Hitchhiking through Narcoland (Serpents and Tigers and Cholos!)

Next I'll write about the Mixe and the Pornography of Difference, which is a chapter that precedes this one, but right now I want to write about Narcoland.

We were warned descending from the Oaxacan heights that dangers lurked along the road.
"Hay tigres."
"Tigres?! Como los con rayas?!"
"Si! Los con rayas. Y hay serpientes tambien. No duermas en la selva."
"Son peligrosos?"
"Si! Super peligrosos. Pero mas peligrosos son los cholos. Si ven ustedes, van a robarlos."

Dangerous territory to say the least. We hitched to the end of the sierra, and found a ride in the back of a truck hauling aliminum silos down through the foothills to the town of Tuxtepec, where we slept in a park.

In the middle of the night, I felt my foot being kicked. I opened my eyes and man stood hunching over me, his arms wrapped around his chest tightly. He told me he was cold. I was confused. What did he want me to do about it? Then he pointed between Nick and I and asked if he could sleep there. I told him no, and he reminded me that he was cold. I told him that I didn't care. He moved his face a little and I saw what felt like a nearly murderous intensity in his eyes. He told me he had a friend with an apartment close by and we could all go sleep there. I told him we were fine where we were. He started to demand that I let him sleep between us. I told him we didn't know him so absolutely not. He told me he was from Tuxtepec as if that was all the information I needed to feel like, Ok, now I know him. I told him if he was from Tuxtepec then he sure as hell had somewhere to go, where he wouldn't be cold.

He wandered off. I lay back down, but now I couldn't sleep. Ten minutes later, I got a chill in my spine and I sat up. He was sitting on a park bench some 20 feet away, just staring at us. He saw me look at him and he stood up, then slowly started walking away across the park, making weird zigzags as if he kept changing his mind about which route he wanted to take.

I spent the next half hour sitting up rigid, keep watch for other potential cuddlers. Then it started to rain and it didn't stop for three days.


II

We took to the highway to hitchhike from Tuxtepec on the border between Oaxaca and Veracruz, to Chetumal, on the Caribbean coast, our crossing point into Belize. The hitching was very slow, frustrating. The rain fell on us and nobody wanted anything to do with us. From the road, we got maybe 3 rides. All the others required negotiations with drivers at stopping points - bathrooms and gas stations. Everywhere we went, the vibe in the air was dark, sad, and deeply suspicious. Most truck drivers we walked up waved us away before we got within ten feet of their trucks. This was a huge change from the smiling and generous drivers in Oaxaca.

What was so different? Why didn't anyone want to have anything to do with us? Finally the story came out:

We were in Narcoland. It was the prime corridor of Narcotrafficking, which is the Mexican term for the drugs that cross Latin America to feed the North American markets. It's the reason Ciudad Juarez has had in recent years many times as many homicides per year as Baghdad during the height of the Iraqi war. It's the reason journalists are frequently found hanging from bridges or decapitated in public spaces. It's the reason people are afraid to visit Mexico, and why Southerners say their country is fucked, while Northerners say their land has been overrun by Satan, demons, and other plagues of evil.

And we were right on the highway it all spills through. We passed Villahermosa, which translates to 'Beautiful  Home' but more rightly should be called 'The Shittiest City I've Ever Passed Through.' The pain and the darkness seeped in thick. A beggar came to ask us for money. When we refused he repeatedly congratulated himself for being such an amazing human being as to not rob or kill us even though he had every right to.

We entered Tabasco state and it immediately smelled like dead fish. Then it smelled like burnt plastic, rotting garbage, open sewage, and general decay. Nick lost his iPhone and iPod in the back of a truck (due to carelessness), and by the time we actually made it to Chetumal, I was deliriously sick.

We met a homeless man with a dog named Manchas, who took a liking to us and took us to a flophouse where we could sleep behind locked doors. It was a series of hammocks and ancient busted matresses full of other homeless people with dirt an inch thick on their exposed faces. We slept until I started vomiting as if my life depended on it. Then I had explosive diarrhea and my entire body broke out in hives. If you've never had hives before, it's the strangest sensation in the world: every inch of your skin swells up in bumps that are unbearably itchy. If you scratch them, it feel amazing, almost euphoric, and then the tingle turns to a ferocious burn, like each scratch was ripping off parts of your skin.

I looked for water but could only find bottles that smelled awful. I drank them anyway but couldn't keep the water down. At 5:45 Am we had a bus to catch to a village outside of Chetumal where a woman from Boulder named Paula I had met through Couchsurfing was waiting for us. I feared I couldn't make it. I was bound to die right there in the flop house.

At 5, I woke up Nick, barely able to talk and whispered I was extremely dehydrated and we were locked inside the flophouse. I was on the verge of tears. Nick handled everything though. He woke up our homeless friend who woke up the owner to get the key. Then we walked, the three of us and Manchas, to the pharmacy where Nick got all my meds and some apple-favored rehydrating solution, and then we made it to the bus station.

Four hours later, we arrived at Paula's house in Xcalac, discovered that she was the expatriate mother of a dear friend of mine, Matt Madsen, and then passed out.

Later that day, I woke up and wrote the following poem:

Hitchhiking Through Narcoland
I once dreamt of hitchhiking around the world.
'To show them all there's nothing to fear' I told myself and them.
But once alone, I found myself out on the road
And what I found lacked the heroism we dream of while sleeping in comfy beds. 
What I found lacked the righteousness of showing them or anyone anything now clearly outside of my power.
What I found was now only my own power: something wan and emaciated from too much talk, unsupported by practice. 

There is a way of a soul - as ethereal as a full stomach - that consists of efforts in every obscure crack in which we never thought to possibly begin.
There is a sadness that comes not from shame nor regret, but simply the knowledge that all along, eyes open across the path, one could have done otherwise; one could have tried in those obscure cracks in which, one did not try. 
(One was distracted by thoughts, the substance of which has now been lost, forgotten as of too little import)

And of the people, the people who were to have been shown something? 
Their reactions were varied - from half-interested confusion to an oblivious sexual predation, impressions unfitting to the acts, or a kind of eye-roll accompanied by the phrase 'rich people.' 

My wealth is failing me now. I once thought it consisted of riches of the heart and of the mind, even of the soul if such a thing can be felt to exist.
Now my wealth amounts to a veneer of protection in an otherwise insecure being, it consists of luxury in the face of what others call work, it consists of a full passport with a feverdream of an empty wedding.

There is a debt that determines the awful logic of evolution - a history of theft.
In parts, the debt has been repaid, giving birth to a world in which one almost wishes the debt had not been repaid. 
In parts, the debt cannot be repaid and in its wake rises a new world as monument to its divisions.
Where do I go now? Swim the current of its awful logic, retreat to the safety of its awful breast, or build, brick by brick, a sanctuary within it, a kind of futile holy house to a phrase of rebellion again the void, a wayhouse for weary travelers, still spinning and fighting within its cold and quiet logic.

And of hitchhiking? One by one we all abandon it, one by one we all learn to take the bus.
And in declaring with my fist in clench that I would show them how to hitchhike across the void, I have only made of myself a comic display of learning to take the bus.


III

So Nick and I decided to abandon hitchhiking. We discussed how for the most part, the only people who picked us up were the ones we asked in person (and who felt like they kind of had no choice), and the others who picked us up not because they thought we would be fun, interesting travelers, but because they legitimately feared for our safety and felt a moral obligation to get us out of the dangerous place. When they found out we were hitching not because we needed to, but because we chose to, they were not only not impressed, they were sometimes actively upset by our stupidity and presumptuousness.

Of course, to get from Xcalac to Belize, we decided to hitch one last time and we got rides quickly from great people who we talked to about Vipassana mediation. Then we got a ride through the hot day in the bed of a pickup, which was windy and cool and generally lovely.

A week later, in San Benito, Guatemala, we met up with two girls, and successfully hitched as a group of four from the northernmost point of the country to Lake Atitlan in the southwest. No rides took more than 5 minutes, and the experience was wonderful.

So much for quitting hitching. But maybe the lesson is that no two places are alike. It's impossible to make a blanket statement about hitchhiking - everything about it is determined by where you are, where you're going.