On the Road in 1980, Part 2
Mujer ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), 1979, Graciela Uturbide
By mid-February I was crossing the border into Mexico. My circuitous route from Iowa City via San Francisco to the border took four weeks as I eased into the flow of travel and recalibrated the balance between getting somewhere (making miles) and being somewhere. After spending a wild week in Tucson with my old friend Tony Hoagland,[1] I hitched down to Nogales and easily crossed into Mexico. I checked out the buses and trains going south, taking a bus simply because it departed sooner, a six-hour, 400-kilometer ride due south to Guaymas, the first good-sized city on the Gulf of California.
When I left San Francisco over two weeks earlier, I hitched just 100 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Cruz. I located my friend Theresa from Iowa City, who had just moved there and was living a couple miles outside of town up a dead-end canyon road. Like some nymph of the redwoods, Theresa and her sweetness kept me lingering in that mellow beach town for almost a week, but I also yearned for the regimen and introspection of the road. “Society, … I hope you're not lonely without me.”[2] On my way to Tucson, I wrote in my journal, “Beginning to look forward rather than back. Paying attention to my actions and transactions. Are the things I do and say equivalent to my feelings, my emotions, my convictions?”
I passed the time on the bus to Guaymas in conversation with my seatmate, using the opportunity to brush up on my conversational Spanish skills. He was a friendly guy, buying me tamales and guayabas from the vendors who crowded the bus in whatever dusty Sonaran village it stopped to take on or discharge passengers, passing their wares up through the windows. When I got to Guaymas, everyone I met was directing me to nearby San Carlos, mistakenly assuming I wanted to be where all the gringos were. Nevertheless, I took their advice, catching a local bus that took me there in a half-hour. Faced with the growing darkness and weary from traveling all day, I quickly found a quiet spot on the beach and set up camp. The next morning I discovered I was surrounded by beauty, situated on a lovely little bay backed by scrub desert and beyond that the craggy mountains and canyons of Cajón del Diablo.[3]
I also discovered my passport was missing. After frantically ransacking my backpack, I went back to Guaymas and checked at my two stops there – the taquería and the bus station – but it hadn’t turned up. The more plausible explanation for my passport’s disappearance implicated my amiable seatmate, who was likely making plans to put it to good use before it expired in five months. I gave myself a stern talking to about not being on my game and not keeping an eye on my essential possessions. On the other hand, I felt good about having perhaps facilitated his immigration plans.
While at the station, I met a young simpatico Norwegian guy, Per, who was preparing to catch a train south, but after I’d mentioned the beach I was camping on, he decided to join me. Meanwhile, I contemplated my options for replacing my passport: retracing my steps to the States, going directly to the American consulate in Mexico City, or traveling at my own pace and accepting the risk of getting stopped by the federales sin papeles.
We stayed just one more night on the beach in San Carlos. When the weather turned cloudy and windy and cool the next morning, we agreed to pack up and head south. We scoped out our options: trains or buses down the coast toward Mazatlán or ferries across the gulf to Baja California. While at the bus station, we met Kathy and Diane, down from San Francisco for a little getaway vacation. After chatting a bit, we bought a six-pack of Pacifico and found a quiet spot down by the harbor where we could drink and continue our conversation. By the time we finished another round of beers at their hotel room, they had persuaded themselves to go with us to Mazatlán. The purposes of our journeys were quite different, but neither Per nor I had any qualms about letting them join us for a while. They were fun to hang out with, and Kathy did speak fairly good Spanish.
By midnight we were catching the train from nearby Empalme, and as the sun rose the next morning we were approaching Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, two-thirds of the way to Mazatlán, a lively Pacific seaport of over 200,000 people. It hosts one of the best Carnaval celebrations in Mexico, a week-long street party that would be just kicking into gear the day of our arrival. On the train, we met Bill from Montana, a rangy, knowledgeable guy with an easy-going drawl, who joined our little entourage and recommended we all head for Isla de la Piedra.
After disembarking in Mazatlán, we quickly sussed out the scene and found our way to the docks, where we caught a ferry launch across the mouth of the harbor to Isla de la Piedra, actually a long peninsula that sheltered the harbor. The ferry took us to a small fishing village, from where we hiked about a kilometer to a beautiful beach sheltered by a grove of coconut palms stretching southeast for miles. The only buildings were a few open-air thatched-roof restaurants, one run by a Mexicana named Linda, who catered especially to the gringo hippies camped there. The current assemblage included Americans, Germans, Swiss, Italians, Brazilians, Swedes.
I was delighted to join this international gathering. We made our campsite near others scattered along the back edge of the beach. Bill was particularly handy as we rigged up a shelter of coconut palm fronds and tarps to protect us from the midday sun and the steady northwest winds that picked up with the new moon. I romped in the sea, body-surfed, gathered freshly fallen coconuts for drinking, and played bocce with German Siegfried and Swiss Catherine, using empty coconut shells. At night we’d gather around a bonfire on the beach, smoke pot, drink rum and Kahlua, drum on improvised percussion instruments, and sing and howl at the moon. It seemed much farther from Mazatlán’s Centro than a half hour by foot and ferry.
On Saturday night, a group of us went into the city to experience Carnaval. Mazatlán’s version is much tamer and more family-oriented than Rio’s Carnaval or New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.[4] But it was still a wild scene. The boardwalk at Paseo Olas Altas filled with laughing people. A parade with florid floats and pretty girls all dolled up. Fireworks erupted throughout the night. Bandas and gruperas played lively music on small stages. Mariachis roamed the streets. Folks carried plastic Coca-Cola bottles containing as much rum as coke. Beer stands on many streetcorners. Lots of drunkenness and a simmering undertone of violence. But Carnaval was mostly a joyous escape from the everyday grind. Young boys and girls flitted about, throwing confetti in each others’ faces as a kind of flirtation. As I awoke the next morning, I was still shaking colorful bits of paper out of my hair.
On the last day of Carnaval, I decided to move on. That evening, at the height of the festivities, I caught a bus to the train station. Many others seemed to have the same plan – the bus was jam-packed, not another person could’ve squeezed on. The old vehicle was laboring. Its shocks, such as they were, had been pushed to their limit, the bus scraping bottom whenever it hit a pothole. Making a right turn, it tipped precariously. Everyone was laughing. Finally, the bus just died in the middle of the road, and we all staggered off into the night.
I got directions to the station and continued on foot. When I got there, I leaned my backpack against a pillar to form a backrest and napped a few hours, ignoring the hubbub. At midnight, I caught a train south through Nayarit and then inland, slowly chugging through rugged mountains and teetering over stunning ravines, across Jalisco toward Guadalajara, where I hope to resolve my passport problems.
Footnotes:
[1] One night, Tony, his friend Lynn, and I dropped acid, hopped in his VW Bug, drove west into Saguaro National Park, and wandered among the strange desert cacti – saguaro, jumping cholla, prickly pear, fishhook barrel – until we were hopelessly lost and howling with the coyotes at low-flying planes.
[2] When I read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild and watched Sean Penn’s movie adaptation and listened to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack, I identified with Chris McCandless’s amazing and tragic journey, undertaken ten years after this (1990-1992).
[3] The Devil’s Drawer, a Special Biosphere Reserve.
[4] However, it’s true that at Mazatlán’s 2017 Carnaval, Sinaloa’s Secretariat of Health distributed 80,000 condoms to combat the spread of STDs.