It's a bird...

It’s a plane, parked on the beach just feet from the malecón, Pancho’s lovely ocean-front plaza. Fortunately it isn’t a Boeing 747! It’s an Ultralight, a small two-seater aircraft that my son Larry, a pilot, refers to as “conduit and bed sheets.”

An aura of adventure and mystery surround the unoccupied plane’s appearance. Did it taxi up to the bar at Las Palmas restaurant so that its thirsty pilot could order a quick beer, taking “para llevar (to go)” to new heights? Is it a marketing director’s dream, another innovative way of introducing San Pancho to prospective buyers?

The real story? Here in San Pancho we gather facts and opinions like pieces of a giant jig-saw puzzle. A little information here, a little hearsay there, and you know as much as you’re ever going to know.

It’s Saturday afternoon in tranquil San Pancho and the beach is crowded with families spread out along the sand, catching waves in the ocean. Further down the beach where the plane has landed, its pilot and passenger have decided that some refreshments are in order. How many refreshments they had is unclear, but let’s just say that observers later describe their takeoff as “shaky.”

Flying too low above the ocean, the wing of the plane is caught momentarily by a wave. Unable to right itself, (remember the bed sheets?) the plane tilts downward, the force of the water pulling it further off-balance and finally submerging it. Swimmers paddle furiously away from the sinking plane while others plunge into the waves to pull the plane and its occupants to safety. Unbelievably, no one is hurt.

The drama concludes with the arrest of the pilot and his passenger and the damaged plane planted on the beach. A few days later, the plane provides a comfy spot for a small child’s nap.

Call me nostalgic: I can’t help but recall the days, not so very long ago, when the only motorized vehicle on the beach was the old dune buggy that belongs to Turtle Frank, the venerable guardian of baby turtle nests.

Basura in Basura out

The pile in the back yard was assuming amazing proportion: yard clippings, felled branches, fronds and nuts from a 30-foot-high coconut palm, broken brick, clumps of concrete from renovation projects.

And the bodega bulged with its own detritus: leftovers from the former owner of our home, small appliances rusted or broken, gadgets and gimcrackery brought from the states we discovered we did not need to enjoy life in San Pancho.

The thrice-weekly garbage service, tremendously improved since our arrival four years ago, has limitations. Although we oblige the expected Christmas tip (suggested $200 pesos), we can’t set out for pick up what we please. Items verboten include large sacks of yard waste, construction materials, debris of heft and girth. Once we tried to give the guys a rusted-out water heater. They tossed it in a neighbor’s vacant lot.

Periodically we’ve asked the location of a municipal dump. We have a truck. We are happy to cart our own stuff away. Response from the North Americans: My workers take care of it for me. Response from the Mexicans: It’s up the road, toward La Penita; colorful gesticulations signal the vague direction. We searched but all we ever found were unofficial garbage sites along the side of the highway. We considered following the municipal garbage truck to its final destination.

Last week we approached Manuel, bagging up brittle fronds from the palapa repair he completed for us.

"Where do you take that stuff," asked Win, my husband.

"To the dump," he said.

"Can we go there, too?"

"Not a problem. Open all the time."

Manuel drew a simple map. He and his workers left. Win and I executed a quick high-five, then began loading our truck.

Directions: from San Pancho head north. Just before reaching La Penita Pemex #8489, a tad past km 94, turn right. At this writing your landmark is a large pale yellow building. About two blocks, turn right when you see a store emblazoned with Coca-Cola advertising. Drive past a soccer field. Keep driving even though the road narrows to one lane. Keep driving past fields of agave, both sides of the street. Keep driving for approximately three kilometers. A guard shack stands left of the entrance.

The zopilotes will greet you, wicked-looking vultures that feed on what you would rather not think about. Park amidst the acres of garbage, the fish heads and dirty diapers and broken furniture and old clothing and deflated tires. Don’t be surprised if what you unload is quickly appropriated for a second life.

The municipal dump is open every day, around the clock. And it’s free.

Monarchs in Michoacán

Millions of monarch butterflies migrate from the U.S. and Canada each fall to a mountaintop in central Mexico. They navigate to an evergreen grove they’ve never seen before: the same one that sheltered their ancestors. How do they do it? Scientists are researching this intriguing question, but they don’t have definite answers. (See http://www.monarchwatch.org/.)

A trip to Michoacán to see the monarchs has been on our places-to-go-in-Mexico list for years. This year we finally did it. An expedition to the preserve -- El Rosario Sanctuary in Ocampo -- has to be timed just right. Late February and early March are best because the butterflies come out of their semi-dormant state as the temperature rises. The weather on the day of the visit should be warm and sunny. If it’s too cold, the butterflies hang from the trees, wings folded, to conserve energy.

Hiking up the mountain to the butterflies’ grove was strenuous. I’m used to aerobic walks in San Pancho’s hills, but my husband Skip…. Let’s just say it wasn’t realistic to expect he’d be thrilled by a steep trek to 10,000 feet.

He and I agreed, though, that what we saw at the top of the mountain was worth our effort: orange and black monarchs wafting in the sunlight, clustering in rivulets of water, mating delicately, clinging to pine and fir trees. When I listened closely, I could hear a faint swishing sound: not wind in the pines, but the fluttering of butterfly wings.

The monarchs’ winter habitat is protected under Mexican law. However, experts say that local people are destroying the preserve by logging illegally and clearing land for crops. I’m not surprised. Three-year old children begged us for money as we climbed the trail to El Rosario’s entrance. If my kids were hungry, and I could get hundreds of dollars for a pine tree, I’d probably cut it down, too.

The Golf Cart

When a neighbor in New Mexico offered an electric golf cart for sale at the bargain price of $275, my husband and I thought it would be perfect for running around San Pancho. It was the original Westinghouse battery-operated model, pushing 50. Along with solar panels to charge the batteries, we loaded it in the back of our old pickup and headed south. Getting it across the border was tricky—officials demanding non-existent VIN or registration—and that only the start of the trouble. In retrospect, it might have been better to have gone north, put it on an ice floe and pushed it out to sea.


Our golf cart is all steel, thick step plate bent in flat surfaces around the three wheels. Dents are not a problem. We’ve had it painted an electric green by the local body shop and had the shabby seat upholstered in oil cloth with orange sunflowers—you might call it an admission that it is a preposterous vehicle. It creaks loudly over the speed bumps, metal rubbing against metal, the broken right front spring causing it to list wildly and making the passenger hold on for dear life.

It wasn’t long before the old batteries had to be replaced, for $800, and the solar cells up-graded to the tune of $1300. The batteries charge strongly enough in a day to take us all the way out the jungle road and back, but an iffy cable, and then an intermittently faulty throttle switch have caused us to be dumped time and again, cart abandoned at the side of the road while passengers walk home. Only Green Pride keeps us careening around on it, that and getting to park right up front, and seeing the smiles on each face as we bounce by.

A friend recently moved down to Mexico and changed his name to Lorenzo for the ease of his Spanish-speaking neighbors. A vaguely bilingual worker he hired tried to explain to him that the name “Lorenzo” has some unfortunate connotations. “What does it mean?” the new Lorenzo asked. “Well, it’s like…it’s like…well, you know that guy who rides around on that green carrito? He’s Lorenzo.”

Porch-sitting

This has been my longest time away from home in twelve years of living in Mexico. I’ve spent the last ten months in California, helping my daughter with childcare while she gets a home renovation business off the ground. It’s nice to be needed, and I’ve grown that much closer to granddaughters Lily, almost 10, and Anna, 8. But still, I miss my life, my friends, and my house in San Pancho.

People ask all the time, “What exactly do you DO in San Pancho?” and the short answer is “Not much.” So what is it that I miss?

That answer, “not much,” holds the key, I think. Life slows to a crawl there, and you adapt to a pace that keeps you calm. You go to bed early and sleep in late. Every other day you knock off a few items on a to-do list of relative inconsequentials, mostly involving a hardware store. You take time for long leisurely chats with friends you meet on the street. You resign yourself to phone and internet and satellite TV outages that can go on for days (plus come to realize that your being incommunicado has not made much of a difference to anyone but you). You make a big deal out of small events, milking them for every drop of enjoyment. In my case, that means cooking elaborate meals for friends and treating myself to hours of quiet prep time in my beautiful kitchen.

I look forward to re-adapting in April, when I’ll spend the month at home at Quinta Elena. I will sit on my porch, drinking cup after cup of café moka, listening to the palm fronds swishing in the Pacific breeze, taking in the solitary hawks and the flocks of wild parakeets that swoop across my field of vision as I stare out to sea. Doing nothing---it will be an excellent use of my time.

The Life of a Garden

Before I came to live in tropical San Pancho, I made my home in the high desert of New Mexico. Our little farm town was in a river valley and our properties, lined up on either side of the river, were irrigated by an acequia system. An acequia (irrigation ditch) takes water from the river high upstream and brings it in decline, gentler than the river, to gates above the fields. When a gate is opened, water tumbles down on crops and gardens.

One never finished lowering this part of the land and raising that, making channels, trying to keep driveways dry, houses, too, getting water to new trees, giving up on hopeless corners. I lived there thirty-six years, and the irrigation work was never done. The winters were cold, and there was snow, but never quite enough melt to fill the river so that everyone in the valley could irrigate at will. The summers were hot and plants could wither in hours. Hail storms, late freezes, locusts…there was a lot of shaking fists at the heavens. It was only in my last years that I could look out on what had been a wasteland of cactus and burrs and see a lawn, large trees, flowers, vineyard, and orchard—a mature garden at last.

Things are different in San Pancho. Start with nurseries where a big day’s shopping might run you twelve dollars. Bananas can hit twenty-five feet in six months. Shade trees require no more than a couple of year’s patience. The birds-of-paradise fill in every empty spot. Philodendron grows leaves bigger than turkey platters. Bougainvillea reaches the roof and beyond. Bright birds come for the papayas. All is lush and the temperature drops fifteen degrees when you come in from the street. Your wrinkles are set back ten years and you could sit all day in contented viewing—a mature garden in time lapse.

Ah, but what comes after mature? Old. These days, philodendrons are choking the philodendrons. The bougainvillea is up on the roof throwing down the tiles. The birds-of-paradise don’t bloom under the shade of the trees. Plants which were intended to settle at different heights are all up there out of sight. Leaf mulch has raised the ground at least six inches. My house is disappearing into the vegetation like Angkor Wat.

To say that the garden needs “pruning” is to understate the problem. Daily, I, my husband, or my sometime gardener, cut, clip, chop and pull. Machete and chain saw. The pile grows in the parking area until the car won’t fit and we call on our neighbor to haul the stuff away in his pickup—for a handsome fee. By the next day the pile will be growing again. Twelve loads since December. Perhaps it is the excess of oxygen that keeps us happy anyway.