Raised & Returned

Toot-toot, all aboard the train of thought. Take a seat as it leaves the station, let’s see where it’s going to go.

There was a tiny terrorist in my bedroom the other night, whining in my ear each time I started to drift away to dreamland. Thankfully, the siege didn’t last long, either because I successfully whacked it, or it wandered elsewhere. But in the morning I remembered it, and that led me to recall other times when mosquitoes and their ilk have taken nights of sleep away from me.

Mexico: A small town on the Pacific coast. My friend and I are doing yoga on the beach at sunset, wondering why no one else is out there, when we realize that tiny bugs are biting us. Feeling spiritual and connected to nature, we stay where we are. Later we’ll learn that the bugs, tiny sand flies called “jejenes” in espanol, are why no one else was out on that beautiful beach at sunset.

We leave that town the next morning and make our way to Roblito, the off- the-grid fishing village, which is our primary destination. And I spend the next week waking up, at least once each night, to scratch the hundred bug bites covering my arms, legs and torso.

I’m lying in the hammock one morning several days later, still scratching away, and one of the locals says something to me. I’m distracted and my Spanish is yet rudimentary, so I don’t really hear him, and so I just say “Si, jejenes.” He shakes his head, points to a dog, and said, “Pulgas.” The light bulb goes on; this isn’t my ongoing jejenes affliction anymore, I am being bitten by fleas.

I start asking questions. Turns out covering my whole body with clothing, as I and the small group of other gringos I’m with have been doing in fear of jejenes, invites fleas to dinner. Turns out jejenes aren’t really an issue in this particular area, and the extent to which they are is mitigated by burning dried horse-manure, as the smoke is apparently a natural jejenes-repellent (not as bad as it sounds, just smelled like burned grass).

So I start wearing cut-offs and going barefoot, like pretty much everyone in town. There are no paved surfaces, the roads are all soft dirt, it’s a pleasure to forgo shoes and socks. The locals smile and nod, the tightly-closed bud of my experience thus far opens and flowers as I follow the trail of discovering what this place is, how to live here, little-by-little shedding my foreign skin. A few weeks later some other gringos mistake me for a local, and it’s a delightfully surprising capstone to my time there.

Toot-toot, last stop. The lesson learned is that by taking in direct knowledge of that place, I became comfortable within it. Geographically localized cultures are sophisticated, knowledgeable cultures. If you’re finding that a lack of community is a constant itch in your life, maybe try letting go some of what you brought here with you; maybe try getting out of the pseudo-world of your phone, and instead reaching out into the actual world around you.