TAPDANCING with SANDPIPERS and Other Notes from Naturalist Jim Conrad's Times in Mexico
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TAPDANCING WITH SANDPIPERS and other notes from Naturalist Jim Conrad's times in Mexico by Jim Conrad FOREWORD Maybe 98% of the words I've published about Mexico have dealt with plants and animals. Much of that writing, often accompanied by pictures, is freely available online at http://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/ This book is filled with words from the other 2%, the ones about Mexico's people, and my own feelings about being there. For the most part, the entries are arranged seasonally without regard for the year when the words were written. That's because that's how I remember it all, all those years mixing together into just one thing, only the events remaining distinct, like hard, glistening little seeds in one big, sweet Mexican watermelon, and both watermelons and my writings have their seasons. That's all. By the way, I know about copyright laws and the rest, but I'm making no effort to deal with all that. Just accept the words graciously, as they were offered to me. Jim =================================================== GAS-FILLED BALLOONS & THE MAGI Issued from Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve Headquarters in Jalpan, Querétaro; January 12, 2007 Last Friday, January 5th, as I walked toward my apartment downtown, I noticed that I was gaining company as I went. I couldn't figure out what was going on until I passed a stationery shop with a handmade sign in the window translating to: "FOR SALE: Gas-filled balloons for sending your lists to the Magi." Of course! The next day, January 6th, was "traditional Mexican Christmas," the day when people exchanged gifts back before gringo Christmas started taking over. In Jalpan most people, I think, exchange gifts the new way, though on December 24th and not the 25th, but in the more conservative smaller towns and countryside the old ways hold on and January 6th is still the main gift-giving day, and an important religious day. The idea with the balloons is that the Wise Men, the Magi, bring little kids gifts on the 6th, so if you're a kid you write to the Magi just like gringo kids write to Santa Clause, and since the Magi are in Heaven, how better to contact them than with gas-filled balloons? Instead of continuing to the apartment I kept walking with the people -- town folks referred to them as "peregrinos," or pilgrims -- as they converged on the cathedral atop the hill. It was like a circus up there, toys being sold in new plywood booths, men circulating selling pink cotton candy, ice-cream, tamales, atole, just everything you could want, and there was lots of loud music. People lay everywhere, some sleeping, some staring about as if dazed, everyone looking frowsy and pooped. I was told that many had walked long distances to get there. Cars, trucks and sidewalks along nearby streets also were crammed with sleepers and gazers. I asked what was going on. People were waiting for that night's mass, which would go on the whole night, I was told. And people especially wanted to spend their nights praying to the "Santo Niño de la Mexclita" -- The Little Jesus carving with its gold crown and two missing fingers -- who performs miracles for the faithful. I asked if they'd be ringing the cathedral bells all night. Sí. Would rockets be exploding? Sí. Would even a lot more people than this be coming in? Sí. I headed downhill to my apartment, strapped on my backpack, and that weekend camped in the mountains. ***** NORTHERS Written at Hacienda San Juan Lizárraga one kilometer east of Telchac Pueblo, Yucatán, January 13, 2006 As I issued last week's Newsletter at Hotel Reef a classic norther was blowing in. People here call them "nortes." This norte had been in the air for some days. Most of the week before had been scorchingly hot and glaring. Then for two days clouds came from the northwest, not from the northeast, as they usually do. The day before my Reef visit it grew cloudy and much cooler, probably not breaking 80° the whole day. On Friday, my Reef day, the sky was even darker and the wind even cooler, surely never hitting 75°. The wind was magnificent, roaring, shaking the Coconut Palms like pompoms, sending ripples of sand migrating onto the hotel steps, and blanketing the lobby furniture with dust and grit. The ocean's crashing waves muddied the water nearly to the horizon. Focusing my binoculars on the horizon, out where the water was much deeper, hill-like waves with long white crests formed and crashed in slow motion. No boats were out there fishing that day, no tourist put a toe into the angry water, and no Brown Pelicans dived for fish offshore. Seaweed piled up on the sand and all that salt spray made my thin hair poke straight out during my evening talk. I love the beach when it's like that. I love the way the wind howls, salt spray stings your eyes and sand peppers your body, leaving thimblefuls of sand in your pockets. Especially I like the dark, raggedy clouds and the feeling it all conjures in you. A few seconds on the Internet explain what a norther is. When a norther is blowing through, just call up any weather map covering the entire US and you'll see slicing across the nation a slender crescent of snow in the north and rain in the south. Its top horn will be in the Northeast but its bottom one will reach deep into the Gulf of Mexico, even to here. So, our northers are North American cold fronts reaching all the way down here. I've experienced them in Guatemala and I've seen them set frost on doomed banana trees in Chiapas. Once in Chiapas I heard an old Tzotzil-speaking man ask during a particularly painful norther whether it was true what they said, that across the next mountain range a volcano in Guatemala was erupting ice. Tuesday morning a radio station in Mexico City reported 27° F at the university and in the northern state of Chihuahua there was a town with 1° F. Knowing the humble homes in which many people up there live, I can't imagine how difficult it was for them. ***** WORMS & MAGICAL REALISM Written at Yerba Buena Clinic and issued in Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacan, Chiapas, January 14, 2008 I was talking with one of our workers when he grabbed his stomach and almost fainted. After some questions I diagnosed his problem as probably a bad case of intestinal worms. From there the discussion drifted into traditional cures and from there into witchcraft and local legends touching on the supernatural. Here native people in traditional dress walk among others wearing sunglasses and using cellular phones, and lethal poverty coexists with obscene excesses of richness. Powerful people display little or no education or talent. "Magical realism" of the kind García Márquez wrote about is in the air here, the sunlight, the very dirt we walk on. I am surrounded by people of outstanding character and solid minds who at any moment of any day may tell me things the Northern mind simply can't accept. Impossible cures by barefoot curanderos, impossible feats of clairvoyance by neighborhood seers, impossible transformations of ordinary people into beings with demonic strength or character... One night this week our three forest-protectors told me about a local creature something like a half-formed, half-alive monkey with mere slits for eyes. It emerges at dusk and after three spastic jumps on the ground suddenly sprouts wings and flies off as a bat. If it's unable to finish its three jumps, it dies. One of the men had found remains of the thing with tiny wings sprouting in its armpits, obviously having died just before finishing its three jumps. I've given up saying that snakes don't sting with their tails. Even my Grandpa Conrad told me about such snakes in Kentucky back in the 50s, about "hoopsnakes" who take their sharp, venomous tails into their mouths, form themselves into hoops, and roll down hills. Moments before spinning into your presence they straighten out and become poisonous spears that impale you. In earlier years I have been here when level-headed eyewitnesses reported certain students at the Adventist university downslope becoming possessed, uttering impossibly bass-voiced blasphemies and fighting off teachers with impossible strength. ***** CHOPPED ONIONS AND HOT-SAUCE Issued from Hacienda Chichen Resort adjoining Chichén Itzá Ruin, Yucatán; January 15, 2012 At 7:45 this Sunday morning I leave the hut on my weekly fruit- buying trip to Pisté. It's 64°F (18°C), so chilly that my nose-holes feel wet and icy. Earlier, while preparing breakfast over the campfire, I didn't notice the smoke odor but, outside, the air has an acrid, ashy tang to it. Visitors say the hut's smokiness smells good, like a mountain cabin with a fireplace, and I wonder if I've become so used to the woodsmoke odor that I no longer register it, except for this ashy smell when I step outside; I'll bet I leave a scent-trail of woodsmoke wherever I go. Gardeners are watering the Hacienda's plants and as I bike past Daniel a summery, suburban odor of sprayed hose-water fills the air. On the road to the ruin pay-zone a bored taxi driver with droopy eyelids and black, greased-backed hair leans against his car, his slopped-on aftershave sending a nervous quiver through the morning air.