everything dies

Take a walk with me.

While I am recovering from my infestation (the word has an Exodus tone to it), I cannot wander too far from the sanctuary of a bathroom. But I started an essay about a walk recently, and never finished it. I will today.

My usual walk is almost a ritual. I hit the four cardinal points of the compass here in Barra de Navidad -- all on paved and even streets. If I bite off the entire course I set out two years ago, I will cover almost 15 miles.

The problem with routines is that they are just that. Routine. And I prefer a lot more variety.

Even though I am the chief fan of the virtues of the rule of law, I am not quite as enamored with order. Chaos is creative. Order tends to be what old men advocate to avoid confusion. It was on that point that I parted philosophical company with Russel Kirk.

Now and then, I walk out my front door and decide to turn right, instead of left. If I do, I will head out to the multitude of rural roads that surround our tourist world.

Within blocks of my house, a person would have no idea that a village of 3000 people exists just around the corner. The unpaved road is as pastoral as any in Devonshire.

Truck farm fields that rotate from tomatoes to chilies to watermelon. Some are longer-standing. Such as this field of overgrown papayas that provide shade and forage for cattle.

I noticed yesterday on my way back from the lab in Cihuatlan that the papayas are now gone. They have been replaced with banana plants.

The far end of my walk that day ended at the cemetery. I always stop in for a visit. No one I know rests there in eternal slumber, but I have always been fascinated with the short biographies of tombstones. In most cases, the biography resides on the hyphen between two dates. And that is it. Born. Died.

Recently, that cemetery has shown signs of vandalism. From whom, I know not. The potential theories are legion.

Angry relative. Revenge for a long-ago hurt. Or just some teenage boys with too much energy and no place to spend it. Of course, it could be nothing more than our tropical climate that, just like a wall that wants it down, as Robert Frost would have it.

The tombs in the cemetery are not the only discordant parts of the walk. Rural areas seem to be garbage magnets. My late friend John used to live on a farm around here. He said people would pull up in vans and dump an entire broken suite of living room furniture on the road in front of his place. He always doubted that the donors were seeking to benefit the cattle with a comfortable place to rest.

It is easy to tut and cluck about such behavior. It is unsightly. Disordered. Northerners now live in societies where the antiseptic is the norm, though that was not the case a half century ago. Garbage still exists, but it is carted off somewhere. Death still exists, but it is done in the privacy of hospitals. Chickens and pigs are not killed in our presence; they just arrive in plastic trays.

However, not all garbage is created equal.

The road I was walking on has a parallel road that was once used as a landing strip for small aircraft.

It no longer serves that purpose. Nor could it. A house has been built right on the strip itself. Its primary purpose now is to provide access to several fields.

But it is also the site where some creative soul (maybe one of those energy-pumped teenage boys) created a bit of street art with discarded garbage.

I should call MOMA to see if it is interested in hosting the piece.

That is the walk that I took a month or so ago. But I have a postscript from this morning.

I took a bag of garbage out to the corner and noticed someone had added a bit of flavor to our street.

There were a pile of palm fronds in the traveled portion of the street in front of my house and the apartment building next door. Haphazardly tossed there like a box of giant pick-up-sticks. But it was not a game.

The fronds are from another house whose gardener decided he did not want them in front of his house, so he dragged them into the street in front of mine.

The charitable interpretation is the gardener thought the garbage men would pick them up. They won't. I know from experience unless the fronds are chopped up and bagged, they will sit right where they are until vermin set up homes and the fronds act as catcher for any garbage that blows from the cans on the corner.

In this particular case, there is nothing to be done but to take on the task myself. I already moved the fronds out of the street. When I am feeling better, I will take out my loppers and a pile of garbage bags to clear the mess.

I started this essay with an assertion that I am not a man of order. But I am. I am a direct result of my culture that likes to tame chaos and restore the semblance of order. (It is, of course, merely a myth. We like to believe we have some control over events in our lives.)

Instead, I now am sitting on my patio surrounded by the manicured plants in my rationally-planned Barraganesque home, where the Moorish water brings the contentment of an oasis.

For now, that is order enough for me.