By October 1976, I was ready to head down to Mexico again. This time I’d actually make it, and wouldn’t return to Iowa City for six months. Michael, one of the many wanderers who hung out at Stone Soup, had befriended me. A tall lanky thirty-something Austrian who’d moved to Australia with his mother in his childhood and to San Francisco in the sixties, he’d heard about my plans and cajoled me into taking him along. Maybe I was liking the idea of some company. 

The Beats and other writers, artists, and musicians had made the idea of going to Mexico appealing. It offered a destination both easily accessible to and culturally far from Anglos. No need to board a plane to discover a different language, different traditions, and a dollar-to-peso exchange rate favorable to the tight budgets of bohemians and hippies. Adding to the romance of the place was the fact that some of the best weed at that time came from Mexico. If the provenance of the lid you were buying from some shady dude was the highlands of the Sierra Madre del Sur – Oaxacan or Michoacán or, best, Acapulco Gold – you could be assured of its efficacy.

As our trip began, I quickly realized that Michael had a larger agenda. While living in San Francisco, before he’d hit the road, Michael had joined one of the many loose gatherings of spiritual seekers popular at that time. In the parlance of the sixties, he was a Jesus freak. In my research into the evangelical “prophet” Lonnie Frisbee, active in the Bay Area in the early seventies, I can see some aspects of Michael – his homosexuality, his interest in UFOs – that suggest he might’ve been a follower. But Michael was always tight-lipped about the origins of his mission. He described himself as an apostle wandering the world and spreading the Father’s Message, a curious casserole of Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, sci-fi, and hippie principles. Clearly I hadn’t vetted him sufficiently, although I think Michael was keeping some of his light under a basket while in Iowa City, worried I wouldn’t let him come along if I knew his full intentions. However, I decided that I might learn something from this experience, that this journey might evolve into a spiritual one. And I rationalized I could go my own way if it all got too weird.

Michael and I met up in Des Moines at my parents’ house and set out on October 7. As the sun slanted low in the sky on a ride to Joplin, Missouri, we asked to be let off near Sarcoxie, a little town in the southwestern corner of the state. We crossed a creek as we were walking into town, and decided to leave the road and follow it. We made camp along the creek, near a stand of oak and sycamore. We spent a couple days there, relearning how to live in the moment. Waking at sunrise and seeing our breath, cooking oatmeal with raisins and bananas for breakfast. The days warming up so we could strip down and bathe in the creek, the water’s chill setting our hearts on fire. Green soybeans from a nearby field and wild watercress supplemented our dinners, Michael demonstrating his resourcefulness as a campfire cook. Sitting around the fire until the full harvest moon rose and cast shadows, Michael and I talked about our lives, getting to know each other. He gently pointed out the spirits of Fear and Self that held me back. In the morning I looked down into the creek at my clear reflection.

We stopped in Edmond, Oklahoma, so Michael could talk with Hayden Hewes, who, two years prior, had interviewed Bo and Peep, a middle-aged couple claiming to be not only aliens but also the two witnesses from the Book of Revelation who would show us how death could be overcome. (Some twenty years later, they’d gain notoriety.) I was skeptical but intrigued, or at least amused. Michael did track down Hewes –  a young, bearded, wary UFO investigator – but failed to get the answers he was seeking. 

We spent a few days in Austin, always a friendly city for travelers and street people. Hot showers and laundry day at a University of Texas men’s dorm. Hepatitis A and typhoid shots at a free medical clinic. One long afternoon trying to cut through Naturalization and Immigration red tape – Michael had concerns about getting a Mexican travel visa because of his Austrian passport. Urban camping’s always a challenge – one night in Pease Park, another night in Assumption Cemetery, another night in an abandoned house on San Jacinto, five blocks from the state capitol, from which we were rousted by the police the next morning.

By October 22, we were in Pleasanton, thirty miles south of San Antonio, where we caught a ride all the way to the border with Julio, an ex-Marine Mexican immigrant who primed us with information about Mexican food, wildlife, and places from his childhood. He gave us a tour of Elsa, the little town where he lived, and invited us to have dinner with his family, a typical Tejano feast of frijoles, arroz, guacamole, tortillas. On the walls looking down at us were framed portraits of the Virgin Guadalupe and John F. Kennedy, standard Mexican Catholic iconography. Then he drove us the last twenty miles to the quiet border crossing at the Progreso International Bridge. This would be a precursor to the goodwill and generosity we’d repeatedly experience in Mexico.

As we camped that night on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, the lively, joyous sounds of Nuevo Progreso floated across the river, the jaunty accordions of norteño, the frenetic trumpets of mariachi, the ay-yi-yis and howls of laughter. We spent three nights camping there along the border, intermittent downpours keeping us from drying out our gear enough to move on. The U.S. Border Patrol paid us a visit, pulling up in a jeep and asking some questions, and then left us alone. We swam and washed clothes in the Rio Grande, waving to our neighbors across the border doing the same. One curious young Mexican swam across just to talk with us. We had a surprise visit one night from a Mexican who dried off at our campfire before proceeding onward to El Norte. We read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East to each other, wondering if we too were on a pilgrimage in search of the Truth.

Because Michael’s Austrian passport flustered and confused the Mexican Aduana officials, that pilgrimage didn’t take us across the border to Nuevo Progreso. Instead, we hitched thirty miles to McAllen, finally got our paperwork in order at the Mexican consulate, slept that night on the porch of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church rectory, and the next morning, walked to the bridge leading into the Mexican border town of Reynosa. On the bridge we passed a distraught Spanish hippie – long red hair, no shoes, just a string bolsita containing his meager possessions – who appeared to be lost, stranded, welcome in neither country. For us, a ten-dollar bribe expedited the stamps in our passports. We didn’t want to spend the money, but it seemed only fair that we gringos should bolster the Mexican officials’ paltry salaries. 

We walked around Reynosa, stopping at a zapatería so Michael could get his sandals repaired, and then caught a bus to Monterrey, enshrouded in a cold steady drizzle. Upon arriving that evening, we received shelter in the form of a semi-enclosed side entrance to the Iglesia Cristo Rey. The padres there were good to us – we stayed three nights, cooking dinners over our campstove, always to a curious audience, arising at seven for morning Mass, leaving our backpacks locked up for the day as we explored that boisterous industrial city. The surrounding mountains are said to be beautiful, but they were constantly obscured by rain clouds and smog. We soaked up Mexican city life as our feet soaked in street puddles.

That Friday, October 29, we bid adiós to the good padres of Cristo Rey and caught a train to Tampico, 500 kilometers south-southeast, much warmer and drier. The ten-hour ride cost 40 pesos (two dollars). As we inched our way toward the Gulf Coast, with many stops in sleepy little towns, we observed the countryside – the thatched roof huts, the orange groves, the fields of maíz and agave. Two Federales sat down across from us and became our amigos, downing a dozen Carta Blancas each, sharing their tacos and tamales with us. We arrived in Tampico that evening. Two tall gringos, our backpacks augmenting our conspicuous height, we would always stick out. We were güeros and, in the opinion of some young girls, guapos. As we walked out of the train station and into the heart of the city, heads on swivel, trying to figure out which way to go, I stepped right into a four-foot-deep open sewer hole, scraping my shin but otherwise unharmed. Everyone laughed, and embarrassed as I was for not paying attention to my surroundings, I did too.

Glossary

Tejano - The first European American to set foot in Texas was the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca (1528). Until the Texas Revolution in 1836, Texas was a part of Mexico, much longer than it’s been a part of the U.S.

Aduana - The visa stamp in the passport received at Mexican Customs usually came at a small price, the bite of the mordida a kind of unofficial toll.

güeros - Michael had blonde hair. Mine was naturally curly and bleaching blonde from all the time spent outdoors. Michael eventually persuaded me to allow him to cut it.

guapos - There’s little photographic evidence, but take my word for it – I was a cutie.