Murray to Henry Victor Morgan, 21 October 1942 -- "dealing in beauty"

 Dear Dad…

We’ve added another lake to the long list the Romur has been on. After Chirchester Harbor, the Neckar, the Danube, the Ilz, the Sava, Puget Sound, the Quinault, the Hoquiam and the Columbia now comes Xochimilco… in many ways it was the most beautiful of them al

Remember the story in the Oz books about the runaway island.The one that wanted to go places and see things. There was a time when Xochimilco was full of runaway islands, floating gardens of vegetables and flowers. It all began back before the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. The lake was big then, and shallow. On its shores lived the Aztec Indians. Many of them built their houses on poles set out over the water. Later these people, deprived of gardens by neighbors who moved in behind them, built barges, loaded them with dirt, and planted crops. Gradually they got to building bigger and bigger barges, some big enough to hold little thatched huts in addition to the crops. When an Indian got tired of his view, he just poled his little floating island to another part of the lake.

Kayaking at Xochimilco: flowers, corn and anchoring poplars

This got confusing, and it was especially bad when a storm came up and blew the islands all over the lake and the Indians had to paddle around in the dugouts, hunting for home and getting in big arguments over whether their garden really was full of spinach or orchids, cabbages or gardenias. So they began to tie the islands to trees, or to ground them on shoals and plant trees so that they wouldn’t move away. And from a lake of floating islands Xochimilco became, after a century or two, a town of canals. It is now the Mexican Coney Island, the place to spend a Saturday night or Sunday. The main attraction are the passenger skiffs, flat-bottomed canoes covered with canopies and ringed with flowers, which you can rent for $1 an hour (if you are a tourist) or fifty cents an hour (if you know enough Spanish to argue), complete with a pole pusher…

The scenery is beautiful. The canals flow past the hundreds of islands, now almost—but not
completely—stationary, and on each are stands of eight foot corn, purple kale, pastel green lettuce and celery, and more flowers than you ever saw at any flower show. Everywhere are the anchoring poplar trees and in the distance the purpling range of mountains, capped by Popocatepetl and Ixtacihuatl, both thousands of feet higher than Rainier.

Our second trip was the better for on it we took the Romur. We put it together at the British Boat Club, to the amazement of the Indian boathouse keeper, who had never seen anything like it, and started out down the canals. Our host, the fifteen year old son of the owner of the place where we are staying, was in a perpetual panic for fear we would lose ourselves in the hundreds of turnoffs. But we just kept paddling straight ahead, or so it seemed, and eventually came back to where we had started.

It was really remarkable paddling, first along a broad canal flanked with the clubhouses of the national rowing clubs: Mexican, Spanish, British, and the German one, closed for the duration. Several four-oared shells were out, warming up for an intra-club race, and while they didn’t look much like the University of Washington, they were pretty as they came swinging along. The slides banging and the oarlocks creaking as the big, bronzed men—some of them with considerable bay windows—slammed into each stroke.

Ruben Jay photo, from gondolagreg.com

Past the rowing course the canal narrowed, and we slipped past little houses, screened by poplars, each with a short canal leading into it, like a driveway. And then came the island gardens, interlaced by literally hundreds of little canals. It was Sunday and not many of the workers were out but there were some: a tall man with a machete, hacking down corn stalks; a boy up a tree, cutting off limbs for firewood; a young man picking flowers and loading them into a boat to paddle over and sell in the tourist section; an old Indian cutting grass with a machete; a young Indian lifting 'Rwater out of a pool and swinging it, in a cloth bag on the end of a pole, over onto his flower garden. We stopped and talked to him, as best we could, and like the flower growers who were at Xochimilco when Cortez came, he felt superior to the vegetable growers because he was dealing in beauty. He told us that if we wanted to see Mexico, we should see the state fair, and, his eyes big, he assured us that they had farm machines on display there from France and Switzerland and England and the United States, machines that could think. …

After awhile we pushed our way back out into the big canal and went on. The Indians were taking flowers over to the market and they came floating past us, pushing their little skiffs with poles and looking very strange indeed, standing up in such little boats. …

We kept paddling along until we ran into a traffic jam down by an amusement park, and then turned around and went home, back past the pig-sty, the cathedral, the low bridges. It was a swell day.

Tomorrow or the next day we are going to run down to Guadalajara for a few days, and we expect to go paddling in Patzcuaro, called the most beautiful lake in the Americas. But we’ve seen Crater Lake, haven’t we. …

Love as ever,

MURROSA