Perceptions

June 3, 2021

Yesterday, I took my dog Rem out for a walk on the trail to the Baptismal Pool (Posa) of Quetzalcoatl. To be accurate, Rem took me, and exhausted both of us in the process. 

From the starting point south of the village, the trail crosses a rock-filled stream, then follows a rough track up a hillside for a few hundred yards. Some distance further along, there is a mirador, an area with large, smooth rocks that overlooks the canyon through which the stream flows. Usually, hiking groups pause here before going on to the Posa.

This time, the place was filled with cheap plastic toys, coloured plates and cups, and it had a string of shrivelled balloons from one edge of the sitting area to the other. There was gold-coloured tinsel, too, and the remains of cookies in the grass. Glitter had been sprinkled all over. To one side sat two toy trucks. I couldn’t imagine who would or could have a children’s party and leave such a mess, but considering the trail to the Posa is seen as sacred, it seemed incredibly inconsiderate. This afternoon, I went back with a garbage bag, and began collecting the mess before all the plastic items were washed by the rains into the stream below.

As I was finishing up, disentangling the last bits of tinsel tied to a bush, Armando arrived. I don’t know him well, but we’ve had a nodding acquaintanceship for years. He had just been to the Posa himself, and had come to the mirador to rest for a few minutes. I explained what I was doing, and he nodded.

Then he began explaining. Something people here do a couple of times a year is come to the mirador to make offerings to the duendes (fairy folk, basically) and to children who have died. Hence the brightly coloured cups and plates, and the toys.

In older times, they left toys made of wood or clay, which of course degraded naturally over time in an exposed place. People now buy cheap plastic toys in the marketplace because that’s what their children play with, or would have played with if they had lived.

As most of my readers know, I edited magazines for the plastics industry in Canada for decades, so I’m acutely aware of the positives and negatives of synthetic polymers. Their use saves us a great deal in energy consumption every year, from production of parts through to shipping, while their disposal is often problematic. The local tendency to just throw pop bottles in a ditch saddens me no end, because I grasp where they’re going to end up. But for millennia, people here tossed aside what they no longer needed, or what was broken, and gave it little more thought.

There is also more of a sense here of rural people living in a continuum. The present is all, and who knows what the future will bring. The past though is still very much here, albeit in fragments and increasingly distorted memories. 

But the dead are not off in some faraway heaven, not all the time, anyway, but will visit a shrine in a house, and of course come back for the Days of the Dead. People will visit their relatives in the cemetery for a chat, or to ask advice. 

Thus, a lovely spot, with a view to the hills rising on the other side of the canyon, is a likely place to be able to reach out to lost children. And the mirador is on a sacred trail, too.

Armando saw both viewpoints. The tradition of leaving cookies and toys one a couple of days in the year goes back centuries, he said, while he also realised that you can’t just abandon plastics and assume they will dissolve with time. Their dissolution will happen after they reach a river and then the sea, and cause harm to sea-life. So, he didn’t criticise my desire to keep the place tidy for the next visitors. I finished gathering bits of tinsel, thanked him for his explanation, and headed back to the village.

And of course, I wondered if I was right to take what the bereaved parents had left for children no longer here. I decided, as I picked my way over the stones down to the stream, that I was.

All kids get to play with their toys for a while, then they need to be put away. I noted that I didn’t trip or slip on the way down, which is easy to do, so I think the guardian spirits of the trail, who protect it from profane visitors, agreed with me.