When I was 13, my parents took me out of school for a year to traverse North America in a travel trailer. My father had had a health scare, so to reduce the stress level they sold their house and ditched their middle class lives. I’ve always referred to them as late-blooming Bohemians.

They didn’t even attempt to home school me. I was a Road Scholar. It was a delightful and formative experience, with a fascinating rhythm. Every evening we’d spread the map out on the trailer’s dining table, and my father would point to where we were. Then we discussed whether there was more to do where we were, and should we stay another day, or whether we’d squeezed the juice out of that particular fruit and it was time to move on. And if it was time to move on, what direction should we head and where should we go?

Even at 13, I was painfully aware of both the peculiarity of this arrangement and the grace of being forced to live in the moment. It was only after Dorothy and I had planned our current adventure and worked through how we wanted to proceed and what our protocol should be that I realized that we’d replicated the pattern my parents had created over 50 years ago.

Decades later, my mother told me that the whole trip had been a hidden treasure hunt, unbeknownst to me. I don’t know why, but they were deathly afraid that at 13 years old, the scourge of drugs would take me. So every city we went to, one of them would step out for a bit (I never noticed the pattern) to talk to the school principal or sheriff to learn whether they’d stumbled on the drug-free paradise they sought.

Apparently, they kept getting the same answer: you’re safest in a big city, because once drugs hit a small town they’re everywhere, all at once. Whereas in a big city, it might skip your school or area. So we just kept going until they ran out of money in San Diego. They parked the trailer, got jobs, and put me back in school.

Where I promptly started smoking pot. So… well played.

All of which is by way of explanation, the long way round, as to how I came to Mexico, and Xochimilco, when I was 13 years old.

I actually remember quite a bit from the Mexico portion of that journey. I remember wading through the shallow beach at night in Guadalajara, trailing bioluminescent plankton in my path. I remember wandering the narrow, twisted streets of Taxco and buying a solid silver peanut-shaped pill container. I remember snorkeling in Acapulco and getting a sea urchin spine embedded in my finger. And I remember Xochimilco.

My most vivid memories are of the flowers. Flowers everywhere, on the banks, over the canals, floating in the air like clouds. As if every frightening statue in It’s A Small World had been replaced with flowers. In my 13 year old brain, I’d visited the Hanging Gardens of Xochimilco.

In fact, Xochimilco is known as floating gardens, not hanging gardens, and they have a fascinating history. Which I’m fairly certain I either didn’t know or didn’t hear, back in the day. Too dazzled visually to take in words.

Xochimilco was originally a lake, until about 1,000 years ago, when the locals started filling rafts made of juniper branches with mud and soil to create chinampas, floating agricultural plots. When one would sink they’d build another on top, until they became a part of the landscape, and the lake eventually became a canal system. That canal system then moved the produce from the chinampas to Mexico City for consumption.

I think back in 1970 Xochimilco was still primarily agricultural in nature, with both produce and flowers being farmed. Nowadays, there are still some nurseries, and there still appear to be truck farms, but agriculture at export scale seems to be a memory. What there is instead is an epidemic of illegal settlements within a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an ecological reserve.

The same gaily colored barges (trajineras) ply the shallow canals as when I was here over 50 years ago. The tours offer two options: one side of the canal system is the party side, with trajineras full of mariachis who will perform for a fee, floating restaurants that will pull up alongside and provide fresh cooked lunch, and floating souvenir stands.

Option two is the ecological side, quieter and more serene. You can still get lunch, but that involves pulling up to a chinampa-based restaurant, rather than staying afloat. We chose this option, and enjoyed two hours of being punted through the canals, observing both the bird life and the local life.

At least I think everyone else enjoyed it. I couldn’t see it without looking through a scrim of my memories. I’m sure those memories are inflated and not entirely accurate. It’s been too long and I knew too little then to really understand what I was seeing. But even factoring those memories at 25% true, the gap between then and now was heartbreaking.

What I could see with my eyes was the inevitable result of the illegal settlements: trash piled everywhere and water so polluted you could sense it. Hardly the floral utopia I’d remembered. What I learned afterwards reinforced that assessment. The water is saturated with human waste and heavy metals. The chinampas are eroding. And the axolotls are dying.

Side note: Dorothy and I kept axolotls as pets at one point, so it’s hard to be neutral about their habitat being despoiled.

Apparently, even those of us who weren’t burdened with my memories were well aware of how polluted and dirty it was. They were disappointed, knowing what it had been historically. I, on the other hand, was sad, knowing what it had once looked like.