At Rancho San Benito

A spotlight of evening sun breaks through the gloom, minutes before sunset

In May I mentioned that I'd agreed to buy a parcel of old ranch land outside of Mérida. The transaction was completed in June.

Rancho San Benito has not had cattle grazing on it for close to fifteen years. In the tropical Yucatán climate, the result is that what once was open pasture now has trees on it whose trunks reach the thickness of a human leg. Large swathes of land are inaccessible due to dense thorny brush. Basically, although in the early stages of succession, the land has reverted to a form of jungle. A few game trails are passable if one is willing to swing a machete, and it's possible to walk around the limits of the place since the owners kept most of the lot lines clear. The back section, more than half of the property, although used as a wood lot has not been cleared in a very long time, if ever. Trees there are larger and the understory less dense but it's still not an easy place to move through.

Most of the progress I've made so far on the ranch has been in planning. Even in passable areas, the rocks and thorny growth do not allow for casual strolling. In order to learn more exactly what I'm dealing with in the area where I hope to build a dwelling, I've had some help clearing brush. This work continues, but slowly. I enjoy having people to work with, and often the work is lighter and goes more quickly with pleasant company. But I enjoy the quiet and think time provided by days spent working alone.

Working by myself allows me to hear and see more, like a small flock of wild turkeys that rose startlingly one morning out of the brush and flew low-to-the-ground to hide themselves out of my sight. Where they had just been, I found these feathers. On a daily basis I see quail, chachalacas, orioles, green jays, vultures and a variety of small songbirds. I've listed about 25 bird species so far, and have seen many more that I have yet to identify. Birds are my constant companions when I am out there alone. Other inhabitants include various small mammals, snakes, armadillos and a large variety of colorful lizards.

Working solo and quietly also means that I am more likely to see the deer that several villagers have told me are plentiful on the land. For some reason I haven't yet seen them, but as I go about my business it's only a matter of time until I do.

Days spent working alone at the ranch may be less productive in the sense of concrete accomplishment, but they give me a lot more information about the environment in which eventually I will live. And I enjoy having time just to enjoy the quiet and solitude there. I take breaks and just wander, or open the thermos on the tailgate of the truck and sit there enjoying the silence and a cup of hot coffee or icy lemonade.

This project is so large that it will never be done. There is no need to rush. The process is the project.


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

Change

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” 

-- Viktor E. Frankl

My "situation" -- life -- got so busy over the past year or so that I neglected to blog about it.

The year without a doubt provided more material for interesting posts than any since I started this blog. But in the process of living through it all I didn't make much the time to write. 

Most interesting of all is that more and more I found myself able to apply the wisdom of Viktor Frankl, a psychologist whose work and approach to life I have admired and attempted to incorporate into my life for many years.

Frankl said:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

There has been lots of change in my life recently, not all easy, of course, but I do my best to choose for it all to be meaningful. Finding meaning is the key element.

Frankl was a young Viennese doctor who survived years in Nazi concentration camps. He became known after the war for using the time he was incarcerated under inhumane conditions, with wife, friends and family gone and others dying all around him, to develop his theories. Frankl's major conclusion was that people most likely to thrive, even under the most extreme and difficult circumstances, are the ones who have a compelling reason to live. His experiences resulted in a book titled Man's Search for Meaning.

We all know if we're honest with ourselves that control and security are illusions. The structures that maintain our sense of stability and safety are fragile and can come tumbling down quickly due to illness, death, accident, economic downturn, loss of employment, or any one of a number of other causes. 

How we react to the losses is the key to finding meaning and moving on. As Frankl said, when you can't change a situation, you have to change yourself. I have done my best to put this principle into practice in my life.

As a result, over time I find myself happier, having more fun and worrying much less over things I can't control.

Mexico has been a big catalyst of the change. There is a Mexican approach to living that a foreigner here can absorb by interacting with and thoughtfully observing friends and neighbors. Aspects of this attitude, which I think of as la vida a la mexicana, mesh well with what Viktor Frankl discovered for himself in a different place and time. It's something that keeps life refreshing. Even after a dozen years living in Yucatán, I am still learning.


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

The Stories

Visiting the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau with my Dad's parents. I now am older than they were then.

As more years of our lives stretch out behind than we are likely to enjoy ahead, often the past becomes more interesting to us. I recall as a kid hearing older folks talking a lot about things that had happened before I was born. I was more interested in history than the average kid, but like most children, I naturally thought more about the moment, tomorrow, or maybe out as far as next summer's vacation than about what had happened long ago.

Now I find myself in the older generation's shoes. My parents are gone. I am older at this point than my grandparents were when the photo above was taken. The remainder of my life life looms like the visible portion of the iceberg, with a larger percentage -- experiences, events, the influence of ancestors --hidden below the surface, yet the critical ballast that steadies my course.

I have been thinking a lot about the past this year. My father's death one year ago and my mother's two years before that have prompted a lot of reminiscences with friends and family, and lately lost snippets of growing up in my family have been passing through my mind. I didn't really analyze it until I was back Mérida and had time to ponder, but on a trip north that I made last year, I was steeped entirely the past.

Graves of some ancestors on the old family farm in Virginia

My great-great grandfather

I visited my cousin Kim in Washington, D.C. She's done extensive family research, and we love to talk together about family history. One day we drove into Virginia, where my mother's family arrived from England in the 1600's. That was the start of a fascinating and humbling experience, exploring places where predecessors of mine had lived and died, and walking land that was in the family for generations. We met a distant cousin who still owns some of the family farmland, and she directed us toward a large, old tree in a field, under which we found the graves of several relatives, including my great-great grandfather, who lived to be nearly 100 and fought for the losing side in the Civil War. To be honest, there is a part of my heritage there which I do not deny, but of which I am not proud.

As a teenager, my grandmother worked in this factory

We visited the nearby country church where many of the family were baptized, married and laid to rest. We spent time exploring the town where the generations before my mother's had lived and struggled to keep the family together amidst grueling work, poverty, and violence which took two family members' lives and prompted the survivors eventually to escape by moving up to Baltimore, where my mother was later born.

I realized that in exploring this area I was visiting a painful past that my mother's family had mostly left behind, and which Mom never talked much about. And I have begun to understand some of the reasons why.

I stopped near Baltimore to visit my aunt and uncle, Kim's parents. They live still in the house they did when I was a child. Visiting there I sleep in my great-grandmother's bed and we eat off of grandmother's dishes, which my aunt brings out for the occasion. We spend hours poring over old pictures and talking about our lives and things that happened long ago.

On the same whirlwind trip I also visited with an old friend and co-worker in Washington, D.C., and attended my 40th high school class reunion. On these occasions as well, most of what we talked about was things that happened a long time ago. Once the conversations warmed up, sitting in a roomful of classmates I hadn't seen in forty years I felt strangely at home. I get along much better now with many of those people than I did back then. Time and maturity clear away the trivial and temper passions. And reminiscing about the best football games, griping about teachers, laughing and crying about friends who have passed away, finding out finally who was the kid who streaked across the student parking lot one morning my senior year, stuff like that, certainly gave us a lot to talk about.

And this was the central theme: through all of my trip, I told and listened to stories. Human beings love stories. Stories unite us. With the mellowing passage of time these stories become interesting and even entertaining -- even the events that made life difficult. In the retelling, we find meaning in the the bad and celebrate the good. This and the practice of telling makes the stories better. Stories of hardship and sadness become tales of survival, and help explain who we are now.

Of course my realizations here are not news, but I've been seeing it lately for myself. I think that this blog will evolve a bit. I believe I will start telling more of the stories.


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

Wild Plums

If you have been reading this blog, you know what I am talking about. Here they are:

In a recent post I mentioned that I would return to a parcel of ranch land I had been exploring so that I could enjoy harvesting and eating the wild plums that grow there, and perhaps daydream about the future. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, the plums (ciruelas) were hard and green. Right now they are maturing, juicy and delicious. The timing of my visit yesterday was just right.

In fact I arrived none too soon because birds have been having an easy meal in this tree. The ground beneath was littered with pits and yellow, orange and green bits of partially-eaten plums. A large flock of Yucatan Jays (che'les) was busily enjoying the feast. The positive side is that it seems the birds favor the higher branches, which means the low-hanging fruit is left for us.

Along with the jays, we saw a pair of Squirrel Cuckoos, orioles (yiuya), Kiskadee (xtakay), Blue Crowned Motmots (Toh), quail (codorniz in Spanish or bechito in Maya), plus the usual assortment of cardinals, doves, grackles, mockingbirds, hummingbirds and small songbirds. We also heard but did not see an owl and a couple of other species we could not identify.

After savoring some plums and stashing more in pockets for the trail, we took another hike, in a section different from the one we walked the last visit. Ramiro, the man doing some clearing of impassable trails, has been busy in the meantime. Passage alongside one of the overgrown pastures is now open (photo below), and the area around the corral and well is now clear.  It was much easier this visit to walk and assess the condition of things.

When I ate the plums this morning, they seemed especially delicious, and not just because they are now in their prime. As I mentioned in the prior post, I have been very interested in this place for a long time. So without too much more thought, soon after taking that walk here and tasting the sour, unripe fruit a couple of weeks back, I signed a contract to buy and made a down payment on this property. We have a couple of legal hoops to jump through yet, but if all goes smoothly, soon I will be the proprietor here. This project will involve a lot of work and a significant shift in lifestyle, but I am looking forward to the change.

Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

Cool, Cool Florida

On this street we lived for four air-conditioned years

When I was 13 years old we, an Alaska family, moved to South Florida. For about the first year or so I really thought I might die. It seemed so incredibly hot.

The whole family felt much the same. We kept the house central air conditioning temperature set very low and spent a lot of time inside except perhaps in the evening or to go to a nearby pool. When we had to go out we ran to the Oldsmobile, which normally had its AC cranked up so high that the noise of the fan made it difficult to talk. Sometimes the kids battled over who got to sit in front between Mom and Dad, where the center vent blew freezing air into the lucky kid's face hard enough to make one's hair fly. We loved that.

Thanks to my parents' ability to afford our electric bills, we survived in Florida for four years. Then we moved back to Alaska, and I did not expect to live in another hot place, ever again.

Now as a ten-year full time resident of Mérida, it's interesting to see how I have adapted. Until just a few months ago I have lived here, a place hotter than South Florida, without air-conditioning at all. Now that I have AC in the bedroom, I still use it only occasionally.

My sister came around, too. After a few decades of feeling always cold in Alaska, she and my brother-in-law moved back to Florida several years ago.

Now, strangely, I find myself looking forward to my visits to see them in Florida as a respite from the heat. Particularly this time of year, when the Yucatán temperatures hit their peak.

The weather in Mérida has been reaching about 39 - 40 Celsius (102 - 104F) lately, and the forecasters say it will get quite a bit hotter later in the week, possibly as high as 45C, which is around 113 on the Fahrenheit scale. Today's edition of Mérida's Diario de Yucatán featured the banner, "Yucatán arderá," "Yucatán will burn." This morning's headline story tells us that record temperatures will be set in coming days.

I find it interesting that I often look forward to a Florida visit as a cool break from the Yucatán's blast-furnace heat. It points out how flexible we can be, and how much I've changed.


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

Wanderings: Walk Around a Ranch

Last weekend I took a walk around a ranch named San Benito, about an hour's drive east of Mérida.

This "ranch" is a parcel of old cattle pasture which hasn't been grazed in years. It definitely is not wilderness, but amidst swathes of maleza -- dense, thorny scrub where fields and pastures used to be -- there are some nice patches of old native trees, wildflowers and interesting plants such as orchids.

I drove out Saturday with my friend Victor and his niece Paola. We left the city early, to avoid traffic and heat, and upon arriving met a guy named Ramiro, who is being paid to clear out some of the undergrowth. Since in advance I'd asked permission of the caretaker, Ramiro knew we were coming, so he welcomed us and took a brief break from his work to chat. When we headed down one of the trails to explore, he resumed work with his hatchet and moruna.

This was not my first visit here. I had walked this parcel a few times in the past, starting in 2009 when first it was advertised for sale. The property suddenly sold before I realized just how interested in it I'd become, and I felt disappointed. Perhaps because I loved and lost, I've had a sort of long-distance romance with this piece of land ever since. Recently when I discovered that the new owners want to sell, I came back here to see if the feeling was still the same.

One of the things I like about the ranch is that because it has lain largely undisturbed for about a dozen years there are animals here. I have seen wild turkeys and a good variety of other birds. Bird chatter was a constant background music as we walked the overgrown trails. There are signs of deer, too, and I found the remains of an armadillo and a large snake skin as we hiked. Along with many native tree species, I spotted bougainvilleas in flower and a "flamboyan" (Royal Poinciana, or Flame Tree) that will be spectacular in season.

Although quiet now, this land was worked for generations. The entire place is enclosed and cross-fenced with dry-stone walls, "albarradas," and there is an old one-room stone house, corral and a deep well with an antique windmill-driven pump to keep the watering troughs and the cistern full.

As we arrived, I'd noticed that the fruit on a great old ciruela (wild plum) tree near the well and house is nearly ripe. After our dusty, hot walk I was tired and parched. I picked and ate a low-hanging plum. Although still somewhat hard and bitter it tasted good. Maybe I'll come back in a few weeks to pick some when they are ripe.

That would be a good opportunity, sitting in the shade by the well and eating those soft, tart wild plums, to consider again all that I might do on a piece of land like this one.


If you liked this post you might enjoy: Hacienda Dreams


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson

A Life Well Lived

This post was originally published five years ago today under the title, "Goodbye Neighbor, and Thanks." Recently as I pondered the future of this blog (which has been inactive for several months), I have been reviewing old posts. This is one of my very favorites, and an inspiration to get the blog rolling again. Stay tuned.

My neighbor Alejandro died last week. I was out of town when it happened, and busy away from the house when I got back, so I didn't get the news until several days later.

Alejandro and I were not close, but he was my first friend in the neighborhood after I moved into my house in Mèrida a few years ago. He was an outgoing, gregarious type, always waving and saying hello, and I guess it was just in his nature to be the first one to start a conversation with the new guy on the block.

Alejandro was not a young man, but with his unlined face and continual smile he was energetic and always busy, so I was more than a little surprised when he told me several years ago that he was 75 years old. I would have sworn he was no more than sixty, and he might have passed for younger. He'd lost his wife at a young age and remarried, and worked many years as a taxi driver. He remained happy in his second marriage and together with his wife Ingrid raised a houseful of children, who now have families of their own.

Alejandro was always busy with projects, such as painting and repairing old cars he would buy, fix up, drive for awhile, and then resell. He told me he liked to work, and the problem-solving and tinkering involved with the cars, along with the incentive of making a little extra cash when he sold them, kept his mind and body agile and gave him something interesting to do.

Not that his days were empty. Various children and grandchildren were usually around, and the modest house full of activity. One of the last times I saw him, a few weeks ago, Alejandro was delightedly painting the house next door, which they had rented so his daughter and her family could move in. People from the U.S. often don't understand why different generations of a family would want to live in such close proximity. Here, people can't fathom how people from el norte manage living so far apart from the company, affection and support of their closest loved ones.

Passing by on the street when Alejandro was outside working often entailed more than a casual "buenos dias." He loved to talk about what he was doing, and to find out what I was up to. I sometimes brought him my car and home maintenance problems for advice. The give and take usually ran on for awhile. It seemed as if the socializing for him was the main point of being out on the street, and that washing the car or fixing the tire was something he would get done but not particularly important in comparison.

Alejandro's family owns a ranch about an hour's drive outside of Mèrida, and many times he invited me to go with him for a couple of days and hang out. Unfortunately that's something we never did because I always had something else going on. I started thinking about that when another neighbor told me Alejandro had suddenly died of a heart attack earlier last week. One of the reasons I moved to Mexico was because I wanted to stop living in tomorrow (laboring on and on for that retirement, saving all year for that brief vacation, etc.) and start doing what I want to do now. I have gotten better at living in the now, but the fact that I had put off the ranch visit time and again until it was too late bothers me. I looked forward to that trip as much as I liked Alejandro; he was a nice guy and we probably could have been better friends. I take all this as another of those little messages that life sends us, if we only will pay attention to them, telling us maybe we need to make an in-course correction along the way. I am taking it seriously.

Once my train of thought got rolling along these lines, I started thinking about how happy and successful this neighbor had always seemed to me. He was not a wealthy man, in fact by many Americans' standards he would have been considered poor. Alejandro and his wife raised a large family in a small three-room (not three bedroom, three room) house, where they lived for at least forty years. He didn't have a lot of stuff. His thirty-year-old cars were worth at most a few hundred dollars, and sometimes were broken down. But he always, even when under a balky car and covered with sweat and grease, seemed to enjoy living in the present and have a good time.

I read not long ago that Mexicans have among the highest levels of personal happiness in the world. I think that Alejandro is a good example of some of the reasons for this. It looks to me as if my late neighbor's success in life boiled down to a few simple points. He liked to be happy, so he usually was. He had a good attitude and didn't let small irritations or things beyond his control ruin his day. He was completely authentic: he had no "image" to maintain. He enjoyed everything he did as best he could. He seemed to be more interested in relationships -- his family, friends, and neighbors -- than in things or schedules. I think these qualities gave meaning to the life of a humble and modest man, and filled it with affection and love.

There is an example and a message here.

Adios, vecino, y gracias.


Text and images copyright 2015 by Marc Olson