PART THREE
A ROAD becomes a lonely place when you break down on it. This happened
to us on our "last day" of the trip, three hours after
leaving Oaxaca City, traveling with ease on the Autopista back to
Mexico City, 500 kilometers, officially a day's driving on this
state-of-the-art highway; headed out on a fine Sunday morning, having
said our goodbyes: Goodbye, goodbye...
At the first toll booth Ron magnanimously offered to take the booth
attendant's "nephew," a young soldier, along for the ride.
He'd finished his weekend pass, was bound for barracks in the Puebla
state capital, and wordlessly settled in the back of the Nissan.
We drove off, settling in for the drive, admired the scenery rolling
past the windows, sung the body electric.
Towards midday, as we entered Puebla state and the final stretch
of a memorable week, home ahead, the Nissan suddenly made a strange
noise as Ron changed from 5th to 4th on a sloping grade. Then he
couldn't change it back into 5th - 5th, or any other gear. The gearstick
was jammed! The car slowed, we drew to a halt, and that was it.
The gearstick refused to budge. The Nissan was kaput. Amazing how
abrupt and complete the transformation was: one minute we were cruising
along the highway, the next - stranded in the vast mountain pale.
Yes, the scenery had been easy to admire from a moving vehicle;
now we could admire it from standing on the road, truly a part of
it - perhaps for a very long time. Certainly, that would have been
the case at the start of the trip, on the free roads, in the middle
of nowhere. At least here, on the toll road and inside the Puebla
state line, we could be reasonably confident that sooner or later
an Emergency Services vehicle would show up, and tow us to God knows
where!
Ron and the soldier began walking down the highway in the direction
of an emergency phonebox. I stayed with the Nissan. Strong winds
blew across the highway. Sleek cars carrying families streamed by
in bubble comfort, tooting horns, waving, cynically smiling. A short
time before we, too, had been flying along the road, just like these
grinning fools.
The road became quiet. Ron and the kid were mere specks, ascending
the next hill. No traffic. Only the wind. I heard a noise, turned,
and watched a large, dust-grey coyote trot furtively down the highway
embankment. It stopped a couple of meters in front of me, stared
for a few careful seconds at the road, tongue hanging out. Seeing
there was no traffic, it cantered across the gleaming black bitumen,
climbed the opposite embankment and disappeared. Ok, I thought.
While Ron was trying to get through to the Emergency Services,
an Emergency Services tow-truck roared past flashing its headlights.
It kept going. Turns out it was on its way to pick up another broken-down
vehicle, back in the mountain pass. Ron and the soldier came sprinting
back. Nonetheless, we waited more than an hour for the tow-truck
to return.
...In the meantime an Emergency Services ambulance came along,
the amiable crew high-fived us and sniffed around, quite enjoying
the mess we were in. They were helpful, though: one of the guys
went and got down right under the car, another fooled with the engine,
and both made quite a mess of themselves trying to figure out the
problem. White uniforms covered in grease. One thing they were sure
of, the Nissan had had it.
The soldier was becoming nervous, he was due at the barracks by
three in the afternoon. It was now approaching one, and we were
still a good two hours from Puebla. A coach came barreling towards
us, one of the ambulance guys ran onto the road, gesturing like
a matador - and flagged down the bus. A quick chat with the driver,
and the soldier ran and retrieved his pack from the back of the
Nissan, and bolted off like a march hare, into the bus and gone.
Hey, the ride didn't work out!
We stood around, staring at the lumps of rock on the ground, making
small talk or taking a few pictures for laughs, waiting for the
two-truck to return from its mission in the mountains. It finally
came back with a car affixed. The two operators hooked up the Nissan
behind. No room in the cabin - another hapless driver was there;
so the boys graciously offered to take us to the nearest toll station
in the back of the ambulance. Off we went, headed for a city called
Tehuacan - and an unscheduled four-day soujourn...
Tehuacan, besides being home to a well-established mineral water
industry is also famous for being the "birthplace of Mesoamerica"
- since it was here that corn was first cultivated, when the nomadic
hunter/gatherers of the North American continent settled down to
plant crops. Ron liked to emphasize this fact when the charms of
Tehuacan wore a bit thin.
We expended most of the day getting the Nissan to this town, which
was a few kilometers from the toll booth. Ron did most of the legwork.
I stayed with the car while he traipsed around Tehuacan finding
a mechanic who would demur to venture out and appraise his crippled
windfall on a Sunday. Eventually Ron returned with quite a team;
we had to push the car about half a kilometer, where a beaten-up
taxi lay in wait.
We tied the Nissan to the back of the taxi's bumper bar; then towed
along an interminable series of rutted, dust-choked tracks, to the
mechanic's garage on the dust-choked outskirts of town. Towing in
this fashion was illegal - so we had to traverse a circuitous route
in order to not be apprehended by the local cops, hungry for an
afternoon meal ticket.
We eventually reached Tehuacan's center by nightfall, booked into
a hotel. And waited for the car to be fixed. For, as I said, four
days. Despite the purgatorial layover a few more facts were gleaned:
the mineral water connection also nominates Tehuacan to be coined
the "city of health," and its natural springs facilities
have been compared to Vichy in France and Colorado Spring in the
United States.
Evocatively-named areas such as El Mar de Silencio (containing
the largest concentration of marine fossils in the world, dating
60 million years); and El Jardin de las Cactaceas (an arid desert
landscape near Zapotitlan Salinas) - may be easily visited from
Tehuacan by running vehicle. The region was cultivated not only
for corn but also beans and pumpkins in the vicinity of the Coxotlan
caves around 10,000 years before Christ; the city itself founded
by the Spanish in 1540.
Finally, on the Wednesday, we were ready to get going. The Nissan
was installed with a new clutch - actually a secondhand clutch,
belonging to a different model Nissan, improvised for Ron's model.
We had to make room for the mechanic's assistant, who was going
to be traveling with us to Mexico City, on hand in case the car
broke down again. We weren't to drive faster than 80 kph and should
take the libre rather than the cuota - since, our mechanic said,
we could hail assistance at a small town more easily if the car
did break down and his man couldn't fix it.
Off we drove, into the wild hazy yonder, once more the back roads
and stopping the Nissan every half hour for the mechanic's assistant
to get under the car and check that everything was properly functioning.
We were moving, that was enough, although the clutch seized up ominously
on several occasions, most notably on the home stretch - after we'd
returned to the Autopista outside Puebla by a clandestine route
that avoided one section of toll fees - and on a fairly hairy stretch
of highway, at that.
The trouble started up after we'd finally overtaken a long line
of coaches traveling slowly in tandem - the Chiapas Caravan for
Peace, dozens of battered silver buses draped in banners, an umbilical
cord of protest, fender to fender, on an historic journey to the
heart of the nation's capital. We pulled over, and watched them
pass, as we had passed them, one by one, trailing a police motorcycle
escort, headlights on. Our man got the Nissan going again; presently,
we once more overtook the caravan. I felt in the train of a school
of dolphins, drawing the city in their argent wake...
By degrees I saw the volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl come
into view, turn by bend, serene, oblivious, hypnotic in their indifference
to the human madness wrought in the valleys below, and knew we were
as good as home.
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