Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Incidents of travel (conclusion) With the aid of a road map I tried to identify a detour that would get us onto the highway heading north from Mexico City without actually requiring us to drive through the city itself again, which I wasn't particularly eager to do. On the map — which I still have — a faint circle in ink has been traced around an unmarked divided road that appears to connect a place called Reyes, on Route 150, with Texcoco on Route 136 to the northeast of the capital. (At least it looks like it would connect up; it's a little hard to tell because the words MEXICO CITY blot out most of that part of the map.) I think we must have missed the turnoff, however, because getting to Texcoco — or wherever it was we emerged when we finally found ourself on a major highway again — proved to be a bit of a nightmare. We quickly found ourselves lost and in heavy traffic, in the midst of some outlier of the capital, and only narrowly avoided a head-on collision when we found ourselves stranded in the middle of yet another labyrinthine, hell-for-leather intersection as the lights changed. Somehow we made it through. As we were now in the neighborhood of the ruins of Teotihuacán we stopped to take a look around, and we may have grabbed a meal at the same time. I will always associate that day with devouring a delicious, cheese-covered plate of huitlacoche, an edible fungus, parasitic on corn, which was to the Aztecs a delicacy, no doubt in part because they had come up with a better name for it than our prosaic “corn smut.” To be honest, though, I'm not sure where we ate lunch that day — or if we even ate lunch at all — and neither am I sure that I've ever tasted huitlacoche, then or at any other time. Located on a broad plain ringed by mountains, Teotihuacán is among the most extensive Mesoamerican sites. Built by an unknown people, it is dominated by two massive pyramids, the so-called Pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon (the photos, I think, show the latter), and in general its surviving monuments lack the ornamentation and grace of the ruins of the Yucatán. To a non-specialist at least, what the site conveys most is simply brutal, totalitarian power, wielded over the countless thousands of conscripted laborers who must have hauled its stones into place, and the even more unimaginable numbers who, over the course of centuries, must have toiled in the fields to feed the city's appetites. The effect is compounded by the mountain that looms over the Pyramid, echoing its outlines, a parallelism which must, one imagines, have carried to the ancient inhabitants of the place the message that even the earth itself had been shaped to reinforce their submission. The ruined monuments of the Maya world may have seen their share of human sacrifice and internecine warfare, but nothing I saw there had this coldness, this dreary absolutism. We must have climbed the Pyramid of the Sun to take photos, and we may have climbed the Moon as well, but I can't remember. On our way down from one of the two we met some roving hawkers selling imitation pre-Columbian ceramic figurines. I took a liking to a rather ridiculous unglazed seated figure about eight inches high, for which the asking price was 125 pesos (about $6). The vendor accepted my offer of 100, which I imagine was still probably generous. The figure was hollow, and I think it functioned as a kind of flute. I think I still have it, though I haven't seen it lately. After we left Teotihuacán I believe we made it as far as a city called Pachuca, about which I remember little except that we spent the night in a cavernous old hotel and that there were intermittent power outages. Blackouts were not an unusual occurence in our trip, possibly because the rainy season was overdue and the rivers were still dry behind the hydroelectric dams. The next morning we must have started north on Highway 85 again, into the mountains, through Valles and Ciudad Victoria, and we may have stayed one more night in Mexico but I think not; I think we just kept going until we reached the border at Matamoros. We were supposed to surrender our car permit on the Mexican side — something about proving you hadn't brought the car into the country and then sold it — but traffic was backed up on the departing side of Mexican customs so we just drove on through (we later dropped the papers in a mailbox). US Customs gave us a perfunctory inspection; we had nothing to declare and must have looked too clueless and disorganized to be smugglers. They asked where in Mexico we had travelled and we probably told them about the broken window. A few miles into Texas we stopped at a roadside luncheonette for a bite. The Iran hostage crisis was still unresolved, and while we ate our first grease-covered American meal the radio blared out a parody of the old Beach Boys tune “Barbara Ann,” with the refrain “Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb Iran.” We were home. A few days later we made it home. The car had 9,000 more miles on it than we we started out, one missing window, and no oil — as we had never bothered to add any — but in the face of neglect, high altitude, heat, and endless and inexpert shifting in up-and-down terrain the Toyota had never failed us. It had been an utterly insane, and quintessentially 20th-century American, way to travel. During our stay in Mexico we had averaged hundreds of miles a day, driving from ruin to ruin and from city to city, from high mountain ridges to lowland jungles, from villages to shantytowns to the cosmopolitan bustle of the capital, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean. In all that time we had engaged in no memorable encounters with Mexicans or other travellers, sustained no conversations longer than necessary to order a meal, get a room, transact our business, and be on our way. And yet in three weeks we had acquired an extraordinary feel for the variety and extent of the country, a perspective that would help prevent us from falling into facile clichés or conclusions about what Mexico was and had been and who its people were and might become. In any case, at least on my part, the trip was never intended to be more than a kind of orientation, a way of getting around and seeing what the country was about with an eye toward returning later for a more extended and focused sojourn. But I have never been back. [Thanks RL for the photos and the company.] March 5, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me