In the years we have been living and traveling in Mexico we
have been drawn, quite naturally, to visit a number of natural parks, reserves
and attractions. Two types seem to prevail, and they are both somewhat different
from what we have come to expect of a National Park north of the Rio Grande.
The first type, and our first night’s stop after crossing the North Mexican desert,
is Cascada Cola del Caballo, Horse-tail Falls, which we soon learn, alas, is
100% representative of the first genre.
Mexico,
just like the United States, whose two backbones, the Appalachians and the
Rockies, run parallel to the coasts, is twin-spined. In the east the Sierra
Madre Oriental range towers over the broad coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico;
in the west the Sierra Madre Occidental soars right behind the Pacific beaches.
As is the way with mountain chains, rivers do not flow gently out of them: they
plummet from the heights to the lowlands with a whoosh and a roar and a visual impact
that is irresistible to the gawking throngs.

Mexico’s tourist
waterfalls—and we have visited maybe a dozen of them over the years—are
packaged differently from those in the States. Our post eco-consciousness
emphasis in the US seems to be on bringing visitors to the falls on a trail,
often as rustic as is feasible given crowds and safety concerns and wheel-chair
accessibility, and allowing them to marvel at the force of nature in a setting
as pristine as possible. The goal is minimal visible engineering; maximum
natural state, or at least the illusion thereof. Our National Parks all strive
to do this, and many privately owned sites do as well, at least those that
weren’t commercialized in the years before modern sensibilities. As for the
pre-modern “improved” natural wonders, Linda and I feel certain that you can
easily draw up a list of places that you wish had been left mostly alone.
Here in
Mexico, the priority on tourist nature is commercialization. The path to the waterfall
generally runs between two lines of vendor stands. Some hawk souvenirs, others
sell candy, or plastic cups of fresh fruit, or sodas and tacos and tortas. Tourist
archaeology gets this treatment too. Not only do you have to funnel through
stands like these at many archaeological sites, at the most famous sites like
Teotihuacán and Palenque souvenir and nosherei stands sprout like mushrooms
right between the pyramids. As far as listening to the sounds of nature as you
approach the waterfalls, every second vendor has a loudspeaker broadcasting
music, though no two ever play the same song. Often as not, the approach path
runs between stucco walls that are just high enough so that you cannot see over
them or escape to some alternate route. At Cola del Caballo, this entry gauntlet
runs about three hundred meters from the parking lot to the ticket stand. The
walls stop there. Now the concrete and flagstone sidewalks that have replaced
the right bank of the river channel the visitors upstream past a succession of
playgrounds (slides and swing sets) and concrete picnic tables. As I write
this, I realize that I took zero pictures of all this tickytack; when I closed
my eyes to it I seem to have also locked my shutter. With me on the approach
trail are a dozen families with kids. The young parents wheel strollers; teens
sulk along behind, buds in their ears, their eyes fixed on their smartphones. Nobody
seems to look at the river or the trees on its other side. The engineered
environment says “move along”, so people do.
The falls themselves
–in two tiers, the lower dropping maybe 4 meters, the upper maybe 12—are pretty
enough, but they are like a diamond overpowered by a clunky setting. Stairs and
bridges and concrete viewing platforms encircle the two tiers of falls. And
there are electric lines both up to the falls and immediately above it. The
families ooh and ahh and hold up their phones and tablets for pictures. Immediately
to the left of the bridge that spans the middle of the two tiers is a thatched
stand selling cups of fruit and bottled soda. An uncle teeters on a precarious rock
to snap the perfect picture of his brother dangling a toddler over the rushing
water.
The whole scene is engaging, but somehow, at least for me, it just doesn’t
satisfy the spirit.
One good
thing: unlike up north in Tort-Land, where site-managers are held legally
responsible for everyone’s safety, with the result that every imaginable dumb
act is warned against with a prominent sign, Mexico has faith that people will
obey the dictates of common sense. The “teeter” and “dangle” of the preceding
paragraph prove that this faith is misplaced, but, even so, it is nice to be
treated like sensible persons, even if we are not.


Hotel de la Cola del Caballo
The type-two
natural sites are the diametric opposite. In the last (we don't know how many) years Mexico has
designated a number of areas as “Reservas biosferas ecológicas” (RBE = Ecological
Preserves of our Biosphere). These are vast relatively undisturbed areas of
ecological significance. The Reserves include a large chunk of a major mountain
range (RBE Manatlán in Jalisco); two 70-kilometer stretches of coastal marsh
(RBE Celestún and RBE* Ría Lagartos in Yucatán); a chunk of the Sonoran desert
the size of two Rhode Islands (RBE Antar-Pinacate in Sonora); a super wetlands
(RBE* de Centla, in Tabasco); a King Ranch size swath of humid topical jungle
(RBE Selva de Ocote and the 10-times larger RBE Montes Azules, both in Chiapas)
and an equally large strip of dry jungle (RBE* Sian Ka’an in Chetumal); an
unusual east coast volcano and the land around it for as far as a person can
see (RBE Volcán de San Martín in Veracruz*); a canyon grander than the Grand
(RBE Cañón del Cobre in Chihuahua); and the one in which we currently find
ourselves (RBE el Cielo* here in Tamaulipas). The five starred reserves are those
that Linda and I have had the enormous pleasure of visiting at one time or
another.
Each of
these is refuge for threatened flora and fauna (and in some cases indigenous
peoples), a laboratory for the study of ecosystems, a potential generator of
sustainable ecotourism, and a source of great national and local pride. If
there happen to be villages inside the reserve, as there are with the Centla
wetlands or the El Cielo cloud forest, they are left in place, although any new
construction is cooperatively monitored. Often the villagers are employed as
rangers, guides, or in myriad small of construction projects to keep the trails
open, the streams flowing, and so for
th. Before El Cielo was made a reserve,
for example, it was lumbered, and the few access roads—only in Mexico would a
track this rough be called a road—were to bring out trees. Now lumbering is
prohibited, although trees that have caught a disease, or are infested with
destructive insects, are tagged and removed.
CThe word Cielo in Spanish signifies both sky and Heaven: is unclear which is intended by the advertisements that
offer transportation to El Cielo. Here it refers to the fact that the reserve
rises precipitously from the coastal plain in three jungle-clad ridges, each
successive ridge loftier than the previous, with the third so high that its
ecosystem is cloud forest. The long thin town of Gómez Farías, clinging to the
top of an outlying ridge at the edge of the reserve, is our base. We stay at
the Hostal Casa de Piedra. We had spent two nights here 7 years previous, and
had been charmed by the delightful owner, doña Elia Méndez. Back then we had hoped
to be able to go up to El Cielo, but a winter storm had made all but a short
soggy hike impossible.

This time
we were determined, and had emailed ahead to reserve our favorite room (Magnolia, with a private balcony
overlooking thick, orchid dotted jungle) and to engage a vehicle and guide to
take us to the heights. There is a newer, much more expensive hotel a little
before the town, but the Casa de Piedra is such a gem that that we did not want
to mess with perfection. Our guide was to be Ricardo Jim
énez, a young man with
a reputation as an accomplished birder. In fact, as we came to hear from
various people in and around the town, he is known for the ability to call in
birds with a repertoire of whistles and squawks and pishhes that are
irresistible to everything from warblers to owls.
Ricardo has
contracted a friend, Beto, with a heavy-duty pickup truck to drive us up the
mountain. For Linda the altitude may be problematic, so she decides to spend
the day in Gómez Farías, watching the hummingbirds around the hotel and
knitting. Beto picks us up at 7:00, and we start up the old logging road. The
air is thick with butterflies, the road with rocks and ruts. The truck, in
4-wheel drive, the rear wheels easily 18-inches thick, climbs painstakingly
from one rock to the next, at about 3 kph. The round trip, over a total of
perhaps 20 km, takes us 13 hours.

An hour up we meet a descending truck that
has pulled over into a layby, the first we have seen. I don’t know how long he
has been waiting, but he must have been able to hear us groaning and jouncing
over a considerable distance. He tells us to be on the lookout: a little
further up the mountain he has seen two jaguar cubs, and their mama must be
around somewhere. We keep our eyes peeled, but no such luck. El Cielo has one
of the healthiest r
esident feline population in Mexico, with ocelots,
jaguarundis, pumas, jaguars, and a couple of others making a good living in
these jungles, but—cubs aside—they are mostly nocturnal animals. We never do
see the cubs.
Each time
we climb into a new eco-zone, we get out and scan the jungle for wildlife. Beto waits with the truck and Ricardo works
his magic as we walk a few hundred meters ahead. We manage to see a pretty wide
selection of the local avi-fauna, including parrots, a mountain trogon, a smoky
brown woodcreeper, and an improbably-named rufous-crowned peppershrike, all of
which are new birds for me. Our elusive goal, once we have reached the upper
jungle, is to catch a glimpse of
a tiny bird that is endemic to the El Cielo
reserve: the Tamaulipan pigmy owl (tecolutito
tamauliteco). Although twice when Ricardo calls it we hear a distant
answering too-wheet, it never comes any closer.
In the
milliseconds between jounces Ricardo and I exchange life stories. Beto doesn’t
talk; he just drives. Ricardo did farm and ranger work high in the mountains
for nine months some years ago and spent his free time with a bird book, his
binoculars, and his ears. Obviously he developed better skills in that short
time than I will in my remaining lifetime. Since tourism is slow, what with the
worldwide economic crisis and the disastrously negative press about Mexico in
the US and European papers (we appear to be the only outsiders in Gómez Farías,
and the same was true 7 years ago), doña Elia needed temporary help when the
occasional group did show up, Ricardo became her part-time factotum: cook,
handyman, minds the hotel when she has to be away. Ricardo and his wife have an
eleven-year-old girl, Guadalupe, and to support the women he has taken on
summer agricultural work. He and 53 other local young men go north as contract
laborers: last year Georgia, this coming year North Carolina. The agent
provides the legal papers, the bus, and the lodging, takes care of the hassles
at the border, solves any issues that might arise between the Mexican pickers
and their American contractors, and brings them
home at the end of the season.
They get some free time on site to shop in the US and talk with the locals, but
for the most part they speak Spanish, and he finds it frustrating to progress
so slowly with his skills. I offer to switch to English, but he says that what
with the noise in the truck and his ear at the open window to troll for birds,
it would require too much conversation. We do talk, though, about his getting
away for a few days to visit us in Rhode Island next summer: go clamming, check
out the local avian life, see a little of
New England. It’s not likely to happen—later Linda repeats the invitation—but
I hope it does.
Meanwhile,
in a high valley between El Cielo’s first and second ridge we come to a small
town, Alta Cima, a scattering of a dozen houses, fruit trees, tiny plots of
corn called milpas, with a few
patches of nopal cactus, whose
de-thorned leaf paddles are one of Mexico’s tastiest and most nutrient-rich
vegetables. The town even has a small elementary school. Ricardo and Beto seem
to know everyone there, and to be related to half of them. We pause at a couple
of houses to leave off small packages that Beto has brought up from Gómez
Farías.
“From here
on,” Ricardo tells me, “the road gets steep, so we may slow down a bit.
Sure
enough, as soon as we leave the valley the truck’s snout tilts high and our
speed drops by 1/3. We jounce so wildly from one side to another that it seems
to me that rodeo bull riding might offer a welcome relief. I am not certain my
ribs and spine will survive the journey, and even Ricardo is clutching the door
handle for support. Still, every few minutes we stop and get out and survey the
jungle. Now we are clearly in cloud forest. The trees are draped in moss, their
trunks glow green, the rotting vegetation on the ground nourishes fungus and
ferns, and lianas hang everywhere in thick tangles. Some of the rocks are thick
with fossils. It is hard to believe that these mountains were once at the
bottom of the sea. Ricardo confirms my impression that this whole area is
karstic, calcium-rich limestone, and that it is riddled with sinkholes and
caves. Here in the cloud forest both the birdlife and butterflies are new. We
strain to hear, strain to see in the deeply shaded forest, and when a mere
glimpse of a bird leaves us with an ambiguity, consult the reference books that
each of us has brought along. But still no pigmy owl.
By mid
afternoon we have reached our goal: in a small valley nestled near the top of
the third mountain is another town, San José.
“We’ll stop
here for a bit of lunch,” Ricardo tells me.
We pull
into a yard at the only house that is visible, get out of the truck, make our
way through the dogs and chickens and one tame crested guan that swarm around
us. The house belongs to Ricardo’s brother-in-law José, who ekes out a living
here with his wife and a couple of kids. The brother-in-law’s wife is Beto’s
cousin. A pot of beans is on the fire, and there is a covered large bowl of
rice on the table. The house—a main room with a table and a couple of chairs, a
kitchen, and a bedroom, is of wood, as is the roof: too wet up here for thatch.
Down we sit, fill our plates with rice and beans, and José’s wife—I never did
learn her name— brings out a stack of fresh, hot, home made tortillas. We drink
water, fresh from a spring up the hill behind the house, probably the only
non-bottled water I will drink until we get back to the States. I notice a
small flat-screen TV on the wall.
“There were
electric lines to Alta Cima,” I ask Ricardo, “but I don’t see any up here . . .
”
“Solar
panels,” says Ricardo.
We bid our
goodbyes, pick a handful of guayavas from a tree in the yard, are given a
basket of live chickens for Beto to take to his family, and climb back into our
truck. Our host won’t take any money.
“No, of course
not, this is my family,” José says.
“But I am a
forastero, someone from outside.” I
protest.
“A guest of
the family,” José says. Behind him Ricardo is shaking his head to tell me not
to push it.
On the
return trip, at a level-ish place in the cloud forest we stop once more for
Ricardo to hoot at the owlet one more time.
“Too-wheet!”
There is an
answer. Ricardo hoots again. Again the answer. Then silence.
“After he calls,
sometimes he goes silent and flies close to investigate. Check the treetops.
High up. He likes to sit in a fork of a tree, and he is colored like the bark.
About this big.”
With his
hands he makes a circle the size of an American softball. Ricardo calls again.
“There, up
there.”
We both
peer through our binoculars and, sure enough, in the crotch of a tree,
thirty-feet off the ground, in the fading light, a light-brown ball of fluff
with a tiny beak stares at us with two big eyes. The tecolotito.