Correr

Estaba corriendo

I like to run, but the habits of slothfulness that have been cultivated in my “vacation” environment have had time to grow strong. For most of my two months here at San Pedro I have not gone out to run. Instead, I have woken up to the smell of wood smoke, an excuse enough, I figured, in itself. (The presence of wood smoke generally means it is after 6:00 p.m. Though most of the women use wood to cook, it is possible to get up earlier than the smoke. Our neighbor’s chimney is right next to our kitchen. Thus the strength of the smoke I initially found highly discouraging). 

There were other reasons/excuses. The guidebook suggested that running alone outside the town limits might be dangerous. Still, it was one or two weeks after that myth was dispelled before I made it out. With Sugata sleeping in, the bed seemed impossibly cozier than the curl of moon and a few cold stars. There have been stomach problems to contend with and monthly cycles that have make running less convenient. It has not been too hard to notice the poverty of my numerous excuses; the challenge has been in breaking free from them.

At some point, discouraged by my lack of discipline in two area of my life sacred to my sanity, I began setting my alarm for 5:00 a.m. so I could write and run before my 8:00 Spanish class.

I’ve seen so many things on this run not: men snagging avocados from the trees with long skinny poles with baskets at the end; swarms of very tiny insects brought by the rains, caught in beams of light; a moth the size of my hand disabled and swooped up by a skinny blackbird; an entire cow skinned, butchered and stacked in bloody pieces in the back of a pickup; an orgy of dogs, the female-in-heat with two males going at her rear and one at her face, two or three others circling around and snarling; the partially bloated body of a dead puppy. (I’ve been told that when the stray dogs here grow too numerous they put out poisoned meat. There used to be a veterinarian, a foreigner, who began spaying and neutering the strays here, but she didn’t manage them all. Thus said, I felt distraught for quite some time at the disappearance from our neighborhood of one adorable golden puppy. Felt great relief to catch sight of him a week later); fishermen standing in their wooden boats, the frilly, waxy green leaves of coffee plants, numerous spectacular sunrises. Each run brings the delightful and the dreadful.

The best time to go running is 5:30 a.m. At this point the moon is still crisp, but dawn has begun, its full glory to be revealed within the half hour. I run on the Finca road. 

First I pass a couple of schools, (one of which has band practice almost every afternoon. They have played the same songs for countless days, still not perfectly, but quite cheery. They are far more tuneful than the Evangelical song services I’ve heard blaring some evenings from one of the neighboring, yet unidentified churches).

The first view I have of the lake is just past one of the corn fields where the tassels wave just above my head. (I’ve heard reported and read in the newspaper that the corn crop will suffer this year. The rains have come later than expected, too late to do much good for many of the corn crops. One of the locals informed us that the name of the people who live in San Pedro—the Tzu’tuhil—get their name from the corn flowers).

On a good day, the sunrise is jaw-dropping. A few clouds hover over the mountains directly across the lake. The sky changes in stages. First there is an ember-like glow, The clouds brighten. Other colors emerge. Orange clouds set off the turquoise sky. I glance to the volcano above me and see that the first golden touch of day has reached its peak. Sometimes, there is a brief instant when everything is covered in a surreal orange glow, all the puddles from the previous night’s rain light up, the corrugated tin roofs (at least the ones that have not yet rusted) radiate the light back into the air. I keep glancing at the sunrise, marveling at what all the early-risers who live here get to see every day. (And there are a lot of them)

Sunrise from the roof of our house.

A little farther down the shoreline vegetable patches run straight down to the edge of the water. (I hate to think what chemicals might be used on these patches. Whatever it is would flow directly into the lake. Two generations ago, the lake was clean enough to drink from. Now it is not. The introduction of the herbivorous carp as well as some other species of fish, helped the cyanobacteria flourish by stirring up the bottoms of the pond. Several other species of fish have died out. The fish that were introduced much earlier by the native peoples tended to attract fish-eating birds. Now I’ve only seen an occasional egret. The lake keeps going through changes. Plastic has become a problem near the villages. A couple of Sundays ago, Sugata and I joined a group of local fishermen in cleaning the plastic out of the lake near the Casa Rosario Spanish School. We paddled out in kayaks and collected bottles and bottle caps, bags and pieces of bags, and various chunks of unidentified plastic. I think there are plans do this cleaning on a bi-weekly basis. My teacher told me that somebody came to teach the vendors at the market how to avoid supplying plastic bags and the consumers how to stop using them. She said that for a while, people were using less plastic in the market in San Pedro, but that eventually the convenience won out and people are using just as much plastic again).  

Fields near the Lake

 

I run past fancy tourist houses, some dangerously close to the edge of the lake. (The lake has been creeping up higher in recent years. From the Casa Rosario Garden Spanish school where I study, I can see water lapping over a cement slab where the school’s restroom once stood. What used to be neighboring houses look like decorative arches in the water. Trees, now waterlogged, and bare-limned, stand twenty meters from what is now considered the shore).

Wood for fuel

They have been doing construction on the Finca road, paving it, not with asphalt, but with slabs of cement. Each day there is a new obstacle course: piles of sand or rock, slabs of wet cement, and strings to mark out new slabs. Around thirty workers are hard at work every day quite early, unloading sand from trucks, chiseling cement, packing sand, smoothing cement, digging ditches. I, and ten or so other runners, mostly locals, make our way through this obstacle course of sand regularly, (Four women, six or seven men). There are others who pass this way, of course, dozens of farmers headed up to their coffee or their corn with spades and machetes, men with huge bundles of firewood braced against their foreheads over their bent backs (I’ve seen a man carry a huge chest of drawers by himself in this fashion as well, but not during my run), women carrying tubs of corn on their head to grind, or tubs of ground corn to pat into tortillas.

These guys were happy to receive this picture in print.

Usually I only run far enough to go up one rain-eroded hill. (When it rains the streets turn into muddy rushing rivers. Those which are not paved and which run downhill are highly likely to develop miniature canyons. I’ve been impressed with most of the unpaved parts of the Finca road. Sand-pack roads. Though it might rain buckets the night before my run, there are no puddles to dodge).

I gasp a few times at the top and catch my breath as I look out across the lake. Then I run back through it all again.