Living in Mexico

My commentariat are a polite bunch, never asking prying personal questions--or maybe they are just not interested! But I have the urge to talk a bit about living in Mexico and why I moved. It was February in 1998 and Montreal had experienced a genuine climate crisis: a five-day ice storm. An ice storm occurs when the temperature of the air is just above zero and the temperature of the ground is just below zero, so when it rains the water turns to ice when it hits the ground. Driving and even walking is nearly impossible as everything is coated with a layer of ice. Oh, and those big electric transmission towers? Covered with tons of ice, they tend to collapse:

A typical ice storm lasts maybe a day, but in early January 1998 it went on and on, for five days. At which point those really big transmission towers had maybe 300 tons of ice and, as you can see in the photo, every twig and branch had a cocoon of ice. Montreal is on an island in the St. Lawrence river and there are five main electric lines to the island. Four of them were down and a lot of local neighborhoods had no power because fallen trees had taken out power lines. The city engineer told the mayor and premier of the province that there was no power for the downtown office towers so nobody would be going to work for a while and there would be enough power to either run the Metro, the Montreal subway, OR to have water pressure. Not both. So they shut down the subway.

We left on a Friday afternoon after a couple of days with no power. We took the subway to the bus station and as we arrived they were shutting it down. The office towers were already dark. Eerie sight! We took the bus to the nearest town in Ontario that was out of the swath of the storm and stayed there until power was restored. In our neighborhood that took eight days. We started to think that there must be a better place to live, weather-wise.

A month or so later we had a friend over for dinner who used to be a vocal coach for the Mexico City opera. He was raving about San Miguel de Allende, where they loved to go on the weekends. San Miguel is one of the colonial silver cities, meaning cities founded by the Spanish in central Mexico during the era when immense quantities of silver were being mined and sent back to Spain. San Miguel was just a stopping place on the route from Zacatecas and Guanajuato to Mexico City and it became nearly a ghost town after the Mexican revolution of 1910. But in the late 40s and 50s it was discovered by a generation of arts-oriented Americans who found they could study art here under the GI bill as the Instituto Allende offered a master's degree. The expat community has been growing ever since and now is about 10% of the population.

No ice storms here. This photo could have been taken at any time of the year:

There are lots of other things I love about the place, health care in particular. A visit to your doctor costs $75 US, I can get an MRI the next day, I can see a specialist within a week and the costs for everything are very reasonable. I paid $150 for that MRI. There are three private hospitals in San Miguel and if necessary a doctor or a nurse will come to your home. In Canada, things are very different. A referral for treatment will take anywhere from six months to over a year.

There is a downside, of course. I miss the rich collegiality of the university community I was part of for over twenty years and it is pretty much impossible for me to get a piece premiered here. My String Quartet No. 2 will be premiered in three concerts in May. In Vancouver!

But, you know, I don't miss that winter weather.

Sibelius said that his Symphony No. 6 "always reminds me of the scent of the first snow."