taking the cycle out of recycling

There was an old hombre who owned a small lot.
Storing plastics and bottles, which he had not bought.
To China I'll sell them he gleefully said,
Until China sneered bluntly: re-cycling is dead.

OK. I know it is not T.S. Eliot. But neither was the original doggerel.

I wish I knew the man's name, but I do not. But, he has run a plastic recycling operation in Barra de Navidad for years where I have dropped off my empty bottles.

Well, not really a recycling operation. He is the first step in turning used plastics into something useful other than for crab rafts in the middle of the ocean.

Neighbors bring their broken lawn chairs, empty bottles, cardboard boxes to him. But primarily plastic bottles.

No longer.

I took him a bag of plastics late last week, and he informed me he is no longer accepting plastics. He cannot find a buyer for his goods.

I was afraid this day of reckoning would hit our area. Last year, China announced that it would stop accepting garbage from the West for recycling (going green can be a dirty business).

My neighbor was just the first step in an international chain of recycling. He would sell his plastic to a buyer who, several steps later, would cram it into a shipping container and boat it off to China. In China, it would be used for all manner of things.

The rub is that recycling plastics is a major pollutant. China realized that it could not meet its agreements under the Paris Accords if it was a recycling hub. And because it is a Communist dictatorship, when the leadership decides to do something, like cutting off the internet or heads, it just does it.

The news caught the West by surprise. Britain had very little notice that it needed to come up with a method to handle the 80% of its garbage that went to China. It is too bad someone did not work it into one of the Brexit plans. Trashit, perhaps.

Last year, when I talked with the man who owns our local plastic-gathering operation, he told me he had not heard of China turning off the plastic recycling tap. He has now. And a lot of us will now need to find another spot for our plastics other than leaving them on the street corner. The woman who used to pick the bottles out of my trash no longer does. There is no value in them for her, either.

I know there are alternatives. After all,the bottles that are gathered in the giant fish containers on the beach must be going somewhere. And I am certain someone will be happy to volunteer that information.

For now, though, as the man who owns the lot told me, his stacks of plastic are merely an arsenal for the next hurricane that blows through.

That is probably not the concept of recycling that the Davos crowd would like to impose on us.

through a mind darkly

Our minds are amazing tools.

I just woke up from a nap thinking I was in the north of England, and I had to dress for dinner to meet my hosts downstairs.

Of course, none of that was true. I was in Barra de Navidad with palm-framed sunsets and Mexicans on wakeboards pulled by ski-doos. I would be hard-pressed to come up with two settings that were less alike.

Therefore, it was a bit jarring when I looked at my telephone and found a message from my friend Hilary in England. She would have been the hostess that I would have met for dinner in that Lancashire house with the staircase.

She was thanking me for a birthday card (postmarked 9 August in San Patricio) that had just arrived today in Thornton-Cleveleys.

Odd that. Waking up thinking about a place that has always had a special spot in memory -- and, for a brief moment, actually being there.

Maybe this is another of those blissful side effects of aging where the best moments of our lives reside in a glass darkly. Constant reminders that what our parents told us is true -- that everything does turn out well in the end. And we get to live them over and over as if our best experiences were trapped in a silver heaven of film that plays on reel after reel.

Or maybe I simply ate too much sugar before I took my nap.

Either way, it is a lovely Sunday evening, I have friends who think about me, and the world is filled with possibilities.

gassing the goat

Earlier this week I received an email from a reader who posed a question I am occasionally asked.

"What's a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like Melaque?"

I chuckled. It was not just the clever use of a line from Blazing Saddles that amused me. It was the fact that the question proceeded from a false assumption.

I am far from an urbanite.

Don't get me wrong. I love big cities. New York. London. Paris. I even considered retiring in two of them until I realized it is not the cities I like. It is what they have to offer. And I can always fly there when I have the urge to indulge in their offerings of haute culture.

There is a bit of Oliver Wendell Douglas in me, though "farm living is [not] the life for me." Given a choice, I will always choose the virtues of Jeffersonian agrarianism over effete urbanism.

That is one reason I appreciated the sight yesterday of a small famliy of goats wending their way through our local filling station. It is not a sight I would see in Manhattan -- or even Salem. Here, it did not seem a bit unusual.

And that is as good an answer as any to the question of why this faux-sophisticate finds moments of grace in his rural hermitage. 

  

on the road with mexpatriate

I mentioned last Saturday that I had just returned from a very brief trip to Lake Chapala -- and that I had two traveling tips to pass along.

One may have some permanency. The other, I hope, was an aberration.

You can see my first news item at the top of this essay. On the route to and from Lake Chapala, there are five or six toll booths where tribute must be paid to the God Who Maintains Some of the World's Best Highways. Tribute amounting to 378 pesos. Or about $19 (US). One way.

The first toll booth is between Manzanillo and Tecoman. I started fumbling, as I usually do, for cash (a 500-peso note at the first toll) when I am about 1000 feet from the booth.

When I focused again on the several traffic lanes, there was something new. A series of bright yellow load restricters led to one lane. A lane that announced that cars of a certain height and width could proceed without paying a toll.

I zoomed through -- an experience that reminded me of my military duties in the 1970s when I drove Greek roads toll-free -- several pesos wealthier.

The photograph is not of that booth. It is the new toll booth near lago de Sayula. The restricters were there, but tolls were required.

What to make of this? I do not know. I was going to stop at one of the booths and interview someone in charge. But, when I am on a travel roll, I roll.

Maybe one of you has better information. It appears that some automobiles are going to be able to travel with less expense in the future.

My second news item is not as good. Or, at least, I think it is. Because I do not have any hard facts, I am simply going to report what I saw.

On my drives to the Guadalajara, I encounter four or five police cars. I do not drive slow. That is an understatement. I regularly travel about 20% above the speed limit.

But, on the toll roads, you would think I was one of those old men in Miami who putts along in the left lane with his turn signal continually flashing and a hula girl dancing from his rear-view mirror. Most cars pass me by going at least 20 MPH faster than I am driving. Even so, I keep my eye out for the police.

I did not have to look intently on my Wednesday trip. There were at least six police cars between Barra de Navidad and Manzanillo. That was unusual. By the time I reached Colima, I had counted over twenty. And there were more past there. Usually congregated at the toll booths.

There were even more on my drive back to Barra on Friday. On the trip up, most of the police were waiting along the side of the highway. A couple had the usual trucker and motorcycle targets pulled over.

What was different on the trip back was the number of cars and pickups that were pulled over with their contents unloaded onto the shoulder. Just outside of Colima, what I assume were the occupants of the stopped car, were on the ground with two police officers holding rifles on them. There were six police cars at that stop -- and more were on the way.

About ten miles further along there was a less dramatic stop. Two police cars and the driver held at pistol-bay with his hands on the trunk of his car.

And it was not just police. There were three Army convoys -- one consisting of troops in the back of four white pickups. CFE (our electricity utility) pickups. That is the first time I have seen that.

When I asked my usual police source in Melaque if he knew what was up, he feigned a lack of knowledge and mumbled something about a Jalisco cartel declaring war on a Michoacan cartel in a territory expansion bid. That was not really news. The same story had been reported in the local newspapers.

And what is the moral of that tale? I really do not know because information involving this topics is always subject to a trip through the salt shaker.

What I do know is that I made my trip to Lake Chapala (successful in some respects, not in others) and returned home safely.

And I still have those two tolls to my credit. 

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.