On Not Going Back

My fellow blog writers are dropping like flies. Two have gone back to the United States and the ones who are left have departure dates not far off. Their eyes are already focused far to the north. It’s the same for all the foreign community. There is a boiling down to just the year-round residents— those who can face being further boiled in the summer to come. We are among the ones who no longer go back.

Every year another person or couple joins the ranks of the year-round. The ties to Back There have been loosening. For several years membership on all those committees has been allowed to go into months of suspension but eventually they don’t want you any more and you don’t mind. The war will be stopped, the watershed saved, and strategies for world peace developed by others. Friends wonder how important they are to you. Events and crises have gone on fine without your participation. You can hardly bear to face the neglected northern home, the opportunity for spring planting passed. There remains the greatest draw—grandchildren, but there is a perfectly functioning international airport. If your children weren’t nearby, one airport is as good as another.

For us, time in Mexico had come to be the better part of the year and time spent here had gone from two weeks, to three months and on to six. The attachment to new friends had grown. New community interests had come along too but with a tiny fraction of the meetings. We eventually had broadband and NPR. Our new home was lovely and open and filled with soft breezes. The flowers were so easy to grow. More and more ties to Back There were either cut or stretched to reach into the tropics.

Now I admit that my husband and I will also leave San Pancho for the summer and fall. We will go two hours away to our cool mountain home in San Sebastian. Turns out we don’t want to be boiled either. Three other foreign resident San Pancho couples have adopted the same plan and perhaps more will follow. Over time, commitment to the new pueblo has grown with friendships becoming established and joint projects started. When we are on the coast we often think of the mountain town, and vice versa. We seem to have chosen the same bind, but with the not-insignificant difference of a two hour drive rather than four days or more. We can easily check in. No meetings there either, though we did recently join a protest to save an ancient tree. Here we go again.

Leaving for the season

Leaving San Pancho to spend the spring and summer in Connecticut isn’t easy. We rent the house when we are not there, and Casa Skip y Nancy needs to be ship-shape. The countdown begins weeks before my early April departure. Each day I update lengthy to-do lists. Conversations with Skip begin, “Did you remember to (clean the grill, get extra keys…)?”

Our property manager and housekeeper, both capable people, take care of the house in our absence. Nevertheless, I try to anticipate any problem that could arise. A notebook I leave for renters contains exhaustive details: disposal clogged? Here’s where to find the Allen wrench. Dryer not working? Call Lorenzo-the-dryer-guy in Sayulita. I imagine renters thinking as they read the notebook, “An obsessive person wrote this.”

But the hardest part of leaving is saying goodbye to people I care about. I’ll miss my walking buddies, my writers’ group, friends who pop in unannounced. Being part of a community seems effortless in San Pancho. On a one-block walk to the store, I might run into three people who stop for a chat. I seldom have casual, spontaneous encounters in West Haven. Many of my friends are still working, and time with them is planned in advance.

Still, I yearn for my Connecticut life. I’ve got to see my children and grandchildren; if I don’t get back there, too much of their lives will pass me by. The recitals and birthday parties, Middlebrook Elementary’s spring fair, walks in the park with my new grandson – I love all that grandma stuff.

So I pack up and leave San Pancho. When I’m in one place, I miss someone who’s in the other place. And that's not a bad problem to have.

The Lonely Librarian

The small two-story building near the beach on San Pancho’s main street, Tercer Mundo, was home to entreamigos for three years. Children gathered out front for art projects at tables under the grand mango tree in the center of the street. Traffic slowed to creep around it. Massive branches provided shade.

A small, hand-lettered sign led to the “Biblioteca, Library.” A narrow hallway with brightly painted murals. Uneven concrete stairs. Children’s voices. In the largest room, shelves filled with books in Spanish lined the walls; large, colorful picture books beckoned eager readers. A long bench with chairs provided desks for studying and homework help, and amidst tangled wires, computer stations brought the world of the internet.

The dimly lit smallest room in the library held the English collection for adults and children. Here books overflowed the shelves and leaned haphazardly at odd angles, stacked and propped; keeping order, my nemesis. As the volunteer librarian, I was uncompromising; fiction separate from non-fiction, non-fiction organized by topic. I vowed that someday the Dewey Decimal system would prevail.

But entreamigos’ lease had expired, and we had to move. We filled boxes and boxes with books. Carefully, at first, labeling “Libros, espanol, ninos, books, Spanish, children.” Then later, rushed, we simply wrote “libros.” We rolled up the colorful posters, gathered the toys, and took down the shelves.

The small, hand-lettered sign above the door now reads “Se renta, for rent.” The mango tree is gone, a casualty of the newly repaved Tercer Mundo. Entreamigos is a strong and committed organization, however, whose work in San Pancho will continue. We will have a new home in one of the old warehouses in town. In time there will be a new library, and I will be in it, trying to keep order once again.

http://www.entreamigos.org/

Love at First Sight

First-timers to San Pancho are among my favorite house guests, and two more came in the other day. From the minute we turned into town on Avenida Tercer Mundo, they were smitten. It’s those first sights as we head toward the beach for a quick look, sights that make my daughter-the-regular shout, “And action!”

There’s the cowboy on horseback, broad-brimmed sombrero angled low on his brow. The weathered old woman in the ever-present apron, standing erect behind a small wooden table where she sells her bread pudding. A pickup, its bed loaded with laughing kids, bouncing them like beach balls each time it passes over a speed bump.

As happens often enough, these latest newcomers arrived just when I needed them. Bouts with mildew, warped woodwork, and water shortages necessitating cold “Navy showers” were wearing me down. “The re-entry blues,” I called it, coming home to issues after months out of the country. I needed the shot in the arm of people raving about San Pancho and the view from my porch. Who scoffed at my “happy problems” and reinforced my choice of this place on the planet with their sighs of approval as they stared out to sea.

Bird Watching

From time to time a hush comes over the garden. My neighbors’ music players have simultaneously fallen silent. No trucks or busses are using engine brakes on the highway. The children are not playing soccer in the street. Shrimp trucks with loudspeakers are elsewhere. In this preternatural silence the anis fly into the garden. It is hard not to believe that they have some causal relationship to this lacuna in the noisy bustle of San Pancho—as though their unrelieved blackness is connected not only to absence of light, but sound as well.

The Grooved-Billed Ani is a cuckoo-related bird. In side view, nearly half the head is given over to a great, blunt beak. Yes, birds are dinosaurs, I think when I see that profile. Anis lay their eggs, not like cuckoos, in another species’ nest, but in a communal nest of four or five pairs. Their extended family of eight or ten glides in on wings silent as owl’s, and enters the deepest foliage where their blackness is hardly distinguishable from the shadows. There is only the slightest rustle and tremor in the leaves as they move through. The anis make no more sound than the occasional brushing feather. Insects and lizards are not forewarned.

The anis use my garden as their family table. I like intact leaves and healthy color, so our interests coincide. They eat the stink bugs which can suck the life out of hibiscus. It is so quiet I can hear the tiny crunch as the bugs are crushed and I get a whiff of their unmistakable odor. I hold still so the birds will be undisturbed. Even the breeze is careful. Too soon, in twos and threes, they glide silently away.

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.