Return to the Wrench, PLUS Holy Hydrologic Hell

Who got a bike? Cat got a bike! Booyah! Iḿ now a two-wheeled machine! Don't worry for me though, I have a helmet (--> Casco). FYI these photos are not of my bike. This morning I got up late (to the extent that late-awakening exists for me), learned that nothing opens till 10am, wandered around, finally was rewarded with coffee, strolled to the Viveros (kind of an arboretum, but really just a city-run arboreal nursery), which is how I get to the Metro, and as I walk through the gates, who should I see but Jafet! O serendipity! In a city of 20 million... So we talked for a minute, but I wasnt prepared to be very talky, so he said he would keep in touch and we split. Every Metro station is surrounded by a thick cloud of vendors, of everything from socks and windbreakers to tacos, tamales, and fruit, to girlie mags and classic novels. Thereś really something for everyone at Metro entrances. Skidding down the worn marble stairs (there are decisive dips in the middle region of each stair, and there has only been a Metro in Mexico for 50ish years, so that is a LOT of feet per day) I checked the map on the wall, okay, 10 stops on the Indios Verdes-bound train to Hidalgo, then switch to the blue line toward Cuatro Caminos, just two stops to San Cosme, right in the heart of the city. Sweet. Noon on Saturday is the only time Claustrophobes are permitted on the Metro. During the week the slow period is from like, 10AM to 2PM, and the rest of the day your face is plastered against the window and youŕe breathing other peopleś sweat... Jaylee would have a cow! Anyway, so there was space to stretch out on the train today, which was nice. The other thing about the slow times on the Metro is thatś when the vendors come around (because thereś space for them!). But today in lieu of a vendor, one guy got on the train, grizzled and shirtless, and informed us all of his feat-to be: in his bundled t-shirt he had a pile of broken glass, on which he would commence to roll around, bloodying up his back and freaking everyone out. Then he strolled menacingly around the train in hopes of donations, presumably to pay his psychiatric bills... I twiddled my thumbs and stared at the ceiling until he passed me by, and then, eyes like dinner plates, I fixated on his wrecked back (a miracle! Elvis´ face in his scar tissue! Iḿ kidding) and the doors slid shut behind him. Every day an adventure, a psychological wrestling match with the world at large... Entonces, the old switch-a-roo, wherein you leap from one train, clamber upstairs, following signs like a fish follows the current: CORRESPONDENCIA: TAXQUEÑA-CUATRO CAMINOS. Back down some stairs, up some stairs, and ya llegas. Two stops to fresh air at San Cosme. Ask a taxi driver where the street Iḿ looking for is (they know the ins and the outs better than anyone, and they drive like bats out of hell). Destination: PLANETA CLETA: bike shop of Erika and Daniel, a brand new hole-in-the-wall repair gig. Erika and Daniel are prefab friends gifted to me by the lovely miss Morgan, and they are big bike advocates here in the city, involved apparently with a multitude of bike groups, including but not limited to: BiciEllas (a womenś group: bikes are for bitches here too!!), Lunáticos (who do midnight rides), and BiciRaptors. Thereś a mass ride this Sunday and the next, and one day this week theyŕe going to take a night ride to the Velodrome and ride around the ´drome. Erika wants to have a womenś bike-repair workshop there one of these days (which would be sick!). Sheś a lady of maybe 40, who is just so friendly and sweet and sassy. Daniel seems more serious; he has a lot of bike repair experience. Heś her boyfriend and this is their joint enterprise. Anyway, Erika has very kindly offered me her 18-year-old sonś bike, and we do a bit of sprucing-up on it and get it running nicely. I stick around all afternoon, and we fix some more bikes, eat tlacoyos made of blue corn (elongated gorditas, not to be confused with tlacuachis, which are opossums-- though if you lived in Arkansas you could probably order a tlacoyo de tlacuachi--yum?), and talk about cycling. What I notice right off the bat is that women are second-rank to mechanics here. Oh, what else is new. Their friend Chan-chan was hanging around the shop, and he wound up escorting me home so I would know the route. Great. Itś probably a good 40-minute ride from their shop to my place, on fairly big roads, but flat as a pancake, so it was easy enough. Too many speeding peseros is all... So basically, it was really nice of Chan-chan to bring me home, and I felt guilty because just as we arrived it started to rain--hard. I hope he got home okay in his sneakers and T-shirt.

Second part of todayś discussion: physical geography of the city and the train wreck that is its water management.

So for those of you who don´t know anything about Mexico Cityś history, I will give you Catś cut: About a bazillion years ago, there was a system of several endorheic (they don´t drain anywhere: they are in a basin with no outlet) lakes where the city (shaped just like a pear, by the way) is now. During the rainy season they overflowed their banks and became one lake. There were little mini-civilizations set up all around the edges of this system of lakes, notably Xochimilco, Coyoacan, Texcoco, Cuautitlan and Teotihuacan. These city-states did all the normal things: trade, hang out, try to kill each other. Pretty standard. And in the 1300s, a bunch of Mexica folks from down south showed up looking for a new place to set up shop (interestingly, these people were never called Aztecs, but they always said they came from Aztlán, and though nobody really knows where that is, exactly, somehow folks took to calling them Aztecs instead of Mexica). The lake-dwellerś neighborhood association nixed the possibility of making space on the lakeś banks, but okayed the Mexicaś occupation of the island in the middle. This was a pretty lucky move, as they were looking for a sign (the gods were like, get going, and settle when you get a sign; the mexica were like, okay, what kind of sign, and the gods just sort of shrugged and said, you know, any old sign...), and when they canoed out to the island (they had all gone to boy scout camp) they found an eagle perched on a nopal cactus noshing on a snake, and apparently that was sign enough for them. Problem: how to support a bunch of people on very little land: build chinampas! Chinampas are ingenious. You build a raft, tether it to the shore, pile on some potting soil and start growing crops. Itś the best auto-irrigation you could hope for. Permanent wilting point, my patootie, this soil never drops below field capacity! In this manner they were able to expand their territory, which by this time went by the title Tenochtitlán (which is Nahuatl for: place where thereś a bunch of tasty cactus), and feed everyone on it. They did the trade thing, yadda yadda yadda. They even built a giant levee to prevent saltwater intrusion, which was important during the rainy season because a couple of the constituent lakes were brackish. So basically they were a bunch of agronomic badasses. Then the Spanish show up and wreck the party. They burn, break, convert, and enslave everything in sight, and build a euro-style city on top of Tenochtitlán. Deep breath. As they continue to expand the city outward, they come to realize that with the drainage basin all covered with cobbles the water has no access to the soil and so instead goes ahead and floods the streets. After two or three disastrous floods in the 17th century, the Spaniards have had enough of this. But do they choose a better place to put the capital of Novohispana? Lord no! They drain the lake. Really, guys? Okay, whatever. So what it comes down to is that today, this very heavy city is sitting on top of these drained soils, which like Sacramento Valley floodplain soils, shrinks every year for lack of water. In the Central Valley itś an issue of oxidation of organic matter--and thereby the net loss of mass via volatilization... here Iḿ not totally sure of the soil type (people keep telling me --itś like a sponge!-- which to me implies a simple compaction , a change in bulk-density, but itś not like theyŕe soil people [help me, Dr Singer!!]). Whatever. So, the city is rapidly losing groundwater, which means that though there is all this crazy water that falls from the sky, none of it is going through soil-filtration and instead is pipelined out of the Valley of Mexico and out into the boonies where it can erode, rape and pillage all it likes: without becoming potable water. So while the city has this enormous and complicated (seriously: network of underground pipes a few meters in diameter designed specifically to drain the cityś foundation) get-rid-of-the-water system, itś now discovering that itś running out of potable water because it isn´t infiltrating into the soil. So we get a city that sinks on average 30 cm a year (some parts more than others-- thereś a cathedral downtown plus the big marble Palacio de las Bellas Artes building that are sinking faster than the areas around them...) and will likely crush the very pipes that allow them to sink.

Oh, but life is funny.

To tie it all up with some bike business and an inspirational piece of graffitti...

1. Weird bike No. 1: Tell me what this is for and Iĺl give you a cookie.

2. Weird bike No. 2 gets credit for being the first bike I rode this trip: it has this crazy sidecar that I very much admire, though it causes one, when not loaded, to feel as if it will flip, particularly on cobbled plazas. But the guy who owns it, Jose Luis, was nice and let me ride it around. He made the sidecar himself. He was a chavo of no more than 18 years of age, selling fruit in front of the Bosque de Chapultepec. It´s also one of those bikes with two top-tubes and solid brakelines (ie no cables), which function by pushing the pads upward onto the bottom of a very shallow wheel rim. It´s an odd but cool system, perfect for Mexico, because corrosion isn´t an issue for them, and they can´t snap like cables. Pictures uploaded! See above.

And here´s the grand finale, my favorite stencil so far, right in my own neighborhood: