making stuff up

Sleepless nights lead to late mornings.


I am sitting at my favorite table in La Rana (The Frog) waiting for a serviceable version of heuvos rancheros. 


La Rana tends to be a hangout for Canadians – and the few Americans who venture to Melaque.  (I was tempted to use “gringo,” but I am simply not in a mood to start another debate on whether the appellation applies to Canadians, or whether a gringo should ever use as term that the sensitive find derisive.)


But things are different this morning.  The Frog is hosting Mexican diners.  A realtor and his three children.  And an older family of four.  From Autlán.  Famous as the home town of Juan Corona – the serial killer, not the inventor of Mexican beer.


I like the change.  Despite the owner’s well-intentioned, but vaguely apartheidish, attempts to use flags to lure northern tourists, The Frog has a distinctly local flavor this morning.  Instead of the usual leaden and flat consonants, the conversation is filled with a torrent of soft vowels.  A language far more fitted to gossip and seduction than accounting and financial journals.


But accounting was under way.  At least, with the realtor’s children.  The oldest boy was cross-examining his father on the sweeter aspects of Halloween -- and wondering why such a blissful custom did not happen here.


It does.  At least, a beachhead has been taken.


I see a few Halloween decorations about.  Some children will show up at my gate tonight asking for candy (or money) in the few words of English they have learned.  Never with costumes.  As if they were government agents.


And the purists need not decry the loss of local customs.  My little village does not indulge itself in many of the highland customs that entrance northern tourists -- such as, Day of the Dead.  So, it is prime pickings for a holiday steeped in Celtic, rather than Hispanic, traditions.


While I listened to the boy Perry Mason his dad, I started thinking about what I would be doing if I still lived up north.  To start with, I would not be eating breakfast at 10:30.


Had I not left Salem, I would have been at work for three hours.  Probably in my second meeting of the day.  Dispensing sage advice.  And believing that all of it actually added up to something meaningful.  An existentialist void wearing a Yankee mask of purpose.


But there would also be people.  Friends.  Acquaintances.  Ready to share dinner at El Gaucho.  With a good story or two.  Or, even better, a lie.


But my self-indulgent reverie has come to an end.


My plate is empty, the bill has arrived -- and the laguna is still filled with water cabbage. 


My Sisyphean attentions are needed elsewhere.

clocking my time

My word to myself is not very good.


I told myself I was not going to waste space by writing about the end of Mexican daylight saving time.  After all, it is not very blogworthy, it happens every year.


But here I am, at the official 2 AM changing point, just itching to switch my bedside clock back one hour.  Of course, I am up at this time almost every night.  And, yes I know, I can do it anytime.  But you know -- I am a sucker for official acts. 


The only news is the same as last October.  Mexico gets its hour back tonight.  Canada and The States will not get theirs for another week.  So, my contacts up north will once again be time challenged.


OK.  I changed the clock.  Now I am going to sleep for an extra hour.

dogs and fairies

Once upon a time --


A beautiful princess named -- oh, let’s call her Diane -- lived in a kingdom far away in The Great Frozen North.  Beautiful, that is, in a biker bar waitress sense.


She was destined to live a life as happily ever after as any princess could live in a land where birds helped with the housework and dogs were wise counselors.


But, as in all tales of this sort, an older woman showed up.  Miffed about a misdirected party invitation or upset about ingenue beauty, we will never know.


What we do know is that poor Princess Diane found herself waking up in a tropical land where she could not speak the language.  And where, what she called “those people,” did not treat animals as she knew they should be treated.


What had seemed to be sensitivity in The Great Frozen North, in her exile, suddenly seemed like self-righteousness.  She alone needed to set right the imbalance between people who were not nice to animals.


So, the princess who would have tossed in bed with the presence of a pea, changed herself into a thief.  Someone is threatening a dog with a stick?  Steal it.  Or what appears to be a starving puppy?  Steal it.  Or someone is training a fighting cock?  Buy it.


Pretty soon she was a princess with a menagerie of animals -- none of whom could help her with her chores or advise her on her next step.  So, she started doling out animals to people she hoped were as sensitive as she thought herself to be. 


Of course, they weren’t.  It is one of the delusions of self-righteousness.  Being nice is nowhere near the same thing as being good.


And she knew things had come full circle when she stole two kittens and had to leave them stuffed in a box at the front door of a woman who did know the difference between being nice and being good -- and doing the right thing.


When last seen, poor Princess Diane was dressed in a black cloak carrying an apple looking for Snow White. 


Because today’s princess is merely tomorrow’s sorceress.


Note:  The photograph at the top of this post was shot by Nancy Dardarian and posted on her blog: Countdown to Mexico.  It has set on my desktop for months waiting for just the right story.  And here it is.

languid laguna

The laguna is starting to fill.


And it is its own performance art. 


Not the type that upsets taxpayers when they discover their hard-earned money has been shelled out to a woman smeared in chocolate syrup reciting her own poetry translated into Urdu.


Nope.  The natural kind.


This year the laguna was opened to the sea to mitigate the flood damage that was expected from the recent tropical storm.  It worked.  To a degree.  If it had breached on its own, the flooding would have been far worse.


As a result of The Great Flush, the laguna’s character took on a Jekyll-Hyde switch.  Though it is hard to tell which is which.


With the water went the water hyacinth and water cabbage in the main channel.  And all sorts of garbage, snakes, spiders, crabs, and fish.  Maybe even the odd crocodile.


For the crocodiles, the drain was a boon.  They had their own beach free from human bother.


But that is all gone.  The water is rising.  And things are returning to normal.  The crocodiles are now destined to skulk through the tule.


Without its hyacinth-cabbage cover, the water surface reflects the natural beauty parade around its shore.

 

And the wildlife is returning.  Some of them new to me, like this ringed Kingfisher doing a credible Woody Woodpecker impersonation.  A shot that somehow reminds me of my friend Howard Platt and how much I miss him at moments like this.

Or this great Egret.  The Norma Desmond of the waders.

 

Even this Everglades Kite is new.  I am accustomed to seeing the male, but I think this is the first time I noticed the female.  Maybe I was wrong about him being a rogue loner.  He may not be the compatriot I thought he was.

 

Even my little inlet is coming back to life.  With a little more water, I may be able to gather up the dead cabbage and snag the living rafts.

 
 

It would be nice to start a new cycle with a clean surface.  Before my friend the crocodile returns in full residence.

eve should have tried this

Sour.


Odd word that. 


On its own, it smacks of pinch-nosed Puritans clunking their way through Plymouth Colony in their not-so-comfortable shoes constantly worried about the state of their salvation while condemning anyone who was having the semblance of a good time. 


It is no coincidence that dour and sour are one consonant away from being Castor and Pollux.


But marry up that word with a tasty noun, and the little tug boat adjective pushes its noun into the heart of hedonism.


Sour cream, for instance.  (For a recent take on that union take a look at Felipe's Avocados and sour cream.)  The very essence of ambrosia.


But some marriages are far more complex than others -- the Windsors spring to mind.  As does sour orange.


I have one.  A sour orange tree, that is.  It is rather stunted due to the shade thrown by the paternalistic Flamboyant tree.  But it survives to throw its fruit.


When unripe, the oranges could be substituted for limes.  They are that acidic.  When ripe, they have a bit of sweetness.  Not much.  About the same measure you would expect to find in Joan Crawford's maternal well.


For the past two seasons, the oranges have gone to waste.  And that is too bad.  When I was in Oregon, I used them in my Cuban dishes.  There was no reason to let the harvest rot.


Making a Cuban marinade is easy.  Sour oranges.  Garlic (lots of garlic).  A bit of vinegar.  And a nice mixture of fresh ground black pepper, oregano, and cumin.  Swooshed together in an overnight bath for the chosen meat.


The marinade is not very particular.  Beef.  Pork.  Chicken.  They all work well with a marinade that is not the least bit subtle.


Baking is the preferred method for most recipes.  But I was in a fusion mood the other night.  Stir fried chicken Cubano sounded just about right.


One reason I like stir fry is that I get to grab fresh vegetables at the market.  Tomatoes.  Carrots.  Little zucchini.  Onion.  Serrano peppers.


Somewhere along the line I heard the voice of  my friend Carrol.  She once told me that men have a tendency to misread the effect of ingredients on each other.  To that I plead guilty.  I once made a salad dressing with mint and basil.  The combination was a disaster.  I would have been better using essence of lawn grass.


In this instance, the combination was not bad -- even though the acid in the marinade and the acid in the tomatoes did create an interesting taste choreography.


Poured over the top of multicolored farfalle, there was nothing understated for either the tongue or the eye.  One of those experiments that could have easily ended up in the trash can as on the dinner platter.  In this case, it was a success -- rather than a learning experience.

two worlds -- one me

Reality is not absolute.  It is relative.


Or so I have come to believe from leading my life -- and then reading about that life as perceived by people who are not here.


Despite what you may be thinking, I am not about to launch into the relationship between time and quantum physics.  Michael Crichton already did that -- to the cost of his reputation.


Almost every expatriate in Mexico has a local computer message board.  Ours is called TomZap.  And an active board it is.  Made up of Mexican citizens, full-time expatriates, part-time visitors, and people who wish they could be counted amongst any of the other three groups.


The big topic recently, of course, has been hurricane Jova, its effects, and aftermath.


As you know from reading my posts, I am very pleased with how quickly the residents of Melaque shook off the effects of the flooding the town experienced.  Within days, the shops and streets in the business districts were clean.  And everything was about as normal as things can be in our little village once the usual stream of commerce was reconnected.


But to read the comments on TomZap, you would be inclined to believe that a large portion of our town had suffered devastating, unrecoverable damage.


Now, I know much of that comes from the feeling of helplessness that people feel when things or people they like are facing what seems to be tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.  I understand the sentiments.  Our congregation felt the same way about our pastor’s family and the other people who were battered and  baptized by the Red River earlier this year.


Today I decided to try a little experiment.  I drove out to the Manzanillo airport to imagine I was one of the winter crowd arriving after my departure last March.  What I knew about the flood was what I read on TomZap.


I would not have been shocked by anything at the airport.  There are a few missing tiles on the front of the airport's overhang.  But work is underway.  Nothing even noteworthy.


On the 2 mile drive to the highway, everything looked as it should.  It is a natural wetland -- and it is wet.  But about halfway to the highway, this field appears.

To the uninitiated eye, it looks like an empty field.  But it is supposed to be (and was before the flood) filled with truck farm crops.  Usually peppers.  It now looks as out of place as a missing tooth in Kate Moss’s smile.


And then, almost to the intersection, things start looking a bit more Irwin Allen-ish.  Where there was once a cloverleaf intersection, there is now a collapsed highway ramp.  That is the photograph at the top of this post.


The river that lost the construction-wrenching water is over a mile away from the ramp.  Not surprisingly, there was plenty of flood damage the closer I got to the river.


This jumble of flotsam was once an Army checkpoint on the river border to Jalisco.  Where surly young soldiers once asked for papers. there are toppled trees. 

Repair teams have done a marvelous job of cleaning up the area and repairing the several hundred feet or road that was simply washed away.


And this is where all of that water was supposed to stay -- the river between the states of Jalisco and Colima.  I apologize for the “airplane window” view, but I was driving and shooting at the same time.

Much to my surprise, Cihuatlan, the equivalent of our county seat, was open for business.  It was a surprise because even with our normal summer rains, Cihuatlan’s streets are choked with sand.


Cihuatlan suffers the same issue as New Orleans.  Its geography recurringly argues against a city being there.  In Cihuatlan’s case, it is its presence on a narrow floodplain below steep hills and above a wandering river.


In the Jova flood, tons of sand washed down the hills choking the streets while the river rose flooding the city.  What the river did not wash away was buried in a combination of sand and silt that needed to be removed before it hardened into an almost concrete formation.


And removed it was.  Actually, the sand gets removed every time there is a rain -- right back to the top of the hill from whence it came.  President Obama may want to take note.  Cihuatlan has its own seasonal stimulus built into its sand heaps.


But our recently arrived visitors would see none of that.  What they would see are the same piles of sand (though they are a bit higher and more numerous) awaiting transport to the top of the hill -- just like any other year.


Once I left town on the way to Melaque, it was possible to see what the river did on the Jalisco side of the floodplain.  There are hectares of coconut plantations.  And under the palms are banana plants.  A very clever use of Mexico’s scarce agricultural space.


The problem is that most of the banana plants are now gone.  Snapped off by the flow of the flood water.

So, if the new arrivals are looking for signs of bad weather, they will find them.


On the other hand, they will also discover that Melaque is ready for them.  The San Patricio plaza was under water and covered by mud just a few days ago.  It is now ready to receive its winter visitors.

Was the flood bad?  You bet it was.  And once the grand gesture of immediate charity is done, people will start forgetting that there is an ongoing economic issue.


This area lives off of tourists and agriculture.  The flood just stripped the area of a full cycle of crops.  They are gone.  And so is the revenue that would have come from those crops.


Like most middle income nations, Mexico’s revenue flow is lightly balanced.  It will take some time to get back into a regular cycle.


And that is why the tourists that come to Melaque offer some of the best opportunities to help make up some of that revenue.  I intend to eat out more often and to leave a bit more folding money on the table as tips. 


After all, 20% is a real easy calculation for my ever-aging mind.  A small price to pay for a view like this.

sweat on the sand

It is hot in Melaque.


No.  That's not correct.  It should be hot in Melaque.  This is October.


Melaque has two seasons.  Hot and unbearably hot.


Hot runs from October through April.  Unbearably hot from May through September -- with moments of just hot when the rains arrive.


The calendar says the hot season should be here.  The arrival of northern short-term tourists underlines the expectation.  It is October and the voice of the Canadian is heard throughout the land.


But it is still unbearably hot.  As I draft this post, the temperature is 90 degrees.  The humidity is 70%.  There are enough drops of sweat on my reporter’s notepad to confuse it with a tween girl’s diary.


One of the benefits of our recent storm was a period of cool weather.  But the price for comfort was far too high.  I have already written about the flooding and the laundry project Christine initiated (laundress to the stars).  The reappearance of the sun has helped us get loads of laundry dry and back to their owners.  It appears that project is drawing to an end.

 

While picking up laundry, I noticed most of the homes had not yet been cleared of mud.  That got me to thinking of the neighbors of our new church palapa (which is looking more and more like a finished building).  They suffered some of the worst flooding -- at least, from the force of the water.


Tom, our summer pastor, and I decided to survey the neighbors to see if they needed any help cleaning out their homes.  Actually, Tom did the talking.  His Spanish and sensitivity for Mexican culture made him the obvious spokesman. 


It turned out that all of them had cleaned up their places and were back to normal.  Well, as normal as they could be with the loss of refrigerators and stoves.


We did discover, though, just how lightly balanced the Melaque economy is.  Most of the families had work.  But they could not work during the flood.  As a result, most of them were running short of food for their families.

Tom arranged to purchase food from a local wholesaler.  To get as many food bags as possible, he cut a couple of items off of the list.  The wholesaler volunteered to put the bags together for us -- and then donated the items that we had removed from our list.


That is Tom (at the top of this post) standing next to the Shiftless Escape with the bounty we were about to distribute.  I took the photograph near the food wholesaler warehouse.  But, If you look closely on the right, you will see a woman on a direct course to ask for one of the food bags.


Tom, Rosa (a Spanish-speaking member of our congregation), and I distributed a bag each to the neighbors of our church building.  The moment the truck showed up in the neighborhood, people were in the streets asking for bags.  But we requested them to return to their homes.  It was easier for us to be certain we had placed at least one bag at each home that way.


The laundry and food bag projects got me thinking about my dislike of hot weather.  For me, a perfect day is 55 degrees, overcast, with a nice light drizzle.  But I can tolerate a lot when it comes to the weather.


And then I felt rather petty when I remembered my neighbors.  They had lost almost everything when their homes were flooded.  But they accepted the fact that the flood was over and they now needed to return to their lives.  All they needed was a bit of food to get on with it.


Between laundry deliveries today, I stopped for lunch at Señor Froy’s -- one of my favorite beach restaurants.  Froy lost part of his palapa in the wind storm.  But it is fixed, and he is back in operation.


As I sat there looking at his new roof and the cleaned-up beach, I realized just how nice it is to simply sit and enjoy this beautiful part of Mexico.


And weather is not going to get in my way of doing that.