by Joseph Toone

I knew from the start we wouldn’t get far touring the old Silver Route between two villages outside of town. I pick this route as the road is much the same as during the Silver Route days centuries ago (versus now cobblestoned streets in town). Normally the dusty path features great views, perilous drops and the chapel where the Spanish rested for the night before taking the last all day foray into San Miguel. Today the same trip takes about twenty minutes.

After all the rain, shortly into our foray, the road was impassible. To reinforce the point a mother pig breast-fed her piglets nestled deep in the mud, happy as, well, a pig in mud. My guests were enchanted, which bode well for a morning in the campos.

Next came the cloistered Benediction monastery with the always chatty Brother Jonas. For those who don’t know, clergy aren’t often extroverted and cloistered ones even less so. Brother Jonas is a Chatty Cathy in comparison. So there’s a good reason he runs the store featuring the CDs of the monks chanting, incense from local wildflowers and St. Pascual statues, patron of cooks, to aid you in your meal preparations.

Following a visit to the church in Atotonilco every group faces a choice between touring a pottery factory in Delores specializing in animals or climbing around a local dam. This group chose the dam which I greatly undersold, saying with the rain there will likely be a waterfall. You think?

But we couldn’t even get out of Atotonilco. The normally sluggish and shallow Laja River overflowed its banks to such an extent that you couldn’t even tell where the bridge once was, so much did the water seep up and into town. I immediately thought of my former housekeeper, Carolina, who has a restaurant alongside the bridge in Cieneguita leading to the airport, just a short distance down river.

We then drove back into town to see if we could approach the dam from the opposite direction. When we got to Cieneguita, again the bridge wasn’t visible and neither was Carolina’s roadside restaurant.

We ventured to San Miguel Viejo, where the town originally started, and, while my guests meandered learning about featured Otomi art, I contacted Carolina. My thought was she had prepared her buffet dishes the night before not knowing flooding was coming. Perhaps she would like to host my group at her home so she could serve her dishes and make some money on a day when her business was, literally, under water. She did.

Next step was asking my folks if instead of going to Coyote Flacco, a lovely steak place just outside of Atotonilco, would they like to eat uber-real Mexican food in Los Lopez at Carolina’s home? They did.

They were such a fun crowd, engrossed in the food and livestock entertainment as horses, sheep and dogs traipsed by. But all these paled in comparison to the young man in charge of goats across the way. Watching goats can get dull so he had a hole in the fence where one could escape and he’d chase the goat around all the puddles leading Billy Goat Gruff back into the pen. The lad was too cute for words, which is more than can be said for a lot of the escaping goats.

As always, I take Carolina aside at some point and ask if she still enjoys the restaurant more than cleaning. Mind you, she works literally all day and at this point she sleeps at the roadside stand to keep folks from stealing her gas stove... again. Sounds like hell to me, but Carolina assures me she loves it. Her work is fun, her family can visit anytime and she’s her own boss. These are the same things that drew me to be an entrepreneur decades ago, so it is hard to argue with that logic. So, I must resign myself anew to the loss of the best housekeeper ever.

As we drove back into San Miguel we passed pickup trucks, their beds filled with machine-gun carrying soldiers, heading the opposite direction, to where we just were. I raised my children on an island in the Atlantic only reached by boat and knew exactly what that means. Anytime the National Guard showed up that meant a mandatory evacuation is about to happen. And it did.

By the time I got home, Carolina called to say more water was expected from upstream in the next four hours and her home, a 15 minute walk from a normally dry creek bed that feeds into the Laja, was to be left immediately. As always, my home is open to her and her family. The irony wasn’t lost on her or me, because right behind my house is the creek by the Fabrica Aurora. This creek itself normally floods, but with the new hotel, plans were already in place to divert the water to two villages on the road to Queretaro, minimizing the flooding here. The Laja River on the other side of town didn’t receive the same protective measures.

All this occurred on the feast day of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Helpful she was, all day to me, my clients, Carolina and some livestock. If you’ve a friend called Socco, she’s named for this image of Mary believed to have been painted on Mary’s kitchen table by St. Luke when he wasn’t tied up writing the bible.

Finally, the rains paused. Carolina went back to her restaurant, her daughter to planning out her party, the pigs to mud and me to in-town, dry (in a tactile sense only) history tours.

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Joseph Toone is Amazon's bestselling author of the San Miguel de Allende Secrets series of books and TripAdvisor's best rated historical walking tour guide. For more information contact toone.joseph@yahoo.com or visit History and Culture Walking Tours or JosephTooneTours.com, also on FaceBook.

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