on a wing and a prayer

 

Mexico is a land of fantasy.

From my swimming pool, I can imagine that I am standing on the runway at RAF Bassingbourn in 1943, watching the B-17s return from their raids over Germany. Well, at least, those that did return.

My version of that tale is watching the black vultures come home each evening to their roost on the communication tower next to my house. Each bird turns on final and slowly descends, feathers, and performs a power-on stall just in time to gracefully land on its perch. It is a nightly ballet.

Well, that is what I usually see. But not last evening.

Whenever the heat and humidity starts stewing up a tropical brew, the vultures disappear. And I am not certain why. Their cousin the Lucy-headed turkey vulture is a champion at migration. At least, some of them are; migrating as far as South America from The States.

But the turkey vulture is more sedentary. Some migrate short distances seasonally. More commonly, they up-stakes in the face of changing weather. When they sense a change in their environment, they will look for more hospitable environs until the bother passes.

Maybe that is why the vultures on the tower are not coming home to roost. In my absence, we experienced the lightest of rain. Perhaps that was enough for the vultures to realize we are entering our storm season.

And we need the storms. Jalisco is already in one of the worst droughts it has experienced. For an economy heavily dependent on agriculture, that does not bode well. It also is a problem for people who need water to survive. Without rain, this area of Mexico could easily become as inhospitable to tourists as it is to the resident black vulture community.

There seems to be something inherent in being human, that we struggle when we try to imagine what is happening in places we know when we are not there. I have a friend in Ontario who stays in Melaque for about five months each year. She was shocked to discover that when the northern tourists leave, they are replaced by Mexican tourists. She has just never seen what happens when she leaves.

Two weeks ago, someone posted on a local Facebook page that we might get our first rain from a storm headed our way. Yesterday, a northern visitor, safely ensconced in his Alberta home, asked how much damage the storm had caused. I assume that question was occasioned by the floods Melaque suffered last year and the mistaken belief that every "storm" here is dangerous.

Of course, they are not. Storms are the source of our much-needed water, and they are welcome. It is true that summer is also hurricane and tropical storm season. And they often affect our weather here even though they rarely visit us directly.

But people who have not live her during the summer lack the context to make sense of local weather discussions. Maybe the virus has over-sensitized us to potential dangers. It is easy to imagine the worst when you are not in the situation.

That brings us back to the missing black vultures. Their seasonal sense is far better than ours. They are gone, but they will return. Just like the successive waves of tourists that storm the local shores.

Last evening, I was thumbing through a biography of Taneda Santōka, the Japanese master of free-form haiku. I must have been musing about the vultures because one of Santōka's poems begged for my attention.

If I walk, a cuckoo
If I hurry,
a cuckoo.

And that is a haiku perfect for filtering thoughts of presence, absence, being -- and black vultures.