Venturing Out … Hopefully

June 26, 2021

Canada was being understandably cautious to re-open in the spring, while I was antsy to go … somewhere. Anywhere. I’ve not been out of Mexico in a year and a half, something I’ve never done before. And like many of us, I was starting to go a little strange. I always do if I can’t cross a frontier every six or eight months. I’m a homebody by nature, but I love to visit new places.

Anyway, there was a standing invitation to visit friends in California, provided I’d had my Covid jabs, so I decided to take them up on it. Ports of entry there are already open, even if the airlines and the travel industry generally are not yet very together again. I’m now at the point of planning laundry cycles and a final virus test … and wondering just how wise it is to be going.

It’s always hard to explain to people who don’t live here what our seasons are like. Or rather, I can and do explain it, but people won’t believe me.

The view from my roof on a typical cloudy summer’s morning here in Amatlan.

Our weather in central Mexico is already in the mid-twenties Celsius (close to 80 deg F) by February, and it hits the low thirties C by April. Then, when the rains come in late May or early June, the temperatures moderate, and sometimes drop quite low. I’m sitting at my computer this evening wearing a sweater, because it’s going down to 14 or 15 deg C (mid-50s F) this evening, and there’s been little sunshine hitting the house today. I’m actually cold. It will stay like this for some weeks, despite us being in the northern hemisphere in June and July, and it will warm up again when the clouds dissipate around October.

Yes, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But clouds in a mountainous area do what they do, and here they cool things off. Some summers, I long for November and warm, dry weather.

Now, my outgoing flight from Mexico City will pass through Phoenix, AZ. Today it hit a mild 108 deg F, or 42 deg C there. And the same elsewhere. That’s a drop from earlier this past week. Plus of course there are tales of forest fires in some of the western mountain ranges. Our forest fire season ended seven or eight weeks ago, when the first rains came.

“Well, you live in Mexico,” remarked one of my friends in the US, “so you’re used to that kind of thing.”

Er, no. Cue another round of explanations. I’ve been in 108 deg F before, in Death Valley, and it’s not the end of the world, but we never get that hot here in Amatlan.

But, it doesn’t bode well for aircraft maintenance schedules. And the airlines are still re-hiring pilots and staff, and pilots apparently need to be re-certified after a year out of the cockpit.

So, I now have visions of being stuck in a baking hot airport while my connecting flight is reportedly somewhere … on its way. Or having its melted tires peeled off a runway.

The new world of travel might not be what I was hoping it would be.

Fire Season

February 26, 2021

The rains were restrained last summer. I scarcely recall any of the massive downpours of other years that, the morning after the storm, would leave the village streets still running with water. Thankfully, the maize crop around here was abundant despite the lower rainfall, but now we’re facing a problem with the water table.

The first clear sign emerged a couple of weeks ago when, sitting on the combi into town, I noticed a high plume of what first looked like cumulus cloud on the hills behind the village. I quickly realised the column of smoke was swirling in motion, indicating a blazing fire. Local teams had it put out by the next day, though on the day after that, a baby version came back for an hour or two.

A photo I took in April 2012, when fires came to the edge of the village. The flames at this point, while
not visible in the photo, were less than 500 meters from the houses at the time.

Normally, forest fires round here are a risk in April or May, but the season has started early, presumably because of the dryness.

Today, the local town declared a partial emergency, announcing that “The City Council of Tepoztlán in coordination with the forestry civic groups, citizen brigades and environmental cultural promoters of the municipality, jointly made the decision to suspend any tourist activity in the Tepozteco Natural Protected Area.” In other words, they don’t want people hiking in the hills, for fear they will light cooking fires, discard cigarettes or drop bottles that might act as lenses for sunlight.

There’s also the problem that if a fire starts, either as a result of spontaneous combustion or from a farmer burning off his fields, hikers or simple bucolic wanderers might be cut off by rapidly advancing flames and smoke, and they’ll need a rescue. This assumes, of course, that anyone knows where they are, or even if they’re missing.

These are issues that anyone who lives here soon understands. although some farmers don’t seem to learn about burning a field with the proper safeguards. People often own fields well up into the hills, some distance from habitation, and if things get out of hand, there’s no-one around to help them. I’ve often wondered if there’s any safe way to burn fields in the dry season, but the practice continues, and most farmers never start a blaze that spreads. A key thing seems to be doing it early in the morning, when there’s a little condensation on the ground, not much wind, and the heat hasn’t built up in the atmosphere. This does mean people like myself find small bits of burned maize stalks have drifted in on the wind, and are all over the patio in the late morning. Still, a broom is a powerful tool in the hands of the determined.

There’s not a great deal we can do in advance, since this is a heavily wooded area, with a great deal of dry underbrush. And fires are one of natures tools for renewing woodlands.

Fires are, however, a fact of life here, like the occasional small earthquake. And they remind us that our ownership of land is at the mercy of nature’s whims.

A Hole in the Road

July 5, 2020

Land in Mexico is like religion. You don’t trammel someone else’s acreage, and the fights over small incursions are debated with a near-theological attention to fine detail. I’ve just had first-hand experience of this.

The roadway that comes to my house divides a few yards before my entrance gates. One part continues at a lower level, seven or eight feet down from my entrance. The roadway I and another tenant here use continues past the gate, and stops a few yards further along at the gate of my neighbour, Marisa.

There is, or was, a slab of banked earth lying between the two bits of road, nourishing a tree and a bunch of shrubs whose roots held it in place. But the family that sold us this land originally, a dozen years ago, kept that piece of bank, and decided a couple of years ago to construct a small house there. Given the tiny space, and the fact that family has other land, this move was hard to explain. Then, the construction took a little of our roadway, negotiations about this broke down, and the local municipality issued a stop-construction order. The foundations of the house still sit there, with the initial walls that were built.

That hole, June 29:20 copy

The un-house seen from above, with the emerging subsidence to the right.

It still sits as an unresolved issue, tied up with counter-arguments and disputes over exact boundaries.

With the intense rains each summer, and no anchoring roots to hold it, earth from our upper roadway began to wash away. Small runnels became established, leading still more storm-water right to the eroding weak point. Last year, it was obvious a chunk of our roadway was disappearing, right in front of our garage doors. Given time, it was going to become a serious problem, making access dangerous or even impossible.

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The hole as it appeared two weeks ago.

Last month, before the rains began to fill up our cistern, I had to order a tanker-load of water, since we’re not on water-mains here. The truck was heavy, having all that water, and more earth around the hole subsided. The truck came close to going over the brink. The serious problem had arrived.

With my limited Spanish, I needed someone to negotiate with the owner of the odd little triangle of land out front, and that had to be Marisa. She’d had difficulties with the friend of mine who constructed the house I live in, so I had to pull out the diplomatic skills I’d needed as a magazine editor in my former life. (Attacking editors is a popular sport for some people).

Marisa, I should explain, is a local celebrity, who had a hit song called I’m Not the Same back when she was young, and she’s had a modest but steady career in the Mexican music scene ever since. That lends her a certain prestige, or maybe an image to live up to. She also has fluent English, and was gracious with me, understanding she had to intercede with the unfinished house’s owners, for both of us. I don’t know what she said, but she has powers of persuasion, and used them. Clearly, she understands the subtler ‘theological’ implications of “you’ve undermined my entrance.”

Now, to my mind the logical thing was to build a retaining wall in the rain-eroded space beside the un-house, then back-fill the space with earth that would then need to be compacted. And that’s sort of what’s happening, courtesy of the owner of the unfinished house. But the wall is being made in the manner of traditional field walls here, with heavy stones piled one on top of the other, without cement. And the soil behind it is not packed down very tightly. The structure looks makeshift.

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The new wall, with my entrance gate behind it.

In Mexico, you become used to some measure of disaster always being just around the corner. You tend to become a de facto anarchist, because under-enforced laws and under-budgeted government departments can’t be counted on. You either make peace with this reality, or go home. So, while the land’s owner is paying for this effort, it might be that Marisa and I will have to cough up the cash for a more serious structure in future. When it’s land you’re dealing with, even just a few square feet, the arguments tend to continue for years.

All I can do for now is be grateful that the issue’s at least kicked down the road for a while; and continue to ponder how people here manage to make their lives work in the face of constant uncertainties. But the rains this year are just beginning, and I suspect the loose-packed earth behind the wall will start to wash away before they end.

I can see being able to spin at least a half-dozen blog posts out of this spell-binding drama in the future.