We call
Carlos’s cell phone the minute we leave the toll road from Orizaba and arrange
to meet at El Huajal in about fifteen
minutes. El Huajal being the name of
the house we are renting from Tammi and Karen, and Carlos being its manager.
Carlos Plata, neé Carl Silverberg, is a young man in his thirties who is passionate
about mountain bikes and runs a business taking visitors out on the trails. The
tourist business is in the doldrums these days, what with the economic crisis
and the foreign press portraying Mexico as resembling Hue during the Tet
offensive, so the bike business does not keep wife and child in food and
clothing. Carlos’s second profession is managing the houses of some of the part time residents of San Pablo Etla.
We park at the end of the short, unpaved, side road that leads to El Huajal,
and before we can even decently doze off from the hours of driving, Carlos
wheels up on a mountain bike he has designed and built himself. After a few effusive
rounds of Great to See You How’s Your Family Doing, Carlos hands us four keys:
front gate, front door, patio door, back gate.
The house
is even prettier than we remembered it. In the small, tree-shaded front yard,
the geraniums, chest high, have blossoms the size of an acorn squash. An orchid
peeks from a crook of a tree. Carlos points out the new sliding windows, fully
screened, and the new kitchen door that also has a screen: more air, fewer
bugs. As we walk through the house we are again stunned at the amount of
high-end art Tammi and Karen—themselves both artists—have amassed. Clay
sculptures cover every table, every shelf, tall figurines and pots rise from
every corner. Hanging in every room are mirrors with their frames filled with three
dimensional mermaids, demons, iguanas, faces, and musical instruments. From the
few remaining bits of bare wall ceramic masks follow our every move. The back
half-acre is shaded by a row of towering eucalyptus trees along the fence that separates
El Huajal’s terreno from that of the
Evangelical church next door. There are fruit trees and five small stone-fenced
cactus gardens, each presided over by a tall clay figurine and her smaller
attendants.

We shuttle
back into the house, emptying the car into a heap next to the dining room
table. We’ll make order later. Linda’s eyes gleam at the opportunity to
rearrange furniture. As everyone knows who has ever struggled to impose logic
on an array of multiple units, be it pots a kitch

en, furniture in an entire
house, staff in a business, curriculum in a university, books in a library, tax
records in the auditor’s waiting room, whatever, there are two basic organizational
models to choose from: the current way, and the Better Way. It does not matter
if the current way functions well, and that the path to the Better Way is
arduous and involves much physical and mental labor, and perhaps even expense.
As long as there is a Better Way, it, like the Grail, must be sought. It does
not matter that after an impossibly short time the Better Way becomes the
current way, so that the whole process has to be repeated. The Better Way is
always out there, begging us to begin rearranging things. I remind myself of
the corollary of the Third Law of Linda-dynamics: always turn on a light before
crossing a dark room, even if you think you know where everything was when you
went to bed.
Saturday
morning I rise at 6:30 and find much of the car pile stowed away and chairs and
tables in unfamiliar places. I hear rockets bursting down in the valley:
someone’s birthday, or the patron saint of a house or a village, or just
somebody who likes to shoot off rockets. A quick cup of coffee—Linda is still
asleep— and I am on the road uphill to Bill and Mary’s house, next door to
where we first stayed when we came to Oaxaca last year. On the road I meet
bearded Jim on his run from Jim and Cathy’s organic farm a kilometer further up
the mountain. I wave hello but he is in a zone and jogs on past me. I know
we’ll get together soon. A few steps farther along, Bob, of Bob and French
Eveline, is coming through the gate of one of the newer houses on the road.
Didn’t they used to live one ridge further north of San Pablo? Bob sees me,
does a double take, launches a hug at me, and welcomes me back. He and Eveline have
relocated to this house because the owner of the other one wanted it back, but
they are leaving in the morning for two weeks with his kids in the US and two
more with her kids in Paris, but we’ll get together just as soon as they return.
A couple of hundred meters higher along the road, past the trees where
sometimes there are flocks of orioles when the sun first peeks over the
mountain to the southeast, I see Saraí wheeling her two kids, David and Itaí in
a stroller. Her husband, Florencio, a brilliant and very nice young man, is the
manager of the properties up at El Barco. Itaí must be eight months old,
because she was born the day before we left San Pablo back in March. Saraí and
I hug and chat, I take a picture of the tots, and turn the corner into the dirt
road that leads to Bill and Mary’s house on the knoll that is El Barco. Bill is
standing on the edge of the arroyo next to two women, all of them binoculars
raised to their eyes, staring at something moving down in the thickets. I move
into the line and raise my glasses.
“A Oaxacan
towhee?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Bill wheels
around. “David! Well, ... well ... it’s about time!”
Bill
introduces me to the two women, short-timers who are staying at the cottage
called El Estudio at El Barco, both of them avid birders on a week’s vacation
from work in the States. Sheelagh, the older of the two, was vice president of
a large software engineering company, and since retiring has spent her time
traveling and birding, so far this fall in Australia and Mongolia (two weeks on
horseback: maybe a jeep next time).
And with no
further ado, we four troop off into the thickets and over the field and down
the hill to the river ford on the route that Bill has been chronicling for the
Cornell Ornithology Program every day for the last six years when he moved from
Chicago to San Pablo Etla.
At 9:00 Bill’s
wife Mary comes striding along the road with Bailey the Basset and Leila the
Miscellaneous from the early morning dog walk that she does with Rebecca Raab
around the perimeter of the Raab’s large maguey farm on the hills beyond the
arroyo that forms the southern border of San Pablo Etla. Rebecca and Tony Raab
manufacture mescal, shelter stray and wounded animals, and host an array of
interesting people in the cottages that dot the thickets around their own
modest home. Tom’s father bought the property more than 50 years ago, and Tom
and Rebecca have made it their home.
Mary, tall,
thin, white haired, our age but with all the energy of a teenager, hauls the
dogs up to us, hands the leashes to Bill, and gives me a long, breathtaking
hug.
“Welcome
home.”