From Scraton to Chicago

So, I have made it this far. My car is still in working order and it’s not even that hot. My little civic kicks but. It gets something like 40 miles per gallon on the freeway and with current gas prices as they are this is a good thing. But when I am not thinking about how good my car is doing, I am listening to one of my two long books on CD.

Scranton was small and set in the low tree-covered hills of Appalachia. Above the down town rose the huge sign of the town’s paper, The Scranton Times. I spent a couple days there and met some of the paper’s reporters. It was a pretty sleepy town. That said, a triple homicide happened the day before I arrived. Some guy took out three people with a hammer.

Crossing PA was a long monotonous drive. I was surprised at how few towns filled in the rocky forest land that is most of the state. It really felt untouched in a way. But once I crossed into Ohio, farms and fields filled much of the flat lands. Here only patches of wood sat alongside the farmland. Indiana kept on in pretty much the same way as Ohio.

I made it in a day from Scranton to Chicago. By the time the skyline of down town Chicago was looming over some rusty bridge, the sun was all in my face. I maneuvered my way through town as my friend Alex tried to direct me to his house in Lincoln Park. I passed a ball park and down town and then came into a neighborhood along the lake.

One more day and then I am heading west.

WEST

It only took three more days to cross Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah and then Nevada. But first Iowa. Iowa was all hills and bucolic farmland, in an English-countryside kind of way. But then came the razor edged flatness that is Nebraska. So flat it hurt. It wasn’t until the eastern parts of the state that the high plains of our imaginations emerged. But then came the crisp blue skies above Wyoming and the yellowing grass lands. Utah was a couple mountains that soon dropped into the seemingly unstoppable desert of Nevada. And then the Sierra Nevada of teh Golden State.

 

EPIC DRIVE # 2

The gray 1994 Honda Civic that sits on my cottage’s front lawn will soon carry this writer across a continent, over mountains, across plains and home. Besides the rust spots and the weird rattling that comes from the muffler, I am hopeful.

Since there is no cheap way to get this car across the country, I will be driving it. I hope it will hold up. If it doesn’t, I’ll just chalk it up to my year of car sagas. What could be worse than being stuck on a beach in Baja with a flu and a broken down car — for a week?

The car used to be my brother-in-law’s. He and my sister have bought a new car and were going to donate it for tax purposes. “No, No, No,” I told them. I can fix it. Three days later I had fixed the car after a minor series of struggles. I had to saw out the old alternator with a metal bladed saw. i had banged on the thing for hours before to no avail.

After three days, my injuries were minor: a couple busted up knuckles, a metal shard stuck in my cornea (I picked it out with tweezers), and a couple bruises. I did a little dance when my triumph over the car was complete.

In a couple days I head out. Wish me luck, and look for more bloging about “my road west.”

 

More…

While my days south of the frontier have come to an end, this is not the end of the road for this blog. From this day forward it will act as a venue for writing about ideas, reflections, stories and my continued travels to as yet unknown destinations. Stay tuned…

“I don’t negotiate,” was the bus driver’s curt reply after I asked him if he could just drop me along the freeway in Sausalito. It was way past midnight and I was at the air port waiting for a bus home. Unfortunately, there where no more Marin airporters for the rest of the night. I had to make do with the Airporter express, which serves all points north of Marin. The driver said that for insurance reasons he couldn’t stop in Sausalito. But he could take me to San Rafael and then I could get a cab. I got on the bus.

As we rolled north, despite my fatigue from a three plane journey from Mexico, I was pissed. And immediately, I began comparing my situating with what I imagined would occur in Mexico. For one, a bus driver will drop you off just short of hell if you ask, and for two, in Mexico everything is open to negotiation. So when the bus driver refused to reason with me and I had to fork over 50 bucks for a cab and a bus home, I was understandably angry. I don’t negotiate my ass. My home coming was made bitter sweet because of this undeniably over priced and non-negotiable ride home.

 

Oaxaca

A Family on their way out of Mexico City

The road from Mexico City to the state of Oaxaca goes up, and then up again, and finally down.

In the still light of the early afternoon, the bus chugged through the massive outskirts of Mexico City and then up into the surounding hills. Covered in green pine trees, the forested landscape was Mexico City`s opposite; I saw men walking behind mule trains.

Once the road rose above the torpid haze of the Valley of Mexico, and then passed the plump pine-tree-coverd hills, storm clouds rose above the plain that reaches across much of the state of Puebla. Some rich ranch land spread across the flatland here and then everything became dry and cacti covered. The small trees that did rise beside their prickly friends seemed thin and frail and grew out in a flat shape at their tops. The land that wasn`t covered in brush or cacti was almost chalk-colored and corroded, streaks of rain water ran down barren hills, dragging topsoil away. The plain was being drenched by a heavy thunder storm and muddy rivulets ran their course.

Once into the state of Oaxaca, past Puebla, we came upon more mountains. The Sierra Madre de Oaxaca raced above and below us in such steep defiles it seemed they might drop at any moment. Not much held the soil in place here except more of the cacti and small brush and trees that had covered much of Puebla.

Oaxaca city was wet. The sun had set, and all that could be gleaned of the city was the dull light of houses climbing up blackened hills. My cab driver maneuvered his way through the small dark streets, hunkered down in his VW bug, wrapped in a long rain coat. He told me that tonight was the year`s first rain.

In the Zocalo, children raised their hands to the sky as if in thanks to the gods. Their happy faces damp with rain drops. Hidden forms under umbrellas passed across the square. It was as if a long held tension had been released and the population was in celebration.

Outside of my hotel room, competing sounds mixed with one another; the beat of Ranchero music playing against the muffled sound of a soccer game; cheers, announcers, scoooooooore. Tarps – blue, orange and clear- covering much of the road, slopped water onto the sidewalks. Raw light bulbs ,hanging from street vendor booths, struke the darkness violently, creasing across the street in shards of light. Cabs squeezed down the crowded street as a shop women flung her baby by the arms to the um pa, um pa of a nearby stereo.

On Monday this mood may come to and end; the state`s teachers plan a strike. In the past, teacher strikes in Oaxaca have been anything but calm.

 

La Paz and El Wrong Bar

Tim and Freda Having a Drink on a Beach Outside of La Paz

La Paz. Sunday night. The streets are emptying. Tim, Freda and I are a bit drunk after free tequilas at a tropical cabana-topped bar. We eat tacos. But still, it is early and we want more drinks. Freda remembers a bar with a two-for-one special. It sounds good to us.

We walk down Avenida de Revolution and come to El Rodeo at the bottom of a hill. This is the bar she´d seen with the special. On a piece of cardboard the special is advertised: two for one, it says.  We can´t see inside, but in a dark doorway nearby a cluster of women stand, waiting, lurking almost.

We go inside the bar. And that is when we realize, when every head turns in our direction, that this is not our kind of bar. But, past the threshold, there is only one option: we must order our beers. You know, the special and all. We cross the bar and walk through the almost completely male clientele. We order our beers, turn around and stand all awkward like and pretend that we are not, all of us, sore thumbs. Then the drunks swarm. An old man who looks like he can hardly stand starts to grab Freda´s arm. He offers her a seat. Two patrons approach. One, a short hood-eyed fella starts talking to Freda. His friend, taller and with a scar, stands close to Tim´s face, telling him of his recent deportation and his 16 years in Seattle. Tim nods and smiles and tries his best. Freda does the same.

 I drink my beer fast and stand with a straight back, pretending to watch the pool game in the middle of the bar. It is at this moment when a flash of realization comes over me like a slap on my forehead. The signs are obvious enough: the way the few women sit in the shadows sidling up to the many men; it is in the gaudy to to-like dress a middle-aged women wears; it is in the dark shadows on the faces of the men against the walls. We are in a whorehouse.

I think this as I look at my friends and the conversations they are both trapped in. I try not to look uncomfortable and hope that they finish their beers as fast as I have.  Finally, they are done. Tim, so as not to offend it seems, slowly, almost in defiance of the situation, finishes the dregs of his beer, nods and thanks his new friend. Then we all walk past the pool table and out of the bar, calm as can be.  We´d missed the happy hour it seemed.

 

Our First Setback

Over a week ago, we were on our way south from the port of San Felipe. The road we planned to travel south on was marked as a ¨rural road¨on our map. It wasn´t a paved road, that was about all we knew. The locals we´d spoken to all said that it was ¨rough but passable.¨ Little did we know that we would come back the way we´d gone more than a week later with two of our number sick with the flew and our van on the back of a´flat-bed truck.

We started south one bright morning along a paved desert road that led away from San felipe. The road turned to dirt an hour later just south of a little town called Puertocitos. It was rough and slow-going as advertised, but passable. We had to swerve around big rocks and even sometimes get out and move them, but we were getting along. The landscape surounding us was little but dry rocky hills, eerily empty vacation homes and a few soaring frigates birds above.

Freda Drives

Things were going along swimmingly but slow when, on a big bumpy rise, Freda said simply that the car wouldn´t go any further. (She had just gotten her hands on the wheel and was going at a nice clip when the car decided to clunck out, so the disapointment on her face was understandable.) The look on her face said it all. We pilled out of the car and started peering under the hood and the car itslef, but nothing was amiss. No drips. No holes, nothing. So we turned of the ignition and waited. To our suprise it started up fine. We got to a flat spot on the road overlooking a big wash and all turned to one another and wondered what to do. Should we turn back now or go on? We decided to keep going.

Later that day we found a pleasant camp site on a clean, almost empty, beach and counted our lucky stars. We forgot all about the car´s problem we were at the beach with much more important things to think about, like, swiming.

We staid on the beach for almost three days, and besides the coyote raid on our camp, all was good. Tim caught a fish even. There was one glitch though, I got sick. In the middle of the night I came down with a splitting headache and it didn´t go away for the next four days.

When we left our beach several days later, we hoped to make it to the Transpennisular highway by night fall. Our car had none of it. The glitch that had killed the car´s power on the road a few days before came back with a vengeance. Tim was driving when it first died and his face turned into a mask of disapointment. By midday, we were stopping every 300 yards as dune buggies and cars passed us with their clouds of dust.

Luckily, one motorists stopped to ask how we were doing. Michael was a retired cop smoking a cigarette in the cab of his truck. He told us that if we could get to a town called Punto Bufeo there was a group of brothers that might be able to help us with our car. An hour later and a thousand stops too we rolled into the little settlement of Punto Bufeo. It wasn´t much more than a line of tourist beach houses, a closed air strip and a kitchen restaurant.

We came to find out that Punto Bufeo (Killer Whale Point) along with most of the settlements to its north and south had been founded by one man — the now deceased grandfather of Miguel and his brothers, the brothers Michael had told us about. Their grandfather had canoed up the Sea of Cortez from Loreto with his family some time mid’century and found Ganzaga bay and its environs to his liking. Now, his descendants own almost all of the land on this coastline. Miguel told me that his grandfather died at some insane age like 114. The day he died he knew his time on earth was done and he told his daughter as much, dressed in his finest close, laid down and died.

The front porch of Punto Bufeo´s little restaurant was filled with a group of laughing people when we rolled up, and one of them was Miguel who we were told to ask for. He said we´d have to wait until his brother Benito came back for a diagnosis. of our van. In the meantime we ate salty, oily fish and had a couple beers. Benito didn´t have a clue what was the problem, but he could tow us back to san Felipe for $400 dollars in four days.

The View from Camp

So, we made camp down the beach and suffered the flies as they rose from some hidden cavern below the beach to torment us, daily. By our second day on the beach Freda had come down with the flew that I had had for several days. Now Tim was the only one of us who wasn´t sick.

A nice Mexican family that was vacationing on the beach for the Semana Santa Week gave Tim and Freda a ride to the next town south for supplies and a group of middle aged women from Visalia bought us lunch and forked over more that $40 bucks as we sat waiting in our hot van the first day we arrived.

After what seemed like a week of pergatory, stewing in our own juices on that fly infested beach, I finally made it out of Punto Bufeo and back to San Felipe. On Monday, Migueal was heading into town and I got a ride in with him. (NOTE ON MIGUEL TO COME.) I was followed the next day by Tim and Freda and their van too. We had made it back. We found out from a mechanic that the road had nothing to do with the van´s problems, it was something with the computer. No matter, it was still nice to escape the feeling of helplessness on that fly filled beach.