Finding a cocucha

Skip and I are on the hunt for a cocucha, a clay pot handmade only in the remote village of Cocucho, Michoacán. We are driving down a country road toward Cocucho, closing in, when a fallen electrical pole blocks the route. “Another way to Cocucho?” we ask a group of school boys. They point toward a dirt track through a cornfield. “Feo,” they tell us. Ugly, nasty, awful. “No turning back now,” we agree. “Let’s do it.” After 15 minutes of bouncing through the muddy field, not a house in sight, we wonder, “Is this dangerous? Are we crazy?”

We arrive in Cocucho unscathed and take a break on a bench in the town plaza. A small indigenous woman, barefoot, approaches, introduces herself as Lupe, and asks if we are looking for cocuchas. She can guide us to Juana’s home, where we will find many pots.

Juana Alonzo Hernandez lives in a one-room house, so unfinished that in the U.S. we would call it a hut: a dirt floor, walls of raw wood, no furniture except for a table, two chairs and a bed. Juana is wrinkly, toothless, five feet tall at most, with long gray hair wound around her head. Like Lupe, she is barefoot and wears a voluminous, brightly colored skirt, an embroidered blouse, and a shawl. Juana and Lupe talk with each other in Purépecha, the language of the indigenous people in that area, but they speak Spanish with us. We explain that we are from the U.S, and that we live in Nayarit during the winter. We are looking for a cocucha about four-feet tall to fill a big empty space at the bottom of our stairwell.

Before we get down to business, Juana wants to talk about the U.S. Are we familiar with Seattle? Her son moved there three years ago for a landscaping job. She shows us a photo of a smiling young man. “He used to send money,” Juana says, “but I haven’t heard from him in a long time. Do you know how much an airline ticket costs? Do you think I could get a passport?” We admire the photo and respond as best we can.

Juana shows us the pots in her yard and explains how she forms them by hand from Cocucho clay. She uses no wheels or molds in the pot-building process. The pots are fired in a charcoal blaze on the ground, not in a kiln. We select a tall, tapered cocucha with fire marks on its mottled surface. It will be perfect in our empty space and it costs less than $100. Despite our protests, Juana and Lupe insist on carrying the giant cocucha to our car in slings improvised from their shawls. They pack it securely in the hatch. We drive back to San Pancho cautiously, protecting our prize from speed bumps and sudden stops.

Victory at Sea

I forgot how dramatic the summer storms can be. "It’s like watching ‘Victory at Sea’," Marsh once said, as we sat on our front porch, mesmerized by the performance. Bolts of lightning attacked the distant horizon and hurtled through the sky over the Pacific. Thunder bombarded our ears and clapped so explosively we jumped in our chairs. As I witnessed the same spectacle last night I thought, Snow birds really don't know what they're missing.

Admittedly, the heat is tough to contend with. I don’t like it either, and will leave again in a few weeks. But it’s worth enduring in order to experience the tropics at their most intense. The greenest of green vegetation, washed clean by the torrential rains, shimmers and steams under a glaring sun. The jungle reclaims itself, shoots tree limbs over roads to form cooling canopies, overwhelms untended land with towering new growth. Even the ocean ratchets up, its color changing to vivid turquoises and emerald greens.

Faced with such intensity, mere mortals are forced to relax and give in. We move more slowly, take more naps, spend more time at home, as we adapt to the natural world that now has the upper hand.

I lived here year-round my first seven years in Nayarit. We who savored the storms, coped with the humidity, and knew how to slow life down to a crawl, thought of ourselves as the only true expats. “Welcome back,” we said smugly to returnees every fall, hoping they would pick up on the superiority we felt. My come-uppance is the slip in social status that I feel now, when locals say "welcome back" to me.

Par for the Course

Ah, the allure of lush green fairways and a gently rolling landscape. Even the sand traps and water hazards beckon. Flags fluttering in the warm breeze entice you to holes you’ll never play. Each day, you peer longingly through the locked gate at the golf course; silent, pristine, empty.

From the beginning it seemed too good to be true. News of a golf course being developed right around the corner from our house sent my husband Bill, an avid golfer, into wild anticipation. How big a golf course? How much would it cost to play? Would it be a public course or could he buy a membership? He planned his daily golf game, relished the thought of how his golf buddies would envy his unlimited access.

As construction began, not the cacophonous parade of earth moving equipment past our house, nor the chorus of water-conservationists crying “foul,” could dampen Bill’s enthusiasm. Watching the course take shape became an obsession. His clubs polished, Bill was ready for opening day.

And then word got out.

There it was, on the San Pancho Message Board. The golf course was going to be “private,” for use only by its owner, his family and friends. Was it a joke? No, it wasn’t. But it was true.

Still, no parade of carts appeared, no golfers or caddies, just the staff who faithfully maintained the grounds; planting, pruning, mowing.

“If he’s going to have his own golf course, why doesn’t he play?” Bill muttered as we drove past. “Wouldn’t a little putting green in his backyard have been enough?”

Then, he packed up his clubs and went back to the little nine hole course near La Penita.