April 6, 2021
A few Sundays ago, I saw something unusual here. It was a bad car accident. Two late-model passenger cars had been in a head-on collision, and there was an ambulance on scene and police directing traffic.
I’d guess that the average age of a motor vehicle around the Tepoztlan area is 12 to 15 years, and they tend to get fixed only when something fails. Yet serious accidents are extremely rare, and the head-on smash involved two people not from here.
Discussing it with friends later, we observed that people who live here show a pronounced situational awareness. They’re very connected to their surroundings through their senses, and as drivers, they’re courteous and try hard to avoid accidents. They know that wandering cows, horses, dogs and pedestrians are likely to be around every corner.
Even those of us who come here from urban environments in other countries change a little, so that we’re less in our heads and more aware of sensory inputs. Often, a person who’s just arrived here stands out because there’s a slightly glazed look to them, and they avoid eye-contact. Locals are the opposite.
This morning, I went for a hike with my friend Robin, before the heat of the day began. She had brought a couple of plastic grocery sacks, and when we came onto a well-walked part of our trail home, she pulled them out. We began stuffing discarded snackfood bags, pop bottles and bottle caps into them. After a couple of hundred yards, the bags were full, and ready to split.
Along with cruelty to animals, or at least indifference to it, littering is one of the most depressing aspects to life here. People discard packages all along the roadways, and of course in the rainy season, they end up being washed into the streams.
You know the rest of that sad story.
I’ve been told that the habit of discarding things comes from the fact that for centuries, anything people ate or used was degradable, or was ceramic or stone, and thus remained inert in the general environment. But it occurred to me this morning that the absence of car accidents is the other side of the coin to littering.
In both cases, people are focused on the now, but have little concern about the future. If I say I’ll be at your place at 11.00, in Mexico you won’t be offended if I arrive at 11.20. If I ask a tradesman to fix a plumbing problem, I fully expect he could be an hour late, because he might not necessarily figure in the amount of time he’ll need to buy a length of pipe or a new tap. Or, if he does make that calculation, he doesn’t see making me wait as a significant problem. It’s simply an aspect of how things are.
Time here is experienced, but most people don’t structure it. I have one or two adult Mexican friends who cannot grasp that every action they perform uses up time, and who don’t really understand why they never arrive at a specified hour. They’re in now, but they pay no serious attention on then. Discarding a juice box gets rid of the juice box: it doesn’t relate to the package’s ultimate destination in the Gulf of Mexico, or the Atlantic.
In many ways, living in Mexico is an antidote to the frenzied lifestyle of modern cities. Coming here can feel like subtle punishment directed at the acquired need to organise every hour of our lives.
However, while successful expats soon lose the temptation to lecture local people on how to live their lives ‘better,’ we always hope that some of our awareness of the world beyond today will rub off. After Robin and I had filled our bags, we both felt depressed by discovering six large garbage bags someone had abandoned along the trail. They had been disposed of in a now of some weeks or months ago, but they had begun to split and spread their contents over an extensive swathe of fields and tracks. Whoever abandoned them had given no serious thought to the bags’ impending then.
Mexed Messages 