Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Incidents of travel (I) In June 1980 a friend and I spent three weeks driving through Mexico. I kept no journal, and time has long since erased landscapes, encounters, and whole cities from my memory and reduced thousands of road miles to a blur. But I still have my marked-up 1979-80 edition of Mexico and Guatemala on $10 & $15 a Day, an album of photos taken by my friend, and the detailed comb-bound custom itinerary prepared for us by Sanborn's Mexican Insurance Company in Brownsville, Texas, where we stopped shortly before crossing the border. The following represents not an attempt to reconstruct those weeks — which would be impossible — but rather a way to organize in time and in geographical space both the shards of memory that I still retain and the absences left by that which is forever irretrievable. By the time we reached the border and crossed into Matamoros we had been travelling for four or five days. The night before, after driving down from Galveston and traversing the flat expanse of the King Ranch, we had camped on South Padre Island on the Gulf Coast of Texas. We pitched our tent on the deserted beach, but wind-driven sand had kept me awake — I was insomniac in the best of conditions — and I had retreated to the cramped interior of my gray Toyota Corolla, a car which was to carry us, in spite of considerable abuse and neglect, through 9,000 miles and safely home. There were no formalities at American customs — apparently no one cared if you were leaving the country. The Sanborn's itinerary describes the protocol on the Mexican side: Stop and tell the man where you're going in Mexico, like Mexico City or Guadalajara or Tampico or Somewhere, and he'll tell you to go ahead a short way and swing to the right and around in back, where you park and go inside the Mexican Customs building.Someone had advised us that slipping a dollar to the customs officials in charge of inspecting our car and our bags would smooth the process, not that we had anything to conceal. As we were unpracticed in the fine points of bribing foreign government officials we performed this maneuver in the most awkward and conspicuous manner imaginable, pressing dollar bills on anyone within range who was wearing a uniform. The officials showed barely less indifference to our tips than to our baggage, and sent us on our way. Such was our first and last experience with the legendary Mexican mordida. Matamoros must have been a bustling town but I have no particular recollection of it. We headed south on Mexican Highway 101 and were soon driving in a rural area past scattered villages and ejidos. (Sanborn's: “An 'ejido' is a government communal or co-op farm community — you'll see lots of them in Mexico. The word is pronounced 'ee-hee-dough.'”) Throughout Mexico the main roads were much better than I had expected. With the exception of a couple of spots that were under active construction they were as well engineered and maintained as American two-lane roads; around Mexico City there were modern superhighways. But where the terrain was rugged no short cuts had been taken to smooth out the ups and downs; the pavement wound around every dip and rise and snaked up mountainsides. The greatest road hazard came when you found yourself climbing behind an underpowered truck, of which there were many. In order to make reasonable time the truck had to be passed, but the switchbacks made it impossible to see oncoming traffic. We soon realized that the only solution was to keep an eye on the exposed bends higher up, and keep track of descending vehicles, calculating whether the concealed road that lay ahead of us would be clear when we attempted to pass. But on the first day there were no mountains, and though Sanborn's had warned us to keep an eye out for straying livestock, vultures, and fishermen, the only animate beings crossing the pavement were ground-dwelling birds, resembling roadrunners in everything except the instinct for survival, which every so often thudded against our front bumper. It was 70 miles from Brownsville to El Tejón Junction (which I don't remember) and another 123 miles to Ciudad Victoria, with one break during the day for sodas in a deserted bodega. In my album there is a single photo that I believe was taken in Ciudad Victoria. Shot out a window or from a balcony of our hotel, it shows a jumble of rooftops, a few trees, and a ridge of mountains looming in the distance. I have no particular memory of where we stayed — it may have been the Hotel Los Monteros, which Sanborn's denotes as “second-rate” — nor of where or what we ate. I vaguely remember an evening along a crowded central plaza, and dancers in Aztec costume. But maybe that was another city, another night. (To be continued) January 28, 2008 [ Permalink ]
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