Well this kind of weather couldn’t last forever, amirite?
I must admit, for someone accustomed to New England weather, it seemed like forever. Merida, Yucatan shifts its seasons, it’s true. But not while you wait, the way it is back in Maine. Yucatan uses a calendar for weather decisions. Maine uses a clock. Summer in the sun, winter in the shade is a thing back there. Here, it’s always some form of summer.
Forgive us for being lulled and gulled by a weather report that looked like it was painted in oils. We went something along the lines of 45 straight days just like you see there. Egad, Lovie! We have to put more water in the pool every day!
It couldn’t last. The seasons are the opposite of up north. Winter’s nice, summer, not so much. There are only two seasons, just like Maine. Maine is nine months of winter, followed by three months of tough sledding. Here in Merida, there’s summer, followed by the other summer.
The “other summer” is the rainy season. If you want to be pedantic (who doesn’t?) there might be a third season: hurricane season. But honestly, how much worse can it get than the “other summer,” which showed up here last week:
That’s out in front of our house. There’s an eight-inch high curb out there, which is a lot by US standards, but barely adequate here. The city of Merida is the geologic equivalent of one of those pool tables without pockets that require more geometry to play than I carry around in my head. There are no bodies of water, no rivers, runnels, or gullies where the water might go. Either it ends up in the ocean, or the Gulf, the occasionalcenote, or your living room.
Obviously this has been noticed by the people who lived here before us. I espied two brackets anchored into the masonry walls outside the only door in and out of our casa. I’m good at architectural hints. For instance, if you remove all the railings on your staircases, because a raccoon-eyed harridan on home and garden TV told you to, I’ll take the hint and fall down your stairs and sue you. I assume that’s expected of me. I hate to disappoint people.
The bracket hint was saner than that. I went hunting around and found a six-inch tall metal weir, a dam that slipped into the brackets snugly. So between that and the curb, we had about a 14″ head start on the rainwater. It wasn’t enough:
Consecutive days of torrential downpours have left the city of Mérida waterlogged, with official data revealing that parts of the Yucatecan capital recorded a staggering 436.7 millimeters (17.2 inches) of rainfall over a single seven-day period.
According to a report released on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026, by the National Water Commission (Conagua), Mérida has solidified its status as the wettest location in Mexico over the past week. The most severe accumulations were registered in the western sector of the city between May 27th and June 2nd. Conagua noted that the 436.7 mm volume is visually equivalent to dumping nearly 22 twenty-liter water jugs onto every single square meter of land in the area. (link)
They were eager to add several rainstorms together to get that figure. There were days scattered throughout that week when it didn’t rain much, or at all. Most of that 17.2 inches of rain fell in a few hours, scattered over several days. It only rained all day once. I’ve taken showers with less water being dumped on me.
According to the chatbots, 17.2 inches of rain is about half the expected yearly rainfall here. Also according to Chad:
Spread evenly, 17 inches of rain means every square foot of ground received about 106 gallons (400 liters) of water.
Now, I may not be able to play pool with no pockets or anything, but I know when Sam Altman’s turbo encabulator is having an aneurysm. I said, check your math, and yourself, roboboy:
Good catch — that number is way off.
Let’s calculate it correctly.
A square foot receiving 17 inches of rain gets a volume of:
17 inches of rain means every square foot of ground received about 10.6 gallons (40 liters) of water.
The previous figure of 106 gallons would correspond to about 170 inches of rain, which is exactly 10 times too high. I accidentally shifted the decimal point.
Do tell.
For poops and giggles, I asked Chad how much snow that would be, if that much moisture fell on Maine.
Maine perspective
A week’s precipitation equivalent of 17 inches of rain would translate to roughly:
14–21 feet of snow in a single week.
So, about four to six hours after I took the video, all the water in the street was gone except for some puddles. Where it went, only Kulkukan knows. The pool was full. And I didn’t have to shovel 14-21 feet of snow off the sidewalk.
We’re in Merida, Mexico. Doing the Yucatango. Figuring things out. Mexico decided to be extremely Mexican on Sunday. Forecast: 103. Electricity: Coy. Disappearing puckishly from time to time. No dear John letter, either. Just wait and wonder in the dark.
Now of course there are many things you can do without electricity. Like most people, I don’t want to do any of those things, and I don’t want to hear about those things. I want coffee and air conditioning. Don’t take me alive, otherwise. A ready supply of these things are mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, or maybe the Magna Carta, or perhaps the terms and conditions on Microsoft Office. If they’re not, they should be. I’m no Revolutionary War scholar or anything, so I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure the Intolerable Acts threatened no coffee or air conditioning for expats, which I guess Americans were. Or maybe it was tea. It was always about tea with those periwigged weirdos.
It was early yet on Sunday, so we set out on an overland trek. An ankle turner through Santiago, the neighborhood we live in. The eastern end is called Gringo Gulch by the locals. It’s a not entirely complimentary assessment of where most of the expats from the US and Canada live. We don’t live in Gringo Gulch. We live on the western end of Santiago, near the zoo, which is somehow fitting. We are similarly displayed to the regular residents as oddities. Like the zoo, strangers are not expected to feed us, but on the plus side, nobody is allowed to throw stuff at us, either. We’re happier among the locals than we would be in Gringo Gulch. If we wanted to live among Americans, we would live in Maine. If we wanted to live among Canadians, we’d live in Maine in the summer, and learn to tip seven percent in the restaurants.
We walked east, because that’s where the Plaza Grande lurks. Some call it the Plaza Principal. Some call it the zocalo. It’s the center of town, done in the Spanish colonial style. Big square park, big cathedral on one side, town hall on another, governor’s palace on another, and a museum on the fourth. Mixed in are 1001 opportunities to ask a gringo if he wants to buy a Panama hat, or a fan, or a guayabera shirt, or another fan, or a trinket, or a ride in a carriage drawn by a horse that looks like he’d rather be in perdition, where it is cooler. We didn’t want any of that, but we figured where there’s commerce, there might be electricity.
We walked on the shady side of the streets. It was almost lonely, although the city has about a million inhabitants. Mexico is a civilized country, the way my own used to be, so lots of businesses are closed on Sundays whether they have electricity or not, and the churches are full. I doubt they’ll withstand the siren song of American go-go franchise commerce much longer, what with all the stronk girrllbosses running the place these days. But there’s a lot of ruin in a nation, as they say, and it will take time, so it will be a problem for the people who mow the lawn over our graves, not the residents under it.
I confused my wife over and over, which is in the job description, I believe. What with everything shuttered, and regular people in church or sleeping one off, or doing both at the same time, we didn’t encounter very many pedestrians, and it was easier to cross the streets than usual. But somehow, I kept stopping here and there on our hejira. I wasn’t taking pictures, or anything else borderline sensible, so my wife had to keep stopping and tapping her foot with “I did?” rattling through her head where the “I do” used to live.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“All the electric meters are six feet off the ground. I’m watching to see if the wheel is turning inside the meter. The first one we find that’s in motion, I figure we can knock on the door, kill the inhabitants, and make coffee in their kitchen until the police come.”
“It’s a strong plan, I’ll grant you. Maybe we could just go to the first restaurant with the meter humming?”
Isn’t it just like a girl to take the easy route. We wandered along past Santiago Park, and kept going. When the zocalo appeared a few intersections further along, still only a mirage full of traffic and importuning, we passed the Cucu. It was open. I realize that “passing the cucu” sounds like a euphemism, but I assure you it’s a restaurant. My wife and I switched roles. I walked right by it, while she paused at its sandwich board.
It looked Mexican twee to me, which didn’t suit. I wanted coffee like a bitter penance, and a breakfast like the kind they serve in prison. The Cucu Bistro doorway was ringed with a garland of plastic flowers, and the sandwich board described the kinds of complicated breakfasts I don’t favor, the kind designed to fool girls into thinking they’re not eating right out of the sugar bowl like a housefly. You know, Starbucks sorts of things. Wedding cakes for breakfast. I pooh-poohed the idea thusly:
“I’ll bet they don’t have air conditioning.”
“There’s a big sign on the door that says ‘air conditioning’.”
“Reading the signs is cheating.”
By this time, a cute little girl (I’m getting old) opened the door and said, “Come in, we’re open, and we have coffee and air conditioning.” At least that’s what I think she said. She said it in Spanish, and I was still in arguing with my wife in English mode. It takes a few seconds of hummina hummina when you switch back and forth. She may have asked me if I wanted to buy a Panama hat, or take a hansom cab ride. My wife went straight in. I was left on the curb with no one but her imaginary divorce lawyers to keep me company. I surrendered faster than Vichy France and followed.
I was disappointed that the interior was as pleasant as the help. It was getting harder and harder to win the argument. The place was like most structures in the city, very skinny and very, very deep. We kept passing through seating areas, past a station where the servers made coffee and conversation, until we hit a door out to a hidden patio. We were about as interested in sitting outside as do-it-yourself dentistry, so we plopped down in the last stretch of seats, right under the mini-split, and looked around. The place was as neat as a pin. It had handsome tile floors in the big, colorful patterns they favor down here. The overall color scheme was a peaceful yellow and gray, with dashes of blue. The tables were simple, sturdy, nicely finished and well-matched, made from the kind of lumber rich suburban American women salvage from pallets, because they wish to appear poor and resourceful, and fail at both. No one was failing at anything at the Cucu.
The siren who lured us in was our server, and continued her song. She took pity on us, though, and she fished around and found menus in English for us.
Aha!, I thought, but didn’t say. There was nothing on the menu for me. I still held out hope that I could win this argument, if that’s what it was. It was the usual lament. Complicated mayonnaises and avocados everywhere. As you know, avocados are just rancid pears full of green gun grease and a giant kidney stone. Mayonnaise of any kind is suitable for several uses, none of which involves eating at breakfast unless you’re more of a honkey than I am. The rest of the menu was runny eggs and runny cheeses and various other things not often sold to drunken Irish authors, which I aspire to be. They had coffee and air conditioning, so I didn’t complain much. As usual, my wife saved me: “They have grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
I know what you’re thinking. This dude is in the Yucatan peninsula and he’s going to order a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup. He must miss grammar school lunches. Perhaps they should serve it with a waxy box of milk to complete the trip down memory lane.
But you’d think wrong. Merida is actually notable for its Yucatecan cuisine, which in my book should be treated as assault in a court of law. It’s all pretty dreadful and strange, and it has no visible relationship to what anyone in the US thinks of when you mention Mexican food. Everything on the menus looks like you cleaned out the kitchen sink strainer after doing the dishes and dumped it into that dish you keep under the sink if the drain leaks. They put chocolate on chicken down here, among other horrors. It gives me the willies.
Think I’m exaggerating? Challenge accepted. Their signature dish is cochinita pibil, At first blush, if your Spanish is rusty and you’re not too inquisitive, it sounds like a pulled pork sandwich. Dig a little further, and you might find your appetite for it wanes. And I really mean dig a little further, because it’s prepared by drowning the pig in the juice of bitter oranges (don’t ask), then wrapping it in banana leaves, followed by digging a hole, starting a fire, and burying the pig on top of the coals in your backyard overnight. The next day, you dig it up, dust it off somewhat, eat it, and pretend to like it.
I’m of Irish extraction, so sketchy uses of various parts of pigs hold no terrors for me. But I, and my brethren, draw the line at grave-robbing.
So no, I am not fondly remembering Mom’s margarine pan-fried Wonder bread sandwiches with two slices of American cheese, along with a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup with an extra cup of water added, because there were six of us. I’m trying to explain that Merida might be known for cochinita pibil, but should be known for its grilled cheese sandwiches, with tomato soup on the side. It’s Elysian here.
My wife ordered this, because she is, underneath her clothes, a girl eating breakfast in a restaurant:
Yup. Whipped cream, blueberries the size of plums, various sugar grenades disguised as fruit, and flower blossoms on top. A wedding cake. I figure anything that reminded her of a wedding cake would turn to ashes in her mouth, what with her husband selection experience, but she soldiers on.
We’re in danger of taking photos of all our meals while writing on the internet. This would make me an influencer. I avoid being called that by always being under the influence instead. Let’s move on. Here’s mine:
The menu reads: Pan rustico + queso de cabra + queso gouda + queso cheddar + tocino + sopa de tomate.
By rustic bread, they’re referring to bread made for humans to eat, by other humans. Big fat, chewy slices that taste of sourdough, maybe a little olive oil, and perhaps a rumor of the wood-fired oven they were baked in. Three kinds of cheese, just not made in the same factory that makes Firestone tires and kamikaze drones like back in the states. The tocino they mentioned is just bacon, in the same way Sophia Loren is just a woman. I don’t know what they feed pigs down here, but it must be more wholesome than cochinita pibil. This also avoids requiring cannibalism as well as grave robbing from the oinkers.PETA would be proud. Almost.
The tomato soup is as thick as hummus, and made entirely by smashing fresh tomatoes in some sort of soup particle accelerator, with some kind of ambrosia for spices. It’s served in a little cup, and you’re supposed to dip the sandwich in it, and eat it like that.
Now, I’m not just going Cucu here. I’ve had the same meal in four different restaurants all over the city. The SOCO. Maria and Montejo. The Galeron. And in each one, in turn, I’ve testified, under oaf (my mouth was full), that it was the greatest grilled cheese and tomato soup combo in the history of the world. And every time I knew I was wrong, as soon as I ate the same thing in the next restaurant.
You know, the historic center of Mérida is protected under Mexico’s national heritage laws as a historic monument zone (Zona de Monumentos Históricos). They list all sorts of architectural and historic reasons for that, but they can’t see the forest for the trees. Put the grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup on the city’s seal, and all the flags, and see the tourist dollars roll in. I promise only a small portion of them will leave a seven percent tip.
Well, they called it a Country song. I guess it was, at least before Freddie Fender got ahold of it. Then it became another country song. It had been recorded by a bunch of people, including Jerry Lee Lewis, but no one remembers that now.
The Freddie Fender version was a throwaway afterthought. A record producer wanted a version with Spanish lyrics mixed in, so he hired Freddie to sing it. “I was glad to get it over with and I thought that would be the last of it”. It made it to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975, and was the fourth most popular song of the year. After that, pretty much no one knew Freddie had ever sung anything else. The music business is like that sometimes.
We have friends here in Merida. It was already a polyglot crew, but now we seem to have inherited a Poligano posse as well.
Poligano is a fraccionamiento, or perhaps a colonia in the northwestern part of the city. No one calls a neighborhood a barrio here. The older sections of the city are called colonias, and the planned developments are called fraccionamientos. Poligano isn’t much of either. It’s an area with a mix of building styles, almost entirely single family homes. It’s where real people live. Working class, and mostly poor. In many ways, it’s the polar opposite of the colonia of Santiago, where we live. We live south and west of the main part of the city, which we can walk to. Poligano is towards the northeast corner of the city. You can’t walk to anywhere from there but more Poligano. Our new Poligano friends exhibited a brand of friendship I recognize, but only dimly, like a black and white movie on a VHS tape. It has not been on offer in the country of my birth for a long time.
They are cousins of one of our original friends here in Merida. They have a big family and get together at the drop of a sombrero and party down. They decided to throw my wife a surprise birthday party. She never caught on, even after it was well underway, because she couldn’t envision something like that happening to her. It had to be explained to her that this party was in her honor, and these people had gathered to celebrate it, as if she were three years old.
Their house is one in an endless row of mismatched masonry dovecotes. It’s hacienda style, I guess, but only technically. The front of the house is a big iron gate, nothing more than a heavy screen. The front room is a garage, sort of, but garages are tiled here, and rarely used for parking cars. The streets are skinny and filled with cars that have seen better days, but will see many more days anyway. For instance, across the street was a glorious 1970-ish VW bus, painted various fetching shades of pink (by brush and roller). It had four flat tires. On either side of it were cars fifteen years newer than our old Volvo back in the states, so I’m not sure exactly what you can infer from that.
The garage had long tables set up in it, lots of mismatched chairs, and a television of the size that would make your children invoke the Geneva Convention if you tried to make them watch it. There were cheap speakers screwed to the walls, the ghost of boomboxes past, I guess, ready for a fiesta at all times. On the wall was a shrine to Our Lady of Guadeloupe, surrounded by Christmas lights. It’s a staple around here.
I tell you what, you have not lived until you are taken in, like stray cats, and eat tacos prepared in a kitchen with no running water (until it rains again, and the cistern fills up), and put yourself outside of arctic cervezas that sweat only a trifle more than you do in the heat. You dance and sing along with an Ecuadorian Elvis, hired to bring his karaoke machine and perform. Was he good? I told him that if he was around when my mates and I were still performing pop song covers back in the day, we’d have put him out front and in five minutes we’d make a grand a night, and two on the weekends. He replied that it wasn’t important, because he was an electrician all day, and didn’t need the money, really.
So Marcello the Ecuadorian Elvis sat on his drum seat throne, clutched his sequinned microphone, and held court for three hours. The crowd ebbed and flowed the whole time, extended family showing up, young men immuring themselves in some interior chamber and playing video games, venturing out for Cokes and cake. At one point, a handful of people were delivering a refrigerator to the house next door from the corroded bed of an ancient Datsun pickup, and danced and sang along on the sidewalk to some slice of Saturday Night Fever that Marcello was improving.
Ecuadorian Elvis was a riotmaster, and got each and every person to get up and sing, either with him, or against him, or next to him, but it had to happen. My wife, who is the shyest person on earth, manufactured the verve to sing Walk on By like the little angel she is. Then Marcello did the impossible, and made me bellow out New York, New York, because to an Ecuadorian, Maine is New York. I was informed that fourteen stray cats were found dead the next day, but I maintain the evidence of my guilt is tenuous at best. There was no indication that they took their own lives, for instance.
And lovely Elsie baked my wife a glorious cake and we all sang Happy Birthday in Spanglish.
We took an Uber home, late, the only long drive we’ve ever had in this town. The car was an MG of the sort you can’t buy in the US. It was an elegant four-door sedan, with leather seats, and the air conditioning set on stun. The city passed by, Egyptian-style in the side windows, an endless scroll of nightlife and fast food and cantinas, dog walking, lovers walking hand in hand, with scooters and buses fighting for primacy in the roundabouts, until we arrived home.
As we turned the key in our lock, the iron grates of the house across the street opened up with a metallic groan, a party with twenty people appeared seated in their garage, and an honest to goodness Mariachi band started playing.
It’s just like that here. Happy birthday, Mrs. King.
When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.
― Nicólas Gómez Dávila
I was at a gathering. Certain kinds of people call a barroom a gathering. Certain kinds. Most everyone was familiar, although nearly no one is here. An extranjero to us, and everyone else, had appeared, friendly, gregarious. He’d been adopted into the brotherhood of the bar tab already. I tried to catch up.
He had been partially disassembled by his country, then put back together pretty well, thank God. But he was a ship of Theseus. He was the same person, but not the same. He was wandering the world in search of new silent loyalties, although he skipped right over the silent part.
A friend pointed to me and said that’s _________. He’s a writer.
No one had ever said that before. Never. I’ve been called every damn thing, but never that. It was way down the list of things to be called, on some second page of a resume that never gets printed.
Al was there. He wanted another copy of my book. He’s a philosopher, I guess. Or maybe a Buddha. A wandering ascetic. Whatever he might be, people sit next to him and feel better. I have. He had a copy once, and liked it, so he gave it to the library. He said he couldn’t do without it, even one step removed, so I gave him another one.
A young girl swam in our pool. When she comes she hugs us and says, “Mucho gusto,” instead of all the wan greetings we’ve learned from our lessons. She wanted a book, although she cannot read English. I signed it in Spanish, or maybe Italian, or both, the language is like that sometimes. She held it like a missal. I’ll never forget it.
No one speaks English here, but my book is in the library. It isn’t in the library where I pushed the rock of my life up its hill, over and over. I fashion for myself in solitude new silent loyalties.
Tag: the other Mexico
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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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