2 July 2017
La Sierra de Juárez
Linda is in the States for the monthly check of oil and
sparkplugs that the medical trial in which she is enrolled requires. In her
spare moments she is fighting with the insurance companies, whose opacity and
inefficiency has long since ceased to astound but increasingly frustrates and
angers. [Don’t the guys in Washington get it? I have a three-page screed ready
to pound out, but I’ve decided it is better I spare you the reading of same,
and my blood pressure the writing of it.] Linda is also haranguing various
airlines, in that gentle and most politic fashion of which she is a master, for
having once again screwed up the requested, promised, and confirmed wheel
chairs to whisk her through the airports and customs. [Note from editrix: no pictures for this, as you can imagine....]
Our brief phone conversations also inform me that she is
heart-to-hearting with friend Jean Carpenter, filling shopping carts at Trader
Joe’s, several Goodwills and Savers, and the Kingston Free Library (aka
Transfer Station, aka Town Dump). She traveled north with a full Vera Bradley
bag and an empty suitcase for just such a binge. [Editrix: Ditto from above]
I’ve taken advantage of four days of bacheloring to head
north into the Sierra de Juárez, the mountain range between the Valley of
Oaxaca and the Gulf coast, intending three days of hiking and birding at
altitudes that Linda does not now generally find comfortable. I tried this expedition
the last time Linda went north, but the very unusual monsoons forced me back on
to pavement and back to our warm dry house in Santa Cruz Etla. This time the weather
reports looked good (dry days, wet evenings, dry nights – it IS the rainy
season, after all). I reserved two nights at the cabins near Ixtlán and figured
I’d find something else for the third night. At the airport, once Linda had
cleared security [Editrix: i.e, they didn't take away my knitting needles] , I drove off in the pitch dark pre-dawn and headed for the
sierra.

These mountains make themselves felt pretty quickly when one
leaves the Valley, which is at 1500 meters, about the height of Denver. After only
20 kilometers of corkscrew driving I had climbed to La Cumbre de Ixtepeji at
2800 meters (la cumbre literally, means the summit; in actuality, the pass). It
was just barely beginning to grow light.
Ixtepeji is an indigenous community, and their land is part
of the Sierra de Juárez Forest Preserve. The community runs some eco-cabins
about seven kilometers in from the highway along the summit ridges. It was
still just barely dawn, and I had six or seven hours to fill before my cabin
would be ready at Ixtlán. It was far too early to register at the Ixtepeji entrance
cabin on the highway and pay my 20-peso road-usage fee, but not too early to
start up the well-maintained dirt road toward the cabins. The plan? Spend a
half day hiking the trails and birding and pay on the way out. But I hadn’t
gone more than 500 meters when I realized a revision was in order. Since we had
risen at 3:45 to get Linda to the airport, and the headache I’d awakened with after
my four hours of sleep had not been cured by the change in altitude, as I had
hoped, nor by the reverse slalom that had addled my head on the quick climb from
1500 meters to nearly 3,000, what I needed to do was nap. I reclined the seat, settled
my head on our Michoacán pig pillow, and cracked the windows enough for the
mountain sounds to lull me. I have no recollection of the next hour and a half.
Then, awake, and with the headache somewhat abated, I inched
along the road, stopping wherever I saw a trailhead. At each I parked and
walked until the path got too steep, up or down, for the remnant thumping in my
head or for my lungs that were still adjusting to altitude. But, in fact, I
quickly forgot both.
Gorgeous morning light filtered through the cloud forest of gnarled
grey encino-oaks, orange-skinned madroños, and a variety of towering conifers, most
of them garlanded with bromeliads and epiphytes. The sun refracted on last
night’s raindrops clinging to the tips of leaves, turning them to diamonds that
sparkled in the breath of a breeze. In the forest’s upper story a group of
Steller’s jays chased me for a few hundred meters. A strong-billed tree-creeper,
the size of a crow but with a brown streaked head and chest and cinnamon wings
and tail, foraged its way up a fir tree until it lost itself in the heights. Here
and there clumps of wild flowers added notes of red, blue, or yellow. Along one
stretch of the road, giant maguey cactuses crouched in the tangled understory. There
were squirrels, both black and reddish brown, and on flat rocks along the trail
neat piles of the detritus from well-munched pinecones.

I took a bunch of pictures that will undoubtedly not come
out. I’ve been in forests like this before, and the enormity and depth and
texture and overwhelming greenness get lost when you reduce them to two dimensions
and try to package them in a tiny frame. I always forget that while the human
eye can see simultaneously both emerald ferns in deep shadow and moss-draped
encino-oaks spotlighted by the sun, the camera, at least any that I’ve ever
held, can’t. It either blacks out the shadows or washes out the bright spots,
or both. But with digital, now that I don’t have to pay for film, even though I
know it is futile, I always try. [Sure
enough, the photos all failed. I’ve posted one forest scene, a bromeliad, and a
red something flower just as proof of presence.]
Ixtlán is on the main highway to the Gulf through the Sierra
de Juárez, just past the village of Guelatao. These mountains—part of the
Sierra Madre Oriental—are named for Benito Juárez, the Zapotec Indian from a
poor mountain family who became president of Mexico. He was born in Guelatao in
1806 and baptized in Ixtlán.
His intelligence and drive, and some lucky breaks
and the patronage of some people of means, enabled him to move to the city and
attain a first class education. He married a white woman in Oaxaca who had
strong social and political connections, became a lawyer, then a judge, and
eventually head of Mexico’s Supreme Court. When in 1857 liberal President
Comonfort was forced to resign, the rules of succession made Juárez president.
He held the office during the eventually successful war against the French invaders
and their Emperor Maximilian. Juárez was known for his commitment to civilian
democratic rule, diminishing the power of the Church and the military, and his
respect for the law. His most famous dictum, Respeto para el derecho ajeno es la paz (“Peace is respect for
other people’s rights”) is engraved on his monumental statue down the hill from
us on la carretera (aka, the Pan
American Highway), and well as on the book that Deborah’s mermaid-librarian is
reading to the fishlings and octopusettes just outside our back door.
The town of Ixtlán is small. It is basically a collection of
houses grouped on one of the less steep slopes of these mountains. It could not
be reached by road until late in the nineteenth century, and the road, even
today when it is paved, is not for the faint of heart. What one goes there to
see, in addition to the spectacular landscape, is its church, with Juárez’s
tiny baptismal font and its extraordinary collection of ornate gilded Baroque retablos that that speak of great wealth.
The explanation has to do with insects, namely the tiny cochineal scales that
infest certain nopal cactus paddles
and secrete an incredibly intense and colorfast red die. The dried insects were,
after silver, Mexico’s second most important export during the colonial period.
Naturally the trade was rigorously controlled by the crown. I should have
written, ‘was attempted to be controlled.’ Little isolated Ixtlán became a
center of illegal cochineal production, with sacks of the dried insects leaving
the town on burro trains, jobbed to illegal wholesalers, and smuggled onto
ships to Europe. Much of the red cloth produced in England and the Low
Countries in the eighteenth century had its color’s origin in little Ixtlán.
And the profits from this trade built and decorated this church.
Today the cochineal trade is mostly gone, and the indigenous
community in heavily forested Ixtlán produces wooden furniture. It also runs an
eco-lodge, Ecoturixlán (www.oaxaca-mio.com/ecoturixtlan.htm), with a dozen and
a half comfortable cabins, extensive territory with trails to explore, several
“adventure facilities” (a zipline, a rappelling cliff, a cave for exploring), a
dining hall, and a young, pleasant, knowledgeable staff. I spent two comfortable
nights there and enjoyed both the conversations and several interesting hikes.
Capulalpam
By the way, neighboring Capulalpam, which is even smaller
than Ixtlán, boasts a similar church that also has several reputedly gorgeous
retablos courtesy of the cochineal scales. I didn’t get to see them because
over the several hours I spent in Capulalpam the church never opened. Its hours
were nowhere posted, the sacristy did not respond to raps on the door, and the
town offices hadn't a clue.
A sign by
the Municipio listed the town’s four restaurants, though not their addresses,
and though I eventually located them, none of them were open either. Neither
was the fenced park, a kilometer out of town on a heavily rutted road, that
houses a monumental stand of sabina
(a kind of cypress), nor the Centro de Medicinas Tradicionales. By me, although
Capulalpam has recently been designated a Pueblo Mágico, it has not yet learned
to act like one.
Eventually a street vendor directed me to a little comedor across from the town’s five-stall
market. The señora and an older daughter served me a nice amarillo de pollo with rice and beans and a pitcher of agua de mango while her several younger children romped and giggled with the two blond kids of a
French couple, the only other tourists in town, who were eating a similar lunch
at the comedor’s other table.
[Editrix: I did a lot better on the food end: dinners with Jean Carpenter were wonderful homemade things and a couple of lunches out were just fine, thank you.]
[As I write this, late Saturday afternoon July 1 at the
table on the covered portion of our front porch terrace, suddenly it is
hailing. I glance at the computer clock: it’s too early for rain to be
starting. But as I look up ice balls the size of olive pits are pinging against
the copper gutters and flinging themselves into the grass, trampolining up again
like little white grasshoppers. A thick, straight shaft of lightening strikes
the mountain to the west and a half second later thunder crashes. That was
close! Another jagged bolt flashes to the south, somewhere in Viguera; two
seconds until the thunder. Over the Viguera hills, Monte Albán, and Atzompa,
the sky is blue. Now all at once we are in a cyclone: rain sheets down near
horizontally from the east, and then just as suddenly from the west. The rain
is so dense that I can barely see the trees along the road. Thick columns of
water pour down the rain chains. I go inside to check the house windows. All
but one of the bedroom windows is closed, and I’ll mop there when it’s over. I
see that the cats have taken refuge, Vilu under our bed, Mitsiú hiding behind
and below Linda’s hanging dresses; Qalba snoozes unperturbed. I run back to my
computer on the terrace. The sky is blue; the few white puffy clouds are not
moving. There is no wind to stir the lantanas or the zinnias. Only a slow drip,
drip on the rain chain and the rapidly drying tiles on the uncovered portion of
the terrace attest that there even was
a storm. Total elapsed time: 9 minutes.]
David
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