Thursday, December 30, 2010

Gee, I Coulda Gone to Taos

The internet connection at the house in Colonia de San Antonio, a 'connection' only by straining courtesy, is not functioning, so I'm sitting in a Starbucks on Canal Street, a main thoroughfare in the center of a colonial town much older than any comparable bit of civilization in Los Estados Unidos. That is San Miguel as succinctly as I can say it (never having been here before).  The streets that are not cobbled are flagged. When the flags are repaired, gangs of men in old clothes and straw cowboy hats sit clustered in the middle of the street with sledges and chisels, digging up the pavement, carefully chiseling old mortar from the flags, and resetting them in fresh mortar. When they leave work for the day, the street is piled with all the unset flags - no barricades, no flashing lights, no yellow "Cuidado" signs, just an obstacle course for any little car or scooter that might blunder through, which they generally do unscathed. I surmise that the ordinary person hasn't yet learned the immense advantages of assiduous personal litigation.

San Miguel is a city with plenty of parks and green spaces, but it is a city so the landscape is distant. The road from Guanajuato runs through that peculiar Mexican mountainscape of small but abrupt hills and bluffs, small plots of maize tilled between the mesquite, the nopales and groves of small trees with thorny leaves like giant holly. Since it's winter, corn shocks are sitting in the fields, piled everywhere on the verges of tilled land, being hauled away on little ricks or wains pulled by burros. The bus has to slow down to a crawl until some unperturbed son of the soil pulls his ancient tractor aside to let the traffic pass. I spotted a small accipiter hunting over an empty field - a sharp-shinned hawk, I think. We've done a little rooftop birding and have taken binoculars to Parque Benito Juarez - the best siting there was a Bell's vireo grazing off the leaves (all the trees are as green as summer right now). But there are woodpeckers everywhere, ladderbacks and golden-fronted woodpeckers with their clown laugh, Mexican robins, boat tailed grackles that make a racket like parrots. The white-winged doves call from before sunup until dark. And vermilion flycatchers, best of all. The day before Chrismas, the local English-language paper advertised an Audobon-sponsored bird walk along the river outside of town, but when we called the phone number for information, a nice American lady told us unapologetically that it's been cancelled, "Bob is on vacation." Apparently even permanent vacationers require respite from whatever their current vail of tears.

San Miguel is a colonial city (1542 or thereabouts, not long after someone sailed the ocean blue). That means the streets are a maze of narrow cobbled trails up and down abrupt hillsides, all higgledy-piggledy and entirely at odds with rational geometry, but wisely rationing the flow of taxis and aged pickup trucks that can nearly compete in sheer numbers with the glossy Lincoln Navigators and Tahoes that wander in with their cargo of blondes in expensive sunglasses from Texas and California. The residents mostly intermingle regardless of income, nationality, levels of education, rank, creed, wrinkles - apart from some obviously stylish new 'privadas' built to replicate the old stone-and-stuccoed barrios that prevail with their easy promiscuity, pressing their housefronts right to the curb, bustling with little abbarotes and tiendas and restaurantes and ferrienderas and servicio automovil and lavanderias and all the necessities of simple civilization. We've already taken a taxi (25 p., no more) to buy some supplies at the 'MEGA', the supermarket just on the edge of town - it has everything you could want - todo el mondo y mas. It can hold its own with any Starbucks in cleanliness, convenience, ambience and sheer modernity. We shop more locally in general, but I blush to confess that it's a comfort just knowing the MEGA is there.

San Miguel is a city but it's manageable, it's in Mexico but could easily be in the south of France or Calabria or Piemonte, it's crowded at the center but it's navigable, there are Americans nearly everywhere but they're still outnumbered and seem to be well-enough behaved, if still odd, for the most part.  They are generally identifiable for wielding expensive cameras at inopportune moments.

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