Born to Run

by Christopher McDougall

  “Narcotraficantes,” he muttered.

  Drug runners. Salvador edged as close as he could to the cliff edge on our right and eased even further back on the gas, dropping deferentially from the ten miles per hour we’d been averaging down to a dead halt, granting the big red Dodge every bit of road he could spare.

  No trouble here was the message he was trying to send. Just minding our own, non-mota business. Just don’t stop … because what would we say if they cut us off and came piling out, demanding that we speak slowly and clearly into the barrels of their assault rifles while we explained what the hell we were doing way out here in the middle of Mexican marijuana country?

  We couldn’t even tell them the truth; if they believed us, we were dead. If Mexico’s drug gangs hated anything as much as cops, it was singers and reporters. Not singers in any slang sense of snitches or stool pigeons; they hated real, guitar-strumming, love-song-singing crooners. Fifteen singers were executed by drug gangs in just eighteen months, including the beautiful Zayda Peña, the twenty-eight-year-old lead singer of Zayda y Los Culpables, who was gunned down after a concert; she survived, but the hit team tracked her to the hospital and blasted her to death while she was recovering from surgery. The young heartthrob Valentín Elizalde was killed by a barrage of bullets from an AK-47 just across the border from McAllen, Texas, and Sergio Gómez was killed shortly after he was nominated for a Grammy; his genitals were torched, then he was strangled to death and dumped in the street. What doomed them, as far as anyone could tell, was their fame, good looks, and talent; the singers challenged the drug lords’ sense of their own importance, and so were marked for death.

  The bizarre fatwa on balladeers was emotional and unpredictable, but the contract on reporters was all business. News articles about the cartels got picked up by American papers, which embarrassed American politicians, which put pressure on the Drug Enforcement Administration to crack down. Infuriated, the Zetas threw hand grenades into newsrooms, and even sent killers across the U.S. border to hunt down meddlesome journalists. After thirty reporters were killed in six years, the editor of the Villahermosa newspaper found the severed head of a low-level drug soldier outside his office with a note reading, “You’re next.” The death toll had gotten so bad, Mexico would eventually rank second only to Iraq in the number of killed or kidnapped reporters.

  And now we’d saved the cartels a lot of trouble; a singer and a journalist had just driven smack into their backyard. I jammed my notebook down my pants and quickly scanned the front seat for more things to hide. It was hopeless; Salvador had his group’s tapes scattered everywhere, a shiny red press pass was in my wallet, and right between my feet was a backpack full of tape recorders, pens, and a camera.

  The red Dodge pulled alongside us. It was a glorious, sunny day with a cool, pine-scented breeze, but the truck’s windows were all tightly shut, leaving the mysterious crew invisible behind their smoked-black glass. The truck slowed to a rumbling crawl.

  Just keep going, I chanted inside my head. Don’t stop don’t stop don’t don’t don’t…

  The truck stopped. I cut my eyes hard left and saw Salvador was staring straight ahead, his hands frozen on the steering wheel. I darted my eyes forward again and didn’t move a muscle.

  We sat.

  They sat.

  We were silent.

  They were silent.

  Six murders a week, I was thinking. Burned his balls off. I could see my head rolling between panicky stilettos on a Chihuahua dance floor.

  Suddenly, a roar split the air. My eyes slashed left again. The big red Dodge was spitting back to life and growling on past.

  Salvador watched in the side-view mirror till the Deathmobile disappeared in a swirl of dust. Then he slapped the steering wheel and blasted his ay-yay-yaying tape again.

  “¡Bueno!” he shouted. “¡Ándale pues, a más aventuras!” Excellent! On to more adventures!

  Parts of me that had clenched tight enough to crack walnuts slowly began to relax. But not for long.

  A few hours later, Salvador stomped on the brakes. He backed up, cut a hard right off the rutted path, and started winding between the trees. We wandered farther and farther into the woods, crunching over pine needles and bouncing into gullies so deep I was banging my head on the roll bar.

  As the woods got darker, Salvador got quieter. For the first time since our encounter with the Deathmobile, he even turned off the music. I thought he was drinking in the solitude and stillness, so I tried to sit back and appreciate it with him. But when I finally broke the silence with a question, he grunted moodily back at me. I began to suspect what was going on: we were lost, and Salvador didn’t want to admit it. I watched him more closely, and noticed he was slowing down to study the tree trunks, as if somewhere in the cuneiform bark was a decryptable road atlas.

  “We’re screwed,” I realized. We had a one-in-four shot of this turning out well, which left three other possibilities: driving smack back into the Zetas, driving off a cliff in the dark, or driving around in the wilderness until the Clif Bars ran out and one of us ate the other.

  And then, just as the sun set, we ran out of planet.

  We emerged from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead—a crack in the earth so vast that the far side could be in a different time zone. Down below, it looked like a world-ending explosion frozen in stone, as if an angry god had been in the midst of destroying the planet, then changed his mind in mid-apocalypse. I was staring at twenty thousand square miles of wilderness, randomly slashed into twisting gorges deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon.

  I walked to the edge of the cliff, and my heart started to pound. A sheer drop fell for about… ever. Far below, birds were swirling about. I could just make out the mighty river at the bottom of the canyon; it looked like a thin blue vein in an old man’s arm. My stomach clenched. How the hell would we get down there?

  “We’ll manage,” Salvador assured me. “The Rarámuri do it all the time.”

  When I didn’t look any more cheerful, Salvador came up with a silver lining. “Hey, it’s better this way,” he said. “It’s too steep for narcotraficantes to mess around down there.”

  I didn’t know if he really believed it or was lying to buck me up. Either way, he should have known better.

  CHAPTER 4

  TWO DAYS LATER, Salvador dropped his backpack, mopped his sweating face, and said, “We’re here.”

  I looked around. There was nothing but rocks and cactus.

  “We’re where?”

  “Aquí mismo” Salvador said. “Right here. This is where the Quimare clan lives.”

  I didn’t get what he was talking about. As far as the eye could see, it was exactly like the dark side of a lost planet we’d been hiking over for days. After ditching the truck on the rim of the canyon, we’d slid and scrambled our way down to the bottom. It had been a relief to finally walk on level ground, but not for long; after striking out upstream the next morning, we found ourselves wedged tighter and tighter between the soaring stone walls. We pushed on, holding our backpacks on our heads as we shoved against water up to our chests. The sun was slowly eclipsed by the steep walls, until we were inching our way through gurgling darkness, feeling as if we were slowly walking to the bottom of the sea.

  Eventually, Salvador spotted a gap in the slick wall and we climbed through, leaving the river behind. By midday, I was longing for the gloomy dark again; with a baking sun overhead and nothing but bare rock all around, pulling ourselves up that slope was like climbing a steel sliding board. Salvador finally stopped, and I dropped against a rock to rest.

  Damn, he’s tough, I thought. Sweat was pouring down Salvador’s sunburned face, but he stayed on his feet. He had a strange, expectant look on his face.

  “¿Qué pasa?” I asked. “What’s up?”

  “They’re right here,” Salvador said, pointing to a little hill.

  I hauled myself back up. I followed him through a crack between the rocks, an
d found myself facing a dark opening. The hill was actually a small hut, fashioned from mud bricks and contoured into the hillside so that it was invisible until you were literally on top of it.

  I took another look around to see if I’d missed any other camouflaged homes, but there wasn’t a hint of another human in any direction. The Tarahumara prefer to live in such isolation, even from each other, that members of the same village don’t like to be close enough to see each other’s cook smoke.

  I opened my mouth to call out, then shut it. Someone was already there, standing in the dark, watching us. Then Arnulfo Quimare, the most feared of Tarahumara runners, stepped outside.

  “Kuira-bá,” Salvador said in the only words he knew in the Tarahumara language. “We’re all one.”

  Arnulfo was looking at me.

  “Kuira-bá,” I repeated.

  “Kuira,” Arnulfo breathed, his voice as soft as a sigh. He put out his hand for the Tarahumara handshake, a soft sliding of fingertips. Then he vanished back inside. We waited and … waited some more. Was that it? There wasn’t a whisper from inside the hut, not a sign that he intended to come back out. I edged around the corner to see if he’d slipped out the back. Another Tarahumara man was napping in the shade of the back wall, but there was no sign of Arnulfo.

  I shuffled over to Salvador. “Is he coming back?”

  “No sé,” Salvador said, shrugging. “I don’t know. We might have really pissed him off.”

  “Already? How?”

  “We shouldn’t have just come up like that.” Salvador was kicking himself. He’d gotten overexcited, and violated a key rule of Tarahumara etiquette. Before approaching a Tarahumara cave, you have to take a seat on the ground a few dozen yards away and wait. You then look off in the opposite direction for a while, as if you’d just happened to be wandering by with nothing better to do. If someone appears and invites you into the cave, great. If not, you get up and go. You do not go walking right up to the entrance, the way Salvador and I had. The Tarahumara like to be visible only if they decide to be; laying eyes on them without invitation was like barging in on someone naked in the bathroom.

  Luckily, Arnulfo turned out to be the forgiving type. He returned a few moments later, carrying a basket of sweet limes. We’d turned up at a bad time, he explained; his whole family was down with the flu. That body behind the hut was his big brother, Pedro, who was too conked out with fever to even get up. Still, Arnulfo invited us to rest.

  “Assag,” he said. Have a seat.

  We sprawled in whatever shade we could find and began peeling limes, gazing at the tumbling river. As we chomped and spat seeds in the dirt, Arnulfo stared off silently at the water. Every once in a while, he turned and gave me an appraising look. He never asked who we were or why we were there; it seemed like he wanted to figure it out for himself.

  I tried not to stare, but it’s hard to keep your eyes off a guy as good-looking as Arnulfo. He was brown as polished leather, with whimsical dark eyes that glinted with bemused self-confidence from under the bangs of his black bowl-cut. He reminded me of the early Beatles; all the early Beatles, rolled into one shrewd, amused, quietly handsome composite of raw strength. He was dressed in typical Tarahumara garb, a thigh-length skirt and a fiery red tunic as billowy as a pirate’s blouse. Every time he moved, the muscles in his legs shifted and re-formed like molten metal.

  “You know, we’ve met,” Salvador told him in Spanish.

  Arnulfo nodded.

  Three years in a row, Arnulfo had hiked for days to show up in Guachochi for a sixty-mile race through the canyons. It’s an annual all-comers race pitting Tarahumara from throughout the Sierras, plus the rare handful of Mexican runners willing to test their legs and luck against the tribesmen. Three years in a row, Arnulfo won. He took the title from his brother, Pedro, and was followed in second and third by a cousin, Avelado, and his brother-in-law, Silvino.

  Silvino was an odd case, a Tarahumara who straddled the line between old and new worlds. Years ago, a Christian Brother who ran a small Tarahumara school had trekked with Silvino to a marathon somewhere in California. Silvino won, and came home with enough money for an old pickup truck, a pair of jeans, and a new wing for the schoolhouse. Silvino kept his truck at the top of the canyon, occasionally hiking up to drive into Guachochi. But even though he’d found a surefire way to make cash, he’d never returned to race again.

  When it comes to the rest of the planet, the Tarahumara are living contradictions: they shun outsiders, but are fascinated by the outside world. In one way, it makes sense: when you love running extraordinary distances, it must be tempting to cut loose and see where, and how far, your legs can take you. A Tarahumara man once turned up in Siberia; he’d somehow strayed onto a tramp steamer and vagabonded his way across the Russian steppes before being picked up and shipped back to Mexico. In 1983, a Tarahumara woman in her swirling native skirts was discovered wandering the streets of a town in Kansas; she spent the next twelve years in an insane asylum before a social worker finally realized she was speaking a lost language, not gibberish.

  “Would you ever race in the United States?” I asked Arnulfo.

  He continued to chomp limes and spit seeds. After a while, he shrugged.

  “Are you going to run again in Guachochi?”

  Chomp. Chomp. Shrug.

  Now I knew what Carl Lumholtz meant about Tarahumara men being so bashful that if it weren’t for beer, the tribe would be extinct. “Incredible as it may sound,” Lumholtz had marveled, “I do not hesitate to state that in the ordinary course of his existence the uncivilised Tarahumare is too bashful and modest to enforce his matrimonial rights and privileges; and that by means of tesvino chiefly the race is kept alive and increasing.” Translation: Tarahumara men couldn’t even muster the nerve to get romantic with their own wives if they didn’t drown their bashfulness in home brew.

  Only later did I find out that I’d thrown my own wrench into the social wheels with big blunder Number 2: Quizzing Him Like a Cop. Arnulfo wasn’t being rude with his silence; I was being creepy with my questions. To the Tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head. They certainly wouldn’t abruptly open up and spill their secrets to a stranger; strangers were the reason the Tarahumara were hidden down here in the first place. The last time the Tarahumara had been open to the outside world, the outside world had put them in chains and mounted their severed heads on nine-foot poles. Spanish silver hunters had staked their claim to Tarahumara land—and Tarahumara labor—by decapitating their tribal leaders.

  “Raramuri men were rounded up like wild broncos and impressed into slave labor in the mines,” one chronicler wrote; anyone who resisted was turned into a human horror show. Before dying, the captured Tarahumara were tortured for information. That was all the surviving Tarahumara needed to know about what happens when curious strangers come calling.

  The Tarahumara’s relationship with the rest of the planet only got worse after that. Wild West bounty hunters were paid one hundred dollars apiece for Apache scalps, but it didn’t take long for them to come up with a vicious way to maximize the reward while eliminating the risk; rather than tangling with warriors who’d fight back, they simply massacred the peaceful Tarahumara and cashed in on their look-alike hair.

  Good guys were even deadlier than the villains. Jesuit missionaries showed up with Bibles in their hands and influenza in their lungs, promising eternal life but spreading instant death. The Tarahumara had no antibodies to combat the disease, so Spanish flu spread like wildfire, wiping out entire villages in days. A Tarahumara hunter would leave his family for a week in search of game, and come home to find nothing but corpses and flies.

  No wonder the Tarahumara’s mistrust of strangers had lasted four hundred years and led them here, to a last refuge at the bottom of the earth. It also led to a meat cleaver of a vocabulary when it comes to describing people. In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are
Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it. It’s a harsh view of the world, but with six bodies a week tumbling into their canyons, it’s hard to say they’re wrong.

  As far as Arnulfo was concerned, he’d met his social obligation with the limes. He’d made sure the travelers were rested and refreshed, then he withdrew into himself the way his people withdrew into the canyons. I could sit there all day and pursue him with all the questions I could think of. But I wasn’t going to find him.

  CHAPTER 5

  “YES, YOU’D HAVE to be down here a looonnng time before they’d feel comfortable with you,” I was told later that night by Ángel Nava López, who ran the Tarahumara schoolhouse in Muñerachi a few miles downriver from the Quimares’ hut. “Años y años— years and years. Like Caballo Blanco.”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Who?”

  The White Horse, Ángel explained, was a tall, thin, chalky white man who jabbered his own strange language and would emerge from the hills with no warning, just materializing on the trail and loping on into the settlement. He first appeared ten years before, shortly after lunch on a hot Sunday afternoon. The Tarahumara don’t have a written language, let alone written records of weird hominid sightings, but Ángel was dead certain about the day, year, and strangeness of the encounter, because he’s the one who did the encountering.

  Ángel had been outside at the time, scanning the canyon walls to keep an eye on kids returning to school. His students slept over during the week, then scattered on Friday, climbing high into the mountains to their families’ homes. On Sunday, they came traipsing back to school again. Ángel liked to do a head count as they trekked in, which is why he happened to be out in the hot noon sun when two boys came tearing down the mountainside.