Their lives go on

     Waking this morning to the news of yet another war started by humans, it was comforting to see a squadron of pelicans sailing overhead as if nothing had changed. 

In their lives, most likely, nothing has, though at least one  commentator has stated that Putin's aggression "changes everything" and that "we are in a different world now." It is probably more accurate to say that humans are in a different world now, a world in which the uneasy peace of the last thirty years seems to have ended and which more resembles the violent world that our species has created for far too much of its history. We have not generally been a nice species. 

     Here in Yucatan, the life cycle is beginning again. Birds, like this pair of common black hawks at Rio Lagartos, are engaging in courtship behavior,

Photo courtesy of Kate Fitzgerald

and indeed, this pair mated in full view of human observers not long after this photo was taken. Hawk life must go on regardless of what humans do. 

     On Isla Cerritos, magnificent frigatebirds are giving up their riding of the air currents for at least a year to nest and ensure the next generation of these genuinely magnificent creatures.

Photo courtesy of Kate Fitzgerald

     In a city park in Merida, groove-billed anis are flirting and occasionally holding still for pictures.

     On the beach behind my rental apartment, Yucatan's melipona bees are gathering pollen, benefiting both plants and young bees.

     The rest of life goes on, doing what it does, regardless of the geopolitical machinations of humans (though war and other human activities are unquestionably bad for life forms other than ours.) This part of the world is full of reminders of rulers and societies that warred with each other, created monuments to themselves, and then vanished into the forest for a century or three. 

Worth remembering.

Learning New Things All the Time

 One of the attractions of the western edge of Progreso is its healthy dune system, home to native plants adapted to salt and wind and capable of holding soil in this difficult environment. 

In this, it is very different from eastern Chixculub, subject of a 2018 blog post critical of what I thought represented poor siting choices. In some places, houses are barely above the high tide line and facing serious erosion.

    What I learned this week is that the beaches of Chixculub were not being lost to the Gulf at the time most of the houses were built. Instead, much of the erosion on that section of this spit of land resulted from the construction of the Progreso Pier, which extends some four miles into the Gulf of Mexico. This extensive human construction has changed water movement and sand deposition patterns.

    It is unquestionable that the world's longest pier has been an economic boon to this area. Inshore waters here are shallow, too shallow for large boats. At low tide, I have seen people walking in water barely above their knees a hundred feet from shore. Because the pier extends so far into the Gulf, massive cargo ships now unload in Progreso's harbor, along with every drop of gasoline consumed in the state of Yucatan. (Fossil fuels create their own problems, but electric car infrastructure does not yet exist here to any great degree.) Cruise ships can now dock in Progreso, bringing thousands of visitors (and the money they spend) to the downtown area and nearby attractions every month. Local entrepreneurs have created small businesses to serve all these visitors, the city has used the tax dollars to upgrade services used by locals and tourists alike, and the presence of so many restaurants, shops, and interesting people has led some of us to spend months at a time here. And of course there are the beaches themselves.

There's a lot to be said for miles of this as an escape from some of the craziness of the world.

    But as with most things designed by humans, there was a price to be paid. This area west of the world's longest pier has benefited, but the dunes in a long stretch west of town are long gone. 

    I wonder how long it will be before some unfortunate folks' beach houses vanish as well.

Maddening, Magical Merida

Yesterday, a friend made on my first trip to Merida in 2017 was thinking out loud about why she might not come back to this part of the world, though it ticks so many of the boxes of what she wants in a winter home: safe, affordable, warm, and full of accessible cultural activities. This year, the things that bother her (some of which I wrote about last year) have really bothered her: the barking dogs in most neighborhoods; the trash in the streets and on the sidewalks in so many areas;  the occasional burning of said trash, even in the city; the lack of promptness in many aspects of life; the crowds; the noise--from traffic, from the music that nearly every store plays at great volume, from celebrations that go on late into the night; from fireworks being set off for no apparent reason other than--hey, fireworks! 

I get it. Not being generally a city mouse, I find myself ready for quiet and green, open spaces when I head back north in the spring. The older parts of this old city are densely populated, and renovated homes sit cheek-by-jowl with piles of rubble as older construction is either rebuilt or replaced by concrete block--eventually.

Of course, old has its charms. Merida is full of historic churches

and the Beaux Arts confections that find their way into every tourist guidebook. (This one now houses an anthropology museum.)

And I must confess to being amused by this fierce watchdog wearing a pink pinafore.

Merida is a city of contradictions, as I suspect most are: wealth and poverty rubbing elbows as elderly beggars sit holding styrofoam cups in the city's restaurant and entertainment districts; beautiful colonial buildings reflecting centuries of exploitation and attempted genocide; civic pride in diversity at the same time that the descendants of the region's indigenous people are disproportionately impoverished; pampered designer dogs paraded on the Paseo while not-so-lucky canines and felines scrounge for garbage in less tony neighborhoods. 

And yet--this is a place that grabs the heart and the imagination. Every January brings a festival commemorating the city's less-than-admirable founding when the Spanish marauders of the Montejo family seized control of the Maya city known as T'ho and used the stones of its pyramids to build its cathedral, streets, and homes. For three weeks, the city's parks, streets, theaters, museums, and even shopping centers play host to arts events of most imaginable types, all of them free to anyone willing to brave the crowds (and the Plaza Grande does get crowded when Cirque du Soleil or Willie Colón performs).  Even during non-festival times, free live music is available in various parks every night of the week and on Sunday afternoons. Anyone who can afford a bus ticket (eight pesos unless one has a discount, in which case the fare is three pesos--or about sixteen cents) can find a bench, chair, or standing spot and get lost in music and spectacle--or join the dance, which lots of Meridanos seem to do.

A real lure of Merida, though, is the day-to-day life here. A walk in any ordinary area can reveal treasures, like a mural turning an ordinary small house into a tropical fantasy,

 or one of children playing that carries an important message, 

or a bronze sculpture of the spirit of ceiba, sacred tree of the Maya, out for everyone to enjoy in front of a government office tucked away on a mostly residential street.

The people are part of the magic as well. People here greet strangers on the street (rather like the Mid-Ohio Valley in Mexico, to be honest), and have no problem with elderly gringas admiring their children or their dogs. Strangers met on park benches share their stories and have thus far been totally kind despite the language barrier.  Taxi drivers share their insights and include language lessons as part of the fare. Downtown often features buskers, ranging from a truly amazing drum group to young breakdancers to living statues to a guitarist who lost his legs in a work accident in the US and shares songs and smiles in front of various theaters. A favorite example of the spirit of this place: heading back to the guesthouse, I admired the sunflowers of a neighbor who was sweeping her patio. In our mixed languages, I shared the sad information that sunflowers have a short season in Ohio and was informed that in Merida they grow todo el año porque hay mucho sol. Before I left, my new gardening buddy pressed two ripe seedheads into my hands, which I passed on to the owner of our guesthouse, who will now have sunflowers in her impressive tropical garden.

I can't not love this place.

Sanguisorba canadensis

Many perennials have stopped blooming by now, but in the Toledo Botanical Gardens this morning, a clump of something I did not know was working with so many bees that the stems were vibrating. 

Fortunately, the plant was labeled. It was Canadian burnet (Sanguisorba canadensis), which, contrary to its name, is found in many parts of North America, though it is rare in much of that range. As much of a wildflower enthusiast as I am, the botanical gardens are the only place I remember seeing this plant, and today I was lucky enough to see it at peak bloom.

A single glorious stem

The plant in its context in the perennial border

Burnet is in the rose family, though it looks nothing like any rose I know. While the specimen I saw is flourishing in a garden setting, in the wild it is a plant of wet prairies, meadows, swamps, and fens; it is not a plant for dry areas. The root system is woody and spreading, making it a useful plant along stream banks, where it will help hold the soil.

Moreover, our native burnet is a magnet for bees, both native species and honeybees, and its late bloom season makes it a valuable addition to the fall garden. Anyone with a damp, sunny spot should probably give it a try.

After all, what's not to like about a gorgeous plant for difficult conditions that feeds the pollinators?

All is flux; nothing abides

Last year at this time, we were dealing with the slow fade of a relative in her late nineties. This year, a recent two-week period brought the deaths of a current colleague, our wonderful office manager's son, two former colleagues, and an old friend who was a fixture of the local political scene. Two memorial services were held just yesterday--a lot to take in all at once.

Spending time in this old town ("old" only by US standards, of course) is oddly comforting. Marietta got its start under that name in 1788, but several cultures have called this place home over the last few millennia. Our patio faces a street named Sacra Via (pronounced with a long "I" in these parts), or the sacred way, but the people to whom it was sacred are long gone from this area, although some of their monuments remain.

The oldest more or less intact monument is the Conus, the large Adena burial mound that, with its surrounding ring ditches, is the centerpiece of Mound Cemetery.

The Conus has not been studied by modern methods, but when the early US settlers found a skeleton buried near the summit of the mound, they chose to re-inter the bones and create their own cemetery surrounding it. Today, this perhaps-three-thousand-year-old dignitary is surrounded by the largest group of Revolutionary War soldiers to be found in Ohio, along with more modern graves.

The Adena culture was succeeded by the Hopewell, who lived in Ohio from roughly the time of the early Roman Republic to the final destruction of the western Roman Empire, a period of some 700 years. They were also serious creators of earthen monuments, as well as serious astronomers. The Turtle Mound, more formally known as Quadranou, aligns with the winter solstice sunset. It was the site of solstice observations some 1600 years ago, and for the last five, a local history group has renewed the tradition. We will be joining neighbors there this week to wait for the sun to hit just the right spot over the next hill.

Although not particularly visible in the photograph, sloped walkways led to the top of the mound and are still available for mindful walking (or childhood sledding). At the time of European settlement, an enclosed walkway led 680 feet from the Muskingum River to the mound itself, hence the name "Sacra Via."

But the sacred way was destroyed to make way for progress. Beginning in 1843, according to the sign a few yards from our house, the earthen walls, which were more than ten feet high, were removed to make the bricks that were essential to our expanding town (according to the local brickmaker who had managed to get elected to city council). Quite a few streets, probably including Sacra Via itself, are made of those 19th-century bricks, as is the Victorian Gothic church building where I attend services.

Changes. Always changes. After the Hopewell ceased to flourish, later native groups moved into our area, according to excavations at a nearby park. The Shawnee and Delaware hunted in this area and occasionally fought the white settlers, who eventually won that struggle. In the years before the US Civil War, Marietta was often the first stop for freedom seekers crossing the Ohio River from what was then Virginia. The open space below the Turtle Mound became Camp Tupper, a recruiting site for the Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

After the Civil War, Marietta underwent a building boom--probably still using bricks from all that excavated soil. The house we live in was built in the 1880s and added onto in the 1970s by wonderfully thrifty people who salvaged bricks from structures being demolished. I like to think that our brick floor and fireplace wall were once part of the earthworks: they are in just about the right place.

Through all the changes wrought by humans and the shortness of our individual lifespans, the soil is still there. Sometimes, we build with it. Eventually, we become it. That cycle seems to be constant.