Cement and cinder blocks dot and bunch in lots alongside the Via to Guadalajara. I am on a bus, to get out of the noise of San Pancho, to celebrate a week of slow travel in Mexico, and maybe to buy a little moto… we will see. It’s an adventure.
A fat and lazy sun does its mediocre best for a February midday. Such things matter here. Oxxo’s everywhere, like some monocultural organ in the body politic.
Haciendas directly front the main 4-lane Via – turning into apartment buildings – then shops – and – Voila! A Pueblo, or a major Mercado Central. There’s little difference between the two. Here’s the taxi stand… white stenciled sedans fleet and flit about, marked by their home Mercado.
I pass dry dusty earth, caught in a mess of tropical vegetative chaos. Agave farms, i would guess to make into alcohol, in various stages and healths, like a Mezcal version of Napa county in my home state. The wild vegetation here is hungry, clawing to climb anything that stands, reaching like a drowning castaway clings to a would-be-rescuer, pushing both down. The whole vast landscape looks sun-blasted, yet right now seems to be catching its breath. At least a few months of respite from the ruthlessness of the summer sun.
Palms proliferate, happily sprawling any expanse of favorable earth, cultivated or not. Some palms are made to live in order, some worship the gods of Chaos. The countryside presents itself gently with rolling hills in partial vegetative cover, greens and browns in mostly agrarian formations, much of the flat land cultivated.
Orchards, of this or that or those, grow into a single solid overstory, otherwise seemingly healthy. A dark mystery lies waiting between the trunks. The shadow stretches quickly away into darkness, out of sight. Nothing much grows under there, though thoughts of what may lurk are easy-come. The mind speculates quickly out of control.
Little country huts, half hidden in fruit trees on hills, tickle my simple, pushing invisible buttons of a dormant child-like imagination. I smile.
People, in surprising quantities, everywhere. Mexicans like pastels. It’s a thing here. But it’s hard to say why? Likely because they are the furthest away from the ubiquitous didgy gray of the unfinished cement block houses. That and bright shocking purples, yellows, and reds are the colors represented by flowering succulents of all types, the mainstay of the native flora. I see a fair amount of ‘Se Vende’ signs, on buildings, complexes, hotels or lots, from my tinted bus window.
A man emerges from the tree line, his face all shadow and angle in the overhead sun. His smile exacerbates the shadow, just as the local friendliness of the gente makes the chaos and disinterest in my comfort all that much harder to bear. I am challenged by paradise here, spoiled for the paradise I left, where I long to be now, where warm arms await, at least in the back of my mind, where partially-imagined hopes lie.