The Road to San Juan, Part I

Wicho and I sit down in a patch of gravel beneath a mesa where a rickety town shines like a carnival. It’s the middle of the Mexican night and the mountain looks like a black curtain spread out across the stars. A chilly January wind gusts from the mesa’s flattop. Wicho, bowlegged, removes his shoes and the imitation Dr. Shoal’s inside fall out like a pair of dead fish. He grimaces and peels off his sweaty socks and begins rubbing his feet with cream made from snake venom. It smells like Vicks. I saw him buy this bottle from a man in a Volkswagen bus playing a schlocky recording through a bullhorn. The pilgrims flocked to him like bald men after hair tonic. I have studied the outlandish claims on the side of the bottle with skepticism.

“Look,” I say to Wicho as I hold up the cream in mock advertisement. “It even cures cancer!”

Wicho rubs his feet patiently, mopping the soles and toes with the dubious salve. His eyes focus so softly on his tired feet that I suddenly feel like I’ve trespassed on some sacred anointing ceremony. My sarcasm seems to have thudded, while the scene around us is bright and lively.

Old ladies behind food stands cook tamales and enchiladas and serve these with steaming cups of cinnamon-scented atole to the tired pilgrims. They brew hot punch of orange, hibiscus, tamarind, and apple. The peregrínos, the ones who are awake, drink and eat and huddle in groups like drunk people playing cards. There are thousands of us. I see the others splayed out before us in the mesa’s bulky shadow, many with their eyes closed, wearing faint smiles, heads resting on backpacks, heads in the dirt. I hear bursts of laughter and, behind this human sound, boomboxes playing accordion-heavy ranchera music. Someone is enjoying “Eye of the Tiger” too. It’s like the midnight Mexican Valhalla, although we are not even halfway to our destination.

Wicho lets out a bruised grunt as he reaches for his socks and slides them back over his blisters. He takes a deep breath and looks ponderously, I think, at the moon. His Spanish, which has been described to me as almost Shakespearean by those who appreciate the campesino vernacular, catches me off-guard. He says,

“There’s a shitload of cancer in the United States, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, rolling my eyes. “There’s cancer everywhere.”

“No,” Wicho says with sage certainty. “Not like there, dude.”

This question of human frailty resolved, I lay back and listen to the rascally noise of ourselves, all the thousands of us. It is a poor sort of carnival with all the rides shut down and everyone playing the games for free or dreaming under the arcade of the sky. I forget that this is a Catholic pilgrimage we’re on, and I am not a Catholic. Little burrs cling to my green sweater and I hear fireworks.

Centuries ago, the Persian poet Rumi wrote that going on a pilgrimage is a way to “find escape from the flame of separateness.” I wish I could say that I had his lofty sentiment in mind when, a moment later, I removed my shoes and socks and reached for the snake venom.

Letter to the Vestigial Reptile

We share this home, you and I,
Though you come and go like a fever
While I crawl around our dwelling
Like a lizard in a fish tank.
How did you ever become the outward wandering, more
Adaptable one, and I the one poised
To jump from the scale? There are moments
When my hands feel like huge fossils
Before I move them and they turn
Into birds. The urge to fly comes then like a storm—
But I stay here because you are gone.
I know there were times of terror
For you too, when you heard thunder and were lost
In smoke, and you didn't have a home.
How did you find me at the end
Of all your epic searching?
I would ask you for that story
If you weren't off wintering on a southern rock.
I hope you aren't late in arriving this year;
Come even if your blood is still cold.

Mayflower

I spent ten days in May at a natural building school outside of San Miguel de Allende called Karacadir. Karacadir is the name for a nomadic tent found all over Asia. The one I stayed in was sewn together from Tibetan yak wool. At night, gusting winds presaging the thunderstorms of the coming rainy season whip the black plastic that covers the karacadir; it sounds like you're sleeping on the deck of a galleon in violent seas. (In this way, the karacadir makes anyone into a nomad.) The wind slackened the tent, so early in the morning I would go outside and readjust the rigging attached to poles that kept the tent's corners taut. Every time I did this, the geckos that lived in the upper shadows of the karacadir skittered down its side to the ground.

The center is located a half-hour´s ride from town in a white 1971 VW kombi named the Albatross. The road that leads to these eighteen acres of thorn forest is rutted and winding. Andy and Dorothy, who live and teach here, steer the Albatross over the bumpy course every morning before sunrise so that Dorothy can catch the bus to her job in Queretaro. I imagine that in the pre-dawn darkness, while I was sailing around the world in the karacadir, they were jostled in their seats like explorers riding a giant white bird on Antarctic swells.

I worked at cobbling the patio outside their yurt with basalt rocks we gathered from the property. One day I found myself walking along a trail looking for rocks when it occurred to me that I wasn't really looking for rocks--I was wandering. And really enjoying it. There is a cord that connects us to something greater and I felt it pulling at me, inviting me to intermingle with the heat of the day. Maybe I was dehydrated, or maybe I was having a numinous experience. For no reason at all the dry yellow grass seemed buttery and the breeze felt like a woman running her hands through my hair. I thought of Thoreau and Edward Abbey and especially of Annie Dillard and I imagined that for one afternoon I had found my own Tinker Creek. I walked with a leaf-in-the-breeze trajectory along the intersecting trails and took notice of the vermillion flycatchers and jackrabbits and all the flor de mayo that sprouted up after the last rain. No one else was there, if you don't count the hydra-headed garambullo cacti or the nopal with its hundred pads like open hands.

Andy and Dorothy teach earthbag building, but they do this intermittently in one-week workshops. I was at Karacadir as a wwoof volunteer when no workshop was happening, so I had few responsibilities and lots of freedom. After breakfast, I would take water to the donkeys and tell them how sweet and beautiful they were. In response, they would bray like rusty train whistles and try to eat my socks. Then I did some cobbling. Then I read. Later in my stay I learned how to make natural cob and apply it as a plaster. I cobbed and cobbled and read and wrote and ate and slept. Then I did the dishes from the previous three meals using the precious little water at karacadir, which is stored in fifty liter plastic jugs. Last year, a nearby broccoli farm owned by Birdseye Farms dug a well deeper than anyone else's in the area, essentially cutting off three hundred families from running water. So when taking a shower at Karacadir you're limited to as much water as you can fit in a small stew pot. It's best to do this at the end of the day when the air is starting to cool off, and the water that's been sitting in the jug outside is still warm from the day's radiation.

At night, when the wind was starting to blow, we would go outside and listen to an old cassette deck Andy rigged to the Albatross's speakers. "Sketches of Spain" has never sounded so right spread out over a thorny desert. "Let it Bleed" was garbled but bloody nonetheless.

I was told early on in my visit that there are roadrunners in the thorn forest. By the end, I was starting to doubt whether I'd ever see one. On the last morning, as I set off on new wanderings, I finally did see a roadrunner. It was running on the road.

Ginger with Haiku

Today I made scones for Alma del Sol, which has become my standard culinary contribution as the most unlikely bed & breakfast maître d' of all time. I love making bread, any kind of bread, because it combines the essential pleasures of mixing, measuring, kneading, and heating up. We should all do it sometimes. It doesn't hurt to have a good crew around, either. Wicho passed back and forth through the kitchen whistling his three-note birdsong, which gets under my skin but massages my ego at the same time because I know these notes are just for me. I emphasized the importance of ginger to him, since he'll be making the scones after I leave. Cristian was "enfadado" today, meaning bored and sick of mopping and ironing. He made sure I understood that he was bored, not angry. These Mexicans are proud of how they can keep their temper. Cris wore a navy blue turtleneck in the ninety degree heat--maybe he felt turtly. Kiti, the perpetually cute teenager, bubbled with enthusiasm for the world between bites of the leftover crystalized ginger with chocolate (an unmatched combination). And Hugo, the dear man, told me about the wonders of "Zorba the Greek" while dancing some steps to gypsy music playing on the University station. Then he leaned over the counter as is his custom and leafed through 'The Joy of Cooking' while bouncing around ideas for a dinner he's hosting next week. Prosciutto stuffed with crab meat, anyone? Taquitos with potato and salt cod? Coconut flan? Hell yes.

A Haiku.

Tonight, dunked hot bread
In penny-colored bucket
Filled with your red wine.

Winter mountain poem

Dear Mountain, I hear you
Are sick of the beautiful slopes
My glaciers spent so much time
Laying with debris. Listen:
If it’s a simple question
Of immensity and loneliness,
I can send a flock of birds
With strange songs of consolation,
Or a snow leopard deeply disciplined
To soothe you with its paws and purr.
My starlings keep good time
And my cat’s as lithe as one of your
Silvery veins. But if it’s more warmth
You need, more than what a small body
Can provide, I grant you permission
(If you’ll allow) to be patient, to muse,
And to wait for spring while I build
Another mountain.

To Summit the Mermaid

Just got back from a hike up to ‘la sirena,’ a mountain bluff on Guanajuato’s eastern border that is capped with a white iron cross. It was my first long walk-with-destination since the San Juan pilgrimage two weeks ago. Climbing up from the panoramica, there is no clear path to la sirena. I left a crumbling dirt road wide enough for one car and made my way straight up the mountainside. A ragged and no doubt thirsty horse seemed an unlikely animal to find on that hillside, but I did. Here you must pick and choose your way through the cactus and other brush and try not to slip on any of the abundant scree. Dry fissures in the folds of the mountains look like ancient riverbeds but I don’t know if they ever held any water. It seems doubtful. I followed one for a few minutes before veering off over the parched grass, which crunches underfoot and makes you wonder how (and why) it survives out here. The summer rainy season must supply the grass and other plants with the vast majority of moisture for the year, and they tough it out for the other eight months. The sun-baked landscape of central Mexico, and especially the unforgiving vegetation, gives me the impression of a great stubborn will to exist. The prevailing sense of manifest heaviness that D.H. Lawrence describes in “The Plumed Serpent” is here. I scrambled up a shoulder of bare rock, determined to reach the summit quickly, willfully. Still thinking of Lawrence, and of the question of will and desire that the main character, Kate, faces:
“But for herself, ultimately, ultimately she belonged elsewhere. Not to this terrible, natural will which seemed to beat its wings in the very air of the American continent. Always will, will, will, without remorse or relenting. This was America to her: all the Americas. Sheer will!”
I trust desire and I'm wary of the will, though conscious of being driven hard by it. It occurred to me that a riotous act of will might also be a way to rediscover a desire and give one the courage to go after it. It is a delicate balance, like trying not to slip on stony scrabble.* I don’t think climbing up to la sirena and back, a hike of a few hours, qualifies as riotous, but it’s at least a sort of brawl with the usual day.


* I slipped once.

Chichifo

Yesterday we got up before dawn to drive to San Miguel de Allende. Hugo had some paperwork for the immigration office there, another favor for another friend. A thin band of seashell blue sky rimmed the mountains surrounding Guanajuato as we drove to meet Wicho at La Casa de Espíritus Alegres.

"Wicho" is what you call someone named Luis. Sort of like calling a William "Billy." Inscrutable Mexican handle.

When we pulled up he was standing in the doorway shrouded in a grey hoodie, hands in the pouch pockets. Hugo had him fetch an inkjet printer that was in the trunk of the car and we followed him inside and stood in the dawn kitchen for a minute. Stars were disappearing in the first light of the madrugada. Hugo and I drank milk and ate a piece of bread and Wicho stood there stone silent and looking like he hadn't slept a wink and was no worse off for it.

I slept for most of the drive through el cerro, the rolling hillsides of scrubby nopales cactus and ubiquitous dusty earth, as the sun rose and burned through the windows onto my neck.

In San Miguel de Allende Hugo waited in line on the steps of the immigration office. Wicho bought me an orange juice and drank a smoothie (licuado) through a green straw from a bulging plastic bag, the kind they give you when you buy a goldfish.

Later, Wicho bought some tools for his work with silver, his platería: a metal clamp and a scraping tool fit for a dentist and a pencil-size blowtorch. He uses these tools to make ornate silver earrings and, with the pointy ones, to pantomime homosexual ambushes. At other times he makes a jabbing motion with his hand in the A-Okay sign, thumb and forefinger forming a hole and the other three fingers flaring out like a rooster's crown. This is to say, "Did you get any?"

The licuado gave Wicho a stomach ache and he became reclusive.

Leaving San Miguel we passed a brick manufacturer, stacks of ladrillos in the dusty yard awaiting some further formation and hunched men building thousands of them into great ochre rectangles. This was Wicho's first job, before he became Hugo's number two -- chauffeur, chef, accountant, messenger boy, toilet scrubber, 20 year-old wage-earning manservant. A fully committed and seemingly tireless body who Hugo would die for and with a mind that is elsewhere and unattainable, always disappearing down the driveway at midnight.

Hugo bought him a can of root beer which he'd never had before and this seemed to put things right for a few minutes. He said it tasted like coffee.

I like Wicho for being a hard worker, a talented artisan and a quick study in almost anything, unapologetically adolescent leather jacket James Dean mile-long stare, never reads a book, for the toothache he had, for calling me chichifo, for the hand on my shoulder out of nowhere.

The leaves on the trees are crinkled dark green and shine. I point at the horizon where the biggest mountain is and tell Wicho that it's his, just trying out saying it. "Nah," he says.

Meanwhile Hugo is sitting in the back seat and tells me I have a bald spot. He takes a picture with his phone and shows it to me. We discuss it for a few minutes, whether I'm actually going bald. We dissect the few pixels of white scalp for evidence. He says in his squeaky trickster voice, "You're going bald, man!" His English is perfect down to the common slang and intonation, and I am learning for the first time that the word for bald is calvo.

We turn off into el campo before reaching Guanajuato, heading towards an abrupt little hat of a mountain called Cerro del Sombrero. The rocky dirt road winds through fields of burnt out corn stalks where goats and burros browse in twos and threes. A disco song from 1980 called "Sexy Eyes" comes on the radio and Hugo and I clap and snap and drumbeat the headrest and dash. "I love this jam!" I yell, even though I've never heard it before. I'm just trying out saying it. I've got one arm hanging out the window and the animals are ignoring the thumping bass like another ray of sunlight. "Yeah," Hugo shouts back. "Isn't it beautiful? It's called 'Las Cajones!'"

"No more lonely nights for me, this is how it's gonna be...sexy eyes..."

The rural village we're bouncing through is called Las Cajones, Drawers. It's wide open. We're moving as fast as a tractor passing little bright churches and box houses where they hang the wet laundry over scrappy metal fences. I wave at a young girl walking the road in her school uniform, a spontaneous greeting from the sheer excitement stirred in me by "Sexy Eyes." Wicho says something that provokes Hugo to censure him in his mock paternal voice, the one he uses to enunciate Wicho's real name, José Luis.

I have tried telling Wicho who Joe Louis was, punching the air to illustrate my point, but he barely knows who the Beatles were and just forget about "Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show."

We arrive at the little home Hugo has inherited in Las Cajones. The backyard has a clear view of Cerro del Sombrero and a glittering dam, or presa, farther off.

I say to Wicho, Vamos a tener una barbecoa aquí un día pronto, ¿no? Unas chelas, unas muchachas. He smiles like someone who just got out and says sí and puts his hand on my shoulder and we gaze at the sombrero.

Hugo says this is where we will come, he and Dean and I, with bottles of wine and paints and easels, and we will all sit out and recreate the hat. I think everyone who comes here knows what dreamy thing they would do if they came back. Hugo calls the house "Las Lomas." So many words for "hills."

So I'm going bald, apparently, and it's late afternoon as we get back in the car and head for Guanajuato. We go through Wicho's home town of Puentecillas and neither of us says anything when we pass his midnight driveway. Outside Puentecillas is a high-security prison and Hugo says Wicho used to live there.

We're listening to a saccharine Seventies ballad by the guy who sang "Lady in Red." He's pining away, "I thought I'd spend my seasons trying!" Orchestral sweep. Trying, sighing, lying, dying.

Wicho is unmoved and staring softly down the road.

I'm pretty sure Hugo was joking.