Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Swinging South on the Lone Road

"Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me." Jack Kerouac, On The Road



Chihuahua to Jalisco- I left  Bauchivo on the passenger train in mid-afternoon as the shadows from the pines and the canyon walls began to stretch out long on the dusty ground.  The train wound through tunnels, over trestles, and along the edge of precipices.  It thundered in the gloam.  The pass-ways between the cars had large open windows and I went to them, the wind rushing through my hair, my soul exalting in the motion, and up ahead I could see the whole silver flank of the train as it glimmered and bent like the sleek side of some gargantuan eel. 









The first stars came out over the massive ramparts of the canyons, now high above and wheeling slowly around, the clatter of the engine battering the granite facade.  In Temoris the tropical plants began, and we whooshed by prehistoric leaves hanging idle in the moist dark.  On the train was a group of Romanians in their twenties, smoking in the corridors in their striped hoodies, snapping photos and swinging their hips to the music of their ipods.  Soon it was just me and one other, with firm arms and blazing lips, and she turned on me and locked me in such a look that I was bowled across the pass-way and found myself with my head outside the train gulping breaths of rushing air and staring at the moon, full and beaming down in the barranca dark.

We came down into El Fuerte, spread green on the flat apron of the sierra, thick with palms and strange twisting trees with the girth of bridge pylons.  I piled into a truck with the Romanians, fully aware of her, the one with a sledge-hammer gaze.  We glided into town, the buildings all white and the trees swathed in lime to keep out burrowing menaces.  And then we were in the plaza, beside the luminescent gazebo.  I fanned out with a different Romanian in search of shelter and accepted the first place we found sight unseen, although the Romanian continued on and I soon found out why.  The room was a cube of concrete with a few dirty sheets on the bed and a pipe protruding from the wall where supposedly water comes.  I sat on the bed deflated.

I went outside and slunk across the plaza, sucked dry by the day's dizzying motion and my sheer distance from the familiar tread of the my bare feet on our living room rug, from the sound that the scrub oaks leaves make as they rustle and fall in October.  Across the way, the Romanians sauntered.  I shrunk and hid from myself inside.  Then I went back to my cell to sleep a swirling, greywater sleep.

In the morning the town was transformed, colors bouncing from the bougainvilleas, kids shouting and jumping outside the schools.  I leered at them as I passed.  They laughed.  Soon fifty of them were pressed aginst the fence, laughing at the leering gringo.  Even the nunnish teacher cracked a smile.  I had an urge to join the circus.

I walked along the El Fuerte river which roils through town with a slow dilluvian force carrying the sediment of the gashes of the Barrancas down to the fertile flats the feed the many mouths of wintertime America.  Herons and grebes hunch and gabble on snags and start up through the morning steam.  The river languors under the old wall of the Spanish fortress.

My insides were jumping to go, and soon I was jouncing along amidst a racket of grinding gears and Banda music on the highway to Los Mochis.  From there I mounted on high the cool rectangle of a Sonora Norte bus, making time through the dark landscape of thorn-scrub  which slipped by remote behind the tinted glass.

I landed for the night in Mazatlan, eager to witness the great pulsing life of a famed Mexican resort town, but found a great wasteland of a city, with soulless seafood restaurants and fat-legged American tourists the color of raw pork and beaches fronted with salmon colored hotels.  I got up and out early.  That night I landed, bewildered and beat in the buzzing plaza of San Blas, Nayarit.  Every night the whole town comes out to the plaza to talk and smoke, and the surf bums come and go on their fixed-gear bikes. 

Right off I met a bum from Xalpapa named Itzvan. Itzvan talks as if each phrase he utters is some great new idea that we have discovered together.  He is skin and bones with flip flops and a great shaggy beard.  He went around the plaza selling the paper flowers he makes, presenting each as a french waiter might present the hours de' ouvoures.  I watched Itvanz' stuff while he made sales and the village idiot came up and started yakking in my ear.

"This is my special medicine" he yelled, swirling some yellow-brown liquid in a coke bottle in front of my face.  " By God this is my Medicine." Then he suddenly started and turned with a paranoid look to survey his surroundings.

"Watch yourself," he murmured to me, low.  "Watch out because they'll steal it.  Bad people here. Watch yourself." He did another slow undercover detective scan of the plaza.  He held my hand.  He insisted I come stay at his place.

Itzvan came back and we took off, insisting to the idiot that we would see him in the plaza the next day so that he wouldn't burst into tears.  In the end he was happy and shouted something about his medicine to us. We found Stoners Surf Camp, a place to camp on the beach.  At midnight we sat on the dark beach and were stung to distraction by hordes of gnats, the evil messengers of Mammon, and ate onions, avocado, bananas, cheese, and apples all wrapped up in tortillas.

"I call it the vegetarian burrito" Itzvan announced, as if he had just made a startling culinary breakthrough.  We smoked a cigarette.  He told me about the Mayan way and about how the only pure life is the one of travel, of leaving everything behind and carrying your living on your back, learning far and wide from the people.  He told of how he learned a fail-safe remedy to avoid sickness from a wizened old Indian women in Oaxaca, which is to drink a bottle of your own piss every morning.  I guess we all have our special medicine. 

We walked down the beach leaving footprints in the wet sand that were gone the next day.

I fished with Itzvan using his special set up that he learned from a wise man in Acapulco.  I hauled in pargo and catfish using shrimp from a bag full of ice, while Itzvan caught nothing.  We strung the fish live through their gills, tied them, and put them in the sea to keep them fresh, and then I went for fruit so we could cook them over hot coals.  When I came back Itzvan was walking toward me. 

"I went for cigarettes and someone cut the line."

I was dismayed but he was untouched and went off the smoke a joint with a dread-locked kid on a skateboard.

Hitchhiking to another beach, Noe Tablas to the left.
I spent the next few days in the ocean trying to learn surf but mostly getting my face slammed into the sand and great gouts of seawater in my sinuses.  Noe Tablas was also there at Stoners, a loquacious and grinning Chicano with shoulder-length hair.  He changed his last name to Tablas (boards) when he came to Mexico three months ago to inaugurate his dream of going pro in surfing and opening up his own shop in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.  But he barely got in the water in San Blas.  When we hitchhiked with a few other people to a remote beach with better surf he mostly just lay stoned under the coconut palms yelling "dale dale" and "animos animos" from time to time to motivate those who were actually trying to surf.
Boating to a beach with fisherman who kept yelling "TODO LA VIDA!"
and whose skiff had a crack in it that let in a spurt of water every time we
slapped over a swell.


The great guru king of Stoners was Pompis.  Pompis barely talked to anyone, and barely even moved, and if it weren't for photos hung up under the palapa of him streaking straight across the glassy face of a twenty foot swell, I might have thought him a dimwit.  But everyone spoke of him with the a holy hush, a reverent awe.  Noe proudly confided in me that he was one of the only outsiders that had been to Pompis house, and that Pompis had told him that the choice was his now, as if Noe now had a pivotal decision to make: would he give away all his belongings to the poor and follow this mystic figure shrouded in weed smoke?

Pompis had a daughter and while we were there he threw a quinceñeros at Stoners and everyone camped there partook in the feast.  There were slabs of Mahi-Mahi 4 feet long and straight off the grill, slathered in lime and garlic.  We flaked off great hunks of fish with our fingers.  There were vats of savichi which we ate piled high on dorados.  We quenched the spice of the savichi with agua loco, a sweet cinnamon and rice drink spiked with tequila.  Pompis presided darkly in the background.

After a week my belly was full of fish and my arms sore from paddling my board I again felt the urge to go southward.  After a wordless exchange of money with Pompis at 6 AM,  I again found myself in the whirring air conditioned box of a bus, ascending the rise to Jalisco, and the blazing green cane fields around Tepic changed to the muted blue green of agave, with sheaves fanning sharp and pointed like the headdresses of old pagan gods buried upright up to the brow.  The bus slid into Guadalajara where I changed to a different magical conveyance and sailed southward to the small town of Tonaya, Jalisco, where before my foot even touched the ground Israel Robles stepped forward to great me with his blazing smile.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Running with the Tarahumaras


The Mission at Cerocahui, the town where the race started
Barranca de Urique, Chihuahua, Mexico- It was just me and Miguel Laura-- the other racers had been left behind in several miles ago. We had covered perhaps nine of the 11 miles between the town of Cerocahui, where the race started, and Bauchivo, its finish.  The sun was high overhead and the road was so thick with dust that our footfalls barely made a sound, though I felt like each time my leg fell it was with the weight of a sledgehammer.    Miguel, extremely small in stature but with calf muscles that would make Michelangelo's David jealous, was absolutely punishing me on the uphills.  But on the downhills I made up the distance with my longer stride and we continued to trade off the lead.  Any minute now the long downhill would begin that would bring us into Bauchivo, with its streets packed with people celebrating the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. 


Parades to celebrate the Revolution.

I am racing a group of Tarahumara Indians, famed worldwide for their endurance running abilities.  Most people in the U.S. know them from the bestseller Born to Run, which tells the story of how the Tarahumaras can, and often do, run for over a hundred miles in endurance races, kicking a small leather ball.  Sometimes they even run barefoot across the rugged canyon country, which has sparked a barefoot running craze in the United States (though I'm pretty sure it´s not out of preference that the Tarahumaras run barefoot). Tarahumaras have gone to compete in world class distance events such as the Leadville 100 in Colorado and have often won.  Today´s race was short for them, like a 100 meter dash for a 10K runner.

But let me back up here and compare a race in the Barranca del Cobre country of Mexico and the race world of the U.S.

Race lead up the U.S:  Subscribe to Runner's World.  Follow the intricate training pattern of speed-work while making sure to take days of recovery so your muscles can recharge.  Engage in at least an hour every day of supplemental exercises that condition, for example, the minuscule muscles in your lower abdomen in order to avoid injury and to reach your absolute maximum potential on race day. With your running buddies, deploy liberally such terms as anaerobic threshold, farlek, and PR, which you learned from Runner's World.  Determine whether or not your buddies are really runners based on their reaction to these terms.  Starting three days before, begin to eat carbohydrate rich foods which will increase the glycogen stores in your muscles.  Take care to not over-exercise the day before.  Read inspiring books about poor people in foreign countries that run really fast without exercising the minuscule muscles of their lower abdomen. Be in awe of them.

Race lead up in the Barrancas: Work all day in the corn fields.  Walk 40 miles to the apple trees you have in the mountains.  Pick bag and carry them back. Eat lots of tortillas.

Race day pre-race in the U.S.:  Eat the special breakfast of toasted bagels without anything on them (you don´t want a side ache) that you´ve trained your body to accept in strenuous exercise.  Don your $180 watch that tells you the time, your heart rate, your longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, your average speed, your velocity relative to the velocity of your dog...  Don your $40 Aesics shorts and $40 singlet-- at least you will look good dammit, when you cross the finish line.  Make sure that you have your special light weight mid-distance road racing flats (not your mid-distance track spikes, 5K/10K track spikes, cross country spikes, marathon road racers, or god forbid, your trainers) and your lucky socks that you will put on at the last minute before the gun goes off, which will send an electric pulse to a complex computerized mat that initializes the computer chip that you have laced onto your shoe with a special infallible system (that you are proud to claim as your own design) so that at the end of the race you will know your time to the millisecond and will know exactly who you are better than and who is better than you ...


Race lead up in the Barrancas: Eat some tortillas. Walk 10 miles to where you can get a ride to the race.  Put on some beat-up trainers if you are lucky.  If not, the good old sandals made of old tires will do.  Hang out for a few hours in the hot sun (and getting hotter) because no one actually decided in what town the race would start, let alone where in town.  Get suddenly escorted, along with other racers, by men with AK 47 submachine guns who load you into the back of their pickups to take you to where they want the race to start (are they mafia? are they police? does it really make a difference?).  Arrive with so much dust in your lungs that if you coughed it up you could make a brick out of it. Eat seven oranges because they are offered to you.  Put on the XXL t-shirt bearing some political propaganda the town president makes everyone wear.  Chuck half of your eighth orange into the gutter and take of running because one of the runners took off and the race has begun.

********************************************************************************
Miguel and I were now in the streets of Bauchivo.  I was a few yards in front of him, but my form was starting to fall apart and my feet were slapping painfully against the cobblestones.  I had no idea as to where exactly the finish line was.  It could be in one block or one kilometer. 

"Which way?" I desperately panted to bystanders, who would shrug or vaguely wave in a northerly direction.  I picked up the pace, trying to get a lead on Miguel on the downhill.  I was really regretting those seven and a half oranges. 


Miguel receiving his first place prize money.  I think he is looking
away like that because he´s contemplating running the 40 miles or
so back to his house.

The road plunged into a rancid creek choked with big trucks honking their horns.  People motioned us to the entrance of the rodeo/ soccer arena on the other side of the creek.  We thrashed through the water, me on the inside of a rumbling F 350 and Miguel on the outside.  When we emerged on the far bank he was ahead of me.  He was pulling away.  We entered the stadium and I could see the tape and I was giving it all I had.  But he was stronger and ran through the tape a few seconds ahead of me.

"Good job," I said to him after a full minute of gasping and wheezing.  "That was tough, huh?"

I looked up.  He wasn´t really sweating.  Or breathing hard.  He shrugged.  My legs threatened to buckle.

And now we come to the final comparison between U.S. and Tarahumara race culture:

U.S. Post Race Refreshment: Expensive energy beverage charged with electrolytes and essence of acai berry to purge the toxic lactic acid build up with a burst of antioxidants!

Barrancas Post Race Refreshment: Tacate beer bought with your second place prize money for yourself and everyone else too because you are the rich gringo.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

The poems I sold in Patzcuaro

A quick interruption from the chronicles of the first part of my trip to share with you a couple of the poems I sold in Patzcuaro (By the way, I am not still stuck in Patzcuaro, but am now in the sprawling, throbbing, smoggy metropolis of Mexico City.  More to come on Mexico City later).


What does an English major who is broke in a foreign country try to do to make money?  Try to sell poems, of course, which everyone knows is one of the most lucrative industries in today´s global market:

Te Espero
Te espero
como una semilla
en tierra seca
lleno de vida
esperando la lluvia.

Te espero
como un pájaro
después de un vuelo largo
encima de la llave
esperando gotas dulces.

Te espero
como un hombre en la noche
sin hogar
con su cara al éste
esperando el sol.

Aunque la lluvia no venga,
las gotas no caigan
y el sol no salga,
aquí estaré, te esperaré.
 



I Wait for You
I wait for you
like a seed
in dry soil
full of life
waiting for rain.

I wait for you
like a bird
after a long flight
perched on the faucet
waiting for sweet drops.

I wait for you
like a man in the night
without a home
facing east
waiting for the sun.

But should the rain not come,
the drops not fall,
and the sun not rise,
I will be here, I will wait for you.



Abuelita
Abuelita, abuelita,
bonita y chiquita,
no hay nadie como tu
bonita abuelita.

Tus abrazos son regalos
trayéndome amor,
tus ojos son brillantes
como cada vivida flor.

Abuelita, abuelita,
bonita y chiquita,
no hay nadie como tu
bonita abuelita.

Has vivido muchos años
y sabes más que yo sé
pero tú me escuchaste
cuando yo lloré.

Abuelita, abuelita,
bonita y chiquita,
no hay nadie como tu
bonita abuelita.


Sweet Little Gramma
Sweet little Gramma
slight and pretty,
there is no one like you
pretty little Gramma.

Your hugs are gifts
bringing me love,
your eyes are brilliant
like each colorful flower.

You´ve lived many years
and know more than me
but you still listened to me
when I cried.

Sweet little Gramma
slight and pretty,
there is no one like you
pretty little Gramma.

Yep, they're sappy.  But sap is what sold, and I was pretty hungry... 

Saturday, January 15, 2011

How I Got My Butt Kicked by a 5'1 Taramuhara Women



My cabin above the Barranca de Urique.
 Barranca de Urique, Chihuahua, Mexico-- After Rancho Norte, I headed south to the Barranca del Cobre area, still in the Sierra Taramuhara. A friend of a friend has a little cabin and he let me stay there for as long as I wanted.  I was working to clean up the cabin to turn it into a bunk house and also preparing sites around the cabins for tourists to camp.

The cabin was perched on the edge of the 5,000 foot gorge called the Barranca de Urique, which is deeper than the Grand Canyon and part of a vast system of over a dozen canyons.  They were formed eons ago by volcanic explosions and lava flows so hot they cracked their crucible- the crust of the earth.  They are so deep that while the pine boughs on the rims bend with snow in winter, the trees in the valley floor are laden with grapefruits, lemons, avocados and bananas. Thousands of birds chime like silver clocks in the manzasnita and organos, and flash by with brilliant colors as if the bright clothing of the Taramuhara had been wafted up and given life by some spacious spirit.

The Taramuharas are the indigenous people that live in the canyons.  They live in the most remote enclaves of the gorges, growing corn, beans, and marijuana, and herding goats.  They still speak their native language although almost all of them speak Spanish as well.

I often hiked over the ridges to visit my Taramuhara neighbors, bringing them fruits or other food in exchange for conversation, corn tortillas, and beans (the corn grown, picked, shucked, ground, and cooked all right there by hand).

Victoriano, a Taramuhara friend.
One of my neighbors, Maria, was in her late 20s and especially liked my visits (and liked to ask me questions like: "So you´re not married, huh?" and "So you don´t have a girlfriend back in your country, huh?" and "What did you dream about last night?"). One day, after we talked and I ate, I asked if I could help with some of their chores. She looked me as if I probably couldn´t even lift a cup of water to my mouth if I was dying of thirst. Then she shrugged and told me I could cut firewood. Determined to disprove my gringo-ness, I told her I would love to and assured her that I had grown up with a wood stove and knew all about wood and axes and such masculine thing. I left out the part where we moved away from our wood stove house when I was age nine.

I fell to hacking at the logs with fury. Sweat poured down my face. Blisters beaded on my hands. The axe head flew off and I had to replace it. Finally I had one piece. Maria and her mother continued their business, graciously keeping their snickers to a minimum. Finally, seeing the oncoming darkness and my paltry pile, Maria came up and said, "I´ll teach you."

Maria is about 5'1". She never moves quickly. She always has a dress with full skirts. But she raised that axe and gave the log a blow such has not been seen since the days of King David fighting the Philistines. In about two minutes she had a pile twice the size of mine. Then, without saying a word, she handed me the axe, scooped up some wood, and went in to start dinner.

The house of my Taramuhara neighbors.


Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Fruit of the Nopal

Sierra Taramuhara, Chihuahua, Mexico- After a while solo on the ranch, my supplies were quite low, forcing me to be creative about my cuisine (how many combination can you make with beans, rice, and oats?). One way I got creative was to mount up on my horse and roam the hills harvesting tuna, the fruit of the nopal cactus.
Beans, beans, they´re good for your heart...

The nopal grows in the most arid, sun-baked hillsides of the Sierra.  The leaves of the cactus are round and thin, like green flapjacks glued together and turned on end, but you would not want to take a bite out of these.  The two-inch thorns grow on every possible surface of the leaf.  They can pierce through leather and have cruel barbs that break off in your skin when you to remove the spines.  A hard land calls for tough defenses.

The tunas are magenta lobes, oblong with a smooth curve like sandstone river rocks that have been worn into shape by the steady pressures of their environment.  They protrude from the thin edge of the the leaves at random points so that they seems to be foreign growths instead of the fruit of the plant.  The fruit itself has its defenses-- minuscule spines that grow from almost invisible nodes on the skin.  To eat it, one must carefully peel this outer layer so that the spines will not stick in the lips and tongue ( I learned this the hard way. I was told that the only cures for a mouthful of spines were to lick a woman's hair or the mane of a horse. I definitely would have preferred the first cure, but there was a shortage of women around the ranch...).  Inside the fruit is smooth and fiber-less, and like the sleek side of a brook trout.  The black bee-bee seeds (which work wonders on someone with an all-starch diet) are packed between the viscera and juice.

This luscious fruit that tastes of melon and honey, is brighter than blood, and slick like the skin of a child still wet from a bath, is a mystery to me.  How can something so vibrant, so liquid, so symmetrical be at home here in the ragged and thorn-filled sweep of the parched steeps around it.  How can something so wholesome, positively pulsing with nutrients, a free gift of nourishment to man or beast, be the product of a land soaked in the blood of it´s inhabitants, a land where nothing comes free of struggle?  The sun keeps rising in the morning, flooding the sky with deep pink.  The cruel cactus takes this light, and inexplicably, from between the vicious barbs, presents us the tuna.




Tuesday, January 4, 2011

The Ghost Ranch of the Robles


Sierra Taramuhara, Chihuahua, Mexico-
Me and the ranch-hands.
For the majority of the two weeks I spent on the ranch after the owner left, I was alone.  For a while another ranch-hand came with his brother and he taught me how to ride the horses, to make tortillas, and to lasso the unbroken mules in the coral (turns out that while lassoing is hard, getting the lasso off is even harder).  But he left after a few days and then it was just me and the horses and dogs and coyotes that howl every night.  Me and the vast forests of pine and oak and the wide valleys full of tall prairie grass.  Me and the magenta sunset and the fuchsia fruits of the cacti.  Me and the many outbuildings with hinges that screech at night.

After several days of silence so absolute that the jets that passed high overhead every couple days nearly scared the living daylights out of me, I mounted up to visit our nearest neighbors, the Robles, who live about 5 miles away.  The owner of Rancho Norte told me about Rodrigo Robles when we were driving up to the ranch.  Rodrigo grows marijuana.  A few years ago he had come to some prominence in the local group of La Linea.  A few years ago, the Sinaloa Cartel marched in and shot most of the leaders of La Linea in the area, and established this part of the Sierra as Sinaloa territory.  Rodrigo hid out for months in the immense and complex country, until Sinaloa finally stopped looking for him and he could return to his property.

Now I am ambling down the hills toward his ranch, which I can see from about 30 minutes away.  I pass a Texas license plate nailed to a tree which I first mistook for a no trespassing sign.  I ford a stream, the horse churning hard through the deep sand.  I dismount several times to undo barbed wire gate strung across the pathway.  I pass the skeleton of an old rusted-out truck and begin whistling a greeting. 

Silence.

I call out.

Nothing. 

I stop in front of his heavily barred house but do not get off my horse.  The flies buzz heavy in the hot air.  A mattress, originally on the porch, has been gutted and strewn across front area.  A stray chicken or two clucks and struts.

At this moment I notice that Codi, one of the ranch dogs that came with me, is hopping around on three legs.  I dismount to take a look.  I bend over, my back to the black and silent windows of the house.  Codi lets out a slight whimper. The flesh between the pads is pink and venerable.  There is nothing visible that is wrong with his paw.

At that moment, crouched down beside the dog, I feel a chill like a cloud had just suddenly passed over the sun. The nearest human could just as easily be 20 feet away from me as 20 miles. 

I swing up into my saddle and ride out of there fast.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Crossing La Linea



Rancho Norte, Sierra Taramuhara.  
 



































Sierra Taramuhara, Chihuahua, Mexico-
About five days after leaving the United States, I found myself alone on a remote ranch in the northern mountains of Chihuahua, with a loaded shotgun under my bed. 

The ranch (which I will call Rancho Norte in this blog) is high in the Sierra Taramuhara.  The Sierra Taramuhara is a vast jumble of ridges and deep gorges, crossed by a complex and twisting system of rivers.  The hills are deeply forested with pines at the higher elevations and oaks lower down.  There are only two roads that cross this mighty range that stretches from the Mexico-US border near Arizona and New Mexico to Jalisco, halfway down the country.  Remnant pockets of wolves inhabit the most remote regions of the range.  The ranch where I was headed is between 15 and 20 miles from the nearest tiny town, and is was only on the outskirts of the vast wilderness of the range.

The history of the Sierra Taramuhara is as rough as its geography.  It got its name from,  the Taramuhara Indians who fled into the canyons of the mountains to escape the bloody conquest of the Spaniards (more about the Taramuharas in a following blog).  The first rumblings of the Revolution of 1910 were in nearby Tomóchic, when in 1891 a group of unhappy Chihuahuans revolted against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.  In bloody battles in the rough terrain, the rebels continually wiped out the soldiers sent to quell the rebellion, until they were crushed by an entire army in 1892.  The cry of Poncho Villa and his men in the 1910 revolution was ¡viva Tomóchic!  What´s more, for the last century and a half this was Apache terrain, after the Apaches were driven south out of the US.  Battles with Apaches were fought very near the Rancho Norte as late as World War II. 

And now it is the terrain of the narcotraficantes running drugs northward to supply the ceaseless market demands of the U.S.  The area I was in is in the loosely defined battlefront, called La Linea, between the Cartel Juarez of Ciudad Juarez and the Sinaloa men of Chapo Guzman.  On a normal spring day a few months before I arrived, Sinaloa men crossed La Linea, drove into the town nearest Norte, executed the leaders of the rival cartel, and shot up the office of the municipal president.  When I was there, the secretary of the president was carrying out the duties of the president who had fled, as no one wanted to take his place.

The very beginning of the road to Rancho Norte.

I arrived in this town straight from crossing the border, with only a day's stop over in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora with relatives of friends of my parents.  I had arranged by email to come work on this ranch and we established a meeting time and place.  But the bus I took from Obregón was hours late, and I had missed my pickup appointment.  So I spent the night in town and set out the next day to walk the 15 to 20 miles to the ranch.  I had only a vague idea of where the ranch was from the descriptions of a cowboy I met in a little store in town. 

I soon was walking down a faint two-track path, overgrown with grass and choked with rocks.  The air was clean and dead still.  It had hailed violently the afternoon before, and the ice was mounded in the gullies and depressions.  Limpid streams slid across sandstone beds in every small arroyo and their banks were lush with a pungent orange flowers.  At high points I could see ridge upon ridge, blue in the air moist from yesterdays rain steaming up from the wet ground to collect again into violent thunderheads.
Farther down the road to Nopal.
After several hours on this track, I rounded the bend to see two men mounted on horses, wearing military uniforms, with semi-automatic rifles slung at ready across their laps.  They had already seen me.  I made sure my hands were visible and stopped in my tracks. 

¨Buenos dias,¨ I called.

They reigned in their horses.  They said something I didn´t understand.  I decided that if there was any danger, diplomacy was my best option, so I came closer to try to engage them in dialogue. I didn´t catch most of what they said as my Spanish was still quite rusty.  But I found out that they were stationed at the ranch, on ranch horses, and they knew that the people at the ranch had been looking for me.

I continued.  At least I was on the right path.  I descended into the ranch a couple hours later, and passed the band of soldiers of about 30 soldiers with their tattered camp beside the river.  I greeted them and they eagerly showed me where to wade across the river to hike up the bluff to the ranch buildings.  As I took off my shoes I asked them if they were here protecting the ranch.  They gave me a strange look.  I asked them how long they were here.  They said, ¨Until we receive orders to move on.¨  A group of them were in the shade of a nearby pine, oiling their weapons.

When I entered the ranch I was greeted by a young man my age from Colorado, Michael, and the Mexican hand Luis and his wife Sandra and three young daughters. Michael began to fill me in on what was happening on the ranch as he showed me around the ranch buildings.  The owners would not be around for another two weeks, he told me.  We went onto the roof, where we could see the soldiers.  Michael nodded toward them.

¨They are camped out here to move the local narcos´weed.¨

¨How do you know?¨

¨Luis and I were in town the other day and the commander was drunk and told us. They´ve been coming up here a lot, using our computer, our horses, borrowing my truck.  What can I say?¨

We were silent for a while.

¨Here come with me,¨he said.

He took me into the back room and showed me a large animal cracker bag bulging like an overstuffed pillow.  "Mota,"he said.  ¨They gave it to us as 'a small gift' after I lent them my truck." He set down the basketball-sized bundle.

All night trucks came and went on the far bank of the river.  We slept little.  We held conference in the stone kitchen.

"We´ve got to get out of here," said Michael.  'I´m loading up first thing tomorrow."

Luis looked amused at our gringo worry.  His youngest baby was in its little cradle on the table and he was rocking it with a kitchen knife.  The bag of marijuana was on the table next to the crib.  "If they come for us, first I will shoot my family and then myself so they don´t torture us.

Michael was on edge. "Not funny Luis."

"He´s not joking," said Sandra.

Me cramped in the back off the truck,
loopy from the fumes of the gas can.
We got up the next morning and left as swiftly as possible, all seven of us in Michael's truck.  The far bank was deserted. The soldiers had moved on. But Michael still drove with a lead foot out the incredibly rough road. When we reached Luis' hometown, Michael dropped us off and then headed straight on to the border, only stopping for gas. I stayed the night with Luis. 

But in the wee hours of the morning the ranch owner arrived, anxious to sort out the situation, and 15 minutes later he and I were back on the road to Rancho Norte.  When we got to the ranch there was no trace of the soldiers. We reasoned that the marijuana harvest was now over, and there were no more goods to move through.  The owner had other business to take care of, so he left almost as soon as he had come.  First, though, he loaded a shotgun with four cartridges, cocked it, turned on the safety, and put it under my bed.

And then I was alone on the ranch.