A VISION OF UTOPIA
A 100-mile stretch of virgin seashore on Mexico's west coast between Acapulco and its commercial cousin up the beach, Zihuatanejo.
January/February 1972
By Mark Lediard
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Have you ever had the chance to live your Utopian vision? Not just daydream it . . . or blueprint it . . . or curse its evasiveness . . . but live it? For a couple of years, our commune of four-plus had that chance. It took us a while to realize it, but—during those years—we were truly in the pastures of Paradise.
We were, praise God, outside the U.S.A. and temporarily out of range of the bombardment of this culture: the news, the phones, the blues, the vibrations. That automatically gave our Utopia a head start.
There's a 100-mile stretch of virgin seashore on Mexico's west coast between Acapulco and its commercial cousin up the beach, Zihuatanejo. There, in tiny fishing villages, men still farm and fish in the eighteenth century way with homemade tools just like the ones already on display in the Indian lore section of Mexico City's fancy Anthropology Museum.
We were on that Pacific coast, 30 miles north of Acapulco . . . where there are still lagoons. Sleepy, tropical lagoons like you see in old Esther Williams movies. There, the sun shines all the time and the air blows in fresh and pure off the sea. It's a picture postcard world where the sounds are all natural and the land urges you to live close to it.
We were slow to get the idea. We didn't even begin to catch on until our Mexican neighbors took us by the hand and showed us what was growing in our "weedpatch". The immense weed was watermelon and the little one was verdolaga, a nourishing and tasty wild green. The revelation penetrated our concrete, city-reared minds and—somewhat in the manner of Og and Charley discovering fire—we said, "Hey! Let's plant a garden."
The peninsula where we'd settled was pure beach sand so—since we'd heard that plants need soil—we carted in tons of rich, jungle-y dirt from the banks of a nearby lagoon (we hired a homemade oxcart for $2.00 a day). The soil was rich in clay and drained well when mixed with two or three parts of sand and we fertilized it with sun-dried cow manure that we collected from the miles of surrounding fields.
"What's a nice Jewish boy like me doing in a place like this?" I wondered. "Organic gardening," they told me. "OK," I said, and plunged my shovel in again.
For several days we fried our bodies as we carpeted the yard with fertile soil. Then we collected, dried and planted seeds from the produce we bought at the local market. We cleverly wrote away for "professional" seeds and planted them too. The results were astounding.
Except for certain cold-weather crops, everything we planted sprang out of the earth and into our bellies in record time: corn, radishes, Swiss chard, mustard greens, collards, eggplants, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, beets, sunflowers (mammoth), watermelons, cucumbers, lima beans, string beans, papayas . . . and many pretty flowers.
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