The High Hills

February 16, 2020

As the sun comes up every morning, it hits the upper cliffs behind me, to the west, some minutes before I see it rise over the ridge in the east. If I walk part of the way into town, as I did today, my path runs for a couple of miles south of the same mountains in which the village nestles, while ahead of me I can see long-extinct volcanoes rising several miles west of the town.

The cliffs over which the Sun rises each morning. This was taken in late afternoon, so they’re sunlit.

My perspective here is always governed by the mountains around me. And I’m not just surrounded by mountains, but by stratified mountains. The layers in the rockfaces are very clear in many places, and the sense of how many thousand of centuries were needed to lay them down isn’t far from my thoughts. I don’t know a lot about the seismic forces that heaved up these mountains that once formed the bed of a lost sea, but the whole deal took a very, very long time. Even a young mountain, like the volcano Popocatepetl, dates back an estimated 730,000 years.

On a purely human level, this village is reported by archeologists to have been populated for 3,500 years. There are petroglyphs around in various places, and in the town nearby are some ruined walls that are seven centuries old, or older. An hour’s drive would bring me to a half-dozen places that date back anywhere from six centuries to two millennia.

The cerros along the trail into town. The rise and fall of ancient seabeds is recorded in those rocks.

I wouldn’t say people spend a lot of time brooding on how ancient things are in this area, but it’s hard to be unconscious of how far back everything goes. Before I came here I’d spent four decades in Toronto, which only dates back a couple of centuries as a built-up town. And there are no nearby mountains or large, exposed rocks, with the exception of the Scarborough Bluffs. The oldest European settlements in Canada date to the mid-1500s, a short time after Cortes and the other Conquistadores began taking what we now call Latin America. The Spanish were dreadful at destroying the records of their predecessors on this continent, but enough information has survived to give us some idea of what those ancient people did, and what they believed. Archeology has excavated other civilisations that were old and gone before the Spanish booked their fateful ocean cruises.

This sense of always being surrounded in Mexico by old things has an effect on my perceptions. I might, as I did in my last post, lament the recent developments around me, but the age of the land, along with the length of human habitation –a habitation interwoven with an appreciation of that land – offers a counterpoint to all that. It underlines the change that’s happening, but geology also has a way of mocking human efforts to copy mountains with much smaller piles of stones. The inhabitants themselves still carry the look of indigenous people, reminding the eye that so much has come and gone, or come and not left.

Mexico can infuriate someone used to tidy streets and gardens. It can stun us at times with poverty, and it can seem hidebound by its rich yet hardly intellectual Catholicism.

But it always offers also the presence of things from times memorial and immemorial. In this way, it has an antidote to the frenetic, frantic pace of things around us: the divided politics, the rush to pave and exploit the land, and the recurrent fear that we might be losing everything.

Hexagonal basalt rocks overhang a walkway at the Salto de San Anton waterfall in nearby Cuernavaca. At the bottom centre, you can see where a fall of these rocks in 2017 destroyed part of the balustrade.

And it reminds us, too, how no culture survives forever. No-one knows for sure who was here those three-and-a-half millennia back, but new peoples and empires washed over this land in that time, and were in turn replaced.

Compared to all that, electoral cycles, economic ups and downs, and the latest epidemic slot into a very different world-view to the mainstream perspectives. I don’t necessarily find the mountains friendly – they can be overwhelming – but they do teach a perpetually important lesson in frenzied times.