Mexico retrospective 2006

3/30/06, 4/24/06

This is a retrospective look at our recent trip to Mexico. I had wanted to write it out as things unfolded but it didn’t work that way, so some things will be fresher than others. Spontaneous writing about life’s events and perceptions has a certain snap to it that a retrospective just doesn’t capture. Yet I still have the impulse to write and record.

We went to Mexico on about February 1^st and spent two weeks in the Sierra Madre mountains at La Mesa de Abajo. This village is about 5 hours drive east of Hermosillo, Sonora and is located near the border of Sonora and Chihuahua, way out at the end of serious dirt roads. After La Mesa we went to Copper Canyon, Chihuahua, to Creel, to Batopilas, to La Cascada Basaseachi and these travels were new to both Kim and I. Then we headed back to Hermosillo and rented and apartment for two weeks, during which time we also visited Kino Bay and the Sea of Cortez. We left Hermosillo and explored new territory for us both again on the way to Puerto Penasco, or Rocky Point.  Becoming quickly disillusioned by Rocky Point, we then went and camped in the Pinacate volcanic area for ten days, exploring much to see there, with side trips to resupply in Sonoyta. And then, after one and a half months in Mexico, we returned to the US at the Lukeville crossing and drove back to Tucson via Organ Pipe National Monument and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. That is the skeleton of it and the following are just a series of observations and feelings made along the way.

Here in Mexico people are highly enmeshed with family, extended family, immediate family and the big question for strangers is all about their families. Are you married? Do you have kids? Where are your parents? Do you have brothers and sisters? Kim and I present an enigma to the people at La Mesa de Abajo, the small village in the Sierra I have gone to for years. We say things that really blow them away. “This is our third honeymoon’ (luna de miel), yet we are not married. We say we will marry when I am sixty years old, and we’ll have no kids, but then we’ll have a dog. Boy do they laugh at that with amazement at how ridiculous it seems in comparison to how they see the world. In a world that is all about family I am like the ultimate stranger, with a divorced woman, never married, living in sin, no kids, no family! Kim is closer to the family thing, coming from a large family and having her own family, so she can touch home base better than I. I have grown up in another universe where the trajectory is as an individual and that is so ultimately foreign to these guys it just stuns them, yet they like me, and they also want to go to the US and make a life there, for the economic benefits. I explain to Eberrardo and Alba that the grass just seems greener on the other side of the fence. Here in La Mesa they have a genuine life and that life in a cash economy, in the USA, is like a rat in a cage, spinning around on its wheel getting nowhere. In my opinion, the grail of the ethereal success is like chasing the wind. In a nation where material success is sanctified, its pursuit has become hollow and rote; there is no heart to it. Eberrardo tells me that the life in the Sierra is hard work and that he feels like a rat in his own cage, he wants the USA cage, as it seems easier.

What we run up against visiting La Mesa de Abajo is two worlds colliding, albeit amidst friendship and good humor. We see that we are all essentially human. At some level we see through the camouflage of time and technology, religion and culture. We see our commonality. The gringos live in the 21^st century, these guys are in a time warp of like the USA in 1850 or 1900. One big difference is between living entirely in a cash economy and an economy more closely tied to the land. The villagers produce their own food and goods to a substantial degree. They are, and have been, largely self-sufficient. In order to be able to do this they must remain closely tied to their homes and land, to the care of their cattle and crops, to the seasonal round of harvest, planting, making cheese etc. These guys are actual peasants as you find in the Middle Ages, with roofs of split wood, adobe walls, dug wells, fields plowed with mules and burros, kitchen gardens, cattle slaughtered in the back yard and every piece used and eaten. They know just how it all works and how to pull it all off. One thing us gringos notice right away is that this life is HARD. It is hard work and lots of it.  The idyllic, communitarian, utopian escape from the hollowness of the American cash economy would mean seriously hard work that us captains of softer ships might not really want to undertake on a long term basis.

So they look at me, traveling, unmarried yet with a woman and they must wonder, how could you have the freedom to do that?!?! How could I make enough money to just travel and have fun when life is so bloody hard?!?! How can people divorce, choose a new mate in mid-life if the life they know is such a hard grind that you need all your family and ducks in a row just to pull it all off? Do you just see a woman you like and like a cow go buy her away from the previous owner? They can’t just get a job and make money to pay for goods and services; they ARE the goods and services. It is a whole other reality. Maybe they make some cash by selling a calf, slaughtering a cow and selling some meat, selling extra sacks of beans if the harvest was good, or by growing some weed, and then a truck can be fixed, tin for a roof bought, a solar panel bought. I might seem cash rich to them but they have actual property, 50 cattle, a house, a ranch, a house in Ciudad Obregon.

Life at La Mesa de Abajo is on the cusp of one time into another, one age into another. As you look back you see the genuine past of small time ranchers and farmers. These are Thomas Jefferson’s freemen; they have liberty because they control their own means of production; they work not for others, are not beholden to wages, to the bourgeoisie, their destiny is in their hands. Then, pour all of that over the whole industrial revolution, the automobile, man on the moon, TV, internet, radio and the modern world, all within the last 30 years at La Mesa de Abajo and show me any significant number of young people who will choose the old ways over the new. They won’t. It is not human nature to choose the hardest way. And so, this way of life there at La Mesa de Abajo is dying, the young are moving to the cities and the old are getting tired, they are reaching the end of their working years and there are precious few kids who are taking the reins to keep it all going. This process is happening all over Mexico, the traditional, self-sufficient economy is giving way to a cash economy and people are moving to the cities to find a “better life”. The cash economy shoots all sorts of holes in the traditional economy and the end result is that people start to see the futility of producing their own shoes if they can just buy them; many things start to add up; small scale economies make products that cost too much in comparison with mass produced items (1); people buy the mass produced and the local producers can’t compete; they give up, move to the city and then you get the poverty and lack of community, lack of a family social net and things all fall apart on the way to becoming pure individuals generations down the road. Is it any wonder that rural Mexicans would want to go to the US to earn money when the rural life is pitifully hard and Mexican city wages are pitifully low, why not imagine a better life in the Shangri-La of the Land of Puro Dinero, the land of milk and honey, of high wages and ease and comfort; why would not that opportunity be offered to a decent human being desiring to have a better life?

It is really ironic that many in the US yearn for a more genuine life like the traditional Mesa de Abajo. They feel the hollowness of the cash economy, of the world as a collection of individuals and objects, the lack of being grounded in a place, grounded in a history, in a family and kin. They soak in the local, face to face life, of knowing the local merchants by name, of being connected on multiple and sincere levels. People may yearn for a more genuine life and time but they also have no training on how to suck it up and work hard like a dog to pull it all off, day after day after day.

The world as an individual, dealing with abstractions for abstraction’s sake, is precious and I wouldn’t trade it myself. Pandora’s Box has been opened and I wouldn’t want to be smothered by traditional culture. It is bad enough to be smothered by what I am smothered by, which is evidence that liberty and freedom is really some sort of illusion of green grass in other places; there is always something to hem a guy in. In a traditional culture I couldn’t then choose the things I have become accustomed to choosing; I would lose my center, no longer any sort of captain to choose my trajectory. I don’t want to always talk about cattle, guns, tools and trucks. I see there is way more to talk about and frankly, it gets boring and is severely limited in scope. My horizons are just bigger and that can’t be taken back; I can’t will myself to be a campesino (peasant) even though it is quite fun and novel to live with campesinos for months at a time. And it is not that these folks are fundamentally different as people; it is the work and the lifestyle that make it really different.

The old folks at La Mesa would never choose anything but La Mesa, they don’t want the US; they are content to be enmeshed and congruent with their own lives. I guess nobody wants to get out of his or her comfort zone. The irony is that the young men and women of La Mesa have just what alienated gringos want, yet they themselves don’t want it; they want what the gringos have, money, opportunity, ease of life, higher education and so, the old ways are dieing (sp?) out. Dora and Sigifredo agreed, “it’s too hard for the young people, they don’t want to work that hard” and I strongly suspect that any middle class gringo wouldn’t want to either.

At La Mesa the one Guarijio Indian man in town, Gregorio (who lives with his wife Justina), came down to Don Facundo’s house to ask for shotgun shells to kill some wild turkey (guajolote or guijolo) as we were sitting in Facundo’s kitchen passing some time with the two old spinster sisters and Facundo. It wasn’t long after that Gregorio got the shells and we were back at Maria’s kitchen that Luz, one of the old ladies, came over with a bowl full of freshly killed guijolo meat, which Maria promptly cooked up for us in the form of a soup. It was quite good, with that distinct turkey taste, yet very lean. We had a few servings, plus pieces of leg and thigh thrown in on the side.

Our Mesa friends keep animals for slaughter and also for milk and cheese. To them it is all no problem. To us, we see a pig stuck in a pen, that will never be able to move around it’s whole life, and it seems like this contract with domestic animals could be better performed. Our friend Gerrardo went to La Mesa Atravesada to buy a fat cow to slaughter and sell the meat to make machaca for his machaca business. Machaca is dried, milled or pounded meat. Everyone in town showed up to watch and help and some even got pretty dressed up, good clothes to go to a slaughter. They prepared the garage floor, swept, mopped, led the cow in, pulled it down, hog tied it, stood on the horns to keep the head down and just like that Tavo stuck it in the jugular vein with his pocket knife and the blood gushed out, Gerrardo catching it in a 5 gallon bucket and immediately Dora got some fresh blood and started stirring it for blood pudding and blood sausage. A dog lapped up blood that spilled on the ground. That was the only moment that seemed at all inhumane, as the cow was frightened by the close proximity of the dog. It took the cow around 10 minutes to die. Kim and I stood and watched as its eyes looked around, as the last flicker of life left its body. It was all calm enough, worthy of the pact between man and domestic beasts, to be cared for all along in exchange for your life.

The men and boys were extremely good at this, very professional. They skun it, butchered it and were done in less than 2 hours, then selling the meat off the scale as the head and hooves were propped up in the corner. Gerrardo throws the ears, connected by skin, up into a tree right nearby and this tree is completely festooned with cow ears, at least 25 pair up there, like Christmas.

The first cut off the ribs under the stomach is called la frezena and that got cooked immediately by Mama Locha, one of the matriarchs, and then it was served to all in bite size pieces with lime; it was good. We had beef for dinner, breakfast and also blood pudding tacos for a snack.

One day at La Mesa we went for a walk and someone found a dead burro on some rocks above the ravine where Sigifredo’s rancho is. This was big news, a real hot topic. What color was it? Was it really a burro? (They doubted if gringos could tell a burro from a deer or a mule or horse, showing lots of confidence in the ability of gringos!.) Where was it exactly? BIG NEWS IN TOWN!!!! DEAD BURRO FOUND BY SIGIFREDO”S RANCH!!!!!! It was determined that it was probably Manuel’s burro, but from my initial directions Eberrardo could not find it, so I drew a map. Everyone asked about it, for days.

Eating fat is a cultural and dietetic gulf between us cholesterol conscious gringos and ranchers who eat every last bit, as all meals for them do not just appear out of the refrigerator; one must eat what there is to eat. Many times we get served straight up fried fat, skin, fat or gristle and we choke it down to be polite and then we get served more! We end up putting the fat aside. They relish the fat. They eat the whole animal. They cook in the fat, buy pork lard to make tortillas and yet they live long. They are very active and perhaps the hard work and activity mitigates the effects of the fat, although there is a lot of high blood pressure that people are taking pills for and Gerrardo’s doctor told him to lay off the fat as he had high cholesterol. The people themselves are not fat but apparently the effects of fat are being seen.

Fat is nature’s savings bank, but if you become filthy rich then it starts to work against you; an unnatural level of accumulation is just out of balance and the savings will swing back on you. What is good becomes what is bad. Is that the success of the gringos, to control all resources for ultimate ease and comfort to the detriment of the body health of the earth?  Has the USA as a country just not learned yet to trim off the fat?

We entertain ourselves with books, reading and studying, which is entirely foreign to the campesinos. In order to like, respect and be with these people there is no reason for us to give up our ways or they theirs. There is nothing wrong with being white and educated. We don’t have to pretend we are poor; we don’t have to adopt complete poverty to show solidarity with people who after all, are people just like us. There is just different camouflage. Out there in the Sierra, under the sun, a man’s nature becomes clear. Our humanity is revealed. It is the props that are different. Out there in the Sierra we seem to have found a common humanity.

We went to Batopilas, Chihuahua, on the suggestion of Ryan, one of the Earlham crew we met at La Mesa de Abajo. The ride took us over and through the Sierra Madre Occidental, from Hermosillo to almost Cuautemoc, Chihuahua, where we turned south towards Creel, spent the night in a motel and then the next day drove down into Copper Canyon, and then over into Batopilas Canyon. The whole area is called La Zona de Barrancas, or the Canyon Area. It is where the Tarahumara (Raramuri) Indians live and where places are very remote and also very beautiful and spectacular. A train goes from Los Mochis, Sinaloa to Chihuahua City, right through Copper Canyon and lots of tourists stop in Creel and then bus down to Batopilas and other places inside Las Barrancas, Uriques Canyon, old mines, crystal caves, Indian villages etc. It is remarkable for that it is all so remote and also that time seems to have stopped out there. Life is going on at a much slower and older pace.

Once in Batopilas we got situated in Juanita’s Hotel, on a corner off of the main plaza, and where our room overlooked the Batopilas River and there, out in front of us was a scene of much interest, people washing clothes in the river, hauling drinking water from the river, bathing in the river, burros, goats, dogs, cattle and horses all walking down in the river, trucks driving up and down the river, shacks of stone and cardboard on the hill on the other side of the river, Indians all over in traditional garb; it was a huge, living menagerie of the past and present all converging on the NOW, we being definitely not in Kansas anymore.

As we arrived in town after hours and hours of steep descent on very curvy dirt roads, we encountered crazy drivers of the highest degree, speeding down one lane, narrow streets; you had to navigate this meandering labyrinth of teeming village life, one way streets and then find a place to stay, weary from the stress of the long ride down, where one could be struck head-on by big trucks rounding blind corners at high speed, and the only way to tell they were coming was to look for the dust clouds approaching, and then, out in this seeming middle of nowhere, there is a town, full of charm and character. Upon first arrival however, it is a bit overwhelming, with no family or friends to connect to.

The village architecture is primarily old adobe, ornate, falling apart, dripping with interest of it’s peculiar history of mining, Spanish and expatriate gringos; you can see there is story there and the imagination wanders into every nook and crevasse of the crumbling adobe, wow; it is quite the little place. The plaza is surrounded by 100 year old huge Ceyba trees, homes and small businesses, kids are playing everywhere unsupervised and at night the atmosphere cranks up as people sit around the plaza, do “the paseo”, a tradition of coming out to walk around the plaza and spend time mingling with family, friends and acquaintances. We ate at a nice little restaurant on the plaza and night enveloped the town. We settled in to the arms of Batopilas.

As Kim and I strolled the plaza I started talking with some folks who where standing around and one turned out to be the president of the municipio, or county. He claimed that desert people are friendlier than up at higher elevations in the pine trees where it is colder. His thesis: cold climate/ cold people, warm climate/ warm people. This is an interesting structural analysis. This fellow would come out on the nurture side of the nature nurture debate. I would say that all Mexicans are friendly face to face, especially to gringos. Mexicans are less friendly to each other than they are to gringos. And then, aside from being Mexicans or anybody, the young, cool and tough are all the same, beyond contact. And, the same as many other people, when driving, many Mexicans are quite rude.

The ceyba trees are impressive, huge trees from the Yucatan. Every town plaza seems to have them, in different stages of growth. In Batopilas they are over 100 years old, they have witnessed Octavio Paz’s 100 Years of Solitude in this hidden hamlet at the end of the road. Other plants of note: bananas, papaya, guava, mango, cumquat, fig and rock fig (tescalama). The rock figs have huge root masses which snake out and cover rock outcroppings; they are really wild looking, impressive, a must inspect situation! As we descended into the lower reaches of Copper and Batopilas canyons, the plant communities changed from pine and oak at the rim into a mix of desert and tropical at the bottom, there were organ pipe cactus, echo cactus, tree morning glory and in town, flowering aloe plants. There were huge bats the size of pigeons. Take a picture of this: roosters crowed, cow and burro bells rung; there was the smell of smoke, cow shit was everywhere; the Batopilas River brought a sense of verdant tranquility, there were silver mines, La Bufa mine and it’s huge tailings pile reaching into the river; Indians sat in the shade with breech cloths, a wrap for a shirt and huaraches or sandals made from leather.

The road in was like finding the lost valley, one huge canyon after another, opening up, deeper down and deeper still, a stunning adventure to find oneself in, the kind of place that Outside Magazine and Backpacker Magazine like to ruin with articles about all one might discover on their own. La Barranca del Cobre is like Redfield Canyon and the Galiuros to the 8^th power. According to Juanita, the proprietor of our hotel, Juanita’s, there has been much less tourism since 9/11, but it is starting to pick back up, the fear of being abroad is being lessened by time.

We sat on the roof of our hotel and across the canyon, across the river is massive poverty on the hillside, while we drink coffee and chocolate in rocking chairs and discuss coming here for 3 months next winter. There is a thick texture of everyday life unfolding all around us, blanketing our sense as anonymous individuals; we are drawn in, enveloped by Batopilas. I imagine myself getting to know some folks over there on the hill; I know they would be friendly; I could meet families of Tarahumara, except that they seem to believe that white men with beards are devils. I can’t imagine why they would think that, when the Spanish conquistadores were well known as friendly and benign people.

The river in Batopilas does it all and is for all purposes. It is a road for trucks, a cattle trail, a horse trail, the watering tank for livestock, dogs relax in the shade and drink and swim, people relax in the shade and drink and swim, sewage is piped directly into the river, people haul drinking water in 5 gallon buckets on their heads way up the hill, women do laundry on the rocks, scrubbing their clothes on age old boulders waist deep in the flow, kids swim for hours jumping off of rocks, the water quality must be kind of marginal yet we saw fish. The water quality must suffer from mining pollution as well as there are big tailings piles right down to the water and the old time mining used mercury to separate the gold and silver from the ore, and the mercury does not degrade, and people still use mercury all over the Sierra for their small scale gold mining, and I have seen liter bottles of mercury, poured into a milled up slurry and then the waste water just runs off into the local drainage. The water looked nice and cool over there across the way, but I declined to want to swim in it. You can see why diarrhea and water born disease is the number one killer in Mexico.

I wonder about the notion of a culture of poverty, that poverty creates similar strategies from people across the whole world. It is another structural explanation. On one hand poverty does make people more innovative and forces them to make do with what they have and thus you see many Mexicans with great technological solutions made from wire or whatever, they need to fix and rig things somehow. And on the other hand, poverty can strip people of overall knowledge so that they lose certain strategies that have already been known and proven, but fall into disuse for lack of being passed on, education and resources.

On our trip and actually since finishing the Appalachian Trail, we feel as if we are continually running out of time. It is now 4 months since we left the trail; we have been off the trail as long as we were on. Commitments rope us in, we want to stay here, go there, be free to explore but we have to keep moving to make dates and arrangements. We have to keep moving to the next thing and there is no time to allow the moment to unfold as it will. This is the world of entanglements, entangled by relations with the world and the feeling of being smothered by pressures from others who demand our presence, our time, our attention, our work, our talk, a piece of us, and so, being free is revealed as a huge illusion. How can you ever be free unless you are the only person in the world? And then you would only be free of other people and not of other necessities like eating, shelter etc. You can’t be an island yet the AT gave us the illusion that we were the captains, and now here we are having the rudder steered for us by external circumstances, events and pressures and we notice; you feel it; you are blanketed by culture, society, family, plans, work, and your volition seems to disappear like smoke. It is an awful surrendering, to see that OK, I’m not really the captain here.

Kim and I realize that our wealth is in being able to choose, to buy time, not to accumulate money or things, although more things are constantly growing around us. We can buy time to choose to go here or there and we are freed up enough to actually sail, yet I still feel hemmed by events…… interesting. If our wealth is in choice to move, travel and experience, to find alternative life ways amidst a work-a-day world where anchors of jobs, mortgages, payments, bills, insurance etc, all those things stifle the spirit and turn one into an ant, working all for tomorrow and not anything for today; if our wealth is in choice, then that choice is still limited. Like the Tarahumara across the river and up on the hill, they can’t just go to Chicago, we can’t keep going without more money and we choose to be out here on a shoe string, beyond other folk’s danger level of finances and insurance, choosing to buy this time and mobility but limited by having to go back and accumulate more resources to do it again; we have to earn this; and luckily I have some fine folks and patrons who employ me and allow me to come and go, so it works; it’s a lifestyle! In spite of being just above extreme poverty by US standards, it is still enough money to go travel in Mexico and the US for 2 or 3 months.

Perhaps we find our freedom within the confines of our choices of how to live and when you know the waters of your choice, then you can navigate as captain. And even the captain cannot command the winds and the sea.

On our way to Copper Canyon we stopped at Cusarare, a small mission town founded by Jesuits in 1741. Inside the church the skull of a Jesuit is propped up on a shrine, looking at you out of hollow eyes. A Tarahumara man named Jose Maria Patricio Safeda let us into the church. I asked him how long his family had been here and he said “10,000 generations”.  The church was cool but it was difficult to tell if it had been hokied up for tourists or whether it was the real deal. How can I tell if the artifacts are genuine or not? I had the suspicion that much of the stuff was for show, still the effect was nice. If you travel a tourist trail, you must expect that history will be gussied up just for you. To me tourist stuff is ultimately disappointing because at the bottom of it all is the fleecing off you of your money. I don’t like to be seen as someone whose wallet may come open, as a rich gringo when in fact, I am far from it; yet Kim and I give plenty away; I suppose we’d rather give it than just buy corny necklaces and stuff.

Here and there are many bougainvillea bushes and trees; some are quite old with thick trunks. I can never forget when Kim first saw bougainvillea and then couldn’t remember the name, she called it a bogus-vine.

The dirt road to Batopilas is one hell of a long, winding, dramatic haul, very tiring. Every now and then a big truck will be roaring around a blind curve right at you in a huge cloud of dust. Many times you are in a head-on situation with no room on either side to move. You can tell someone is coming by looking for dust clouds above or below. It is amazing how far down you go, from pines to full-blown desert. It is Sonoran type desert, foothills of Sonora mixed with tropical flora. The drop in elevation over all is 6000’, similar as from Mt. Lemmon to Tucson. And then, on the paved road down from Creel, there are big buses coming around the corner in your lane; Indians are walking, walking, walking out of the mountains and canyons and onto the road, to make rendezvous’ for unknown Indian business. They are carrying babies in slings, a 14 year old mother with amazingly colorful clothes. They said they had a “junta” to go to, a meeting.

In some ways it is like the AT; you have to take everything as it comes, but here we are way beyond dealing with super cool 20 somethings with ultra-light gear. The AT was real; Mexico is realer, much realer. The AT with its constant conversation about gear seems superficial compared to Mexico. I suppose it is that the AT, while all genuine and sincere, is pure recreation, it is in the bosom of a call home for rescue, it is not that out there as is severe poverty and actual isolation. I don’t know, it is difficult to compare actually; I suppose it is that Mexico represents real life while the AT is a kind of fantasy, a finding of oneself, a personal quest of some kind while Mexico is a journey as well, for us anyhow, but we can’t control as much of the saga as we did on the AT.

Mexicans cannot put together a decent toilet. There is something wrong with every last toilet you find. Am I squeamish about shit? I don’t think so. The toilets and bathrooms are simply not planned nor constructed adequately to serve their purpose. Maybe I do bring a first world sensibility and think that taking my constitution should be relatively comfortable and predictable. At least the toilet seat should fit the bowl. In our apartment in Hermosillo, that we rented, there was no room to even sit down; the toilet was practically up against the wall, your knee went right into the toilet paper holder, the seat was loose and didn’t fit, came off when you sat down and the door frame was so low there was constant danger of a major forehead smack; and then, in Hermosillo, half the city, for half the day has no water, as they are running out of water, so you only get pressure for half the day, and you need to stockpile water in drums to be able to haul water in buckets to flush your poo poo, and then you can’t flush the paper because the plumbing pipes are smaller and it clogs them and you have to put the used toilet paper in a basket next to the bowl, which maybe then your significant other makes you zip loc it for fear of flies landing on it and then your tooth brush, so all in all, taking a crap can be quite the ordeal, and then, shit, what if you have to go again in 15 minutes? I prefer a good outhouse, no flushing, just digging a hole every year or two.

We met two couples that drove their big SUV rigs down to Batopilas, one older gringo and his friend and their plump wives. It was definitely bold of them to go and it wasn’t this one guy’s first trip either. He came over to our table in the restaurant and said, “don’t tell your psychiatrist that you came to Batopilas”. I can’t really imagine actually having a psychiatrist and what they might make of going on a great adventure, how they might turn it into a problem and thus make more money on the return visits discussing the roots of why one would want to experience something totally awesome and different. “Son, your need for outlandish adventures is a real problem… you need to be safe at home like the rest of the flock….”

In a tourist town you get the sense that there is a double standard, one price for tourists and another price for everyone else. One maddening thing about many Mexican stores is that there are no prices posted on anything, so it appears that they can just make up the price at the cash register. One woman tried to sell Kim two used, dog-eared paperbacks for 15 bucks! Even if I do have more money than these people, at least for the short run, I still don’t like the sense of being bamboozled and taken for a ride. Regular Mexico isn’t a tourist town like Alamos, Sonora or Batopilas, Chihuahua. In tourist towns the whole game is to fleece you, waiting for the big gringo wallet to open and shitfire, I’m poor by gringo standards. I need to be given some dignity. One German expatriate who sold us some of his artwork called us “alternative tourists”. At any rate, the unabashed fleecing to me amounts to killing the goose that lays the golden egg; it is a short-term frenzy for them but for me it is my dignity and wanting to be treated as a regular guy, not as an economic opportunity.

It was 3 hours from Batopilas to Creel and then 3.5 to La Cascada Basaseachi (Basaseachi Waterfall) and 12 hours total to Puerta La Cruz at the peak of the Sierra above the Sonoran Desert. We left Batopilas very early, maybe 4:30 AM, so as to be able to see other vehicles coming by their headlights, and without any stops per se, we were out of Copper Canyon in 3 hours. With stops on the way down from Creel, it was better the 5 hours to Batopilas.

At Puerta La Cruz there are people who know my people, cousins of Tavo and Maria and we rented a room and went over for dinner. The sense of the place is what a medieval traveler must have felt in a road house, dark, big thick tables, the menu consists only of what they have that day and the food is served in baskets, wrapped in clothes, with sides of fresh cheese, hot tortillas, peppers, salsas, a pot of beans set right on the table and probably machaca from Gerrardo’s cattle served as the main dish.

In Hermosillo, Sonora, new draconian measures have been taken to preserve water. As I mentioned, half of the city has no water for half of the day, thus, there is simply no pressure, nothing comes out, no dishes, no toilet, no cooler, no nothing. Where we rented there was a 50 gallon drum which we filled at night when there was pressure and then we dipped a bucket out of that for dishes and to flush the toilet. There are various views as to why the city has decided to manage the water service in this way. One is that there is an actual shortage of water and that there is drought. There is not one drop of water in the reservoir above Hermosillo; the Sonora River, that river which is the interesting trail of the missions, the trail of the colonization of Sonora by the Jesuits, that river is about dried up from the drought. There are cattle grazing on the grass where the water was. And then, the ground water has limits; it is not a bottomless supply. And Hermosillo has no Central Arizona Project bringing water from any Colorado River. So Hermosillo, being on the dry coastal plain of the Sonoran Desert, is now hurting for water and the residents feel it right at the tap. Some say that the issue of water came to a head because of the Ford maquiladora plant and the associated industrial development around the Ford plant. They say this industrial use requires a lot of water and in order for Sonora and Hermosillo to develop economically, Ford et al needs the water. The shut–off of water to residential areas for half the day is thus perhaps a sacrifice for economy at the expense of the city resident’s comfort. Who can say if this is true? State industrial development is in some ways stymied by a conflict of governing parties, the state being run by the PRI and the city by the PRD, who are at odds and who don’t cooperate well. Others say that the water issue is being forced by political/economic powers that want to develop a desalinization plant on the Sea of Cortez and that by choking down the water, that will make it more feasible for them to construct the plant and then makes huge gobs of money. This is the cynical view growing out of lifetimes of corruption in Mexico. Who could believe that people actually had any public service or altruistic motivations? Who can believe it if a politician tells you, you are running out of water in the desert? One upshot is that Hermosillo is very hot for most of the year and most of the cooling has been done by swamp coolers or evaporative coolers which use water pumped up to the cooler, to cool off the house. With this lack of water and pressure, people are being forced into buying air conditioners, which cost a lot more to run, by electricity generated by the El Novillo dam, on the Yaqui River, which is at less than half capacity now. The overwhelming majority of people cannot afford the electric bill for AC. The whole thing seems like a Catch-22 mess of water, cooling and municipal services that for whatever reasons, is going to result in more and more hardship for the citizens of Hermosillo. I have to wonder as well if this cut-off of water is a harbinger of what cities in the arid southwest of the US can expect, should a drought continue. What of all the swimming pools, green grass lawns and golf courses then?

Mexican women can be smothering in some ways. The sense of family is at the center of their universe and me or Kim as American individuals, well, that doesn’t really fly to them; they don’t know it; they don’t imagine it. We want space, they want to rein us in and serve us, know our plans, make food, keep us for their very own. We always get family centered questions, “when are you getting married?” I tell them Kim is my girlfriend, or novia and they ejaculate “novia!” at 47 years old!!!!! Our landlords don’t understand that we want to be left alone sometimes; we don’t want to be smothered by family; we are individuals and that is OK with us; we aren’t lacking something vital, we just prefer some space from the tethers of other’s realities.

The trajectory of the individual is foreign to the trajectory of the family, fuera, de la familia. It is very strange to Mexicans, this phenomena of divorce, of women choosing, women as independent and strong entities. To many Mexican men, an American woman’s sexuality is seen as more free than a Mexican woman’s sexuality. American women are seen as loose but that is really just a manifestation of Mexican men’s minds. An independent woman is on equal footing with a Mexican man; she chooses whom she wants to have sex with or as Kim says, the man chooses, the woman decides.

In Mexico there is a strong sense of sexual boundaries and mores, for example, that one should not have premarital sex is a strong idea. Yet, women are dressed in a highly provocative manner, plucked eyebrows, tight clothes, showing skin and so what is up with that? Mexican women in the cities put it all out there, married or not, and so if you are not supposed to have sex premaritally or after wedlock, why are they putting out all the lures? I see a contradiction between exterior social mores and marriage and then, all that happens under the radar, under the surface. There is the fiction and there is the truth. And then as Catholics, you can just confess it and move on, freed up by admitting your shortcomings. Catholics have got some things right.

Men want to have sex with all other women but other men then cannot have sex with one’s own women, wives or daughters. This machismo is not peculiar to Mexicans at all and you can see how women are treated as second-class citizens in a man’s world. Our friend Lucy said she could never live in the Sierra, making tortillas, cooking with wood and washing clothes by hand. Kim said she couldn’t either.

I feel like Wilt Chamberlain here. All door frames and bathrooms are way too small for me. Bathrooms especially are too small. There is no room to hardly even sit down. The bathrooms are teeny weenie weenie. I’m always hunched over, even in the yard, clotheslines way low, in constant danger of hitting my head on something. 

Unpainted speed humps and bumps in Mexico are a real peeve of mine. You might be driving 30 or 40 mph and then wham!!^$#&^$#%& you are pounded big time. Municipal maintenance is not a big thing in Mexico as apparently mucho dinero gets siphoned off for other things, like the politician’s bank accounts. Kim wondered about taxation and how public funds are even generated inMexico, as it is obviously a very poor country; how do they get the funds to fix streets and paint the topes (speed humps & bumps)? Apparently, according to my friend Panchita, the main tax funds come from automobiles and not from home property tax. Luxury cars are taxed at an extreme level. Sedans pay much more tax than trucks, as trucks are the backbone of the rural economy in terms of carrying goods and people from their far-flung pueblos. My friend Lucy has a nice house, in a nice neighborhood and she pays only $250.00 a year in property tax. Wherever municipal funds come from, they are not often spent to paint the topes and thus my truck has taken some massive poundings and I have learned to drive very slowly in any little town, as you just never know when the next one will come up. I guess unpainted speed humps have their intended effect, slow down or ruin your car.

I did an informal study of Mexican hand signals used to accompany and accentuate speech. There are special signs to indicate if a person is cheap, rich, poor, drinking alcohol, afraid, whether they have gone, when referring to a thief (ratero), whether a person is worldly-wise (colmiudo) and so on. It is fun to know what the signs mean and to use them in the flow of a conversation.

I took Kim to a large shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe outside of Hermosillo and what we encountered was an amazing combination of the sacred and the profane. As we entered the area Kim asked, “is this a dirt park?” There were folks all over, under the only trees, in the complete absence of anything else green, in clouds of dust, and trash was blowing all over in the wind, and people hung out in chairs, in the little shade there was, passing the day in front of a giant painting and shrine to the Virgin. There was a long set of steps and stairs which went by all kinds of small monuments thanking the Virgin for helping them, usually for an illness, and below all of this walkway, was a kind of alluvium of broken glass, melted wax, trash, old broken monuments, all emanating from the Virgin above. Kim noticed that the Virgin’s eyebrows were plucked and wondered whether this is why Mexicanas pluck theirs too?

From Hermosillo we went to Kino Bay, to Old Kino or Kino Viejo, which is on the Sea of Cortez, mainland side. It’s about 1-½ hours from Hermosillo. We didn’t know what we might find in terms of camping or lodging. I had wanted to go up on the beach past Punta Chueca, but the word there was that the Seri Indians had gotten into methamphetamine and it was not safe. Drug crazed people were robbing tourists and their own people for their next high. So we meandered our way into the bowels of Old Kino and found a down homey RV park. Like the Appalachian Trail, it was nice to be thrown in with a bunch of different folks; all driving their own drive. Out on a far beach, past all the towns I found a little shell heaven where there were millions of tiny shells all wet and glistening, revealing their mysterious and beautiful patterns while waves lapped upon the shore. I sat in the sand musing over each one, endlessly fascinated. Massive cardon cactus stood by, incredibly large. Elephant trees dotted the extremely dry desert. It was said that at one time, it did not rain at Kino Bay for 6 years.

At Kino I met young men, entrepreneurs trying to sell things to gringos, fishermen they were and they had been to the US but had been deported for the lack of papers. These were nice people who are now living a hard life trying to just get by with the very least; these guys were not accumulating any riches in Kino by getting enough fish for that day, or by selling necklaces and baskets. I found out that cashiers at the Mexican Wal-Mart make $5.00 a day. Twenty bucks a day is good pay. These are people with families, mothers, grandparents and kids, just like us. Can you blame them for wanting 7 or 8 or 9 an hour compared to 5 day? When you see the poverty that people live in, materially, you can’t blame them for wanting something more. This situation is beyond nations and countries, these people are human beings. America, as a nation of immigrants, has been a magnet as a land of opportunity. All of our ancestors came here for this same opportunity, this same promise of the hope of a good life. And now that we are here, do we burn the bridge behind us? Would we be so quick to send our own grandparents packing back to the old country?

Personally I find that Mexicans are much friendlier and more generous than Americans. Mexicans will share all they have, even when it is obviously little. Americans are almost scared of strangers, fearful, superstitious, grasping onto what they’ve got. Mexicans will welcome you and open up quickly.

People kept trying to sell us fish, scallops and shrimp and I remember Peter Franken who died of hepatitis that he got at Kino or San Carlos by eating ceviche, or raw fish casserole with limejuice. What it is, is that the sewage goes right out into the bay, and these guys fish in the bay, so, put two and two together.

Farther away from town on an isolated beach we saw a school of big dolphins, in a brilliant shining sea, pulsating with sparkling sun; there were desert islands in this sea with rookeries of pelicans, frigate birds, many gulls and different sandpipers. The desert where it meets the sea is a really special place; the sea seems to take on an even sweeter, more luscious and inviting, captivating aspect. Can there really be all this lapping water when there is cactus and desert under your feet?

At a roadside stand we bought a bag of more than 30 oranges for two dollars, amazing when the same two dollars barely buys you 3 oranges on VT. Avocados were 25 cents each. We bought freshly made tortillas, warm from the oven and could choose from many, many types of salsas. Kim made the best salsa, fresh, a kind of pico de gallo salsa of tomatoes, cilantro, onions, limes, maybe a chile, all chopped very finely and very saboroso of tortilla chips. Lucy told Kim that this is also called salsa bandera, because it has the colors of the Mexican flag, red, green and white. We found the food overall to be really tremendous; real Mexican food, of all types, is really a treat; from Maria’s kitchen in La Mesa de Abajo, and also the kitchens of Las Senoritas, Alba, Dora, Dona Locha, and in Hermosillo, from the Central Market where we got tasty comida corrida, to Lucy, Sofia and Adelida’s kitchens, a variety of foods and dishes that had us just shaking our heads at how good it was. Part of it must be the intimate atmosphere in which you are served; the women pride themselves on serving you well.

The level of noise in Mexico overall seems to be greater than the US; there is a greater threshold for cacophony. For example, in front of Wal-Mart there is always this amazingly loud music, that when you walk by, you can’t even talk or think. In our neighborhood some guys had an ALL NIGHT party, not in their house, but out in the street in front of everyone’s house. From previous experience I know that parties are right out front and there is not much effort to be quiet. How can that be acceptable to the neighborhood? Is there no civil respect? No cops? To be fair, it is the same in the US, students, teens, drunks, loud music, inconsiderate, except here in Mexico there is no recourse to law; there appear to be no enforceable statutes like in Tucson with the $500 dollar fines for loud parties.

Why might there be this sort of inconsideration? Some have said that this represents a sort of freedom from regulation. I see inconsiderateness as a universal quality of humanity (2), it goes with the territory; it’s just that in Mexico they can get away with more inconsideration because that’s how it’s been; that’s their inertia, they litter because they are not educated to not litter; there is a poor sense of civic responsibility that grows out of poverty and lack of education. There is more noise, more cars and trucks belching smoke (no inspection), loud mufflers (no inspection), roosters everywhere (legal cockfighting), dogs everywhere barking all night and kept in yards their whole life. In my opinion the poor sense of civic responsibility comes not from an inherent quality of Mexican people but from what Oscar Lewis termed the culture of poverty. There is an undercurrent of desperation, of poverty, of being on the edge, really on the edge, beyond what almost all Americans can imagine being poor really means. They are crammed together in close neighborhoods, in tight spaces and then you have as well developmental issues like youth being unconscious and inconsiderate with their behavior and noise, and it gets magnified in any given neighborhood; it is just loud. I needed earplugs to sleep.

And one thing you notice, that with the government not doing much for the average person, people get out and hustle, they go try to make some money somewhere. You don’t see much begging and when you do, that person is so poor and dirty and on the bottom, you almost can’t believe it. Compare this to US beggars, on 4^th Avenue in Tucson, and it is like night and day, the US beggars are like on a picnic, they are not even trying, young and able bodied, they are playing out the system; it is a lark. They don’t know what poverty is. So, the lack of governmental intrusion in terms of regulation of average behavior has a flip side, in that with the government not supporting anybody hardly, the people HAVE TO take care of themselves; they don’t wait for a check or for a handout, they go out and get it themselves, by hook or by crook.

Many prices are much higher in Mexico, Wal-Mart in particular, as well as Costco. These stores that advertise as being always the cheapest are hardly a good deal for Mexicans, especially for people with lower earnings. When Wal-Mart pays 5 bucks a day, how can they then pay almost 5 bucks for a small bottle of stinking Listerine? The US companies seem to have no ethics. The laws in the US that protect consumers, that are presumably good, that supports a public good, when not in force in Mexico, are not applied. For example, Sherwin-Williams puts lead in their painting products in Mexico. I read it on the label, plomo, lead. That seems to me to be entirely immoral, to put such a public health hazard, such a known hazard, in a currently consumed product. Why is it OK for Mexican babies to chew on lead paint chips but not US babies? But many US companies go to the Third World precisely because they don’t have to pay as much and are not restricted as much in their operations. They are freer, and so they unfetter themselves of messy restraints, which favor the public, and they then pollute and exploit more easily. After US workers earned rights over centuries and centuries, the companies and employers then leave to go to countries where workers have no rights. Is that really freedom? This is what is happening in the world today, behind all the rhetoric of democracy and freedom; it is not freedom for the average person, but freedom for money to make more money the easiest way. The only way to stop this inertia of greed at the top is to seize power, but then the new bosses become the same as the old; the new bosses are human after all.  Idealism then fades into the substrate of human nature, and the corruption of power changes the idealistic into the new exploiters.

Puerto Penasco or Rocky Point is the worst kind of American tourist recreation place there could be. The beach is thrashed by ATVs, broken glass, charcoal from fires, trash and people drive everywhere on the beach, robbing any sense of nature, tranquility and magic of the ocean. At night fireworks are constantly going off everywhere with loud booms and cracks. The air smells of gunpowder and with the music, fireworks noise, engines droning, you can’t even hear the waves. Why even come to the beach then? Over the hill behind the beach is an area for ATVs and 4 wheelers and the noise is terrible, to be so close to those on the beach. Spring Breakers are drinking and shaking their tits and this all seems fine if you are 19 or an ugly American or a recreationist who needs motors and engines to have fun. I guess I have just turned into an old fuddy duddy. Mexico sometimes can seem like Dante’s Inferno.

But then we visited with my friends Lalo and Sofia and their kids, with a conversation about lucid dreaming, being open to all truths and how that squares with being Catholic; we visited with Lucy and Pancho, Roberto and Macrina and their grown daughter Xochitl, with deep, personal conversations about all sorts of topics, went with Adelida and Hector to Ures and in all we found sincere friendship. Tavo said que les vayan bien (that you may go well) and “we’ll be waiting for you”, contrast this with the noise  and insanity of Mexico in general. I suppose we are just not acculturated in some ways. We are used to a different ballgame and it would take a while to accept a new set of rules. Our sensibilities are maybe cast in cultural stone.

But shitfire man, Puerto Penasco on Spring Break is TOTAL INSANITY. Idiots in small, ultra-light aircraft, ATV’s, boats, dune buggies, there are frigging engines running everywhere, spewing up clouds of dust and sand, right on the people at the beach. There is no quiet at all; no privacy, and more knuckleheads keep rolling in. The machines just get to me; it seems so stupid and idiotic, mindless, making more noise to get more thrill. It is childish is what it is; kids do stuff like that.  Perhaps in part it is little dick syndrome, the more noise and the knobbier and bigger the tires, the littler the dick and thus the more insecure? Whatever it is, many, many people have a bad case of it; you see RV after RV towing trailers full of ATVs. At least I got some good shells and saw some dolphins.

At Rocky Point, on this Inferno of a beach, the local bathroom was locked until 8:AM, so Kim shit in a plastic bag by the truck, hidden by the door. We were far from the bathroom anyhow, so we must piss here and then it is Mexico, corrupt, so there you have one of my Dad’s old oaths, “shit, piss and corruption!!!”, right next to my truck.

There was a fellow camped next to us on the beach who was cut right out of the Road Warrior mold. He had done an amazing customizing job on an old Suburban and trailer. He had 2 dogs, Akitas, 2 parrots, red and green, 3 boats, a motorcycle, an ATV, a 50 gallon drum of water, a refrigerator, 4 batteries, 4 spare tires, a battering ram cattle cruncher in front, a welded, unfolding tent platform on top, the cab roof extended up 8”, a killer stereo; and he speaks no Spanish and is going to Costa Rica by all back roads. I watched him going up the beach at about 60mph trying to hit sitting gulls with his ATV. Mack is his name. What a rig! I have never, ever, EVER seen anything like that. He has a one of a kind scene, super customized, not obsessively neat. Kim wondered if a woman could ever stay with him for more than 1 night. Which reminds me of graffiti we saw on the AT, on the roof of a shelter, “a love like this, can only last 1 night”.

On the Rocky Point beach, at “The Reef”, where we stayed, there were Mexicans coming by all day hawking cheap jewelry and necklaces, artesania, straw hats, interesting inventions and ploys to separate tourists from their money. They are out there in the hot sun, walking long stretches of beach to try and make a sale, one after the other. Kim and I give then water, an orange, we talk with them, give them their dignity. They want to trade goods for a cassette deck, want to trade for things you have; they want gringo things as there is a pervasive belief that anything made in the USA is way better than things made in Mexico. At Rocky Point they get the big tourism bulge for only about 2 months a year and then it dies off a lot. They are trying to make money at a fast clip and the tourists are ignorant of what a good local price might be. A guy tried to charge me 5 bucks for one load of laundry; they say outrageous prices for many things because suckers have paid it in the past. If you can catch a big fish with fake bait, why not try?

So we got out of Puerto Penasco after 2 nights; we had to leave; and we went just a ways down the road, maybe 30 miles to the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve, a magical desert, exquisitely barren and remote. It is crisp and desolate with sand dunes and 150 million year old volcanic craters with flumes sticking out their sides. The Pinacate can be massively hot. It is one of the hottest places on earth and probably the hottest in North America, but that is in the summer. We came when things were tolerable. We walked miles around the edge of El Elegante crater, with elephant trees, senita cactus and ocotillo ringing the edge and we enjoyed imagining the forces that must have created this place, big strong, epic forces, to blow a hole in the ground that big,

We got to our camp and there was a group of 20 Antioch students from Keene, NH, who had just been to town in Sonoyta and gotten food, beer and tequila and as it got later they proceeded to make more and more noise, only 30 or so yards from our tent. They did not respond to requests to quiet down as the alcohol had clouded their judgment. Youth, alcohol, lack of respect for the commons, they should be made into cat food. Ugly Americans have a me-first attitude, similar to ugly Mexicans. Many Americans, perceiving the lack of the rule of law in Mexico, think then that anything goes; that whatever law and rules there are can be ignored and that these regulations do not apply to them. Everyone ignores rules they think are foolish anyway, give them tequila and a wild desert, and why even think about rules?

I did get to speak with an ecology professor before the party got going and I found out that the Pinacate is too hot for organ pipe cactus in the summer and too cold for cardon cactus in the winter, but there are lots of saguaro, senita, ocotillo, cholla and ironwoods as well as the type of ocotillo seen mostly only on the Baja California peninsula. There are many-headed barrel cactus, red barrels, gobernadora (creosote bush) and brittle bush. The plants look robust and healthy in spite of the drought going on for 12 years or so. The immense heat is partly because the Pinacate is inside the Lower Colorado River subdivision of the Sonoran Desert, which is the hottest and driest subdivision, and, the professor said, the Pinacate is like a subdivision within this subdivision because of the black sands and cinders and black lava flows, the substrate gets even hotter because the black absorbs and reradiates more heat. With the black sands and lava flows it really is a one of a kind place, a stark desert, volcanic, jagged, dry, and maybe peaceful and quiet.

The Pinacate is Don Juan desert, magic desert, crème de la desolate, isolated, out there, with plant assemblages unseen in the US. The roads are rough and it takes hours to get into the interior of the park. As you walk, you are in the footsteps of the Sand Papagos (Arenenos Pinacatenos), in the footsteps of Padre Kino, to the top of Pinacate Peak, where 4 ravens came and soared around the top doing barrel rolls on the wind; the exuberance and elegance of life, soaring freely, playing, over such beauty and desolation. Can you see ravens doing barrel rolls on the top of the world?

The place has a glow, a special feel. You see the Sea of Cortes from the top of the peaks and the whole volcanic field all around. The big peaks Kino named Santa Clara. You see lava flows spewing out of craters all around, frozen in time, barren yet full of life. We sa  more mammals here in 1 day than in 4 months on the Appalachian Trail. In the saddle below Pinacate Peak we came upon I’itoi’s place of emergence, where the creator of an extinct people came out of the earth through a lava tube. What of all the stories, memories and life ways of the Sand Papago? When people perish, where do the memories go?

You get the sense here of a vibrant moment over-layered upon the vanished past. There were pinon-oak-juniper forests just to the north of here, up 1000’, there was Pleistocene mega fauna, ancient Indians, newer Indians, the Spanish explorers, all vanished. And a hummingbird comes. Now canyon wrens (saltapared) call as the moon fades over an elephant tree and the glow of the sun warms the silent aloneness of the Gran Desierto de Altar.

Were people here past 12,000 years ago? With questions like these there will never be absolute proof. With no proof, people will believe what they want to, which they do anyway regardless of reason or proof. People can justify anything, so it is not worth the trouble (no vale la pena) to get a hair across your ass or get your panties all in a wad about the shortcomings of humanity, of the rule breaking and immorality. It is all us anyway. They who seem to bear the (culpa) blame are the same as us. To indict humanity for its shortcomings is like pissing in the ocean if we do not take a good look in the mirror at the same time. In the face of time, in front of extinctions, vanished people and all of life, I find myself reaching an acceptance of humanity’s paradoxes and foibles. The world is a messy place and people have shown that they do whatever they want, regardless of any long-term consequences. That is the way it is. To recoil in disgust from the nature of humanity is to then fail to take an honest look at ourselves.

The Sierra Pinacate has two high peaks, Pinacate Peak and Carnegie Peak. Carnegie is the taller of the two. From up here you get an expansive view into essentially unoccupied desert, for 360 degrees, as far as you can see. From Carnegie you see the Bay of Adair, Puerto Penasco and the outline of the Sierra on Baja California. It is the same view Kino saw when he discovered that Baja was not an island but a peninsula. It is an unparalleled view, a huge tract of uncivilized land and out here in the middle of this nothingness, who would think I would need earplugs half the time at night? The park rules are roundly disobeyed, Mexicans and Americans alike: fires, descending into craters, noise, disturbing terrain, drugs, littering and enforcement is about zero. Yet the place still looks good. It is amazing actually. This is a magical desert; it glows with magic. If only we could be alone and left in peace, with our freedom not impinged by other’s freedom…

Shade is at a premium. Each tree and bush shelters many other plants and animals, pack rat nests, ground squirrels, nurse trees, rabbits, hares, quail, bugs etc. We saw some wrens with yellow markings on the face and cheeks. Who were those guys?

After all of humanity has gone to bed or back home to the city, there is immense quiet amidst such harsh starkness. All people then become an annoyance, their noise and presence breaks the tranquility, the lava flows, the ocotillo, the saguaro. The senita, all bear silent witness and in this silence and quiet, a person can melt in as well, to join this Quaker Meeting of the desert, this meditative space, which turns you inward, reflecting on the great mystery.

Near our camp at Cono Rojo, below the peaks, there is a wash and small slot canyon about a half hour away called Emilia. I explored this area 3 times and found 11 little pools of water and three big ones. There was one mother pool, 3 feet deep with dragonflies, water bug larva, lizards, bees, flies and evidence of sheep and big birds coming to drink. On the other side of the Pinacate there are more pools, natural reservoirs for the life here, core areas from which all ambulatory life must flow, except those who do not need to drink. Emilia gets lots of deep pools when it rains as evidenced by the watermarks. I mapped all the pools and the location of Emilia, as it is difficult to find, hidden amongst the lava and desert. Who would think that in this severe desert, in a 12-year drought, that there is water enough still.

So then we went back to Tucson and spent a few weeks to take care of business and visit my old friends, and Kim got to run in the Tucson Mountains, climb Wasson Peak and also climb Picacho Peak and we saw The Flying Dutchman.  It was interesting that just at this time there started the demonstrations and hubbub in school about Mexican immigrants. Russ had a first hand view from the front lines and Kim and I also, from just being in Mexico.

The first day out of Tucson we drove to Parker, AZ, on the Colorado River, which at first blush, looked green, tranquil, a haven, an oasis from the incipient heat of the summer sun. As we drove along Kim spotted a county camping area on the river and we pulled in and found a nice spot under the shade of huge and evil tamarisk trees. As it was late in the day we started work on setting up camp and making dinner and as it grew dark and we were eating, our neighbors began to pound down beers and get louder and louder, inhibitions released, their ugly and inconsiderate subconsciouses percolating to the surface in waves of rude, coarse laughter. The music came on and kept getting turned up as well. This all not to mention the other neighbor who was compelled to run his huge inboard motor for a half hour, revving and revving, as if to discover some hidden flaw amidst the monstrous noise of his machine. Boats, cigar boats, speedboats and other smaller watercraft with whining little engines went up and down the river in a parade, leaving violent wakes to wash the soil off the shore and ripples of noise out into the surrounding communities.

I wonder, how is it, that in a public space where many and most are simply sitting quietly in the evening air, how is it that people could conceive that everyone wants to listen to their stupid ass big boat engine? How can they conceive that all the campers nearby would not be annoyed by drunken laughter and loud music? I guess the answer is, is that they don’t conceive; they are cretins, Neanderthals, boors, idiots, scum, who exist outside of the realm of sensibility and consideration. We had to move our whole camp in the dark, exodus from Rocky Point 2.

The area along the Colorado from Parker to Needles is quite nice, lots of canyons and jagged rock formations punctuated by the deep green of plants drinking water. The Bill Williams River is very nice as its delta empties into the mother river. And then we busted out into the Mojave Desert and into the Great Basin Desert, leaving our Sonoran Desert plants behind, all except the resilient gobernadora. Sage began to fill the valleys, long loping valleys of alluvium spilling off of jagged mountains through the eons.

Pulling into Four Corners there were two or three major accidents, perhaps caused by the high winds. There were chemical spills, HAZMAT teams, and giant tow trucks to drag their dead butts off the road. The traffic was snarled for 50 miles in all directions, making 4 Corners a kind of living hell, to get gas, to pee etc. People were driving all over through the desert and along 4 wheeler roads, along the frontage road, to try and avoid the interminable waiting. I mentioned to the cashier as I paid for my gas at ridiculously inflated prices, “this place is like hell on earth” and she gave me a knowing nod, “yes it is”.

Off then we were to Ridgecrest. A small county fairgrounds park found us tucked into a corner by a windbreak of pines. The wind was ferocious and yet we still were able to set up the tent with the truck as a further windbreak and Kim made an extremely tasty salsa bandera, even with some of Bill’s key limes. From Ridgecrest you can see the Sierra escarpment but you are not quite in it, and the pines around you indicate that the desert is being left behind, yet there are still gobernadora. Voila! It’s a transition zone!

The next day out of Ridgecrest we entered the beautiful, scenic, magical and perhaps indescribable Eastern Sierra. We drove into Owen’s Valley, the last basin west in the Basin and Range province. It feels so good to see this place, the huge mountains on either side, where the bristlecones dwell, the jagged knifes edge of the Sierra Nevada, laden with snow, towering 10,000’ above you, streams flowing across plains of sage and ribbons of cottonwood and other deciduous trees full of birds line the streams, each stream named by the town it runs to, each owned by the Los Angeles Dept of power and water.

And so we pulled into this region, driving along admiring the sense of place and all of a sudden there is a Ford Ranchero, a Barracuda and an old Chevy truck set up top of a tin fence. I pulled over and we got out to marvel and saw that we had to go back and back we did to Pearsonville Auto Wreckers, specializing in 50s, 60s and 70s American cars, rust free, second largest on the west coast. We were given the tour and let out to admire the Rambler section, nice Ramblers of all sorts, making me long for my Rambler days. I saw my grandfather’s sedan, a 1963, and then Chris’ white sedans and even Chris’ wagon and my 65’ wagon, Classics and Americans. People used to say while looking at my wagon, green with a white top, “wow, that’s a classic” and I would say, “no, it’s an American.”

I just happen to have the slip from my grandfather’s Rambler: May 13, 1963, $2105.00 paid in full, Green’s Rambler, Penn’s Grove, NJ, manufactured in Kenosha, WI, (where I brought my Rambler on a pilgrimage years ago), OK, Alfy’s car: a Classic 4 door 770 sedan, two-tone paint, greens, reclining backs, individual front seats, flash-o-matic transmission, 6 cylinder aluminum engine, 6 cylinder power pak, weather eye heater, radio, white tires, light package, Dowgard Full-Fill coolant and, with seat belt provisions! Alfy gave this car to us when he stopped driving, around 1974 or so. Dad and I went down to Medford, NJ from White Plains, NY to get it, with my cat Otis. On the way back the lights went out and worked no more, on the NJ Turnpike, in the dark. There was s now storm. Dad went off to get help and I stayed with the car and cat. A tow truck came and took me away; only it was not one that Dad sent. I had no money at all and the people at the gas station would not give me a dime for a phone call; and I walked off into the night with the cat in my jacket looking for a dime and a phone. The adventure then was finding each other, which we eventually did and got a motel and I remember, sucked down some tall boys and smoked a bunch of cigarettes to cool off. What went wrong with the car I don’t know? I was supposed to get the car when I was 18, but the aluminum engine messed up, or the insurance was too much for Mom to think of, and it got sold to somebody else, thus my potential first Rambler got away but I was destined to be in and own more. I wanted Alfy’s bad. I ended up with my green 1965 American wagon, which Michael et al made possible for me to rebuild. Bill Whitmore called old greenie “the Kelvinator”, as American Motors grew out of Kelvinator Corporation , which made refrigerators.  And then I bought Chris’ yellow wagon off Pete MacDonald, which I parted off of and then sold to a Mexican guy for $200.00, who came up on weekends and fixed it up with wood plugs and wire and started it up after 4 or more years of sitting and then drove it off to Mexico, with no electrical system or lights. I later saw him on I-19, passed with old greenie going down south. And that is a Rambler Saga. Somewhere in the late 60s and early 70s, AMC stopped making Ramblers and were left with Gremlins and Eagles and then they died. Now you barely see a Rambler.

Kim made friends with the Pearson matriarch, who gave her a hand made welding hat and some post cards and we bought Davis a t-shirt. Kim remarked as to how Davis has to come out west because of the cars; you just don’t see the quantity and quality of older vehicles as you do in the salt free, arid west. Here in Independence there are all sorts of ancient rigs with life, just parked in front of houses as if normal. Apparently they do not salt, even in the mountains, as you would not be seeing the rigs you do if they did. When I found out the matriarch was a Pearson, I refrained from one of Dad’s favorite jokes, two men meet at a urinal, one asks the other, “are you Drew Pearson?”, “no, I just started.”

However, in front of me now is the Sierra Nevada, covered with snow. I look up valley, as it gainsg in elevation, framed by snow-capped peaks on either side. It is big country. Independence Creek babbles behind me. We are alone at the campground; the slight cold and leafless trees keeps the tourists home. It is huge country, expansive, dramatic and inviting. This here picnic table sets me directly in front of the mighty Sierra, blond granite gravel at my feet making its way to the sea. Monstrously strong tectonic forces continue to lift the mountains even now. Weathering turns the batholith into sand at my feet. The sun peaks over the Inyo, White and Panamint Mountains, having already wakened Death and Saline Valleys with light. We are aimed north to Big Pine, Bishop, Mono Lake, Carson City, Reno, Susanville, to 36 West, into some of my favorite country ever, northern California, across the valley from my Yolla Bollys, across from the Trinity Alps, the Eel River, Trinity River, all running down through the Redwood Coast to the fog-laden, upwelling Pacific Ocean. I am touched by the land of California. People who have never been here do not suspect how nice northern CA is; they are overwhelmed by stereotypes of foolish self-indulgence, surfers and Hollywood. And how could a big state like California, with the 5^th largest economy in the world, how could these people be reduced to one simple stereotype?

The wind has been savage and ferocious, blowing away every last little thing you take out or put down. When both car doors are opened the wind clean sweeps anything loose, including our saint of cars card from Magdalena, Mexico. Still we have managed to cook, set up camp, shower and take care of all of life’s necessities as practically the only ones to be seen outside in the wind. All others run for cover, which is not to say that after our business was done we did not seek shelter in the old tent.

I went for a small bike tour of Big Pine and found a car restoration shop where the guy had a 1967 Toyota truck, quite the rig; I’ve never seen any that old. He also had 2 nice Barracudas and a Ranchero with the boxy Falcon styling. The guy across the way had 10 Toyota Land Cruiser truck beds, very rare rigs of which he was asking 10,000 each. Big Pine is not as nice for us as Independence. Independence is slower with more character, older, with nicer homes and fewer chain businesses. One nice thing about these small towns is that the grocery stores are all unique. Chains get tiresome and the workers are under the boot heel of pressurized bosses. You can sense the difference in tone with an independently owned store. The workers seem more relaxed, genuine, spontaneous, more free to be themselves without fear of petty reprisals for simply being human.

The snow line has dipped down much closer to the valley and last night’s storm has put a smooth blanket of white over the saw blade profile of the mountains. The drought here is temporarily over. They got water here in California. Spring’s bloom is incipient with the bursting buds and birds sing for the glory of water, sun and seed.

We then drove up to Reno, Nevada and got a motel downtown. After a bit we strolled down the strip, going in a casino here or there, searching for the inexpensive prime rib you see advertised all over the billboards. Well, we found it, and had a nice chat with our Mexican waiter as well. I was struck by the hollow faces and sense of desperation from the people in the casinos. They did not look like they were having that much fun. It was as if they were robots. And, I did not hear any money jingling out of any machines, and so we put in our pocked change and walked back to our motel.

It was not long the next day before we were in Susanville and entered another transition zone, between the northern Sierra, the Cascades, the Modoc lava plateau and the Basin and Range. Susanville sits at the cusp of all that. Susanville’s primary economy is a prison and the local surrounding economy is mostly logging and some tourism form Lake Almanor.

Now, we have been settled into Clear Creek for almost two weeks and it has felt good to work and throw myself into projects, to be absorbed by local things. My job now is to better the Thompson Empire. Having traveled so much I feel no pressure to see local sights. Now I want to work. I feel this essay is not as good as the AT Journals, as I had to wait so long to be able to type it up, there is a certain spontaneity missing, but there are flashes of what it could have been. I am now working on my first laptop, a Mac, which George has lent me and I feel good to be planted, inside, and with a computer, a kitchen and some time to open up the mundane aspects of life.

(1)  The Shakers are a perfect example of how the industrial revolution ruined the hand-produced economy. The Shakers invented the flat broom and had brisk sales of a well-made product, but as soon a machine could make essentially the same thing for much less money, people chose the less expensive version. Who can fault people of small means for choosing the less expensive? Individuals cannot turn the tide. It is the same as the Wal-Mart phenomena of today; people bemoan how Wal-Mart is putting local businesses out, but why should we buy the same flashlight for $10.00 more at Nichols Hardware or Dan and Whit’s? History won’t be turned back by small actions, only a big bust will take us back to a local economy.

(2) In my opinion, regardless of culture, humans are isomorphic in certain behaviors, what is characteristic of one is characteristic of the many. There are not behaviors which are characteristic of white guys or Mexicans or Indians; we are all largely the same in significant respects, particularly with things like greed, lust, thirst for power and control, envy, taking the easy way, not planning g well for the future, etc.

                                                                                                                         

MEXICO, WHAT A MIXED BAG !!                                                                                                     

Frederick C. Allebach

9061 E. Seneca St.

Tucson, AZ 85715                                                                                                        

                                                                                                             

Mexico, what a huge mixed bag!  How to characterize Mexico?  With no context it would be easy to make a lot of surface judgments.  (The context being the deep structure upon which the surface rides.)  “Superficie” in Spanish means, the surface.  Hence we have superficial in English.  So, what can I say to provide some context?

There is a history in this country of economic policies under which the rich become richer and the poor poorer.  There is a history of power politics and self-aggrandizement by those in power, starting with the royalty of Spain sacking the riches of the country, and then through the Catholic Church, the hacienda system, when both accumulated huge tracts of land and exploited both its resources and workers for their private gain. Then the Porfiriato, where foreign investment to develop infrastructure was welcomed but only the rich realized any benefit. Then came the PRI, with the fixing of  elections and a  monopoly on power  for almost 80 years, culminating  in Mexico becoming a vassal  of  the USA, with little concern for the man in the street, all  in the name of a  presumed global economy.  As a result, institutionalized corruption is generally accepted as a way of life leaving a  legacy of governmental discrimination against  Indians and mestizos.  A majority of  the  people either are living or have lived in poverty   The police, military and justice systems are widely recognized as corrupt and dysfunctional.  The social and political  problems in Mexico are many but are not of recent origin; these problems have deep roots in the culture of Mexico.

When I  look on the brighter side,  I can point to the strength and coherence of kinship and the family.  Their colorful traditions, and the way the religious cycle is celebrated seems more genuine than in other more spurious cultures.  There is an openness, friendliness and generosity among almost all the people providing opportunities  to strike up  friendships and social participation with the natives.  They have a unique  ability to enjoy the moment; the positive elements in Mexican society almost all have personal and social dimensions while the negatives reflect the way the country is and has been administered.

On balance, then, what I am describing is perhaps a people who have learned to cope by exercising their human qualities in the face of almost insurmountable problems.  It  speaks well of the Mexican people that they have not become so jaded as to lose their natural spontaneity and optimism.  Why do such conditions continue to prevail?

Perhaps by being so Catholic, Mexicans have internalized many of the more charitable messages of the Bible: messages encouraging humility, of accepting poverty, of sharing , even down to the last tortilla, which, in their religious life, is more noble than having all the world’s riches but  losing one’s soul.  Perhaps the overwhelming poverty has created a sense of  common suffering. Or maybe, as good Catholics, Mexicans are more inclined to be obedient and accept their lot in life, assured by the church that they will find something better in the hereafter.

As always, Mexico presents stark contrasts and no easy answers.  Robbery, crime and substance abuse are rampant.  Is this fueled by poverty?  Hardly, since the US wealth provides no immunity against  these faults.  All the public order and high rhetoric in the US provides no guarantee against the basic temptations of life.  The US has the highest rates of crime and violence in the  world, which is often attributed to the breakdown of the family. Such is not the case in Mexico.

It is really difficult to get a handle on Mexico.  It is at once many things that don’t fit into any neat and clean pattern.  Many Mexicans desire the riches and opportunity held out by the US but they don’t want the every -dog- for- himself ethic.   They see the US emphasis on individuality in a negative light.  They are amazed at the science and technology, at how clean it is in the US.  It is as if one brother has excelled to an incredible degree, while the rest of the family has stayed at home, content to let the river roll by.