We announced recently that we’re looking for a new blogger to replace Antonia Malchik and that those who applied would get a spot to do a guest post. Next up is Sarah Menkedick, a freelance writer and editor currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico. She is a contributing editor at the Matador Network and a contributing writer at Change.org. Check out her blog of creative nonfiction inspired by travel at Posatigres.com.

The first thing I noticed when we came crunching to a stop in Mazunte, Mexico were the dogs. Packs of street dogs roving casually, lazy beach dogs idling on the sandy walkways leading to bungalows.

I had visions of exposed fangs and shouts and blood. My dog Stella had been attacked a few months prior by a viscous Shepherd-Husky mix. Since then, I had been paranoid around dogs and Stella had been downright panicked. I obsessively devoured dog training manuals and websites about how to recover from an attack in an aim to cure us both. None worked.

I wanted to give up on Mazunte then and there, hop back in the bed of my friend’s truck and trek it six hours through the mountains back to Oaxaca.

My friends, however, were having none of it. They marched right up to a house at the end of a path and asked about rooms while I waited with a pacing Stella below. Lurking on the house’s porch was a Rottweiler mix a huge, flat snout. He spread his bulk between the hammocks, with a view over the tiny street below and the vast beach in the distance.

“Perfect!” I heard my friend Eleutario say. “We’ll take it.” He came trotting back down the driveway and announced that the deal was sealed.

Confrontation and Control

“Eleutario,” I said, “I don’t think…I mean, the dog…” Eleutario sighed. He found the gringo obsession with training a dog, buying it plush little beds and obsessing about its mental state vaguely amusing. His dog, a pit bull named Pirata who’d suffered eleven gunshot wounds in his pueblo and emerged unfazed, had never had a day of training and was the calmest beast I’d met in Mexico. Eleutario was constantly admonishing me to give up the elaborate routines I worked on with Stella, the stays and the comes and the conditioning, and just let her off the leash already. I tirelessly resisted. The only thing that could help my dog, I insisted, was control.

Eleutario stood over me, waiting. Everyone else was lugging bags into the rooms. I had no choice but to sidle up to the house with Stella. The Rottweiler mix stood up and started strolling over. “Vamos!” I shouted, “Vamos!”

A woman, lithe with a buzz cut and a sarong, emerged from one of the small rooms upstairs.

“That’s Milo,” she said sleepily, an Italian lilt to her accent, “he won’t do anything to you.”

“But my dog was attacked,” I replied nervously, “she probably makes him anxious.”

“No, no,” she said with a slow wave of the hand, “he’s fine. Stop holding onto your dog so tightly. He won’t do anything.”

Eleutario looked back at me. “Sueltala,” he said. Let her loose. “Va, va,” he urged. I reached down, my heart beating in my throat, and let her off the lead. She charged Milo and barked at him full force. He sat down and panted as if to say, “Dang, woman, chill out.” Eleutario laughed. I stood frozen. The dogs circled one another, Stella occasionally barking and jumping and Milo chilling, sniffing. Finally, they reached some sort of equilibrium and smelled one another.

Letting Go

That was the first encounter of many in the next few days. Deep breath, release, repeat. I let Stella roam the beach. She met emaciated dogs with desperate eyes, perky well-fed dogs adopted by the Italian families that owned pizzerias on Mazunte’s dusty streets, visiting dogs who threw themselves at the waves. Again and again, Eleutario repeated “Sueltala.” Let her go. The books I’d read, the notes I’d made, the techniques I’d put into play dissolved in the hazy yellow-green air of Mazunte. We ate thin-crusted pizzas the Italians made and watched their cherubic children race in circles in the sand, played soccer with the tattered hippies, who camp in this scrappy town ignored by mainstream tourists in search of piña coladas and pools, drank micheladas on the beach (nearly empty in February) and began to sink into Mexican beach time (an octave below that of normal Mexican time in slowness). Most importantly, I let go of a little bit of control.

My Mexican friends understood why I’d be so eager to protect Stella, but didn’t get the extent to which I wanted to control the situation. For them, it was a matter of letting go of the past rather than obsessively organizing the present. For the locals, containing anything on a leash with 110% control and paranoia was simply anathema to their way of living and being. It was, I could see, a massive cultural difference that extended beyond dog training.

Being in Mazunte, a place where people come precisely to escape the go-go-go vice grip of everyday life elsewhere, further etched out this difference between control and letting go. Americans want control so badly, want to have a grip on everything so we can keep making tangible measured progress. But sometimes, it leads only to a narrow myopic unhealthiness, driving us in circles. Such was the case with Stella, who I’d tried and failed for so long to control, making us both neurotic in the process.

What she really needed, I discovered, was less obsessive control and more room.  And what I needed was a little time in Mazunte and my Mexican friends nudging me, saying, “Sueltala, Sarita.”  Let her go, let her go.

- Sarah Menkedick