excerpt from an unpublished essay: "Lonely in Kino" or "The Long Stretch of Day" - MUSEO

Here in New Kino - where the wealthy from Hermosillo and the retired gringos build homes on both sides of the narrow road, houses surrounded with concrete walls topped with broken glass, houses dug into the beach, still and hollow, crested with satellite dishes winking at the sea - an old man with saggy eyes leans on an abandoned fence post, picking his teeth.  I stop to read a little wooden sign hanging on a wooden door.  MUSEO.  The man slowly crosses the empty street and asks me for five pesos.  He slips the coins into his trouser pocket, pushes the door open and returns to picking his teeth, leaning his head inside and raising his eyebrows as if he has never seen the place before. 

The museum smells like pesticide and the fungus that grows beneath the photographs of those Indians who used to live here, photographs of people wearing hats, standing on the beach, smoking in the wind, photographs of people who wove baskets as big as caves and painted lines on their faces from one earlobe to the other, over their wide cheeks and flats of their noses because that is all they saw - horizon and the long line of the ocean beach, parallel waves and the long stretch of their days.