Cows With Horns

4 March 2011
Puerto Escondido, Baja California Sur


Two nights ago our friend Dorothy dreams--really it is a nightmare--that she is being gored, cleanly, by a bull.  And that, although many people crowd the street, no one comes to her aid.

Did anyone notice she was being gored? She cannot say.

Then yesterday as we walked up the dusty road to the tienda, a strange lowing animal cry floated out from the bush. We looked, and saw nothing but buzzards circling in the sky, riding the currents up the pink mountainsides of the Sierra de la Giganta.

We entered the tienda--we were back again another year!  The owner greeted us like old friends.  Everyone remembers Marike, la Maria grande who speaks fluent Spanish with an Argentinian accent.  We bought a few supplies: tortillas, a head of cabbage, peppers, yoghurt, onions, some chicken, avocados, some tomatoes, raisins.  No cucumbers--they froze in the last cold snap and aren't available.

Suddenly, outside, a commotion.  Bellowing.  There at the side of the shop is a horned bovine.  Your bull! Marike cries to Dorothy.  And then we notice the hanging udders.

The owner comes out and chases off this skinny desert cow, who clatters up the road to join a lowing companion.

She's a bad one! the owner says.  Bit off the water hose earlier this year--we had water shooting fifteen feet into the air.

You see that green there? She points to a patch of bushy blooming bougainvillea, the only green palm and some grasses.  It's all grown up because of that water, and now she comes to eat it, the wretch!

A smart one, Marike says tapping the side of her head. Inteligente.

As we walk back up the road Dorothy comments, that's not the cow of my dreams.

Because it's had a sex-change operation?

No.  Because it's more white than black.

That sounds like a metaphor or a moral, but its import escapes me.  Was this walk a fable?

Images
Cactus, San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico
Buzzards, Puerto Escondido, BCS, Mexico
Cattle skull, shadow, San Juanico, BCS, Mexico

February in Mexico

19 February 2011

San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

It happens here that the seasons get confused in your head.

I imagine it is summer, but it is not.

At home the snow piles in banks as high as my shoulders.

But here, the red mountains glitter in a green sea,

and the pelicans drop cleanly into the water. 

25 February 2011
San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Still, it is cold here.

Nights drop below 10 degrees C and we huddle in the cockpit beneath blankets, marveling at the stars.  It will snow today on the California coast, and tomorrow on Tucson; on Sunday, here in the Baja, we will reap a harvest of wind and more cool air.  Then, next week perhaps, warm.  Strange to walk in the desert unparched, feet, head and arms cool.  

 

The air smells of sage and bitter oranges, the buzzards circle overhead, cacti twist and spread, but the earth is cracked and broken, the ocotillo clatter into the sky, leafless, the whole plant forcing just a single scarlet bloom.  This, or death.

Cholla lose their bark, shells sink in the dirt, the grasses are bleached yellow and grey.  

Even the water is cloudy, the birds scarce; for the moment a hard season here.

But the mountains remain, their peaks and cutaway faces shifting colour in the light: grey, yellow, rose, ochre, green, sanguine, blue, violet, black.

 

Images

Bougainvillea blooms, pigeons on a wire--San Carlos, Sonora

Moon sets above reddening mountain, early morning, Bahia San Carlos, Sonora

Quoddy's Run in Bahia San Juanico, Baja California Sur

Scrub growing on the lowlands, La Ramada, BCS

Desert track into the mountains near Bahia San Juanico

Ocotillo branch scrapes the sky near Bahia San Juanico

Buzzard in flight

Dried grasses, La Ramada

Scarred Cactus 

Cactus covered peak near oasis, Bahia San Juanico

Rocks bordering northern anchorage at sunset, Bahia San Juanico

Little Tsunamis

27 February 2010

We've been in San Juanico a week now, and every day I think it grows more beautiful.  It is as if we must settle into the landscape, enter its rhythms in order, truly, to see it.

Today we hiked over the hill on a stony trail and then along a sandy road to La Ramada, a little inlet on the north side of the hills that form Caleta San Juanico.  Here, surf crashes on a crescent of sand beach; green water gradually gives way to blue depths, cliffs tumble to the shore and Punta Pulpito rises in the distance, a purple and pink stony face, sheer against the sea.  Songbirds flit among the cacti on the dry hillsides, egrets stand on outcroppings and peer, unmoving, into the water, while buzzards cast dark silhouettes against the hills.  They seem to follow us up the dusty road, so that when they rise into the sky, their shadows drop behind them and pass over us--poor trudging mortals, ignorant of our fates.

Worry dogs us this trip and I am not quite sure why.   In truth it accompanies us on most trips, but this year I feel almost dangerously distracted.  Is there something I'm forgetting?  What if? What if --I don't even know which what to feel iffy about.  A sense of my own fragility follows me; I am less supple, more tired; I feel the weariness of days as in no other year.  I am afraid for my heart. Afraid of some hurt. Am I being complacent if I don't carry with me a constant sense of dread?  I feel too brittle some days to handle all of the things I think must be done.

And.  But.  Then.  We've begun a practice of getting up and heading off in the mornings while it is still calm.  Walking.  Drawing.  Marike is nearby on the beach, painting.  For some reason I can't fathom, but related to my impatience with myself in other endeavours, I can't seem to muster any enthusiasm for my own drawing or painting.  There are the camera images, there are words: these I can handle, but exercising myself, putting myself through the stretches that have kept me well, drawing, letting myself relax into a delicious langour on the beach, these things I find hard, if not impossible to do.

The water breaks further and further out; several lines of surf roll into shore, moving against the wind.  Now and then a gust throws sand into my face.

I wonder if now, having said I can not, I might be able to draw something....

Later

A strange thing happens this afternoon in La Ramada--perhaps it's related to the earthquake and its aftershocks in Chile.  The water seems to receded in the inlet, sand flats emerge, and rows upon rows of waves break, quite far out.  Then suddenly, within just two or three minutes, the water rushes in, east to west, running into every little gully and depression.  The waves settle, flatten, then, bit by bit the water recedes and the whole process begins again.  It's curious--we've watched it for several hours--and waded across the flats to a nearby spit before deciding to swim out beyond where the water was breaking.

The swim was cold but refreshing.  We've dried now, and changed our clothing.  Marike has gone back to painting and I'm sitting in the sun watching the water ebb and flow and listening to a yellow finch call and sing in a nearby bush.  A seagull waddles to the edge of one of the tidal flats and runs along the water, bending, stooping, plucking.  I imagine he's clamming.  Then the water rushes back in and the circle around him narrows....Now he wades and cries out.

How weirdly alike our two species are!

Notes

For information on the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that occurred off of the coast of Chile at 3:34 am on 27 February 2010, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake

Non-dangerous peculiar wave effects of the sort we observed at La Ramada were also observed in Hawaii and other parts of western Mexico.

For more photos of San Juanico and La Ramada see
http://picasaweb.google.ca/karin.cope/LaRamadaPaintingMoonlightWhale?feat=directlink