his privacy wall. In front of him, nine or so people sit and watch; eventually they break into a cracked and variously certain rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. It is not the first holiday I have spent while expatriated from my country, but it is the first where that is an overt irony.

This is Dan’s party, and he has been good to us. There is plenty to eat and drink—he’s even barbequed ribs on the brick grill that came installed in his back yard. He and a DEA agent have been diving from the top of the pool house into the smallish pool. People are friendly and happy, and there is very little to indicate that our little American party is so estranged from its nation of birth. I am standing approximately one thousand miles away from the last place I celebrated the Fourth of July. I strongly suspect that the police will be called at any moment: today is just a weekday for Monterrey, and what we are lighting up sounds enough like gunshots to possibly alarm an already tense northern Mexican community. The police never come, though, possibly because all of the neighbors are at work.

This has been an eventful long weekend, full of sci-fi and Independence Day parties. Today, before coming to Dan’s house, we watched Guerra de los Mundos in the VIP theater at the mall. Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise examined the working-class freedom-fighting father in a hostile, alien-ravaged world in a way that was informed by the events of September eleventh. I ate a Philadelphia cream cheese and manchego crepe during the post-apocalyptic apocalyptic turmoil.

On Friday, Sunshine attended a more official party at her employer’s, an annual black tie event that is orchestrated to reacquaint area VIPs with the charming nationalism of their American guests. A celebration so structured and premeditated that the night is very much more like work than gaiety. Sunshine and her coworkers are instructed to mingle in Spanish and spend very little time talking to people that they already know. Classy background music provides the ambiance, wine sparkles, there is a great attempt made to produce classy hors d'oeuvres from “typical” American cuisine. This party is confusingly enacted on a date close to, but never on, the fourth day of the month.

I had assumed that I was not invited to this function due to the fact that I am not an official spouse and this is such an official party. When it became apparent that I was sort of expected to go, it was already way too late for me to have the suit dry cleaned in time. I was ambivalent: on one hand, it would have been interesting to see such an classy shindig; and on the other, well, it seemed so much like work. Sunshine had been preparing for nothing else for the past week, working with committees for decorating and catering and inviting and et cetera. She seemed to have had a good time when she came home that night; but she came home exhausted and she seemed equally glad that the whole thing was finally over.

By last night we had taken our first road trip in México, braving the flames of the sun to travel down the way to Santiago. Sometime early on the morning before we did this, 83 million miles away from where I am sitting, a US space probe, moving at 64,000 miles per hour, fired a washing-machine sized bullet at a moving comet, finally scoring a direct hit fifty-two minutes after midnight last night. The first fireworks already, with it being a holiday in only two American time zones. The Deep Impact space probe had traveled over 266 million miles in a 172 day flight plan. Both the impactor and the delivery vehicle sent back thousands of riveting digital images. The whole maneuver was conceived to help Earthlings study of the origins of the universe by taking a good look at the insides of an ancient comet. This feat was pulled off with only very slight deviation in trajectory and impact predictions that were worked out before the probe’s launch in January. This is wonderful space news, and a towering testament to math and engineering, evident both in an elliptical orbit somewhere between Venus and Jupiter, and here in this room where I watched the whole thing unfold wirelessly on my laptop. I think about this feat of science every time the DEA agent cannonballs into the pool, sending a plume of water into the neighboring yard.

NASA’s Tempel 1 Deep Impact mission and other news can be found here.

Only 41

2005-07-04T11:31:00.001+07:00

number forty-five

A half hour or so south of Monterrey there is an idyllic little town called Santiago. Between these cities, stretched along the hot highway, there is a shopping Mecca. 1,714 words.

[NL]—México’s Carretera Nacional (Highway M85) runs its sun-blasted course from the Tamaulipas border town of Nuevo Laredo, through Monterrey, and on to points increasingly south of the border. Taking this route down through the arid dust bowl of Nuevo Leon’s winding midpoints, the next town on the map is Santiago, about thirty kilometers deeper into the interior. About twenty K along the way is the popular shopping area of los Cavazos which is conversationally referred to as “la Carretera” because of its proximity to this main artery. Starting just behind Monterrey’s iconic la Silla mountain, snug in the scorched earth of the northeastern Sierra Madres, this long strip of booths, concrete shops, and corrugated metal lean-tos winds along both sides of the Carretera Nacional for a half dozen sunny blocks. This strung-out mercado is a great place to shop for many things considered traditionally Mexican and attracts a prodigious amount of daily visitors to what is otherwise a baked and sunburned cake of dusty heat.

To further our circle of familiarity, we decided to head off on our first Mexican road trip on this beautiful July day. Sunshine could show me this much ballyhooed roadway market, and we could both see the quiet little village of Santiago, tucked into a crevasse in the surrounding mountains, where there is a honest-to-god lake and the very famous waterfall Cola de Caballo, or “Horse Tail Falls.” Santiago or bust.

Driving south along the Highway, we came to the medium-sized mission church that signals the beginning of the Carretera. This traditionally whitewashed two-story adobe building had been turned into a store for Mexican arts and crafts. The place is beautiful and filled with beautiful things: ceramic lily tree candelabras and clay animals, hand-painted vases of all sizes, woven fabrics, and wooden Loteria-themed wall shrines made of beans and bits of glass. They had the coolest wicker loveseat I have ever seen, long, low, and with jaguar heads for armrests. The stuff was, for the most part, priced in a way I felt pretty good about, and I even ended up buying a jaguar head planter for my bathroom. But the pure joy of the place is the building itself: the mission church with a capped well in its newly-covered courtyard and little off-center adobe bell tower. The floors are covered in slate tiles. The stuff for sale fills the first floor and the courtyard within the old privacy wall, covering every centimeter of flat space on the floors and walls. Some things even hang from the ceiling. Upstairs, in the back, are living quarters, I assume for the proprietors, opening onto a pretty, somehow green, little vine-filled back yard.

The heat today was amazing. I am pretty much getting used to the dry, furnace heat of this semi-desert world, but today was almost surreal. On the way out of town, in occasionally heavy but slow-moving traffic, the air conditioner in the car meekly struggled to putter out thinly chilled air. I kept trying to crank the little knob to “high” but it was already as high as it would go. By the time we pulled into the mission church twenty-five minutes later, my Coke was like coffee and I was somewhat afraid to get out of the car. The parking lot of the church, a patch of road shoulder roasted sterile long ago, sits adjacent to what must have originally been the gate to the church’s outer courtyard. Here there are already many interesting, larger scale items of interest for sale, but today it was simply too bright to see anything (and to hot to feel around). We scurried into the shaded open courtyard in self defense.

The accessible part of the building was not air conditioned. Inside this uninsulated clay oven, the air took on a more humid quality; though if this was because of some residual dampness in the old well, or just a byproduct of the shade, I do not know. It was so neat in there, however, with so very many interesting things tucked around everywhere, that we stuck it out for a good twenty minutes before retreating to the car and promising to return in the fall. The car was a blazing crematorium, or course, the Cokes just this side of actually simmering; but at least there was the puttering blat of cool AC, and a breeze through the windows once we got going on the highway again.

Not far down the road we started passing flower and fruit sellers (about the twenty kilometer mark south of Monterrey). Then we were passing a strip of road where the majority of the parked vehicles were advertising dogs for sale. Cages were lined up along the baked shoulder and in the backs of pickup trucks, men standing beside handwritten signs would hold a playful little tuft of puppy up to the passing traffic. Another minute or so later, we started flashing by the Carretera proper: runs of low stalls and concrete bunkers connected across the road by stout pedestrian bridges, busily populated by shopping families beneath fluttering tarps and Mexican flags. We opted to stop here on the way back when it was a little cooler, maybe. So we drove straight on through the action to the sleepy town of Santiago.

Santiago is such a quiet little place that it was very easy to find a parking spot on the zócalo right in front of the eighteenth century catholic church. The town is idyllic: leafy and slow—certainly a complete reversal from the modern reality of downtown Monterrey. Like some preserved TV village, Santiago sports a laid back, Sunday afternoon sort of a small town ambiance. People strolled around the town square, listening to popular music playing from inconspicuous speakers throughout the plaza, birds chirped, flowers bloomed. There is really very little to do in Santiago: it is a small place, visited mostly as a jumping-off point for the area’s scenic nature preserves or for the water sports offered down by the lake. It is telling that the free map we picked up at the tourist center is dominated by friendly arrows indicating the shortest routes to these surrounding areas of interest. A tiny map of Santiago with the Church in the center and multiple invitations to leave town. But the overlooked village itself is very appealing, rambling colorfully across its gentle slopes, verdant and very picturesque.

Down the hill from the middle of town, with its church and zócalo, three Italian restaurants, a pharmacy, and little civic museum, we could see across the street to the large lake pooling at the bottom of the mountains to the southeast. We wandered in that direction for a while, but didn’t feel like crossing the highway on foot, so we turned around and chose one of the Italian restaurants to relax in. This is when we noticed something very strange: we were sweating like crazy. Twenty miles away in Monterrey, I have never gotten so much as a damp armpit due to arid surroundings that steal the moisture right out of my skin. In Santiago however, nearly on the shores of a large lake, where there is precious moisture just laying around on the ground, it is a whole lot more humid. Actually it is sweltering, sultry, and oppressive.

So we retreated for an hour or more into the restaurant, which was vastly more successfully air conditioned than the car. I liked the place a lot, it was dark with high wooden ceilings and the waiters seemed to actually be Italian. We sucked down a number of drinks, and the appetizers were yummy, but I was served a fettuccini that was full of ham. What I will remember, looking back, is that the whole time we were there, we were wiping hot sweat out of our eyes. By the time we left, we had grown accustomed to the temperature inside, and stepping outside felt like taking a hot shower. The climate in July, in Santiago, is a lot like the North Carolina summers I left behind. It is far more uncomfortable than the more deadly desert air a few miles north. We hurried to the car, and headed back to the arid places to which we have grown accustomed. Getting in the car was uncomfortably akin to settling into a stew.

With over two hours of blinding daylight left, we parallel parked in the toasty berm alongside the Carretera. The revolving electronic sign we had just passed had the late afternoon temperature written out in small light bulbs: 41 degrees. Outside the car, I could feel my lips begin to crack, but at least I was not basted in sweat anymore. For the next hour plus, we strolled along the Carretera down sidewalks shaded with stretched blue tarps. Beneath the tarps were rows of stores selling souvenirs, saddles, and stationery; plants, pottery, and custom wooden shelving; bedroom sets in wrought iron flower or crescent moon motifs, electronics, jewelry, hardware, cutlery, tiles, terracotta, and toilets. There was one overpriced squirrel monkey who looked pretty comfortable in the heat. Roaming along beneath the tarps was like window shopping beneath a solar strobe: alternately too sunny and too shady to see.

Incredibly, standing between the shaded sidewalks and the shops were long lines of working stoves griddling up all manner of traditional Mexican fare; and, incidentally, filling the covered areas of the Carretera with clouds of billowing heat. We bought a deck of Loteria cards and water, but the hungry could choose from funnel cakes, cornbread, gorditas, tacos, and select peelings from vivisected spit-roasted baby goats. It smelled wonderful, but I was beginning to blacken around the edges by the time we finally headed back to the car. A little less than an hour remained before nightfall, and the sun was now almost to the low line of scrub that decorates the mountaintops. Inside the car we were cozy and warm, nothing near the broiling we had endured earlier in the day. We nosed our way back into the heavy traffic heading toward Monterrey; north to the constant 24 degrees of our ferociously climate-controlled desert sanctuary.

A short explanation of Loteria can be found here.

The Loteria deck I bought looks similar to these; but not these, or these.

Can I have cream in that? Photo © the Author

Monterrey is Okay

2005-06-27T11:30:00.000+07:00

number forty-four

Initially I was less than enthusiastic about Monterrey versus other Mexican cities as a place to live. After doing a little traveling around, and a little acclimating to my new home, I am warming to the place. 1,482 words.

[NL]—After traveling to México City and Guanajuato, and learning so much about those places in very concrete and historical ways, it feels embarrassing to admit that I still know very little about Monterrey. I was eager to start changing that, so we made the trip over the bridge and through the tunnel to town today.

Part of my trouble with Monterrey is its distance from my house: far greater than I am willing to walk in the June heat, here. Also, this ignorance self-perpetuates because it is very difficult for me to take a cab to town due to my inability to give the driver a destination, owing as much to my feeble ignorance of Monterrey’s locations as to my feeble Spanish.

Certainly there are plausible reasons for all of this, but there are also shameful excuses. We are located inaccessibly, in a cultural and environmental desert, making it easy to put off acclimation to this new place. It is entirely too hot in the middle of the summer out there, and, really, there is just not that much to acclimate to. It becomes a rather less pressing necessity. San Pedro, at least the parts around me, is pretty dull. The house is great, and there are plenty of things to do in it. Culture shock is something that one has to slowly wear away by subjecting oneself to ever greater amounts of that culture; and that is very easy to avoid here. This self-perpetuation rolls along: hard to go, sort-of don’t know what to do, not immediately interested, mildly troubled by daunting ignorance and minor cultural divide. Then repeat, with more intense qualifiers. The solution, as always, is over the bridge and through the tunnel.

Plus, I found Monterrey disappointing. This is the shameful part. There is something about travel that can be looked at as the peeling off of fanciful prejudices to be replaced with local realities. This is probably much of the reason I never came to Monterrey when I was traveling in México a decade ago. Monterrey is very real, and fantasy visions of México and Mexican culture are hard to maintain here. These are not so difficult to maintain in ancient and quaint Guanajuato, although they are just as false there. My attachment to this desire to travel in a fantasy México from movies and literature is a byproduct of my fancy of the exotic. In reality, exoticism owes more to willful ignorance than knowledgeable perception to perpetuate a thing’s mystery. Once you see real people, running about living real lives, with jobs and educations, they immediately become normal people and lose their exotic mystery. This is all very obvious, of course, but it can be a hard thing to let go of in the face of a really beloved fantasy. Conversely, once faced with these realities, often it seems that the fantasy was at best without merit, and at worst actively corrupt. If you shut your eyes when you think about México, and you see banditos and bell towers, piñatas and mariachis, terracotta and adobe, you should be aware of what I mean. That all of these things exist here is somewhat beside the point; México is a real, modern place made up of far more than these icons. Monterrey is a city with very little invested in the tourism of people interested in maintaining a vision of México’s exoticism; Monterrey doesn’t care about all of that.

I don’t mean to make myself out like an idiot clinging to some Pancho Villa romance. Or like someone who is disappointed that México is fully in the twenty-first century. México is vibrant and dynamic and real, and I like it just fine that way. But, for just a little bit, it is sad to feel my fantasies recede, and it can hurt to come face to face with my own inexplicable presumptions.

We took a cab to the Mercado Juarez, located in the central district of Monterrey, somewhere between the end of the Macroplaza and the city’s pretty, tree-lined Alameda. The Alameda is where families and teenagers would stroll in the evenings and weekends in a small, fantasy Mexican town, firing their guns in the air, and trilling loudly. Here they go to the shopping centers and watch movies, talk over crepes and baguettes in stainless steel coffee joints in palm shaded strip malls. The Mercado was very much the way I remembered them being from my trip ten years ago. A massive concrete building crammed with booths grouped by subject. In one corner there are electronics, in another CDs, and in another little places to sit and eat. Guanajuato’s Mercado Hidalgo was much the same, though more touristy and fanciful, mostly brimming with non-essentials like candles and ceramics and toys. In other parts of México, and the México in my head, the mercado is also where people go to buy grain for the livestock, browse hooked rows of butchered pigs, and pick up the hardware for the farm and the fences. The mercado is tons of fun, and filled with really cool stuff, but at all times it was impossible to ignore the reality that Mexicans do their real shopping at the grocery store.

Across the street from the mercado, we found ourselves in a piñatería, a bulk candy store specializing in the festive papier mâché figures as well as the industrial servings of brightly colored fallout rewarding the person who manages to beat them open with a stick. The candy was awesome: every conceivable shape and flavor, leaning toward the freakish. Rows and rows of chamoy- and tamarind- and chili-flavored hard, soft and gummy candy; hard pastel cereal-marshmallow scoops in the shape of ice cream cones big as a monkey’s fist. Straws and ropes of powdered sugar, figurines of crusted sugar, and toys and bottles of liquid sugar occupying a vividly-colored warehouse of boxed candy. In México, sweets stores known as duclerías produce and sell Willy Wonkan varieties of fancy confection; chocolaty, powdered sugary, and fruity fantasies of dessert living. La Catrina in Guanajuato, with its pharmacy of colored bottles of fancy syrups and candied fruit-encrusted stuff, is an example of this. The piñataria is the downscale reality, sporting every conceivable type of packaged candy product as different from a dulcería as orange circus peanuts to grandma’s apple pie. The whole warehouse is like the swag of a particularly strange and successful trick or treating, and occupies the space of a medium-sized grocery store in the US. And of course, populating the rafters like a condemned zoo are the countless swinging carcasses of frilly, crepe piñatas. Fantasy versus reality: I wanted to see piñata bulls and donkeys and cactuses and big hats, “traditional” things that make good souvenirs from my stint in this country;. The piñatas that sell however, are the ones that kids want: Star Wards, Finding Nemo, Spongebob and dinosaurs. The piñatería also sold hot sauce.

Wandering on down the road we passed numerous small bookstores and an occasional used clothing store; a paper goods store for art and office supplies and long rows of white privacy walls advertising this and that in colorful three-foot-tall block lettering. The black school-type city busses looked pretty third-world with their chicken wire and missing doors, but many of the passengers had mobile phones and PDAs. It was pretty hot out, and we began to make our way over to the Barrio Antiguo, the old area of town with the strange sushi buffet and the huitlacoche joint. I wanted to eat at a Greek restaurant Sunshine had been telling me about. This took us past one of Monterrey’s museums where I was finally able to get a few postcards of this city in the gift shop. After eating, we wandered in the cooler Monterrey twilight, enjoying the comparatively leafy and pretty neighborhoods just northeast of the building Sunshine works in. We stopped at a gas station to pick up some eggs, but they were out.

Monterrey is a good town. There is plenty to do here, and there are friendly people to do them with. There are a few museums I will venture into later, I am sure. There is a reportedly excellent planetarium and science center. There are several large technical universities, and several feats of modern architecture. The food is consistently wonderful and the water is actually drinkable. The array of things to see and do are not engineered to be spectacular to some fantasy tourists from an exotic culture; this is a real city, interested in its own people and things. It is not lovely, but it is a nice place to live. I am just not sure I would want to visit here.

On the one hand, Huitlacoche is excellent; but on the other hand, it looks nasty.

On the third hand: something from the blog of Poppy Z. Brite.

La Catrina’s website.

La Silla panorama © the Author

Power

2005-06-23T14:19:00.000+07:00

number forty-three

It’s my first foreign power out, and not it occurs to me that it is pretty important to have power in the desert in the summer. 1,172 words.

[NL]—Tonight we went to see Batman Inicia in the VIP screening room at the mall down the road. It has been a fairly movie-related week, actually. Coming home in the early am, after being up all night on the bus, has undone much of my progress re-orienting my sleeping patterns after a decade of second and third shift employment. So, in a week filled with mind-numbing domestic chores I also found myself staying up very late at night again, just like the old days.

Tony and Christene, the couple who took care of our house during the two weeks we were out of town, did a mighty job of it. The cat is alive, and the houseplants are thriving and blooming. Hector, the man who works on the grass, has the yard kempt and growing in the front, but either he couldn’t get the back gate open or the lack of rain this month has been particularly brutal, because there is a narrow swath of dead earth running the length of the back yard. So, along with the sleeping late and knocking two-weeks worth of dust and eddies of swirling cat hair off the house, I have spent a large amount of my time since my homecoming outside; watering brown nubs of brittle, dead grass in the back yard. Not as much fun to do as it is to read, really, but if I can’t bring the stuff back to life in the next eighteen months, or so, we will have to replace it.

All this excitement was made palatable by the arrival of my headphones early in the week, making it possible for me to quietly watch DVDs all night without disturbing Sunshine, who has to be asleep by ten pm if she wants to get up for work on time. Before the headphones, this meant that I could only watch movies on the weekends when she could stay up late, because it is too bright in the house to even start the projector, really, before eight pm. On the weeknights, I have about six hours of applicable darkness between the our respective bedtimes, and now I would be able to use this time to watch movies instead of skulking creepily around the house hour after aimless hour. I was very excited about these headphones, and was eager to start using them right away.

We had been planning to see the Batman movie that night, actually, but Sunshine got stuck at work a little late, and we had to put it off until today. Instead we went to an Italian restaurant near here for dinner, and then went to the grocery store. There was next to nothing in the refrigerator due to our carefully consuming everything possible before we left for México City, and then throwing all of the bad stuff out when we returned. This invasion of domesticity makes a poor substitute for going out to the movies, but at least I would have something to drink in the house tomorrow. We got home with dozens of yellow plastic grocery bags full of perishables.

Shortly before Sunshine was to turn in, the power went dead. This was our first power out in México, and it was sort-of neat. The power went out with a little tink right after I had turned on the kitchen light, so we immediately understood what was happening. The house was eerily silent. Out in the front yard we could see that the whole area was out, several neighborhoods, so there was no need to go checking breakers or anything. We made some rum and Cokes, and sat on the little patio over our front door, watching as the neighborhood was quickly candlelit. The security guards were struggling to dismantle the electric gate at the entrance to our community. I assume the natural reaction of many of our neighbors was to go someplace with electricity, and their SUVs and minivans were lining up impatiently along the street. Every kid in the neighborhood immediately congregated in an impromptu sleepover at one house right across from us, judging by the excited shouts and waving flashlight beams coming from all their upstairs windows. There was a general excitement in the air outside that contrasted with the unnatural quiet of the powerless house.

Worry set in soon, though. Domestic worry first: would Sunshine get up at six with no alarm clock? Would the thousand pesos of groceries we had just gotten make it through the night? The house was already getting warmer, and we were shutting doors and things to keep cool air locked into its different spaces. In the desert, in a rich person’s house, there is little need for a lot of insulation. Our house is made of cinder blocks, and the temperature was thirty-nine degrees (C) outside. Inside the thermometers were climbing pretty quickly. I keep the temperature in most rooms set at twenty-three or -four, and a half our after the lights went off, it was already climbing past twenty-eight in every room. The worry started in earnest, now: there was no reason to assume, even in this very rich neighborhood, that the power would come back any time soon. We’ve heard stories of power outs that last for weeks. I was a little worried about the food and the cat and the two of us all curling up and burning the same brittle brown the yard does. I was also doing a lot of whining about my new headphones. Sunshine went to bed, and I busied myself protecting the liquor and the ice from the coming inferno. The power came back on about an hour later while I was addressing a few remaining postcards from vacation by candlelight. The thermometers were reading thirty-four already. It took a lot longer to cool the house back down than it had to warm it up. Looking around San Pedro, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate the realities of the unforgiving landscape on which it has been erected. Things like this remind me that this is an environment that must be fought off constantly for survival.

So, if we had gone to see Batman Inicia yesterday we would probably have totally missed the power out, and I would have not gained all my newfound respect for the desert. Conversely, we might not have gotten seats in front of a two puzzled eight-year-olds who loudly quizzed their parents as to what was happening on the screen throughout much of the movie, as we did today. We still could never have made it to these seats in time to get the cream cheese and Manchego cheddar crepes that I have been craving, though, and that is a shame. Still, I am on top of the world. Barring any new loss of power, knock on tile, I will get to watch movies, silently to all outer perception, for as long as I can stay awake tonight. Everything is a-okay.

Click here if you are interested in my thoughts on Batman Begins.

Our Departure from GTO

2005-06-20T12:08:00.000+07:00

number forty-two

This is the last in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This installment is about our return home from Guanajuato. 1,144 words.

[NL]—On Friday, when Sunshine ventured to the ticket agent just down from the Jardin de la Union to book our passage back to Monterrey, they had kind of laughed when she asked if the bus might be crowded. Apparently, there are not that many tourists heading from Guanajuato to Monterrey like we were doing. I suspect there are just not that many tourists heading to Monterrey from any point of departure. The ticket woman’s attitude about this was borne out when we boarded the bus: there were about four other people on it. Mexican bus travel can be pretty posh, the seats are plush and large, with plenty of foot room. The busses are dark and cool, and every window has a shade and a curtain. The busses are the large, touring variety, used by film crews and rock stars. They often have double-paned tinted glass and TV screens that automatically descend from the roof when it is time for the movie. Some even serve meals. The lack of other people on the bus makes the travel even more comfortable. The bus stays darker and cooler with only one or two of the curtains open.

Our last day in Guanajuato had been eventful. We had run around purchasing all of the things that we had seen window shopping throughout the week. We were up and checked out of the hotel by noon, leaving our stuff in the office to be picked up on the way out of town later in the evening. Our shopping took us on a last whirlwind tour of the town: to the mercado for T-shirts and a carry-on bag for the bus; to Dulcería la Catrina for candy (but more for the hand-painted gift boxes), and to various plazas and things for little knickknacks and postcards. While wandering, we swung by the weird taxidermy museum again today, with a camera; but the very same ticket guy was guarding the doorway and I felt that it would be obvious that we were smuggling in recording equipment if we returned so soon. I think that it might have been okay if my intentions were pure, but since I mostly wanted photos to prove the joint’s dubiousness, paranoia won out. It might be my imagination; but he eyed us suspiciously as we walked on by, whistling nonchalantly.

On up the hill, and back down again, and up the next, we paused to rest for awhile at the Alhondiga, were we were treated to a Volkswagen Bug show on the structure’s nearly two hundred year old plaza courtyard. México is a world leader in Volkswagen production, and manufactured the old style of Beetle until 2003 (ending a fifty-eight year production run in Puebla, México). The streets of México are infested with these cars, and it is neat to see slick, modern trappings, like well-designed interiors, decorating a design that has been produced with very few external changes since before World War II. I had thought these cool, old cars had been abandoned with the production of the New Beetle in 1998. The car show was nifty. There were other types of Volkswagens included, Cabrios and Things, but the old style Beetles, souped-up, lowered, converted, and painted in an array of colors and patterns, were really the star of the show.

Next, we took a cable car up the side of the mountain to the three-story statue of Pípila that looks over the town. Sunshine went to watch a beautifully tacky “oral” history of Guanajuato performed by animatronic dummies, and I occupied myself taking pictures from the feet of the statue itself. This overlook is another fifty feet higher than the second floor of the wonderful Italian restaurant that we had eaten at previously, and had pretty much the same view. Guanajuato is interesting looking because the whole town, as scattershot and juxtaposed as it may be, is contained in such a small place. It was easy to stand up there with this giant stone hero of the revolution and trace the last few days with my finger along the vista.

When we ran out of things to do, we killed some time in the Santo Café, then picked up our belongings. The hotel guy helped us out by flagging down a cab. I do not know why it is that I always have the feeling I need to get to the bus station so early; but I do, so we killed the last few hours before the mostly-empty bus arrived camped out there.

The ride was overnight, stretched to eleven hours, and turned out to be pretty eventful. Not only did we stop every now and then, all night long, to pick up the dozens and dozens of people waiting at gas stations, abandoned parking lots, and every little town along the moonlit way; but we were treated to a screening of Tony Scott’s terrible Man on Fire and accosted by people chucking cinder blocks off an overpass at us. The movie, basically demonizing México City and the corrupt asphalt hell of the developing world, comes early on my list of worst films of all time. But on the bus from Guanajuato it was absolutely mortifying (although, to be fair, the Mexicans on the bus didn’t seem to mind). The cinder block assault happened fast and was over, though the bus driver had to stop to shake all of the glass out of his clothes. This is when I learned all about the double glass panes in commercial busses, as the outer layer was shattered in many places down the left side of the bus, but the inner layer was only crisscrossed, here and there, by long cracks. After the noise and the swerving it took a little while for the news to filter from person to person to our row in the now mostly full bus, and by then the incident was far behind us. Far from being worrisome, it was kind of exciting and it provided a needed break from the embarrassing movie. Throughout the night, after the movie when the bus was pitch dark between stops, the occasional sound of glass falling out and swirling away on the highway behind us kept me awake.

We pulled into the Monterrey bus station in the pissing rain with a full load, still shedding glass here and there when the driver turned particularly tightly. After eleven hours I was more than ready to get the hell off that bus. From the outside, it looked like we had survived a war zone like Tony Scott’s México; come limping out of that asphalt hell in our smoking and busted-up tour bus. The driver said a couple of things to me while I was inspecting the damage, but he was speaking Spanish, of course, and I didn’t follow most of it.

And so concludes this Mexicn vacation.

Photo Illustration © the Author

Our Stay in GTO, part III

2005-06-20T12:07:00.000+07:00

number forty-one

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican Vacation. This is also the third in a series of numbered posts about what we did in the city of Guanajuato for eight days. Make sure to read the two previous posts, too. 1,857 words.

…and other animals.

[NL; composed from notes taken in GTO 6/14-6/17/05]-Guanajuato is the home to a world famous annual festival every October commemorating Miguel de Cervantes called the Cervantino. Originally a party for local students to stage excerpts from Cervantes’ work on the steps of the church in the Plaza San Roque, this festival has gained momentum to become a full-tilt arts festival. Once a year, this festival takes over the whole city for a number of weeks and many of the hotel vacancies in the state evaporate. People flock here from all over the world to not only see Don Quixote and other plays performed in whole, or in part, on dozens of stages around town; but also to see a global culture of live bands, artists, writers and circus performers who have also flocked here from all over the world. This is one of the reasons Guanajuato has a number of large and beautiful theaters, as well as why it is crammed with Don Quixote stuff.

Right down from the Casa Méxicana is the Plaza de Cervantes, a ellipse of stairs around a cobble stoned half circle featuring large Quixote and Sancho statues. Down the road a little from this plaza is the Teatro Cervantes, a large stone building featuring local and touring performers. On down the road there is the Museo Iconográfico del Quijote, an art gallery dedicated completely to renderings of the notorious man of La Mancha. Surprisingly interesting, this small gallery with about seven rooms crammed full of paintings, lithographs, art prints and sculptures of Quixote and Sancho Panza has amassed quite a number of world renowned pieces. These include original sketches for Picasso’s and Dali’s famous line drawings, an original-run production print from Posada’s Calavera of Don Quixote, and a who’s who of important Latin American artists. There were dozens of canvasses depicting Quixote and crew. There were many statues ranging from postage stamp sized to several stories tall, the latter propped in the open inner courtyard of the building. Everything was fascinating, each new idea and representation of the classic characters commanding attention for its uniqueness within these parameters if not its thematic individuality. It was a whole eyeful of subtle and not-so-subtle variation which was inspiring and challenging.

On the other side of the Jardín de la Union, up from the post office (which we visited almost every day of the week), past another damn sixteenth century church, along the road past the immense, crenulated university building, was the Museo y Casa de Diego Rivera. This is the house that the famous muralist was born in, and even though the Riveras had been driven from town when Diego was six, even though he so hated the memory of Guanajuato that he never returned (indeed, only admitting his ties to this birthplace very late in his life), there is a simple memorial museum there. It is fantastic. Certainly, it is also modest. The bottom floor of the ancient hacienda is a re-creation of what it probably looked like when Diego was living there, with restored rooms and reclaimed Rivera family furniture. There is also a gift shop with many great books on Rivera and Frida Kahlo, plus all sorts of key chains and postcards. The upper two floors house the art gallery, filled with very enlightening lesser works and production charcoals. These serve to illustrate an autodidactic career which bounced through many established schools of modern art (derivative canvasses include impressionist work, fruity bowls of still life, and, believe it or not, some surrealist stuff) before he found a footing in the styles of narrative illustration that made him world famous. Many of the little charcoal and ink sketches for his illustrations or murals show obvious ties to modern works and indicate the depth of the inspiration he’s provided to many artists working today. As I walked along the timeline of Diego Rivera provided by this collection of work, it was possible for me to see the development of a style of artwork still very much alive in Latin culture today.

There were some upper-floor galleries in this beautiful house that were devoted to temporary installations of work by other artists. Possibly chosen because of their contrast with Rivera’s collection, these were mostly surreal or abstract figures, or totally non-representational fabric dyes and collages, and I wasn’t overly impressed with them.

Besides the temporary shows, the only thing disappointing about the Diego Rivera house and museum was the stifling mugginess inside. It is a little silly to have a fortune in artwork hanging on thick concrete walls that retain moisture. Plus, if there was any air conditioning in there I didn’t feel it at all. Outside the breeze on the street was refreshing; and even though it was sunny, it was still cooler than inside Diego’s house. So we strolled down the other side of the hill, toward the bus stops, to the famous Guanajuato Alhóndiga de Granaditas.

The Alhóndiga, the grain warehouse used as a makeshift fort by rich criollos at the outbreak of revolution in 1810, is a huge, two story stone square with an open courtyard. The name Alhóndiga was derived from a Moorish word, making the North African style architecture seem appropriate. When rich Spanish colonial silver barons were constructing this place, they were expecting to wow the world at a town so rich that even its grain silo was more like a mansion than a warehouse. Because of this, it is finished with decorative arches and marble tiles on the inside. It is easy to see why the frightened overlords turned here when Miguel Hidalgo’s troops marched on the city that historical September day: the Alhóndiga was so overbuilt that it is damn near impregnable. Of course, since it was not actually built to be a stronghold, it was built onto the side of a mountain more accessible than defensible, and the outside doors were made of wood allowing Pípila to burn an entrance for the rebels to take advantage of.

Today, the building looks very much the same as it did then, only instead of floor to ceiling grain, corn, cotton, and livestock feed, the giant stone rooms are filled with museum exhibits. After listening to a forty-five minute history of the Alhóndiga delivered by a very charismatic guide (who only spoke Spanish), we were let loose in the place. The building contains exhibits on diverse subjects including the municipal history of Guanajuato, seal beads from ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, and modern photography. In one room hung the cage that once held Miguel Hidalgo’s head on a corner of the building. It is a simple, rather spare museum housed in an awe-inspiring relic of the revolution, and I learned a lot of what I know about the history of that revolution, and Guanajuato, inside its slightly post-revolutionary wooden doors.

Back up the hill (and down the other side, and up another hill) toward the post office, is the Universidad de Guanajuato we had walked past of the way to the Diego’s house. Here, in the main building, is where they keep Guanajuato’s Natural History Museum. Natural history museums interest me because I like dead animals. I think animals are pretty cool when they are alive, too, but I have always held an artistic interest in bones and taxidermy. Wonder cabinets of labeled trays filled with exotic beetles and spiders in a dusty side room are sort of like a treasure chest; glass display cases filled with lacquered dioramas of local fauna are like a creepy children’s book illustration come to life. Looked at in this way, the Natural History Museum in Guanajuato was very satisfying.

After paying the seventy-five cents each to get in, we walked around the corner where there was a little annex with some educational texts on biology and taxonomy. The books were mostly dusty and old, and looked as if they were part of the display. This was an excellent sign of things to come. Walking through the next door, we found ourselves in a wooden room with those glass display cases. It was arranged much like a dissection classroom from the nineteenth century might look in a movie. In a glass cabinet in the front of the room there was a human skeleton, and lining the walls were darkened displays of stuffed raptors and felines; rodents, bugs, and etc. Many of the birds were exceptionally well made and arranged. The cats were not so well done: morose, lumpy taxidermies that squatted awkwardly in cramped cages filled with other objects suffering afterlives more or less lifelike. Every now and then we would come across one of those et ceteras: animals of such poor craftsmanship that they managed to be indeterminate. Between the beaver and the happy-looking groundhog, for example, rose an asymmetrical foot of salt and pepper fur with glass eyes above its black snout. Hulking over the armadillo was a long, four legged spotted brown thing, deerlike except for the carnivorous muzzle. Some of my confusion over these vague specimens was the probably byproduct of a lack of familiarity with the length and breadth of variety within the animal kingdom. Some, I believe, can be attributed to the same lack of familiarity from these animal’s artists. A third possibility, of course, is that the hollowed out veneers of a wide variety of critters had been stretched like a canvas over whatever frame was handy. It might explain why some of the large cats seemed to be pointing out game, the small cats were tipped up like prairie dogs, and the unknown things just seemed at odds with whatever coat hangers or hat trees were puppeteering at the time.

All in all, it is fitting that our week of visiting museums would end here, after starting with the impressive show of mummies at the top of that sunny hill west of town. We had, in a way, come around a thematic circle of preservation. But what the ground in Guanajuato spits up naturally preserved, the natural history scientists in a third room of the museum labor to make, working in tight alleys between cluttered shelves of wired-together parts and handy jars. Here, under fluorescent lights, with tools and textbooks, naturalism is perverted to greater and lesser degrees by the hands of people with varying talent for the job. Maybe, at long last, this is the answer to many of the questions I posed about the mummies, too. Maybe the cemetery ground in Guanajuato just gets some specimens catastrophically wrong. Maybe there is a darkened fourth-room closet in the natural history museum filled with items deemed less than display-quality, locked away for further tinkering; or for cremation. Or maybe all of this is wrong, and the university students have just been burying their pets in the Guanajuato soil, and the joke is on us.

Many thumbnails from the Museo Iconografico del Quijote

A close-up of José Guadalupe Posada’s Calavera of Don Quixote

A panorama of the Museo Iconografico I happened to find online

The official site of Museo Alfredo Dugés, the natural history museum

Next up: the end of the long road.

More pictures form Guanajuato © Cavin

Our Stay in GTO, part II

2005-06-20T12:06:00.000+07:00

number forty

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican Vacation. This is also the second in a series of numbered posts about what we did in the city of Guanajuato for eight days. Make sure to read the previous and subsequent posts, too. 2,168 words.

food,

[NL; composed from notes taken in GTO 6/11-6/17/05]—Looking forward to our vacation in Guanajuato was as easy as getting excited about seeing mummies and museums and a side of México that is not evident in San Pedro. It is strange that it never dawned on me to also look forward to the food there. There is no reason for this, food has been generally excellent everywhere I’ve eaten in México. One of the things I really love about travel is the opportunity to eat new and exciting things. But under the daunting shadow of those museums, a very striking Spanish colonial plan, and mummies for Pete’s sake, food just got overlooked as something I should have been getting excited about. I didn’t take long to remember to be excited about it, though, after that first night.

Our first full day in Guanajuato, after spiraling down from the mummy museum, we ate in a little unnamed cellar off the Jardín de la Reforma, across from the Mercado Hidalgo. The food was exceptional and I wish that I had been able to eat it, frankly, but it was full of chicken. The bite I had before I realized this, however, was really spectacular. This had happened to me in México City, too—twice in the same restaurant. In Guanajuato I thought I was getting good at asking first, but when I ordered the enchiladas de nata—explained to me as a cream and cheese paste with peppers—it came with the unadvertised chicken anyway. Sunshine got to eat it, and I got to eat her French fries. The French fries were also exceptional.

The next night, still trying to stick primarily to places which would take Sunshine’s credit card, we searched out a Hindi restaurant up in the alleyways off the main roads. The Hindi restaurant was advertised as a vegetarian place called “Restaurante Vegetariano Yamuna.” The central roads in Guanajuato all run parallel to one another, and end up coming together in a central area down from the basilica where the busses stop. These roads all pretty much occupy the area that would have been Guanajuato’s river before the dam was built. Servicing the scattered jigsaw of precarious housing jammed teetering on the surrounding hills are all these little alleys called callejones. In places these alleys are so narrow that the balconies on either side would touch if they hadn’t been so strategically built. In places they also seem to lead straight up, sometimes becoming a flight of stairs for a while before leveling back off to merely steep. Since they are the primary access to the sides of the mountains, these alleys all have official street names and are dotted with frontage: little grocery stores, bars, and supposedly, Indian food. The interesting thing about the callejones is they never seem to dead end, leading instead to another callejon, then perhaps another. Occasionally, the alley’s street signs will indicate that its name has changed at these right angles. Sometimes, the name will not change. Sometimes there is no sign. Someone searching for a Hindi restaurant is eventually spit back onto a main road somewhere far from his hotel.

We have not been able to find Indian food in Monterrey. The place is teeming with the odd sushi joint, huitlacoche, and one can hardly eat anywhere without having a choice of different types of crêpes. But no Indian stuff anywhere. This is why, when we discovered mention of a Hindi restaurant in our travel guide, we jumped at the chance to climb the side of a mountain to find it. Alas, when we finally located the place, the sign for the Indian restaurant still painted over the door, we discovered that it had been replaced by a menudo stand, sides of beef swaying beneath the word “Vegetariano” painted over the door. The woman with the big bowl of tripe told us that the Indian place was gone.

This was sad, but certainly no tragedy. We ended up eating at a large place off the zócalo where I had the worst meal I ate in this city: an excellent grilled vegetable sandwich with nata. We were seated in front of a large open window where we could look out on Guanajuato’s lavish Teatro Juárez (commissioned by emperor Porfirio Díaz to be the most resplendent theater in a town full of them). The theater is a popular gathering place for local college students and tourists alike. People congregate on the theater’s wide stairs to gaze over the scene on the plaza. Since we were eating on that plaza, it meant that about two hundred people were idly staring right in the large window at us. Luckily, the whole time we were seated, there was a clown entertaining the people assembled on the steps by doing improvisational comedy skits between us and this crowd. He was earning big laughs mocking passersby (and traffic) in the street right outside our window. This was actually far less annoying than it sounds, and we really enjoyed watching the clown while we ate. At one point, while hassling a passing police car, all of the clown’s change fell out of his pockets and landed in the middle of the busy street. He didn’t notice. From then on I spent my time evenly divided between watching the clown, and watching his change on the ground six feet from our table, sparkling beneath the wheels of backed-up traffic.

Intermittently, random small children would walk up to our table and stand on our unused seat to watch the clown outside. These kids would watch in silence, a look of awed concentration on their faces. Regularly, children of about the same age would try to sell us Chiclets through the open window as they walked by outside. These kids would plead silently, holding their cardboard boxes of gum in at us. The clown show went on for a really long time and occasionally I would spot a pedestrian, fleeing the clowny side of the street, stoop to retrieve an abandoned peso in the middle of the road. The clown packed it up and headed off after an hour or so. The kids inside drifted back to their own tables while we finished our dinner. By the time Sunshine got her credit card out, all of the clown’s money had been taken.

By Monday, cash advances from the bank meant that we were able to eat anywhere we wanted. By Wednesday we had discovered a cool little courtyard coffee shop and very cool little courtyard bar. The coffee shop was in a whitewashed villa just beside the university apparently built by two European brothers who had immigrated to Guanajuato and subsequently fallen in love with the same woman, a soap opera that left one dead and the other in the local jail for life. The ice lattes were great, and they served these little veggie baguettes with tapenade that were messy but tasty. The bar, the Clave Azul, or Blue Clef, was a dark brick warren located on a callejon just off what was quickly becoming our favorite plaza, San Fernando. After nightfall we would go for a walk because the weather was so much nicer in Guanajuato than what we had gotten used to at home. On many nights, bands of musicians dressed in ceremonial uniform and called Callejoneadas, would meet beside the large Templo San Diego on the Jardín. They would sing bawdy songs and hand out wine as large groups of revelers followed them up and down the alleyways for hours. When all is said and done, the spectator would be drunk and very winded, but deposited back at the Templo. When we tagged along for a while, the group consisted mainly of a large group of drunk young Puerto Rican tourists and the women they were trying to impress. When we finally departed it was long before the route had gotten us near the Templo again, and we had to find a new way home. We new we were heading in the right direction when we passed the menudo restaurant with the sides of beef advertised as Hindi Vegetarian food.

Plazuela San Fernando is larger than the Jardín de la Union, and paved with slate tile. The center is a large stone fountain and here and there it is decorated with ancient, rusting mine cars that have been turned into flower pots. It connects with two other plazas, the middle of which (Plaza San Roque) sports a sixteenth century church. Roving mariachis and Norteño musicians solicit table to table or sit in front of the fountain. The bands come in sizes ranging from three to five players, and can be grouped together by the color of their uniforms. Plazuela San Fernando mostly had green and gold mariachis, but occasionally a red band would wander through. In the course of our stay in Guanajuato, we ate at a majority of the places situated around that plaza, and talked to quite a number of mariachi. When we were tired of being solicited, we would retire to the Clave Azul where it was always dark and cool, and they were always piping Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald.

By midweek, Sunshine was really beginning to come around to my strategy in regard to vacationing. At first, the hours that I would sit around in the shade reading or working on postcards was driving her nuts. She felt as though maybe we should be busily doing all of the things that the city offered us to do. I wanted to relax. I won, and we began to relax more than do. One of the nicer places to sit for an hour or two and read or write postcards was the Clave Azul, and in our short week, we sort of became regulars. Of the other regulars, my favorite was the thirty-something guy who sat at the bar, impersonating (or caricaturing) Armstrong whenever one of his songs would play. It really never stopped being funny to hear him phonetically belt out gravelly song lyrics.

Two doors up the callejon from the Clave, around a little corner, and before the alley became a steep stairway, we found that the Indian restaurant had not closed, just moved to another location. We were elated, and decided we would come back first thing the next day when it was opened. Inside, it was painted a shade somewhere between peach and Caucasian, and it had two-foot-thick adobe walls. When we sat down, the waitress asked if we wanted two meals, and we agreed, although with the luck I have had getting food without chicken, this lack of control made me nervous. The sign over the door, though, said “Restaurante Vegetariano Yamuna,” so I took a chance. All in all the place was really good. The meal consisted of a great salad and soup, and strange but acceptable appetizer of goat cheese and veggies stuffed in a pickle, and rice. There was a apple yogurt dessert. It did not consist of any chicken. The weirdest thing about the meal was the drink they served, and while other parts of the menu changed on a day-to-day basis, this drink remained. It was some kind of celery juice (or maybe melon) with lime, fennel, and anise. Maybe a little mint. It was really strange, and served sort-of lukecool. I didn’t really dislike it on the first taste, and I liked it better and better as I went along.

But the best food that we ate in Guanajuato was the place we finally found on the second to last day we stayed there. Up past the menudo place, teetering high on the side of the same hill that the Callejoneadas serenade by night, perched directly below the feet of the huge Pípila statue that looks over the city, is el Gallo Pitagorico, home of the most excellent Italian food I have eaten in México. We ate looking out a window with a splendid view of the whole valley; a vantage point from which we could see just about every place that we had been. All of the cool museums and plazas and churches and restaurants were arrayed before us like a collage of the city. The salmón carpaccio and penne alfredo were superb, and neither contained the rooster from the restaurant’s name. All of the table sets were hand carved Michoacán furniture depicting moons and suns and corn and Posada Calaveras. The staff was friendly and attentive. After dinner, to get away from a group of young women drinking diet rum and cokes and speaking loudly in English about many dull and uninteresting things, we headed up to the terrace for drinks. If anything the view here was even more spectacular, encircled with twinkling Christmas lights in a much darker room. We hung out here for another hour, as the sun set on Guanajuato and the Callejoneadas started singing loudly in the valley far below us.

stay tuned for part three.

Click images for pictures from Guanajuato © Cavin

Our Stay in GTO, part I

2005-06-20T12:05:00.000+07:00

number thirty-nine

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican Vacation. This is also the first in a series of numbered posts about what we did in the city of Guanajuato for eight days. Make sure to read the two subsequent posts, too. 1,946 words.

Mummies,

[NL; composed in GTO 6/11/05]-We went to the mummy museum on that very first day. The Guanajuato climate was crisp and warm and very sunny. My sunburn from the DF was beginning to come off my face, and I thought it would be a very good idea to come up with some indoor activities for the day. A museum seemed to be in order, so we headed out into the Guanajuato day. The sky in México City, famed for its smoggy haze, had seemed pretty normal after so long in Monterey. This is because Monterrey has also become famed, to a lesser degree, for its sky. Looking up in Guanajuato was sort of a revelation. It was crystal clear: beep blue with little puffballs of white cumulous wafting in a gentle current. Nothing like the sometimes bright yellow sky of Monterrey, dense enough to cut visibility like a fog. It was also very sunny, of course, and I could feel that on my skin acutely.

We soon discovered that three of the five directions leading away from our hotel took us to the zócalo. Down what seemed to be the main road there were more shops and plazas and restaurants. This road took us past a number of several hundred year old churches before it joined other roads in a centro of sorts in front of Guanajuato’s enormous basilica. From here, the main road was obvious, and we wandered along, taking little detours through adjoining plazas. At one point, we came across what we later learned was the Plaza de San Fernando, where there was a whole pedestrian walkway filled with booksellers under stall-like tents. We browsed here for a while, and then wandered farther along the main road, called Avenida Juárez, which took us past the Alhóndiga, the Mercado Hidalgo, and about every other thing I had read about in the guide book. I realized that we were heading in the direction of the Museo de las Momias, about a kilometer west of the edge of the guide book’s map. Well, okay, so if I wasn’t going to be spending the day indoors, then maybe I could at least walk on the shady side of the road. Sunshine seemed game to attempt a walk to the distant Museum, even though about every other bus was heading that way. We crossed to the shade and continued to wander along Juárez.

Pretty soon we had to cross back again because the road forked left and then curled up a mountain, and we had to fork with it. After about twenty minutes of trudging up this steep incline, we stopped and bought a drink and some sunscreen at a tiny little grocery. Farther up the hill we stopped for no good reason at all. Then we began to stop every few minutes. It took a while to get to the top of the hill, but once up there we saw a sign for the museum, and we got a little of our confidence back, so we kept moving forward. Interesting word, forward, as related to directions. It holds no expectation of up or down, straight or corkscrewing up the side of a precipice. It just means moving in the way you happen to be looking. Eventually forward got us there, but for a while we had been totally corkscrewed up.

At the very top of a treeless, sunny path in Guanajuato, México, there is a cemetery hidden behind sixteenth century stone walls. In this cemetery, all of the possible plots have been filled for over a hundred years. In Guanajuato, there is no room to expand, really, which is why the roads are mostly underground. Along about the same time Guanajuato ran out of room for roads, it also ran out of room for burials. Of course, people kept dying; so, in this cemetery, when they ran out of space to bury more people, they decided to exhume older graves to make room for new tenants. The first time this had to happen it was already pretty obvious it was going to become common practice, so they instituted lease agreements on the graves: everyone gets one for a little while, and after that, people who could afford to keep loved ones interred could pay the rent. Others were dug up to make space. This system has been in place here since the end of the nineteenth century. What makes it really interesting, of course, is that because of something about the cemetery—be it the high-altitude air pressure, the minerals in the soil, the high silver content of the mountains, or the very dryness of the atmosphere most of the year—the cadavers buried here mummify. Put someone in the ground in this cemetery, and within a few years (the typical stay seems to be between five and seven), chances are good that they will have desiccated into a leathery, anatomically correct brown husk. Being that this is México, where society often celebrates life with the memento mori of skeletal imagery (examples include calavera candy at el Dia de los Muertos time, the work of José Guadalupe Posada, or the long tradition of taking posthumous portraits of loved ones—especially stillborn children), there was nothing to do but put these dried cadavers on display. Mummies that are dug from the ground were, with permission assuming there were still family around to ask, propped in a hall of the catacomb for people to view. Remains deemed unfit for viewing, for whatever reason, were cremated. The paraphrase “unsuitable display quality,” keeps popping up in research, and is somewhat ominous-sounding. I have identified no explanation or definition for this label. Besides familial disinterest in turning a loved one into an attraction, what catastrophic ruination is deemed too unsightly by cemetery staff? Is this classification owed to the occasional violent mutilation before burial, or some perversion of the earth’s rendering of various specimens? I don’t know if I want to know, but thinking about it is keeping me up.

After these many years, the earth has provided so many quality specimens that the hall of mummies has become a whole museum. At the tip top of this steep hill, we finally spotted this museum along with several dozen stalls selling refreshments and souvenir trinkets. There were mummy key chains, mummy postcards, and mummy t-shirts. Admission price was a couple of bucks, including permission to photograph the displays.

Inside it was pretty dark and much cooler. The floors are cement, and the ceilings are arched. The rooms are part of the outer walls of the cemetery, and while freshly painted, are obviously very old architecture. The adult mummies are, for the most, laid out on glassed-in shelves. Initially, I thought that this was to provide humidity and temperature control for the specimens, but on closer examination I noted that the panes of glass are cut away in the corners to provide ventilation, instead. Just think, I could poke my fingers in there. Some of these vents were big enough for me to put my hand inside. All of them were big enough for a child to reach into. Some of the adult mummies were standing upright, secured here and there by twine. These glass coffins also had the ventilation cutaways. Most of the children were lined up in curio cabinets. In the cabinets there were no gaps in the glass, possibly because the children were all dressed up in expensive, if also mummified, little burial dresses.

The mummies themselves lie in various degrees of arrested decay, possibly based on when they were buried in relation to the rainy season. Some are merely mummified strips of flesh over filly exposed bone, others are whole with identifiable facial features and genitalia. While some of the mummies sport old clothes, most of the mummies are naked except for socks. Another thing to wonder about on those late nights: why are most of these mummies wearing socks? Is it because no matter how fast the world dries a mummy out, animals love jerky? Is it because after years of propping unceremoniously in the hall we were standing in, some of the mummies’ feet had just worn away? Is it to make them warmer? Quieter? I don’t know the answer to this, either.

The mummies have a number of different expressions, because, I assume, muscles and things had constricted as the moisture left them. Some of the mummies have a drawn rictus making them look like they are screaming, or smiling, or singing. Some look quite peaceful. Some of them have their hands or their feet tied together with dark twine, but it is impossible to conclude whether or not it was there for the burial or added for the display. These mummies are natural phenomena, unlike the hollowed-out and fussed over mummies of Egyptian antiquity. Like the bog people found in Denmark, or ancient men found frozen in ice, these people just happened. They were not adorned or expected to enjoy this afterlife. Their bodies were not prepared for this: they are unshaved, un-sewn; they retain their organs. There is a lot of evidence of this. The children are all terrifying. They look less human by dint of less deformity: most are propped there looking like darkening china or stained plastic, blotches that look like bad artistry; their funeral dresses are ludicrous.

A little side museum, another two bucks, was dedicated to tales of horror. This had what my travel guide called “hokey horror-show” exhibits dedicated to the illustration of local or Hollywood legends. Of course, these were all constructed with real bodies. There was a Count Dracula in the floor with a stake through him. There was a witch in her coffin, her herbs and flowers arrayed around her, an explanation of their use in her potions on her plaque. There was a finger that had haunted a young lover or murderer. There were also fake displays of torture devices and one lone wax dummy getting guillotined. I was entranced. Here was a real body, man, and someone had filed the teeth down into fangs, and staked it right through its dusty, dried-up heart.

The trip through both museums took us about forty minutes, and I took forty photographs. Some of these I threw away immediately because it was so dark the camera had been unable to focus correctly. It had been an excellent experience, making me want to walk around in the sunlight some. Sunshine kept talking about how, apparently, things that she thought had not looked realistic in movies actually did look real after all.

When we finally left the cemetery museum area, we looked around for a way to get into the cemetery itself (because I really love Mexican cemeteries), but we never did see a way through the giant walls. I admit that we didn’t try too hard because we were hungry and tired. Or maybe because for one day we’d had enough. It was still pretty hot even though it was almost four-thirty, but the trip back down the mountain was much easer and it was finally possible to find some shade along the walls that lined the road. Back at the Plaza de San Fernando, we ducked into a dungeon-like basement restaurant, and downed a lot of cold refrescos. My face was coming off pretty hardcore now as my sunburn peeled. Sitting there in that restaurant, it was impossible not to feel like this had some correlation with my day and my proximity to that cemetery that dries people. But there was no correlation, it was just the effects of the sun.

Stay tuned for part two.

Click image for guesome mummies © the Author

Our Arrival in GTO

2005-06-20T12:04:00.000+07:00

number thirty-eight

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This installment is about our travel day between México City and Guanajuato. 2,106 words.

[NL; composed in GTO 6/10/05-6/11/05]-We pulled into the bus station in Guanajuato a little before eleven. The trip had been pretty great; I have always really liked traveling by Mexican bus. It had taken a predictably long time to get away from the DF, over an hour heading northwest from the Centro del Norte, and the light had held out throughout much of the five-hour ride. Occasionally the bus would stop to switch drivers or let on some new passengers. Once, when heavy traffic had us stopped for a while at an underpass, a woman had gotten on the bus to sell taquitos from a brown paper bag. The half-empty bus was well air conditioned and comfy. In case the five hours seemed too short for the ticket price, two terrible movies were screened. The first was an action adventure I had seen before, the second was a cowboy comedy that I had never heard of and wish I had never heard of still. It had a talking horse. So I did my best to spend the whole trip looking out the windows at México gliding by.

The bus station in Guanajuato was friendly, but mostly closed. The people from our bus had scattered immediately, leaving us nearly alone on the platform. We walked out of the terminal, and to a waiting cab who quoted us the expected price for the ride to town. This was a nice switch from the long lines at the taxi stands in México City: worry free and immediate. It took us about six minutes to get far enough into Guanajuato to start seeing how very interesting this town is. Wedged into the crevasse-like valley formed by a number of rolling hills, Guanajuato quickly ran out of space and began to dig its major thoroughfares below the city. Originally, this had been a city plan: one way roads heading west were to be on the surface of the city, and roads going the other way were to be underground. As Guanajuato progressed, it was realized that the narrow Spanish roads on the surface were not going to be able to handle even half of the traffic, and more underground roads were completed. This was pretty easy for a town with a long and uninterrupted history of mining: they just used their tunneling machines to dig some roads for street cars. The older sections of the underground road system are about one story under the town, and look much like asphalt canals where the surface of the city breaks into deep stone trenches overhung by flowers, bridges, and houses. The newer subterranean roads are tunnels through the mountain.

Eventually, we drove onto the surface of Guanajuato where people were strolling and lively music was playing. There were restaurants and little food stands and things to do. I wanted to get out of the cab immediately, but we needed to get to our hotel room first. The cabbie took us to a dark, unmarked building and asked us: “is this it?”

We were unsure. I handed him the address we had written on the back of a receipt. He said, “no, I guess not,” seeming unsure himself. Then we headed through the exciting little town some more, and stopped right beside a arena with giant statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, which we took to be the Plaza Cervantes reportedly near our hotel. Still, there was no sign of the hotel itself. To the driver’s credit, he seemed rather concerned for us. We obviously didn’t know our way around, and it was getting to be eleven o’clock. We had called ahead to let the Casa Méxicana know that we would be arriving pretty late, but we were going to have to find the place sometime before dawn. Actually, the cabbie was going to have to find it for us.

He got out of the cab and tried to hail another cab to ask its driver where this Hotel was. At last someone stopped for him, but that guy didn’t know either. So the driver walked down to a grocery stand, and then on down the street. He eventually came back to where we were parked in the middle of the busy street, and said that the hotel was back behind us about a block. There was no way to get the cab pulled around in the other direction on this one-way street, so we were going to have to walk that block. Then he gave us detailed directions. Then he apologized. We already felt like this guy had gone way over and above the call of duty, so we tipped him really well, loaded up our stuff, and started to walk in the dark and uphill direction that he’d indicated.

Of course the hotel was right there beside the statues. I am glad that Sunshine noticed the very small plaque that said “Casa Méxicana Guest House” above the narrow wooden doors, because I was already heading past those doors and starting up a pretty severe-looking hill when she did.

The door was locked and no one was coming to answer it. She knocked for a while. I sat the heavy luggage on the curb and then I sat down on the curb, too. Sunshine walked to the adjacent grocery shop, and asked about the place. They told her to knock loudly; that there was supposed to always be someone in the office at night. Sunshine then knocked loudly. The bar next door was louder, with live music and celebration, so she knocked even louder. I was beginning to embrace my new homelessness by the time a young man answered the door and ushered us in.

The way Casa Méxicana works is that guests are given a key to the room as well as a key to the outside door. There is no one letting people in and out all night. After looking for a while, the young man told us that he was unable to find our reservations, and that we could wait until the morning to work out our room charges. The night guy didn’t seem to want to deal with our money, but was willing to get us hooked up with a room. He took us to a very big, tiled, geometric shape awash with hideous flesh-colored fluorescent light that was, Sunshine pointed out, both too bright and too dim at the same time. Luckily, there was a cactus-shaped lamp on a bedside table with a more normal light. There were three beds, but we were assured that we were not going to have to share the room with anyone else. Casa Méxicana is a travel hostel as well as a real hotel and they sell bunks to less privacy-minded people for sixty-five pesos a night (right around six bucks). The night guy handed us our keys, and told us good night.

We then unpacked some stuff, planning to take a small walk around the neighborhood and get a bite to eat. We’d see the things we had ignored while we were trying to find the hotel, now that we were more relaxed. While sifting through her belongings, Sunshine noticed that her ATM card was missing. She’d just used it in DF to get cash for our trip, and now it was nowhere to be found. Relaxation went right out the window. We began tearing through our baggage, emptying everything out onto the blue bedspreads and sorting through it all piece by piece. The card never did turn up. We began to suspect that it had been left in the ATM machine in México City, of all places. Sunshine called the desk at the Galleria Plaza, and they said that no one had turned in a lost card. Then Sunshine called her bank and was told that there was no one around to cancel a lost or stolen card, and she should call back Monday morning. It was Friday night. Sunshine said that her local branch would be open until noon the next day, even though it was Saturday. Then we began to count our cash. We had a good deal of money, but nothing like what we needed to stay at a hotel for eight nights and also eat food. It reminded me, as everything seems to, of traveling in México before: the constant attention to monetary reserves, the planning and budgeting. Somehow, though, the nostalgia was losing a battle with the fear of poverty for my mood. Or the fear of having to return from vacation early.

We still had a credit card, though, and that small stack of cash. Nothing more could be done tonight, so we headed outside to see what we could see. What we found that first night was that we were staying about three blocks away from what the guide book calls the “beating heart of Guanajuato’s social scene,” its verdant and lively zócalo, el Jardín de la Union. Here, under trees cut so cubically, and grown so close together, as to make a ceiling; on very old tiles worn so slick and flat that they looked more like a kitchen floor, we ate our first meal in Guanajuato. It was a charming little plaza restaurant with outdoor tables chosen primarily because they took credit cards. I had a XX Lager, crêpes stuffed with mushrooms and cream cheese, some sauce called queso fundido, and another XX Lager. The night was wonderfully cool compared to other Mexican places, and the air was crisp and utterly clean. There were night birds twittering about, children and dogs frolicked. Mariachis played in a gazebo in the middle of the plaza, and grown men and women were dancing. After our meal, the walk back was peaceful, and it was hard to remain as concerned as we should have been about the bank card. At a little after one am it looked as if Guanajuato was already closing up for the night. The bar next to the hotel was quiet, and the adjacent grocery was locked up. We let ourselves in with our key, and headed to our room.

The next morning started earlier for me than some because of my early bedtime the night before. Sunshine had been up for a while, calling the bank and getting her card cancelled. She was just stepping into our room’s freakishly triangular shower as I was stirring. In the past, I have stayed in Mexican hotel rooms where the bathroom was a toilet and a sink with a drain in the middle of the floor and a shower head in the wall over the other fixtures. This bathroom was a little less severe than that: the right triangle of the room sported the sink and the toilet at right angles from one another—the doorway was directly between them—and the shower head was tucked into the acute angle to the left. The other acute angle incorporated a tall, thin window with smoked glass. Along the hypotenuse was a little wooden table, carved with flowers. There were no towels, and Sunshine dried off with a t-shirt.

I took the opportunity to explore around the hotel. Upstairs from our room (number ten), there was a little laundry room, a little wooden shelf with dozens of folded towels, and a rooftop terrace with plastic tables and chairs. The room across from us (number eleven) was a better color, had nicer tiles, and a bathroom with a tub and a sliding glass door. It was a better room. Downstairs, there were more rooms arrayed around a two-story courtyard filled with plants and tables with umbrellas. It seemed like every room was empty except for ours. All of the rooms had a large number of beds, but many also had more lamps. When I got back to our room, I told Sunshine about the other rooms and the roof while she dried off with a t-shirt because there were no towels. Then I told her about all of the towels I had seen. While I took my oddly acute shower, Sunshine went to the bank to see about getting a cash transfer, and was told that we could do that on Monday. This meant that we only had to get through two days of rationing our tiny amount of money. This was good news, and pretty much put to an end our worries of the night before. Sunshine also signed in at the front desk, and paid for the hotel through the weekend. By the time I had gotten out of my shower, she had also rented some towels.

Museum of the mummies, next!

Panorama from Casa Mexiana rooftop © the Author

About Guanajuato

2005-06-20T12:03:00.000+07:00

number thirty-seven

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This installment provides back-up information on the history of the town of Guanajuato. 1,813 words.

[NL; partially composed in GTO]-The area now known as the Mexican state of Guanajuato was probably first settled by nomadic tribes wandering in from the state of Michoacán to its south. One of these tribes was the Purépecha people, who have been linguistically tied to tribes in South America. They were the creators of an artisan culture originally centered around Michoacán’s lake Pátzcuaro. Here they had engineered several pre-Aztec cities and trade communities, prompting certain sources to refer to their modest hold on the area as an empire. The Purépecha, later renamed the Tarascans by the Spanish, eventually became territorial enemies of the competitive Aztecs who were gaining a foothold to their southeast, causing them to seek friendly trade territories to their north and west. By the time they had ranged as far north as the lowlands west of Guanajuato’s rocky offshoot of the Sierra Madre, the area was already home to numerous indigenous tribes, possibly laboring under the yoke of Aztec production tariffs. One of these tribes, choosing to settle in Guanajuato’s river valley because of its frog population (or: some sources indicate that a particular mountain was thought to resemble a frog), had named the area Quanashuato (or Quanax-juato), which means “place of frogs” in Tarascan.

There is difficulty in distinguishing the contributions of individual tribes in this area because when the Spanish arrived here during their conquest, they categorically renamed the various indigenous peoples under an umbrella term: the Chichimecas. This was a Náhuatl word indicating that these long-time Aztec serfs were descended from dogs. This term was applied to any and all indigenous peoples in the Guanajuato area—including the northern Tarascans, the Guachichiles, the Guamares, the Pames, and the Otomíes—serving to obfuscate who did what in the region before its Spanish history.

By the time Spain had set its sights on the colonization of what is today northern México, military subjugation of Guanajuato had proven costly and illusive. Heads of southern territories began to offer treaties in an effort to settle peaceably with the stubborn tribes, as well as divert dwindling resources to unconquered areas. This worked, the Chichimecas were willing to share the land they had always shared, and soon Spain was free to build a small village in the valley of Guanajuato to provide ranch land for livestock. Discoveries of silver and gold in the mines surrounding the settlement of Guanajuato in the early 1550’s changed the sleepy settlement from a bucolic ranchland into a boomtown, fueling the Spanish colonial machine just in the nick of time.

Things really got rolling for Guanajuato at this point. Silver mines were thriving here and there all over the region, but flourishing in little Guanajuato, helping to keep Spanish colonialism afloat over the next two hundred years. During his time, Guanajuato delivered higher and higher amounts of wealth from its seemingly inexhaustible silver veins (the town’s mines are still alive and well today); providing, at times, forty percent of the whole world’s silver. The small town stretching along the shores of the valley’s river grew exponentially as people gravitated to this fount of wealth. Silver barons built hacienda estates and Guanajuato climbed the ladder from town to city to capital of its own eponymous territory. As the silver kept pouring in, Guanajuato became so important to Spain that these silver barons were elevated into the colonial nobility.

From the time the valley was discovered by the Aztecs until the early nineteenth century, the indigenous population had borne the horrors of a subjugated class. Captured, enslaved, laid claim to, these original Guanajuato Valley inhabitants suffered and skirmished but never got much of a toehold in colonial Spanish society. Franciscan monks acting as missionaries were the only champions of well-being for the poorer classes. Generations down the line, after it had become illegal to keep indigenous people as slaves, these lower classes became wage-slaves, working to pay off their debts to their landlord employers. As time passed, new social classes were born of mixed blood between the Mexican-born pure-Spanish overlords (the criollos), and pure-blood indigenous Indians. These new classes, the mestizos, can be regarded as the first generations of what we think of today as Méxicanos. These were another poor working class, less suppressed than the indigenous population, but otherwise refused the right to govern or, in some places, even own land.

These new generations grew under the spiritual tutelage of the Franciscan Catholic church. The Franciscans had long frustrated the process of keeping the common man down in early México, and by the late eighteenth century had succeeded in converting much of the country to Catholicism. During this time, there were certain changes taking place within the Franciscan order. There were movements to both modernize and reform the Franciscan way of life. Many of the people pushing for modernization were also pushing for civil equality for the Indians and mestizos. In the meantime, the New World was at the mercy of Spanish overlords who were finding themselves more and more estranged from the guidance of home. Spain had her attention diverted by the Napoleonic War, and the New World was going to have to solve its own problems. Liberal-minded people were suddenly becoming the vogue, and theories of equality were beginning to spread. In the United States a new revolution had reordered civil society from the bottom up, and the ripples caused here were impossible to ignore. In the state of Querétaro, a literary club was formed with the advertised aim of “intellectual discussion,” but in fact began sowing the seeds of Mexican revolution.

One of these new liberals was a well-read and progressive parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo. Hidalgo had been modernizing the area just northwest of Guanajuato from his church in the little town of Dolores. Learning that the Literary Club de Querétaro had been forced underground by the threatened criollo boot heel, he felt compelled to speed up the timetable of Mexican revolution. Calling his parishioners at dawn on the morning of September 16, 1810, Father Hidalgo delivered what is called the Grito de Dolores, the words of which have been forgotten, but the message of which remains clear: Take México! Viva la revolution! The amassed mob of mestizos and Indian peasants then marched on another mining tiown, San Miguel de Allende, which fell without much of a fight, and then headed south to Guanajuato. Hidalgo’s mob now consisted of nearly twenty thousand people, armed primarily with farming equipment and slings. The Spanish had holed themselves up in a newly finished, fort-like grain warehouse called the Alhóndiga, where the outlook for weathering a siege was pretty good. The Spanish, morbidly outnumbered, still had a small number of firearms and all the food storage in Guanajuato.

On September 28, after suffering setbacks due to Spanish gunfire, Hidalgo convinced a man (with the nickname Pípila) to strap a stone to his back for protection against the hail of bullets, and set fire to the entrance of the storage warehouse. He succeeded, and the proletariat army of Miguel Hidalgo flooded the Alhóndiga and slaughtered every last person in it.

The considerable wealth of Guanajuato, in food and silver, then came under the control of the rebels. Hidalgo created a foundry for making armaments in Guanajuato (he raided Spanish houses for bells to melt into cannonballs), and then headed south, attacking and taking the towns along the way to México City. Reaching the outskirts of the Capital, Hidalgo managed to take a few outlying neighborhoods, but neglected to march on the City itself, even though his army had reached upwards of fifty thousand men. This would prove to be a mistake. México, shocked that Guanajuato had fallen and it had very nearly suffered attack itself, managed to rally and send a giant army out to rebuff Hidalgo. But Hidalgo was retreating already. Skirmishes ensued, as advance patrols came in contact with Hidalgo’s receding army, and Hidalgo found it necessary to return to Guanajuato to rally his troops and gather his resources. Here the Mexican forces caught up with him in earnest and completely routed his army; retaking Guanajuato and forcing the rebels to flee north. Hidalgo was betrayed in Chihuahua by a former conspirator; excommunicated, tried, and shot. Then, in an effort to quell the remaining lust for revolution in the masses, his head was hung, along the heads of three of his generals, on the corners of the Alhóndiga, looking out over the compass points of Guanajuato.

This put the rebellion into a setback that lasted for about ten years. During this time, the Spanish wreaked vengeance on Guanajuato’s rebellious population through lotteries of death, where names would be randomly drawn and the winners killed. Eventually, the revolution was won, and the heads of the fathers of that revolution were taken down and buried under the monumento a la Independencia in México City. Then Guanajuato returned to an existence very much like the one it had before the war. Silver was taken out of the mountains, and people got rich. In 1905, after numerous floods over the years, a great flood inundated much of the city and killed hundreds. In 1960, Guanajuato built a dam, and paved the river bed to accommodate increasing traffic. During the rein of Benito Juárez, Guanajuato was briefly the capital of the country, the first time this honor had moved out of the Valley of México since before the days of the Aztecs. Guanajuato is the birthplace of Diego Rivera (though he only lived there until he was six), and the place where President Vicente Fox kicked off his political career. It is the scene of a yearly festival dedicated to Cervantes, it is known for its annual strawberry crop, and it is an object of pilgrimage for people seeking to walk the paths of México’s national identity.

Today, it is possible to imagine what Guanajuato must have been like a hundred years ago. Silver mines still dot the surrounding hillsides, sixteenth century churches still overlook about every block. The city is jammed into the very same ravine it has been in for almost four hundred and fifty years. The bus station is located a few kilometers outside of town in the only area where Guanajuato has managed to creep away from its mountainous perch. It is a beautiful city filled with history, culture, and art; populated by friendly people. Still, it is the roots of Mexican independence that remain the city’s most evident feature, demonstrated throughout its Spanish colonial design with national monuments and a people blended from indigenous and Spanish blood, categorically renamed Mexicans, who are also monuments to this revolution.

A nice overview of Guanajuato, including some photographs of the city.

The beginnings of a rich education in the History of Mexican independence.

More in-depth information on the indigenous people of the Guanajuato river valley.

Next: our vacation in Guanajuato.

Guanajuato panorama © the Author

The Trip is Half the Fun

2005-06-20T12:02:00.000+07:00

number thirty-six

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This installment is about our air travel to—and cab travel in—México City. 2,711 words.

[NL; composed in GTO]-Originally, we had planned to take our vacation in May, just ten or so days after I arrived in México. We cast about the map for a good place to go (not terribly difficult to do in México), and finally settled on Guanajuato. Other things came up, and the vacation was put off until June. We were to take the bus, and spend the week between Wednesday, June 8th, and the following Tuesday. However, because one of Sunshine’s coworkers had unavoidable wedding plans, the opportunity to attend a conference in México City in her stead pushed the vacation another three days away. This worked out very well for us, because not only were we going to get to take a business trip to México City, but now our vacation week was book ended by weekends, making it two days longer. Of course, for me, this whole thing was a vacation, since I didn’t have to attend the conference. So, instead of one week, I got to go on holiday for almost two.

Arrival.

We arrived in the DF in the early evening of Tuesday, June 7th. Travel day is always a little exciting and stressful for me. It is hard for me to enjoy the world while I am concentrating so far forward. It was a long ride to the airport, after a day of cleaning the house, and just generally getting it ready for the people who would be caring for the cat and the plants while we were away. The temperature was in the mid thirties, and the crazy half broken-down cab we had hired wasn’t noticeably air-conditioned. Due to having to stop at the gas station and a couple wrong turns, we had been in the cab for over an hour by the time we arrived at the airport. All of this should have been a great time: seeing a lot of outlying Monterrey for the first time, talking with a really friendly and knowledgeable old cabbie; but I was only focused on my goal, ticking through check lists, and a little apprehensive of the flight.

I have been on non-US air carriers before, and shouldn’t worry me any more than any other airline. This was a brand new brand with what certainly turn out to be brand new planes. There was nothing to worry about. And heck, the flight was fine, no real bumps of turbulence, no flickering lights, no mid-flight seatbelt warnings. They even served a lunch, unheard of in American fifty minute flights. The schedule to México City is pretty funny, as the plane must climb a whole lot farther up than it then descends to land, and because this the trip is fairly dramatic: spiraling up and out of Monterrey’s congested airspace in a dogfight maneuver taking us to 35,000 feet, and plunging about half of that (okay, okay; three-fourths) into a city which sprawls well out of sight, even viewed from above. The plane did not turn out to look very new, though. It had large black stains issuing from seams in the wings. I spent the trip gripping the armrests. What scared me was that I was scared. I have flown a good many times in my life, and the only fear of flight issues I have ever suffered through seemed to be pretty rational. After the whole flight of reading or staring out the window, as the ground rushes at me during descent, I get a little nervous and tell myself all of the things that might go wrong. No big deal. It’s normal. But this time, take-off was very difficult. I had to resort to reading a book and pretending like I was on a bus. This is a little irrational, and worse than I was expecting. It was my first flight since 2000, and I think most of the world developed some flight issues overnight on September 11th. Most of the commuting world had the opportunity to work these issues out. I am hoping that a flight or two more and I will come out of it. It is going to be a short life if I cannot: this future of mine will have me flying to and fro across the globe regularly; and that will have my heart thoroughly dead and gone but quick.

Funny thing is, that when we got to the ground and headed through the airport, the things I was supposed to be terrified of didn’t bother me in the least. I am fairly undaunted naturally, so the airplane nerves really got to me because I wasn’t really used to it. By turns the taxi ride, which should have terrified me, was actually pretty fun. Maybe it was near-death euphoria: I was on the ground, and simple Earthbound death didn’t scare me anymore.

See, the thing about Taxis in el DF, is that many of them are stolen. The State Department sent out an official warning speculating that at any time there are thousands of stolen, or otherwise fake, Taxis cruising the streets of the city looking for fares. Typically, once the passengers are seated in the back of the evil cab, the driver will pull over and let armed accomplices into the car. People have been held hostage for days, riding from ATM to ATM, draining their bank account. There have been assaults and murders. It is not safe to hail a cab in México City. What is considered mostly safe is hiring a sitio cab. In other words: calling for pick-up. Most dispatched cabs are on the up and up. Plus, cabs gotten at taxi stands and hotels are driven by people the establishment are familiar with. Often, the passenger is given a form with the cabby’s name and identification number printed on it. The prices are fixed in advance, and there are no grey areas. So, the City is doing everything it can to make choosing a cab safer. What happens after the passenger is slapped into the backseat, however, is under nobody’s control but the maniac bouncing to and fro behind the wheel. City things scream by the windows and careen in parabolic tracers; hopefully, people and animals manage to dodge out of the way. Our cabbie had a TV for us to watch, mounted on his dash board. I am pretty sure he was watching it too. Luckily, I was untouchable because I was on the ground.

Stay.

México City is no more of a realistic view of México than the trendy streets of San Pedro are. While home resembles a landscaped hamlet with all of the existential vibrancy of a golf course, the DF is a teeming, kinetic den of near-lawlessness, occupied by big city people and big city issues. Much the same way that the spirit of the US probably rests around the midpoint between Aspen and the Bronx, México City represents merely one polar extremity of Mexican culture. Still, this city is a big world all to itself, and everything that happens in México, happens here first.

The nice thing about this first leg of my vacation being a business trip is that Sunshine’s employers put us up in a really swank hotel right in the middle of the Zona Rosa. This “pink zone” is a district chock full of restaurants and clubs and shops. It is home to el DF’s gay and Korean scenes. It is made primarily of cobble bricked pedestrian walks shaded by enormous five-story palms. The hotel is called the Galleria Plaza, and it is simple and elegant. We were staying on one of the executive floors, so we were told to check in at the honor bar on the eleventh floor. In the rooms, the door key cards fit into a slot just inside the door which activates chosen settings for the lights and air conditioning. The view of the City from the picture window was astounding. I would have been able to see the entirety of a smaller town. México City’s twinkling early evening lights stretched beyond the curve of the world.

I was really happy to be here. So far, living in San Pedro has been about finding a domestic identity: moving furniture, cooking, and buying household wares. It is a whole different type of adventure than the traveling I had done in México before. This trip to México City was more nostalgic, and I was having a ball. I spent the time Sunshine was working walking around town (well, walking around the tiny slice of downtown that comprises the Zona Rosa, the Centro Historico, and the area in between), getting sunburned, and just taking in as much as possible. The first day I was there I made my way several miles from the hotel we were staying in to the Zócalo in the center of the Centro. I love going places I have seen in dozens of movies.

The Zócalo (la Plaza de la Constitución) is a city-block sized square of pavement with a huge flag in the middle. Of note: zócalo means “base”, and the nickname comes from a point in history before the plaza was paved. There used to be a statue in the middle of the square, but it was moved to one of the traffic circles along Paseo de la Reforma, a busy street accessing el Centro, la Zona Rosa, the posh neighborhood of Polanco, and the large city park called Chapultepec. Reforma is riddled with traffic circles and statues. Many large Mexican demonstrations march down this very busy thoroughfare to the Zócalo. For a long time, the base of the statue remained. People out for a stroll, or mounting a rebellion, began to refer to the square as el Zócalo, the base, rather than by its lengthy official name. Not only has this moniker stuck long after the removal of this famous pedestal; but, in other parts of México, the word zócalo has been adopted for cities’ central plazas. Most zócalos are a place to stroll in early evening, hanging out with the community. The park-like central plazas of many Mexican towns are green with trees and sport burbling fountains. Adolescents court each other here and their chaperones do the same. In México City, where the trend was founded, the plaza is a hot, paved blank used for demonstrations and unrest. If you want what most of México is talking about when they say “zócalo”, you will need to walk about seven blocks west to the Alameda.

Also on the Zócalo is the national Cathedral (la Catedral Metropolitana), and the Palacio National, México’s White House. Admission is free, but you must show ID. The Cathedral was begun in 1573 and was supposedly finished up two hundred and fifty years later. It is smack on top of an Aztec temple, and because of this it sinks even faster than the rest of the city. This is also why it seems to still be under constant construction almost two hundred more years later. The Palacio is notable for its many world-famous Diego Rivera murals, as well as for being the seat of the Mexican federal government. Nestled between these two historical sites are the remains of the Aztec Templo Mayor. The Templo was thought to be the exact center of the universe, where the Aztecs saw the eagle eating the snake. It was rebuilt seven times over the centuries, and then the stones were used to make colonial buildings by Spanish conquerors. Of the once-grandiose pyramid of the sun, only the base structure remains; the only uncovered remnant of ancient Tenochtitlán in central DF. This is not surprising since, to uncover more of even this temple, they would have to tear down the national symbol of Catholicism, the federal government, and the giant slab.

The nearby Alameda is a three-block long network of parks, each with a central fountain intermittently spraying green water onto tile mosaics. Vendors sell refreshments and couples stroll in the lush shade. The park is patrolled by mounted Mexican police who travel in threes wearing enormous sombreros. The triangle made by this park, the Zócalo, and my fancy hotel includes México’s block-long Chinatown, the Café Cuadrilátero, Latin America’s first skyscraper, and el Monumento a la Independencia (el Ángel), where the heads of Mexican rebellion are buried. This was my stomping ground during my stay in DF. I saw many of these things on that first day, and then returned to photograph them on the second. Several things I returned to with Sunshine in the evenings after she got off work.

I kept planning to see some of the many museums during my stay, but never managed to go to even one. Walking around with no plan at all was just too seductive. Museums I missed include: anthropology, history, Diego Rivera, José Guadalupe Posada, Mexican medicine, culture and wax. I missed Frida Khalo’s blue house, where Leon Trotsky once lived. I missed the Trotsky house, where Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice axe.

My favorite dinner over the next three days was in the Café Cuadrilátero; Super Astro, proprietor. It is, as far as I know, the only restaurant owned and operated by a retired luchador. It is a humble little sandwich shop with seven tables and dozens and dozens of donated wrestling masks displayed in box frames on the wall. On other walls were photos of Super Astro in the company of a parade of famous luchadors. Café Cuadrilátero is the home of the enormous el Gladiador, a torta as large as a human thigh and free if you can eat the whole thing in under fifteen minutes. There is no wall of fame for the defeaters of el Gladiador, by the way. I am pretty sure that no human being has ever beaten it. Super Astro met us at the door, and told us to make ourselves at home. After we had eaten some merely huge sandwiches, Sunshine got to talk to him a little bit. He seemed like a really nice man, and just looking at him, I am sure that he was a técnico and not a rudo before he retired.

Departure.

Sunshine got off early on Friday, about noon, and without much more ado, we packed and left the hotel. We had not really investigated the bus schedules, but the travel guide had seconded the opinion of the concierge that the busses to Guanajuato rolled about every hour. The cab was rather harrowing again, but this time because the bell man had hailed an unmarked car, and the trip took much longer than I was given to believe it would need to reach the station. Whenever we slowed down, I anticipated the arrival of armed gunmen. This makes no sense, frankly. A decade ago, not wanting to deal with this immense and dicey city, I had nevertheless needed to take a bus through it. México City actually has a central bus depot for all four of the cardinal compass points, and heading from Guadalajara to Oaxaca meant that I needed to get off in one, and then gat back on in another. Between the Western and the Southern bus centers, I took the Centro Estacion de Autobuses bus. Not counting my brief waits inside the stations, I figured that I was passing México by in a bus for better than three hours. Three hours to ride right through it. This taxi ride to the station took about thirty minutes, and this makes all the sense in the world. Eventually we got to the Northern bus center with all but one of our important belongings. The next bus to Guanajuato was a little over two hours away, but hanging out in the bus station is really pretty cool. There is plenty to eat and drink, video games, and souvenir shops. The time went by quickly. It is slightly annoying that in México, mostly there are pay toilets in the bus stations (oddly, the airport toilets all seem to be free). The cost to visit the typically unsanitary facilities is three pesos. It costs more to play the toilets than it does to play Super Street Fighter III.

Some excellent photos of the inside of the Café Cuadrilátero.

Next up: a brief history of Guanajuato.

El DF, part two

2005-06-20T12:01:00.000+07:00

number thirty-five

This is an installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This is also the second post in a numbered duo about the history of México City. Be sure to read the previous post, too. 1,018 words.

[NL; composed in DF]-México City enjoys a long and sordid history too interesting and complex to condense to the space constraints here. But briefly: after the summary, near total destruction of Tenochtitlán, its site was rechristened México, and rebuilding began right on top of the ruined Aztec city. This new city was to be the capital of Spain’s new colony. Over the next fifteen years, Spain extended its control past the boundaries of the deposed Aztec civilization all the way to Panama in the south, and to the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the west. Prolific silver mines located in Zacatecas, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí helped finance Spain’s seizure of northern territories as far as modern-day Texas, California, and Colorado by the 1590s, though these far-flung occupations proved impossible to control. Medical pandemics brought to the New World by Spanish soldiers killed indigenous people by the millions. As the new generations of mixed Spanish and Indian populace were introduced into colonial society, they were regulated by a class system based on skin color and degrees of nationality. The darker Indian a person was, the more menial his or her place in a society run by white Spanish purebloods. Notably, missionary presence geared to engineer the local Catholicization began to champion the health care of the local population, leading to the abolishment of indigenous slavery in the 1550s (much of which was replaced by African slaves). These champions of the people succeeded in turning most of the New World into Catholics, along the way protecting the lowest classes and helping usher Mexicans to independence in the nineteenth century.

Modern México City is the federal capital of the country, an awe-inspiring megalopolis over-spilling its ancient lakebed plateau, the surrounding mountains, and its federal district. It is the most populous city in the Western Hemisphere, and the greater metropolitan area (located in the Distrito Federal, plus the sates of México and Morelos) is one of the most populous in the world (research varies: some sources report México as number one, some report it as low as third, possibly depending on quantification criteria). There are somewhere between 18 and 23 million people living in the metropolitan area, according to census projections based on the latest data. México City’s giant two-volume phonebook, including telephones contained only within the Distrito Federal (there are three more volumes for areas in México State), attest to this. This population is roughly equivalent to one-fifth of the population of the whole country. Population density is an interesting thing. In New York City, much of the five boroughs stands upwards of ten stories high, an average that means people live and work in less square acreage of city space. México City, referred to as DF (for Distrito Federal) by many in México, tops out at an average of about three floors, significantly increasing the amount of acreage taken up by the same number citizens in New York. This is part of the reason the city seems so much larger and more intimidating. In an effort of keep track of the sprawl, México is split into some 350 different neighborhoods, called colonias, stretching far past the horizon and out of sight around the surrounding mountains.

The DF has grown ten times its size since 1940, and it is estimated that six hundred new people move there every day. Social strife, health, and other over-population issues are never far from the surface, and in times of unusual stress (for example, unrest came to a head during the great depression, during the Mexican hosting of the Olympics when student demonstrations turned into a massacre in 1968, after an extremely deadly earthquake measuring over eight on the Richter scale killed thousands in 1985, and during the recession of the late nineties), México can find itself damn near anarchy. Over the last eighty years, street crime has fluctuated back and forth between unacceptable and epidemic. In an effort to curtail México’s constantly swelling criminal element, the city has been outfitted with its own newly autonomous government (previous to 1997, the DF was governed directly by the federal government. Next year, the third-ever elected mayor of México City will run for the presidency). Also, in 2002, president Vicente Fox hired recently replaced New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani to assess the crimewave and suggest some methods for México City’s government to fix the problem. Here’s the problem: México City says it is still waiting for the funding to implement Giuliani’s initiatives.

Traffic had already reached such staggering proportion that in 1969, the DF installed the country’s first Metro, which, almost forty years later, is not making much of a dent. In the nineties the Mexican government passed laws restricting certain cars from driving on certain days (the last digit on your Mexican license plates, 0-9, indicates which day it is unlawful to drive on the Distrito’s roads, Monday through Friday) in an effort to cut down on emissions. Many cars, though, legally or otherwise, sport exemption stickers. In the late nineties, many roads were changed into one-way streets, while others were widened to create a system of “axis” versus “access” roads throughout the city. Still, traffic is a snarling entanglement and pollution levels are dizzyingly high. This is due, in part, to the México’s high altitude (2,340 meters above sea level), and the fact that México’s relatively flat lakebed is ringed by mountains (some adding to the atmosphere through their own volcanic activity), keeping industrial output and traffic emissions trapped above the city.

And for those who tire of worrying about the streets or the sky, below the city is a sprawling Aztec wonder, centered beneath the very heart of the DF: its Zócalo—the Plaza de la Constitution, its Palacio—the seat of the federal government, and its national cathedral. As the loose earth and archeological structures settle due to time, geology, and early water extraction, the new city is sinking into the older one.

Click here for more information on modern México City.

End of part II. Coming next is the story of our vacation there.

El DF, part one

2005-06-20T12:00:00.000+07:00

number thirty-four

This is the first installment in a nine-part series detailing our first big Mexican vacation. This is also the first post in a numbered duo about the history of México City. Be sure to read the subsequent post, too. 1,009 words.

[NL; composed in DF] México City enjoys a long and sordid history too interesting and complex to condense to the space constraints here. But briefly: about thirty-two hundred years ago, the Olmecs founded a vast cultural base of arts and religion in southwestern México, creating an empire that is presumed to have taken part in a trade network uniting tribal units from as far away as northern Honduras. A thousand years later, an unknown civilization, centered in a town posthumously dubbed Teotihuacán by its eventual Aztec conquerors, flourished about fifty kilometers north of present-day México City. The Teotihuacán people worshiped Olmec gods, and built a spectacular metropolis of level streets and towering pyramids. To their south, over the next nine hundred years or so (overlapping, but outliving the empire at Teotihuacán), the Mayan people were doing very much the same in the Yucatán Peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras: inroads followed after the collapse of the Olmecs. Other peoples came and went, some mostly unknown to us: a large post-Olmec classic-era Veracruz empire, the Toltecs, the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs, the Totonacs, and others. Many Mexican civilizations created themselves by conquering the civilization previous. At times it was enough for a new people to merely take up residence in the civilization left behind for them. All over México, people from different settlements were often at war or in treaty with each other. The Mayans alone were split into at least two distinct factions at war with one another. In this way, smaller, newer tribes were able to grow and flourish because of strategic diplomatic ties to shifting protective trade states. Eventually, these would vie for control in the next era of Mexican history. Then the process would repeat. New civilizations came and went.

In among all of these shifting long-term empires, satellite communities had lived and traded in the Valley of México, a large mountain-ringed plateau mostly filled with the receding lake Texcoco. This high-altitude valley had supported hunting and fishing settlements beginning about 10,000 BC, which had given way to agrarian communities in the fertile banks of the lake as it began to shrink some three thousand years later. Much later, about 1300 AD, the brutal Aztecs, a nomadic tribe from the north of México, arrived on the banks of the lake offering their services to established settlements as war-makers. They were allowed to populate inhospitable land to the north of the lake. Soon their Aztec ways of human sacrifice caused rifts in the relations between local communities. Instead of being kicked out right then, the Aztecs were employed as mercenaries to stave off aggression between larger tribes vying for dominance. Eventually, the Aztecs were captured, and then employed as mercenaries, yet again, by their captors. Finally, they were run out of town by the tribe which had employed them, the Culhuacán. The story goes that the ruler of Culhuacán, Cocoxtli, happily the new master of the south and western shores, offered his daughter in a marriage alliance to the Aztecs. Upon receiving the gift, the Aztecs offered her in marriage to Huizilopochtli, their hummingbird god. By the time Cocoxtli arrived at the ceremony, she had already been skinned and hummingbird priests were dancing sacred rites while wearing her.

Fleeing the enraged forces of Culhuacán, the Aztecs fled to the weedy and uninhabited marshlands where Texcoco had receded, and there spied an eagle sitting on a cactus with a snake in its beak. This was interpreted, and by all evidence interpreted correctly, as a sign to stop running and found an Aztec empire. Tenochtitlán, the city begun that very day, eventually spanned an entire series of islands, natural and Aztec-made, across the lake, its shores, and finally across the whole valley of México (with its sister city Tlatelolco). Aztecs took the remains of Teotihuacán in the north and revitalized it, returning it to its status as a breathtaking marvel of human engineering. Over the next two centuries they repeated this process many times, bulldozing old civilizations and recreating a Mexican city-state stretching to Veracruz in the east and to Guatemala and the Yucatán in the south. Much of their empire they found ready made for them by the departed Mayans and Toltecs, but this in no way undermines their achievement. By the time Spanish conquerors happened upon Mexico in 1517, the Aztec empire was one of the most jaw-dropping spectacles in the world: an animistic civilization of brightly painted architectural wonders, with a floating metropolitan garden of Eden at its heart. Based on the evidence of such riches, the Old World had reason to covet the Aztec’s empire, and within a few years had snatched it away with the aid of numerous indigenous allies used to playing power-hungry superpowers against one another. Thousands of years of Mexican civilization defeated in a war that saw the buildings of Tenochtitlán systematically razed.

It is possible to speculate, hopefully without condoning anything, that the Aztecs blossomed, and then wilted, in the expected way. An end mirrored by their very own beginning; repeated regularly throughout the history of Mesoamerica before them. An unbelievably brutal race, the Aztecs indulged in an almost unimaginable cult of human sacrifice, traded their women as commodities, enslaved whole city-states, and employed corrupt martial politics to wrest their country-wide control. The end of their local colonialism by the international colonialism of Spain’s King Carlos I, their resulting near-genocide, and the relegation of indigenous locals to the bottom classes was not an especially new story in the history of Ancient Mexican civilization. The fact that these egregious acts were perpetrated from afar by rich whites from the modern world is one of many evils in the Spanish past, but from the perspective of their Aztec victims, surely, what comes around goes around.

And from this clash of warlike and colonial cultures, the intermixing of Spanish and Indigenous blood, came the seeds of modern Mexico, and modern Mexicans everywhere.

Start here for a better understanding of Mexican history.

A good overview of Mesoamerican civilization.

Stay tuned for part two.

Painting, National Museum of Anthropology.1930 by Dr. Atl

The House is Done Again

2005-06-08T01:53:00.000+07:00

number thirty-three

We are leaving to go on vacation soon, and I feel like I have the stuff that needs to be seen to seen to. Again. 323 words.

[NL]—There have been many times over the last month that I have declared the work on the house finished. I said it was finished when we finally got the shelves up and all of the books off of the dividing wall between the living and dining rooms. I declared it done when I had the furniture in the office set up and the things all put away in the closets. And again when Sunshine set up the spare room, and again when I potted the plants and again when I outfitted the maid’s room with a bed and a lamp. The house was finished when my speakers arrived and the entertainment center was finally available to watch the 400 blows projected majestically on the wall of the TV room. The house was finished, finally, the other day when I set up our new Linksys wireless network, and neatly stowed all of the wires out of the way.

Today, in just a little while, Sunshine will return early from work, and a cab will take us to the airplane that will whisk us off to excitement and adventure in gritty México City. Then, within days, we are off to historical Guanajuato. For two weeks the house will belong to the cat and the incredibly sweet couple who have agreed to come by every day to fed her and water the geraniums. I have finally cleaned the fridge and put the pantry into some kind of order. I have placed the plants where I want them to go. Door keys have been put on a ring, and handed out to the necessary folks. Soon I will cut the power and the wi-fi and the air conditioning (I’ll leave some on for the cat), put the chairs on the tables and lock up. So, now, finally, for at least two weeks, the house is done.

Which means I don't have to think about that anymore.

Blackyard

2005-06-05T14:51:00.000+07:00

number thirty-two

I don’t even like yards, so I am hard-pressed to come up with a good reason why I am becoming obsessed with mine. 963 words.

[NL]—Standing, looking over the CG’s lawn, I began to worry a lot about my vacation. I have seen a number of other houses this week, many of which are larger and more ornate than mine. The CG’s was the biggest and most ornate of the bunch. I love my house, and I wouldn’t trade it for any I have seen, but it struck me that the CG’s lawn was perfect: even, thick, short little grasses, glowing greenly in the spring sun.

Last week, we had gone to another of Sunshine’s coworker’s houses before gong out to dinner. She lives in a house very similar to the house we had originally been offered by Sunshine’s employers. It was tall and thin, with a loft making up a truncated fourth floor. It had no yard, only a tiled square of patio in the back, walled-in for privacy like all of the houses I have seen. It was nice, and even then I felt pangs about my vacation.

The next day, we had been to yet another coworker’s house for a little Sunshine-inspired gathering to watch Miss Universe. This house is huge, with yellow walls and rounded corners, arches over everything, and a whole office/playroom floor under the main living room area. Miss Universe was fun, and I got to hang out with some really great people. Outside the strip of backyard was a deep, forest green in the twilight.

I have never loved yards. Growing up, I feel I was saddled with the sporadic upkeep of some fairly challenging specimens: sloped, sparse, root-filled over-grown rock-piles that stretched on for hundreds of acres, dotted with ground hornet nests and prairie dog holes. Examples of gardening difficulty having to be tended with an ancient, hundred-pound, dull push mower that leaked gas and billowed smoke which needed, sometimes, several hundred pulls on the ripcord to start. Naturally, I would put off the cutting until the grass was up to my navel, assuring that I had to roll over every square inch of yard at least twice, lowering the mower onto clump after clump of brambles and saw grass to get the level somewhere near passably kempt. Long ago, when I was leaving the nest, I promised myself I would never mow the grass again.

Over the sixteen, or so, years since that day, I have kept my word. I have occasionally lived in places which have had little yards, but never have I lifted a finger to save them, and more often than not I have been guilty of burning them off with lighter fluid. The chagrin I felt when I discovered that I was going to have a house with a yard here in Mexico was pretty apparent to Sunshine, who had immediately promised to do all of the yard work. But arriving in México, and seeing the little strip of green grass behind our house beginning to overgrow, and the little square in front burned to a crisp by the desert sun, my heart began to change a little. I still will never mow the grass, I swear, but the lawn here is closer to another one of my houseplants than to those monster yards of yore. Instead of horror and hatred, I felt the same desire to see these plants grow and prosper.

So we hired Hector to mow the stuff, and to trim it all up. There are many plants in the landscaped corners of the yard, and he tend to them as well. But the sun is pretty intense here, at its worst it is extremely hot and dry, and Hector only comes once every two or three weeks (this is my prediction: Hector has only actually come once). If I don’t do something, the grass burns black in a matter of days. Sunshine told me that the housing people told her that we would have to replace the yard, if we killed it, when we move out. So, I water the yard. I water it once a day in the late evenings. I water a lot of plants, actually. I repotted fourteen of the Geraniums Sunshine had recovered from a work function before I got here. They are doing well. The lawn is doing well also: the scorched earth of the front yard is almost completely verdant a little over a month after my arrival. The back yard is emerald green.

Sunshine’s boss, the CG, threw a party today to say goodbye to several families who were rotating out of post in Monterrey over the next few weeks. It was a nice party, and I feel as if I have now met nearly everyone. But looking out at his massive field of verdant lushes, I began to worry that I was about to kill mine dead. Our vacation had initially been scheduled in May, but the Hemispheria Conference had postponed it. Now it was to be next week, but first a Conference in Mexico City was to take up the end of this week, too; beginning with our flight on the seventh. We are now leaving for our vacation from México City, instead of here. This is very exciting for me, as it means a sort-of double vacation. But now, instead of being gone for six days, I will be gone for the better part of thirteen. We have begged Hector to come by and water the grass as often as he can while we are away, but he is a busy man, and there will be just so much he can accommodate. I already feel guilty. The plants and the cat will be fine while we are away, but I am pretty sure the yard is going to be a goner.

Maybe it will rain a lot while we're gone.

Sphere Wars

2005-05-28T11:09:00.000+07:00

number thirty-one

Star Wars at the Golf Ball, but my inner eight year old slept right through it. 1,322 words.

[NL]—Today we went to Monterrey to see la Guerra de las Galaxias: Episodio 3—la Venganza de los Sith. It had opened here at the same time that it opened in the US, and mostly I had not been that excited about seeing it after viewing the last two Episodes. Like many people my age, I am forced into being, to certain measure, a Star Wars geek just because I was the right age (when the original movie opened) for it to take root in the foundation my developing creativity.

No big deal. I saw Star Wars dozens of times in the theater because that is what the seven- and eight-year-olds I knew did. The movie opened when I was six years old, and its first run lasted until I was eight. From first grade until High School, it is easier to add up the time a Star Wars movie was not at a theater near me. I know the names of all the ships and characters and planets. When I see a scene from what has been retroactively re-christened Episode IV: A New Hope, I have a familiarity with what I am watching akin to my familiarity with natural numbers. To illustrate: when you ask me what place p has in the alphabet, I have to talk my way through it—“m, n, o, p, q”—but I know exactly, without thought, where fourteen falls in the numerical system, how it relates to the numbers before and after it, even how it relates to numbers significantly removed in the chain. If I were to say “q, m, i, e, a” it might take a little bit of figuring to realize that I have, starting with q, listed the alphabet backward skipping three letters between. Not so hard to identify the same pattern if rendered “17, 13, 9, 5,1”. Both are ordered systems we all grew up with, one is merely grasped far more abstractly, understood far more readily. This is a long tangent to illustrate the very simple, basic understanding that has developed between Star Wars and a culture of seven-year-olds who recognize it inside out. When I see that random scene from the first movie, I know where it comes in the in order. When I hear the lines, when I see the machines and planets, I know—surely as I know when I hear “fourteen”—exactly what is happening, what has happened, what will happen within the set comprising this film. I have no need to view Star Wars in order. It is that completely understood, its set is so thoroughly recognized.

For me, it was the first movie in the series that was this important. Star Wars opened on May 25th, 1977, and I saw it a few months later. I was watching this movie while I was still learning how to add numbers and spell two-syllable words. For many people younger than me, it was the second Episode that was special; even younger, the third. There are many, many people out there who are rendered geeks accidentally, as a trick of their development, by this series of movies.

But I moved along. While the original series of Episodes entrenched themselves into my development, I was still actually developing. Even by the time the third film was released I was starting to leave them behind. The third film is the one that that really caught in Sunshine’s childhood attention, she is a little under seven years younger than me. I cannot fathom what it would be like to be a newly seven- to ten-year-old kid watching them now, but I think it is possible that the wonder still holds, that there are still those today who are honestly and unapologetically enchanted by this galaxy far, far away.

In Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith opened subtitled in a mighty array of malls and VIP lounge theaters scattered across the countryside. My inner seven-year-old had finally gotten wind that something was going on, and slowly the disappointment and total exasperation I had been feeling regarding these movies was beginning to dissipate. Lucas’ inability to deliver a clean, coherent narrative devoid of gaudy faux realism and acres of talky high school civics theory had receded behind the strings and horns of the soundtrack in the film trailers, and I was ready to get in line. We chose to go see the movie in Monterrey’s Cinema Rio 70, a white geodesic sphere looming in the Centro district, incapable of being compared to anything but a Golf Ball.

This theater is great. Looking as if it is sunk nearly to its equator into the sand trap of Nuevo Leon, it stands about three stories with a curved concession stand forming a base that honestly probably keeps it from rolling away. On the inside, the geodesic panels have been sprayed matte black, and the huge screen faces not-too-uncomfortable wooden seats. The screen is hung the only way it is possible to hang a flat sheet inside a curve, and thus stands pretty far away form its backing wall. This backstage space is lit up like daylight before the movie starts, and seems to house a hell of a lot of speakers, because between the amplitude and the terraced (non-stadium) seating at the conjunction of all possible angles, the aural effect is just shockingly loud.

In the past, with hype films that I feel certain will prove to be disappointing, I have placed my faith in the event itself. Certainly, if the movie is to be a dumb gallery of CGI cameos interspersed with wooden philosophy, the best thing to do is gather up a number of friends and stand in line really late at night like an excited kid. Eat a lot of snacks, drink a lot of caffeine, rail and rail. It is not impossible to make a stupid movie into a pretty fun party, and still recapture a little forgiving youth in the process. In other words: fall for the hype. Why not? The movie costs the same anyway, right? It’s a sealed environment, like a space station. Let the candy smells and lights and posters invade a little with its carnival-quality. Let the nearby fans explain why all of this is so exciting. Let the inner geek take over a little in this isolated atmosphere. This had been my method for many, many animated summer-release extravaganzas like the Matrix movies, previous Star Wars Episodes, and whatever Jerry Bruckheimer is working on now. It might not make me like these films much better, but it makes me have fun while I am watching them.

Here in Monterrey, this was a difficult thing pull off. The theater is great, but scheduling time to see the movie, what with getting a cat and all the tea paper stuff, was predictably haphazard. We were thwarted a number of times before we finally managed to cram it in today. This left precious little time to get excited about such an incidental endeavor. Finally, there just were not any friends to drunkenly gather.

I don’t mean to sound sad. I had an okay time watching this movie, but it turned out to need every bit of the outside support I thought it would. I would have enjoyed it more, as meaningless as it is, had I enjoyed it with people who were very into it, and very excited about it. Sunshine and I were fairly apathetic. We went to the movie, that was all. No big deal. Afterwards, we went for a walk around Monterrey. I will in the long run remember this as going to a cool theater. That the ‘70’s gimmick building somehow helped to develop my understanding of the ‘70’s gimmick of my fanhood; all in a spherical home world far more like a golf ball than a space station.

Click here for a full movie review.

Tea and Shadows

2005-05-27T10:59:00.000+07:00

number thirty

Sunshine brings a stranger home. And she gets stranger and stranger. 752 words.

[NL]—Long before I managed to get down to México, Sunshine had been talking about getting a cat; and that cat arrived today. Up until late this weekend, this cat has been a slowly focusing reality, winding its way though concept—“maybe we should get a cat”—to concrete theory—“there are plenty available, and they are not that expensive to feed”—to conceptual realism—“when Joel leaves somebody has to take his cat.” I have tentatively provided the counterpoint in what I fooled myself into thinking was a hypothetical discussion. I offered the data about the destructive power of cats, the difficulties that may be involved with obtaining a Mexican vet, the sheer temporariness of our stay in any one country. None of this seemed to slow the time between my arrival in San Pedro and Joel’s departure, however.

Apparently, that time actually sped up. It shortened. I had been being very tentative because I was told that I had until mid-June before the previous owners packed out, and the kitty decision needed deciding. That took a distinctly more immediate twist this weekend when we were called and told that we needed to pick the cat up by Wednesday.

Most of this week, Sunshine has been concentrating on the newest extra-curricular services she is providing. This time, she has volunteered to deliver a talk on the history of the international tea trade at a tea function. This was to be held, we initially were given to understand, on Saturday afternoon; but in the same immediate spirit that infected the cat timetable, we discovered Tuesday that it was to take place on Thursday. We had already wasted her rare free hours at the beginning of the week by going to see Sahara, and Sunshine was now faced with the prospect of writing a twenty-minute presentation on a brand new subject in two evenings after work. And on one of those evenings, she was going to have to pick up a cat.

The cat was described to me like this: a black, three- to four-year-old, castrated male, shy around a lot of dogs and children, born and raised in Mexico. Answers to the name Shadow. The cat had become a more concrete reality than I had initially hoped, but I was prepared to try making the best of it. I love cats! This one would not come with a litter box or food. We were going to have to spend some of Sunshine’s precious writing time getting these things, too.

By Wednesday morning, Sunshine had already worked until after bedtime once on the paper, and there were two neon-colored clear plastic cat bathrooms, litter, wet and dry food in the pantry. Here is where I began to reflect that the cat had been philosophically approaching tangibility for a while. Right now I was ruminating on the brink of Schrödinger’s cat-box, the object accelerating toward manifestation along a countdown that started with an innocent little aside about having a pet. Soon the future would flip its lid, inside there would be a real cat, instead of the philosophical cats we’ve had for the months previous.

What I was not prepared for was the cat itself. There was at least one more incarnation for this beast, as I discovered on Wednesday when Sunshine walked through the door with a borrowed plastic pet carrier, and emptied its contents onto the floor. Out dumped a seven-year-old, declawed, black and white female, bug-eyed and freaked out, who immediately made her way behind the washing machine and wouldn’t come out. Vet records showed receipts from Illinois in the name of “Kitty,” Sunshine said she was told the cat “sheds when it is nervous.” I’ll admit that I was pissed, sitting in the floor with white and black hairs wafting in the air conditioning around me. But inside I was a little bemused, too. Sunshine went off to write until well after midnight, and I did the cat-sitting, trying to coax this newest cat out from behind the major appliances. We seemed to have run through at least three distinct cats so far in this venture: a fantasy cat, a false advertisement cat, and then this actual cat who was haunting the laundry room. In another few days or weeks, this cat might warm up to us, come out of its shell a little. By that time, I think it is clear that it will have become yet another whole, new cat.

But we will still be calling it Shadow. Maybe.

A cat stops hiding for five minutes as favor to Author

Home Theater

2005-05-24T11:08:00.000+07:00

number twenty-nine

In San Pedro it is possible to feel like a VIP in their special movie theaters, even after a week of being a menial laborer in my own home. Our home. 1,079 words.

[NL]—Tonight we went to see Sahara at the VIP theater in the mall. We live very near the mall—it is located just on the other side of the grocery store form the Costco—and last time we went to a movie there (the Interpreter), we walked. Today we drove, though, because if we hurried, we would be able to catch a show in one of the multiplex’s VIP theaters: plush recliners with footrests, wait staff, alcoholic beverages and sushi menus on little tables between every cluster of two seats. Having worked at the Janus Theaters in Greensboro, NC, I had a little trepidation about the whole idea of “lounge” theaters. At my ex-employer’s, the special theater was a dismally dark and musty place, with the atmosphere and squalor of a neighborhood tavern. Spilled beer and stronger smuggled substances had managed to seep into plush, but uncomfortable, squares arrayed before a disastrously incorrectly-shaped and misaligned rear-projection system the size of a large sports bar TV. The few times I actually went and saw a film there (at least in its later days), I was dismayed at the dank, blurry, and cropped-down spectacle of it all. When the theater finally burned down, this room was shielded by its own crust and left vulcanized but otherwise untouched.

But this is the culmination of a fairly busy week. The bookshelves had finally arrived, hours after they were expected, and ten minutes before we were to attend a smallish dinner party thrown by one of Sunshine’s coworkers. Thus, there had been no time to put them all together; but the penne was excellent, and the salad we took was pretty spot on, too. This was the first time I had taken the opportunity to meet the people that Sunshine works with, and I found them friendly and charming. The next day, I’d just spread bookshelf pieces all over the kitchen floor when a man with a lot of pagers came by to install grounded wall sockets in all of the outlets on the outside of the house. He didn’t speak any English, but I don’t really worry too much about that, anymore. I just apologize, make the universal call-someone-else sign with my thumb to my ear and my pinkie at my mouth, and hand out a cold Coke from the refrigerator. This guy was in a hurry to get on with it anyway since I was following him around the house with a hammer. Next time the doorbell rang, it was some English-speaking folks dispatched by the make-ready coordinator to pick up the welcome kit full of appliances they gave Sunshine during the months she was waiting for her stuff to get here by truck. We’d put it all in one place (the kitchen table), and so they busied themselves with boxing it all up while I crawled around the kitchen, fitting cams into locks and lining up wooden pegs. The next time the doorbell rang it was Hector, the man Sunshine had hired to “do the yard.” Hector is round and very friendly and only speaks Spanish. This is the first time Hector had been by in the three weeks since I had arrived in Mexico, and I was unsure how I was supposed to proceed. The back had never been mowed (it had reached a height that would keep kids out of school if it had been snow), and the front yard had been tended to right before Sunshine had come to Laredo, but had not been paid for. Plus, the poor grass had not been watered during the time Sunshine was acclimating, and the sunny front yard had been burnt to a bright brown. Luckily, the make-ready guy could translate for us, because I was running out of Cokes.

Eventually everyone cleared out of the house, and I got the bookshelves finished up, too. By the time Sunshine got home from work, all of the boxes were unloaded and we busied ourselves with the last few hours of putting things away. Then we ordered a pizza and looked around because there just wasn’t much else to do besides break down and give away the empty boxes and sweep up. This was easily handled the next day because there is always someone moving out of town. We celebrated the next night, too. Heck, we’ve been celebrating ever since.

The VIP theaters here are totally different from the Janus, thankfully. I should have expected this, owing to San Pedro’s tony urbanity. The standard theater that we had seen the Interpreter in was pretty nice, much like what is expected in the new millennium from a stadium theater: THX Digital Sound, Very large screen, and no seat in the house too awkwardly forward or to the side. It had been crowded (it had been a Saturday night at the mall), and the theater had pretty much filled to the brim, but it had remained comfortably roomy. Theaters here get very dark. Dark enough that it is almost impossible to see the person sitting in the seats on either side. Plus, they usher the crowd into one door at the beginning, and out a different door at the end. Otherwise, there is nothing terribly exotic about the experience.

Not so, the VIP treatment. The theaters are pretty much the equal of the standard theaters (all have excellent sound and light quality), but the chairs are very far apart and very comfortable. I would imagine that it is most difficult to remain awake in these chairs, in the dark, if the movie proved to be even the slightest bit underwhelming. Plus the wait staff is efficient, and clears out by the end of the trailers and PSAs against DVD piracy. The intermittent clinking of silverware as patrons eat their baguettes or crepes would have been far more irritating if there had been more than two other people in the theater. A tip: movies in the mall in San Pedro are far less crowded in a theater costing twice as much and during the middle of the workday. All in all, it was a very good experience: and my crepe was excellent, the movie highly enjoyable, and the place was unbelievably clean. But, honestly, the best part was that when we went home, it was to a finished home, filled with easily accessible things, put away where they actually go. I could keep celebrating all week.

Click here for a look at the floor plan.

Photo and construction by the Author

Look Before You Leap

2005-05-19T13:33:00.000+07:00

number twenty-eight

All I ever seem to write about is homemaking and my burgeoning domesticity. But Jesus, there are books laying around freakin’ everywhere. 808 words.

[NL]—Fifteen days ago we noted that there were some really neat, albeit smallish, bookshelves at the grocery store closest to our house. We had liked them, but since they were close, we had decided that we would like to see what other stores had to offer. Fourteen days ago we were at the same grocery store, picking up some things, and we noted that one of the shelves was gone. Over the following weekend we looked at shelves at Costco, and various and sundry other stores, many of which were grocery stores. There was nothing, really, comparable. The next time we were in Carrefour, the grocery store closest to us, two of the three shelves that we had picked out were gone. We asked an employee about it, and he said that they were planning to receive an order, maybe just after the weekend. So we waited through the weekend.

Sunshine’s job provides us with a house when we are posted abroad, as well as the furniture for that house (in most cases). We had heard going into this thing that bookshelves were a rare commodity. I do not believe that this is because there is a very pressing need for shelves among Sunshine’s compatriots. Rather the opposite: no one really needs many bookshelves, so there just isn’t much supply. In the “special requests” box on the housing form, where many people ask for central location, school accessibility, room for pets, southern exposure, or bathtubs, Sunshine had requested a bookshelf. And that is what we got: one bookshelf. I took the whole thing up with my DVDs, and then we got all these boxes. Looking for more shelves stretched out for weeks.

During this period, I had been fixing up the house. Sunshine had spent a great chunk of her first full week back to work after my arrival working the Hemispheria Summit, a trade corridor congress that included dignitaries from most of the US and Mexican states that border each other. Governors, Cabinet Members and the President of Mexico were there. Sunshine filled her days being a member of Monterrey’s go-to team, and her conversations became peppered with words like “motorcade,” “armored car,” and “advance team.” Her seventeen-hour days during this summit afforded me between ten minutes and half an hour’s company for several days straight, and what I did with all of my alone time was crank out the house. By the end of this latest weekend, I had lifted almost every large piece of rental furniture in the house and hauled them from room to room. I had unloaded nearly every box. I had then broken down those boxes, and set them out for the trash guys. I had made all of the food every day. I was getting exhausted; but I was also getting the hang of domesticity. It was exciting, because the house made a good goal. I couldn’t help but notice, kicking back with a rum and Coke at the end of an evening, that there were still about thirty forty-pound boxes of books laying all over my otherwise quickly-shaping homestead.

On Sunday, when the conference was finally totally over, we went to Home Depot, and bought the first and second bookshelves we saw. Less extravagant by far than the perfectly square book cubbies we’d seen at the Carrefour, these were utilitarian at best, but would still match the house (if not the other furniture). Mostly, I was just sick of all the damn boxes, and had learned that “look before you leap” is a bad rule for furniture.

We got three shelf units. Two are large and standard (blond wood-looking, with six adjustable shelves), and the third is more like an adjustable wooden CD rack that we are using for paperback books. We had Home Depot ship them, and they arrived today. It took me about fifty minutes to put the first big one together, and about ten to put it together the second time. The little one was a little more difficult, but I still had them all ready to go by the time Sunshine came home.

It took us about two hours to fill them up. There were still about ten boxes of books sitting around the house, but that is a whole lot better, right? We ate a nice Thai noodle soup (made from ramen) that I created, and talked about getting more shelves.

Finally, fifteen days after losing our opportunity to buy the first shelves we saw, we have four new units (two big and two small, identical to the ones above) arriving by delivery tomorrow. These will compliment the three units we already have, and should take care of the rest of the books with some room to spare. Now I feel like the house getting really close to finished.

And it is a good feeling.

Strange Sushi

2005-05-04T14:57:00.000+07:00

number twenty-seven

I finally manage to leave the house today on a lunch date with one of Sunshine’s contacts. The Barrio Antiguo is very nice, but I have discovered that even sushi can be unexpected here. 916 words.

[NL]—Now, today I got out of the house. Apparently, Sunshine and a coworker have been exploring a process by which the man’s poetry can be translated into Spanish. This has given Sunshine some interesting material on which to practice a new skill, and brought her into collaboration with a woman who freelances as an interpreter and translator. All this is just a shortened way of setting up going out and eating lunch today with Sunshine’s friend Leticia. I was looking forward to getting out of the house for the first time since I had arrived (since I am not counting grocery stores). I was still a little shy about barging into Mexican culture, and we were both a little leery of the traffic on a Tuesday afternoon, so we opted to take a cab to Monterrey’s Barrio Antiguo, where the sushi restaurant that Leticia favors is located.

The simplest way to draw a map of the Centro area of Monterrey is to draw a tic-tac-toe board. The up/down line on the left is the major artery that we’d taken through Monterrey on the first day. This is the north/south line (#2) of the elevated metro. The tic-tac-toe line on the right is the eastern border of the Macro Plaza, Monterrey’s large monument- and plant-studded paved central park. The bottom line in the game board is the Rio Santa Catarina, the mostly-dry riverbed that is probably responsible for this valley, and is lined with ten-lane highways and attendant remora service roads making life a real bitch if navigating toward all points south (like where I live). The side-to-side line to the north of the game board is the other large road following the metro’s east-west route (line #1), and leading north of Cerro de la Silla toward Laredo. With me? This is vastly inaccurate, as none of these lines are straight (or flat) in the real world; but it should get the gist across somewhat.

The Barrio Antiguo (antique neighborhood), is located in a little triangle in the south-western corner of the square just right of center. It is framed by the Plaza on its left and Rio at its bottom. Here, in this little island in the midst of all this traffic, is a quant little colonial Mexican village, which is all that is left of the way Monterrey was originally intended to look. It is beautiful, with little, narrow cobblestone streets and overhanging trees; and it makes my heart flutter for the more romantic fantasy Mexico it is more possible to glimpse in poorer towns. In the leading edge of this neat little old quarter, there is a little neon green all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. Predictably, this is where we are headed.

I am still a little, shy as I have said, and this is why I ended up drinking tea. I just couldn’t be entirely sure that the waitress had looked at me and very clearly said “would you also like tea?” So I nodded. Sunshine’s friend Leticia was extremely nice, and was very happy to speak in English the whole time we were eating so I would understand what we were saying. She also gave us a book containing the letters of Frida Khalo translated into English (which I am very excited about because I am a fan). She stressed that she’d picked it out of her own collection, so it wasn’t really a present. I felt bad that it had never even occurred to me to take her a luncheon gift.

Sometime after my delicious sweetened iced tea arrived, after a lot of shop talk between bilingual people, we stood to walk down the line of sushi trays. Since the extent of my Spanish today seems to be nodding, I took the rear, and did what they were doing. The restaurant was still nearly empty since Mexicans tend to eat during siesta, sometimes as late as two. Of the five different items there were to choose from on the sushi bar, not one seemed to contain any ingredients I don’t eat. There were stuffed mushroom caps, California and crab rolls, bowls, and some tempura. It wasn’t until I had gotten back to the table that I realized that the tempura was fried crab-stuffed chipotle peppers. They were wonderful, and really very hot. I ate two of them.

The dinner lasted about two hours, there is never any rush in Mexico, and Leticia kept trying to get me to go up for seconds, but I was okay with my one helping. She and Sunshine talked about this and that, and it was all very charming. When she got around to biting into her pepper, she said it was too hot, and didn’t even eat the rest. Finally we got up to leave, and as we walked past the sushi trays I noticed that there had been at least two-dozen things added since our first pass. Apparently, the lesson here is to get the sushi when it is crowded in the joint, not when it is empty.

Out on the streets of the Barrio Antiguo it had begun to rain, and I watched Sunshine very closely as she placed her hands on Leticia’s upper arms and gave her an air-kiss to the right cheek. When she turned to me, I feel I did a really good job emulating Sunshine exactly. Then Leticia left us, and it was up to us to figure out where to get our cab to our home.

And our boxes.

Photo Illustration by the Author

Nesting

2005-05-04T11:12:00.000+07:00

number twenty-six

Two days to catch my breath here south of the border before a huge orange truck pulls up in front of the house and starts unloading everything, everything in the whole world.. 503 words.

[NL]—The thing is, it took me a little while to get back to Monterrey. It is a good distance from my house, and I pretty much will have to take a cab if I go there alone. This is no bother, really. Monterrey is filled with things to do, sure, but so is San Pedro; so is this house, for that matter. When I arrived on Saturday, my action plan included only sitting around in the air conditioning and doing very little. I accomplished this with gusto: we filled two glasses with Stewart’s Ginger Beer and dark rum, and Sunshine and I clinked them together on our tiny front balcony while I re-lit and re-lit the candle we’d taken out with us. We clinked the next two glasses together on the patio in the back. And the next two. The candle worked better in the back yard where the privacy wall kept most of the wind away.

Sunday, I continued this wonderful streak of lazy disinterest in getting back into a car. I explored around the house, and I looked out all of the windows. Sunshine and I watched a lot of TV, and we clinked some glasses together some more.

By Monday, I think Sunshine was growing a little tired of my dedication to laziness. We were due to get her shipment of household items (which, in government acronymic jargon is called the HHE) in the morning, and I think that Sunshine was determined to get me out of the house in the afternoon. But, as it turned out, the HHE, which is really a giant Mack truck with thousands of forty-pound boxes of books on the back of it, didn’t arrive until almost four-thirty, and wasn’t unloaded until almost six.

By this time, there were sixty-seven smaller boxes, and nine more larger boxes, strewn about the house. Any gushing I might have done about the sizeable and airy minimalism of this place withered and died. A lot of Sunshine’s interest in dislodging me form my nesting also gave up the ghost. I made some food, and we knuckled into putting things away. There was a point when we did go out to the grocery store for some odds and ends. It is right between the Costco and the mall, and about a four minute walk, but we drove anyway. It is far larger than the average grocery in the States, but the extra room is given to extra things: cell phone stores, appliances, toys, tires, office furniture. We were there for some cereal and maybe some cheese, but we ended up spying an array of bookshelves that we thought might go in the house nicely, and we did have all those books with no home. We decided to sleep on it, maybe see what else is available here before we jump to any conclusions, right?

Back at home I noticed that the bigger boxes were just about exactly as tall as Sunshine.

I started looking for some glasses to clink.

Maps

2005-05-02T14:54:00.000+07:00

number twenty-five

It all seemed to easy to navigate when I was looking at it on a map, but in reality Monterrey is big and wadded up and filled with traffic. Luckily, I live thirty minutes away. 932 words.

[NL]—Nearly thirty minutes after we’d arrived in the outskirts of Monterrey, we arrived at my house. Monterrey had been pretty much what I’d been led to expect by the photos and websites I’d seen while anticipating my arrival: industrial, non-beautified, and teeming with people. It is a bustling modern metropolis, obviously slapped hastily together as it charged through its rapid expansion. In this way, it sort of seems like Mexico’s Charlotte, North Carolina; or maybe Greenville, South Carolina.

I had acquainted myself pretty well with the maps that I had seen, but was still surprised when I half knew where we were in the city as we drove through it that first time. Reality is always surprisingly different from the expectations I build when I read maps. The landscape is shockingly confused and mazelike when I am plonked down in the middle of it, instead of very flattened-out like on paper. Even in Mexico, where many places have buildings that top off at four floors, turns vertical and confusing. I know this is a pretty obvious thought, what with maps being sheets of paper, and cities being corridors of multi-colored buildings heaped on top of one another in an uneven and unplanned chaotic scatter mostly obscured behind the observer’s present vantage. Still, it is striking to me every time. In this instance, while I was wowed by the sheer size of Mexico’s third-largest city, Matt was pointing out certain landmarks outside the van’s windows (he made driving here seem easy, if not sane). I gradually realized that I knew pretty much where I was. There was the metro station, where the two public transportation lines come together. That meant that the bus station was going to be up on the right. We were going to turn left through the center of the city. The Macro Plaza, Monterrey’s answer to Mexico City’s National Zócalo, a large monument of open park space smack in the middle of downtown, was going to be up several blocks to the left after we turn. Eventually, we were going to get to the river (which is mostly a river bed), and then we would turn right and head past the Consulate. Matt confirmed everything I said. I felt at least a little less lost.

Of course, the map did not really prepare me for all of the mountains. Every picture of Monterrey seems to include its iconic Cerro de la Silla, so I was expecting “Saddle Mountain” to be looming over everything. But there’s also Cerro las Mitras to the west, and Chapenque to the south, not to mention all of the little hills and valleys Monterrey spills over and around. This means that the town is far more sprawling and jumbled than I expected it to be. Even after I had noted that Monterrey maps contain less than the average number of straight lines, and I’d assumed the reason that many of the roads seemed to merely end is because they are pointing up pretty tall slopes, the reality surprised me. Monterrey is a city of dramatic and dazzling natural backdrops, to be sure.

Somewhere in the traffic and confusion after the passing the Consulate, we picked up the road that took us under the ridge that separates the suburb of San Pedro from the center of Monterrey. On the other side of the tunnel, traffic lessened somewhat, and the buildings and landscaped greenery began to look a little more like Beverly Hills than Charlotte. Here we passed along a wide speedway of large, mostly US, shopping opportunities like T.G.I. Friday’s and Home Depot. There were a number of giant malls, banks, and grocery stores. We turned right a the Costco.

So now I am at my house for the first time. It is very, very large and dazzlingly white. Almost all of the internal walls are the same stucco-looking cement that make up the outside walls, too. Every bedroom has its own bathroom with a shower, and the entryway has a water-closet. The kitchen is enormous, with a walk-in pantry. Appliances like washers and driers and microwaves have built-in nooks for that sharper image. There is a white privacy wall around the whole rear of the house, which means I don’t have to close the blinds unless I want it dark. Most of the closest houses are a story below me down the hill we live on. I can see at least one mountain out of any window in the house. Sometimes that is all I can see. It is possible to view the famous Cerro de la Silla from the dining room table. The place is made of marble where it isn’t stucco; and, currently, it is empty like some deco Miami Vice set. When I call out to mi amiga, I echo, like, thirty-seven times.

It is a really nice pad, to be sure. It’s a nice neighborhood. But Monterrey is a disconcerting distance away, over the mountain I can see from all of the windows facing north. I am afraid that it would take me over forty minutes to get there on foot, even if I could find a way over the hill and through the traffic. San Pedro seems nice enough for the “richest neighborhood in Latin America,” a quote I can attribute to damn near everyone who lives here, but it isn’t wildly exotic. Near me there is a park, a lot of neighbors I can’t visit without explaining myself to the guard that runs the gate, and Cerro Chipenque.

And Costco. Finally, I am a member of a Costco.

A la Frontera

2005-05-02T02:37:00.000+07:00

number twenty-four

I finally reunited with Sunshine in the border town of Laredo. Here I changed cars and was ferried on over the Border and south to Monterrey. 813 words.

[NL]—Laredo, Texas, may be a less-than-charming place. From the highway, it looked to me like a very little town very bloated down its arteries by the business that is to be boomed from nestling up against another country. It seemed as if the city planners had drawn a T in the Texas dust: where the east-west pole was the border, and then populated the post with Wal-Marts, strip malls, and brightly painted bunkers with yards full of tin souvenirs. When I entered Mexico almost a decade ago, it had been through El Paso, and while dustier—and equally hell bent on its border identity—it had seemed like a fairly merry place, complete with a bon-homey sort of “welcome or adios” to the peregrinating masses it was built to serve. In contrast, Laredo seemed far more utilitarian, like it was there to register in the rearview mirrors of the no-nonsense shoppers it was built to convey.

Much of my sense of Laredo, to be fair, is gathered from looking at it from the highway like that; or the hotel windows. I found the Pizza Hut friendly enough, and the Best Buy was filled with helpful staff. By the time we were visiting our last USA gas station heading south, I was still ready to hit the road and miss Laredo very little for the rest of my life. This said, I was sort of happy to discover, after leaving the highway and nearing the actual border, that some faint pulse does beat beneath Laredo’s conduit.

Most traffic pumps on down the Wal-Mart highway, toward Puente Internacional 2. The bridge shunts traffic to the east sides of both Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, her Mexican sister city. This is the fastest way for commuters, because Texas highway 35 becomes Boulevard Luis Colosio at a two-dollar toll booth, and then becomes the bypass straight through to Monterrey. We assumed that this was going to be the higher traffic route, and less charming to boot, so we exited the highway to delve into the dense cluster of downtown Laredo. This route turns into the wider cluster of Nuevo Laredo’s main drag after the two-dollar toll at Puente Internacional 1.

This possibly far more scenic route did wonders for my recollections of entering Mexico in the nineties. Here were all of the signs and tourist information postings. Here were all of the street dudes selling newspapers and hearty food from oily paper bags. The traffic was slow, making it easy to appreciate all the two-story, brightly-painted square buildings with ten foot tall, brightly-painted bilingual advertisements (present in either of los dos Laredos). People swarmed everywhere, music blasted, and the tempo seemed to quicken with the temp. It was all somehow a little terrifying because it was something that I wasn’t actually navigating myself, and also because it happened so fast. In recollection, it happened too fast, like it always does. I still remember longing to hang out in Ciudad Juarez ten years ago, but afraid to actually do it with little preparation and a lot of luggage. Today was the same, over too fast and not fast enough, and I look forward to the time when I can go back, a little less jumpy because it will be a destination and not a hurdle.

Entering Mexico, Sunshine tried to spot the bullet holes from last week’s newest narco-altercation, which she said might be evident all over the toll bridge. We didn’t see anything. Maybe the shots were fired on bridge number two. Leaving Nuevo Laredo, we stopped to get a newspaper at one intersection because Sunshine and her coworker Matt were hoping that they were actually in it, but they weren’t. Matt assured me that they would be in the other paper, that we could pick up in Monterrey. Then we drove on and on thought northern Mexico, and my heart calmed as the border receded.

Northern Mexico is nice: the landscape is filled with crops which give way to low scrub; which, in turn, gives way to blue succulents and the intermittent really tall cactus. Beside the road, we saw an occasional stock animal tied near a well. The roads were creepy, potholed disasters for a while (Sunshine had killed a tire coming through here almost three months ago—she showed me the spot), but the traffic moved us along at a nice clip, and the conversation in the car was fun and interesting. Occasionally we’d pass though a narco- or immigration checkpoint, but we’d always get the wave-through. Eventually we hit a toll bridge signifying that we’d moved from freeway to expressway. This was a far nicer road, and Matt got the van up to a far nicer clip than before. We reached Monterrey, and then San Pedro, in a little over two hours.

Maybe we were all hurrying to get away from the border.

Home in San Pedro taken by Matt before I'd even gone inside.

Cherchez la Femme

2005-05-01T01:31:00.000+07:00

number twenty-three

On the road to Laredo and eventually my new home in Monterrey. 1,003 words.

[AT LARGE]—I guess I figured it like this: if I was going to leave town and country, friends and family, then I had better get somewhere. The design of my leaving had always been to meander around the landscape, seeing this and that, and finally end up at the border when Sunshine was able to meet me and carry me away to my new life. But striking out of Kentucky I started noticing that there was a flaw in this plan. It had worked out pretty well for Sunshine and her dad, who had taken a full week to travel from Kentucky to Laredo, and split up when Sunshine had crossed the border. They had spent quality time looking out at America, and their enjoyment was infectious enough to warrant our burglary of their plan. But I had a growing sense, as we headed down I-64 through Lexington and Louisville and across the Tennessee border, that this wasn’t working out so well for me. I was pinned between the extraordinary effort it took to leave Greensboro, and the far greater effort it took to endure the last eight months estranged from Sunshine. Between points A and B, it was decidedly hard to concentrate on the driving.

Still, I was hurting, and called off the first day’s ride by the time we were advancing on Nashville. In Kentucky, I had already altered our route to miss New Orleans and much of the southern area I had seen numerous times before. Still later, we had slimmed the trip again to take us in a straighter line directly trough Texas. Mom was surprised that I wanted to stop after driving barely five hours, but was happy to comply. So we pulled into a sleazy as hell Comfort Inn we had chosen out of a coupon book based on the criteria that it was right off the highway. At this creepy motel all was deserted until about seven, and then there were people hanging out in the parking lot all evening. We made sure that the computer, ratchet set, and other important things were out of the car, which we parked in a spot optimal for quick getaway. None of the vending machines worked (the only one with a cord that made it all the way to the wall had a handwritten note that said “Please NOT Use This Machine Because it is Broken Please. Okay, --Management), and while I was on the phone with Sunshine, two people slouched by and asked me where to “find the stuff around here.” By the time I was going to bed, mom and I were in agreement that we were changing the plans from “meandering around the landscape”, to “getting close to the point B”, and then staying in one location for as long as possible. This would cut down on the traveling aspect of our border run, but it would concentrate the vacation part.

At first we thought that Austin might be a good destination, but after getting on the road by ten the next morning—both alive!—we decided that San Antonio would be better since mom had really loved the day that she had spent there, and I had never been. We crossed into Arkansas by early afternoon, and Texas by five. We got gas in Dallas, and were approaching Austin by nine-thirty. We stopped at a rest area swarming with loud trucks and birds where the bathroom had no roof. At some point, we had decided that we owed ourselves a stay in a comfy-type hotel. The creepy Nashville motel had us jumpy enough to lose any discretion we might have had, so we ended up staying in the Capital Marriott Austin for a night, and heading out at noon the next day (mom said that as much as the place cost, we would be hanging out until checkout).

Austin is only ninety minutes form San Antonio, and if we had known that in Dallas, we would have pushed on through in that one day. But I am glad we did it the way we did, because we got to drive around in Austin for a while, and see famous Austin landmarks. We got to San Antonio right around two, with plenty of time and daylight to: get totally lost, find ourselves, then find a La Quinta, check in, and do a little wandering around the architectural marvels of San Antonio (including the Alamo), all in the first day.

Hey, I fell in love with San Antonio. We stayed there for three days, and it was diverting and nifty enough to keep my mind off the fact that this was a numbingly long time to wait between leaving someplace, and arriving someplace else. The idea was to view this as a vacation (even though what I was doing is relocating), and we did all the right things: shopping, museum, IMAX. Mostly, we walked around the downtown, and it was really enjoyable. I was longing for me and Friday to get to Laredo together, and to see Sunshine for the first time in three months, but I also had a great time in San Antonio.

The last little leg of our trip started Friday at noon, eight hours after we had struck out for Kentucky the previous week. Laredo was a pretty quick two and a half hours down the road, and we got there in plenty of time for me to get really bored and antsy before Sunshine called me at six thirty, or so.

And that was it, sort of. We spent the night in the Holiday Inn in Laredo, where all the food is meat, and the décor is ‘seventy-five; and then we left about one this afternoon. After a week of putting it off, mom and I said so long,; and then I hopped in the van to the border as she headed on back down the road we come in on.

And that was the last of all the leaving.

Photo credits, from left: the Author, el Joy, the Author, el Joy.