Saturday, April 26, 2014

Holy Week

Holy Week in a region of great tectonic tension-- we stray  briefly from Jalisco's highlands to camp on the coast of Nayarit for a few days before doubling back to Guadalajara on Easter Sunday. Semana Santa (aka Holy Week) is like national spring break in Mexico, where census says Christians, (vastly Roman Catholics),  make up 93 percent of the population. Suddenly the razor's edge we cut through this dense and heaving country reveals a distended cross section --- Mexican vacationers clog roads and gas stations, overtake mountains and seas.  The very pious and the very drunk parade by, while regular folks wait to use the bathroom.  
As we head south from San Luis Potosi,  pilgrims and penitents walk single file over  scorching desert mountains and across valleys of blue agave, carrying icons to a remote sanctuary. We stop for a couple of nights at a ranching village  in a canyon about one hour southwest of Guadalajara, sheer pastures willed out of rock and cactus. The central church of Barranca de Santa Clara was damaged by a reecnt earthquake. Tower fissured, loudspeakers toll instead of bells. 
Our host is Maria, the mother of a lover of a friend, though her hospitality never hints at the tenuousness of this connection. Degrees in natural medicine and psychology hang on the wall opposite Maria's airy kitchen, in which she prepares us delicious food. She proposes I use white vinegar and tranquility to treat an allergic reaction that has temporarily disfigured my face and dampened my spirits, likely the result of unwise flower picking in the desert of San Luis Potosi. 

One side of Maria's face seems affected by stroke - an eyebrow always raised knowingly at you. According to her daughter Fabiola, she was drawn to the church in Barranca de Santa Clara by an 85-year-old mystic and illiterate named El Segundo, who reports from the astral plane while Maria takes notes for an as-told-by book.  Story goes, El Segundo's mom died when he was three. Unwilling to accept this loss and ignorant of decomposition, he dug up her grave. But the sight of her rotted corpse only shocked and grieved him more. Then his mother appeared bathed in celestial light to deliver a message: as an adult El Segundo would have powers to travel in other dimensions, to relive the lives of saints and the cruxifixion of Christ, to ward off evil and save souls from hell.  All these things came true, Maria says.   Bearing in mind the limitlessness of other dimensions, El Segundo prognosticates a bleak future for the world as most of us know it. The end is near, etc. However Barranca de Santa Clara will remain a protected place, a spiritual refuge in times of great suffering. 
Moving westward, we cross something like seven mountain ranges. Our prickly path becomes lush green an hour from Sayulita on the coast. Joined by two teenage hitchhikers -- Brian and Beto -- springbreakers on their way to a beach rave, elated to listen to American funk and soul music. They offer us obsidian and crystals, "por protecion";  we thank them with a Taj Mahal CD. 
Salt water and  a cortisone shot revive me. Chance would have us stay up all night on Monday April 14 to see the moon turn "blood red," the first of four total lunar eclipses happening every six months over the next two years. This rare "lunar tetrad" is a source of meaning for all kinds of believers.
Evangelicals seem inclined to doom. A couple of Americans have been best-selling books aligning the eclipses of 2014-15 with Biblical verse Joel 2:31: "The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes." 
A cheerier outlook on the beach in Sayulita the night of the first eclipse. Unaware that anything auspicious is going to happen, Alessandro plays his guitar while I navel gaze. Three women pass, then one comes back, inviting us to join a meditation circle down the way. Not a trap. It's a ragtag group of friends and strangers, tourists and local tea-leave readers, lighting candles, singing, banging and clanging on stuff, chanting,  playing Aztec ritual, burning wishes and saying thank you to the moon. The MC is  a 70-something white guy named Gary, wearing a Mayan calendar tee-shirt. Gary says this will be time for change, a time to let go of something that's been bugging you, a time for relationships to make or break. A beautiful woman wrapped in traditional textiles sings folk songs, her infant son asleep under the thumping hand drum. An unlikely variety of instruments emerge from the candlelit sand. Gongs the size of man-holes.
The moon bruises then bleeds in a contained way, like a smooshed toenail on its way out. Other stars and planets emerge from the falling darkness. 
The next day we peruse crowded souvenir markets, admire handicrafts of the Huichole culture. Exquisite embroideries, peyote-inspired beadwork, sacred symbols for sale. Cocos, too. Young women use machetes to decapitate and drain them into plastic bags, cutting bright white flesh into manageable pieces for the throngs of dehyrdated, sunburned 20-somethings that have descended upon Nayarit's coast in the tens of thousands.
Pilgrims they ain't and by Good Friday our pretty little campsite by the beach turns into my own personal Hades, crossed by the river Piss. Its like a civil war reanactment with no history buffs; a religious revival with no religion. Dome tents pimple every inch of ground; every boombox plays a little louder than the one next to it. There's like, five obnoxiously drunk dudes for every one inscrutable, hiccuping girl. 
Before the Holy Weekend brings 3,000 people into our five-acre campground, I don't quite grasp how completely the situation in Sayulita will transcend any one puny person, no matter how bitchy, tired or entitled she may feel. 
It's only Wednesday, after all.  Almost midnight. Murmurings of a tropical shore obliterated by our neighbor's smackfest thinly veiled in nylon. Way way worse is the terrible dance song they are playing on repeat at bowel quaking volume. I implore Alessandro. He cajoles Jorge the night guard: is this really permitted here? Its only Wednesday, after all. Already midnight. 
Dutifully, Jorge interrupts the rustling tent while we hide in ours.  The music dials down for five minutes, gets louder incrementally over the next ten.   
Jorge works 12-hour nightshifts guarding this camp, dealing with the campers. He's paid less than one us dollar an hour. He welded the new zip line. He has another job in the afternoons. "I've been to the US," he says. "When I was 13." "With your family?" I ask. "No, by myself." An uncomfortable look passing over his face. "For work."
He's 44. Wife lives in town with another guy. Son estranged. Sister in Salt Lake City. Mother dead. Father gone.  Eventually I ask him what he does for fun and he closes his eyes for long second, sighs and really can't think of anything. "Work," he shrugs. Its 2 am and a marching band strikes up in the near darkness, accompanied by full horn section. 
We find refuge thanks to a guy with a massage tent of the beach. He sees us cleaning the surfboards, asks if we are "serious surfers" and then volunteers directions to a secluded spot, something along the lines of "go down the little road out of town to the power plant, park there and walk along a fence, through the jungle via the creek until you hear howler monkies." 
Then he apologizes for being so drunk so early in the day. It only takes us the better part of an afternoon to find secluded playa de los burros, where we spend two days surfing a mellow point break, snorkeling and laying around under trees, trying not to rile up any mad little bugs too much. 
Back to Guadalajara, reluctantly. An earthquake precedes us by one day. Our host Polo reports he was home in his underwear when it began.  For a second he debated putting on pants, then ran outside without them in case the building gave way while he was doing something foolish like putting on pants during an earthquake. On the still street he found himself alone, indecent and embarrassed.
Easter Sunday we head to the city center -- riding with Polo along wide, shop-lined avenues -- fancy storefronts clad in wedding dresses, bars and familiar brands, then down into a pitch black tunnel that leads to the center. Desert sun to reeling darkness, no headlights, the smell of fried chicken. Polo seems unfazed. We emerge in a parking lot and ascend to the roof for a view of the city's sprawling lines, hard edges capped by ubiquitious church domes. Makes me think of all those tents in Sayulita.
In the central cathedral on this Easter Sunday the crowning virgin gazes as she always does, ever downward on the sacristy, a curio cabinet of holy crap and old bones. A line forms for the eucharist as a more haphazard crowd gathers on the north side of the church, under the impassive figure of Domingo de Guzman, patron saint of astronomers. Guzman guards the point of interest, an ornate terrarium blooming with white tafetta and lace, the face of a sweaty cupcake. 
A child martyr, her eyes are closed peacefully under smears of pale white flesh and tendrils of copper hued hair. Taped to the reliquary is a color photo of the real Santa de Innocencia from Guadalajara -- a girl of maybe 8 in a contemporary white button-up top,  the sheen of sweat on her deep brown skin, her jet black hair in schoolgirl's braids. Story goes, Guadalajara's Inoncencia was the daughter of a very bad man. After she was beaten mercilessly for asking to take first communion, a nun taught her catechism classes in secret, advising that when in a damned if you do, damned if you don't siutaiton,  better to ally with good than evil. Following her first eucharist, Inocencia ran into the kitchen to tell her father, who promptly stabbed her in the chest. Blood spurted all over the onions he was chopping. 
True story. In a sense, anyway. More than three sources confirm Inocencia's existence in the Guadalajara cathedral; two talk about the well-meaning nun who taught her to pray, the abusive father who stabbed her to death; only one says it happened in the kitchen with a chopping knife. The onions are made up, maybe true. Mulling gospel truth. Only Luke mentions that under torture Christ turned down a sedative of wine and gall, a desert plant akin to nightshade. Only Matthew mentions a sudden darkness and an earthquake following the crucifixion.
At the Easter Sunday Eucharist service in Guadalajara, a procession of open mouths take communion, a cracker for the body of Christ, thimbles of wine symbolizing the blood of the Lamb. Afterwards we find a taqueria overlooking a pedestrian street -- a menu of  lips, head, eyes, tongue, and cheek. Tacos vampiro?  Meat served with blood, Polo says.  We all order ahogada tortas, a regional speciality consisting of pork on a bun drowned in tomato-based sauce. A sandwich eaten with a spoon.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The fabric of our lives

The road from Northern California to Central America is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear. For now I'll start with the journey to Monterrey.
Alessandro and I leave our home in Smith River, CA on March 10. By the end of May we plan to be in Costa Rica, where he has a job with a non-profit and I have a situation at a Spanish language school. We begin with months of dreamy planning -- routes mulled, gear got, budgets begun. I feel like I am researching the writing of Bohemianism for Dummies. Maybe I am. Then comes much ado about everything we own; survivors packed in to every corner, cubbie and cabinet of a '98 Dodge conversion van.

And so we go, in our wake a trail of pretty clothes, beloved pets, 10,000 things I found on the beach. In their stead all manner of potentially life-saving crap: things that cut, things that stick, things that burn, cool and heal, things with real ass potential and things I really really hope we never use.

We cross at Nuevo Laredo, spending our last night in Texas with a couchsurfing.org host at his casita overlooking the Rio Grande. We explore the remnants of a cattle ranch being consumed from the outside in by a master planned gated golf course community, its scabs of unholy green, pretty women holding babies and resident deer advertised on billboards of few words along Laredo's many  industrial parkways. Lucky for us the developers of La Bota Ranch went bust before they could evict tenants of the run-down casitas or remodel the faded glory of the main house. So far the bankers havent touched the spider strewn barns, the corrals, the skeleton cars or the water intake system you'd rather not think on too long. For now, old dogs, skinny horses and wild white cats laze unmolested in heat that drives us south  by mid-morning.

We cross the border without much fanfare -- just a couple hundred machine guns, three half-hearted searches of the cabinetry and a roving X-ray scan of the van. Save a couple more military checkpoints at which we are asked to stand aside while bored looking men in black swat gear pick through the van, mostly with their eyes. It's straight to Monterrey, five hours down the road. We arrive at 5 pm and I'm driving as the lonely toll road tumbles into a frenetic metropolis--- one of the largest in Mexico and its industrial capital.

The drivers do not disappoint and my education in fluidity deepens. In some ways the driving makes more sense here -- people do as they do, not as they ought. There's real freedom  in half a lane; self-determination in horn honking. Less rage overall. Lots of potholes though, and animals in the road, cars stopped with no emergency flashers, unseen children dashing in front of the bumper at stoplights, old ladies ambling across 8-lane highways, very impressive juggling in very dangerous conditions, mangoes for sale.

In Monterrey we stay with another Couchsurfing host, Sarchem, a 30-something university professor set on marrying a Russian woman. His kindness and generousity leave us well fed and feeling bolstered about this whole half-baked scheme. The bed is big, a fan blowing right on it. Little birds sing outside our window in the morning. Children play at all hours of the night. We spend a day off the road, hiking in a national park clinging to the heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental.

Looking down from the impossibly sheer peaks of Chipinque, the city reminds me of a harried  mouth, mid-chew. Mountains resembling rotten teeth bite sky so blue it hurts to look. The encyclopedia tells me this skyline was cut about 65 million years ago, when the vast Mexican plateau first folded, faulted and divided North America. Contemporaneous with the creation of the US and Canadian Rockies, the south bore the brunt of this epic displacement. 

Today some 85 percent of Mexico's exports go north along the same tollways we follow south across the crumbling canines of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Moving through the rough country on smooth, federale-policed roads with no rinky dink stops, I imagine the great outpourings of lava that sculpted Central Mexico 30 to 50 million years ago. In the ceaseless semis roaring by, I hear America singing commercial jingles.