Canyon Roads, a Lake, and a Magical Village

Jalpa to Comala, Mexico 4,409 km

There are more canyon lands between Jalpa and Guadalajara. By now the tired, old misconception that Mexico is a country of long, dry, flat, barren lands – like our own Texas only more so – has been thrown out and I understand that the topography of Mexico is a great deal more complex than that. To say that the landscape is turbulent is an oversimplification at best.

But by now I am becoming quite accustomed to riding canyon roads – the whipping turns, the hard leaning, the accelerating and decelerating. There is a thrill in the not knowing what you will find beyond the present bend and the not overly caring because you know that you have your hands plenty full with just handling the present turn. I ride along, happily reconciled to the uncertainty, wishing that I could be just this accepting of it as it appears in all aspects of my life. Then I remember my former boss, Clayton Williams, who is now a big shot with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, because he used to say that learning to deal with ambiguity is a sign of maturity. It’s a fine thing to say, I think.

These are canyon lands, not highlands, and in Mexico altitude decides everything. So, unlike in the mountain country of the north, here, among the rocky, barren ridges of the canyons lands, it is not cold. Even, actually, it is warm, but this warmth is precarious at best. It is thin as tissue paper and stretched too tight so that when a wind rises it tears and the cold rushes through the torn places. So it is a delicate thing, this warmth, and it seems that to acknowledge it with anything above a whisper and it might disappear. So I do not speak of it, only I make a gesture: I lower the zipper of my riding jacket and I raise the visor of my crash helmet. I do this to enjoy the sun on my face and the warm breeze on my neck. But the gods see everything and they are quick to interpret arrogance in our actions and they are ever quick to punish arrogance. So, no sooner have I lowered the zipper and raised the visor and the bright sun disappears behind one, lone, self-important cloud – the only one in the sky.

I raise the zipper and lower the visor and shiver voluntarily to quicken the blood in its warming course through my veins. I look up at the sun behind the cloud and I shake my head in disappointment. I want to say that it’s ironic but it’s not ironic. It’s not ironic in the same way those things in the Alanis Morissette song are not ironic, they’re just bad luck, and this too is bad luck, nothing more. But the sun behind the cloud reminds me of a story I once heard and I like it so I’ll recount it here:

Once there was a stonecutter who wanted to be more powerful than he was. One day as he toiled at his work he looked up at the sun as he wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘The sun gives life and warmth and burns my back as I work,’ he mused aloud. ‘If I could be the sun then would I be most powerful.’

It was a restless Universe that heard him or maybe it was a mischievous deity but, whoever it was, the stonecutter’s request was heard and it was answered and he became the sun. After this, many days went by during which the stonecutter traveled the heavens in his daily course, giving light to the land and warmth and burning the backs of hardworking men, and he was pleased. Until one day a storm cloud crossed his path and covered his face. Angry and bewildered he said, ‘I must be the storm cloud, which may go where it pleases, ravages the land, and extinguishes the very light of the sun.’

So he became the storm cloud and for many days he spread himself across the heavens and brought rain and darkness and destruction to the land. Until one day he came upon a great boulder that was unyielding before his blows. Almost insensible in his rage and his impotence he said, ‘I must become the boulder, which is immovable and unyielding.’

So he became the boulder and much time past during which he stood tall and majestic – a symbol of dominance over the forests and the creatures of the land, and he was pleased. Until one day a stonecutter came and chiseled him into powder.

By early afternoon I am in Guadalajara. It is warm here because the sun has emerged from behind the cloud and the choking exhaust of a hundred thousand idling motors heats the heavy air so that you see wavy distortions everywhere. Several times I cut the engine while waiting at traffic lights. It goes like this: while your light is green the cars trying to move perpendicular are stuck in the intersection and then, when they move past and the intersection is cleared, the light changes and the cars going in your direction make a quick dash and fill the intersection so that the cars going in the perpendicular direction cannot move during their green light. This continues all throughout the afternoon as street vendors walk among the idling motorcars, selling water and snacks and newspapers and cards for recharging the credit on mobile telephones and coloring books and toys for children and a million other random and bizarre things, and all the while the shrieks of impatient claxons ring out in a discordant cacophony.

It is late afternoon before I am away from Guadalajara and I arrive at Chapala near sunset. Here there is a long boardwalk and a narrow beach along the shore of the lake. There are sailboats docked and some are sailing and there are people in kayaks and sitting on the beach and sitting on benches kissing and children flying kites in the strong, warm wind coming off the water. I buy a beer and I sit on a bench facing the lake. I drink the beer and close my eyes to the warm wind and breathe in deeply the clean air from the lake and exhale deeply the bad air from the city streets. I watch the sun set and the dusk becomes twilight.

In the morning I meet a group of retired Americans and I join them for breakfast. They are real old-timers and their droll banter sounds like it comes out of an old movie or radio show. They tell jokes and talk about their veteran’s benefits and the way things used to be and about their ‘girls’. Someone mentions that his girl is coming from a nearby town to stay during Christmas and that she expected him to buy her a present. He doesn’t know what to buy her. Someone has a suggestion: ‘You should tie a red bow around your dick and tell her “Feliz Navidad.”’

That morning the breeze comes cool off the lake. I ride south, detouring onto a secondary highway that meanders through rugged hills. The tarmac is mostly destroyed here and the going is slow – potholes and fissures are difficult to avoid when you are already leaning hard and fast into a turn. In the afternoon I arrive in Colima and I find a hotel. In the night at have drinks on the patio of a restaurant and watch a group of dancers have a milonga in the plaza. The next morning I go to the small town of Comala. It is a few kilometers away down a lovely highway that is flanked on both sides by green bushes and wildflowers.

Comala is the setting of my favorite Mexican novel, Pedro Páramo, which also has the distinction of being the only Mexican novel I have read. It has that same mysterious, fantastical quality that you find in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and sometimes in those of Isabel Allende. The small town is bright and lovely and nothing like the morose village of broken spirits from the novel. But Juan Rulfo wrote the novel in the 1950s, which was another time, and long before the Mexican tourism bureau came up with the idea of designating particular towns as ‘Pueblos Mágicos’ to bolster tourism. It felt cliché but I bought copy of the short novel and I sat at a table on the patio of a café and I read the novel while I ate breakfast beside the central plaza where there is a statue and a plaque dedicated to the author.

A Night at the Cock Fights

Zacatecas to Jalpa, Mexico
3,832 km

After the night at the disco I slept in (until 8:00) and then I rode over to the Yamaha dealership in Zacatecas because for a while now I had been detecting a failure of the motorcycle at high speeds and hard climbs when she was exerting all or almost all of her 535 ccs. So I went to the service department and explained the situation to the two mechanics. Juan Federico Gomez de Ana Quezada was the head mechanic and Faramundo Aurelio Ortega was his assistant (both names have been changed). Both thin men, they nevertheless struck me a bit like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb the way they stood over the motorcycle rubbing their beardless chins, wearing rather blank expressions on their faces, and asking me if the motorcycle has fuel injectors and me dumbstruck, nervous now about where I had brought my motorcycle, and pointing out the clearly visible carburetors above and between the two cylinder heads. They listened to the motor and Juan Federico listened through a hose to isolate the sounds. They agreed that the rear exhaust valve sounded loose and so they opened the covering and spent what seemed like ages loosening and then measuring and then tightening and then measuring again and, the measurement not right, them loosening and then starting all over again. After a couple hours the superficial adjustment to the valve was done and I paid them 150 pesos, or $15, off the books, saying ‘Thank you for your time and expertise” and then riding off still feeling that the motorcycle was sluggish but deciding that, in consideration, the money was well spent because she was no worse off than before.

About 50 kilometers south of Zacatecas I stopped at the hilltop ruins of La Quemada whose crumbling walls and columns and pyramid are the same parched color of the desert plain that stretches in every direction around it. Across this plain the color of the brush and vegetation changes where the buried remains of pre-Colombian clay roads pass beneath and extend out in several directions. They say – that is, the ‘they’ who say all general and imprecise things that then go repeated until what was originally maybe a guess or a conjecture has become hard fact like the various explanations for why the moon looks bigger at the horizon and how come it always seems that the lane you are driving in is the slower one – anyway, they say that La Quemada was once a city of 60,000 to 70,000 and that it is the mythical Chicomostoc, the place of seven caves, although only six have been found so far.

In Jalpa, which is a small city about equidistant between Zacatecas and Guadalajara along the major highway that connects the two, I found a hotel and stayed for the night. I didn’t want to go out because I was tired from the night before but I was in a new place and there were new things to see. So I walked along the main street toward the central plaza, the zócalo is what it’s called in Mexico, and as I walked I noticed that, through two large open doors, there was an area with a small enclosure surrounded by bleachers. When I asked the woman at the door what it was, she said, “Gallos” and I asked, ‘At what time?” and she said, “A las 9.” So I continued on to the zócalo and I bought a Michelada, which is a beer drink that includes ice, salt, some type of mystery sauce, chili sauce, powdered chili around the outside of the cup, and, of course, a slice of lime. It was awful, outright horrendous, I thought, and I consider myself rather a good democrat when it comes to alcohol in various colors and flavors but I couldn’t force down more than three sips before I had to throw out the entire pint. I ate dinner at a food stand in the zócalo and then at 9 o’clock I went to the cock fights.

I took a seat in the front row because I figured that if you are going to try a new thing then you should do it all the way or not at all. There were eight ‘breeders’ that each brought four cocks and so there would be 16 fights that night. During the preparations, which is quite a lengthy process, one cock is tagged with green on his leg and the other with red. Then they are weighed and then each corner picks out a steel talon and these are measured and observed by a judge. The talons are then fixed to the leg by a band that is wrapped around tightly many times. Next the toes are pulled at and cracked, to loosen them, I suppose. Then a third cock is brought in and both are held and it is allowed to peck furiously at each of the two combatants in turn, loosing large tufts of feathers, this to anger them, I suppose. The whole while men hurry around the ring shouting, ‘Rojo!’ or ‘Verde!’ and try to entice you to place a bet and women go about selling tickets for the between rounds raffle and another woman takes and delivers drink orders.

When finally the combat begins you are exasperated by the waiting, but then, immediately, you are surprised by how fierce it is and how bloody it gets if one or the other cock gets lucky and its great steel talon finds a soft home in its adversary’s belly. The fight lasts a matter of seconds and it ends suddenly when one cock lies on the ground defeated, usually alive but almost always bleeding and panting and the life quickly departing, and the other, the victor, standing over the defeated, refusing to finish him either because he fights only to save himself or because he is merciless in his triumph and he would drag his victim around the ring in a victory lap like Achilles did to Hector if it weren’t that he, too, the victor, is also wounded and mortally exhausted. This is when the breeders leap into the ring and each retrieves his champion and carries him quickly out and behind a curtain. I don’t know what happens to the cocks next, if the defeated is killed or if they are both killed or if something else happens before the killing finally comes. I know only that both cocks have left the dirt ring covered with their feathers and sometimes with bits of flesh and often with a deep puddle of blood. I know, too, that it is exciting as all violence is exciting but that it lacks finesse: it is crude and artless. It is not a corrida, a bullfight, which is not a sport but the playing out of a tragedy, the tragedy of the bull’s death. It is instead all fury and no skill, no story, and so no triumph in victory or bitterness in defeat, only it is a bloody combat between two mindless brutes where one will win and the other will lose and both will break themselves in the trying and then both will be killed eventually.

I stayed only for the first few fights and then I was tired by it and also a little disgusted. It was dark and quiet now on the main street, which is only one lane in either direction. The storefronts were all closed and the food and drink vendors had gone home because everyone not attending the cock fights was back in their houses. I walked back to the hotel and in my room, looking in the mirror while I soaped my hands to wash up, I saw on my face and my clothes that the blood from the fights splatters.

The Disco in the Mine

Guachochi to Zacatecas, Mexico
3,654 km

From Guachochi you take the Chihuahua Highway 23 south and east to Hidalgo del Parral, a city along the major highway that connects Chihuahua to Guadalajara in the south. For a time the forested canyonlands continue but soon the slopes become gradual and the thick pine forest disperses and the land becomes dry everywhere. Soon you are riding through rolling yellow plains, the canyons ever further in the distance but never completely out of sight. Now you realize you have come back to the desert: harsh and pitiless, subtle and grand and unconquerable, someplace you can visit but not settle. God must love deserts, you think.

Here it is warm and the breeze becomes a formidable crosswind. Yes, it is desert but the jagged canyonlands were never far off and now they have returned, only this time dry and barren. The last 40 kilometers to Hidalgo del Parral are difficult ones because the highway here is bad from neglect and overuse. The tarmac is broken and rough. At least if there were potholes that would be something to avoid. So you rumble on, teeth clattering, spine jolting, front forks and rear shocks absorbing what little they can.

From Hidalgo del Parral it is a long 300 kilometers along a straight desert highway to Gomez Palacio. Even now in the winter it is hot and dry and very windy. There is no hurry in a desert. Maybe because it is so hot or so dry or maybe because it seems so endless in every direction. But you can ride all day as fast as your screaming engine will carry you and feel as though you have only advanced at a crawl. That is the way it is here.

In Gomez Palacio I completed two weeks on the road. It was an important psychological barrier because, previously when people would ask where I was going, I would say “to Panama” and then add “but let’s see if I make it past two weeks.” Two weeks came and went and I continued riding south. I was holding up because a body can get used to almost anything and grow stronger. The motorcycle was holding up because the riding was smooth here and there were no extremes but she wasn’t getting stronger. The riding went fast along the desert highway, always moving south, occasionally passing a small town, all the while the weather growing colder as you gradually ascended back into elevation.

Zacatecas is a beautiful colonial city nestled within a wide valley. It was once a mining town whose bounty of silver long fed the decadence of the Spanish crown. Here there is a cathedral and many churches; there are monuments of politicians and war heroes and buildings from the colonial days whose beautiful stone facades have been well preserved. There is a teleférico, which is a cable car that runs from midway up one hillside to the top of the other across the full spread of the old city. In the western of these two hillsides there is a once prosperous silver mine that ceased to produce and was shut down. Now it is a tourist attraction and at the end of one mine shaft they built a discotec.

In the evening I went to La Mina Club, which is the disco in the mine. After you pay your entrance fee they seat you on a small train and take you several hundred meters down the mine shaft. When you exit the train they escort you into the bar room, which is adjacent to and smaller than the dance hall. Here they seat you one at a time according to the number in your party. The walls are bare rock and dome-shaped except for the support beams that run every which way, reinforcing the structure and anchoring the large television screens and sound system.

I ordered a Bacardi on the rocks. Soon the dancehall became full and the music got louder. Now people were dancing. I ordered another Bacardi. I drank it and I tried to reason with myself to go out there. I prodded myself. I tried to shame and cajole. You didn’t come here to stand around! Nothing worked; I was unmoved. It seemed that I didn’t have the sand to go out and dance on my own. Finally, disappointed, I said: You’re riding a motorcycle alone through Mexico. The bad highways, the banditos, and the drug traffickers. All the countless dangers. Every day you wake up thinking about how today might be your last. You’ve accepted this and you’ve come this far and here you are in a place where no one knows your name or will ever see you again and you haven’t got the gravel to get out there and dance to just one song!

So I finished my drink and I went onto the dance floor. I danced to one song and then to another and I met people and I had fun. I felt about as awkward as I have ever felt when I first dancing but it got better and I felt braver than in any other moment during the trip.

¡Qué Aventura! ¡Qué Aventura!

Creel to Guachochi, Mexico
2,688 km

Creel is the last major town before you enter the Parque Nacional Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon National Park). Here I took a room and unloaded the luggage from the motorcycle. In the afternoon I took a long hour’s ride along the corkscrew highway that follows the train tracks along and over and through the great canyon ridges. These are the tracks that run from Mazatlan on the coast to Chihuahua in the middle of the empty, mountainous northern country. That a train can run through these vast canyonlands is marvelous; it makes you think that maybe anything, anything at all, is possible.

The highway ends at a train stop. Here, at the train stop, there are artisans and souvenir vendors and women cooking and selling food. They come here because the train makes a stop here and also because there is a famous mirador (lookout) and tourists come to see the view. Here at El Divisadero on the northern rim of Barranca del Cobre, you can stand at a cliff’s edge, along a railing and a stone parapet and you can see as far south across the canyonlands as your eyes will let you. You see the rough, jagged slopes of rock and scrubland barreling into and away from each other, looking like the great, colliding waves of a storming sea frozen forever as earth and stone.

The next day I rode more than 150 kilometers of canyon highway from Creel on the north side of the Barranca del Cobre to Guachochi on the south side. The road was rough and meandering: hard corners, twisting as it rose and falling again according to the terrain, cutting through thick forests along the heights where the air was cool and smelled of earth and pine needles and, descending into the valleys, it was hot and dry and bathed in sharp sunlight. In one valley about halfway through the ride I stopped beside a bridge where the road crosses a river and I sat upon a boulder reading and resting and eating sunflower seeds and getting sunburned. Warm and sweating and skin becoming red and no shade anywhere, it was lovely here after so many days of cold.

In Guachochi I rode to the Sinforosa, which is the principal southern mirador as El Divisadero is in the north. It was 10 miles from the town to the lookout and the road was all dirt, rocky and potholed, and at one point I had to cross a large puddle which was thick with mud and sludge and I thought for sure that I would go down. This was my first time riding off of tarmac and it was not pleasant as dirt roads go. I rode slowly and looked straight ahead, avoiding large rocks and gravel and sudden dips in the road.

As I rode, gingerly and nervously, I thought about a story that a friend in Chile had told me. She had gone with her family to a pebbly beach in the south of the country with her family and they drove out onto the sand. There they saw a young American with a rented Jeep. He had got floundered in the pebbles and sand and had kept gunning the engine, which only drove him deeper in. Eventually he got help from a couple of local men with a pickup truck and they rigged a tow line and tried to use the truck’s torque to free the Jeep.

The American had a good attitude and saw it all as an experience. While the two men rigged the line, pulled from the pickup truck, and slowly reversed on the Jeep, the American had his camcorder out. He was circling the scene and filming and smiling and saying over and over again: “Qué aventura! Qué aventura!” (What an adventure! What an adventure!). Some time passed and the Jeep was not freed and the American lifted his gaze from the camcorder aperture and saw that all during the ‘adventure’ the tide had been rising up the shore. The last “Qué aventura!” was only half uttered when he made this realization and now he began repeating different words: “Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck!” Now he was no longer filming and he was helping push the Jeep. Only now there wasn’t time and the rescue had to be abandoned and the pickup moved further up the beach. The tide rose and flooded the Jeep and soon the strong, sidelong current knocked it loose from its moorings and swept it some ways down the coast.

I thought about this story as I rode, bumping and crashing into and over the uneven road, repeating to myself “Qué aventura! Qué aventura!” until finally I arrived at the mirador. There, after crossing a small cow pasture, I was alone at the lookout in the late afternoon. It was a wide concrete platform with a fenced metal rail, the cliff face tumbling down and away below. All around there was only wind and sky and what must certainly be some of the roughest, ruggedest canyon country to be found anywhere on the whole earth.

Motorcycle Trouble at the Edge of the Canyon

La Junta to Creel to Chihuahua to Creel, Mexico
2,481 km

The 90 kilometers of highway between La Junta and Creel cut through yellow plains, soon becoming rolling hills and canyonlands. Entering the canyonlands around Parque Nacional Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon National Park), the highway first began to meander and then corkscrew among rocky slopes and sharp ridges. It was good riding, great riding: the hard turning, the leaning, the looking through the present turn and into the next, the bike oscillating from this side to the other, like a pendulum, and me back straight and sitting vertically, arms locked, locking the steering, and leaning the bike into the turn and out of it, easing on the throttle going in and opening it up again coming out, me happy, would be smiling but for the concentration: perceiving, calculating, then doing. My fingertips were freezing under the leather gloves that were covered by electrical tape and duct tape to serve as an insulation, which did not work.

Creel is a small city on the edge of the national park. It has a downtown of a small square and a couple main streets that run parallel on both sides of the train tracks. The train tracks are those that run from Chihuahua between the two mountain ranges to Mazatlan on the coast, running though a hundred kilometers or more of the canyonlands in a marvelous feat of engineering.

I parked the motorcycle near the central plaza and took a stroll to see the town and look for accommodations. When I returned to ride the bike to the hotel where I had taken a room, she was reluctant to start and idled poorly, cutting out after exerting force to climb and slope. I parked the bike at the hotel and left the troubleshooting for tomorrow.

That night I ate dinner at a restaurant that was really the dining room of a family’s house. The mother served me Menudo because that is what she had prepared. Menudo, I learned, is a soup of beans, broth, and cow intestines. I did not much like it. While I forced myself to make a show of the eating, not enjoying it, the older daughter sat at the same table decorating Christmas stockings to be given to the children in her mother’s class – she is a school teacher when she is not running the restaurant. The younger daughter helped her little brother read a picture book about the Greek King Midas who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and it did but he came to regret that wish. It was pleasant to watch them go about their evening business, me just being, listening, observing, not having to entertain or be entertained, no formality, no ceremony.

The next morning I tried to service the motorcycle. I had the Clymer manual and the small toolkit that comes with the bike. I cleaned the air filter with compressed air from the nearby gas station. I cleaned the fuel filter by running gasoline and then compressed air in a reverse flow. I also replaced a fuel hose, which cracked when I removed it to remove the fuel tank. This helped but did not solve the problem. The carburetors were gummed up and I didn’t know anything about carburetors.

I considered having the bike shipped to a Yamaha shop in Chihuahua, not knowing if to ride the bike would cause problems or find me stranded along the highway. I decided to risk it when the shipping service refused to let me ride along with the motorcycle.

So I rode to Chihuahua and the bike performed well enough to get me there. In Chihuahua I went to the Yamaha dealership and had a full tune-up done that same day. Uriel, the mechanic, cleaned the carburetors, which were fouled with water and dirt and rust; he changed the oil, and did all the things that you do during a tune-up. He treated me to lunch and gave me numerous motorcycle maintenance tips. He refused to accept a tip when I tried to give it.

The next day, now day 11 of the trip, I was back in Creel, the motorcycle humming nicely: idling calmly, steadily, and running strongly.