“South of The Border.” Those words conger up images for some visitors to Mexico that do not embrace screen-fragile ease, but take on wind-rain challenges.
Chunks of this September and October often meant ripping and slamming pieces of mountainside as well delightful doors and windows; and “normally“ gully- and draw-protected livestock fencing. A short while of that kind mountainside attention can often shred even well-cared-for fencing. Up on Las Agraciadas mountainside a couple of fast wind-driven mud-dark streams tumbled downhill. The landscape began to change. With two hefty limbs of a guaje tree, and a home-made raincoat, you can limp out to change the direction of streams, spreading a day’s wide experience.
Guadalupe Ramos, who shared the high, climbing field above my home, joined in wading through the clay-heavy mud the rainy morning offered. We were unblocking the readily rainwater blocked cornstalks, tree limbs, uprooted cactus and the growing walls of barely moveable rock.
Working uphill was a bit like wrestling while steady footing got lost on slippery clay. Our clumsiness produced laughter and invented swearing in both languages. Cattle had been herded up to the partially harvested milpas above us. They had stomped apart the earthen channel leading away from the cluttered rocks forming a rain-addled wall that partially protected the downhill surge.
Slicing into the churned lodo, Lupe’s quickly moving shovel made a sucking sound as it pulled out mounds of tangled debris. When the canal was opened, I slogged slowly uphill to the corner of the modest wall. The opening there was partially plugged with a boulder the size of a small barrel. The wind had picked up and the earlier modest rain had turned cold and pushy. I stretched my aching back. Lupe grinningly mentioned my age and made a rough remark about his heritage. Luckily, my shovel’s handle was made from a four-foot piece of inch-and-half water pipe. Using it as a crowbar, I levered the boulder sideways into the hole I’d slowly made, flanking the boulder sideways into the wall. The water made a pleasing slashing sound as the rock rolled out of its way.
Holding the shovel in my uphill hand, I carefully climbed in a bent-over posture. With huge globs of mud covering my boots, I was clumsy. Lupe, giving me a hand, was again joking about age. At the next corner of the wall, there was a tangle of barbed wire above a stone fence. Using the shovel to hold down the wire and with the wind pushing me, I scrambled awkwardly over, rain leaking down my collar. Felt like ice.
Sunny Mexico I thought, watching the clouds a few hundred yards away plunging down the mountain slopes toward us.
At the next opening in the wall, a clot of brush and corn stalks, rocks and gravel choked the canal opening. Turning the shovel backwards, I scraped at brick-sized rocks hidden under the soupy mud. The wind was shifting so that if I walked close to the wall, it was almost almost like standing in a doorway, not dry but well out of the blustery air.
Letting go of the shovel, I tugged at a large rock hidden by brambles and gravely mud. But it wouldn’t come loose: the suction of the water and heaviness of the mud held it fast. The only result was a dull scraping sound. That’s all I was able to get. I plodded through the sodden corn field looking for something, anything to use to lever loose the rock. If I didn’t get it out of there, the canal would dam up with debris off the mountain, sending the runoff down toward the house.
A campesino I knew but whose name I couldn’t remember was coming across the milpa astride a burro that looked like a large wet cat. “Are you out for a walk in the fresh air?” he asked, guiding his mount beside me, grinning slyly. His sombrero had been well shellacked against rain, and he wore a long piece of clear plastic, fastened at the waist with a piece of lazo. His well-patched pants were rolled above muddy shins. He grinned broadly in the wind and rain. “What has made you to come out in this fine weather, Ey? Crazy gods are sending us all this water when we don’t need it, no?”
I leaned on the shovel to rest, to seem to agree.
“But what are you doing in this damned weather, Señor? I thought I and this fine stallion were the only ones crazy enough to do such a thing.”
When I told him, he nodded at the wall, jabbed spurs he wore over his bare muddy feet into his burro’s sides, trotting the animal uphill.
By the time I got there, he was squinting and pulling a heavy iron from the gunny sacking that served him as a saddle blanket. “This barra – and your shovel – will serve, Señor. Vamanos! Let us move this son of a whore.” With a moment’s fierce prying, the rock sprang free. The campesino kicked it with a muddy, spurred foot, sending it rolling downhill. “Get out of here, you son of a whore.”
He seemed fond of that phrase and the word “loco”: The rock was loco, I was loco, he was loco, the weather was loco.
Actually, the weather did not seem so bad. Perhaps it was because I knew the canales were open. Maybe because it was the harsh eloquence of this cheery, muddy campesino. Probably, crazily, it was the fact that the two of us, wet and chilled, were standing on this drenched hillside making fun of the cold, the rain, the wind.
The campesino slipped the barra into the wad of sacking beneath his saddle. He looked around, sniffed the wind, grinned grandly up at the rain and rode off at a bumpy trot, calling back that I should “Go with God.” An admirable-seeming man, and I didn’t really know his name.