Buried Church and Guadalajara for Luz del Mundo
July 6th, 2007
Percutin_We took the backway out of Uruapan’s congested mess of traffic and into national forest, through pine, fir and fruit trees, to get to Guadalajara. It’s gorgeous country, surrounded by volcanoes, waterfalls, hills big enough to look like The Smokies along the Blue Ridge Parkway with endless rows of corn on both our sides. It was a Mexico I was not familiar with and it frankly surprised me to see pristine forests and such an expense of wilderness. Having become too much of one with nature, we decided we would take a pit stop for a little something different in Paracutin, a.town most known for having been destroyed in the 1940s when the Percutin Volcano erupted and laid to waste everything in the town. After the disaster the remaining residents moved the town miles from its original location. “It’s the town where hills have eyes,” Mark said. Out of brick medieval homes women carrying large loads of wood would emerge, boys raced on the cobblestone road, mud and brick abounded and there was the usual central plaza with church, zocalo (a large public open courtyard) and a municipal building. But there wasn’t much more and as we drove into every resident stopped to stare and we were immediately followed by two men on horses offering rides to the volcano. We had picked up Pablo, an elderly man who had lived in the town all his life, to guide us to the trailhead He told his life story, including the fact that he was old enough to have outlived his first wife and was not on his second wife who he called “muy nuevo” or very new, apparently she was 30 years younger tha him, but he still managed to keep up with her. We dropped him off at the trailhead and headed our way.
When we reached the path we began our hike in past black soil and finally reached black craterlike rocks that slowly kept rising into little mounds until finally all you could see was the top of the Catholic Church tower and sanctuary of what has once be the town. As we continued to climb the rocks it became it apparent that below was an entire town and the volcano in the distance was now just a featureless nub with vegetation growing where once smoke had risen.
In front of the volcano the tower of the church still stood untouched and below was the chapel where people had climbed down to place flowers, rosaries, pictures of Christ and Mary and pictures of their families by the altar. Standing there as the black rocks rose like moonrocks towards the now clearing blue sky all I wanted to just do was dig and keep digging to find what was buried there.
At 9.30 at night we enter the third largest city in Mexico, Guadalajara and now I’ve gone full circle.
