VIva Santa Cruz de los Senderos

Arrived this afternoon via Autobuses del Norte. I write as sunset slants through a guava tree across this stony little courtyard.

I had a couple hours waiting in the big terminal, pushing through the crowds of Mexicans to buy tickets. They don't form lines; they just stand around the counter and hold up a hand, or money, like they were bidding. Still, someone does attend me in time, by whatever mysterious charity, and there's a couple of hours to wait for the bus anyway. No one seems upset or even bored; I entertained myself imagining they could wait as well at the station as elsewhere. The kids stop at me to stare absorptively, and as I type I realize it's not like cattle exactly, but as though I were cattle, or an orang, or something too altogether foreign to respond.

The bus rocks through fairly eternal suburbs, with tall Barrier-Block-style rectangular housing perched on improbable slopes. It's a darwinian theory of construction, I suppose: those buildings that survive the rains and quakes will tend to remain, and what remains will eventually house the greatest number of people in the smallest space.

The hills outside Santa Cruz feel like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, at Disneyland. The road careens so narrowly all I see outside the window are the rocks. A goathead pokes around the seat from beneath the clothes of the senora in front.

For a second I imagine it has just done nursing. "O walleyed, unrepentant goat" -- insouciant, with his legs, I have to imagine, tied -- "tranquility to accept the things I cannot change" or "so placid and self-contain'd." But then, he's probably birria by now. /I'm stewing. But then, he's probably stew./

With the rocks parted, Santa Cruz opens below like sunrise, roads flickering in and out of red and goldish rocks, sparse nopales and mesquite, darker green gathering towards the copper lake below, and pink narrow spires rising above the town.

From closer, dust dominates. I can't say I mind, now that it's no longer midday and I'm no longer stomping from hotel to hotel with that GI dufflebag across my neck, but I wonder how the farmers manage. Maybe it reaches a point where as much topsoil lands as leaves, but I'm suspicious.