Chapter 1
When I was 13 and my dad said to me, “pack up, we’re going to Missouri,” I never would have imagined the far-reaching consequences of his decision. A road trip for a visit to another part of the country (a completely different world for me) would forever change the way I looked at life. A farm outside of a town of 1,200 on the plains of western Missouri is a far cry from Southern California. I later thought of that journey as I rode cross the Sierra Madre del Sur in Southern Mexico 10 years later in the back of a Volkswagen, looking up at the daytime ghost moon and some clouds tossed across a deep blue desert sky and thinking about going to Missouri for the first time and how it was the first major trip of my short life (the first of a great many) and how sad I was to be going back to California afterwards. That trip from California to Missouri as a kid awakened in me a love for traveling, adventure, and moving restlessly.
When I was 13 and my dad said to me, “pack up, we’re going to Missouri,” I never would have imagined the far-reaching consequences of his decision. A road trip for a visit to another part of the country (a completely different world for me) would forever change the way I looked at life. A farm outside of a town of 1,200 on the plains of western Missouri is a far cry from Southern California. I later thought of that journey as I rode cross the Sierra Madre del Sur in Southern Mexico 10 years later in the back of a Volkswagen, looking up at the daytime ghost moon and some clouds tossed across a deep blue desert sky and thinking about going to Missouri for the first time and how it was the first major trip of my short life (the first of a great many) and how sad I was to be going back to California afterwards. That trip from California to Missouri as a kid awakened in me a love for traveling, adventure, and moving restlessly.
That trip across Mexico in the back of a
Volkswagen became in time one of my favorite memories simply because of the
free beauty of it and the realizations it brought later on regarding time,
memories, and the past. It began at 6am on a Saturday morning when my restless
roommate, a Mexican named Alex who spoke broken English burst into my room “hey
gringo do you want to go to Acapulco?” I’d gotten tired of living in the US and
had been living and going to school in Central Mexico for the year. Never being
one to turn down spontaneous road trips, I immediately jumped out of bed in
appreciation of his enthusiasm and began packing. A few hours later we were
coming down from the central highlands into Cuernavaca and I marveled at how
the land changed from arid as we descended into a more green landscape. Leaving
Cuernavaca, we wound the old Volkswagen up to 95 mph and jetted across the
countryside on our 6-hour trip. Always being one who loved watching the land
change, I was amazed at the pure beauty of the cacti in the desert, the yellow
rocks, and the skeleton bushes caressed by a Mexican wind beneath the immense
sky above me. I reveled in the moment with my head stuck out of the window in
the wind, my hands in the sky.
That last trip across the country a couple
weeks before I went home for the winter turned out to be a significant moment
in my life because I finally saw something more beautiful than Glacier National
Park. The mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur just east of Acapulco are, in
my opinion, the most beautiful things on earth- the green, jungled mountains
with their sheer sides and rugged, steep peaks are something that totally took
my breath away. Seeing them sorta made me wonder about giving them that noble
title as Most Beautiful Thing Ever in place of Glacier because it had been a
few years since I had seen Glacier and maybe I had forgotten the beauty of the
former champion. In the back of that old Volkswagen I pondered this, as to me it
has to do with time, and how time mixes up memories and changes things around. Memories
later become seasoned with emotions and eventually fade altogether, leaving
behind only faint flavors of the former banquet. How accurate are my visions of
Glacier? How reliable is my memory? We have a tendency to bend history and
retell it how we feel it should be and sometimes even we believe our own
accounts of it- emotions, nostalgia and all. I thought of this for hours with
my head stuck out the window and my eyes closed.
When I saw Glacier for the first time it was
toward the end of a long trip that is the best summer of my life. My adult life
had begun earlier that year when I moved out of my parent’s house for the first
time, a freshman in college and moved into a janky 3- bedroom house in a
cul-de-sac closer to where I was going to school. I moved with my family from
California to the Midwest my last year in high school. I took a year off out of
high school (which displeased my parents) because I didn’t know what I wanted
to study in college or really whether to stay in the Midwest. I worked and thought
about life, and then once I started at the University in town I moved out of my
parent’s house and in with some guys from my campus ministry, still not knowing
what to study or what I wanted to do with my life. I was totally excited about
this new stage: the independence, college life, and new adventures. My
enthusiasm was only matched by the amount of energy in that household. People
were constantly coming and going and the novelty of it all was what made it so
exciting. I could make as much noise as I wanted, not do my dishes, and pretty
well live how I wanted because not only did the other roommates not care, but
because they as well lived rather savagely. The walls were dirty, the carpet
stained, and the dishes piled high. It
was the perfect living situation for a guy like myself and a lot better than living
under your parent’s roof when you’re trying to break free and be a man. The
guys I lived with would become great friends, but one in particular, Will, was
my closest friend and later became my road buddy. He was a tall, slender
redhead from Cincinnati who was extremely intelligent, hated technology, corporations,
and materialism- he was very much about people and connections and living
simply. The best way I can describe him is a clean-cut hippy. His dad was
military and Will had learned, from growing up all around the world, to speak
German and Spanish fluently. I loved the way he looked at life and the world,
and we talked a lot. I learned more from him in college than from anyone else.
A recent graduate, he lived in the house part-time and worked the rest of the
time on the road.
Andrew was from Texas and short,
potbellied, lived messily, and a good cook that was known for his chili. He
moved out that following summer and another friend took his spot. James was
studying to be a writer and loved basketball. He was a few years older than the
rest of us and a son of immigrants, from a large family. I never connected with
Andrew or James as I did with Will, but we still were good friends. Us 4 in the
house was a comical scene, to say the least. When it got warm outside we would
spend afternoons playing whiffle ball, basketball, and football in the
cul-de-sac. Other days we would hit soda cans with a golf club in the street. Warmer
days we would haul a couple lawn chairs, a radio and a cooler up to the roof of
the two story house and would sit up there shirtless, enjoying the sun and
life. Sometimes at night we would go back up and look at the stars and blow
smoke into the sky. Behind our house was a lake about 50 yards away and we
loved going up to the roof and hitting golf balls off the house into the lake.
Across the street lived 3 other guys in
our group of friends and we were always at one another’s house. In the other
house lived Mike, a guy who became a best friend my first year in school. He
was Hispanic and we spent all of our free time together, often talking until
late at night and then just sleeping in each other’s bed instead of walking
across the street. We shared clothes and food and pretty much everything else
that whole first year.
We had a lot of snow that year and a lot
of snow days, so we sat in and watched a lot of movies and did pushups to burn
energy. None of us paid a whole lot of
attention to school and never really even went except for tests. All we ever
wore at home were basketball shorts. We never liked shirts, and seeing as we
never went outside when it was cold, it worked out nicely because we kept the
heater on high. When I would get bored I would put on a beanie and boots with
no socks, unlaced and run across the street in the snow shirtless to the other
house. When it got too late I would crash over there and sometimes walk back home
across the street as the sun was coming up. Sometimes I would get bored and
prank Andrew as he slept in bed in the middle of the night.
“Andrew! Wake up! You’re late for class!
Get up, what are you doing still in bed?” I would throw open the door and burst
in the room, flip on the light, scream and shout. The first few times I did
this it was funny because he would throw off the covers and leap out of bed
like a chubby little ninja. After looking at the clock, he would angrily get
back in bed and order me out. After a few times he stopped falling for me doing
this. Other times I would open his door in the middle of the night and throw a
tennis ball at the back wall while I stood in the doorway and caught the ball,
bouncing it off the wall until he would wake up. Once he came in my room in
December while I slept and opened up my windows. It was freezing outside and it
didn’t take me long to wake up. My favorite prank, though, was to throw a
pitcher of ice water on him while he showered. This he loathed above all else
but I found it unendingly amusing.
Winter made me restless. When spring
finally came it was a mad frenzy of barbecues and tanning in the sun,
debauchery, and sitting out on the roof at night talking and smoking cigars and
dipping. When it got warm outside, everyday after class (if we went) I taught
Mike to eat sliced avocado on toasted bread and we ate them everyday, sitting
in the sun out the back door. With the
longer days and warmer weather, there was life in the house again. When the sun
went down, people would begin trickling around the side of the house to the
back, where we would sit in the grass or in lawn chairs on the patio and eat
hotdogs and drink and sit under the spring stars. Sometimes my brother would
come over with a few cousins and hang out and we would all act like I lived
really far away and that we were really grown up and living busy, adult lives. How have you been? How’s life? How are Mom
and Dad? I had so much fun over there that first year. I had it bad for my
closest female friend, a girl named Mary who also was good friends with
everyone else in the house. Mary knew good and well of my feelings but me,
being rather shy, never really told her.
Some nights we would get a bug to get out
of town so we would all pile in my roommate Andrew’s truck and run down to the
River and build a bonfire. There on the banks of the River our souls would
break loose and we would sing and dance and scream into the night, and then at
2am we would pile back into the truck and drive back to town. Eric Clapton or
CCR would come on the radio and I would sing at the top of my lungs, my head in
the wind, my hands in the stars.
Other nights we would open the doors and
let the Midwestern spring wind stream in through all the windows and front door
and come out the back door, and 30 people would come over and sprawl out on the
couch or living room floor, sitting on the stairs in conversation, or wind up
out back on the porch. I would buy a few tubs of ice cream and they would be
gone in a few hours. In the spring, Mary and I had a falling out and Mike decided
to move back home and I really hit a low spot. I spent fewer nights on the back
patio with everyone else and more time in my room, listening to music and
staring at the wall, deep into the AM. I raged against Mary and against Mike,
two of my best friends who in a one-week span both disappeared from my life.
Overall, my first year in school was a
great time that I looked back on throughout college as the funnest, purest, and
most simple time in my college career as I tried to figure out this thing
called independence. This was long before my insatiable desire for alternative
and foreign ideas and philosophies and the years’ long plunge into communism,
Buddhism, atheism, and revolution - life was still relatively simple during
these days and those simple, sunny days in the cul-de-sac with all my friends
around me, marveling at the independence and freedom of a newfound life was
truly a special time. I would frequently during more difficult and complicated
periods of life reminisce about these days and miss the simplicity.
Chapter 2
After Mike moved back home I seriously
thought for about a month if I wanted to stay in state or go out of state for my
next 3 years of college. Spring break I
had taken a trip to Georgia to visit some friends of Lorenzo’s (our Campus
Ministry leader and a great friend who was couple of years older) in a campus
ministry, and loved it down there. It was an incredibly memorable trip for me
because I went with two really great friends (Will and Lorenzo) and we piled in
his Taurus and jetted across the land. When we left the cul-de-sac, it was
about 30 outside and there was snow on the ground, and we joked about what a
scenic spring break we’d have had if we’d stayed at home. We hated the cold and
were so pumped about this trip to the warm south and we threw our bags in the
trunk, bought munchies for the road and jumped in Will’s red Taurus that I
named Queen Latifah.
When the trip commenced he put some Bob
Marley on and still to this day, One Drop is my favorite song by Bob. I had
never heard that song prior and fell immediately in love. I had listened to a
lot of his music but Will opened me up to the lesser-known works by that
legend. We played that CD probably 4 times on the trip there. I love how Bob
Marley’s music is so deeply spiritual and carries such a strong message. Being
from the west coast and only having living in the Midwest for a few years I had
never been to the south. Being big fans of Waffle House, we made sure to stop
and eat at only there on the way there. That greasy chain of restaurants is
brilliant for the amount of delicious fatty food for your buck. You can
seriously get stuffed for about 3 bucks.
Back in those days I had a really serious
speeding problem and it wasn’t an hour on the trip before I found out his
Taurus topped out at 111 mph. I drove the whole way there because I like to fly
and because the other two guys like the speed limit. On the way there we got
lost in rural Georgia and had to stop for directions in some po-dunk town deep
in the sticks. At a gas station we stopped for drinks and to ask for directions
and all the guys in there stared at Lorenzo in silent but obvious animosity
because he was black. From that point on he decided he would stick to staying
in the car. I wasn’t accustomed to such blatant displays of racism and it
shocked me that people were still like this. It didn’t shock me enough to say
anything though, as we made double time back to the car and left in a hurry.
We had some friends who lived off of the
UGA campus in an old house not unlike the one I lived in and their place was
always full of friends. When we got to Georgia we went shopping and went back
to the house and cooked up a pan of chopped potatoes and fried chicken. Their
kitchen was absolutely disgusting and we cleaned it from top to bottom as a
thank you for their hospitality and shared our food. We spent days sitting in
front of their house talking about the differences between the Midwest and the
South, differences between our universities, and a lot of random things. They
had a basketball hoop in front of their house and we played a lot of
basketball. I loved the atmosphere and
attitude of their house.
One day, bored and alone in their house
in Georgia, me and Will went for a drive out of town to the country and went
for a little hike on a trail we found. We hiked and came up to an old bridge
that was over a shallow, wide river and climbed down over the bridge until we
were at frame beneath the place where you walk and sat there with our feet
dangling over the water and prayed. The river on both sides had a little grass-covered
meadow that thinly covered the red soil, and there were freshly budded trees
everywhere. It was very warm outside for what we were used to and I loved the
moment- I loved having left a snow covered wintery scene and coming to a new
land where the ground was red and spring was early, the trees were different
and the air smelled different and I met tons of new people, I loved being over
the water only because Will and I had the balls to jump the bridge and climb
down onto the frame.
“Will, I love the South. I want to move
here and live on this red earth,” I said.
“I’ve always wanted to live in
Mississippi.” Will had lived in Georgia as a kid while his dad was stationed
there and loved the South. “The South is so unappreciated and underrated. There
really is so much history and I love how rustic and traditional everything is.”
We had a great time on our trip but after a week we were ready to get back
home.
The trip back I again set the cruise
control at 111 and zoomed. We stopped for Chinese in a tiny town in Tennessee
that made me sick and had food that was entirely too overpriced. Just outside
of that town a huge storm hit and was so intense I could barely see the road and
everyone on the highway slowed down to about 20 mph. Coming back into the
Midwest we hit another massive blast of cold air that really reminded us of our
homecoming. Leaving the cold a week earlier we hated it but on the way back it
was welcomed as a comfortable familiarity. At about 10pm in the middle of
nowhere in the perfectly flat land we decided to pull off the side of the road.
I took an exit that had nothing, not even a gas station and drove off the
interstate for a mile or so on some little country road. Pulling off the side
of the road we put Porcelain by Red Hot Chili Peppers on repeat, rolled down
the windows and each drifted a few feet from the car separately. There were no
lights in any direction, except for a few faint farmhouses on the horizon. The
earth was perfectly flat and dark and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Gazing
up and listening to that sad, slow song slowly pouring out of the speakers like
honey in the 20-degree air, it was one of the most beautiful scenes of my life.
I looked at the immensity of the black dome speckled with brilliant stars and
the faint purple smear of the Milky Way and marveled at the size. It was a
great end to a spring break not spent on a foreign beach and a moment that was
occasionally brought up among us guys throughout the years as a favorite.
I liked Georgia and during the
spring semester of my freshman year I thought about moving down there out of
depression and growing pains and doing college down there. Mike had been toying
with the idea of moving for a few months and I tried hard to persuade him not
to. The beginning of finals week was when Mary and I had the falling out and at
the end of it was when Mike came in and told me his car was packed and I
refused to acknowledge him. He got really angry and yelled at me. “At least say
good-bye to me!”
After 5 minutes of trying several
different approaches, including being sensitive, angry, sad, guilt tripping, etc.
he finally started to tear up out of frustration. This was the only approach
that worked and finally I gave in.
“I loved Mary and she left me. Now
you are going to, too? My two best friends both leaving me in the same week?”
“It’s not like that, dude,” he tried
to explain. I refused to say anything else and then he finally left. I never
spoke to Mike again except very briefly and awkwardly on the phone after that. I
was very hurt about Mary and Mike and for the next several weeks I pretty well
stayed in my room and thought about moving to Georgia.
Chapter 3
Shortly afterwards, two weeks into
summer vacation, Will came home from the road. I entered the summer with no
grand plans and had no clue that it would end up being not only the summer I
met Glacier, but the best summer of my life. Will had spent 3 months on the
road working for the US Geological Survey taking soil samples all around the
country and was back for a week, full of stories. We spent a lot of time
talking and he had a thing where he loved gathering rocks from every distinct
environment he had been to and he had a whole box of rocks from Wyoming,
Mississippi, Kansas, and tons of other places. One day I was sitting in front
of my window after a game of tennis baseball in the cul-de-sac and in front of
my house they were mowing around bushes when a nest of tiny baby rabbits was
scared out from the bushes. I immediately jumped up and grabbing a cardboard
box while running down stairs sprinted outside and began chasing rabbits. I
caught two and thought they were the most adorable things on God’s green earth.
They fit in the palm of my hand and I dialed up the humane society to see if
they would accept them but for some reason or another they wouldn’t so I called
my grandparents and they said to bring them up because there was no way I could
release the tiny baby rabbits into the wild to die. I drove the 30 minutes to
the countryside where they lived and my grandparents accepted them. “I’ve
raised a lot of rabbits,” said my grandpa. They bought bottles to nurse the
little things and raised them until they were grown enough to be turned loose
in the woods. My grandparents were farmers but since they were now too old to
farm, they just had a big garden where they grew tomatoes, blueberries,
peppers, corn, watermelons, pumpkins, and a few other random things. I was very
close with them and spent a lot of time with them, especially during the spring
and summer when I worked on their property. Every Tuesday they would drive into
town and take me to lunch, and every Friday I would work it out with my class
schedule so that in the morning I could drive up to their house to eat a
pancake breakfast and work for the day. This tradition lasted all throughout
college and was one that I dearly cherished. My first year in college my
grandpa was 80 years old and worked sunup to sundown, every single day. He was
always building things or doing projects around the house, so there was always
a lot of work to be done at their place between the big garden and the
projects. I used to take friends up there, and we would help him with his
projects and he would pay us. He was retired military, having served from WWII
through Vietnam. My grandma was from the rural deep south and still held to her
roots with her cooking and her manner of speech.
One day a few weeks after school ended we
were all lazing around the house when Will hung up from a phone call and turned
to me and asked what I was going to do for the summer and I said pick up a few
more shifts a week waiting tables- other than that, nothing really. He said he
had a better proposition. “How about spending the summer on the road?” His
partner had decided he couldn’t handle anymore time on the road and although I
knew nothing of soil or science, Will said all I had to be able to do was read
a map and drive, and this I could easily do. All we were doing anyways was
digging holes and gathering soil, nothing that required all sorts of field skills-
but still in the roughest and most rugged states in the lower 48. Up until then
I hadn’t been on any trips longer than 14 days. Working with Will, not only
would I be working, but I could travel across the country and I couldn’t
imagine a better way to spend my summer vacation. A week later I was shooting
across the country in Queen Latifah to Denver and then to Idaho after quitting
my job and selling my car. I had no idea what lie ahead of me when I signed up
for that job, but it was great to leave town for the summer and have an
adventure.
We left in the morning about 8am and got
into Denver around 6pm and went out to eat. We went to one of Will’s friend’s
house named Brent and crashed on his couch for the night. Brent was asleep by
the time we made it in because he got up every morning to run at 5am. As he was
sneaking around the living room in the dark the next morning I, in the most
condescending, patronizing voice I could create broke the dark silence with “so
you’re Brent, huh?” He was startled but amused and said in a very courteous
voice, “yes, I’m Brent.” I rolled over and went back to sleep without even so
much as saying “thanks for the hospitality, bro” and he kept chuckling and went
out for his run. Will woke me up at 7 with a slap on the butt and said we had
to be up and on our way to the Denver Federal Center. Brian was just getting
out of the shower and he was a massive, muscled rugby player that could have
easily ripped my arms off and I looked over at him and said again in my
condescending, unimpressed voice “so you’re Brent huh?” and Will was shocked
and embarrassed and started apologizing for me while giving me a what the heck are you thinking I’m gonna
kick your butt, dude face but Brent started laughing in his easy-going way
and I jumped up and smiled and told him I was only kidding, I knew good and
well he wouldn’t have much of a fight if he got into it with me, and “hey by
the way man you have any tips for my triceps? I’m trying to put on a little
muscle and by the way thanks a ton of letting us crash at your pad, bro.”
We made it to the Denver Federal Center
and went through screening and a whole lot of bureaucratic nonsense being that
I was going to be working for the government and driving their truck and using
their tools and all. We got a lot of supplies, a brand new Ford Expedition with
big mud tires on it, government credit cards, government IDs, and lots of tools.
We jumped in and with me behind the wheel we headed to the northwest. We were
going to be in the most rugged and wild areas of the country- and we were both
pumped. On the way there we went through Utah and it was great to be there
again because I love the desert there, the red and orange rocks, the mountains-
it is all breath taking.
Late that day we came into extreme
southeast Idaho and stopped at our first predetermined site- a place called
Bear Lake. The only things we did were get as close as possible to a randomly
predetermined point on a map, take a surface sample, dig a few feet with an
auger into the ground and take a sample, and then dig a few more and take
another sample, snap a few pictures, and do quick paperwork for the site. It
really was extremely easy, paid well, and best of all I got to travel all day
with a good friend- I didn’t need to know anything about soil science. One of
the very first things I saw in Idaho was a bull moose eating off a bush beside
a lake. I didn’t know there were moose in Idaho and was extra stoked about
that. I screeched to a stop and began snapping pictures. I saw several moose,
several bears and even a herd of elk that summer.
Since there was nothing else to do except
drive and dig a few holes a day, we worked from sunup to sundown, 6 days and 80
hours a week. We made our way to Pocatello (a name I never used, because I have
a juvenile tendency to intentionally butcher names of people, places or things.
At any given moment I might call that place Pontacello, Pocahontas, or
Platonica) where we ate at Dickens (I never used that name either- it became
Dinkies, Stankies, Stinkies) and slept. We wanted to work as many hours a day
as possible seeing as we had nothing else to do anyways and we loved the land
and the wilderness. We rose early in the morning everyday and soon knocked out
the southern part of the state, with its varied topography but with lots of
desert that I loved. In the same day, crisscrossing all over the state I might
wake up in the desert and enter some heavy mountains around noon and then end
up in the desert again at night. In southern Idaho I had no idea what I might
run into in any given day. Being in the wide-open nature also meant that we
pooped and peed in the open field. That in and of itself is quite a liberating
feeling, squatting down in the wide open with your pants off for all of nature
to see and letting your body do its thing.
I grew
up in the desert in Southern California and after a few years in the humid green
Midwest, seeing a desert again was fantastic. There were hills covered in red
sand and sagebrush for as far as I could see beneath a pure blue sky that could
suck you in. I lived in the lower
Midwest in a small town, very close to the country and spent a lot of time out
there, hiking all over the hills and fishing- I absolutely love being out in
the trees and hills so this job was a perfect match for me.
The Expedition was a big, heavy beast but
was surprisingly nimble and seeing as how it wasn’t my vehicle and I had to pay
nothing for maintenance or repair, I drove that thing extremely hard. I found
out the first day that it was governed to 105 miles per hour, which rather
saddened me. We worked in very rural areas and on highways I drove very fast
firstly out of curiosity and then out of boredom the entire summer. I had that
truck over 100 mph probably over 100 separate times in two months. When we
weren’t on highways but instead on dirt or mountain roads, I had a lot of fun
because the roads were in such horrible conditions that normal vehicles could
never make it through and four-wheel drive was an absolute necessity. Every
single day we were in the mountains the underside of the Expedition was drug on
rocks and within a few weeks the running boards were smashed to pieces, not to
mention we chewed up a set of brand new tires in a month and at one point spent
2 days in the shop because of tearing something major up that I can’t remember.
Some days in the unseasonably rainy desert I would be in a foot of mud, spinning
the tires to keep them from gumming up with mud as they fought to grab onto the
slippery slop to claw the 2 ton monster an inch at a time and another day be
rock climbing on some little road on the side of a mountain, with a several
hundred foot drop if I happened to slide too far and off the path. It was a
challenge, a chore, and nerve racking, but extremely entertaining to at times
be driving in a foot of mud, or crossing rivers with water washing over the
hood of the truck, or just generally driving on the roughest roads I’d ever
seen. I learned very quickly the finer points of navigating an enormous Ford
Expedition in roads barely suitable for a pack mule and honed my off-road
skills.
Something that completely astonished me
about Idaho was the free-range for cattle. Cows are pathetically stupid
animals, entirely incapable of even the most seemingly elementary and
rudimentary of tasks aside from eating, sleeping, and mooing. For some reason
or another, a small group of cows will have the entire state to roam and yet
decide to cluster on the highway. This can be a real pain when you’re driving
and suddenly see 15 cows lined up on the road. They don’t move if you honk,
yell, or even hit and kill one of their friends. They also will stick their
entire face into a patch of cactus for a single blade of grass and neglect the
cactus-free pasture a few feet away. They will come up with a face full of
cactus needles, chewing on them, completely oblivious to the cause of the pain,
moo a few times randomly, and then stick their face right back into the cactus.
A few days into the job we were an hour
into Caribou National Forest- a huge national park with extensive wilderness.
That summer was unusually wet and there was a lot of mud. Being in extremely remote
areas made me nervous in the event that we broke down or somebody got hurt. The
last house we passed before this site was probably around 30 miles away and we
were easily 20 miles away from the nearest paved road (a two hour trip in these
rarely-traveled dirt roads), so we were deep into no man’s land wilderness- a
place where if you just so happened to fall dead the next time anyone would see
you would be on judgment day. It was the last sample of the day, close to
sunset and we were on our way back to Pocatello for the night, driving on some
crappy dirt road and at one point the road on one side was particularly muddy
and the other side decent, but for fun I decided to veer through the mud. Because
of the flat surface of the mud I couldn’t see exactly where the road ended and
where the ditch began, so I went too far to the right and slightly off the road
and the right side of the truck dipped down into the ditch and the truck became
high-centered at a 45 degree angle. I tried for a while to get out but it was
all no use. We tried everything- rocking it with Will bouncing on the hood,
pushing, digging around the wheels, turning cart wheels, speaking and babbling
in gibberish trying to evoke the spirits of the Idaho wilderness, pinching our
nose and spinning around in a circle 3 times- but nothing worked. So then we
tried walking to a ranger station 10 miles away laden down with all of our
non-perishable food and a gallon water jug each but decided there would never
be enough time before the sun went down and we didn’t want to be walking around
at night so we went back to the truck after about a mile. We had enough food
and water to last us a day. I had one bar of life on my cell and no signal. So
we climbed up the nearest hill in the barren mountainous wilderness to look for
signal. This trip up the mountain took 20 minutes one-way. With one miserable
fleeting bar of signal I dialed 411 and got the county sheriff but the line
kept getting disconnected because of the weak signal. After a while and in
between dropped calls, I managed to tell them we were stuck in mud and which
road we were on, complete with our GPS coordinates- they promised to bring a
truck within an hour. After 2 hours, I called back and for the next hour it was
dispatch radioing whoever was coming for us and endless confusion- they
couldn’t find us. They told us to honk the horn so maybe whoever was stumbling
around the mountains could hear our direction, asked us again for the
coordinates, which road we were on, and said if no one was there after an hour
to call 911. We did just that and it was more confusion, dropped calls, and by
now it was pitch black and 10pm- not to mention it was below freezing outside.
Each time we ran up the hill it was a steep, tiresome hike. We heard wolves
howling while we were waiting in the car but decided to run up the hill with
shovels for protection and try calling again. Eventually the phone’s battery died
while I was making a call and then the nervousness turned into fear and
desperation. It was after midnight when the phone died and the wolves began
howling that sounded like within a stone’s throw. We both felt full blown panic
and heard running in the trees mixed with howling and immediately began
screaming, shouting, and it occurred to me suddenly that I might die on this
barren remote mountain 1,500 miles from home. We began yelling “Don’t run! They will chase
us. Maybe can we scare them away!”
“We will die together! We will fight
till the end!” pumping ourselves up, punching each other in the chest, yelling
threats at the wolves. “Come and get us! I’ll kill you!” We began throwing
rocks into the trees and then sticks. Tonight if I die I die with my best
friend, and I truly believed in my heart that I would die any at moment. Up
until that point I had never been that close to death and had always envisioned
it as this fearful sensation, any moment I may die, I am terrified, but it was
quite the opposite for me. I was pumped, my blood was rushing, I was ready to
defend myself and protect my fellow man and I was calmly resigned to whatever
outcome. Will and I began to scream songs and prayers of praise to God most
high and began inching our way down the mountain begging for our lives back to the truck never having seen
even one wolf through the darkness but we were nonetheless relieved to be
seated in safety.
I woke up at 6am and groaned and
went back to sleep. I had dreamt all night of deliverance, of phone calls with
distant dispatchers in a far-off land of paved roads and traffic lights and
restaurants with warm coffee pots, of being pulled out of the miserable pit I
sank the old grey beast into with my horseplay. At 8am Will woke me with some
rather vigorous shakes. “Wake up! I hear engines.” My first thought was that he
was just imagining things but I cracked the window and sure enough I heard the
same thing. I prayed it wasn’t an airplane and heard it closer and closer and
then a 4-wheeler came into view in my driver mirror. When I stepped out he
cussed at us, angrily asking why we were up here on the side of this God-forsaken
hill. When I explained the situation he said they had been looking for us
continuously all night and were just about to add another 20 people to the
search team. Search team? My jaw dropped. “Why didn’t they just send a truck
with a chain?”
“They did, but they can’t find you
boys.” After 10 minutes a one-ton Chevy Sheriff’s truck with an entourage of 2
other trucks rounded the corner and the sheriff jumped out. He too began
cussing at us. Why you boys up here on
this mountain? Even the locals don’t come up here- no one comes up here! The
mud is impassible. It took us all night to drive up here because of the mud!
Besides that, this is dangerous land, full of mountain lions and wolves. Ah,
Midwest boys, eh? That explains it. We gave him the same speech and said he
had to radio the helicopter that we were ok. My heart stopped. Helicopter?
Search team? Immediately I panicked and thought we would be financially responsible
for this elaborate Artic Alaska production. We only got stuck in mud for a few
hours! All we need is for someone to yank us out! I kept my mouth shut and then
a helicopter came around from behind the mountain and landed in a field a few
hundred yards away. I told him we only needed to be pulled out, no helicopter
needed for that but for whatever reason they had to touch down and then fly
off- we were to pay for nothing, it was all legal stuff, its ok, we’ll pull you
out, don’t have to worry about paying. We were pulled out and drove off,
counting every blessing as we made that trip out of Caribou-Targhee. I swore to
never again play in mud.
We had several more sites scattered in
remote, dangerous wilderness in Idaho, including the Bitterroot range which has
the largest wilderness area in the lower 48, high peaks, few roads, fewer
towns, and a scary name. This was the bigger brother of the Caribou-Targhee,
which had already given us a good working over. Luckily enough we had no
incidents there, as we took few chances and played it safe in that beautiful,
barren land. We seemingly had snuck through the roughest of the rough without
angering any more wolf packs.
My memories of those first few weeks in
the southern part of the second most beautiful state God created are of rain,
cold temperatures and storms. It rained 17 of the first 18 days I was there.
One day during the second week we were in Idaho we were in Curlew National
Grasslands in southern Idaho digging a hole on some BLM land and we were both
sitting in some grass. We were constantly dodging storms those days and we knew
at the moment there was one behind us. I just happened to randomly turn around
for some reason and saw a funnel cloud dropping down out of the clouds and
nearly touching planet earth. We both jumped to our feet and turned to see a
long, scraggly tornado about a quarter mile in front of us moving laterally
fighting to reach down and touch the ground. It was extremely unnerving, scary,
humbling, and awe-inspiring to be alone in a field that stretched as far as you
could see and to be alone and close to such a beast. We stood there silently,
mesmerized. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a tornado but the other times I
had always been in within close shot of cover- in this instance cover was
nonexistent- the truck was 100 paces away and offered little shelter from a
tornado. Luckily, it burned itself out before it could touch the ground and
wasn’t even moving towards us to begin with but that moment is nonetheless one
that sticks with you forever.
Chapter 4
A few weeks after the Caribou-Targhee we
had worked our way all the way to the northern tip of Idaho. On the road,
inching closer and closer to Canada the idea occurred to us that we could find
the border with Canada and if no one was there perhaps jump the fence just to
say we had been to Canada. The whole way there we built up our nationalistic
hatred and racism and threw every race joke and stereotype we could possibly
conjure up towards Canada. It was of course all in good fun. Our work map had besides
highways and roads every deer trail and goat path in existence clearly marked
and we found a two-tracker that was a good ways from civilization and snaked
north until disappearing into Canada that we drove for a good while, completely
in the wilderness and filled with excitement and anticipation the closer we got.
We knew we were close and checked our GPS to confirm we were at the border. We
didn’t see anything that marked a border so decided to keep driving, and
suddenly around a turn we then arrived at an impassible bulldozed part of the
janky dirt road that clearly was the border- but no fence. Getting out of the
car we saw in all its magnificence the US border with Canada- an impassible
road that they had destroyed, complete with a warning sign threatening fines
and prosecution for misuse and misbehavior. Looking laterally, the only way I
could describe the border would be to say an enormous lawnmower passed through the
forest and completely bulldozed a 20-yard wide line to mark the territories- it
looked to me like the Great Wall of China got turned inside out and overrun
with grass. All the trees inside that zone had been cut down and it was a
naked, bare spot they had drawn that stretched into the fog. We walked away
from the truck and hesitantly looked around. No cameras, no border patrol, no
nothing by which to enforce their weighty threats! And so we ran down into the
massive sinkhole in the middle of the road, up the other side and into Canada.
“Oy mate! Fancy this, I’m in Canady, eh, what say you about yer stinkin hockey
ya bloody Canucks eh?!” we yelled, using British accents as mock Canadian
accents. We took turns on either side of the border, imitating whichever side
we were on and creating mock arguments. “Shut up you stupid ignorant redneck
American!” “Go play some hockey you Canuck! Go make some syrup!” “Shut up,
George Bush!” We made every juvenile attempt at a Canadian accent and proclaimed
how much better the US was while standing inside Canada. We meant none of it,
of course, but it was still hilarious. We walked back into the land of the free
and the home of the brave and sat looking at Canada and talking about how cool
we were for finding this hidden spot on planet earth. As a souvenir I ran across the border and picked up a maple
leaf to take with me back home. I lost it that summer and still miss it.
At the end of June Will had a wedding to
go to so he headed back east and I went on a float trip in Southern Missouri
with my family. We drove straight through and he dropped me off in Missouri,
where I linked up with my parents who were also on the road and we drove to the
place my family chose. Will and I were so relieved to leave behind the cold,
rainy curtain of Idaho behind and to feel finally like summertime in the
scorching heat and humidity of the Midwest. On the drive, we came into Kansas
and hit the humidity wall and triple digit temps and welcomed both with open
arms, windows down and Red Hot Chili Peppers at full blast. We had been away
for almost a month and although we were having a blast in the mountains, a
short break from life on the road was due. Idaho is insanely beautiful and
immense, wild, rugged, natural, and raw, but a lifestyle where you travel all
day everyday, never seeing the same thing more than once and never knowing what
the next day holds and only having one other human being to speak to and look
at continually becomes wearisome. We woke up at dawn everyday and drove 16-18
hours a day, stopping only maybe 20 minutes at a time, 8-10 times a day to dig
a hole and then back in the truck all day until it got too dark to see. Only
then would we stop. You cannot maintain friendships or stability with that
life- and we were college students, accustomed to constant social interaction.
That lifestyle is fun and adventurous in spurts but gets wearisome after time.
This was to be my first float trip, and I
loved it. My family had driven for an entire day to get here and we had driven
22 hours straight from Idaho, rotating drivers in the seat and 5 hour energies
in our hands. I met my family at an off-ramp and we went to the place and set
up camp and the next day we drifted downstream on a big inflatable raft,
fished, and drank beer in the day and at night built a huge fire and cooked and
ate fish and slept in tents. It was a mixture of rafting, camping and fishing
in one trip, and was a ton of relaxation and fun. The Ozarks in Missouri are
indescribably beautiful and the green of the trees and bushes is so deep that
it seems to never end.
One day floating downstream we came to a
particularly rough patch of river that had a sharp bend and boulders in the
middle that high centered the rafts. Ninety percent of the streams are slow,
lazy currents but there was a dangerous place that was totally unexpected, with
these boulders underwater and a fast current. We made it through without
incident but a family behind us on their raft flipped and all their supplies
and children went into the fast current with rocks hidden beneath the water
that can really bang you up if you fall on them or if the current slams your
body into them. My dad and uncle and I jumped ship into the river and began
fielding the supplies that were coming towards us and trying to help the
family. We eventually got them squared away and as they went down ahead of us,
a couple strapped into a kayak coming downstream hit the rocks and capsized. We
went to them as quickly as we could and used all our strength to flip them back
over. After maybe 10 seconds we were able to, and they came up choking and
coughing and gasping for air. While we were helping them, some other float
trippers and their raft traffic came and backed up behind the disabled kayak,
slamming into each other and we were in danger of being run over and injured as
we were on foot in chest-deep water. Glad to have saved the kayaker’s lives
(who thanked us profusely for saving them from nearly certain death), we
quickly jumped back on our raft and paddled away before being run down.
I loved waking up in the morning to my
grandma scrambling two-dozen eggs and frying bacon and making coffee for the
entire family in the wilderness of Southern Missouri. That trip was the last I
took with my grandma and therefore one of my most missed times in my life. An
old country gal raised 4 kids, she loved taking care of her family and was an
exceptional woman who would always wake up at the crack of dawn and drink
coffee and make breakfast. Little by little the family would begin trickling
out of tents, toothbrush in mouth and rubbing eyes, ready to eat and pack up
and jump back on the river for the day. I had to leave a few days earlier than
the rest of the family and negotiated my departure. I met Will on the plains in
west central Missouri and after a four-day hiatus from life on the road, we
were back in Queen Latifah and headed back to Idaho.
Will and I made every reasonable attempt
to sleep in hotels rather than cowboy it in the hills. We also made every
reasonable attempt to reach a sizable town which held better chances of having
a decent hotel, but often times this was impossible and sometimes in tiny towns
we had to bunk in the local inn which looked like a scrapyard, with a
flickering neon light that was run by an enormous toothless woman at the front
desk with a wig falling off her head smoking a cigarette and three dirty cats
asleep on the counter. We would always roll slowly by the inn, windows down and
debate to keep going or scope out the inside or see if there were any other
inns in town. I nicknamed dirty, dingy motels “jank-n-cranks” and one day in
Lewiston we checked out one motel and then went to scope another. We walked
inside, made small talk with the lady at the desk and then making eye contact
with one another and knowing it was time to leave, we politely said good-bye
and walked out. “What’s wrong, saw the place and decide you don’t like it?” she
yelled at us as we left. “Yep!” I yelled with my back to her, walking toward
the exit. “Its clean, ya know!” she snarled. I kept making my way towards the
door and began singing rhythmically and loudly “number one jank, number one
crank,” over and over. We both laughed hysterically once outside at her reaction
and at our inside joke. Clean, decent motels are hard to come by in the
backwoods of mountain Idaho. Some nights we couldn’t find one nearby, so we
made way towards the nearest town while gathering samples along the way,
sometimes until 1 or 2am until we made it into a town and slept.
After Idaho we were charged with doing
the same thing in Montana. We were crossing into Montana on a dark highway one
night at about 2am. Will was asleep and I was silently following the yellow
lines across the border where we intended to find a motel and stop for the
night, hypnotized and focused on my mission. The road was completely empty and
dark and out of nowhere I saw in my peripherals some elk running across the road.
Elk are massive beasts, the size of a horse and I immediately slammed on the
brakes, panicking and dodging the first few, to see out of the darkness about a
dozen more in front of me running across the road. Will jumped up in his seat,
suddenly awake and plastered up against the dashboard from the brakes, while I
must have looked like a panicked ship captain in a hurricane, gripping the
wheel, blown by the wind, navigating his vessel away from destruction. Swerving
around elk and standing up on the brake pedal I came to a very quick stop and
hit an elk at about 20 mph, which was towering over the hood when I hit him.
The impact barely phased the behemoth elk. He looked annoyed and confused (what
is this big ugly grey thing that just hit me?) and kept running, and a few more
went around the truck to the front, confused and grunting and following the
pack. They all disappeared into the trees, all was calm again, and we were glad
for our slim luck to have not wrecked the truck hitting one of those things at
60 mph.
I have an aunt and uncle that live in
Ennis and for the fourth of July and a few odd weekends we stayed with them. They
were very hospitable and fed us and let us celebrate with them for the fourth.
Ennis had a nice little parade and rodeo that we went to and it was a great
time. My uncle had a box of fireworks that allowed us to have quite a show and
quite a lot of fun as we set the entire box on fire and sat down as everything
exploded and shot into the sky at once. They knew the state well and told us to
make sure we went through Glacier. Our last morning there, my aunt made us
blueberry pancakes.
After we left Idaho the heat started. Idaho
was cold and rainy and Montana was hot and sunny. Western Montana was as
beautiful as Idaho and so rugged, mountainous, and wild; I loved the natural, green,
rocky unspoiled beauty. A few days into Montana our trek across the state swooping
on soil sample sites took us to Glacier- we even had a sample to collect inside
the park. We were super excited about it and said we were going to take the
second half of the day to pass slowly through it and take our time since it was
so famous. It was a beautiful sunny day, fresh and mid 70’s when we entered the
National Park and once we entered we followed the main road with all the other
cars. The main road from the valley going up onto the mountain is called Going
to the Sun Road, a little narrow mountain road that twists and goes for a long
drive all the way up to the top of some mountains where you can see forever.
The going was very slow as there were so many people going and the road is tiny
with sharp turns. We stopped a few times and snapped pictures and as we went
up, the higher we climbed beneath us with our eyes and mouths open we saw the
world opening up, turning inside out, and out of the bosom of planet earth
itself rising the most massive things I have ever seen- monstrous mountains
that rise from the pit of the world to the sky as I was climbing to the sun
astride the road of the sun itself. Every time we stopped to look and stand on
the stone wall that lined the outside of the road I could see farther and
farther into the clear distance across the universe. The size alone of these
mountains on top of the globe means that they wouldn’t fit in the depths of the
ocean and that there don’t exist mathematics, numbers or vocabulary of
sufficient capability to properly or accurately measure neither the size nor
the beauty of these mountains that sit King atop the country of my birth where
it meets its northern neighbor.
As our altitude increased, the
temperature markedly decreased and the wind picked up. At the top of Going to
the Sun Road, a whole crowd of people had stopped beside a small brook and was
bottling up water there as it ran down the mountain. Will and I had been
drinking water from creeks and rivers all summer long, being that we spent most
of our time deeper into the wilderness than most of humanity’s imagination
dares to venture, let alone their person and so we never worried about
pollution or disease but just for novelty’s sake we emptied out some gallon
jugs we constantly kept on hand in case of emergency with water from a creek a
few miles down the road and filled them with water from this creek in Glacier
National Park. At the top of the mountain range, at the continental divide is
the border with Canada. We kept straight inside the US down the other side of
the range and were disgusted to see the contrast between the two sides of the
divide- the western side is beautiful and green and breathtaking while the
farther east you get from Glacier it turns into this dry, crackly, barren Judas
Iscariot armpit. In my mind it only reinforced the beauty of Glacier and I
proudly, from that day forward proclaimed Glacier National Park as the most
beautiful place on earth and thereafter stood thoroughly convinced until the
Sierra Madre del Sur tested my conviction.
Chapter 5
After getting out of the mountains in the
westernmost third of the state, we entered into rolling hills and golden wheat
fields- a land completely different from the western mountainous third. I felt
like I was entering into another state entirely- if mountain Montana is rugged,
wild, mountainous and rocky the rest of the state is hot, dusty, yellow and dry.
There were tons of mosquitos in the mountains and tons of grasshoppers on the
plains. I believe the mosquito to be the state bird of the left half and the grasshopper
to be that of the right because right from day one after entering the eastern
half the air was so thick with grasshoppers that we couldn’t drive with the
windows down, even on the highway because the truck would be filled with them
after 10 minutes. This was towards the end of July and by the time Will and I
made it to flat Montana, we were both starting to get a little stir crazy. At
this point we had been each other’s only company for 90% of the last two months
of one another’s life except for text messaging in the rare event we had
service and church on Sunday, and more often than not that would be a
congregation of maybe 15 people. We quickly reached the point of missing
normalcy and routine in our life and wanted to get on and finish the summer. We
were delighted to reach the plains because here was located the headwaters of
the Missouri river, the river that flowed through my homeland. Back home, we
used to spend a lot of time doing bonfires on the banks and other random
excursions, and here were the headwaters of the river that I loved so much. As
soon as we could, we took a little small road to a place where the river was
located and were surprised to see a little shallow, slow-flowing stream with
children playing in it. I was used to seeing a mighty monster of a river on
which traveled tug boats and barges that were hundreds of yards long. The scene
here in Montana was a very different one to what I was accustomed to, but
fascinating and nostalgic, nonetheless. I threw a stick into the river and told
myself, “soon this little stick is going to flow through home.” Here was a baby
of a stream that grew into a mighty beast of a river and was a mile wide where
it passed near my home, and was a great piece of home that we were able to see-
I’d now seen the beginning and the end of the longest river in North America.
We generally stuck to the border with
Canada and collected all the samples all the way to Westby- a town that sits on
the border between North Dakota, Montana and Canada. We spent a lot of time in
Havre, a place that has got to be the ugliest place on the face of God’s green
earth. It was completely full of mosquitos (and of course the infinite
grasshoppers) and there were no decent places to eat there. The mosquitos in
that place have to be on par with those Moses brought down on the Egyptians in
the plague- the air was thick with them and they so were so big that from a
distance sometimes I thought they were prairie chickens that had miraculously
developed the capability of flight. There was absolutely nothing to like about Havre
and I cringed every time the name passed through my mind and choked back a
toddler’s tantrum every time we had we had to go there or even pass through
there. This is also partly due to the fact that one night at truck stop outside
Havre I ate a bacon cheeseburger. A few hours later I leapt out of bed and
rushed into the bathroom, groaning in misery as I vomited so violently that what
looked like at least 3 of my internal organs along with that bacon cheeseburger
exited my body. I was so sick all night I cursed and blamed the entire state
and every cheeseburger on the planet for causing me such grief.
There were quite a few ghost towns in
eastern Montana and I got a kick out of them. For the most part, we stuck to
working along the border and every chance we got to sneak into Canada we took.
One day in particular there was a dirt road between farms that actually formed
the border and forked at a point with the left fork staying in the US and the
right fork going into Canada. We took pictures there and ran in and out of
Canada for fun but after running 10 feet inside Canada for the hundredth time we
got pretty bored. We contemplated ways we could one day go inside and go to
something interesting inside Canada- we decided to try to go to Calgary, a city
a few hours north of the border. I didn’t have a passport and therefore no
documentation to reenter the US, so we tossed ideas among us of going to one of
the unmonitored roads that entered Canada and using it as our cross point and
finding a Canadian highway to take us to Calgary. Will decided it was too risky
to try to sneak with a US government vehicle, so we would just deal with US
border patrol upon reentry rather than gamble sneaking in. So one Sunday we
used as our excuse to go inside Canada going to church in Calgary with a church
in our fellowship because the ones in Montana were too far south. Sweet Grass
was the border town and the Canadian border patrol at the crossing lazily and
uninterestedly asked us a few questions. We gave quick answers and he let us
in. Canadians really have no interest or problem with foreigners entering like
the Americans do. We entered Canada without incident and high fived each other,
excited but also aware we had just entered the point of no return. Rather than
chicken out and head back, we pointed the truck north and racked up kilometers
inside Canada. I suddenly became nervously aware that I was no longer inside my
country- my citizenship, my driver’s license, all the security of being in my
country quickly went away as I realized I suddenly was a foreigner. It’s a much
different feeling than just going to another state.
We
had a blast in Calgary. It was a few hours drive north and we first bugged out
that the signs were all in kilometers and the gasoline in liters, something
completely foreign to our Standard eyes. We switched out currency at a gas
station and drove north. Calgary was remarkably clean but rather cold for mid
July. We drove up there slightly nervous of the potential consequences of using
a government vehicle to drive 200 miles outside the country but we figured our
superiors in Denver would never find out. We ate out in at a place called Swiss
Chalet and couldn’t believe how expensive everything was compared to the US and
how small the portions are in comparison, as well. We spent the day sightseeing
and driving around Calgary. To me it seemed very much like the US but with
kilometers, and a little bit cleaner. We also enjoyed the stares of Canadians
as we drove around their country in a beefed up Ford Expedition with government
plates.
At the end of the day we started the long
trip back to the US. We were pretty nervous we would be detained or denied
entry for not having a passport. We made it to the border and at the port of
entry at Sweet Grass, Montana, pulled up and I told them I had no passport. I
showed them my driver’s license and government ID and told them I had just gone
into Canada to shop. He asked where I was born, where I went to school, and a
few other questions. He asked if I had drugs or alcohol or any weapons. They
were pretty suspicious and searched the vehicle. I was written a warning for
not having a passport and then granted entry into the country. We both breathed
a huge sigh of relief that we went into Canada and back into the US without any
problems. We only hoped that our bosses in Denver wouldn’t find out and that it
somehow wasn’t a federal offense to use a government vehicle the way we had.
After the trip to Calgary we were heading
a few hours south into Montana to start work the next morning. We had just
entered the US, maybe 5 miles inside and Will was driving. He had plans to call
his girlfriend that afternoon and as he was talking and driving, I was kicking
back in the passenger seat, unbuckled as always. Will was always very giddy
whenever he talked to her but appeared very composed, and as he was getting
rather goofy for a moment, making faces and smiling to me that she couldn’t
see, I reached over quickly and tried to snatch the phone from his right ear to
talk to her and embarrass him but he yanked back with both hands and suddenly
we were fighting over the phone at 75 mph on the highway. He suddenly yelled
“dude!” and I looked up to see us leaving the pavement to the left into the
grass. He hit the brakes and jerked the wheel back to the pavement and the
truck overcorrected, slid and swerved across both lanes, out of control to the
other side, the wheels leaving pavement and sliding on gravel, and he yanked it
back to the left, trying to correct the truck. It went sideways the other
direction, skidding and sliding back across both lanes of the highway and I
braced myself for the truck to flip, one hand on the roof and the other on the
door, acutely aware that I was unbuckled, panicking, thinking I was surely
going to die, and we wildly careened for a few seconds out of control. Finally the
truck slid to a sideways stop and we both sat panting, relieved, at a standstill
on the interstate. We both relaxed and breathed very heavily. “Don’t ever do
that again,” he said. I promised him I never would, scared out of my mind and
glad we didn’t flip. “Good job not killing us, bone.” I immediately reached
over and buckled up and we kept down the road. He reached down between his feet
and picked up the phone, which had closed and disconnected the call.
It was late in the season and very hot
during the day- sometimes over 100. The wheat fields were a bright, glowing
bronze that stretched to the horizon in rolling waves and where they met the
vivid blue at the horizon the contrast of colors is beautiful enough to make
one forget to breathe. At some of the untouched, natural spots in eastern
Montana, there were badlands- short, sparse yellow grass on white powdery dirt
hills that had been eaten away by wind and time and that held no moisture lying
scorched beneath a short summer sun and buried under ice and snow during the
long winters. These were absolutely beautiful to me, and I loved the wheat
fields and walking among them in their neat little rows. When the sun went
down, they would light up into a fiery orange and I would look at them under the
glow, two spectacular orange seas that faded into the purple night. Also there
were lots of oil drillers that we saw and lots of salty, dried up lakes that
were as white as snow and that you couldn’t walk too close to without sinking
in.
It was also elk season, and all the rich
tycoons with their long rifles and long RV’s came flooding up to the top of the
world from as far away as Alabama. This also meant that all the hotels often
had no vacancy, especially in the more upscale areas along the major highways.
One night in particular we couldn’t find a hotel and were far away from any bigger
towns, so we decided to cowboy it under the stars. It had been a while since we
had done this and I kinda looked forward to it. We drove to some public land
not far away and off the road into the shortgrass prairie that by this time was
completely dry and dead. We were about a quarter mile south of the Canadian
border and about a mile off the highway, sandwiched between both, and we put on
our jackets, tucking our socks into our boots and our shirts into our pants to
keep out ants and any other bugs. We lied down underneath the sky and as it got
darker, out of the grey and then the purple emerged the blackest and darkest
sky I have ever seen. From one horizon to the other and back again, 360
degrees, right down to the flat earth was the most spectacular celestial show
ever seen by man, from the days of the ancient Chinese sages and Moorish merchants,
a sky with an infinite number of stars in the virgin cosmos in which evil men
have yet to tread with malicious feet and with crafty intent. In vivid, creamy
purple lied the milky way in a long purple band like a road, that went from
northwest to southeast, to the lower Midwest where it meets the upper South, to
home- the fabled silk road of old, here in flat Montana, mid-continent. We lied
there on our backs for a long time, sleepless and mesmerized by a living sky
that was unknown to Will’s Midwestern eyes and a distant memory for my former
desert eyes. We spoke nostalgically of home, and of climbing the purple silk
road and following it back to a green, lush land of slow, muddy rivers and
humid nights where the sky is hazy and foggy, and hey Will, what if we could go
home through space, through that bright sky, forget the daytime I love the
nighttime, how about climbing along on that purple tiger stripe all the way
back home surrounded by these beautiful stars, I’m getting tired of living on
the road everyday and digging in this yellow dry dusty heat. We lied there most
of the night while the temperature plummeted and we froze there on the hard,
parched, yellow land trying to get comfortable, tossing and turning. It was
hard to take my eyes off the sky and put them behind my boring eyelids, but we
finally fell asleep and then woke up as the northeastern sky was starting to
lighten up and we got up and staggered over to the truck with our breath
frosting, hey man who’s friggin idea was this anyways to sleep out here on this
cold hard ground in the freezing night when we have a perfectly good seat to
lay back in over there in the truck, gosh dangit these stupid elk hunters
taking our warm beds and warm showers, man I’m freezing, maybe I can finally
get some good sleep, hey crack the window so it doesn’t get too hot in here
with us stuffing up the truck with our breath and our sweat and stink from
yesterday.
The sunrise woke us up again, and we
decided we might as well get to work, with or without sleep. The nearest site
was super close, but on a farm so we had to stop and ask permission from the
farmers before we started digging in their land. “Hi, howya doin? I work with
the US Geological Survey, uh…. here’s my ID, see? And we’re on a project going around all over
the state taking soil samples. Can we take a sample in your field?” He didn’t
have a problem but wanted to know where we had come from looking so haggard and
rough, in dirty clothes at 8am when the day had just started. He found out we
had slept about 2 miles down the road in the field and had been awake about 15
minutes. “So have you boys eaten anything yet? How about coming in for
breakfast and coffee?” We were extremely grateful for the offer and accepted,
inwardly squealing like 10 year-old girls. His wife made us toast and cereal
and we sat around the table, feeling awkward over their hospitality, sitting
there stinking, dried mud on our faces and arms, drinking coffee and talking
about the job, self-conscious, wondering if this couple thought that we were
railcar hobos who had stolen the truck- certainly government employees don’t
look like this. After breakfast and coffee, we said how incredibly grateful we
were for their trust and their hospitality, and made our way out. We took the
sample and were back on the road.
It wasn’t long after that that we found
ourselves in Hutterite country. There was one day in particular it was so
miserably hot that we drank so much and we were so far from any gas stations or
places to fill up our water we began to get worried we would run out. We worked
through midday and found no places to get water, as there were no gas stations
in any of the small towns we came to. We had a sample to dig and seeing as it
was on private property, we had to ask permission. We got out and talked to the
Hutterites and they asked us about our water supply. We told them were out of
water and needed to refill, so they invited us inside one of their houses. The
man who invited us in told a woman in there to give us bread, and she gave us
these delicious, hot rolls. He came back with our water jugs filled and as he
walked us out, asked us if we wanted some vegetables. We thanked him for his
generosity and were glad we got our water filled, as who knows what bad
situation we would have found ourselves in had he not offered.
The last few weeks during that summer we
were both irritable and ready to be done. We committed ourselves to our days on
the road, rotating our CDs for the hundredth time, and stayed in our thoughts. Before
we started looping south towards the end of the job and working our way closer
to Wyoming we decided we might as well sneak into Canada one last time because
who knew when we would ever get to again. We were in farmland Montana and were
on a little dirt road that on our map led straight into Canada and we took it.
We had a hole to dig right around there and joked about taking Canadian soil
unknowingly. We didn’t know where exactly the border was, so we drove for a bit
before circling around and heading back and just assumed we crossed. A little
ways down the road, stopping to take the sample, a US border patrol vehicle
stopped us and began asking a ton of questions. We explained that we didn’t
know where the border was and said we guessed we had crossed and then just
turned back to be safe. We knew were working along the border but weren’t sure
we had crossed. He was very suspicious and kept harassing us for a long time, searched
the truck, made some calls and then let us go. We decided we were going to stay
at least a mile south of the border from then on out.
The first half of the job we worked in
the wilderness and mountains, but being that we were working eastern Montana in
these days, mostly private land close to towns, houses, farms, or otherwise
human settlements in general, the call of nature sometimes knocked rather
vigorously at your door before you could find suitable arrangements, being that
most of the land was private and there were few hills and no trees to hide
behind and oftentimes you were in sight of a farm. Sometimes this meant that
after getting permission from a farmer to take a soil sample in his wheat field
you would inconspicuously squat among the neat little rows to go number two and
do your job when he wasn’t watching, or just happen to strategically take the
sample behind the truck where he couldn’t see you, leaning up against the tire
and hurrying. At other times this meant you simply had to hold it until you got
far enough from public view to answer nature’s call- whether on the far corner
of someone’s farm or not. One such occasion had us out in the badlands, bad
land where no one lives and no one goes, bad land that is impossible to
cultivate and owned by the government because no one wants bad land, and we
squatted a few feet from one another and completed bacon and egg’s circle of
life. Walking back to the truck we noticed some quarter-sized black beetles fly
past us and land on our feces. Fascinated, we rushed back and for the next half
hour watched with our jaws dropped as half a dozen of these beetles fashioned
little balls of dung and wheeled them away amidst fights and scuffles. Neither
of us had ever seen such a thing and were totally astonished that such foul,
vile creatures would handle feces like this, what an altogether odious
existence to live only to find some turds from which to make balls to push
around. Nonetheless, it was very interesting to see the beetles fight over
poop. Will said he had heard something about these before, that they laid their
eggs inside the balls and that the children ate the poop later (how’s that
taste, Junior? That’s all the inheritance I’m leaving you!). It was pretty
nasty and I wasn’t sorry to move on after that sample.
The last event of that job occurred one
day where we stopped to dig a hole and saw some naked, untagged horses off in
the distance on public land. When we got out of the truck to work they came
running over to within a few yards or so in nervous curiosity and Will lured
them closer by throwing oats on the ground from a Quaker can while I looked on,
fascinated. These horses were absolutely enormous and all of them mares. At
shoulder they all measured more than 6 feet tall and their heads towered above
not only our own heads, but above the top of the Expedition. After several
minutes and several nervous inches, Will had them to the point that we could
touch them and we fell apart like a couple of second graders turned loose on a
playground as soon as we started petting. We stayed for probably an hour,
petting and touching these mammoth horses and falling completely in love, while
they nibbled on our shirt collars and rubbed their heads on us trying to get us
to pet them, fighting over our oats and attention, us petting them and calling
them our wild horses. We talked about what freedom they must have felt, having
the whole state to run wild upon in that flat prairie underneath the
immeasurable sky. The horses clearly were someone’s property, being so friendly
and affectionate and I never wanted to leave. Finally we had to get back in the
truck and both of us totally sad, we drove off and left the horses there. Up
until the very end, Will and I loved the freedom of the road- no schedules, no
routine, no supervision, no repetition and to us our wild horses represented
completely the summer on the road, the summer of going to the sun at Glacier, the
summer of crossing the country and living in the wilderness 90% of the time,
untamed and undomesticated, having only the sun and the wind above you and only
the sun and the wind to love. Wild horses were a very fitting name and event
for our farewell.
We had a huge campus ministry retreat at
the end of the summer, immediately following the job on the road where
ministries from all over the country (some from abroad) get together for 5 days
of worship and sermons and celebration. This year was in Virginia Beach and we
wanted so badly to be done with this exhausting, emotionally draining job and
to be with other Christian college kids on the beach. We blazed through the
last few weeks and I remember the last sample we took in the state of Montana.
After we took it, I hurled the shovel as far as I could and let out a warrior
cry and danced, glad to finally be done after 40,000 miles on the road in just
3 months. Those last few weeks helped teach me a lesson that would take 3 years
to be learned.
Chapter 6
The first place we went to was Ennis,
Montana for a day to say goodbye to my aunt and uncle and to relax. We arrived
late in the afternoon and had dinner. On the back patio, telling our tales to
my fascinated family, we told the story of how the Hutterite people had lent a
great hand by giving us water. My 80 something year-old great grandmother broke
in suddenly, in the middle of conversation after 20 minutes of silence and
staring off into the wild blue yonder (I though she’d fallen asleep) “Oh no!
Those filthy Hutterites! Your best bet is to keep going and never even speak to
them. They’re all dirty, rotten thieves and swindlers.” My aunt’s jaw dropped
and she looked over. “Mom! Did you not just hear these boys tell how the
Hutterites helped them?” My grandmother never missed a beat, but kept on right
in stride. “Oh no, don’t even speak to them. They’re awful people.” Will and I
glanced nervously at one another, holding back laughter while my aunt started
lecturing her more-than-slightly senile mother. “Mom, that’s a terrible thing
to say. That’s racist. You have little black great-grandchildren, imagine
someone saying terrible things about them.” Before my grandma could reply, I
tried using another tactic to help her see differently, and I butted in.
“Grandma, have you ever spoken to one?
They’re nice people. Have you ever met one?” I asked, knowing she probably
never had seeing as they lived on the opposite end of the state where not many
people go.
“Well…. No! But your grandfather has. If
he were still here, he’d tell you himself how they stole from him once back
when he was a young man. When he was in his 20’s he was cheated out of some
money by one.” Will and I couldn’t contain our laughter any longer at this
point. We kept our patience though, and at the end of the conversation my
grandmother had retracted all of her statements. “We might have died were it
not for the kindness of the Hutterite people. They stole nothing from us,
rather they only gave to us.” We converted a belief that had existed in her
mind for probably more than 60 years and we both felt rather accomplished that
night because no one else in the family had ever managed to change her mind on
anything.
After breakfast the next morning, we were
back on the road headed to Denver. The trip took us across Montana and into
Wyoming, which resembles pictures I’ve seen of Mars. Late that day we came into
Denver and turned in the truck, our ID’s, and bade farewell to working for the
government. We stayed for one day in Denver with Brent in his funky, hip
neighborhood, and went up into the mountains early the next day to hike for fun
before our flights the following day. On the way back into town we also went to
this stadium overlooking the city where people were running the bleachers for
exercise and both Will and I, who are athletic and play sports all the time,
were glad for a chance to work out even though Brent made us look like
schoolboys. Brent took us all around Denver that night and showed us a great
time. We all had a steak dinner and walked downtown. We crashed on his couch
and at 6am the next morning boarded a flight to Virginia Beach for the church
trip.
I was extremely excited for this event,
and I was going to see all my friends from back home plus others I’d met from
traveling around. Right from the beginning, people are constantly in your face,
happy and yelling and at first my enthusiasm I’d built up all summer on the
road easily matched everyone else’s. I saw my roommates from back home and we
danced and yelled and high-fived, but as that day wore on I began to feel
strange feelings of claustrophobia and tension. I ignored them and later that
day we went down to the beach and played sand volleyball and every 5 minutes, I
would see someone else I knew and my initial happiness quickly began fading.
The next day it worsened. I kept seeing
people I knew, and everyone was yelling and happy, but I felt odd and awkward,
and though I felt guilty about it, I ignored it. In the evening we had a dance,
complete with strobe lights and pounding electronic music and I had to leave
after 5 minutes because I was starting to have a panic attack. It freaked me
out and I went outside alone, frustrated that I had been looking forward to
this campus ministry trip all summer long during those long days on the road
when Will and I didn’t speak for hours at a time, each lost in his own thoughts,
and had daydreamt of this mini-vacation on the beach on the other end of the
country, seeing all my friends and making tons of new ones, playing in the
ocean, hearing life-changing sermons from speakers and singing praise to God
with several hundred other college kids from all over the country but instead
here I was, alone in the night, angry and claustrophobic and weird, having a
panic attack on the curb. I had begun to identify what I was feeling earlier
that day and by now was very aware of what was going on. A girl from my
hometown who ended up marrying James, my roommate was walking back to the
convention center from dinner with some friends and saw me sitting down.
Leaving the group she came to me and asked me what was going on while her
friends kept walking. “I’ve seen more people yesterday in the first hour of
being here than I’ve seen all summer combined. I have been surrounded by
nothing but woods for 3 months. Yesterday in Denver I was around people, but
they weren’t talking to me and they weren’t all so excited. This is quite a lot
to come back to your second day back in civilization.” I had been playing alone
in the woods for so long I’d misplaced my people skills and couldn’t partake in
everyone’s festive shouting. I tried my best to keep up, but it was a lot of
energy to swallow after what I’d done all summer, even being that I am
naturally very outgoing and energetic. Being around all those people and talking
to so many people at once made me feel claustrophobic and it angered me that my
trip was being ruined. I was used to being around trees and sky and wind, not
hundreds of people.
She understood what was going on and
helped me talk through it and after a little while I went back in. I felt a lot
better the remaining 2 days but still the trip to me was a downer. I got on a
bus my campus ministry had rented and fell asleep in West Virginia in late
afternoon and woke up early in the morning in a Wal-Mart parking lot back home.
Over the summer my dad had taken four thousand dollars out of my bank account
and bought me a car. I had found it on the Internet and told him to buy it for
me, and I couldn’t wait to get home to see my new car.
I went back home and my room was exactly
how I had left it. My room was exactly the same, perfectly preserved as it if
it were yesterday that I’d left, and now I felt like a completely different
person than the last time I had stood inside this room. “Hello, room. You’ve
been here all alone, untouched and preserved all this time while I’ve been
living life,” I half mumbled, half thought, as I saw it for the first time in a
long time. I looked at all of my Bob Marley posters, my posters of Chinese art,
my futon bed I slept on, and the clothes I’d not taken along with me back in
June exactly as I’d left them. I thought of all the life that had happened, all
the places I’d been, all the days my room sat here by itself while I was off
exploring the world. It filled me with a weird feeling, almost as if I’d jetted
directly from my departing day until now in a split second, and I felt as if
someone else had lived my life the past two and a half months while I’d crossed
the country. I looked out the window to the cul-de-sac and saw the grass, now
brown from the summer and lack of rain whereas it had been a bright green the
first week in June. School started in a week and I felt somewhat regretful that
I had missed the summer: missed the barbecues, the late nights, the camping
trips, and all the other happenings that I’d heard about from my friends. Lying
down on my bed and closing my eyes, I wondered how the coming school year would
turn out.
Chapter 7
As the semester commenced, I tried to
focus on my studies. I tried to attend classes this term instead of only going
on review and exam days. I tried driving across town to see my parents more
often. I tried hanging out with my friends and playing basketball and sitting
up late, goofing around and wrestling. I eagerly tried going back to my old
life, but there was a strange dissatisfaction from day one that lurked in my
bones with every activity I’d undertaken. I would inevitably find myself with a
closed book and an opened laptop in the library, flipping through all the
pictures I’d taken during the summer. I felt so out of place after having seen
so much wild land. Here were streets and cars and buildings, but no mountains
and no elk to see. At first I tried ignoring it but after coming back home, my
mind was still up north, my heart was still lost in the wilderness. I felt
cramped in the city, in econ lecture, in the library, with houses and cars and
people all around. Where were the mountains and trees? The wide-open sky? The
empty, vast mountains and plains and rivers? I tried to talk to my friends and
parents about how awesome everything was and how I felt now. My friends would
listen and assure me that they understood- they too had been to the mountains
before, and once in sixth grade their family went to Yosemite and so they too
had seen the mountains, good golly it’s beautiful in the mountains I know just
what you mean. I would smile, knowing behind the smile that a weekend summer
camping trip in the family station wagon through a tourist town in Colorado or
California doesn’t compare to an entire summer in the wilderness of the far
north, seeing a herd of elk and wild moose and wild grizzlies, sneaking into
Canada, living your days free, but I would rather not make someone feel bad by
telling them so. My parents would tell me all I ever talked about was Idaho and
Montana, and that it got old after a month of hearing about it. I went home and
called up Will, and he understood. I called him probably once a week just to
talk about it. “Man, I miss it. I miss driving across the open country.” Will
would say, “It was so wild man. That whole area is so wild. The enormous rocks
and mountains, the grizzly bears we saw in the meadow. It was beautiful. These
people have no idea how big earth is and how much of it they don’t know exists.”
We would talk about Glacier. I even proposed withdrawing from the University
for a semester and going back on the road, he and I together until winter, but
we both knew in our bones that our days on the road digging holes were over.
A month into the semester my Mom called
me and told me her 84-year-old dad back in San Diego had a heart attack and had
fallen down on his floor in his apartment where he lived alone and had lied
there for two days before the neighbors had finally checked on him, worried. He
was in the hospital, very sick and they were going out there immediately. I
bought a plane ticket, emailed my professors and flew to San Diego later that
week. I hadn’t been back to San Diego since the day we had moved away and I was
filled with a ton of emotions. Coming into the airport through downtown and
flying low over the city, I was reminded of a childhood of nearly constant
sunshine and aridity, sand and dust. My dad picked me up from the airport and
we drove up the freeway to La Jolla, where my grandpa was staying at the
hospital and I was amazed to see everything still was exactly as I had
remembered it. Every minute detail of the South Bay, the skyline, the palm
trees, the brown foliage on the hillsides, even the sun was exactly as I had
experienced it for my entire life before moving away.
My Mom’s sister and her husband had a
mansion in the hills inland and we stayed in their house, as they were out on a
vacation somewhere. At nights my parents and I would sit around in the pool,
drinking mojitos. In the day we would go to the hospital and take a couple hour
drive around the city while my grandpa slept. It was a very weird feeling to
drive past my old high school and to think that at one time it was mine. It was
the same with the beach. Later we drove past our old house and paused on the
street, in a neighborhood that somehow had become more affluent and seemed to
have shrunk. I was filled instantly with a thousand emotions and a million
memories, along with anger as they had painted the house a different color. This
was my home, or had been, because now I lived almost two thousand miles away,
but this used to be home. Who knew one day I would drive past it as an adult,
as a ghost from the future? Maybe now I was passing my old self in the yard,
visiting my memory from the future and telling myself that one day complete
strangers would sleep in the bedrooms and sit around a table, eating and
laughing where at one point, 15 years in the past I had a vivid memory of
sitting as a small boy at a dining table while my mother cut my meat into
little pieces while my kindergarten homework sat pushed aside. From inside my
parents’ black Yukon XL I remembered myself at 4 when we first moved in, and I
remembered running around a new house with my brother and being yelled at by my
parents for screaming and running wild in the driveway; at 5, playing with toy
cars with the neighbor kids in the driveway; at 7, crashing my new bicycle in
the driveway; at 10, unloading a Christmas tree from the truck in the driveway;
at 13, holding my first girlfriend’s hand in the driveway; at 15, sneaking a
cigarette in the driveway and at 17, waving goodbye to a lifetime spent in that
house from the back of my dad’s truck as we pulled out of the driveway- except
the driveway I walked up everyday was no longer there, as the new occupants had
redone it and laid fresh white concrete over where I had grown up wondering who
in 1972 had scratched their initials and what they stood for. I felt as if the
white car parked here was an offense and the occupants were invaders who must
be removed from a house that was all I knew only a few years before. My dad
only paused momentarily before we pulled away, each lost in over decade of
memories in a small, three-bedroom house 4 miles from the beach alongside a
canyon on a road named after the highest point on earth.
My Mom’s older brother lived in Little
Italy and was wealthy. Our last night there he took us out for celebration and
we had a nice dinner in an upscale restaurant. It was blazing hot the whole time
I was there, upper 80’s and sunny, that typical Southern California dry,
brilliant heat and we walked along the South Bay downtown all night while he
told us about his business, the city, and stories of my mother as they were
growing up, from the perspective of a brother that was 10 years older than her.
I had never known this part of my Mom and it was quite interesting to hear
stories of their childhood. He also spoke of their parents adjusting to life
after immigrating to the US from Spain, something that my Mom never got to see
(being that she came around much later after they had already adjusted, the
youngest of 7 kids). While I listened, they talked about growing up, their
family, and the different experiences with their parents and I got to see and
hear a part of my Mom’s life that I never had known, and hear from my uncle
about a young grandfather that I had never known. We walked along the bay until
late into the night, watching the city lights and the night people, smoking
cigars, and enjoying ourselves back in the city in which we had lived for a
long time and missed.
Chapter 8
My 4-day vacation ended with me boarding
a plane back to real life on a Thursday night in San Diego and sitting in the
back of a 300-person anthropology lecture Friday morning. I went back to the
routine, back to my hours holed away deep in the library, back to a life in a
tame land in flat America, autumn days watching football games from the stands
in a big American university with seventy thousand other fans. I tried hard to
enjoy life, hanging out with friends and doing activities with my ministry. I
tried to ignore my mind that constantly wandered back to the summer, back to
Idaho and Montana. My mind was still lost in the wilderness. My heart was still
roaming all over creation, untamed, under the sun like those wild horses and
not stuck in a library in a book.
My roommate Andrew had moved out and the
guy that had taken his place was a guy named Aiken who we called Bacon, and he
had a girlfriend who went to school in Massachusetts. I used the last few
hundred dollars from my savings from the summer job to buy a ticket to go with
him to visit her one weekend that they had a regional fall campus ministry
retreat. It was early November in New England and the retreat was being held in
Cape Cod. It was a great time, staying in a hotel on the beach and enjoying the
beauty. The last day I was there, I got up early and walked down to the
deserted beach, just as the sun was peeking over the ocean and put on Sun is
Shining by Bob Marley. There on the beach, early in the morning in the freezing
air I danced my heart out to that song on repeat on my iPod, in the early
morning sun as it kissed the North Atlantic, and the sun was shining just as
Bob said it was. Monday morning, here I
am! made me think of God, as did all the other lines we lift our hands and give Jah praises. I danced for a good hour
there on the deserted beach, all alone, looking out over the North Atlantic
Ocean in the 30-degree air while the sun beamed down on creation. It was so
weird for me to be on a beach that was so cold, as just a handful of weeks
earlier I was in San Diego on an 80-degree beach.
I boarded a plane in Boston Sunday night
and was sitting in the anthropology lecture Monday morning. As I was walking
out of class, I got a call from my Mom. Her dad had just died back in San
Diego. My first thought of him was all the times over the last couple years
we’d talked on the phone, our conversations in Spanish, and his many dirty
jokes. My parents had been back and forth to San Diego now for almost two
months, and I had neither the time in school nor the money to fly back and
wouldn’t let my parents pay for it. Besides that, I felt content and at peace
that I had spent the time with him while he was alive. I told my mother to make
sure to give everyone my love and to tell my abuelo Que le vaya bien, Tata.
About this time in the semester I quit
trying hard in school. My resolve burned out rather quickly and I was back to attendance
on review and exam days, just like I did my first year. I figured that even if
I bombed my finals, I’d still pass all my classes because I’d built enough of a
head start thus far. I also got a part-time job as a telemarketer, as all my
summer savings had been spent and I needed to make some money. I loathed this
job. I said the same eleven words about three million times a day, except most people
hung up before I got past the fourth word on the script.
The day after my grandfather died, in the
second week of November, Bacon and I were walking into a deli on campus. Bacon
made small talk with two girls in there, and I found out I had a mutual friend
with one of them. Soon thereafter, this young lady and I began talking and
hanging out and became friends, both knowing we had a strong attraction to one
another. We agreed to remain friends for several reasons, one of them being
that she was graduating at the end of the year and I wasn’t. Our attempts at
moderating our interactions despite the feelings were completely futile and we
ended up hurting one another several times and complicating things, because one
of us would fearfully pull back from the other at random times, scared of the
intensity of our interactions, which would confuse and hurt the other. As the
coldest winter in 30 years set in and the snow began to fall, we swung like a
pendulum, from one extreme (texting all day and talking on the phone all night,
until the sun came up) to the other (freaking out and suddenly not responding,
which would frustrate and hurt the other), with talking non-stop being the
norm. A complete coincidence resulted in us having a class together in the
spring, something we saw as a sign, being that we were students at a huge
university and it was highly unlikely that chance would have us sharing a class.
Eventually, in a moment of passionate, reckless abandon in the early spring we
decided to just date and deal with the future when it arrived and while the
relationship lasted, it was great and I fell in love with her, and we even
joked about running off and eloping because we got along so well and were so
crazy over one another, but suddenly one day Elaine decided to end things
rather than deal with the inevitable heartbreak of her leaving and the
relationship ending.
After she ended things began the worst
heartache I could ever have imagined. The first day I lied on the carpet in the
living room and cried for nearly an hour, completely soaking the carpet with my
tears. This was something entirely foreign to me, as I’d never hurt this way
before. I’d had high school breakups and been rejected, but this was something
different. Before Elaine, I’d never cried over a girl. Now, at the complete
opposite end of the pendulum, I lied awake all night, feeling planet earth underneath
me, turning slowly and groaning in sync with my own pain, feeling the same
thing I felt. I counted the seconds in which and I counted the infinite miles
of space through which the solar system sped at unquantifiable speeds; I
counted my breaths, and I counted the memories. At work, they sensed a change
in me and using academics as my excuse, I eventually ended up quitting the job
for the rest of the semester because I was so crushed. I’d always written
poetry, rather half-heartedly, but after the heartbreak I really found my
voice. Writing poetry was how I painted pictures of feelings and examined and
sorted through them. After the heartache, I began writing poetry like a madman,
spitting out 3 or 4 a day. Somehow, the turmoil really helped me find my voice.
Sadly enough, I also pathetically self-destructed,
and resorted back to old vices to sooth my aching heart and body and completely
nosedived for the duration of the semester. I drank copiously nearly everyday, becoming
a functional alcoholic that hid his problem which lasted far beyond the
heartbreak; I dated random girls as rebounds, and smoked weed- all to forget my
pain. One of the few people I talked to about the heartbreak was a female
cousin, Sara and she used to help me so much and try to cheer me up. Elaine and
I still had class together and after the breakup I sat on the other side of the
room, watching her and seeing her expressionless face when we made eye contact,
which angered me because of the contrast between her face and my heart. Two
weeks later was Spring Break, and I spent it drunk in bed in my room in my
parent’s house alone, and most days afterwards during the semester I would
drive around drunk in my car listening to music, sad beyond belief and weeping,
feeling that I no longer saw things in color but rather in black and white, and
no longer had bones- angry and bitter than I still had to go to the same class,
walk the same campus, and live in the same city as the girl who had broken my
heart and no longer wanted me.
Not long following the heartbreak, I
tried everything I could think of to change her mind and be with her again because
I loved her, but although I knew she was lying, she said she no longer felt the
same way. One day, outside of her house we talked and I told her I loved her
for the first and last time. I wrote her a poem and read it to her, and tried
everything to get her back, but after she didn’t respond, I realized that for
my own good I had to move on because my words were simply nothing more than ghost
whispers from Elaine’s past. We made peace in her driveway and made a cheap and
painful attempt for the rest of the semester to be friends, casually saying hi
when we passed one another and sitting together in class like we were old
buddies, and even hung out once. All of this felt like fresh knives cutting at
old wounds, especially when she would randomly text me “hey what’s up” and
never respond after I’d reply, or never respond if I ever randomly hit her up
with a text. It felt like nothing but games to me.
That semester I learned how intense human
emotions could be, from the love I felt for Elaine to the indescribable
heartache I felt as I watched everything go down the drain. That spring rained
harder than it had ever rained and rained for more days than men could count,
and we had severe flooding. I hated town, hated campus, and hated humanity, so
I spent as much time as I could those first couple weeks alone in the wet forest.
The cold rain on my head became a dear friend, as in my world it was the only
thing that understood my pain, for as the sky wept, so I too, wept, and we wept
together everyday, and the forest became soaked by my tears and those of the
sky. My broken heart gushed blood through the tears in my eyes and as the whole
world watched me and as well was heartbroken, the sky and cosmos and all of the
galaxies were torn down the middle and they cried, too. The earth and sky and
my beloved forest all were dear friends of mine because I’d withdrawn from
everyone else and I learned a new love for the land and for the river that
flows through it, for there I spent my days, watching the dead, brown forest
sprout grass and the trees grow leaves during the floods, everything growing
its deep, dark green and taking life, and when the floods came I rushed to the
river banks, wading in and bathing, desperately trying to wash all memories of
this girl from my broken mind. I lied close to the riverbanks waiting, and when
the current rose, the skies opened up and all the waters of the earth gathered in
one place to rise above my head, and I floated freely in the floods,
underwater, being tossed and carried by the current, not knowing if it was my
tears or the skies that caused this inundation of my heart and being. As the
months passed, I left my boots and jacket at home and now visited in shorts and
tennis shoes as the sun climbed higher and stayed longer and the temperature
soared. The dead of winter become the floods of spring, which became the life
of summer. During this whole time, I thought of my days on the road working
with Will, back to my days lost in the wilderness, where I turned my dreaming
heart loose, back to the days before I ever knew the face and name of this girl.
I longed for those days and wished to return to them, far away from home and
the memories.
My cousin Sara and I were raised together
and really close as kids, but the last few years since I had moved away we
hadn’t talked much. Fortunately, during this difficult time we became really
close again and talked every day. She had just finished her first year in
community college and I’d convinced her to move from California to where we
were after her second year because she was having a really difficult time back
home and wanted a new start, and I couldn’t wait to live close to her again.
She as well had problems with her boyfriend and so we both tried as best we
could to help each other out in that regard.
The day of the final exam in the class I
had with Elaine, I finished before her and waited outside of the building where
the entire class always exited to tell her goodbye one last time. I peeked
through the door as I left the room at the back of her blonde head in the front
row where we always sat, looking at her for the last time while she finished
her exam. I waited outside in the shade for a long time and after a while, returned
to the class, looking for her only to find the room empty. I realized she had
seen me as she exited the building and had opted for another exit at the other
end of the building to avoid me. I never saw Elaine again.
Chapter 9
Elaine left town after graduation. I still
was completely heartbroken and tried to erase her from my life, being that I
now knew I would never see this girl again. I quit my job as a telemarketer and
went to work at a Car Wash for the summer. This job was mostly outside in the 100-degree
heat and humidity beneath the sun and was hard work. The work that was done
inside was done inside a tunnel with no ventilation, where we sprayed 200
degree pressurized water on cars and spent the whole day soaked in a 140-degree
steam room with absolutely no ventilation. I hated that job from day one, but
the pain of Elaine inside of me was longing to escape and so I subjected myself
willingly to long hours in the blistering sun, hoping that the sun and hard
work would purge the pain from my blood through the sweat that drenched my
body. I would look at the sun as an enemy at times- curse it, hate it, but at
other times love it, because it was the only thing connecting her and I besides
memories, even though it fried the flesh on my bones as I worked those long
hours beneath it. Sometimes I would look at it and imagine Elaine looking at
the same sun. Days off I would spend hiking through the hills and the woods, running
through the forest, following deer trails deep into the hills. That summer I
bought a mountain bike, became an avid biker, and would pack up for a day and
bike deep into the forest, far off the beaten path and eat beside a stream or
on a hill. I would climb the rocky bluffs that are everywhere in the woods
outside of town, roaming through the hills like a crazy person, bearded, eyes
on fire, chasing the sun. I was very heartbroken and was frustrated that I
couldn’t get over this dumb girl. I would sit around sometimes and wish that
she would text me or call or something, but she never did. It was a very long,
lonely summer.
Rainy days were great days at the Car
Wash. No cars meant no business meant no work. We would sit around, smoking
cigarettes and drinking coffee, spitting tobacco juice and telling dirty jokes
while gambling- playing cards and throwing whatever we had into the jackpot,
which usually was cigarettes, candy bars, money, maybe a soda, or whatever we
had in our pocket, everyone eager to walk with something he didn’t have when he
came. People would yell and cuss when they lost, and then next hand throw in
another cigarette or another dollar, or dig through their pockets for a
lighter, a few pieces of gum, or whatever they could get ahold of. Usually we’d
have 10 guys in a circle hiding behind the building or in the corner somewhere,
all crowding around, hovering over a pile of cards, the air thick with
cigarette smoke and cussing. Someone would yell, “Who dealt this hand? This
hand sucks!” Whenever the boss man would come around the corner we’d all
disband frantically, put out our cigarettes on the ground, grab our money from
the jackpot pile and run away, avoiding eye contact while he yelled at us,
sorry boss I don’t know who has the cards or whose they were! I was just
watching the game, not playing.
That summer, I set out to forget about
Elaine and to move on with my life. I made some new friends, tried to clean up
my act, and tried to repair. I quit smoking early on in the summer, and towards
the end, I finally gave up drinking. I said goodbye to the girls I talked to
and hooked up with as rebounds and I got back into church and made great strides
in my life, along with my cousin, Sara who as well partied a lot. We helped
each other a lot to clean up and fly straight. I started hanging out with a guy
who I moved in with before school started who became one of my best friends.
His name was Carnell and right off the bat we were always hanging out- biking,
hiking, tramping all over the woods and climbing the bluffs that tower above
the river. We both loved biking and were daredevils, biking as fast as possible
down hills and not stopping at intersections, but instead timing it so that
we’d pass between the cross traffic, which would slam on their brakes and lay
on the horn as we darted in between them, with us screaming as loud as we could
from the rush and the adrenaline. Neither of us owned a helmet, either. At
night we would bike down hills as fast as we could, lean back and look up at
the stars and put our hands up, feeling the wind in our ears and in our fingers.
I loved the feeling, the adrenaline, the life of that summer and the coming autumn.
We moved into an apartment a week before school started, where we lived for the
majority of the next three years, until I graduated that spring and he got
married that summer and we parted.
As school approached, I dreaded returning
to campus because I knew it would remind me of everything. I tried my best to
suck it up and to remind myself that I’d moved on, I was done with her, and was
beginning a new time in my life. Two weeks into school (and doing really well) I
was out with friends one night eating dinner when my phone vibrated. I looked
at my phone to see “I loved you. I just wanted you to know” from Elaine. 4
months had passed with nothing between us, and then suddenly this text. I
refused to reply for a couple weeks because I was so angry, but eventually we
talked. She was trying to rebuild things, and I was conflicted. Her excuse for
running away two seasons ago was that she was too scared of being hurt, and I
didn’t have much sympathy. On one hand I still loved her, but on the other I
hated her and wanted nothing to do with her. Her popping herself back into my
life really messed with me, because I felt so much time had passed and yet none
had passed- I suddenly felt everything and remembered everything as if it were
yesterday, simply because of this text and what she was communicating when we
spoke later on. Here suddenly I was in the autumn, retracing old steps laid
down in the past, remembering things from the previous autumn- places we’d
walked, conversations we’d had, football games we’d gone to. I now felt lost in
a Sea of Gold at football games, and while seventy thousand people screamed and
chanted, I was stuck in slow motion, separated from everything, viewing things
apart from everyone else, inside of a silent void and while everyone screamed
and chanted and was festive, I wandered through a Sea of Gold, against the
rushing tide that threatened to swallow me. While on national television
seventy thousand people rushed the field, tore down the goal posts, and marched
through the streets of town, I silently tiptoed through the crowd, inexplicably
indifferent, confused that my red blood was tinged with shades of green and
gold. The autumn came swiftly and silently from within summer, and the leaves
turned a bright, magnificent orange and red and yellow and even purple, the
most vivid, uniform, seamless and beautiful fall foliage I’d ever seen in my
entire life and still have yet to see, and I would wander through the forest like
a phantom from the past while it burned in all these perfect, seamless shades
of red and orange and I was sad, because the forest I’d seen come to life
earlier that year and with whom I’d become a dear friend was now burning down
and dying, which paralleled the whole relationship with Elaine in my heart. The
text from Elaine angered me, and made six-month-old scars feel like six-day-old
wounds. Everything was different and distant, and yet everything was the same. I
treaded lightly between the trees, while the entire forest burned in flames,
stubbornly insisting this was the same old place I’d walked before, the same
sidewalks, the same cold wind of autumn that bit my face, the same cold mist
that fogged the stars. It was a swing in full circle, back to the months of the
previous year, October is again October and November is again November,
regardless of the year it has the same feeling and the same smell, everything is
on a loop, time is cyclical and it hasn’t moved, we are just revisiting the
past except now I’m not with Elaine, dressed nice, getting to know her, learning
her, smiling in the moonlight on a hayride or driving around town for no reason,
late at night listening to music and talking about everything on our minds
except for the exam I have early the next morning, but instead I’m reliving all
of these memories in an invisible, inescapable world full of ghosts. Everything
was on repeat, and I was confused because everything looked the same and felt
the same, but was undeniably different. I walked past the deli where I’d met
her last fall and would see everything all over again as it happened one year
ago. I had no choice but to retrace all of those steps, but on the other hand I
decided to not retrace old steps with Elaine and get involved with her again
the way I was retracing the sidewalks, thereby not completing that aspect of
the loop, and I told her that I didn’t want to speak to her anymore. As the
last dry, toasted leaves fell off of the trees of the burning forest before the
snow came, so the last pieces of her fell from my heart and I buried her. The
snow really cemented this in my mind, because the snow was like ashes, the
remnants of the fires. Once again, the land continued the loop and paralleled
everything that occurred in my own world.
Chapter 10
That fall semester I took a class about social
revolutions. I’d never studied social class and how it related to economy, but
being born and raised in the US I knew one thing was for certain- communism is
bad. The professor of this class was a tall man with a long beard, who grew up
in the US but had spent most of his adult life in South America. He was very
eccentric and never missed an opportunity to share with us his love of
communism and hatred for US foreign policy and the government’s backdoor dirty
deals, much to the not-so-silent disdain of the class. I, however, was
fascinated and wanted to hear him out.
Over the semester, I spent a lot of time
in his office, reading books that he lent me and having long conversations
about communism. At first, I was very adamantly against it- my family had
fought against the communists and we in the US all knew communism was evil, but
I personally didn’t know a thing about communism and had never studied any social
revolutions. Slowly though, I began to see that most of America is fed
propaganda by the government and that communism wasn’t really such a bad thing
in theory. In that class we studied in depth all of the social revolutions
(primarily Chile and the Banana Republics) in the western hemisphere and how
crooked the United States had been in funding repressive governments to squash
these revolutions for purely economic motives- here I saw History for the first
time from the other side of the rifle barrel. I love history and that class
very quickly became my favorite class that I ever took in college and that
professor became my favorite, too. It was a hard pill to swallow, believing
that communism and socialism were actually good things for those people and
that the United States did some terrible things in Latin America, and I
frequently found myself in discussions on campus with the intellectual kids,
talking about anti-capitalist and revolutionary ideas, trying to learn as much
about this taboo subject that was now so interesting, these kids kept saying educate yourself, guys. We’re changing the world.
Don’t believe the government’s lies. I began hanging out with a lot of
hipsters and intellectuals and other deviants from the norm and mainstream that
told me to reject all corporate music and to instead listen to music from
independent labels, to support local business, to hate big megacorporations, to
think green, and all sorts of other things that I couldn’t keep track of all at
once and some of which I didn’t think mattered as much as they did. Suddenly I
found myself embracing new philosophies and ideas and rejecting so much of my
old ways, and I quit listening to corporate radio stations and began getting my
music from forums and indie sites, and from sitting on people’s couches and
downloading from their computer. I built a network with many people that I
shared music with, and it began a hobby that lasted all the way through
college. We sent numerous songs/musicians back and forth as we found them and
so became exposed to a lot more music.
That professor and that class started me
on a trend of searching out and studying all of the things that I had been
taught were intrinsically evil but knew nothing about. I was so shocked to
realize both how sheltered we are in the US from what goes on in the rest of
the world and the severity of the economic corruption and exploitation that
occurs, as well. That semester and that class began in me a trend that lasted
for a long time, that trend being my insatiable desire to learn about new ideas
such as communism, Buddhism, atheism and revolution. It was unnerving but
exciting to learn all of this new stuff. All the hours I spent holed away in
the library I was reading articles and books that had nothing to do with my
classes. The coursework was neglected and I was flooding my mind with other
things.
As the spring came, I found myself burned
out of being a college student and began feeling really restless. I wanted to
live the life of a poet or travel in a hippy band, and I wanted to move abroad,
so I began extensive research of the study abroad programs offered at my
school, and was dissatisfied. I decided on going to Mexico because of what I
knew of it growing up in San Diego and because I had a lot of family there, but
sadly, my school offered no programs there. My Social Revolution professor, by
now being a friend, suggested I do what he did when he was in college- move to
a country and enroll in school, having your credits transferred back home after
your time is done there. You are completely free, can do whatever you want,
save money, and don’t have to stick to anyone else’s plans. My family was very
against me going to Mexico and wanted me to go to Europe, a la Grand Tour of
the privileged English elite during the Enlightenment but I’ve always been a
bit of a free spirit and rejected the idea of a cookie-cutter, stereotypical
“study abroad program” with a very regimented, controlled, planned stay- and
besides that, half the kids at my school study abroad in Spain and I wanted
none of that. I did some research and decided on Mexico City, because it was as
far away as possible from what I was used to. I applied for one academic year as
a visiting student to La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in January and
in May was accepted. I was excited beyond words and counted the days from the
moment I got the acceptance letter, eagerly reading as much about Mexico City
as I could. In the meantime, I took out a Mexican Visa. Some people from my
church helped me find roommates through our network of congregations all around
the world, and everything fell right into place and I couldn’t wait.
That spring was a beautiful time. That
was an unusually cold and snowy winter and early in the spring we had a massive
blizzard that dumped more than two feet of snow and crippled the entire state from
one end to the other with the ice and snow causing power outages that lasted
for a week in some places. Classes were canceled for a week and there were
snowdrifts that were 6 feet deep on the side of our apartment complex, in which
we built tunnels and igloos. The day after the blizzard we emerged from the
building and hiked the two miles to campus through two feet of snow and single
digit temperatures where everyone played in the snow all day. In the center of
campus there was a big group of students that built a snowman that was probably
20 feet tall. His icy remnants were visible for more than a month, and even
when the temperature was approaching 70 degrees he left a soggy, muddy pit in
the grass as his legacy that lasted till finals week.
When spring finally came, it was
delicious and I was so excited to move to Mexico that summer. I was full of
hope and happiness and dreams about a new life in Mexico. At my apartment
complex there is a brick wall that you can climb to get up to the top of the 2
story building. I spent a lot of time sitting up on the roof enjoying life,
watching the traffic, enjoying the sun and the sky. There was a massive
outbreak of storms that spring and one day I was at home when the tornado
sirens began going off. I immediately ran outside and scrambled like a lizard
up the side of the building and filmed on my phone as massive black clouds
rolled in and the only thing that was heard was the shrill, eerie tornado siren
that pierced the otherwise silent, apocalyptic scene. Suddenly, without
warning, a powerful gust of wind hit me in the chest and blew me backwards a
few steps. Slowly, directly above me the sky began to turn in a giant circle
and I ran down that wall panicking, and out into the parking lot where I
wouldn’t be blown off of the roof. At this point, the wind was howling
tremendously, and a few neighbors had gathered in the parking lot to watch the
sky, which now was heavily rotating. A few people were frantically running to
the apartment Laundromat with their valuables, which was made in a basement, while
yelling at us for standing still, watching the sky take cover you idiots! There’s a tornado coming! But we just stood
there, hypnotized, staring at the rotating sky and listening to the sirens. I
debated whether to follow the other people or hide in my apartment, but neither
seemed like good ideas in the event that a twister knocked everything down
because either way I’d be covered by a crushed, two-story brick building, and
so I’d rather be in the open, where I could run. I instead took cover
underneath a tree in the yard holding on as tight as I could and hoping no
tornado came, but then lightening started and then hail, so I just hid in the
apartment while the world shook with rain and hail and thunder. No tornado came
near us, but it was a massive storm that just a few miles away from us ripped
up trees, downed power lines, and threw tree branches everywhere from the
winds. During the tornado outbreak that day across the state, over 150 people were
killed and over a thousand injured, resulting in it being one of the worst
tornado outbreaks in US history, and the worst in over 50 years. Fortunately,
none of us were directly affected, although the entire state mourned the
destruction.
The day following the tornado outbreak
was very cool and clear, with absolutely no breeze. It was as if the land
itself were mourning yesterday and holding its breath for what was to come
tomorrow, because what occurred next was the most bizarre thing I’d ever seen.
Walking home the next day after a jog, my shirt in hand, I saw a massive,
multi-colored insect flying in an uncontrolled, zig-zag pattern alongside me,
and then suddenly crash into me. It ricocheted off of my shoulder and before it
got out of reach, I towel-snapped it in mid-flight with my shirt, a fatal shot
that sent the insect to the ground. I believed it to be either a blind or a
drunk horsefly (because of its very erratic flying pattern) that was just
trying to make his way home from the bars last night, but horseflies are
insects that I loathe intensely for their aggressiveness and their painful
bite, so I stepped on it and kept walking.
The next day, I woke up to what I thought
was someone mowing the grass in the complex. I walked out to my car in the
morning to find not a lawnmower, but millions of these insects everywhere that
were all making the same noise. They were on the trees, grass, bushes, and I
counted no less than 6 on one of the tires on my car, all sitting there, making
their buzzing noise. They were oozing out of the ground like little zombies and
walking up trees, walking up cars, walking up the buildings, like an insect
version of the Allied invasion of Normandy. I ran bewildered back into my
apartment on the second floor, covering my ears and immediately to my computer
to check the news, believing this completely unprecedented plague to be some
sort of evil omen from the days of Moses “Carnell!
They’ve got them in Indiana, too! They’re all over the place! Pack a survival
kit and let’s hit the road!”
Not long after that, as they kept
crawling out of the ground, the air was thick with millions and millions of the
bugs so that you couldn’t look anywhere without seeing them and you couldn’t
walk anywhere without them landing on your hair or shirt. In the panic, kids
were crying, dogs were barking, car alarms were going off, the neighbor was
hyperventilating and screaming while her husband fanned her face, but you
couldn’t hear any of it because these bugs made an unbearable noise that
deafened everything else. It was an eerie, unnerving plague that had all of us
confused because none of us had ever seen these bugs and we thought maybe they
were aliens from another galaxy that had come to take over the world, and their
deafening buzzing was to drive all of us insane so that we wouldn’t fight back
and defend planet earth. All day long, driving with the windows up and the
radio blaring to drown them out, you’d hear them thumping on your car and
splattering your windshield as you drove. If you left the windows down they
would fill up the car. Everywhere you walked, you were stepping on their
shells, crunching under your feet and of course with this many bugs being
alive, many died, too and there were hundreds of dead ones on the ground
squishing under your shoes. The only good thing about these bugs was that they weren’t
aggressive at all and made little attempt to protect themselves if you tried to
kill them- they just flew around everywhere, buzzing. The birds chased them all
over the place, eating so many of them that they looked like Easter hogs, so
stuffed up they would lie on the ground and vegetate, unable to roll over, let
alone fly.
Everyone was confused beyond belief as to
the origin of the plague, and many superstitious hypotheses were invented to
attempt to explain by various local madmen. Personally, I believed they were
somehow the result of the F5 tornado outbreak that had killed over 150 people
in the southwest corner of the state a few days beforehand, because they
appeared only two days after the destruction. I told my friends and anyone else
who would listen that they had hatched from the eggs of some prehistoric species
of insect that had a really long incubating period, laid during the days of the
dinosaurs, and that maybe the earth needed a good shaking to wake them from
their slumber and continue the lifecycle. No one believed my theory, or
anyone’s for that matter. Scientists as well tried to explain it, but no one
knew who was right, whether the religious fanatics or the scientists because
after all, if scientists are so smart, wouldn’t they have predicted this plague
and warned all of us so that we could bury down in a shelter with some
non-perishable food? But when a local
store in town began selling and advertising a new flavor of ice cream with
these bugs as the main ingredient, we forgot all about trying to figure out
their origin because suddenly everyone cherished them and apparently wanted to
eat them like the birds did, to which I scoffed. Not long after, the City came
and shut down the insect ice cream operation and deeming it unsanitary, which
made me mad, because by that point I’d just worked up enough courage to try
putting one of the little prehistoric insect devils in my mouth.
Back at the Car Wash, no longer bored
when there was no business, we’d have contests to see who could towel-snap the
most insects in 1 minute. There were hundreds that would fly around and land in
completely arbitrary places in our immediate proximity, like the wall, the
ground, or your T-shirt, so towel snapping them was easy. Hitting one in
mid-flight was worth five stationary ones. Soon we’d be betting quarters and
candy bars and sodas because playing cards was boring when we had insects to
splatter with our macho towel snaps- the masculinity of all of us Car Wash
Attendants was now on the line. Soon towel-snapping was boring, so we’d catch
them with our hand and throw them at each other as hard as we could, or put them
in someone’s hair or down their shirt and then run. That soon became boring as
well, and next we were putting them in someone’s Gatorade bottle or lunch box
when he wasn’t looking and now we had fistfights breaking out because that was
crossing the line. After a couple weeks, bored with towel-snapping and juvenile
pranks, we were sick to death of the bugs not only at the Car Wash but
everywhere, because they became such a nuisance: landing on the back of your
neck with their prickly legs, flying into your house, into your car, into your
mouth when you yawned. They flew everywhere and landed everywhere and there
were so many of them that after you killed one in your living room, you found 3
more in your bedroom crawling up the wall and you lost your temper, screaming
and throwing shoes at the wall to kill them, foaming at the mouth and clawing
at the carpet. Despite all of this, we grew accustomed to them and lived life,
for they were now as common as the heat.
One day I walked outside and immediately
noticed a very tranquil scene with birds chirping, not the insects. The
population had suddenly and drastically dropped. By the next day, I saw maybe 5
the entire day and by the third day, not a single live one was anywhere to be
found but only a few dead ones being eaten by ants. Just as soon as they’d
come, they disappeared and we’ve never seen them since, although the ringing in
my ears from the obnoxious buzzing stayed behind for a few months. We still
haven’t figured out what happened or where they came from, but nonetheless,
every single one of them had disappeared.
My cousin, Sara that was going to move
out decided to stay in California and I was sad about it. We had gotten so
close and helped each other out so much I was really hoping she would get a
fresh start moving out of California to start over, but she decided to stay out
there with her family and her boyfriend. I spent a ton of time tramping through
the woods that summer with my friends. I’m so blessed to live in a part of the
country where one is in touch with nature, and me knowing that I was soon to be
leaving for a year only made me want to live even more for the moment. I
counted the days until leaving time, as nervous as I could be because I’d only
been to Mexico a handful of times growing up and that was only to tourist
areas- Mexico City was a completely different story. The weekend before we
left, we went to Colorado for a church trip, to the Rocky Mountain National
Park, and it was a great way to say goodbye to the United States of America. As
we were on top of the world right before I boarded a plane, I said goodbye to
the country of my birth, knowing it would be a while before we would meet
again.
Chapter 11
I’d never flown internationally before my
flight to Mexico. I’d always crossed into Mexico by foot or car to visit family
that lived near la frontera norte and I really had no clue what I was getting
into when I enrolled in the largest and oldest school in the New World and
moved to one of the biggest cities on earth, because all I’d known was the very
touristy north and small border towns. My flight from Denver that Sunday night had
a layover in Dallas Ft. Worth and once we took off from Dallas to Mexico City,
the flight attendants began giving instructions in English and Spanish and I
was very nervous. I was full of anxiety about what this new place was going to
be like. I sat next to a gringo on the way there and he warned me to be very
careful around town as I got used to it. I landed and made my way through
immigration (muy bienvenido a México!), and later went to meet my new roommates
who were waiting for me at the airport. We jumped in my roommate’s girlfriend’s
car, took off and all I kept thinking was “this is Mexico, this is Mexico. So
this is what its like.” I was completely fascinated. My head was on a swivel,
taking it all in. It was after midnight and we made our way to where I was
going to be staying- Colonia Narvarte, on the second-floor of a 10 story apartment
building on a corner. I hadn’t eaten since the morning and during the over
night hours a guy had a hamburger stand in the intersection near my apartment
building and my first meal in Mexico was a hamburger- I’ll never forget it. We
went upstairs and I met my new roommates and they showed me my bedroom- a very
simple room with a small bed, desk, and dresser. The living room had huge
windows that went from the floor to the ceiling and overlooked the busy
intersection; a small kitchen, and cactus plants everywhere. Most of the
windows in the house were permanently open because of the agreeable climate. I
was so elated to be in a new apartment with new roommates, in a new city, in a
new country, and making new adventures. My roommates were Ouby, Alex, and
Chucho. Ouby was a refugee of the Earthquake in Haiti and a French teacher who
spoke Creole, French, English and Spanish fluently and who helped me brush up
on my French; Alex was an engineer from Acapulco who I became great friends
with; and Chucho was in his thirties- a guy I never saw too much of because he
worked all the time. My time in Mexico had begun, and I went to bed thinking que comience la fiesta.
The next morning I woke up at 9 am and it
was a second before I realized where I was. I immediately jumped out of bed
like a ninja and looked out my bedroom window to the corner below. I saw a busy
Mexican intersection with people walking everywhere- carts being pushed around,
people talking, hailing taxis, heavy traffic honking, and the sidewalks, which
were empty just a few short hours ago when I arrived, were now full of mobile
carts selling clothes, shoes, and all sorts of things I couldn’t make out from
my second story vantage point. An endless wave of people and cars flooded my
busy corner and I ran into the living room where my roommates and some other
random guys were to see my new city. A friend named Alberto was going to show
me around the city- take me to immigration, show me my school, and give me a
small tour of some of the more important parts of the city. We walked down the
stairs and out into my first day in Mexico City, across the street, around the
block and to the nearest subway station. I was unaccustomed to so many people
walking around and the novelty alone was enchanting. We walked a few blocks and
downstairs into the subterranean subway station and Alberto taught me how to
buy tickets and how the subway worked. We went to immigration to finish my Visa
stuff, hopped a bus and rode it down La Reforma to the angel, passed through
the historic center of town, and a few other popular places. My face was taking
everything in as fast as it could, as this foreign landscape was so different
from what I was used to. There were millions of people flooding everywhere,
millions of cars, millions of indígenas, millions of bicycles and millions of stores.
All through the subway, people walked up and down the cars selling CDs, candy,
gum, flashlights, and all sorts of things, and otherwise normal people became
savages when the subway was crowded, pushing and shoving their way on and off
the trains. I was a total gringo and completely lost in this chaos, but Alberto
helped me swim my way through the crowds. He introduced me to the small buses (which
he called savages because of how the drivers drove them- whipping across lanes,
taking turns on two wheels, screeching to a stop, etcetera), the larger buses,
how to properly hail a taxi, and all of the other crucial skills and knowledge
I’d need to be a competent resident of el Distrito Federal.
I
was shocked when I saw armored police vehicles rolling down the street with
officers toting assault rifles, and armored guards with assault rifles guarding
the immigration building and banks. It was so different from what I was used
to, I was a wanderer in a foreign land and this city was so alive, so green, so
vibrant, so loud, and so chaotic- it totally sucked me in and swallowed me
whole. It was nothing like la frontera norte, the poor desert border towns I’d
known growing up.
At the end of the day it began pouring
rain and flooding the streets, and it was a mess trying to get home but I
didn’t care. The subway was backed up an hour because of flooding and I got
soaked walking home but I was in love with this city already. I had spent the
entire day completely awestruck at how different this new place was. The dream
had begun.
The next day I had orientation for all
students who were studying abroad and Alberto, who also was a student at la
UNAM, took me to see my new university. We took the subway south and got off at
Copilco, to a very beautifully decorated train platform, and to a part of town
that reminded me of a Turkish bazaar when you climbed the steps to daylight. There
were dozens of vendors surrounding the subway stop and there were tarps strung
across the sidewalk, and hundreds of people inching their way through the
crowds. A little ways past the subway stop was the street with restaurants that
lined the narrow avenues, with vendors everywhere and waves of people. The walk
to campus was just as intense as the rest of the city, and the second day was
just like the first- I walked around constantly with my mouth agape, viewing
this new place. The university, as I came to learn, was a city in its own
right- it was enormous, with its own bus routes, two subway stops, and took a
full day to cross on foot. University City, like the rest of the city, was
massive and full of cars, vendors, restaurants, and the endless numbers of
people who were coming and going about their business. The trip from the subway
to my building was a 30-minute walk and we slowly ambled around campus, taking
everything in, marveling at all the food vendors, looking at my schoolmates,
and I had to do a double- take when I saw kids smoking weed out in the open. Alberto
explained that it was completely normal and accepted around here to smoke it,
and that the police weren’t allowed to enter campus to do anything about it.
We arrived early and walked to my
building and saw the main library and basically walked around Ciudad Universitaria.
I kept stopping and talking to random people and buying and eating random food
to try. Later at orientation I met a whole bunch of English-speaking Americans,
Europeans, and Canadians who were studying through their respective programs
and I befriended quite a few of them based on our linguistic origins. A group
of us met up and traveled around to sight see those last few days before school
started, and I made some lasting friendships. One of the guys I met there named
Hugo was from London and we exchanged numbers and became good friends, hanging
out a lot. He lived in Colonia Roma, a rich district with a large proportion of
Europeans and colonial architecture.
I had a few days to burn before school
started and adjusting to life in Mexico was extremely exciting. I was
constantly having my mind boggled by all the new things there and simply loved
the fact that I was in another country. Every day during my time there I left
home and bought a tamale down the street from my house to give to a homeless
person I saw on the way (there were always many of them lined up begging) and
would eat something new for breakfast each day. There was sweet bread for sale,
fruit cocktails, smoothies, and many other things that I always found to eat.
I’d try to find someone to hang out with and just cruise around the city with
them. On the savage busses I’d go to the back door and hang out of it with the
wind in my face, riding until I found something interesting and jump out and
walk around. I’d gotten a list of places to see from random friends and the
internet and I went around, taking in all the sights and eating and taking
pictures. I was fascinated that the grass and trees were completely different,
the streets were different, the walls inside houses were different, the air
smelled different, even the sky and the sun were different. The sun was a lot
more powerful and its heat was felt a lot more strongly on my skin. My birthday
was two days after I’d arrived, and I spent that night on top of my ten-story
apartment building with Chucho under the stars drinking beer and watching the
city lights.
I loved picking my way through the city,
listening to For Emma, Forever Ago and placing myself into a deeply
internalized tranquility, silently relishing in a Mexican dream, observing
millions of people and wondering about their lives so far from my own. I sat
silently on the bus, looking out of the window or hanging out of the back door,
getting lost in the chaos, yet definitely safe inside my head and inside my
music and inside of my newfound dream. I’d come home at night and write home
about my new adventures and places I’d planned to see the prior day and had
been able to visit today, and talk to my roommates about differences and
similarities to my own land. At night I’d wait until the tamale guy passed by
and race down the stairs as his speaker screamed out “acérquese y pida sus
tamales oaxaqueños” a hundred times before he slowly was lost in oblivion, or
walk with my roommates a few blocks over to where the overnight food stands
were and eat a torta or some flautas. I learned to walk assuredly, confidently,
naturally in this megacity. I loved standing silently on the subway inside of
the crowd and jetting across the city toward my destination and feeling
important, having a place to be, I as well live in this city and I as well have
places to go, I’m not a tourist, and as my foreigner’s insecurity melted away, I
adopted this city as my own and its image, feelings, dreams and accomplishments
became my own. Everything that was at first different and new became natural
and eventually, became a part of me. I learned many new neighborhoods, districts,
and areas of this city that were so different. I fell in love immediately and
loved the feel of this massive, pulsing monster of a metropolis. This place
quickly became familiar and slowly began to feel like home.
Chapter 12
The first day of school I went to class at
9:00 am. I found the empty room and walked inside 10 minutes early and sat
down. At ten past the hour, I checked the number outside the room. At 9:20 a lone student walked in and I asked
him if I was in the right class, to which he replied that I indeed was and that
the instructor probably was late. But… why is there no one else besides you and
I? “I guess everyone is running late,” he offered. An older lady walked in
forty-give minutes late and introduced herself as the instructor. She gave us a
list of required texts and dismissed us. My jaw dropped. This was the daily norm
for 2 of my 4 classes- it was totally normal for the instructor to cozily
stroll in 20 minutes late and for half the class to arrive 30 minutes late. I
quickly learned from other students that the culture in my department was
different from other departments at the university, and drastically different
from the culture back home, where the class erupts into hysterics and demands a
resignation if the instructor is more than 5 minutes late in coming. Here there
was almost no assigned work and little accountability. I quickly realized it
would not be hard to pass my courses here.
There also was an extremely militant
attitude in my department towards the government and towards foreign
imperialism, particularly that of the United States. I had many students come
to me and launch into very heated discourses about how awful my country was for
what we had done to Mexico and all around the world. There was a great deal of
hatred towards certain Mexican political entities and politicians on behalf of
many students I met, and massive banners being flown all over campus speaking
out against the PRI and other groups and specific politicians and demanding
reform. There were some students that dressed in camo attire and spoke of a
socialist revolution like the one in Cuba. This place had a very different
environment and culture than that of the universities in the US, and it at
first fascinated me. I hung around campus, learning about the culture here,
talking with some students about communism and all types of other revolutionary
ideas. Most people never paid me any attention and never spoke to me, even in
my classes, but I met a few really cool people that I made friends with.
My third week in Mexico, I was at church
Wednesday night with my roommate when I found out that our church sponsored a
non-profit group that had a clinic on the other end of town. I asked about how
to get involved, because I was quickly running out of things to see and was
spending more time at home and wanted to have something to do in my free time.
I told them I wanted to volunteer and so the next day after class I hopped the
subway and shot across the city to Iztapalapa to look for the place. It was a
long trip and I had no clue how to get around this new area. This was the
poorest and most populous borough of the city and was a totally different
environment from what I had seen thus far. I had heard stories about Iztapalapa
being poor and dangerous and that I should stay away because I was white, but
didn’t give much weight to what people said because other people I’d talked to
said that only parts of it were dangerous and that I would probably be fine.
Once there, I noticed everything had a different feel and the majority of
people seemed markedly poorer and browner than my upper-class neighborhood and
that there were less bars, less fancy restaurants, and less elaborate architecture
than in other places I’d seen up to this point.
I had no idea where to go, and so I did
as I was told by my friend from The Clinic- I hopped into a taxi and told the
driver the address. He said he didn’t know where it was but that he could
probably find it without much trouble. We began making turns and he was flying
down streets and saying everything was fine, he was looking for the place, we
would be there in no time. I was nervous because of this being the first time I
was alone in a poor part of town and I had no clue where I was going. Everyone’s
rumors were playing in my head and I was hesitant about being in the taxi with
the driver not knowing where he was going. As the minutes passed I noticed the
fare going up and us getting into noticably poorer and more dangerous-looking neighborhoods
and I again asked the driver if he knew where we were going. He said that he
did, and I replied that I’d heard this place was only a ten-minute walk from
the subway stop and that we’d been in the car for ten minutes now and the fare
was continuing to climb while he continued to search for The Clinic. He kept
silent and I repeated myself, very aware that I was a foreigner here and that
everything about me screamed lost tourist, from my well-kept shoes and jeans to
my distinctly different flavor of the Spanish language.
I immediately became very nervous and
asked him to stop the car, that I would call someone at The Clinic for
directions and find another taxi to take. He said it would only be a minute
till we were there and I said “you don’t know where this place is, how can you
say that?” And he said in a very firm voice that he now knew where it was. I
said which direction and he motioned straight ahead. I said to stop the car,
and that I’d walk. He kept driving down the street, and I had red flags and
every instinct in me yelling at me to abandon ship, you’re in trouble and so I
dropped the fare in the front seat, leaned towards him, and inches from his ear
yelled as loudly and aggressively as I could to stop this car right now. He
turned quickly to look at me and I stayed leaning forward, inches from his face,
scowling at him, and he stopped the car and I jumped out as quickly as I could.
Since he had motioned that the place was straight ahead, I headed back as
quickly as I could the opposite direction in case he had friends waiting to
jump me up ahead. I made my way down the street and saw that I very clearly was
in a neighborhood that I shouldn’t be in. Everyone was staring at me, and I
dialed up my friend at the Clinic on the Mexican Telcel phone I got the day
after arriving and after telling him what intersection I was at, he told me I
needed to get out of there as quickly as possible and luckily enough a savage
bus passed by just then that took me back to the subway station where my friend
was waiting for me. He told me that I indeed was in a dangerous part of town
and that the shady taxi driver sounded like a crook that drove a fake taxi. That
was the last time I made the mistake of jumping in a fake taxi.
Back at The Clinic (which happened to be
in a very safe neighborhood), I was given a tour and learned that there were
dental and medical services offered to poor people who otherwise wouldn’t have
access to either. There was a general doctor and a handful of dentists, all
part-time volunteers or full-time employees who made substantially less money
at The Clinic than they could garner elsewhere. In addition to the services
they offered throughout the week in Iztapalapa, one weekend a month they would
fill up a truck with supplies that basically became a mobile version of The
Clinic, and went outside Mexico City to some poor rural town where they had a
prearranged agreement and offered all day on Saturday the same services they
offered in the city. I accompanied them on all of these trips, which they
called brigadas.
I was to work with Rodrigo, a man of
forty-nine who spent his days collecting donations throughout the city in the
van, organizing the inventory, and doing general repair/maintenance of the
building. He had a lot of work to do and definitely was glad to have an extra
set of hands to help with the work. He and I became great friends and I counted
him as an uncle. I spent three afternoons a week at The Clinic the entire time
I was in Mexico and became very fond of the people and the work. That first
tumultuous day there happened to occur on a Friday, and I was excited to have
volunteer work in Mexico where I would be exposed to a different side of life
that was unknown to me. The second day I was there, we got into one of the
service vans and had an errand to run and we drove through a shantytown. I had
never seen one before, and I couldn’t stop staring. All along the road,
squatter settlements were constructed behind tires that were placed to protect
the house from being struck by cars. These little huts and makeshift homes
extended off the road and into a field that was an abandoned landfill, but behind
the settlements, however, was a sea of massive sunflowers that after
consideration made me a little emotional. Amidst this region of deplorable
poverty, between the high crime rate and all of the other things that this life
bred for these people, sunflowers had the courage to grow and flourish and
create a scene of beauty and purity on top of a sea of buried trash. These
massive sunflowers were in such stark contrast to the reality of their
environment that I felt as if they should live forever. Sadly, several months
later I passed that same way and they were all dead.
The first trip I took out of Mexico City was
the next day and was to Pachuca, where some friends and I spent part of the day
hiking in the mountains outside of Pachuca and then some time in the city
sightseeing. It was a fantastic day in a beautiful city, except it started
raining mid-afternoon but still was beautiful because the clouds came in and
hugged the mountains against which the city was built. We rode a bus there, and
in town mid-afternoon after hiking and back in the city, we were in line to buy
some coffee, hiding from the rain when my American phone from back home rang. My
mother rarely called randomly because of international charges and I answered
the phone, only to hear her tell me in a very apologetic voice that my cousin
Sara had died the previous night in a car accident back in California. I was
speechless for a few seconds before I let out “No. No. I talk to her. We talk
all the time. I talk to her. She’s not dead.” My mother told me, “I know you
talk to her. I’m sorry. She died last night at four a.m. in a car accident. I
just got the call.” She sat silently on the other end, not knowing what to say.
I frantically hurried out of the coffee line and out from under the busy
cluster of pedestrian traffic, looking for a safe, quiet place to tell my Mom
yet again “I talk to her all the time. I talked to her a couple weeks ago right
before I left! How is she dead? She was just telling me how she wanted to come
see us, and now she definitely won’t because she is dead!” Suddenly aware I was
speaking nonsense, I told my Mom I’d call her later and stood for probably a
full minute, blankly, in the rain before I immediately began sobbing in the
middle of a cobblestone sidewalk in Hidalgo Pachuca, high in these foggy
mountains, amid the clouds, with rain falling on my head. I pulled my wet hood
up over my wet head to hide my wet face, hands at my side, my body being racked
with intense sobs while I stared up a long, steep road that climbed up the side
of a Central Mexican Mountain on which the city’s white houses abruptly ended
where it got too steep. Immediately my sobbing stopped and I became infuriated.
I belted out “Sara’s not dead. She’s not dead. That’s foolishness, Mom. I’ll
call her right now. No way, I won’t call her. I’ll text her, its cheaper. No
way. Wait, maybe she really is dead. How could there be a mistake that big? Who
knows? I’m going to call Mom back, tell her to make sure Sara’s dead. Tell her
to call my aunt back, to call Grandma. It’s on the news, you say? Do I have
reception? Should I Google that real quick? Are you kidding me, Mom? Sara’s
dead? Don’t you know I’m out with friends right now? I’m in another country!
I’m not around family! How can you tell me that right now? How can you? I’m two
hours from Mexico City! But who cares, because she’s not dead anyways. Look,
I’ll call her right now.”
Suddenly I heard someone call my name and
I turned around to see my friend Gaby walking towards me. She stopped suddenly
when she saw my face and asked what happened. I told her, and she awkwardly
just kept saying she was sorry, that was horrible. She said that the group had
gotten their coffee and was moving on to walk the road up the mountain to
overlook the city and then she slowly and awkwardly walked away to leave me
alone to grieve. I lagged far behind the group, sobbing, thinking about what a
horrible thing it was that my cousin was dead. But wait, she’s not dead. How
can she be? I talk to her all the time. She was saving money to come out next
summer and visit. I walked up the steep hill, every part of my body shaking
from the sobs while strangers stared at me in confusion, don’t you know my
cousin is dead? Stop staring at me. I sat down on a doorstep for a few minutes to
attempt to compose myself, and then started walking again. Within a few steps
the uncontrollable sobs started again, and I tried to pick my way through a
crowd of faces looking at me, while the tears muddled and clouded my vision. What’s
it like to die? Is your vision while dying clouded and blurred like mine during
rain? Who does this? Who dies? Not Sara, that’s for sure. The rain continued on
my head at an infinite and rhythmic pace, soaking my hood and then running down
my face and mixing with my tears. I slowed my pace to almost standstill, not
caring if I lost the group, wondering if I could have helped her through this
problem the way I’d helped her with others. Stay away from negative and bad
people, Sara. Remember who you are, don’t let people tell you who to be. I
picked up my phone and went to her number, contemplating calling her but also
wondering if her phone would even ring and how awkward it would be if someone
answered. The simple fact that I would never again speak to someone I loved so
dearly was heartbreaking, and her random “you’re the best” texts would never
come again, and then Gaby’s face appeared out of the crowd and she told me in a
very soft voice over and over, “ya basta,
ya basta. You have to control yourself.” And I realized that this was not
the time, I couldn’t do this now, this is not the time, get ahold of yourself
and get ahold of your rambling thoughts. Every time the tears threatened to
come back I fought them away. I kept thinking over and over, “How does this
happen? How in the world does this happen?”
After a long walk we stood on a hill that
overlooked the city, and then made our way home. It was such a beautiful drive
back into The Central Valley and down into Mexico City, and on the bus ride
back I fell asleep, exhausted from the emotional trauma of the day. My mother called,
and later my grandmother, and I assured them both that I would be ok.
Chapter 13
I went back to school, back to life, back
to smiling with my friends and told no one about my cousin except a few people
that had become good friends. I tried to mourn quickly and move on, for life is
for living. A week later after the trip to Pachuca, we had a brigada with the
non-profit group and had to be up and in the bus at 5am on a Saturday. The
night before, we had been packing and getting things in order and we left
Mexico City and headed to Guanajuato and arrived at our destination around ten
a.m. We pulled off the highway at a small road and then were met by a bunch of
pick-up trucks that we piled into and which carried us up the most ragged
little rocky dirt road that led to a town situated a few miles off of the main
highway. The bus couldn’t drive on this road so it was left at the turn-off. On
the way there, we passed numerous children that were shepherding goats and
several people mounted on donkeys. What was hidden back in those hills was an
image of abject poverty that startled me. There were no paved roads, and many
of the children were barefoot and dirty and wore ragged clothes. Most of the
houses had tin roofs that were held down by tires, cinder blocks, and scrap
pieces of metal. The cars were ragged, the houses ragged, the entire town was
ragged, but it was situated in such a beautiful little green valley that the
contrast was unnerving. It was surrounded by steep hills that were covered in
green cacti and green foliage underneath a clear blue sky, a valley that for a
short period of time sat well-watered during the wet season and blossomed with
beautiful plants.
In the back of the pickup truck that
carried us to town I was informed that these people were extremely poor and
isolated and had likely never seen a foreigner before. I was also informed that
no American had ever been back into these hills- most of the people here were
indígenas or had heavy indígena blood, and most of the people here spoke
Nahuatl. The plan of the day was that we would work all day, and at the end of
the day would be fed and housed by these people. We were not to expect any
meat, as they were too poor to eat meat regularly and that I would sleep on a
floor. I didn’t care. To me, this was the epitome of cultural enlightenment,
far better than anything offered in a University or in a study abroad program,
and my heart had long yearned to see something like this.
Once we got into town, we began setting
up shop at the local schoolyard. A strong man of around forty years of age
named Javier was in charge, directing traffic and coordinating the operation.
He and I climbed up to the roof of the school where we pitched enormous gazebos
for shade from the brutal sun, strapping tarps and securing the shelters, under
which the operation was to commence. We set up tables and unboxed supplies,
filling many tables. All of the men ran a long ant line from the trucks to the
schoolyard and the women unboxed supplies and set up the various stations.
Townspeople slowly congregated in the vicinity and stood a few yards off,
observing. Many women stood wrapped in shawls, and others wore jeans. Some of
the men wore cowboy hats and boots, and others sandals. Some offered “Bienvenidos, bienvenidos. Buenos días,”
To which I offered “muchas gracias, con
permiso. Buenos días.” We hustled to get everything set up and then the
long day began. The people lined up and as they were invited forward they answered
a series of questions, and information was documented about them including
their name, age, occupation, etcetera and then they received a teeth cleaning
or pulling and a toothbrush with toothpaste, and then went to see the doctor
where they were given a check-up. If they had diseases and needed a
prescription, it was given to them. This whole process included a sit-down
informational session conducted in groups of 20 or so, during which they were
educated on dental hygiene and proper nutrition. There were bags and bags of
donated, used clothing that people picked through, and were so grateful to
receive. To me it was very sad that
these people were left alone in this beautiful valley that offered no means of
education, jobs, or social mobility. They could never hope to rise out of
poverty unless they left, which many men had done. Many had gone north into the
United States, seeking to send money home to their families.
During that day, the temperature soared
and it reached the middle nineties. We worked and sweated all day in that sun,
running back to the truck for boxes when supplies ran low. I was very content
to be here in this little village in Guanajuato, observing a life that existed
so far from what I knew. When work was slow, a game of soccer picked up in the
far corner of the schoolyard between a ragtag little group of kids and they
invited me to go play with them. I ran over and jumped in and had a great
little game, kicking around a flat soccer ball on a patch of dirt. The
simplicity of their happiness amazed me, and when I pulled out my cellphone to
take pictures of them, they thought it was the coolest thing ever and each one
wanted his picture taken individually so that he could see it on the screen.
They looked at all of the pictures I had taken of Mexico City and looked at
ones from back home, too, asking questions about what life was like up there,
in that country where their dad or uncle or older brother was working. I was
amazed at the happiness these children possessed despite the poverty. I was
amazed at the politeness of the adults despite generations of marginalization
and economic despair. I was amazed that life would have me hidden away in the
hills in a place where apparently no American had ever trod. I reveled in the
moment, soaking in every piece of it and etching it into my mind. Late in the
day, Rodrigo said he wanted to go for a quick hike up the side of one of the
mountains bordering the small town. We hiked up through the rocky, steep
terrain that was covered with massive cactus and other thorny bushes. We
carefully picked our way along a goat trail and after a half hour or so were at
the top of a mountain and could see the tiny village nestled in the green
hills. The land here was so foreign to me, so unlike anything I had ever seen.
As the sun went down, we began breaking
down shop. A couple of hours of tearing down the gazebos, boxing up what was
left of the supplies and repacking them onto the truck ended things. There ended
up being a shortage of housing, so all the women went to sleep in guests’
houses and all the men were to crash at the school. It got very dark and we
rested from the day, eating a few snacks and talking. I wandered away from the
group and for the first time since being in Mexico, was afforded the
opportunity to gaze upon a black, clear Mexican sky. This sky was so different
from the one I was used to back home, with all of the starts and constellations
shifted and new ones being shown. The temperature was dropping fast and it
became time to bathe before it got too cold. One at a time, someone would enter
a small building with a drain in the floor while a man stood outside handing a
bucket of water at a time drawn from a well. I was second to last and Javier
and his twelve year-old son handed me two buckets of water- one to get wet and
the other to rinse the soap. The water was very cold but it was a new
experience to bathe by pouring well water over my head, which to me was just
another part of this new way of life.
We laid out on the tile floor of a
classroom, me in jeans and a hoodie with my shoes on, and using my backpack as
a pillow. It was cold on the hard tile, but I fought to sleep. I kept waking up
in the night shivering, cold and uncomfortable on the hard floor, and at some
point in the night I felt a blanket fall over my body. I said, “thank you” in
English and heard back Javier’s “de nada.”
I was grateful for the warmth and for him giving me his blanket. I woke up as the
sun was coming up and saw it rising over the green hills and spilling its light
into the town. We cleaned up, ate some food we had and had a time of prayer on
that Sunday morning. Later we piled into the pickup trucks that took us down
the rickety little dirt road to the highway, to the bus and back to Mexico
City. I was thoroughly amazed at what I had just experienced, although it was
during this trip that the dreams about Sara began, dreams that haunted me for a
long time. She had been dead for maybe a couple weeks, and I tried hard to not
think about her and let it ruin my days. The first dream occurred the night we
were there in Guanajuato with the brigade. In the dream, I had gone hiking up
the mountain with Rodrigo through the massive cactus and prickly trees and
after spending a few minutes relaxing, we turned down the hill and walked back
into the town. Picking my way through all of the people that were crowded
inside the schoolyard for our event I saw Sara standing to the side alone,
looking very lost and worried. I stopped in my tracks and my heart froze, and
she caught my eye and hurried towards me. I stood there, speechless, while she
hugged me and asked where she was. “Where am I? What is going on? Who are all
these people?” And I immediately began crying and hugging her. “Sara, what are
you doing here? How is this possible? What
are you doing here?” And she kept replying that she didn’t know, and I
never told her that she had died. I was too confused. That was one of the many
times that night I woke up on the cold, hard ground. The next night, back home
in the Capital, I dreamed the same thing, except I saw her as I was picking my
way through a market buying groceries. “Sara? Why are you here? What are
doing?” And she never knew. I would just hug her and cry and she was completely
disoriented and confused. I woke up in the morning soaked in tears and in an
awful mood. After about a week of this happening every night and by now being
troubled throughout the day, I ran into Sara close to my school and for the
first time while I was in the dream, I was aware that I was dreaming. She saw
me, ran over to me in a panic and asked where she was, completely confused as
to her surroundings and the events leading up to her being lost in Mexico.
“Sara, you’re dead. This isn’t real. You’re dead. You died the end of last
month.” She looked at me, completely dazed, and began shaking her head. “I’m
not dead. I didn’t die. What are you talking about?” I burst into tears, “no,
Sara. You died. I’m so sorry, but you died. Don’t be so scared, this isn’t even
real.” These dreams happened much the same way every time, and grew more and
more bothersome every morning.
Life from this point forward began to set
into a routine. I would wake up every morning at 6am and dress, and then leave
my beautiful, well-manicured neighborhood for the nearest subway stop. I would
spend a few hours at school, going to class, walking around, hanging out with
other foreign students, playing soccer or basketball, or sitting somewhere
comfortable and watching all the people. I made a lot of friends from my church
group that also studied at UNAM and was quickly immersed into their social
circle. I settled into life as it existed and relished every moment as best I
could. Within a few weeks there was another trip- this one to Ixtapa. It was an
outing with friends from church, and we rented a bus and left for 4 days to the
coast. I hadn’t been to the beach in a very long time and was enchanted to see
the changing landscape as we traveled across the land. We had gotten lodging in
a very nice hotel and it was entirely opened up to the outdoors except for the
air-conditioned rooms. The beach was closed due to storms and dangerous waters,
but some friends and I ignored it and went in the water anyways, which was the
warmest beach I’d ever experienced. The water was gray and dark and choppy, but
still very warm. Over the three days we were there, the waves were huge and the
beach remained closed, but we kept going in the water and body surfing the
enormous waves until someone came and kicked us out. On one of the days, we
took a taxi to Zihuatanejo and walked around the beautiful pacific town. We
stopped and ate lunch at some small restaurant and walked around the harbor and
relaxed. That night many of us congregated on the beach to wait for the sea
turtles to make their trip ashore to lay eggs and I was filled with such
excitement, because turtles are my favorite animals. After a few hours of
waiting, we spotted an enormous turtle making her slow trek through the sand
and we followed her and watched her dig a hole with her back feet and lay eggs.
I was totally beside myself and felt so blessed to have witnessed the legendary
sea turtle trip. While the turtle was laying her eggs, I lied down beside her
and talked to her and stroked her head and shell. There were some people there
who collected the eggs for protection after she returned to the ocean and
guarded them. The next day the sun came out, the ocean calmed, and I spent the
entire day on the beach and got so sunburned that upon arrival in the Capital I
was escorted to the doctor by my roommates. My entire body was covered in
blisters- I’d never been so badly burned and never had experienced such a
thing. It was completely tortuous and on the bus ride home I was shaking with
muscle spasms. Within a week, it cleared up, was back to normal and I stayed
out of the sun. While I was in Ixtapa, I didn’t dream one time of Sara, but
they promptly returned upon arrival back home in Mexico City and continued
every night.
Chapter 14
Life in Mexico City is not for the timid
of spirit. It is massive, congested, loud, and obnoxious. Because of this,
every couple of weeks I would get the itches to get out and experience some
peace and tranquility. My buddy Hugo from London liked traveling as well and we
made several trips during the time I was there up to the mountains to a
national park called La Marquesa. There we rode horses, rented ATVs, ate lunch,
walked around, and enjoyed the peace and serenity up in the mountains. The food
was amazing and I always dearly loved visiting one of the small towns in the
mountains outside the Capital. Our favorite thing was to rent the ATVs and race
around the dirt track like madmen. When the attendants weren’t watching we
would get off the track and go into the woods and fields until they would come
looking for us. We always found a lot of things to talk about regarding the
cultural and linguistic differences between England and the US and the
differing viewpoints regarding global issues. This always lasted for some time
when we met up, but inevitably after a couple of beers our intelligence and
gentlemanly composure abandoned us to insults and heckling.
After about two months of
being there, my friend Carlos and I planned a trip to the Riviera Maya. We
bought some cheap tickets to Mérida and flew out. I had contracted food
poisoning a few days before we left and was so violently ill that I was scared
I was going to miss out on the trip. Once the plane touched down in Mérida, we
rode a bus to Playa del Carmen and arrived at about four in the morning. We walked
from the bus station and chilled out on the beach until morning, when we went
and got the cheapest room we could find and crashed for a few hours. We planned
the trip about two weeks out, and bad luck would have it raining during our
trip. There was a tropical depression a few hundred miles out that was causing
a lot of rain, but we were stubborn and still tried to enjoy the beach that
first day. After about an hour of torrential downpour, we tried to find
something else to do and hopped the ferry to Cozumel, and after about an hour
the rain let up. We found some guys standing along the shore that offered to
take us snorkeling for super cheap because business was so slow, and we jumped
in their boat. A few minutes later a white couple came aboard speaking English,
and I started talking to them. They were from Canada and on holiday, and I
offered to translate all of the instructions given by the instructors. Once we
had a sizeable group on the raft, we took off out into the water away from the
docks and I didn’t really know what to expect when I was putting on my flippers
and snorkel and listening to the instructions. We sat on the edge of the boat,
adjusted the mask and pushed off. The
instant my face hit the water I was completely mesmerized. Beneath the choppy
gray water was an immense sea of the most beautiful and colorful fish I could
imagine. I was absolutely taken aback by the brilliant colors of the fish and
clarity of the ocean, where I could see crystal clear for hundreds of yards. It
was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and these fish weren’t
scared of being so close to humans. If you swam at a normal pace, they would
gather in close to your body and swim with you. I surface dove and went a few
meters beneath the surface and swam with the fish, reaching out and touching
them. I swam down to the ocean floor, which was maybe 20 feet, and looked at
the sand, the bottom of the boat, the foreign shapes of the rock and coral
figures that lined the bottom of the ocean. There were rocks that had holes
that made tunnels, through which we swam. After a while, we got back into the
boat and were taken to new place farther out, where it was the same routine.
The instructor and I were brave enough to swim among the plants and rocks
thirty feet below the surface, observing the martian life below. 
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