What You Gonna Do When Your Well Runs Dry?

            What You Gonna Do When Your Well Runs Dry?

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Three weeks and counting. Two deep wells supply the municipality of Etzatlan with water. One of the city well pumps quit working. Died the good death after a life of service to his community.

Down on the lower edge of town, we in my neighborhood experienced an extreme decrease in water pressure.  We had no idea or thought of concern to what was occurring up on the hillsides.  A week passed before we were aware of a problem. Until our own water ran out.

I took immediate measures to conserve. Short showers every other day. Laundry piles grew high in the bodega.  Flowers gasped with thirst.  My green grass faded to brown. I flushed only when necessary. I stacked dishes in the sink for the once-a-day wash. My insular world is coated with dust. But I have lived with less water.   

Here’s the background story. Etzatlan snuggles tightly in the foothills against a mountain. Water from the two city wells is pumped up the mountain to a huge tank. From there water flows by gravity to the maze of water pipes and to the tinacos or storage reservoirs on every business and household roof.

I am fortunate. There is enough water coming down the hill in the evening while I sleep to replenish my tinaco. I’ve not gone dry one single day. Yes, flowers will wilt and some will die. Most will recover. Laundry will eventually dance on the clothesline. Living with less water is inconvenient for me, no more than that.

Water runs downhill. We at the bottom might have little water but generally enough to keep the tinacos full if nothing else. Those in the foothills have no water whatsoever. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

I am fortunate. I repeat, I am fortunate. What I did not know until a few days ago, is that entire sections of town have no water. Miguel, who works on the ranch for Josue, is one without water to his home. Miguel has five children. I quit my whining in an instant when I heard. So, a few flowers die, so what.

The city hired an independent business to fix the pump.  When the pump was determined to be unsalvageable, a new pump was ordered from Monterey. By this time we were two weeks into the water shortage.  In installing the new pump, somebody with fumble fingers, imagine that, dropped the pump into the well, Whoops!  Days pass as attempts are made to retrieve pump. Days.

The “fixer” company ordered a crane in from Guadalajara, which also failed to reach the drowned pump, now in permanent residence in the bottom of the well. Did you notice the water tastes metallic?  More days slide by.

The schools have issued a request for teachers to go slack on the uniform requirements for students. Many families are unable to launder uniforms. Let the children wear whatever is clean and available. It is these little details that let me know how fortunate I actually am.

How do people in town get water? Some walk to a public faucet and fill buckets they lug home. Neighbors put containers into a pickup truck and drive to the water plant to get enough water from the public spigot to get along another day. I quit whining immediately on hearing these stories.

Etzatlan is a small city. We do not have unlimited funds, no spare half a million pesos or more lying in the coffers to order another pump when the city already paid for the first one, which city workers did not drop. I’m telling it like I heard it.

Going into the fourth week, the outcome between the city and the “fixer” company is uncertain. The president of town, an office similar to a mayor, is an astute rancher. Citizens with no water are predictably angry. If I were a gambler, I’d bet the city will scrape together funds to buy a new pump and it will be installed on arrival, even if it takes all night.

News Flash: At 10:00 last night the mayor announced that the city purchased a new pump and it is installed. By tomorrow, everybody should be back on full water service. Who paid? The city.

Listen to the rattle of sinks full of dishes. Every washing machine in town is swishing school uniforms, every clothes line full. In my own yard, hear the small gulps of gratitude as flowers drink heartily.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

March 21, 2019

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I Got Culture

            I Got Culture

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            Last Thursday Kathy, Richard, Nancie and I drove into Guadalajara for a night of highbrow music.

El Teatro Santo Degollado, in the Centro Historico district where the Orquesta Filamonica performs, is a spectacular building of European architecture, a treat in itself.

Are you impressed? I am. I grew up minus music, other than what I heard on the radio broadcast from Havre.

Kathy, however, an avid cello player for many years, is in a different league and knows music intimately, classical music, that is. I envy her knowledge. I love classical music in which I can lose myself while listening, transported to imaginary worlds. Of musical knowledge, I have none.

Thanks to long winters when I was housebound in Dodson, snowed in on the ranch south of town, thanks to radio from Saskatoon and Regina, every Saturday morning I tuned to opera. Knowledgeable? No. Enjoyable? Yes, very much.

The orchestra preformed works by three Russian composers. The first presentation, by Gliere, should have been last in my estimation. I did not want it to end.  It was alive, purely magical.  

The second, a grouping by Tchaikosky, while romantic, with glimpses of love stories, was inconsistent, alternating wonderful with ho-hum. Remember, now, I an ignorant of music, just telling it like I heard it. Technically, the performance was excellent. It lacked that indefinable spark that creates, what else, magic.

            Shostakovich; mostly I wanted to go home. I heard horses charging through narrow streets. I heard moans of pain and hunger, of war torn fears. The music was savage. The music cried tears. The music exhausted me.

            Later, after much urging by Kathy and hesitation by myself, I told her my impressions. I could have listened, transported, to Gliere all night. I wanted the magic. Interestingly, Kathy, in more sophisticated musical terms, agreed and added knowledge to my assessments.

            Thus, I discovered my hidden musical talent—identifying the magic. I went on to discuss the magic of other music, unknown to Kathy; of Hank, Sr., of Elvis, of Freddie Mercury. I felt redeemed. I felt good.

 It’s true. I got friends in low places and perhaps I ain’t big on social graces. But I know magic when I hear it.

            The following night at the Casa de Cultura in Etzatlan, a different cultural experience unfolded. It was the International Day of the Woman. Etzatlan held a pagaent to honor the Working Woman of the Year.

            Samantha had nominated her mother, Bonnie, and I’d helped Sam prepare the nomination paper. Bonnie, who manages the rancho is a licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine. So I was happy to be in the audience for support.

            A dozen women were in the running. The impressive program was well presented. The women nominated consisted of a professional, a woman runs a dress shop, another who makes and sells crafts such as pinatas, a domestic worker and cooks and vendors of simple foods. Five women were honored for various categories and I wish I could have taken notes. Bonnie was selected as Elegancia Woman of the Year.

            Chosen for The Working Woman of the Year was a quiet and humble woman from Santa Rosalia who made and sold tacos, tamales and atole from her home kitchen. Santa Rosalia, an ehido about ten kilometers from here, is included in the greater Municipalia of Etzatlan.

            The only thing that would have made the night better would have been subtitles. But as a bonus, I learned that the Casa de Cultura sponsors a movie night. Using discretion, of course, being as cultured as I am, I plan to show up regularly at the cinema. Popcorn, please.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

March 14, 2019

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Strange and Sad and Sweet, Amid Mardi Gras

            Strange and Sad and Sweet, Amid Mardi Gras

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            I’ve heard stories about this elderly couple who live in El Amparo, the abandoned mining town in the mountains, ever since I moved to Etzatlan.

Every Thursday this traditional couple, she in her long skirt, he in baggy white pants, both with wide sombreros, rode horses down the mountain road into town. They stayed the night with family and bought supplies at the Friday morning tianguis. Then in the afternoon, the couple would ride back to their mountain home, carrying their meager needs in saddlebags.  

            “How old are they?” I ask. Answers vary but all agree, somewhere in their nineties. A couple years ago they quit riding horses but kept the same routine, riding into town with neighbors, often sitting on an old bench seat in the open back of the pickup.

Four days ago the old man died. He must have said something like, “It’s okay. I cleared the path. You may come now.” This morning his wife died.

Somehow this news touched me greatly. I don’t know, have never seen, this couple, yet their story lodged in my heart as if they were family.

Sitting in a rocker under the jacaranda, I imagined, made up a life for this couple, who surely had lived in El Amparo back in the mining days. Perhaps they played together in the creek as children. Their fathers were miners. Their mothers called them inside to bathe Saturday night, a light supper of mangoes and tortillas, Church in the morning.

They would have lived through the closing of the mines, fathers out of work, hard times, mothers making do, shelling beans from the garden vines, grinding maize for tortillas on the metate in the back yard.

In a few idle moments I carry the youngsters up a rosary of years, from school mates to sweethearts. They marry. He finds a job in Etzatlan, walks to work down the mountain road every day to the cane fields. Perhaps one day he apprentices to a welder in town, carrying on a job his father once held at the mine.

They have babies, bury their parents, celebrate the good times, tough out the lean years, add a room or two their house, hobble a pair of horses in back. Watch their children grow up, leave home, one to California, one to disappear, two daughters to Etzatlan, grandchildren to love. They grow old.

I stop myself before I give the elder couple names and an entire history to relive. Any people who have garnered the respect I hear in my friends’ voices deserves my respect. I’m a sucker for a love story, even an imagined one.

These last few days in Etzatlan have been full of celebrations of Carnaval (Mardi Gras). By chance, I saw the first day’s parade of horses, and such horses as we never see up north, of Spanish bloodline. Every horse dances to the music of the band leading the parade.

Prancing in front of and alongside the band are other dancers, the “ugly queens”. These “beauties”, young men in feminine attire, wigs and tight skirts and jutting bosoms, vie for the crown. The contenders are a hardy lot to dance the cobblestone streets every rock of the way to the Plaza.

As afternoon segues into evening at the Plaza, bands compete at top volume. Young and old dance, celebrations carry long into the night, events I choose to skip this year. One street is blocked for children’s rides. Another for food stands. One evening food is free to whoever comes, a community thank you from the city.

World famous toreador Andy Cartagena from Spain led the spectacular bullfight event. At the old charro, every afternoon one could see precision riding or contests similar to our rodeo. Our city sponsored an agricultural expo, with purebred bulls and goats, any one of which would take top prize in any State Fair and bring a pretty peso to his owner. These events satisfy my needs for a whiff of farm life.

In the dark nights I hear the bands from my patio, catch some of the fireworks over the trees. My own celebrations are quieter, private.

Etzatlan, a town trying to hang onto tradition, is changing rapidly, as everywhere. (Children have smart phones. What is the world coming to!)

After Carnaval, the quiet weeks of Lent. No tianguis in town during Lent. No bands in the Plaza. We have quiet until Easter when Cathedral bells waken us back to Celebration.

I am glad to be here in what might be the last of the “quiet” years for Etzatlan. I’m glad I can imagine, with some knowledge of what their lives might have been, the years of Tia and Tio, the elder couple from El Amparo, now part of my own imaginary history. I still haven’t decided what to give up for Lent.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

March 7, 2019

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February is the Longest Month

                                    February is the Longest Month

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            Winter, we are weary.

            Whether she gambols like a bleating lamb or roars like a lion, we welcome March after the grim days of February.  Skies may still be gray but a fleeting scent in the air says winter is over and spring is here, or nearly so.  Snow may fall, temps hit the low scale but spring will burst forth, even in Montana.  The calendar tells us so.

            I’ve no complaint, I admit, here in my mountain valley in Jalisco. But friends and family live in frozen Montana and even worse, in drizzly gray-to-the-utmost western Washington, so I keep a weather eye on other places. 

            This morning I found three more corn plantings, caches of the squirrel-who-hates-me. I’ve yet to figure out what the rabbits eat. Perhaps their nibbles are small, a pruning with little damage. I catch glimpses of them only before sunrise but my yard is well-fertilized with leavings.

Iguanas lounge with impunity on the brick walls enclosing my yard, awaiting their chance to savage favorite flowers. Lizards of several varieties skitter across the patio as soon as the sun is out.

I don’t mind lizards because they eat bugs, unlike their vegetarian cousins. Though I took exception to the wee lizard in my shower enclosure. The thought of standing beneath water, eyes closed, head full of shampoo, and stepping on his cold little body undid me. I asked Leo to please remove the critter.

My favorite pair of partridge doves are sitting on eggs in their nest in the air plant on the lower branch of the jacaranda tree. To me the nest seems vulnerable to attack. But I have to imagine most threats to eggs or babes come from above so I suppose the low hanging nest is well placed.

Perhaps I hang onto Montana weather because, even after three years, I have little understanding of weather patterns here in this mountain valley. Montana weather and seasons seem “normal” to me.

My Jacaranda, a huge canopy of green most of the year, sheds its leaves in spring. Today it is nearly naked but not shivering because on the top branches I see tiny buds which in a few days will burst into lavender clusters and eventually clusters will merge into a purple umbrella. After five or six weeks of color, new green leaves will push the flowers off, to float to the ground.

This year I will get to eat mangoes from my own baby tree, first time, hopefully in July. My mouth watereth.

Lest you think all I do is sit in my garden admiring fruits and flowers and birds and growling at lizards, though I can think of few better ways to live, I tell you, I do have a social life.

In the weary month of February I went with John and Carol and Leo to the top of the caldera of Volcan Mt. Tequila, a trip I’d long contemplated.

Several days later John, Carol, Jim and I explored the gold and silver mining town of El Amparo and over the mountains on the trail to the backside of Ahualulco.  

The opal mine of San Martin outside of Magdalena, a short drive from home, is nothing more exciting to see than a pile of red rocks in a quarry.  With picks in hand, Pat and my cousin Steve and Jim and I hammered rocks into bits and pieces in search of opals. I brought home several small opals. My best chunk of opal I picked off the ground, walking from here to there with “eyes peeled”. I will go again.  

Some of the best times are the simple times when we come together for food. Just yesterday Pat and Nancie, Julie and Francisco and I dined at the Casa de Romero. I had a chunk of pig leg baked to perfection, tender and moist, full of flavor. I ate a small portion and brought home enough to graze on for several days; the whole meal cost 110 pesos, less than five and a half dollars.

No matter what I might have planned, each day dawns with its own agenda, “weather” or not! Today I am back in the garden, watering, pruning, admiring. That pair of doves I mentioned? I think they think I am their grandma with a pocket full of crackers.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

February 28, 2019

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A Road Less Traveled

A Road Less Traveled

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            Jim phoned, “Would you like to go to El Amparo? John and Carol are coming.  Be ready in half an hour.”

            I’ve been wanting to go see the ghost town of El Amparo for three years.  Beginning in the early 1500s, the mines were a rich source of gold and silver. From boom town Etzatlan miners trudged over the mountains to work and brought back refined minerals through our town to Guadalajara to Spain.

            In the hayday of El Amparo, historians and local stories confirm that the mining town was quite the cultural center with symphonies, theatre, schools, sports and medical care, all supported by the mine owners.  Amazingly, the mines operated 400 years, even during the Revolution. Though to see the place is to say, ah, yes, isolation in this mountain valley kept the outside world away.

            Throughout the centuries the mines changed hands, ultimately to be owned by a corporation in Pennsylvania until 1938 when a “workers-of-the-world-unite” sort of rebel gathered the union leaders and pulled off a coup. The owners shrugged and pulled out. Production was down, the rich veins had probably been milked dry.

            Altruistic as a movement may sound, it seems somebody will rise to the top with ulterior motives. Rumor, gossip and history agree that the new leaders were more interested in wine, women and song than in equipment and maintenance and the boom went bust.

            We set off in Jim’s pick-em-up, up, up the cobblestone streets of Etzetlan, up the mountain on a dirt road past the Mirador (lookout atop the mountain guardian of Etzatlan), into the mountains beyond. We rolled through a section of country that reminded me of the old mines in the Little Rockies, from back when I was in high school. The vegetation, the rock formations were so similar.

            On and on we went, on switchbacks, fording creeks, through oak forests, through meadowland, down and up again where rushing water had carved gullies into the road. We rode through country with vistas so beautiful to steal our breath.

            Whether they be ghosts in El Amparo, I do not know. I never saw a ghost though I felt the spirit of the place, the quiet. I saw the ruins, remains of architecture once stunning in its sophistication. A few people live there to this day. How many, I cannot guess. Two dozen? I never saw a person but a half dozen casitas were obviously occupied.

            Bits and pieces of the impressive administration building still stand. Partial walls of other buildings are everywhere we look, Stone walls, some looking like fortifications, criss-cross from here to there. We guessed at function and made up stories.

            We walked a path devious, winding through the hills, across creeks. Stopped at what we named the main shaft. Who knows?  Thoroughly enjoyed our exploration adventure, enjoyed each other.  The hills, of course, are riddled with mine shafts.

            Back in the truck, we decided to drive the back road through the ancient town of Las Jimenez. More switchback rough road, forded numerous creeks, most of them dry,  chose the wrong option more than once, turned back and said, ah, grateful for 4-wheel drive and high clearance.

Above Las Jimenez we stopped and stared in awe at the impressive ruins on the hill above what might once have been a town. Carol and I decided it must be an old monastery. The men said a tequila distillery.

Once we zig-zagged our way down and around for a better view, below the monolith on the hill a long low brick structure.  Yes, a monastery with rooms for a hundred monks.

Continuing on, we eventually reached a paved road with Ahualulco in the distance. Jim kept track of mileage. How far, he asked. John guessed 24, Carol 30, I topped out at 82 and held firm. Seventeen, Jim smirked. We had been on the road or afoot exploring for over five hours.

Another fifteen minutes, tired, hot, hungry and happy, we climbed the stairs to the palapa at Soky’s for fish tacos.

This morning, still curious, I went to Google with a question. The “monks’ cells” at Las Jimenez turned out to be a processing plant where the rocks from the mines were crushed and the gold and silver extracted. The building, in ruins, at the peak of the hill, might have housed transformers, Mr. Google speculated, since nobody knew for certain.

I still say it was one time the Monastery. Though perhaps monks built a cathedral and mine owners pushed them out and set up transformers. Mere speculation.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

February 21, 2019

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