muerto de vaca

As I was saying earlier, and as I am sure you've all heard, Mexico is very dangerous. Last night I came within one hundred feet of being trampled to death by a cow. But more on that later.

We left Xilitla and headed south west to camp in the desert for a night. Wylie Coyote land, or so Justin promised us. Between the jungle climate that surrounded Xilitla and the desert was a stretch of apline forest full of pine trees that resembled Georgia. Maybe an hour out of town, we stopped at a gas station and ran into the gringo Stephen and his wife Cindy that we had met a few days prior at the sandwich shop. We were just down the road from their house and they invited us over. Even though Stephen has only been in Mexico for two years, he has assimilated enough to the culture to describe a forty five minute drive each way down a mountain road as a “twenty minute detour”. The road was gorgeous, though, a combination of pine trees and straight tall cactus.

They live in a beautiful little town, Tichihaun, dominated by a Baroque Franciscan Mission, the largest of five in the area. Stephen was extremely knowledgeable on the history of the place, and according to him it had been a small indigenous town first, then the church was built, a few of the saints' heads on the facade had been shot off during the revolution, then the population was almost completely wiped out by the flu, after which the government gave away the lots to people to try and repopulate the place while at the same time kicking out the few remaining indigenous residents.

Stephen and Cindy had just purchased a large plot of land just on the outskirts of town where they planned to build their dream home and garden, but for the time being they were living right in town at her brother's house. Her brother was still in North Carolina with no intention of coming back, and was happy to let them live there rent free if they fixed the place up. As I mentioned in the last blog, Stephen is a retired agriculture professor, and had spent time working on agricultural project in South East Asia. Their garden, though only one year in its existence, was incredible. So many types of lettuce, spinach, five different kinds of bananas, papaya, hamaika, okra, broccoli, small trees with edible leaves, sweet potatoes, and extremely fat chickens that they had to smuggle into the country because Monsanto(or some other large evil corporation) only sells chickens in Mexico that either produce eggs or meat, not both, and neither can reproduce without an incubator. Stephan and Cindy's goal was to be self-sufficient within one more year, and they were pretty close to that goal already.

Stephan was humble enough to admit that something unforeseen could wipe out their garden, and justify the doubts of their skeptical neighbors. But he seemed to be approaching the whole thing from the right perspective—no pesticides, collecting all the rainwater on the property due to the dry climate, only watering with buckets and drip lines, feeding the chickens lots of greens with their feed—not quite permaculture, but pretty radical compared with most contemporary farming practices. Their stated goal was to try to win over the locals (it helped that Cindy was already a local) and if they were interested, teach them how to farm in this more sustainable way. According to Stephan, eighty percent of the local economy was remittances, and that was already starting to dry up, with a few families even sending money to the U.S. to help their grandchildren get by while they looked for work. Most of the farming in the area today was corn (grown mainly to feed the emaciated cows) and beans. Stephan was trying to walk that fine between noticing critically how the current farming practices were hurting the land and the people, while respecting the fact that he was the newbie and that these people had been surviving on this land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It gets complicated when Stephan is growing plants that the locals' grandparents, or even too many greats grandparents, farmed but the current generation has completely lost knowledge of the plants due to the global economy.

A large track of land around the area had recently been turned into a nature reserve by the government, and a friend of Stephan and Cindy's was heading the operation. Her goal was to preserve what was there, though Stephan found this goal short sighted, even if the overall project was a giant step in the right direction. “There was an over-population problem here, before the Spanish,” he commented. “Have you read 1492?” followed, to which I had to admit I never made past the first chapter. He went on to describe how the native populations had been cutting down so many trees to build structures to keep up with the all the people. When the Spanish came in, they burned much of what remained of the old forest, which most likely had tall pines twenty feet high, in order to bring the natives out of hiding. Next the Spanish brought the cows which meant that basically only plants with thorns could survive, since the cows would eat everything else. It's crazy to look out at these beautiful mountains, that only have small towns scattered between them, and contemplate that the whole landscape has been completely altered by humans, more often to their own detriment.

I'm really curious if Stephan and Cindy's experiment will work. I hope for all our sakes it does. With global climate change and the precariousness of the global economy, we're going to need people who know how to grow a lot of food with little resources on small plots of land. They also bought us beer, which was very hospitable of them.

After the twenty minute detour that turned into a three hour highlight of the trip, learning about agriculture, Mexican history, and hanging out with the cutest baby and little girl, we figured we'd have just enough time to get over the mountains and into the desert to set up camp by sunset. Stephan and Cindy told us about a place about an hour and half away, which should have put us there around five thirty, if we didn't stop in the grocery store or get stuck behind slow moving trucks barely able to climb up the mountains, or if we didn't have some minor car troubles ourselves. The van, a.k.a. The Workhorse, was not working so well, and was having a hard time climbing the mountain. The ridge line that crossed from pine forest into desert also kept eluding us. We tried to pull into one official campsite, but the road was so steep that neither the station wagon nor the van could make it up.

We finally crossed over into the desert, with the sun just behind the mountains. At this point, however, the road started to head down, down, down, and the towns were smaller and fewer. I've heard from a number of friends who have traveled throughout Mexico that it is not considered rude to just camp on the side of the road on someone's property, and Justin is a firm believe in this statement, though I have to admit I was a bit skeptical. At this point, with the sun already behind the mountains, we didn't have much choice. The first town we passes didn't appear to have a road that went to it, which still seems a bit confusing. We pulled into the second town we came across, Cuesta Colorada, which maybe had 50 buildings at most, started to drive through. We passed basketball court with some graffiti, which I'd hardly seen any of so far in this whole country. There was one cartoon-ish drawing of a thugged out gangster type, which at the time freaked me out a bit, though upon reflection was probably just the musings of a bored fourteen year-old from a podunk town. It was Friday night and we did pass a bunch of dudes hanging out on the street. Justin asked them if we could camp up the road, which they said was fine. Of course I was fifty percent sure they were making plans to round up a posse and attack us in the middle of the night.

We found a corner of almost flat land with a relatively few number of rocks on the ground, next to a stone wall with crops on the other side and some goats off a bit in a pen. Upon unpacking my tent that Dan and I were supposed to share, I realized I brought the wrong tent, the extra one I own that doesn't have any poles. Whoops. Still, it seemed warm enough to sleep outside for a night. And the view was breathtaking, mountains all around, small cacti, tequila, as long as nobody gets bitten by a rattle snake in the middle of the night, I think we're going to be alright.

We got in our sleeping bags little after ten, and though the temperature had dropped a bit, it still seems alright for sleeping. And I did manage to doze off, under the big sky full of stars. Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awaken by footsteps. It could only be the gang of teenagers that run this tiny town come to give the gringos their comeuppance, I thought to myself. Then I hear the gang of teenagers let out a harrowing “moo”. I sat up in my sleeping bag and saw the silhouette of either a cow or a bull on the road about a hundred feet from my head. The beast must have seen me, for it lets out another bone-chilling “moo” and ran for the hills. I almost shit myself. Dan and I decided to sleep in the cars, which meant the rest of the night was extremely uncomfortable, yet safe from marauding hooves.

I thought I'd wake up in a terrible mood from the poor night rest, but luckily that appears not to be the case. Dan and I were both awoken early before the sun came over the mountains by a donkey making exactly the sounds that a donkeys make in kid's TV specials about farm life. We walked up a hill full of shrubs and cacti and watched the sun rise. Justin and Kyle arose shortly after that, and the goat herder came by to tend to his goats. He talked to Justin and seemed to have no problem with our having camped there. About half an hour later two men pulled up in a pickup truck and asked Justin what we were doing and if they could see his id. Justin asked the men if this was their land, to which they promptly answer “si”. He showed them an expired driver's license that he keeps in his glove compartment explicitly for situations such as these, and that seemed to satisfy the men, who then told us about all the great views you could see from different points on their property. As we drove out of town, about half the old women waved us goodbye.

We stopped to eat on the way out of town at an actual coffee shack, made out of wood with menudo, pork chops, and gorditas all cooked over an open fire. Dan, Justin and I braved the menudo, a soup filled with tripe, knuckle, and other mystery meats. Putting modesty aside, I was the only to clean the fat off my knuckles. The mother and daughter team served up delectable salsa verde in a giant stone mortar made fresh in the twenty pound vessel.

Down the hill we stopped in Pinal de Amoles, a poor man's Italian village where red painted corregated steel is a fine substitute for terra cotta roof shingles. It was only eleven thirty a.m. on a Saturday, which made it difficult to determine whether it was a sleepy tourist town, simply a sleepy town, or somewhere in between. Ninety percent of the buildings were painted ocre with a red stripe two feet high on the bottom. The small town had a roundabout with a sculpture of two miners three blocks from the zocolo, which added to the European feel. The busiest commercial district did seem to be along the highway, but by no means did the streets have an abandoned feeling.

We stopped at a beautiful national park with a giant waterfall, where somehow I missed the ridiculously hot young couple doing the adult that the rest of my party witnessed.

Just down the road was the larger town of Jalpan, an old colonial settlement with a giant zocolo surrounding three quarters of the baroque chapel. First we walked through the busy market on the other side of the highway from the church. They had just about everything you could ever need, including an aerosol spray can purportedly capable of silencing a loquacious spouse. After the market, we walked around the quiet residential streets surrounding the zocolo, which were as pretty as any I walked down in Spain. We spotted the first espresso machine we'd scene at an open cafe in all of Mexico, and Dan, Justin and I proceeded to buy the worst coffee ever made. I'm beginning to fall for Mexico.

(we're camping a lot now, and I've got less access to internet cafes, so I am unable to put up corresponding photos with this blog right now, but I wanted to post it, as I wrote it two days ago. I'll add pictures soon, and note that in a following entry. All apologies -mgnt)