Holy Shit. Canadians

We’re in Mexico, but we’re from Maine, of course. We lived in western Maine for many years, near the place where northern New Hampshire and Canada butt geographic heads. Although we weren’t that far from Canada to the northwest, there was a lot more Maine northeast of us. Maine is huge, and as empty as a politician’s promise. There’s 1.4 million people in a state the same size as Ireland, and about 1.39 million of them live in the same apartment building in Portland, I think. If you look on those official USGS maps of the US, about a mile or two north of where we lived is marked uninhabited. There aren’t many places like that left in the US.

So trees, fleas, and disease up there, and snow like a test of wills, and temps so low that it doesn’t matter if it’s marked in Celsius or Fahrenheit. Or maybe borderline Kelvin.

Maine is the only state in the contiguous US with only a single state on its borders. Well, they call New Hampshire a state, but as far as I know, it’s just a toll booth or two, and a state-run liquor store, with a theatre backdrop of trees behind them. I’ve heard tell that our far northern border has an entire country lurking there. Snow Mexico, or Canada if you’re politer than I am.

Canada had a ring of the mystical to me. Is it really there? Is it full of Dudley Dorights and sasquatches? I’m informed that the Quebec version of Canadians routinely visit Maine, but they go where I don’t, so I can’t testify under oath or anything. They like to put on speedos and go swimming at Old Orchard Beach, which they’ve mistaken for the Riviera. If it’s the Riviera, it’s a Buick Riviera with rusted quarter panels and splits in the naugahyde seats.

So I don’t know what to make of Canadians. They are shadowy figures in my imagination, something like wild and crazy accountants, or polite hockey goons. Luckily, I didn’t have to make anything of Canadians, because they made something of me first. I have now officially been drunk in Mexico with les habitantes.

We met some American expats the other day, and they took pity on us and pretended to like both me and my wife, instead of just my wife, and told us to go to the Tropico 56 cantina on Thursday night. It sounded exactly like the kind of fun I hate, and sorta love at the same time. Karaoke was mentioned. To a former musician, mentioning that karaoke is available is like mentioning that dengue and leprosy is on the menu. But the joint sounded lively, and our new friends promised additional new friends.

Holy shit. Canadians. There are plenty of expats on the prowl in Merida. A wide selection. We were in the Walmart (Mexican Walmart is a trip, man), and a young lady sneezed in the next aisle. I reflexively uttered “Bless you,” and she said, “You’re American.” I said, “Yes, it was refreshing to hear someone sneeze in English.” That’s the limit of my dazzling, witty conversation with young women these days. She said, in perfect, unaccented English, “Not English; German.” I asked her how she was, in German, which mystified her, because the last thing in the world she expected was to be asked was how she was doing in German in a Mexican Walmart by an American.

We’re all sort of lost and adrift here. Merida is a tourist destination, but mostly for other Mexicans. Americans routinely go to Cancun and similar tourist pestholes to annoy the locals. English speakers in the general population in Merida are fairly rare. We’ve rubbed elbows with Cubans, Germans, Italians, Americans, and as I was saying, holy shit, Canadians.

The Tropico is several bivouacs joined together into a complex of alcoholism, gustatory excess, jolly, blaring music, and general conviviality. We wended our way through the back door near the kitchen like Henry and Karen Hill, through a cavernous dining area, and back outside through the front door into a big grotto of picnic tables and other seating arrangements. The place erases the line between inside and out, street and sidewalk, and earth and sky. At 9 PM, the temps were in the 70s, with a breeze, and a moon facing the wrong way surrounded by stars in the wrong places.

Oh, yes, almost forgot. Holy shit, Canadians. We were immediately adopted by a legion of expat Canadians from all over their country, which apparently really does exist. Quebecois, Cape Breton, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and who know what else. They’d all moved to Merida to stop shoveling snow, and start shoveling cervezas into themselves like stevedores filling a cargo hold. They ordered beer by the bucket, literally. Things are inexpensive, relatively, in Merida. The peso has lost about 20% of its value since we were here a year ago, so stuff like booze served in bars seems really cheap to us.  The waiters plopped ice-filled buckets of local beers on the tables, and as near as I could work out with my hazy math, each bottle of beer was a buck.

Our new Canadian friends told us their life stories (we asked), and decimated bucket after bucket, and introduced us to a dizzying array of people passing in and out of the place like a school of fish. There was Diego, a bartender from down the street. He was very friendly, and his English was passable, and he pretended my Spanish was, too, because people are desperately polite here. The crowd wanted to buy him several hundred beers, because he had served them several thousand at one time or another, but he couldn’t linger too long. He was a family man, with two children, and needed to go home. I rose when he got up to leave, and was flummoxed when he embraced me like a brother.

Carlos and Gabby invited us to their home, to eat barbacoa steaks and play Jenga with big blocks. Carlos was from Houston, and wore a glorious garish Astros jersey. He’s a mechanical engineer, and retired to Merida before his first gray hair. His parents were originally from there, and he lives here now and buys up chunks of it. He loves fishing and life in his privada. He wondered if I had any lobsters in my luggage, because he’d take them off my hands if they were a bother. Gabby was about the most charming human you can find outside of my wife’s mirror. She spoke no English, but her Spanish was clear and direct and I could understand her better than the rat a tat singsong run-on version of the average person. She was curious about where we were from, and what it was like. She’d never seen a snowflake, or a temperature below 50 for that matter. She said there were iguanas in her yard. I said there were bears in our yard. She exclaimed, “Osos! Ay yay ya!”

My decks were awash with beer, and I can barely remember Mario, who I think was Puerto Rican, and his beautiful companion Melissa. A very tall, stout, blond fellow was friends with Carlos, and I spoke to him for five minutes before I realized he was from Dusseldorf, not the midwest. What is it with German schools? Why do they all speak with perfect, unaccented English? I speak like a guttersnipe compared to them.

So the Canadians sniffed at the Boston Bruins, and extolled the virtues of the Leafs and the Canadiens. They drank like they didn’t want to live. But of course, it was just the opposite. They were living their best life in Merida, friendly, loud, coarse if they could cadge a laugh with it, and perhaps finally finding out that yes, someone did live just below that dotted line on the Canadian map, and maybe we weren’t half bad.

And I hate to admit it, but the karaoke looked fun.