Leaving Baja

Tomorrow, after nine months in Baja California

I leave for pastures new

As ever in my life

It’s been a

Strange

Wonderful

Confusingly amusing

Time

First half as a school teacher in dreadful Cabo San Lucas

Second as a hot springs bum living barefoot in shorts

I flew in last August

Freed from my year-long UK gloom

And stepped into a whole new role as

School teacher to a bunch of Mexican kids

Went to Costco to buy shirts and trousers

Was shown my desk, my books, my laptop

Worried about how the hell I was going to be a teacher

Sleepless on the night before the kids arrived

No plans, no ideas, except –

Get to know them and take it as it comes

And trust in my inherent smarts and –

Whaddya know? It works

The kids are great

They speak wonderful English

They’re smart and polite and mature and articulate

They’re much better than the kids back home

And for the next five months we

Well

Ya know

We do the teacher/student thing

Sometimes imparting knowledge

Sometimes nothing more than a glorified babysitter

Sometimes frustrating

Questioning education itself

(Mostly me, though sometimes them)

And oft times lots of fun

The sharing of ideas

The seeing young minds spark

The learning from them

The investigations of literature and good movies and

Our differing cultures

All in all, Mexican school kids amazed me

In all those months, I didn’t see one cross word between them

An entire school of friends

A real questioning of the notion that

Teenagers are overwhelmed by hormones and emotions

And it makes them crazy and awful

Unless, of course, the suggestion is that somehow Mexican kids have

Different hormones and emotions than English kids

And that’s why they’re better here

But somehow I suspect it’s something different

Something to do with families

The idea of families

And the way its carried out

I think I do a pretty good job

Give my all to trying to help them

Enjoy it when in the classroom, in front of the class

See development and improvement

But then, of course, there’s the other side

Just as there was when I was a teacher in England

Loving the kids, the time we’re together (more or less)

But struggling with the administration

With other teachers

With bureaucracy and box-ticking

And mostly ignoring all that

And doing instead what I believe is right

Which is probably what got me fired just after Christmas

My own ingrate and grating personality

My inability to do things the way others want them doing

My insistence on turning off classroom air conditioners

Despite being repeatedly told not to

(It often made hearing quiet kids’ voices impossible

And sometimes froze them too)

My shunning of useless but expensive text books

The school had made everyone buy

Even though everyone – students, teachers –

Felt they were rubbish

And I felt education more important than

Following silly orders

Or perhaps it was some other manifestation of something

The way I spent the Christmas holidays not wanting to go back

Wanting to continue being free in the hot springs

The way I could very clearly see that

My heart had gone out of the job

The way I was only doing it because I’d said I would

And thought it would be good to finally see some commitment through

Not wanting to let the kids or the school done, but –

Life is weird...

All because of a bag of bad raisins...

But that’s another story

One I suppose I’ll tell if asked;

In any case

On January 9th, my five months as a Mexican school teacher came to an end

And my five months dwelling in hellacious Cabo San Lucas

A city built only to serve the needs of fat Americans

A city little more, really, than a roaring highway

A bunch of dust and fumes

A Wal-Mart and a Costco

(The “M1-on-Sea”)

With little escape from the noise of traffic and nightclubs and dogs

I felt sorry for people who had paid all that money to vacation there

Wondering if they knew what they were getting themselves into

As they themselves wandered ugly streets

Searching for good times

What an awful waste

How sad for them

But then...

The people we’re talking about here

Seemed the very worst kind of Americans

Almost another species entirely

Grotesquely fat torsos hovering over stick thin legs

Necks and backs bent

In unnatural postures

Shuffling along, barely able to walk

(A life at the wheel, at a desk, in front of the TV?)

I saw them in Wal-Mart

(I shopped at Wal-Mart! I never thought I’d stoop so low!)

Scanning the shelves gormlessly

Empty, stupid expressions

Searching, lost

Cabo San Lucas

Made me completely racist

Racist against Americans

Racist against a certain type of American

(Though I think I may have used that brush to tar the lot of them)

And it made me wonder –

Was that emptiness

That lostness

That fear

What the Mexicans saw when they looked at me too?

For, in content brown Mexican eyes and faces

(And lovely Mexican hair)

I never saw those lost expressions

The anxiety

The uncertainty as to what life was about

That I saw in weird American expressions

I wanted to get a t-shirt made:

“No soy Americano, soy Ingles”

Just to make it clear

I wasn’t one of THEM

But did they know it anyway?

Or did I look the same

As I too compulsively shopped for beans and tuna and

Something to fill the void?

Poor Americans!

Poor silly fat Americans!

All fatuous and shallow and –

Well, that’s enough of that

(For now, anyway)

What else did we do in Cabo?

Well...

We made a good friend

And sometimes one friend is enough

To make life tolerable

And played a lot of tennis

And a lot of chess

And boardgames, and ate, and

Spent time with the lovely family

And that was grand

Also...

We lived in a tent

After trying an apartment for a month

A great little house, actually

In a desirable neighbourhood

Convenient and with everything one would want

And it made me crazy

Sitting within those four walls

The noise of neighbouring air conditioners

And neighbouring dogs

(The number one improvement to Mexico, surely,

Would be to exterminate all the dogs

Or, at least, have them de-barked)

And I had to leave

Went up a hill

Above and behind town

Up a sandy arroyo

Pretty much back in pristine nature

No dogs

No traffic

Only the occasional sound of Cabo nightclubs

When the wind was blowing the wrong way

And the wonderfulness of sleeping in a tent

Of waking up in a tent

The cool breeze

The naturalness of it all

Infinitely better

Though perhaps slightly weird

To be a uniformed school teacher

In a posh private school

Living thus

But, oh well

It suited me

It was what I needed

I tried the other

Couldn’t sleep

Went half-crazy

So a tent it was

And I was much happier that way

And also freer to leave town on weekends

Zoom direct to the hot springs when school broke on Friday

And sometimes stay right till early Monday morning

Wake up around 4.30

And zoom the 90-minutes back

(School started at 7

I was often there for 6

And getting up at 4.30/5 was neither unusual

Nor unwelcome

The perfect time of day in this Baja autumn heat

A few chill hours before work

And an early night by 8/9

Nothing else to do anyway

In the Baja darkness

In the CSL night)

And...

What else?

What else did I do in Cabo?

August through December

Two thousand and sixteen?

Well...

That may be about it

I don’t really remember

I do remember lots of evenings at the school

Ostensibly preparing classes for the following day

But also diverting in internet ways

Debunking the flat earth

Playing games

Reading about soccer

All my usual things

That I do when I can’t think of anything else to do

And which pretty much stopped

The moment I came to the hot springs full-time

Oh –

I also remember soccer

Playing soccer with the kids

Sometimes instead of lessons

(Well, they would only have been dancing anyways)

And that was wicked fun

Some beautiful moments

Life in the old legs yet

But

Beyond this

Not much more

Not a glorious time, looking back

And actually somewhat lonesome too

(Not lonely, nor even alone

But definitely “lonesome”)

(A problem which disappeared once I came to the hot springs

Once I put myself in a place that suited me, that was me

Where I felt, as a friend so aptly put it,

Very much “a fish in water”)

Plus –

I wrote not

Even though I wanted to, and had the time

And you know how I get when I don’t write

The pipes get blocked

My head gets weird

And

Conversely

When I finally do do it

As I did so memorably on New Year’s Eve

The pipes are cleared

My head emptied and expunged

My heart set free

My soul doth fly

And, so often,

The very nature of reality gets changed

I felt twelve-feet tall after that session

(I’d been a squashed little mouse beforehand

Lowly and flat)

And it’s no surprise that things shifted so soon afterwards

My confession to the Universe

That my heart wasn’t in it

A surefire “go ahead”

For t’old Universe to pull some levers

Put a plan into action

And work it so wonderfully

With some bad raisins and –

Ah, writing!

Ah, my blesséd friend!

Ah, the thing I think about more than pretty much anything else!

The writing that I’m doing now

That is also making me feel wonderful

Even though it may be devoid of any merit or purpose

(Not for me to judge)

And so –

When I came to the hot springs

Finally

Around January the Twelfth

My plan to spend three days contemplating things

Clearing my head

Awaiting an answer as to what to do next

What should happen? When lazing in those glorious pools

But

The re-emerging of long-forgotten book ideas

Some books I’d even started

Some more than 20,000 words in the bag

One after another – five of them, to be precise –

Presenting themselves

Writing themselves

In my floating brain

Sentences and paragraphs

And me saying,

Yes, okay, we’ll do it – one day

(Always holding them off at arm’s length

For although I love them

I’m also afraid of them

Afraid of the work

Afraid of what it will mean)

Three days I said I’d come to the hot springs

Three days to get an answer as to the next direction

And by the time the three days were up

So glorious had that time been

The pools

The beauty

The weather

The people

That I forgot all about the question

And the notion of moving somewhere else

Became ridiculous

For why would a man want to go elsewhere

When he was already in paradise

And had everything he needed?

So I stayed

And dedicated my time to building and perfecting hot pools

(When I’d arrived, there’d been three-quarters of one;

Within a few weeks

There were six

A whole range of temperatures

To suit every kind of bather

From the self-boiler

To the six-hourer, such as myself)

It was a great, healing time

For

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this before

But, much as I always loved the hot springs canyon,

Returning there as I had done in 2009 and 2015

And now this year/last

Was also a source of pain

And a trouble to my soul

You see

My time there in ’99 had been so divinely glorious

So full of experience and learning

Life-shaping moments

And friends

That whenever I returned

I was always harking back to that time

Always seeing it as it was then

Always noticing the differences

And everywhere I looked

Ghosts

Ghosts of my former friends

And ghosts of me

Former versions of me

Younger

Freer

So full of life and optimism

Learning lessons now old and discarded

Jumping into pools joyfully naked as a babe

The whole of life ahead of him

Having made none of the mistakes I have made

These past eighteen years

And me now so clearly

Strapped to an aging body

Closer to the grave

Stumbling down a one-way street

And in the mirror of that ever-youthful canyon

So clearly changed and running out of time

I mean –

I know that seems unnecessarily bleak

And no doubt I’m exaggerating it somewhat, to make the point

But ghosts is what I saw

And old memories is what dominated

And sadness is what I felt

Mixed in there with the

Present-day beauty and wonder

And –

The point is

That was the way it was

But coming back here in January

Something else happened

I was so happy and even blissed out

And enjoying all the new people

And the building of the tubs...

Those old memories became superseded

New memories superimposed

My mind updated

The ghosts banished and extinguinshed

Everything brought up to date

A head no longer stuck in 1999

But right here in the present

Happy to be in the canyon as it is today

Happy to be in this body as it is today

Running

Jumping

Splashing in the water

Swimming in the pools

Drinking the river

Discovering new things and ways

And that was pretty groovy

Supremely groovy

Incredibly good

Though, of course, not totally good

For, as time passed, I began to see the flipside too

The flipside of the local Mexicans

Who I had always idealised and romanticised

(“The only angry people I’ve ever seen in Mexico

Are gringos and Europeans”)

(See also: ‘The Myth of the Noble Savage’

A must for anyone who’s fond of using the words

‘Indigenous’ and ‘Native’)

And the flipside of my own inability to connect with other people

My intolerance at hearing, over and over again

The same old sentences and conversations

(New Age chatter I would have been a happy part of

Fifteen years ago)

And, of course, those dear blesséd empty-headed Americans

Who cruise in

Sit in the water next to you

Ask you where you’re from

And then use that as a springboard to

Go into a forty-five minute monologue

About some boring thing from their life

Or someone I’ll never meet and have no interest in

Or, more likely, to leap from one yawnsome topic to another

Barely related

Silly tangents

With zero consideration for the listener

Or –

OMG! Is this what I’m doing here?

Indeed it is!

Just

Self-absorbed

Meandersome chattering

About things that are of no interest to you

Non-sequiturs

Complaints and –

But then:

You’re here out of choice

I’m not forcing it on you

And to give myself credit

I’ve avoided about fifteen hundred words of complaining about others

Which I’ve actually been carefully nurturing and brain-brewing

For quite a few days now

So –

All in all,

Everything’s groovy

I came in January

I had marvellous times

I got my head updated

I cured my lonesomeness

I figured out what I wanted to do

I chalked a bunch of things off the list

I even did some work

(A job offered, serendipitously,

The day before I got fired)

For important people back in England

Unwashed

Barefoot

Shirtless

Sitting under mango trees

Among cowpats and abandoned buildings

Finally doing that

“Working remotely in exotic locations” thing

So many of us dream about

(And earning about four months’ worth of Mexican teaching salary

In three easy weeks)

I’d done the same work in rainy grey England

Enclosed by four walls

And gone mad with it

But working outdoors in the Mexican sun...

The work felt marvellous

And then the beginning of March came and I got...

Bored

Restless

Wanted to do something else

Go someplace else

I guess fulfilled with my hot springs life

And ready for more

For

Beautiful as this life is

There’s only so much nothingness a guy can take

Especially when spring comes around

(March generally gets me feeling

Ready for action

After my winter hibernation and slumber)

And yet

I was tied to it

Committed to await the visit of lovely friends

Flying in from England and Canada

Filling the whole of April

I didn’t do much the rest of March

Save my hike across to the Pacific

At the beginning of the month

(Notable desire ticked off the list

Perhaps the fulfilment of everything here)

(You do realise, don’t you, that a great deal of my life is simply

“Ticking things off the list”?

I do them because I think of them

And because I want to see what’s on the other side of that thinking

Or, at least, be free from thinking about them

And know that doing them is probably the best way to reach that place

A place of both

Freedom and emptiness

But, again, that’s another story...)

March passed

Things got kind of sucky in places

But perhaps that’s a good thing too

Makes the leaving of here easier and more tolerable

And will hopefully make the being away from here

Easier and more tolerable too

I’ve been ready to go almost six weeks

But I guess had some things that needed accomplishing

Needed seeing through to the end

Or other things that needed to fall into place

And the visit of my friends

Was great and good

Awesome times

With the kiddies

In the pools

Swimming with whale sharks

And seeing my first ever dolphins

(From gloom to surprising spontaneous joy

In the blink of an eye

Just like everyone always said it would be)

Now, I suppose all is done

Everything accomplished

All avenues explored

And as the heat grows more oppressive

The time is surely here

And I at last have a clear picture of the next step

The answer and direction I originally came for

Those first three days in January

And so

Tomorrow

I say goodbye

Get back on the road

Venture into the unknown

And move towards

That