Sense of Place - Part I

Sense of Place – Part I

Until the events of a couple of weeks ago, (Am I Safe) I would generally walk alone in the countryside every morning taking the same road each day. This is the road that leads out of town, to the canyon area and eventually to Arandas, tequila capital of the world. After over two months of walking this same road I found that I had become bored with walking and started to jog, run or take the bicycle out.

What never bored me though was the road. It’s not much to look at but it was ever changing and always showing me something new. Whether it was the people I shared the road with, the animals I came across, a shift in the sun, the crops that line the road, the lake that was starting to fill or the smoke from the brick makers, everyday was like my first time.

When I first arrived the weather was hot, dry and dusty. Everything was a shade of brown covered by a layer of dust. I felt like I had ridden into an old western movie where everything is wilted from the heat and there is just a heavy silence. With the start of the rainy season in June all that has changed. Where I could walk on the side of the road before the grasses and weeds have grown to shoulder height in places and everything is green. It is amazing how such a brown, scrub like landscape can change so dramatically. Oh, by the way the weather is pretty close to perfect, warm to hot during the day, humidity is negligible, the evenings cool off and it generally rains overnight.

Animal and insect life abounds on the road. The cows in the fields are always watching me as I approach to see if I am there to feed them, even as they are munching on fresh grass.

One of my first mornings out I saw what I have come to call my little blue birds. They are a tiny bird the size of a wren with a neon purple blue body that looks like velvet with wings of black and gold. And they are quick, it’s almost as if they know you have gotten a glimpse of them and then they are gone

Other bird life is abundant with the hawks, black and white stripped eagles and then the vultures hovering about. I have vowed never to leave the house without my camera but whenever I do there are always the missed photo ops. One day it was a turtle and a white crane sharing a rock in the middle of a pond to sun them selves on while across the road the skeleton of a tree was filled with black crows.

The grouse or “little chickens” as they are called are the fun ones to startle. They always seem to be in pairs and make a very distinct whup, whup, whup sound with their wings as they slowly take flight. Never going very far or gaining much altitude.

After the rains had started it was the first overcast morning I had walked and all the landscape was a subdued grayish green when I encountered my friend. Mi amiga is pictured in the photograph for PostCardFromMexico Numero Dos, please see below. She stood out so brightly that morning I thought she was a Monarch butterfly. I stopped and spent some time there watching her before resuming my walk only to find her still there on my return. And there she was the next morning, same bush, same branch. And she remained there for a week, every morning it was like visiting an old friend. And then she was gone.

There have been many spiders, dragon flies and giant green beetles but never another one like her. On the last morning I walked the bushes on the west side of the road were filled with giant black beetles while on the east side of the road the bushes were empty.

Turtles and huge black caterpillars are always climbing on to the road for the heat but really it turns into a suicide mission for them.

Like I said the road was always showing me something new and sometimes unexpected. One morning it was a dead dog lying in the grass on the side of the road. You couldn’t see it till you were upon it because of the grasses and even after that first morning it would continue to startle me. But I also became intrigued and developed a morbid fascination with that dog. It like the road was in a constant state of change. That first morning it was just lying there on its side but over the next couple of days it became bloated and the legs of its right side stuck straight up in the air. Over the weeks that followed it would slowly deflate and disappear. It had been a medium sized dog with reddish brown fur but it started to look more like a wet bath towel that someone had tossed out their car window. Then one morning, of all the strange things to happen it was gone. All that was left were a few tufts of fur tangled in the grasses but the rest of it was just gone, bones and all.

The sky here is big, and as you walk up the hill out of town it only gets bigger as you look back. When you are up on the high plain above town everything is laid out before you and you can see mountains, plateaus and valleys miles and miles away. But the sky, it is the sky that brings so much change to the road. Some mornings you are walking in the clouds, some mornings they are below you in the valley, some mornings they are high above you or they may just not be there. It is this constant change in the sky and the light that lets you see things you never encountered before. Like a gate or a lake or the remaining wall of an old, abandoned house. Things that are always there but you never noticed them before the sky played it's trick.

The road is popular with people from town out walking, running or biking. And it is the way to work for many others like the folks who farm the land alongside the road. I have an appreciation for farms and the people that work them. My Grandparents were farmers and I have many fond memories of time spent at the farm. My Grandparents certainly worked hard but I have to think they used more machinery to help with the work than the folks here, here it is manual labor. There is one gentleman who works a field of alfalfa to feed the cattle. He has the field divided into six zones and he is out there harvesting the grass with a machete. He then loads his crop into a wheel barrow to take back to the barn. About the day he finishes one zone the next is ready to be harvested and when he has done all six the first is ready to go again. I am watching acres of corn grow and the farmers walking the field, spreading manure by hand and spraying the field with hand sprayers.

For many weeks I encountered a farmer who would appear at the same time and about the same place on the road each day. There is no gate, no path and no consistent place he would emerge from the fields. He would just walk out on to the side of the road with his bicycle and ride off down the hill. Aside from his mysterious entrance onto the road what makes him so memorable is that as he would ride off down the hill he would let out a yell just like a little kid riding their bike down that hill. To me that yell was such an absolute expression of joy and just having fun with the life you have. I found out recently that is his family farm and each morning when I saw him he would be returning to town from milking the cows.

I do miss my morning walks in the countryside and all they had to offer but like that farmer on his bike no matter what, just enjoy what life has to give you.

This was Part I of Sense of Place, in Part II we will discuss more on the landscape of this area of Mexico while Part III will be about small town life.