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

Our Lady of the Tides (Not Me)

Lost and Found on Land

25 February 2010
San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Northerlies, northerlies, northerlies.  Fierce winds blow every day, all day.  We sit on the boat and ride up and down, watching, watching.  Will our anchor hold?  Will the 17 other boats here also hold fast? Yes, and yes, to everyone's relief.

Today the wind died down a bit and we went ashore.  We hauled the dinghy way up the beach and went for a long walk up dry creek beds and down dusty roads....Saw wild fossils, volcanic rock, all kinds of cacti living and dead, the desert in flower, birds of every sort, tracks of horse and cattle, even the dried skull of a cow of some sort, rotten hide tossed beside it, by a brackish waterhole.  I took pictures of everything, all in black and white so they have the flavour of an old Mexican movie from the 50s.  

In fact, I got so busy taking those pictures (especially of the skull) that Marike got really far ahead of me and I lost her!  And the trail.  It led beside the brackish waterhole to the beach, and then along a ridge. But I was far enough behind that all I was really following was Marike's hat.  I thought.

Turns out when I got to the beach--certain that she was WAY down the beach ahead of me talking to someone--that the hat-wearer wasn't her at all, but another sailor in a wide-brimmed floppy hat. And a beard. 

It was hot, the sun high, I couldn't find the trail, and I was thirsty. Marike had the gatorade. 

I started to get worried.  I looked way up on the ridge, along the road there, where I expected to see her, a dusty figure trudging uphill, white shorts flashing in the light. Nada. 

I used the camera to zoom in on spots at one end of the beach or another.  Yes, a flash of white, a flutter.  She's waving to me! 

Oops, no.  Pelicans, not Marike. 

Where was she?  How could she have disappeared? How could I have lost her?  What if she were on the trail somewhere and met up with a rattler or tripped and fell? What if that happened to me while I was looking for her?  Or what if I got lost? What if........?

Finally, I regained my reason and began to look for signs of the trail BEFORE the beach, between the brackish water and the last line of hills.  The beach, I reasoned, was what had distracted me; I'd been too seduced by the sea and that floppy hat, so that I missed both trail and girl.

Yes, there it was!  And there were her tracks.  I followed them along, through a fence, and soon there she was, coming back from the top of the hill. Turns out she'd seen me on the beach. Or, thought she'd seen me, but it was a mer-lady built of driftwood.  Then she did see me--I was looking right at her, she said--and she motioned for me to come. But I never saw that. 

Still, when we finally did meet up (I stowed my worry immediately, feeling silly, feeling embarrassed) that yicchy green gatorade she was carrying was pretty delicious....

Seasick

20 February 2010
16 hour crossing from Bahia San Carlos, Sonora to Caleta San Juanico, Baja California Sur

 

There aren't really any pictures for this story--and if there were, you wouldn't want to see them.

I have a confession to make: even after all these years, I still get seasick.  To hear others tell about it, I'm blessed (cursed) with only the mildest version of the affliction, a vague and generalized nausea resulting in an inability to eat--probably caused more by anxiety and excessive gripping of stomach muscles as we leap from wave to wave than true motion sickness.  Small doses of Gravol help, and time cures the problem--not so apparently with more violent forms of sea sickeness. 

It's frustrating.  There's the boat, doing what she's meant to do, and Marike grinning and whooping and riding the waves like a cowboy.  I have utter confidence in both of them; both handle the seas far better than I can or ever will.  Indeed, they are in their element there, sails taut, wind singing through the rigging, boat plunging through the waves.  I'M the problem, and I know it.  Setting off into large seas, I'm like an ungainly dancer, a figure who knows no rhythm and clumps about in poor shoes, awkward, dropping on the downbeat, missing the upbeat, swinging forever the wrong way.  And I know if I can just relax, just settle into or find the rhythm of the boat's motion, I'll be fine.  But somehow, for a time, no matter what I do, I can't.  I'm like a polka dancer at a samba party, stomping when I should be flying.  

Sometimes sleep helps--to lie down, let go--holding myself up in all that plunging is hard work--always one hand for the task, one for myself.  Then, as I dream, the music of the boat slips into my bones.  I breathe--though sometimes this takes hours--deeply.  There.  Finally, the dance; the pleasure of the blue blue sea and the force of the wind and this rollicking motion hour after hour and into the night, whirl of stars above and dolphins leaping alongside us.

 

What We're Here For

17 February 2010
San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

Wind blows the dust out of the hills, off of the roadways, from dusty parking lots.  I eat a fish taco and drink a limonada and wait for Marike to come back to land.  She's on the boat with Salvador, the electrician, doing repairs.  I've been online all day trying to figure out how to get the computer to stop thinking the gps feed is another mouse or pointing system.  No luck.  Next to me a couple speaks urgently, quietly, into a telephone.  There has been an acidente grave.  They seem to be everywhere these accidents.  We've had word from home that our doctor's daughter was thrown from a car and hangs between life and death; her pelvis shattered, she's in an induced coma in the hospital. 

Inside the bar, Cesaria Evoria sings and men drink alone, so I've come out to sit in the sun and watch the street--and the dust--blow by.  The couple next to me goes on speaking softly, anxiously, in Spanish, reviewing the details--four young people in the car; one girl--the woman's neice, and three young men. Suddenly the man breaks out into English, his accent pure LA--SH I I I T!  How'd that happen?  Nothin'
 moves fast here, not even a burnin' bar.  What you got to be in a hurry for?

So I eat slowly and watch the palms bend in the wind. 

Snapshots

Marina Seca, San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico

1. The wash filled with red earth, spots of mud, standing water.  Swallows flit across the road, a gull flaps by, then suddenly, along the line of trees, a commotion.  An egret lands; the other birds scatter then return while it highsteps happily in the rocky ditch.

 

2. I am on the way to the market.  A bright grey knee-high dog with large ears comes scampering up the road and sniffs my heels. Two women in a golf cart stop to pet it.  One stumps out handling two canes, the dog backs off, then runs forward: he knows her.

3. Water gushes beneath the road, still tumbling out of the mountains after the rains two days ago.  This is where the road washed out in the fall after the hurricane, and an entire work gang is still labouring to replace it.  They've built themselves a tarpaper shack just off of the road; all day they move machinery and screen earth, separating out the stones.  Trucks full of pipes discharge their loads here; a woman waits for the bus; two boys dig what looks like--but cannot be--a shallow grave with pickaxes.  Someone has just planted palms in the median; abrupt holes in the earth--pedestrian beware!--indicate where other plantings may be.  I come from the market and carry heavy bags.  I pick my way through the uneven ground of the median until I arrive at a culvert.  Water is gushing from a cast iron pipe, creating a small red mud lake.  A young engineer balances on the pipe, talking on his cellphone.  He gestures to someone else, then suddenly looses his balance, teeters, his eyes wide as he peers into the watery mud.  He flails his arms, regains his balance, shrugs, then snaps his phone closed and pulls out a tape measure to count off the length of broken pipe.

4. It is night. Cold, clear, the sky filled with stars. There, above the yard, is the big dipper, its handle tipped back along a mast so that the ladle dumps out backwards, pouring starlight over the deck.

5.  It's dusk.  The cattle wander up from the arroyo, where they've been feeding on grass and sheltering in the trees. They decide to cross the road and nothing will hurry them, not the baying of the dogs nor the honking chorus of a line of dusty pick-up trucks, tired men on their way home from work.

On the bus to Mexico!

2 febrero 2010

Tucson-Nogales-Hermosillo-Guaymas-San Carlos

 Tucson

It is early morning and we are ready to get on the bus to Mexico.  Thin cirrus clouds streak across the sky, combed into strange upswept forms by winds blowing from the mountaintops.  Sere black earth, desertic plants growing in the crevasses, then broad, almost fertile valleys. Here and there a horse ranch. Cattle ranges. 

 

As soon as the sun rises, the US Air Force practices: fighter jets tear into the sky, one after the other, then rise and bank.  They peel off one by one and roar back towards the base, their afterburners crackling, the air vibrating with an infernal and terrifying din.  Triangular aircraft with long cone noses, they rip through the air much faster than you think they could.  Than you think they should, shooting across the sky twice as fast as your eye seems to move. I am always frightened by these monstrous mechanical birds, thinking how terrible the passage of their shadows.  I shudder, as if I’ve been visited by the angel of death, which in way, I suppose I have.

At the bus station, we pass our time peering into tiendas de belleza, dress-makers’ shops, a photographer’s studio; all of them specialize in first communions and quinceaños celebrations.  Everywhere, mannequins are dressed as brightly coloured princesses, butterfly daughters, daughters of love, soon to be ready to be given to love.  Behind us, palms stutter down the boulevards.  Finally we pull away.  Then stop.  The Tufesa office has called the bus driver; someone left her purse in the washroom.  We back into an alley, turn around, return, and the purse is handed up onto the bus, with much laughter and chistes for the grandmother who has forgotten it.  She is shy and rattled by being in the US, where she has been visiting her daughter and grandchildren, tired from having boarded in Phoenix well before sunrise.  She becomes much more animated once we cross the border into Mexico.

Nogales

In Nogales now.  The silvered tin dome of a cathedral glimmers in the morning light.  We turn down narrow streets, headed for the border, which divides the town.  As we approach the Mexican side, signs sprout up everywhere , selling goods, services, food.  I am instantly and completely happy.

We stop at the border.  Our bags are unloaded onto a trolley and everyone is ushered into a small room.  But Marike and I are sent elsewhere, to Migracion, where after showing our passports and filling out a form and paying a small fee—240 pesos or $21USD—and acquiring all of the necessary official stamps, we are admitted to Mexico for 180 days.  (A small window of dream and possibility creaks open, birds fly through.)

When we return from Migracion, our bags have been loaded, and everyone on the bus is waiting for us.  The women across the aisle hold plates of steaming tamales, a quesadilla.  Pungent aromas fill the air and the bus pulls away.

Soon we are in the countryside.  Vast tracts of greenhouses line the road; small workers’ villages gather nearby.  The earth is dusty.  Soon the road climbs into open countryside—here and there compounds with pick-up trucks, horses, some cattle, a trailer—but the rest is desert scrub.  I fill my mouth with the names of plants that dot this landscape: ocotillo, saguro, palo verde, mesquite, agave, nopales. 

Hermosillo

Hermosillo lies in a broad flat plane inland; it is a commercial centre in the heart of the state of Sonora.  But like every part of Mexico closely linked to the US, it is on hard times now.  Abandoned car dealerships, hollowed buildings, graffiti-covered walls.  And as always in Mexico, everywhere, building, building in and from sand.  Rebar reaches into the sky from an unfinished tower. How long has it been like that?  How long will it stay?  Until the next flood, perhaps.

Guaymas/ San Carlos

Shapely red coastal mountains come into view as we approach San Carlos and Guaymas, plantings of palm and bougainvillea, then there, finally, the sea!  It is cloudy, cool.  Rain hangs over the mountains.  We climb down from the bus, gather our bags and hail a taxi.  The baggage handler helps us haul everything to the front of the station, then lift it into the cab.   A la marina seca!  We arrive just before closing time; the taxi slips through the gates.  We drive down the line of boats in the work yard.  There’s Quoddy’s Run, with her painted waterline eyes!  We unload our bags, and one of the yard workers comes to help us heave them up the ladder onto the boat, and to open the lock on the companionway.

Everything is covered in layers of fine red dust, and soon we are too.  But we are happy to have arrived, with ourselves and all our goods intact.  I make the bed, Marike checks the batteries and hooks up the propane and makes sure we have water.  We eat, then sleep to the sound of rain.