[If you’re new here, I went to Merida, Mexico and it’s more interesting than recounting how we shoveled snow for two days when we got back, so I’m sticking with it]

We were living in a barrio called Santiago. It’s not quite the center of town. A little south and west from the Zocalo, the big square where they flense the pesos from the tourists. Santiago is considered a nice neighborhood, but hardly the nicest in the city. There are some mansions in Mérida that defy description. Mérida is like New Bedford.

I know that last sentence makes you want to lay a hand on my forehead to gauge my fever, and to instruct me to lay down before I keel over. What I mean is that for a certain period of time, both were the center of the commercial world, and money flowed through their streets in rivers. And then it dried up as fast as it appeared. In New Bedford, and nearby Nantucket, it was whale oil that made the towns into some of the richest in the world. At least until Colonel Drake drilled a hole in the ground in Pennsyltucky and ruined it for everyone. In Mérida, it was henequen.

You think you don’t know what henequen is, but you do. Before Pier 1 did a swan dive into the deep end of the Chapter 7 pool, it was full of henequen. We USA-ers mostly call it sisal. It’s a plant that grows in evil-looking, thorny, spiny blades that can be crushed, shredded into fibers, and woven into very strong rope, and twine, and suchlike. Ships used to require a great deal of rope, and henequen was just the thing for it, especially during the late 19th century. During the Spanish American war, we got to monkeying around in the Philippines, and they stopped sending us rope made of hemp. Henequen plantations went from making their owners well-off to making them very, very, rich indeed when they, ahem, took up the slack.

Thirty-five years or so later, you couldn’t give the stuff away, and the Yucatan turned into a sort of ghost town. It reminds me a lot of western Maine, only here it was paper mills that went belly up instead of henequen plantations. Luckily for the Yucatan, you can also make booze out of henequen. That’s what agave is. First you make pulque, which is the equivalent of Thunderbird wine of the house of henequen. You can distill mezcal from the stuff, too. Tequila is a kind of mezcal, I think. I can’t remember because I drank a half-dozen tequilas once, in one sitting, about thirty years ago, and my mind is still a little fuzzy. Here in Maine, you can’t make anything worth drinking out of poplar pulp, so they switched to cooking meth in the trailer parks instead when the mills closed down.

So Mérida was nowhere, and they it went way, way up, and then way, way down, and now it’s on its way up again. Everyone loves that story. I think it’s usually called Cinderella. Anyway, here’s some more street scenes from a city that stayed put, and persevered, and got rewarded for hanging in there.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and buying my book and contributing to my tip jar. It keeps this place going]