one of these is not like the others

Sometimes I feel as if Barra de Navidad is in a time warp.

Of course, it is. That is one reason I like living here. But I was thinking of a very specific slice of anachronism.

In the eleven years I have lived here, I have seen several changes in Mexican bank notes. 

• 2010 --  Diego Rivera replaced Ignacio Zaragoza on the 500-peso note.
• 2011 -- The Bank of Mexico issued commemorative notes celebrating the bicentennial of Mexican Independence and the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution: a Revolution-era steam engine on the 100-peso note and Miguel Hidalgo on the 200-peso note. That last one is a favorite of mine because it is printed portrait rather than landscape.
• 2017 -- The Bank issued a commemorative 100-peso note honoring the anniversary of enactment of the Mexican Constitution of 2017.
• 2018 -- Benito Juarez replaced  Diego Rivera on the 500-peso note as the first step in issuing new notes for each denomination.
• 2019 -- The second step was to replace Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on the 200-peso note with Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos y Pavón, in honor of the War of Independence.

I have written about the last few revisions. But there is always a time lapse between the Bank's announcement that new notes are on the way and when they actually show up in wallets here on the Pacific coast. That is why I was surprised last year to see the 500-peso show up in a San Patricio ATM last year within two weeks of being issued (money makes the words go round).

It took a bit longer for a local ATM to disgorge the new 200-peso -- on Friday. Almost four weeks since it was issued.

Actually, I am not the least bit surprised it would take that long for bills in circulation to make their way here. Even after printing new notes, the Bank allows the old versions to circulate as long as they are still sound. The ATM that delivered the new 200s to me also included a 500-peso Zaragoza note. It was issued (bit not necessarily printed), eighteen years ago.

The down side of all these notes is that they all quickly disappear as I trade past-hours toiled for my current needs of food and housing. All three -- the past, the current purchases, and the notes -- disappear too quickly. As do we.

But there will always be new notes in the batter's box. The new 1000-peso note will be issued next year. Not that we will see many of them here.

Just think of your wallet as a Mexican time tunnel.
  

breaking the bank rather than the bronco

I should know better.

But after six years of living in a house that requires me to make annual "trust deed" payments, you would think that I would have learned to ride the bureaucratic bank bronco.

So did I.

Because I live within the restricted zone where the Mexican Constitution prohibits foreigners from owning property outright in fee simple, I must pay annual tribute to a bank to maintain the legal fiction that it is the bank that owns my house rather than some nefarious outlander.

It is an interesting fiction.

Rather than amend Section 27 of the constitution that prohibits foreign ownership of land within 100 kilometers of the border and 50 kilometers from the coast, the Mexican congress passed a foreign investment law in 1995 that created the legal chimera I now indulge in -- along with many other foreigners. My bank (Bancomer in Cihuatlan) and I have an agreement called a fideicomiso.

I paid all of the money for the house. I insure it. I pay the taxes it generates. And I maintain it. But I do not have a fee simple interest in the property -- at least, not as we northerners use that term.

I pay the bank an annual fee and it lets me live here for 50 years. That agreement is then renewable for another 50 years. When I asked my attorney what happens then, he smiled and asked me if I had many any other plans in 2105. He had a point.

Last week Bancomer sent me an email reminding me my fee for 2019 is now due. If I wanted to keep living in the house with no name, I had best hie myself to Cihuatlan with my homage in hand.

Mexico, having a modern banking system, gave me a number of options to meet my financial obligations.

1. Pay at the bank in either US dollars or pesos. (The fee, like many bank international charges are denominated in US dollars. $522 in my case -- including VAT.)
2. Pay at the bank with a check. (I tried that once. My American bank account was found to be unsatisfactory for the task.)
3. Send a check to an address in California. (Or maybe it was to a prince in Nigeria. Too time sensitive for me.) An address in Mexico City is provided as an alternative.
4. Use a credit card. (That process is initiated by email. I have never tried it.)

The only option I have used with any success is driving to Cihuatlan and paying in US dollars. I just happened to have the exact amount handy because I was in The States recently and knew the fee was due.

But this is Mexico. And my task involved a bank. I stopped before I left the house and thought of everything that might go wrong. The most obvious bump was if the bank refused dollars, even though it has never done that in the past.

So, I took along my debit card. When none of the local ATMs are working (and that is not an uncommon occurrence here during the past year), Bancomer is where I go for cash. I could get pesos there if I needed them.

I thought I had outfoxed the system. (Please cue the hubris trombones.)

Yesterday I drove through Cihuartlan on another mission. The place was a mess. Traffic was snarled because the bridge was closed and the streets were clogged with sand washed down from the hills during our tropical depression on Sunday night. (The sand is a problem during our normal summer rains. Yesterday it was bad enough that cars were getting stuck in it.)

This morning, the bridge was opened, but the traffic was much worse. I knew why. A lot of people could not get to town yesterday because of high water. They were now in town doing what they needed to do.

One of the things they needed to do was go to the bank. There was a large line in the lobby waiting to use the bank's four ATMs. But that line was short compared to the people waiting for cashiers. My number was 47. Number 3 was being served.

The customer representative operating the new number machine was kind enough to ask why I was there. He took my letter to a cashier and returned with what he thought was bad news. I could not pay with dollars -- despite my payment history and what the letter clearly said.

I did not have that many pesos with me. Undeterred (because I had thought of this option), I retired to the ATM line. A line that had not moved since I entered the bank.

One machine was marked "out of service." But the same three people kept trying the other three machines. Over and over and over.

Finally, a very pleasant young lady informed us that the bank's system had crashed. Please come back tomorrow. And thank you for being a customer.

Everyone departed. Glum, but without grumbles.

I now need to gather up pesos to take to Cihuatlan tomorrow. I stopped at the Banamex ATM in Barra de Navidad. I did not need to even try. A notice informed me it was incapable of providing any cash -- for the moment. Come back another day.

I did learn a lesson, though. Next year I will have both US dollars and the equivalent in pesos in my hand. Mind you, I do not for one moment believe that some other requirement will jump up and send me home for another try.

What surprised me is that I did not have a northern fit -- even internally. Like the Mexicans in the ATM line, I left glum, but without grumbles.

And that is something Mexico has taught me. I may not get my way all of the time, but everything will turn out just fine.

in the still of the day

There is nothing quite as disconcerting as nature in repose.

The first experience I can remember was on 12 October 1962 -- what we from the Pacific Northwest still colloquially call The Columbus Day storm. The Big Blow.

I had just returned home from grade school. The afternoon had an eerie calm. No dogs barking. No birdsong. Just silence.

Well, silence from nature. People were still going about their mundane lives oblivious to the extratropical storm that was bearing down on us. Some claimed to see a mystical yellowish light in the western sky minutes before the storm hit.

With the exception of the light (the stuff  superstitions are made of), this morning was just as silent as that afternoon almost 57 years ago.

When I stepped out of my bedroom, there was no breeze, no chattering birds, no geckos smooching it up.  Just silence. In its silence, even the air seemed to hang heavy.

The comparison with my first big wind storm made me wonder if I had been wrong about the storm on its way here. The National Hurricane Center had predicted disturbance Sixteen would arrive here late this afternoon as a tropical storm. Nothing out of the norm for our summers.

But it felt as if the storm now re-christened Narda (as if it were some second-tier C.S. Lewis adventure) might have some surprises in store for us. I even ran across a friend who swore that it was a category three hurricane.

I once said I thought I would never experience anything as anti-climatic as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. I was wrong.

Last night our bay experienced one of our regular thunder storms. It was not related to Narda, but it certainly seemed like a fitting prelude to a true tropical storm.

Imagine being stuck in a timpani with a Jacob's ladder as your sole companion while by a testosterone-fueled teenager swings his mallets above as buckets of water continually pour over your head. That was our storm last night. I personally love those periodic shows.

But Narda was yet to arrive. It did this afternoon. Not as a hurricane. Not as a tropical storm. But as a tropical depression. Its passage over land had sapped most of its Thorian power.

No thunder. No lightning. A bit of a wind. And quite a bit of rain.

Enough rain to transform Barra de Navidad's streets into a miniature Venice. Of course, that means the contents of our sewer pipes that were once flowed underground are now floating down the streets just like -- well, just like Venice.

The rain is still falling. But it has been transformed into the type of soft rain that used to draw me to on the Oregon coast.

So, there you have it. If this had been an Andrew Lloyd Webber production, there would not be one memorable song. I guess that would be the same thing.

That is good enough for me. The farmers are getting their rain. For the rest of us, the aquifers are being refreshed.

Best of all, the temperature has fallen to a blessed 79 degrees. Tonight there will be no need for fans, let alone air conditioning.

I talked with some acquaintances this afternoon about the affect television news has had on our anxiety about weather. Every cloud now portends a Dorian.

No one was a better prophet on this, and most other social phenomenon, than Matt Groening. Summing it all up is the inestimable Kent Brockman:





Update: I may have been too hasty to call Narda over. We are now getting some healthy gusts of wind. I will let you know in the morning what our towns look like.

storm sa brewin'

I am back in Barra after spending two days in Ajijic.

I will share my Ajijic impressions and some travel tales involving tolls and police activity. But that can wait until Sunday and Monday. I think.

But there is a story percolating now that I wanted to talk about. I watched our hurricane that passed over Barra earlier this month from the tranquility of the Oregon high desert. There is a possibility that I may be treated to a reprise. Here in Barra this time

For the last two days I have watched a weather pattern developing south of Acapulco. Actually, there were two. One came to nothing, as most of them do. But the other has daily increased its possibilities of turning into either a depression or a tropical storm. About an hour ago, it received its temporary christening -- Sixteen.

What is a bit surprising is how quickly it is developing. There is a 90% chance of the pattern turning into a depression or storm within 48 hours. The map explains why our morning is heavily overcast. We are already seeing part of the weather system.

Here are two interesting pieces of data:

1. The system is moving west-northwestward. If the westward component prevails, the disturbance should move out to sea before it reaches us. But, if the northwestward component prevails, it could run right over the top of us -- just like hurricane Lorena did. But, this time, as a tropical stprm. The current path says we will experience some of it. Whatever it is going to be.

2. The National Hurricane Center feels the disturbance is worth warnings. "Interests along that portion of the coast [southwestern Mexico -- that includes us] should monitor the progress of this disturbance since tropical storm watches or warnings could be required later today or Sunday." We are part of that blue potential warning line on the map.

As always, there is no need for panic over storms this minor. They simply take a bit of planning and watching. With all of that summer-warm water out there, there is plenty to feed the system as it develops.

Even if it does not turn into a depression or storm, The Hurricane Center is warning of heavy rainfall with possible flash flooding and mudslides for the next few days. Starting tonight or Sunday around Acapulco. We should see activity Sunday evening.

It is that time of year.

falling into the season

It passed right by and I did not feel a thing.

The first day of fall.

The cycle of seasons always make for good blog fodder. Four essays each year are just there for the plucking. And I wasted one. Instead of talking about the crisp air and autumn leaves, I was yammering on about the banana plague headed our way(don't slip on that peel).

Well, the part about crisp air and autumn leaves just does not happen here. We are at the height of our Very Wet and Hot season that has very little to do with spiced cider and afternoon football games. The first day of any season is a bit hard to detect in this neck of the woods.

The only real sign that Earth is on its constant route around the sun is our slightly diminished day length. I say "slightly" because Barra de Navidad is not Svalbard where the sun will soon disappear from the sky.

Because we are much closer to the equator at 19 degrees north than at Prineville's 44 degrees (where I just spent two weeks on an aborted mission), the days still seem relatively long to me. Even though both Barra and Prineville now have just over 12 hours of sunlight each day, Barra will gain the edge with each passing day until the balance swings in Prineville's favor around the first day of Spring next year. The swing, of course, is far more radical for those of you who call The Great White North home.

Yesterday, a reader and Facebook friend, Gayla Pierce, announced she had pulled out her astrological charts as part of her neighborhood Autumnal Equinox party. (She lives in California.) I told her, if I had thought of it, I would have sacrificed a couple doves to read their entrails. But that struck me as far too Shakespearean.

Apparently, the bird population took umbrage at my avian humor. I was sitting in the patio this morning reading the newspaper. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a bit of movement. When I looked up, there were fifteen or twenty black vultures, who nightly roost in the antenna beside my house, circling over me -- wheeling as if they were a squadron of bombers returning from a raid on Ploiești.

That is them in the photograph at the top of this essay. Or, rather, that is some of them. Trying to capture the entire group would have left them nigh invisible in a photograph.

But the message was clear. "You got a really nice house here. It would be a shame if someone dropped a drying cat corpse in your pool."

And that is why I am not going to share with you what I think is the obvious solution to the overpopulation of wild horse herds in the American West. (I was reading a newspaper article on that particular problem when I noticed the vultures. Nature does ape art in sardonic ways.)

I am not going to share my pony thought thoughts based on the instruction of that wise philosopher Mr. Spock: "Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end."
I do take some lessons to heart -- even if they are only another day on the calendar. 

don't slip on that peel

Someone asked me last week how it feels to live in a village under the constant threat of hurricanes.

I really did not know where to begin -- because I do not live in a village that is under a constant threat of hurricanes.

Barra de Navidad has its share of summer storms. That is how we get the rain that makes farming a going concern here on the coast. And we do have the occasional tropical storm.

But hurricanes are a relative rarity. We have received glancing blows from only two hurricanes during the eleven years I have lived here -- Jova and Patricia. Well, it was two until last week when tropical storm Lorena upped her game to be a category one hurricane.
 
Unlike Jova and Patricia, the major portion of the storm did not turn east over mainland Mexico as the two previous hurricanes had done. Instead, it moved due north up the coast as a chimera -- part aquatic, part terrestrial -- leaving wind and rain damage in its wake.

In every storm here, the crop that pays the largest price are the banana plants. The plants look sturdy. But they are very susceptible to damage in high winds. There have been plenty of photographs posted on the internet showing snapped stems and broad leaves strewn across once-orderly fields.

Growing bananas has many risks. Wind being one of the most common. But, the banana plant's weakness is also its strength.  

The fact that a banana plant is not a tree is important to banana growers. Each plant grows only one stalk of bananas. When the stalk is cut, there is no more need for the plant. It has served its duty and will receive the Marie Antoinette treatment. That is, if Marie Antoinette had been guillotined at her feet.

Commercial bananas do not reproduce sexually. They are all clones of one another. Once a banana plant is in the ground, it will propagate through shoots from the sister plant.

Once the debris is cleared away, banana plants, like those in the photograph at the top of this essay, will sprout a new stem and produce a stalk of bananas. That is, if the grower is lucky. If not, the stalk will be cut down and the process will start all over.

I have been told that most banana plants here will produce two crops each year. Most of the banana growers are going to have a late harvest for the current crop. Some will need to start the process all over, and subsequently lose 50% of their revenue for the year.

Wind storms come and go. But banana growers the world over (including those in Mexico) are facing an imminent disease tsunmai. The grocery store banana with which we are familiar is called Cavendish -- named in honor of the Duke of Devonshire whose gardener developed it in the 1850s.

It was not the grocery banana of my youth. That was the Gros Michel that succumbed world-wide commercially to the Panama virus in the 1950s. The reason for the inevitable demise goes back to my earlier factoid. Commercial bananas do not reproduce sexually. They are clones. That means once a disease strikes a banana strain, it is just a matter of time before it can no longer be grown profitably.

And as went the Gros Michel, so is the Cavendish going. For Gros Michel, it was the Panama virus. For the Cavendish it is a fungus: black leaf streak. The fungus has been held at bay in some areas, but it is a losing strategy. The disease will win out eventually because of the cost of fighting it.

Science has an answer. Several botanical strategies have been developed. But the most promising was announced earlier this year. Through gene splicing, scientists believe they have found a way for the plant itself to fight off the fungus. That, of course, will mean eventually digging up all of the Cavendish root stock and replacing it with a fungus-resistant Cavendish.

And, yes, in another 50 years or so, some other disease will develop that will Humpty-Dumpty even the Super Cavendish. It is the inherent weakness of cloned crops.

I doubt I will ever witness a fourth variety of banana on my breakfast table. That would mean living longer than my mother -- who has far better genes than any banana plant.

But it goes to prove, even with our obsession with the weather, there are far deadlier things in life than a tropical storm. Especially if you are a banana.

not cottoning to politics in my mother's garage

Change comes in increments.

When I sold my house in Salem in 2013, I pulled a St. Francis and gave away most of the goods I had accumulated over the past sixty-something years. Almost everything either went to the dump, Goodwill, or the Salvation Army. Clothes. Furniture. Books. Vinyl records. Electronics. Stalin conducted lighter purges.

But not everything was sent off to the Gulag. Of course, there was the Escape-load of personal items that I took to Mexico in 2009. And there were several boxes of items that managed to escape destruction. Most, for sentimental reasons.

Sentiment is an odd thought pattern. I realized that this week when I moved some boxes that I had stored at my mother's house.

I am not certain why I did not throw out the contents of those five boxes. This month, I decided it was time to move those boxes south. There are too many to ship by air. I can take a few items in my suitcases on this trip back to Mexico. But I will need to return with my current Escape to move the remainder south.

That meant it was time to triage the contents with a fresh eye.

I suspect everyone falls into the trap of nostalgia when sifting through possessions they have not seen in years. I had kept a lot of loose photographs that created a rather manicured thread of my life. Grade school. High school. College. Air Force. Politics.

Some of you know that I ran for an Oregon legislative seat in 1988. I have been involved in politics all of my life. In high school, in addition to being conversant with major league baseball statistics, I could recite the names of every person in the United States Senate and House -- by state, sometimes by district. I was a regular reader of The Congressional Record. It was merely a matter of time before I would run for office.

In 1988 I lived in a House district in suburban Portland that was represented by a two-term incumbent. That would usually be a warning signal. Incumbents tend to win. But he had won both times by extremely close margins.

Before I could meet him in the general election, I had to win a primary against an opponent who was over 20 years older than I. (I was 38 at the time.) He was also far to my right. Both factors made it a very close primary election. I won by 111 votes. Awarding me the sobriquet: "Landslide Cotton."

While filtering the boxes, I ran across one of the many mailers the campaign sent to voters. The issues I ran on seem quite familiar: crime, property tax relief, jobs, workers' compensation reform, public school funding.

I will confess that other than fund-raising, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There is something exhilarating when friends, family, and total strangers get together with the common goal of improving governance.*

If you already knew I ran, you also know how the tale ends. On election night the race was too close to call because of a large number of write-in ballots for an Oregon Supreme Court seat. Only a couple hundred votes separated my result from my opponent's. We had to wait almost a full week to discover that my opponent had once again pulled off a victory in the closest race of the 60 assembly seats.

I did not run again -- for a number of reasons. But my box-rummaging Reminded me just how professional the campaign was. Most of us were volunteers, but we also had professional advice. That distinctive green and white graphic in the photograph art the top of this essay was borrowed from a candidate who had run for governor.

When mistakes were made, they were the result of good intentions gone bad. The worst one involved a campaign button.

In 1965 a state representative (later US Senator) by the name of Bob Packwood started the Dorchester Conference. It was originally designed as a forum to discuss how Oregon Republicans could re-build their party after the 1964 Goldwater election. Because of it genesis, it was long-viewed as a liberal Republican conference.

The conference always attracted politicians interested in election. My campaign was there in the winter of 1988.

My campaign manager told me she and our campaign consultant had cooked up a surprise. When I arrived, the two of them had set up our booth in the foyer of the Seaside convention center. Our green-and-white lawn signs, buttons, brochures, and bumper stickers were tidily displayed.

Then, I saw the surprise. And here it is.

I was dismayed. For two reasons. The less-important reason is that "pick Cotton" was something you might see on a construction paper poster for a candidate seeking the class treasurer position of his high school class.

The more-important reason is the obvious one. "I'm a Cotton picker" sends exactly the wrong message on my stand concerning racial equality.

There was only one button left on the table. I took it. All the rest had been sold and were being worn by delegates. I tried to buy them back. No one would give up theirs.
In the end, it all blew over. It did not become an issue in the campaign. But it is a reminder to me every time I see it that even the best-run project can go astray.

I will now give you a warning. When I get back to Mexico, I will undoubtedly stumble down nostalgia lane with a few of the odder pieces I have discovered in my mother's garage.

It appears I will be heading back to Barra de Navidad on Friday with my business in Oregon unfinished. We will talk then.

   

* -- That sentence made me chuckle. The Economist recently reviewed a series of presidential political campaign books. My very earnest sentence seems to be akin to the reviewer's summary of Bernie Sanders's writing style.

Each chapter in Bernie Sanders's book, for instance, is headlined with a date. Where We Go From Here reads as though, on those particular dates, he turned on the recording function on his smartphone, shouted into it for a while, and then got an intern to transcribe everything.