I was thirty years old, a rugged adventurer and a sexual infant.
* * *
—
I JUST KEPT PEDALING, talking to God, not Weston. And by that I mean thinking, staring at the ground, at the mountains, feeling my smallness in the bigness of the world. Feeling how ancient and powerful the desert was, how disinterested it all was in my life and in whether I touched my lips to someone else’s. How entire mountain ranges could disappear, and I wouldn’t care, but if I kissed someone, or didn’t, I would be elated or devastated. I made a lot of miles boiling in thoughts like this.
We made it down the rest of Baja without much incident. In spite of the gruesome tales about Mexico and drug cartels and beheadings…we only met kindness. The police at the many checkpoints laughed as we approached on bikes and offered us water and advice on our route. Truckers continued to pull over to hand us more water. Even the tarantulas and scorpions moved over as we passed, as if saying, After you, good sir. I rode many miles with only my mind as the enemy, missing home, missing my friends. I was tired of thinking and tired of the desert. Tired of forcing meaning and pretending to be tough on this stupid road. I didn’t want to voice my despair—I thought it would discourage Weston—but I also felt so weak and alone in my loss of wonder and desire for the trip.
“Dude, this has been hard for me,” I finally confessed to Weston the night before we got to La Paz. We had camped for the night in a dusty riverbed, and as we were drifting to sleep, with the promise of a city the next day and some kind of escape, I told the truth. “I’ve been trying to stay positive, but damn, I’m ready for La Paz, for a city, for that ferry, and to get off this peninsula.”
“Shit, I’m so glad you’ve hated it, too. I want tropical beaches and warm water, any water. I can’t drink one more Coca-Cola or eat one more cracker and salami. I’m so fucking over it. Dude, I thought you were so okay with all of this.”
“Fuck, no. I’ve hated this hell since I got sick in Guerrero Negro.”
“Really!? Me, too!” he said, feeling sudden companionship. “I didn’t want to say anything because I thought it would bum you out, or chance the energy. I wanted to be positive.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I feel like we’re so lucky to be on this trip and people wish they were doing it and not stuck at a desk job, but damn, the adventure wears off, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m not ready to quit right now or anything. But it feels good to admit it isn’t one long string of euphoria.”
“Fuck, it feels good to admit that,” Weston said in the darkness of his hammock.
“Let’s drink all the beer in La Paz, live it up for a minute, and catch the ferry out of this shit box of desert hell.” We both laughed hard at the release of being allowed to hate the adventure we were on.
The next day we cycled into La Paz and celebrated the miracle of civilization. We stayed with a Christian woman name Lucinda that we found on Warm Showers. She was excited to share Jesus and her church with us. We slept on the couch in her small house. Her hot shower and stocked refrigerator and soft voice felt so welcoming. We went to a movie theater—an IMAX, even—and downed enough popcorn and soda to make us nearly puke. We saw the movie Gravity, and felt that we’d been transported to the future. The air-conditioned theater. The soft seats. The special effects. I felt very close to Weston, having survived the desert, sleeping by fires and hunting water and relishing cold Coca-Colas and the conversations with locals, both strange and sweet. We were comrades. Brothers already.
* * *
—
WHILE IN LA PAZ, homesick but encouraged, contemplating how I was going to stay sane for the next year on this bike trip, my friend Adam e-mailed. “A crew of homies is going surfing in Nexpa, Mexico. Is that on your way? It’s tropical and tiny and perfect. You’ll love it. Come hang with us! November 6!” I checked the map. Nexpa was indeed on our course. We’d ferry from La Paz, near the tip of Baja, to the mainland, to a city called Mazatlán. Then we’d head south to Puerta Vallarta, then down below that was Nexpa. To get there by November 2 would require a push, but to see our friends would be worth it. When I ran the idea by Weston, he was ecstatic, so I told Adam that we’d meet them there, no matter what it took.
We stayed a couple more nights in La Paz, relishing the creature comforts, laughing and getting drunk, then bought tickets for the overnight ferry to Mazatlán and the mainland.
It was a thirteen-hour crossing. We couldn’t afford the private cabins, so we had to sleep on the deck of the ship. There were probably a hundred people, maybe more, bodies in every corner hiding from the cold and wet wind. Weston met an eccentric old white man who had left the United States because he thought it was too corrupt. They started swapping conspiracy theories. The guy told us he had a private cabin with three empty beds and said we could sleep in his room. I crawled into the top bunk and tried to sleep while the old man kept telling Weston about contrails and the falsification of the moon landing and Obama’s secret mission to buy Cuba. Weston was endlessly fascinated. I was happy to be off the deck of the boat. I fell asleep as they were discussing the fact that fossil fuel comes from dead dinosaurs, and how it is impossible that there were that many dead dinosaurs to provide enough oil for the world, and that therefore petroleum was a chemical made up by the Russians to control the world.
Chapter 7
CARTELS AND COCONUTS
11,834 miles to go
Crossing that slip of ocean was like sliding down a wormhole to another kind of Earth. Immediately the mountains of Mexico turned from dust brown to jungle green. The rivers here swelled with muddy water, and I had never been so happy to see chubby tourists and traffic.
Mazatlán is a tourist destination, with hotels and restaurants lining the beach, bicycles for rent, families splashing in the waves, and everywhere signs for beer and tacos and happy hours and margaritas. It felt familiar, like Florida.
Weston got high and we rode our bikes in the humid hot night air without shirts on. True to form, Weston’s tire popped on the boardwalk and we had to fix it and it took forever, so we found a shitty hostel down the road and slept in a bunk room full of snorers. Still, we were incapable of being frustrated, so inflated with joy that we floated like parade animals over a marching band.
The next day under a hot, wet sun, we started south to Puerta Vallarta. The city quickly turned into coastal farms and fields. We hadn’t ridden in humidity yet, and sweat poured from our bodies. My helmet filled with sweat that dripped in my eyes. Over the next few days, farms gave way to tree-covered mountains and now it looked like Hawaii. In Puerta Vallarta, the scene changed to expensive boat docks and condos and high-rises. We stayed at a hostel and walked around town. Halloween was in the air. We got drinks with strangers and people were in elaborate costumes, and lots of gay guys were out in Speedos and boas. “Jed, you might just get some tonight!” Weston said.
“Uhm, I don’t think so. I am not in a Speedo, nor do I intend to be. I look like a scrawny hippie rat from this bike trip. I ain’t getting no buff beach boy,” I said, deflecting.
“Well, you’re not with that attitude,” Weston said.
We had so much fun in Puerta Vallarta that we stayed for several days. We should’ve left, because Nexpa was several days’ ride away, and we had to get there by the second, but we met some French girls and Weston was trying to kiss one and we loved the beach and our hostel was cheap. The town had great restaurants, narrow cobblestone streets, and steep mountains all around. I read on the beach. Watched a parade. Drank good coffee and bought coconuts from street vendors for a dollar. We knew we were staying too long, but we wanted to have fun anyway. We knew it would mean hitchhiking south. We didn’t care. Fuck expectations.
Early on the second, we packed up our things and biked out of town. We figured if we could get on the southern highway, some truck or farmer might take us the rest of the way. At a promising spot, we turned our b
ikes upside down and I managed to find a piece of cardboard to make a sign. “Nexpa.” I added a smiley face.
No ride materialized. Every truck that came around the corner only sped on by. After several miserable hours of standing in the sun, a local bus stopped and the driver made an offer we couldn’t refuse.
It took the rest of the day to reach Nexpa. Turns out we had badly miscalculated. We learned the hard way that three hundred miles by bus on a narrow, winding road in Latin America is likely to take a lifetime. We drove through forested hills and shoulder-high grass along the road. Cows stood almost invisible in the fields, eating their fill. At dusk, when the bus finally pulled into Nexpa, we felt like cheaters but we didn’t care. Who were we cheating? We made the rules.
Nexpa is just a romantic blip on the coast where the waves are perfect and a lazy river pours into the Pacific. Almost no Internet, no supermarkets, no stores. We showed up to the one-street town and went looking for our friends. They’d mentioned that they were at the main hostel right by the beach. As we walked our bikes down the little street we saw hammocks and people on the balcony of the only obvious hostel, and I heard English, and then I heard Adam’s voice. We ditched our bikes without locking them and ran up the rickety stairs. It was a riot of cheers and hugs and “Holy shit, you found us” and “Get these men some beers!” I felt like a soldier coming home from war. We laughed uncontrollably and hugged and touched their faces and made foolish jokes about getting shit-faced and partying just to laugh more.
The hostel was a series of beach huts and shacks owned by a British woman named Susan who’d married a Mexican man and was raising her kids in this outpost of paradise. The beach curved around a crescent bay to the mouth of a river, where the flow of fresh water had pushed sand into a bar that made for excellent surfing waves. Huts topped with thatched roofs studded the sand, and the air was warm and pleasant. We surfed and got sunburned and drank beers and befriended the owner of the only bar on the beach. His name was Stewart, and he spoke English with an American accent. I asked him his story.
Stewart told us he was born in Mexico but had raised a family in Florida until “some bullshit” happened between him and his wife. She called the police and claimed he “hit her and messed her up,” and he got deported. He said she was a crazy bitch, that he just wants to see his kids and that he’s not a bad guy.
“It’s a wild thing to think,” he said, “you’re building a whole life in the U.S., with a wife and American-born kids, and then you get sent to live in Mexico again. I had never really lived in Mexico. So I opened this bar. It’s pretty cool. But I meet a lot of American surfers, and it makes me want to get back to the U.S. It’s pretty fucked up.”
As he talked, I would drift between good cheer and observation. This often happens to me when I’m listening to someone tell a story they’ve rehearsed a hundred times with a hundred different visitors. Their face is not astonished by their own words; they’re not reading your face as they go, to tell if their sentences are landing. They’re bored at the injustice of having to make their case again and again to a deaf universe.
The days drifted by with big beers and big waves and sitting in the back of rented trucks and beat-up local trucks as we hunted not just remote beaches, but beaches that seemed to be lost to humanity. I half expected a velociraptor to stalk me as I napped under the palm trees.
Then, on the morning of November 4, the town started scrambling around, gossip traveling with lightning speed. All roads in every direction had been blockaded. The military was staging an overthrow of the Knights Templar, the main cartel here in the state of Michoacán. An hour down the coast in Lázaro Cárdenas, the largest town on this part of the coast, the Knights Templar had taken control of the port for the past few years. They’d slowly bribed and muscled their way into controlling trade in and out. Component chemicals for methamphetamine production came into the port from Asia, and then from there, they could make the meth in the nearby jungles, then put it right on trains and trucks bound for the United States. They’d made millions as a result. The military was retaking the port and pushing the Knights Templar into the jungle and up the coast, back toward us. We had no idea what was going on—only that the people of Nexpa seemed to be stressed. “The mafia is pissed,” they told us. “They run this state.” The last time the Knights Templar fought the military, Nexpa was stranded without food or water for two months. “Every kid and grandma comes out to the street with their guns.”
Black military helicopters buzzed overhead all day. Humvees loaded down with local vigilantes, supported by the military, roared past the surf shacks. We couldn’t even get to a supermarket two miles down the road.
Shaken up, we went to Stewart’s bar to drink and dull our nerves and listen to the gossip. He explained that the Knights Templar got their name from medieval warriors who protected Christian pilgrims during the Crusades. They’d become the de facto government in Michoacán. They patrolled the state’s steep forests and chaotic network of dirt roads in lifted four-wheel-drive trucks. They moved like ghosts, nowhere and everywhere. Recently, they had been trying to diversify their income. They’d made a fortune selling meth to the U.S., and had seized iron ore mines in Michoacán to sell the mineral to hungry Chinese companies. They were also illegally selling rare Mexican timber to the Chinese, Stewart said. They’d bribed and conned their way into control of the massive industrial port in Lázaro Cárdenas, which had a direct line to China and was poised to become the biggest Pacific port outside of Los Angeles. In retaliation, the military had been secretly preparing an attack.
Today was the day. Today they choked every road in the state.
When men entered the bar, “You can always tell cartel boys,” Stewart whispered. “They show up in lifted trucks and carry huge walkie-talkies.” The men couldn’t have been older than nineteen, and it was clear that the far corner table was theirs and always theirs. They seemed calm and wound up at the same time, like pit bulls.
For an hour, the cartel boys set the tone of the room, ordering beers and talking among themselves, watching football on the television and occasionally mumbling into their walkie-talkies. At one point, one of the teams scored and they were visibly pleased. They looked over at us—the nervous gringos at the bar, pretending to be oblivious to their presence—and raised their glasses in muted cheers. We cheersed back. They smiled, downed the last gulps, and walked out.
Stories of life in cartel country kept flowing with the beer. Susan, the British surf goddess who owned the hostel shack we were renting, talked about a Texas family that had come down in their brand-new white F-150 truck. They entered Michoacán, and within the hour, cartel boys in Jeeps had pulled them over at gunpoint. The boys politely escorted the startled Texans out of their truck, said “Gracias for the donation,” and left them on the side of the road.
“You have to drive a beat-up piece-of-shit car,” Susan explained, “and you’ll be left perfectly alone. Show up in an all-wheel-drive anything and it’ll be gone in a week.” She had built a life on this beach, minding her own business and making it a point to own nothing the cartels could want.
We spent the next few days at that bar, thirsty for news. In this place, the Internet, where it even existed, offered no answers or updates. We only had word of mouth.
The sense of being stranded in paradise was kind of nice. Susan kept ensuring us that everything was fine, that the cartels would never bother tourists. But there was a forced confidence in her words. We all knew that drunk, money-hungry teenagers with guns could lead to unfortunate events. Our buddies from California stayed up through the night debating whether or not to tell their girlfriends and wives about the roadblocks. And by roadblocks, I mean the cartel. In the United States, the dominant story about Mexico is cartel violence. I had told my mom that reports were overblown, that Mexico was wonderful, that she was xenophobic. But here I was, surrounded by teenagers with guns and Humve
es and military helicopters. My friends were deciding not to tell their wives. I was not going to tell my mother.
I couldn’t give up on my global optimism. I’ve always believed that the world is far friendlier than it is not, far more loving than hateful. Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled. But dammit, I felt stupid, feigning my optimism here in Nexpa. Playing it cool. Wondering if I’d be shot by accident or on purpose. There is truth in a mother’s worry. There is also exaggeration and unfairness. If I die, she wins, I thought. If I live, I win.
The truth is, violence is the exception—not the rule—in almost all places on this planet. There’s a saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it. But the truth lies somewhere in between blood and peace. Most of us will move through life without experiencing the abnormalities of violence, but that doesn’t mean those abnormalities don’t exist.
It was strange, watching the waves crash, feeling the cool breeze on our faces. Nothing had changed, except the news, and the goings-on of humans. A coup was under way, and paradise didn’t seem to notice.
We went surfing, my California buddies talking nonstop about their wives and girlfriends. “Melissa did not want me to come,” one guy said. “But she’s always worried about nothing. Fuck.” Now that the roadblocks had sprung up and the locals were nervous, they seemed shaken; perhaps more shaken by proving their ladies right than by the possibility of injury. To hear them talk, this wrongness would come at a great cost down the road. “I told you so” is a weapon that can be deployed for years. Weston and I listened as our friends anxiously calculated how to get home, but we knew we weren’t going anywhere. They heard the government was letting people through the roadblocks to the airport, so they decided to hop in the rental car and chance it.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 12
