Laws of the road
Incongruous as it may be, here we sit, in the courtyard of a three-hundred year-old Spanish mission, as the rip-roaring sound of engines rumble past. As it turns out an off-road car rally is routed through this quiet, ancient mountain town of San Javier - the Loreto 400. I’ll resist the convenient temptation to blame Murphy’s Law because, as the hitchhiking doctor from Mexico City said, “Murphy’s Law is bullshit.” According to Sebastian we’re quick to accuse our ill-fated bad luck but rarely mutter a word of gratitude when things go right.
So it is. Even just a few quiet hours in this beautiful, under-exploited, tucked-away town in the mountains is cause for gratitude.
Yesterday we passed through Loreto, on the Sea of Cortez. It was the biggest town we’d seen since crossing the border and far more commercialized. We were happy to get our fuel and supplies and vamos before being offered any more tourist packages or two-for-one margaritas. From Loreto we wound through a red rock ruin-like mountain pass. We quickly discovered several places where the road had washed away, numerous cavernous sections - one excavated on a blind corner on the other side of the road.
Everything was green from the recent storm - Hurricane Newton, I think. Everywhere we go I ask: “Hubo una tormenta aquí? Cuántos meses antes?” That’s my best Spanish for: Was there a storm here? How many months ago? The answer is always an emphatic “si”, quantified with anywhere between ten days and six months, sometimes both. Mostly people shake their heads and wear a grave look like the man at the campsite in San Ignacio, as if to say: ‘I can’t even begin to tell you...’
San Javier itself is incredibly well preserved, which is the sum total of what the Lonely Planet has to say about it. It doesn’t gush about the cathedral of red rock mountains, or the luminous green cacti and dense palm-laden river valleys. Or the cobblestone streets studded with orange trees, each one surrounded by its own bench. Never mind the church itself with its charcoal stone towers, intricate archways, decorative spires and bleached white domes. “This is paradise,” I told Tim when we arrived in the glow of early evening light, not another soul in sight. We didn’t for a moment check the impulse to snap a hundred photos. Heaven may very well be a 17th century mountain town made from stone, tree-lined with fruit for the picking and an abundance of taps with spring water for the drinking.
It was Roverto who put us on to San Javier, otherwise we would have ignorantly driven past. He and his girlfriend, Dani, are skateboarding/hitchhiking from Cabo San Lucas up through Baja. We met them south of Mulegé on a little sandbar beach called Playa El Requeson. The two live a nomadic life, wending their way through Mexico as their impulses urge. Dani, originally from Mexico City, has been travelling for ten years, since she quit school at fifteen (the teachers stopped coming, she said). At first she explored Mexico City, riding busses and subways to various neighborhoods to visit friends, discover new scenes. Her journeying soon broadened to all of Mexico.
Dani loves to read, so I gave her the book I just finished - a memoir of a woman in a punk band from Seattle who had a similar restlessness. But Dani seemed curiously grounded too. She had a genuine desire to grow, with travel and books her vehicles for cultivation; and simplicity, a consequent virtue. She and Roverto stay in a place for a few days or a week - sometimes a month or six - getting to know people, asking questions, carrying on again. They sell their handmade jewellery along the way and live frugally: camping with just a backpack, fishing and collecting clams at the coast. It was selling their wares that crossed them with Natalia and Juancho - a young Mexican/Argentine couple who were leading the same roving life, travelling throughout Central and South America. Juancho had been on the road for four years. He met Natalia, also from Mexico City, somewhere on a beach in southern Mexico. Since then they had been travelling together for, “one and a half blissful years!” she said, face alight.
Natalia had an especially monkish wisdom and warmth she inserted into our every conversation. When she congratulated us on taking our journey, I responded modestly by saying it was nothing compared to hers. She replied: “It doesn’t matter the time but the intention, no?”
What I haven’t mentioned about Roverto and Dani, Juancho and Natalia, was how strikingly slight they were - alarmingly so. It’s a life of occasional hunger, I’d imagine, little security and very rare excess. But indeed, a choice.
I confess that when we met that first evening after pulling into Playa El Requeson, my first reaction to their openness and ostensible kindness, combined with their appearance (rough, sun-worn, skinny, though dignified) was one of apprehension - what might these people ask of me? Me (albeit, with just a van to my name), with all the creature comforts I value all the more for having fewer of them. Then they retuned to our campsite with offerings of fresh caught clam ceviche, and the next morning, again, with a watermelon. And theirs was a posture of generosity and philosophy of enough to go around. It caught me off guard. I spent the night a little tormented, searching for holes - were they drug-addicts? Thieves trying to reel us in and manipulate us with their sweetness?
It’s hard to know how to sum it up. The interaction still leaves me pensive, questioning. But I am certain their motives, for that night and afternoon on the beach, were grounded in something cultivated by a self-reliant and fate-reliant existence: the goodness of the right now, and the juicy moment that’s all the more sweet if shared.
As the sun touches the mountains, the roosters crow and the morning and the cars rumble past, I think of the friends we made who directed us here to this village in the mountains. For them, I am grateful.
