William Mertz: Artist & Naturalist

We were new to Troncones. One night, a fist-sized tarantula walked across our veranda and stopped. I took a picture of it and sent it to Aura, who was with her daughter in the United States. She wrote, “OMG. What are you going to do?” I wrote, “Nothing. Leave it alone.” She, in turn, said she was going to check with William Mertz, a name I couldn’t quite place, but someone who she said knew everything about wildlife here.

A little while later she wrote back, “William says some fool built a house in the field where that tarantula hunts.” I liked that. He also said tarantulas are harmless to humans and not to worry. When we had a rattlesnake in the house while I was off surfing, Aura called William. He took care of it, came to the house and took it away. I liked that, too. As we started to put together articles for La Onda Troncones, Aura reached out to William to write about nature and local history. I liked what he sent us. He’s written seven pieces for us already.

I’d seen William around town. He’s linebacker-big, over six-feet-some tall, maybe 250 pounds, maybe more. White hair, thicker on his face than on his head. 60-some. Pierced ears, a hoop in each one. Lots of tattoos. The other thing I knew about him, besides his being no-nonsense and being savvy about local wildlife, was that he makes coloring books. Sensitive, solid, smart and creative. I found out he’s all that and that he’s done a lot of things I haven’t.

LOT: How did you come to be in Troncones?

William: In Troncones? Because my wife, Belem, got a job here. She was working in Ixtapa at Pacifica Hotel, which is the big hotel on the top of the mountain. It has a lighthouse-looking thing that’s super famous. She was the capítan de meseros [head waiter] there. Her father saw an advertisement for a job here in Troncones, as a restaurant manager, and he thought we would like it here, that we would do well in an environment with more Americans. We had been living in the United States and had just recently come back to Mexico. He knew Troncones had a lot of Americans. So, Belem came out here to interview for a job here with Christian Schirmer, who was the chef at Hotel Eden. That was 18, maybe, 19 years ago. She ended up managing Cocina del Sol, the café at Hotel Eden, and, later on, Café Sol.

LOT: Where were you coming from in the States?

William: The last place we lived in the States was Phoenix, Arizona. I’d been in Mexico before. I’d started off in La Paz, in Baja California Sur, where I went to help build a serpentarium, a zoo for reptiles. When that got finished, I was going to leave but I had some friends who had a place in Cabo, so I went to Cabo to stay for a few days. I was trying not to go back to the States. I wasn’t in a big hurry to leave, especially after I met my future wife. We’ve been together ever since. 25 years. I didn’t go back to the States until a little while later, until right after 9/11. And we only went to the States because there was a period after 9/11 where there was little to no tourism in Mexico, for maybe two years. We stayed in the States for six years, something like that, then we came back to Mexico as soon as we had work here again.

LOT: What were you doing in Phoenix?

William: The last job I had in Phoenix was as an accident investigator and road supervisor for a cab company, the largest cab company in Phoenix. It was my job to keep track of the drivers and their “camera events”. We had cameras in the cars, watching what was going on. I had to go out to investigate any accidents they were involved in, take measurements, write reports. I did that kind of stuff, accident investigation, disciplinary actions against the drivers and so on. I’ve had a million jobs.

LOT: What were some of your favorites?

William: Favorites? I worked for a reptile wholesaler. [That’s in the article William did on tarantulas for La Onda Troncones.] The last place I worked before the serpentarium in Baja was at a mouse farm; we raised mice. I worked for an adult toy store for a while. I did a lot of work in pet shops, managed and ran pet stores, for a long time. That’s kind of my specialty. I have a degree in visual communications, which is graphic design, but I never really worked in that until we came back to Mexico. It’s only lately that I’ve put that into motion as part of what I do for a living. I got the degree and then I didn’t do anything with it for a long time.

LOT: What sort of interests did you develop along the way?

William: Reptiles were my first main interest, but I’ve always been a sort of naturalist. I’ve always enjoyed being outdoors, hiking, that type of stuff. Now I’m a birder; birds are my thing, although I still find reptiles very interesting. Really, I like any kind of animals, insects, any type of arthropods, like spiders, scorpions, anything outdoors, like geology, crystals. Not like in holistic crystals, but rather the crystals made in the formation of caves. Anything to do with the natural world. Ecology.

LOT: Why reptiles?

William: That got started when I was five years old. I caught a snake in the yard, a little tiny snake, and I brought it to my mom. Instead of her freaking out like most moms do, she helped me build a terrarium for it and keep it. Instead of her teaching me to be afraid of snakes, she taught me to like snakes. She was afraid of spiders, but she wasn’t afraid of snakes.

LOT: What did you find yourself doing in Mexico?

William: First was the serpentarium, building and designing that. Then I worked in timeshare, a lot of Americans do that when they come here to work. I worked as what’s called an “OPC”, or an “opening personal contact”, for Westin Regina Hotels. We had a different way of doing things. The regular timeshare people, the people you see on the streets who try to hustle you in and make all these promises about things—you know, you see them—holding up signs that read “Tourist Information”. Those are all timeshare people. Their basic goal is to get you to the hotel, and then they trap you there until you buy a timeshare.

The way we did things at Westin Regina Hotels was that we had retail stores. The store we had in Ixtapa, where I started, sold art from indigenous tribes. That came mostly from the Wixárika tribe, from Durango, Jalisco, Colima, from up in the mountains. They’re a tribe that makes beaded art, yarn paintings and a few other things. They’re also called the Huichol, and they’re pretty famous because their culture revolves around peyote. There’s a pilgrimage every year where they walk down from the mountains to Durango to collect peyote in the desert. Then they bring it back and use it in ceremonies throughout the year.

The Huichol are one of the more isolated tribes in Mexico. They don’t allow people to come to their villages or see their ceremonies, but the Huichol developed these art forms in order to bring income into their communities. There are stories about people who were killed when they tried to go in without being invited first. Anyway, Westin Regina had contacts with some of the people doing the art, and they would bring the artists down from the mountains to do live demonstrations in the store. Some of the artists would live for a while wherever a store was. I started off in Ixtapa and I did well there. They moved us to Cancun and I did really well in Cancun. I was running two stores in Cancun. I had a sales staff and then 9/11 happened. Overnight, we went from booming tourism to you could have laid down in the middle of the street, gone to sleep and not been run over by a car.

We stayed in Cancun as long as we could. Westin Regina said there was more tourism in Puerto Vallarta so they moved us there. There was nobody in Puerto Vallarta either. We stayed there as long as we could. That was about six months. Belem’s family is from Zihuatanejo, so we packed up and set off for Zihuatanejo. We didn’t have money right then, so we hitchhiked out of Puerto Vallarta, heading for Zihuatanejo. We got part of the way here, and some lady picked us up on the side of the road, bought us food and gave us bus tickets so we didn’t have to hitchhike all the way home. When we got back here, we stayed for a while, but I couldn’t find work, so I went to the States, to Phoenix. Belem joined me later.

LOT: When you came back to Mexico, and Belem was working, what did you do?

William: At first, when she was in Ixtapa, I didn’t do anything because I didn’t want to get back into the timeshare business again. But when she came to Troncones, I started working for Alejandro at Costa Nativa, doing kayak tours, hiking tours. He only had three tours he did back then, so I started doing tours on my own, to places he didn’t go. Belem has family in the mountains, Mesa de Bravos, where there are some waterfalls. I also knew about the archaeology at La Soledad de Maciel, where there are ruins that date back 2800 years. I would take people to those two places on my Costa Nativa off-days. They’re both about an hour-and-a-half away, so they were easy day-trips. Eventually, actually, very quickly, I got popular enough to where I didn’t work with Alejandro anymore, and I was just doing my own tours. I would take people birding, too.

I ended up being my own tour company, Blue Morpho Eco Tours, named after the blue butterflies that live in the mountains. Blue Morpho became the most popular thing to do in Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo and Troncones on TripAdvisor. I was working as many days a week as I wanted, 6 or 7 days a week, taking people out on these tours. It was really nice. It was really fun. It was really interesting. But then a few people in the transportation industry decided that I was taking business from them. They claimed I was taking people to the airport and things like that, which I was not. They tried to have me shut down and went to Sectur, which is the division of tourism in this area, and told them about me and tried to get me shut down. When Sectur came and took me to their offices, I figured I was going to be in a lot of trouble, but instead they said, “Hey, look, you’re number one on TripAdvisor for this region and nobody else is doing eco-tours in this area. We’re going to create a special division just for you, and you’re going to be allowed to continue doing your eco-tours. But you’ll have to follow a process, a structure, to get an actual official badge.” I didn’t know you had to have an actual tourism badge here, and because I was an American, I had to have one.

Sectur was going to create these classes here for me so that I could be legal, but in the meantime, I could do the tours with my paperwork “in process”, which once that happens in Mexico, that can kind of go on forever, as long as you’re “in process”. Sectur did try to get the classes together and we did classes, but we couldn’t get enough teachers and we couldn’t get the classes finished. I never did get my badge. Meanwhile, things got worse and worse and worse until finally they would blockade me and not allow me to pick up my clients. That caused me lots of problems. It made my clients afraid to go out with me. You have to have a special license plate to legally transport people on federal highways. It was impossible for me to get one and, in the end, that’s what ended my business.

LOT: What were the implications of that?

William: I wasn’t able to give tours any more. Later, we found out, the community in the mountains, Mesas de Bravos, who were my wife’s cousins, took quite a hit. It was a community of about 20 homes, and we’d lifted them up by bringing people there every few days, by collecting donations for the kids who lived there, school supplies, clothing and shoes. The community was also making handicrafts to sell to the people we brought there. They made meals for us and we would pay them for the meals. We built hiking trails and all that kind of stuff. We’d become a support for the community, basically. When I got shut down, it was really bad for the community because nobody else was going there. It had a bad reputation and no one would go there because of that. But because it’s my friends and family, I could go there whenever I wanted. After we got shut down, the community went and made an agreement with the federal police to allow me to keep doing business, but by then it was too late. Months had gone by. I’d sold my Suburban. I couldn’t deal with the problems and threats.

I’d get people on my tours who’d been coming to Zihua and Ixtapa for many years, who’d never been outside of the coastal area. They’d tell me they had no idea how real Mexicans lived. It was an amazing experience for them, the best food they’d ever eaten, swimming in crystal-clear mountain rivers. To this day, people stop me when I’m out and say, “You don’t remember me, but 15 years ago you took me on a tour and it was the best time my family ever had.” That’s cool.

LOT: What have you done since then?

William: After that, I went into graphic design, doing websites and photography for people who were marketing condominiums and for people who wanted to promote their houses, here, and in Zihua and Ixtapa. And I got more into birding, getting a better camera and really getting to know my birds. That’s pretty much what I’ve stayed with, and now it’s evolving into merchandising my art. I set up on Thursdays at the market at Tres Mujeres and sell prints of my photography. I also paint watercolors, primarily of birds, and I have my paintings there, too. Last year, I did bookmarks, too. This year, I’m expanding. I’m doing even more bookmarks along with things, keepsakes, that have a Troncones focus. Nobody’s doing stuff like that. I’ve designed decals that read "Troncones" on them, the designs coming from photographs I’ve taken. [William’s art can be found on display at Los Raqueros, where his wife works. It’s for sale there, too.]

LOT: And your coloring books?

William: The coloring books. They first featured primarily Mexican birds. Those are something new. I have an AI assistant, which many people do these days, and I worked with her to help design the coloring books. We came up with these beautiful Birds of Mexico coloring books.

I don’t want to say they’re adult coloring books, but they’re a little complicated in that I put in color plates of the birds so you can see what the real bird looks like. You can color the bird the way the real bird looks, or you can color it however you want to. I also did a kids’ coloring book which has scenes from Troncones, like baby sea turtles, whales and pangas [fishing boats] on the beach, you know, little scenes that you see every day, chairs at sunset, with simple lines, simple colors and less expensive. That one sells for like $10. The other one sells for like $20.

LOT: What is it about birds, and the birds here, that attracted you so much?

William: Birds are amazing things. Something people don’t understand about birds is that birds are dinosaurs. It’s not, like, birds are descendants of dinosaurs, or birds are like dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs. Period. The end. That’s what happened to dinosaurs. They got really, really small and they grew feathers. That’s fascinating. So are the evolutionary factors, how they’ve evolved in so many different ways. I’ve seen some of the smallest birds in the world, like bumblebee hummingbirds, and some of the largest, like Andean condors that have a nine-foot wingspan. Those are in Peru, but the bumblebee hummingbirds are from here. You see can see them in the mountains. You don’t see them in the lowlands.

In birds, you go from this one extreme to the other extreme. Look at the ostrich. Can you get any more dinosaur than an ostrich or a rhea or an emu? It’s a two-legged dinosaur. It doesn’t fly; it runs. And the way birds gather food, their colors, their mating habits, how they’ve evolved to occupy every niche and ecosystem; they’re just fascinating to me. Photography-wise, to photograph birds is really difficult. Birds don’t sit still very much. It’s very difficult to capture their colors. It’s very difficult to capture them looking natural. It’s a challenge. I’ve always painted, always drawn. I found myself with 5000 photos of birds. I started painting them.

LOT: I could ask you lots of bird questions, but I think all your answers will go right over my head.

William: Go ahead, ask a few.

LOT: Could I possibly be seeing parrots?

William: Yes. There are four species of parrots that you’ll see fairly regularly in Troncones. Three that you see super-regular. One of the things I like about Troncones is the fact that I can be standing in downtown Troncones, and a flock of parrots will fly over my head. Wild parrots. One parrot species we don’t have here are macaws. They’ve been totally wiped out in this area. Even up in the mountains, it’s pure luck to find one. I’ve been at it for years and I’ve only seen macaws once or twice. It's just not something you see anymore. People have captured them and sold them off, even if it’s illegal to cage a wild parrot.

LOT: What is the most common rare bird that you see here?

William: That would be the hummingbirds. We have quite a few hummingbirds here. Some less-common ones, like the one called a Mexican Hermit. It’s a fairly large hummingbird, as big as a sparrow, almost. It has a long tail that tipped in white and it has a long, curved bill. It’s different-looking than the way you think of a hummingbird. There’s also a bird called a motmot. A russet-crowned motmot. It’s a bird the size of an American robin. It has a long tail and it pulls the feathers out of its tail, forming like a racket on the end of its tail. Then it ticks its tail back and forth, like a clock, like a pendulum, as part of its display. It’s really beautiful, kind of green and its got some blues and some cream colors. There are cardinals here. Tourists love the cardinals. They like finding the same birds they have at home, even if they’re a little different, a tropical sub-species, like our cardinals.

LOT: The eagles here are smaller.

William: We don’t have eagles here. Most of the raptors you’re going to see here are hawks and a bird called a caracara, a falcon, a type of raptor, with a white head. The national bird of Mexico is the golden eagle which is only found in mountainous and desert regions. If you go into southern Mexico, there you’ll get into some tropical eagles, rare birds nobody knows, unless they’re birders.

LOT: What do you see coming next for the area?

William: In the 18, 19 years I’ve been here, the thing I see is that everybody wants it to stay the same as when they first got here. If last year was your first year in Troncones, and you fell in love with it, you’ll wish Troncones never changes from the way it was last year.

For me, it’s like night and day from when I got here. There were no paved roads. I think there were 107 houses, period. With less than half a dozen restaurants during the rainy season. The road was impassable many times. We sometimes had to drive from downtown Troncones and go all the way out and around, through Lagunillas, to get to here to Manzanillo Bay because there were quicksand beds in the middle of the road that would bury your car. Sometimes between here and Majahua there would be huge mud-beds you couldn’t get through. You’d have to park and walk. A fast Internet back then was four megabytes. Now, I’m sitting here with 350 megabytes, some days as much as 500 megabytes. I can download something in 30 seconds that used to take me a day and a half.

I see the growth here in Troncones as being more organized than it is in other places in Mexico. The original people, they kind of did it right. They set up the lots, they set up the roads, they set up a good grid system. The original homeowners’ association got the water system in here. They fought hard for electrical service. They did a lot to get things happening here. So, at least we’re growing in a way that is organized. Is it sustainable? No, it’s not sustainable. Absolutely not. Why? Because Troncones doesn’t have water. And why don’t we have water? It’s pure geography. We have mountains all the way down to the ocean. And what does that mean? It means that all the water that falls on the mountain goes directly into the ocean. There’s no aquifer here, there are no rivers here. There’s no place for water to be here.

All we have is this limestone karst system that captures water in caves underground. And nobody knows exactly where the caves are. We look, we find water, we dig wells, we pump the water out of caves and there’s no more water until it rains again. And the caves are not all interconnected, so we’ve had to dig more wells. The first well here was on flat land less than 500 meters from the ocean. When they pumped the water level down low enough, they got salt water incursion. That well was dead. If we were like Saladita, where the mountains are 25 or 30 kilometers distant, then we’d have an aquifer. All the water that falls in those mountains goes into the ground and then slowly makes its way to the ocean. That allows people in Saladita to put in wells and draw up fresh water. We don’t have that option here. That’s our biggest problem.

What’s helped here along Manzanillo Bay is we’ve been split off from Troncones’ main water system, and we’re now on river water that’s coming through La Boca de Lagunillas. It was a hassle, a difficult transition, but it works. Five large hotels on Manzanillo Bay are now on the Lagunillas water system instead of drawing water from the Troncones system. That helps the community massively. In addition, it’s better for us. We’re getting river water instead of limestone-rich water that constantly clogs up all of your pipes, your showerheads, your faucets. Our maintenance costs have gone down dramatically as far as water-related problems go. It’s good all the way around. The river that comes into La Boca de Lagunillas comes from very high up in the mountains. The chances of it running out of water are fairly small.

Still, even with that water problem, I think overall growth is inevitable. The people who say they don’t want to see Troncones grow are the people who own houses here. And you know what they do with their houses? They rent their houses out. And you know what happens when they rent their houses out? People come here and love it. Then, what do they do? They buy land and want to build a house. It just kind of keeps continuing like that. Troncones is the worst kept secret on the planet, you know.

LOT: How did you start with your tattoos?

William: Those started a long, long, long time ago, about when I turned 22. I had friends who were learning tattoos and they wanted somebody to practice on. That’s where it started. I had specific things I wanted done and they did a few on me.

LOT: What kind of tattoos were your first ones?

William: Poison dart frogs, which I used to actually breed and raise. Rattlesnakes, which are my specialty in terms of reptiles. I got one of a gecko, a phantasmal gecko from Madagascar. Little things like that. I didn’t get any tattoos again for a long, long time, mostly because in the United States, tattoos are kind of expensive, and I didn’t have money to get more tattoos. Then I found a tattoo artist here in Troncones—Pelón—who’s really, really good and really affordable. Now I have lots of tattoos.

LOT: Can you show me or describe a few?

William: I’ve got a lot of things on my arms right now. From places I’ve been. This arm is primarily Aztec stuff, because I’ve spent 25 years in Mexico. I’m 61 years old, which means that I’ve spent far more of my adult life in Mexico than in the United States. Mentally, I’m a mix of the cultures, but I identify more with Mexico than I do the United States. I went to the United States for the first time a couple of years ago, to North Carolina, for four days. I hadn’t been there in 16 years and I was lost, in just four days. Everything was bizarre to me.  

LOT: What’s on your knuckles?

William: These symbols mean, “I am greater than my highs and lows”. It’s a mental health reminder. I’ve always suffered from depression. I was diagnosed with Type 2 bipolar disorder, so my tattoos are a visible reminder that the condition will not control my life. The semicolon is a very personal kind of thing. I’m somebody who’s had a choice of either continuing something or not continuing something. Like when there’s a semicolon in a sentence, the second part of the sentence is equally as important as the first part of the sentence. The semicolon divides that idea, one from the other.

LOT: What are these Aztec-looking ones?

William: This is a rabbit moon from Aztec mythology, which represents selfless devotion. The rabbit gave himself up as food for one of the gods, and the god put an image of the rabbit into the moon. If you look at the moon, you can see its shadows take the shape of a rabbit. This one here is Huītzilōpōchtli, the god of war. He’s also the god of art. This one is Xolotl. He was going to be killed by the other gods, and he started changing forms to escape. One of the things he became was a xoloitzcuintle, the hairless dog. And part of the time he became an axolotl, a type of salamander. I like his axolotl form because axolotls can maintain their larval form and reproduce. They never have to become adults, never have to grow up. I kind of relate to that.

LOT: A lot of people have tattoos in Mexico. Why is that?

William: It didn’t used to be that way. When I came to Mexico for the first time 25 years ago, tattoos were not a common thing at all. I was shunned for having a lot of tattoos back then. I also had a lot of piercings, like, nine earrings in one ear, five in the other; my tongue was pierced, my lip was pierced, my nose was pierced. People thought I was a narcotraficante [drug dealer] or a drug addict or something. Nowadays everybody has tattoos. What changed? I think it’s changed because of television and pop culture. Tattoos are everywhere there. Because I’m an artist, and this may be true for a lot of people, I consider my body a canvas. I want to express my art, and a lot of my tattoos are either my designs specifically, or I explained to somebody else what I wanted and exactly how I wanted it done. It’s like transferring art and ideas onto a different canvas.

LOT: What’s your next tattoo?

William: I have one major one left to go. That’s going to be Quetzalcoatl, one of the main gods of the Aztecs, in his serpent form. That's going to wrap all through here and tie all of this together. That’s probably going to be my last major tattoo. I was going to get another tattoo on the back of this hand, a tattoo of a hummingbird, a super, super rare hummingbird from the mountains here. But when I got this tattoo on this hand, it hurt so bad, I literally was in shock, in medical shock, because of the pain. I said I was never going to get another hand tattoo. My tattoo artist said that you forget that after a while, you forget how much it really hurt and you’ll get another one done.

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LINKS

For William’s art and more: https://www.williammertz.photography/

For Troncones-Let’s Chat: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2712289695489550

When William shut it down, it had 7,000 followers. He re-opened it, with stricter guidelines, and the group now has 15,000 followers.

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