Retiring on the Wild Side in Vallarta
 Eileen Kuperschmid-Pierce
| | A few, but increasing number of us, have opted for the wild side, for fresh, unpolluted air, a dangerous rip, a glorious deserted beach, a jungle that pulses with life. |
You can get bamboozled by an endlessly blue sky. The sun rising early and slipping into the sea for a well-deserved dip after a long hot day, every single day, adds to the confusion. Time melts in the steamy Mexican summer. You can lose an afternoon. Hell, you can lose a day, a whole month. (It's July??) The rainy season, they warn newcomers, can make you crazy.
In the early morning before 8, the pool is in shadow. I can actually feel the difference between the temperature of the air and the water. The birds of San Pancho are flying west toward the sea, the insects are drowsy, the dogs settled down for their first nap of the day.
We chose cool cobalt blue tiles for our pool, a rich terracotta apron to wrap around it. Now, alone in it, at the start of another new day, I settle into floating on my back for an hour or so. If I can't meditate, I can at least bob around with my eyes closed, my hearing muffled, my skin softened by the salt water, an easy happiness bubbling just beneath the cooling, 63 year old surface of my body.
Back in the Berkshires, the parallel universe where I spent more than three decades of my life, the summer season is gearing up. The rains of June are clinging like saran wrap to the damp, greening hills.
The tourists have begun nudging their way North, a few shows have opened, the BSO is in rehearsals, reviewers are crunching their schedules into two hour bites, and innkeepers and restaurateurs are praying that rising interest rates, forbiddingly high gas prices and summer rains won't deter the arts-driven, deep pocketed tourists from visiting America's premier cultural resort.
After my float [one can hardly call this a morning exercise routine,] I go online with the Berkshire Eagle. I read the crime notes first, noting how things have changed since the '70s, before the advent of DUIs and breathalyzers.
A 49-year-old North Adams resident was given 33 days in the county jail for "bothering his father for alcohol." According to Dad, his son was "yelling at him for alcohol and would not let him sleep until he got it." The father called the police, [what parent wouldn't?] When they arrived, Jr. was in bed, pretending to be asleep. Aren't little boys the damndest kind of cute?
But alcohol related crime has lost its once firm grip as the number one substance abuse problem facing the United States. It has been replaced by far more exotic drugs: Oxycontin, methamphetamine, crack.
On this particular day, fresh from my float, I saw that the Eagle's focus was on heroin-related crime. There were several articles written about the effects of it on
the body, mind and spirit, the burden of it on the health care system, the difficulty of recovering from it, the extraordinarily high price society is paying for a post
9/11 culture more and more desperate to escape the pain.
The grim, dreary litany made one thing abundantly clear: globalization doesn't stop at the festering wound of a border that stretches between Mexico and the
United States.
What's happening in Pittsfield and Great Barrington and North Adams, in New York and Springfield, MO and L.A. can be traced directly to the drug cartels carving each other up in Nogales and Tijuana, in Acapulco, Mexico City, and Central and South America.
The engine of capitalism, whether driven by oil or beans or drugs, sweeps past border patrols as swiftly and easily as it changes time zones. Someone wants something bad enough, someone else is going to get it for them.
This is not trickle down economics or any other fancy kind of high jinks. This is just the system at work. People have been buying and selling drugs and weapons and each other for centuries.
A friend asked me how safe it was to live down here. I told him I wouldn't recommend Mexico City any more than I would New Orleans. But, San Pancho, and much of the rest of Mexico, is a different world.
Almost 1,000 miles south of Nogales, San Pancho is quiet, except for the fiestas which are as integral to the Mexican way of life as Sunday brunch is to New Yorkers. Word of the occasional break-in spreads like dog fleas through the town.
Before you know it, we're all scratching the same itch, warning each other to lock our doors against those who would have our flat screened TVs. Two weeks later, it's too hot to figure out which key fits the back gate, and we become more and more lax.
Basically, except for the drug gangs on the border, rape is a pretty rare thing in Mexico. You hear about it once in a long while. The last round of break-ins, three in one night, and only one of those minimally successful, occurred on Mother's Day.
On this Mexican version of the holiday, the women all go out drinking together, which enrages the men, who then have the perfect excuse to get drunk themselves. By 11 pm the whole village is in the plaza fired up and mad as hell. Hence, the impetus behind the crime wave. Within the next few days, rumor had it that most of the culprits had been kicked out of town.
Tales of past crimes surfaced as they will whenever evil is afoot. There was the story of the two brothers who accidentally killed their mother during a duel, another about the old postmistress who was shot interceding between a dog and his rabid master (hence the limp), and still another darker story of a woman killed on the beach in Sayulita (a scant 3 miles away) in 1992. If statistics mean anything at all, that would make San Pancho at least as safe as Stockbridge.
Still, you can die of other things besides each other in Mexico. Scorpions bite a lot of people, some of them die. The riptide is harsh, care must be taken. Dengue Fever strikes occasionally, and cobblestones, manholes and uneven pavements send more tourists to the hospital than just about anything else.
Those who will talk and walk at the same time [a common practice in the States,] leave here in casts and braces and gauze. But by far, the most dangerous thing to do in Mexico is to drive a car. Everyone here will tell you that, and not just once or twice. Oh, no, you'll be warned about The Road over and over again.
And after a while, after seeing enough accidents, and hearing enough grisly stories, you learn not to take your eyes off the road, not for a second. You know you do not pass on curves, you do not speed, you keep both hands on the wheel and you do not take any unnecessary chances. Sounds simple, but some folks learn the hard way.
Mexico's most popular tourist destination, Puerto Vallarta, lies 33 km south of San Pancho. Highway 200, which connects the two is a hairy, if stunningly scenic run. The first part of the trip, the jungle road that takes us to the dentists and doctors and vets, to Walmart and Sam's Club and the Cinema, is lined with dozens of roadside crosses, well-constructed cement monuments to fallen drivers who ran out of road, many of them through no fault of their own.
The second part is lined with billboards. Marching like good little soldiers on either side of the highway, along the Bay of Banderas all the way to Vallarta, they all promise the same thing - a slice of paradise.
Thin, white women lie on chaise lounges, gazing at lurid sunsets, children splash in a sparkling, gentle surf and wide glass sliders open to a world as calm and safe as - well, as the beautiful, rolling hills of the Berkshires. "Authentic Luxury," one of them announces, as I tackle the traffic, the polluted air, The Road.
And there you have the contradiction of modern Mexico. Between the Jungle with its crosses, and the resorts with their billboards, there is a military check-point which exists for no apparent reason other than to distinguish clearly between what is real and what is authentic.
It is a clear division, the passage through the unknown, from the dangerous half of the highway where the sting of the scorpion is one unshaken shoe a way, to the "safety" of Mexico's premier beach resort, where the most dangerous thing that can happen to you is signing a lease on a pre-construction condominium.
A few, but increasing number of us, have opted for the wild side, for fresh, unpolluted air, a dangerous rip, a glorious deserted beach, a jungle that pulses with life. More than 20,000 others have limited their Mexican experience to the advertised specials. They think the rest of us are crazy.
An email I got the other day claimed the chances of getting shot in Washington, D.C. were higher than the chances of getting shot in Iraq. My son and his family just spent a terrific four days there last week.
I drove across the border at Nogales twice in the last 10 months, and I will do it one more time before the end of the year. The fact is if someone asks us if where we live is safe, the chances are that no matter where we are, we'll say yes.
It's about our perceptions, about what we know, and what we don't know, about what we think we can expect, and about we think we want. One thing's for sure, the longer I live here, the safer I feel. |
Vallarta Weddings
Vallarta Living | July 2006 
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