Media Agua to San Juan, day 9: Week 2

Monday, 19 March; 50 km

San Juan:

I like the sidewalk and street sweepers of a town. Their work seems so gratifying, so honest. They take such care, pushing their brooms and squeegees outside their storefront or along a road, sweeping it clean of cigarettes and lottery tickets, broken glass and scraps of paper, the discarded things of a hurried and careless people.

The street sweepers are up early with their long-handled brooms and their water hoses and buckets, washing away whatever has collected there from the night before. What is that law of the universe about entropy -- about how all things tend toward chaos? Something like that. The streetsweepers understand this law, I think. I like that they are out there anyway, keeping chaos at bay. Keeping things tidy is a small, but sweet pleasure.

I started to notice them in San Juan, I suppose because the sidewalks were always freshly swept and because the town is a pedestrian town. There are sidewalks and ramblas and avenidas, a beautiful plaza filled with sun and flowers.

We rested for the night in San Juan. The streets were quiet all afternoon for siesta, but at 9 pm, when we went out to dinner, the town had come alive. Sometimes the noise and motion of a town are comforting; these things made me feel like we were part of real life.

We were still in the desert, and it was still stultifyingly hot in San Juan, but it was nice to be back in a world of taxi drivers and coffee shop owners, florists and bakers and streetsweepers.

-- Mad Dawg copyright 2007