The Cheap Seats

It costs about U.S. $75 to get into a high speed inflatable and go speeding across the bay for close-up views of the humpback whales that swim down from Alaska to spend their winters along the Pacific Coast around Puerto Vallarta.

I only paid about twice that for these oversized binoculars and tripod, but now I can stalk marine mammals and a good deal else for free from the comfort and safety of my living room.

I'll admit it's not really a substitute for getting up close and personal, where you can see the scars and barnacles on their shiny hides and hear the deep throaty gasps that accompany their expulsions of spray and mist.

In fact, if it weren't for the tourist barges I'd see far fewer of the creatures long distance, because nine times out of 10 the way I spot them is by noticing a cluster of boats heaved to in the bay. Focusing in on them, I see spouts, dorsal fins, and now and then the lifting of wide flukes that means the whale is diving to cruise the depths for as long as 15 or 20 minutes.

When there's not much haze, the binocs give me such glimpses almost to the horizon. But the ideal distance is close enough to see the action with the naked eye, in which case the glasses make a real show out of it.

That was the case a couple of days ago when I looked up from my book to see a couple of boats flanking some disturbed water in which a gout of spray suddenly appeared that was larger than either of them. A dark shape rose up, and then there was another huge splash.

I lunged for the lenses and got them aimed and focused just in time to see the entire length of that frisky adult whale, certainly a testosterone-driven male, thrust free of the water, then fall back in a cloud of spray that soaked everybody on the nearest boat and probably scared them to death.

It was the best look at a living whale I ever had from any vantage point, ashore or afloat, and for my money those binoculars paid for themselves in that one exciting moment.

Sharps and Flatulence

I'm already on the record as a heartfelt admirer of Las Peregrinaciones, Puerto Vallarta's 12 days of homage to the Virgin Mary as she appeared in a 16th Century vision to an Aztec convert to Christianity near what is now Mexico City. In this manifestation she's known here as Our Lady of Guadalupe, or La Guadalupana.

But notwithstanding my deep pleasure in watching them, I have to say I'm puzzled and bemused by the musical accompaniment. My Spanish will have to get much better before I've got the chops to interrogate someone who might be able to explain it to me.

"Peregrinaciones" translates roughly as pilgrimages. During the first 12 days of every December, Vallartans assemble in groups, usually consisting of colleagues from their workplaces, to march at all hours along Juarez Street two blocks below our place to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which greets them with extravagant pealing from its many bells. They are ringing as I write this.

Each group has its own personality, but a typical one includes the following elements:

1. At the front, a banner identifying the pilgrims by the government agency, grocery store, hotel or restaurant where they work, thanking the Virgin for the blessings of the preceding year and asking that she look with favor on their lives and their work in 2013.

2. Pilgrims carrying boxes or baskets of flowers, food or other goods to be left in Mary's honor at the church.

3. A drum and bugle corps.

4. One or more groups of dancers, sometimes wearing traditional Mexican folk costumes but more often dressed as Aztecs, most of whom cheerfully perform and march on the rounded cobblestones in their bare feet.

5. An oom-pah band, which is the main part I don't get.

6. The main body of pilgrims singing "La Guadalupana," a ballad that recounts the legend of the vision and celebrates its place at the heart of Mexican culture. Their massed voices are lovely and even after nearly two repetitive weeks the carol has not lost its appeal.

It's a very rich mixture and emotionally powerful, even for lookers-on like us who only dimly grasp what the processions mean to the actual participants. Even Elizabeth is riveted and has asked several times to be taken down the hill for a closer look.

What's so odd about it all is the horns. The buglers sound like halftime at a high school football game. Oom-pah music is absurd even when it's played well. When the band members are the rankest sort of amateurs who probably haven't played together since last December, the result is a musical pratfall. I can't make sense of it as theme music for such a sacramental occasion.

Yet the processions go by, one after another, and virtually all of them have somehow come to the conclusion that off-key Souza and rusty tubas are just the right touch. The Virgin keeps coming back year after year, so she must like it too.

Mexico, Land of Contracts

I'm not an economist, but I think it would be hard to beat this as a model of how spasmodic interplays of human idiosyncrasy can spawn a market on which an alert entrepreneur can then feed for as long as it lasts.

That's our Christmas tree above, and it's alive, although I doubt it's very happy in our 85 degree days. But we're watering it daily and sweeping up the needles it's dropping in protest.

In fact, it's not really "our" tree at all. We're only renting it from an outfit that delivered it to us with its ball of dirt and plastic pot and will come pick it up later when we're done with it.

I don't know where they'll take it. But their pitch is that killing fir trees by the million every December is evil, so they swear they will put it back in the ground somewhere to go on with its life.

Will it be somewhere the tree can really put all this behind itself and keep growing? Well, I think such places may exist within a day's drive from here, maybe two days. But gasoline is expensive and the roads into the mountains aren't that great, so the promise is a serious one. I hope they really intend to keep it.

You can buy dead Christmas trees here for less than the rent we're paying. That would be just as effective in nourishing our nostalgia, salving our homesickness and helping us construct the tissue of white lies otherwise known as the "magic of Christmas" for little Elizabeth.

But it would crush our aspiration to be eco-friendly and life affirming, which seems to intensify with age.

So here in aging expat-rich Mexico, one of Mitt Romney's "job creator" types has sniffed us out. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Discontent of our Winter

This is part of the wall on which we had to fill in a large picture window, formerly a source of sunlight and wildly romantic vistas and now blocked by a new building as I'm sure I've mentioned.

We hired a contractor recommended by knowledgeable friends of friends to come in and do the job. I suppose there was no way we were going to be pleased with the results, but not being pleased is not being pleased whether you expected to be or not.

The guys took out our lovely wood-framed window, built an aluminum frame inside the opening and covered it with a sheet of waterproof wall board. Aside from a plaster ramp on the exterior window sill to deflect any drips that get between the two buildings during the rainy season, the board itself is directly exposed to the narrow space outside.

Since there was no room for access to that outside wall, our workers next applied a heavy layer of cement to the inside, laced with some kind of sealant that supposedly will keep moisture from seeping through the wall and spoiling our paint job. On top of that they put a layer of ordinary plaster and a coat of white paint. We followed that with two coats of the pale blue we wanted.

But when we stood back from the finished job, we saw to our dismay that the outline of the old window was faintly but clearly visible, mocking our grief over the loss of the view. If you stare long enough at the picture above, you might detect the lower lefthand corner of it.

When we complained, we were told there was nothing to be done. The wall board is absolutely flat, they said, whereas the rest of the wall is like all masonry surfaces in Mexico, which is to say uneven at best and crudely pocked and off-plumb at worst. No reasonable amount of human effort, they claimed, could duplicate what casual haste created with conspicuous lack of effort.

As I wrote a while back, I'm actually a fan of the overall look that mediocre workmanship and materials  produce around here. So in addition to my unhappiness over the phantom window frame, I'm also caught up in some cognitive dissonance over why it's there.

If you're thinking that I've reached a place in life where I have to reach for a pretty high shelf to locate something to be unhappy about, no need to say so.

Accion de Gracias

Fast forward. We're in Mexico, where even though it's now past Thanksgiving it's still too hot to blog. But it's been too long since I did.

Puerto Vallarta and its neighboring communities that ring the sprawling Bahia de Banderas are home to roughly 350,000 people of whom I've read that 40,000 or more are from the U.S. or Canada.

Speaking for this non-native group, our primary objective and main activity here is not being cold. Mission accomplished, but that leaves most of us with time on our hands.

One thing we're not spending much of it doing is thinking about that thing that happened with the police chief last month.

Our fellow expats have developed a fast-working formula for putting such occurrences quickly behind them. It's as easy as one, two three:

1. Bad things happen everywhere.
2. Your chances of being a crime victim are at least as great anywhere else.
3. These people won't bother you if you mind your own business and keep your nose out of theirs.

There's more than a little pixie dust in this way of looking at things, but we tried it and it worked. Look at my little friend in the photo above. What, her worry?

No, instead we all are focusing on problems we can actually solve, such as dispensing with diapers. They are now a thing of the past, and it happened almost overnight.

That cleared the way for a preschool. We wanted Elizabeth to have playmates, some early exposure to decent Spanish, not like ours, and some experience being away from home for a few hours a day. We had no idea where to look for the right one, but when we consulted some friends it turned out there were scads of them.

E now goes to La Casa Azul. No se habla ingles, except in the single English class each day for the older Mexican children. But E doesn't seem to mind. She spontaneously helped herself to a seat at a table with other kids on her first visit to check the place out, and she's gone cheerfully back each day since.

So far, we're using most of the free time this gives us attending classes to improve our own Spanish. This in turn will equip us to express in more idiomatic terms to assorted "technicos" the bad noise our washing machine is making, the apparent source of condensation from our AC units dripping on neighbors below, why we're unhappy with the plaster job on our new wall where the window overlooking the church used to be, our theory of where leaks in the ceiling during rainy season may be coming from etc.

Thus do we and our thousands of compatriots fill our days while keeping pesos circulating in the local economy, which exists to assist all of us in expanding the time and space available for gazing at the dazzling Pacific all the way out to where it meets the sky. We watch for flukes of the humpback whales, which are just now arriving.

For this life we gave thanks yesterday around a large and brilliantly decorated table with old and new friends, set alfresco on a colorful hillside terrace. Mexicans don't celebrate our holiday, of course, but they have a fine name for it nevertheless. El Dia de Accion de Gracias.

Dawn of Time

On a more cheerful note, we're in Truth or Consequences on the first day of a little touristing.

It's not much of a town, but we love it for its dusty little cluster of old auto courts huddled around several acres of hot mineral springs. The steamy water seeps up into concrete basins in faded bath houses where road-weary travelers refresh themselves as wanderers in this region have done for millennia.

During an earlier visit as I rectified my humors in the 107-degree water, it suddenly occurred to me that my bath had been warmed by heat that was absolutely primal, never cool since it got hot, however many billions of years ago that was.

My realization dazzled me and sent my mind reeling off into a series of even deeper thoughts about how vast the universe and how small a thing is man etc etc.

I was still wallowing in cosmic truths the next day when we visited the local museum and I browsed the gift shop for a book on geothermal heat. When I located one and found the page that described the phenomenon on which the town and its museum depend for their living, I drifted over to the counter to share my insights with the clerk.

"Doesn't it amaze you sometimes when you're sitting in the springs to realize that you're actually bathing in the original heat of The Big Bang," I asked him.

After a moment's reflection, he replied. "Um, yeah, are you gonna buy that?"

I was abashed and deflated, but I learned my lesson. On this trip I'm curbing my enthusiasm.

. . . But think of it, the original heat of The Big Bang!

Now What?

Well, isn't this sweet.

The trashed-out vehicle in the photo above used to be the armored Suburban of Puerto Vallarta's newly-appointed municipal police chief.

A couple of mornings ago at around 8 a.m., a pickup truck full of heavily armed barbarians tossed a grenade under it at the intersection of Basilio Badillo and Insurgentes, a place and time that might have found us at that very spot, strolling from breakfast at Freddy's Tucan toward the farmer's market where we get a lot of our produce. If we'd been in town.

The chief's SUV sailed flaming along Insurgentes for a couple of blocks before crashing into a taxi parked in front of a pharmacy where we often stop to buy a toothbrush, or nail clippers or diaper wipes.

The barbarians -- you all know the line of work they're in -- followed in their truck. They tossed another grenade or two and then peppered the chief's ride with military assault rifle rounds before fleeing. They abandoned their truck not far away, guns, grenades and all, and disappeared into the neighborhood.

Miraculously, the chief and his bodyguards walked away unhurt. But five bystanders, two of them children, were hurt by flying shrapnel.

We've always said we'd have to rethink our plans for making Vallarta our retirement home if the cartels started doing the kinds of things there that they've been doing for years in Acapulco, Michoacan, and along the border.

The loss of our south-facing view of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and our unexpectedly keen enjoyment of Ruidoso already had us wondering what we might decide for the future.

The future has sneaked up on us. We've reached out to a broker to find out what options we might have in the current market, which was starting to perk up before this, no telling now. We go down at the end of this month. Our plan was to spend the winter. We'll have to see.