Mexico, Land of the Crystal Man (1971)
by Judith Goldsmith

In Villahermosa, Mexico, they dance in the streets when it rains. At least they did in the summer of 1971, when the oil was discovered, when the place was a feisty frontier town, a bit of the "old west".

All along the road to Villahermosa, people were burning out strips of land on both sides of the road. The road itself was only a few years old, and most of them were brand new settlers. Some Mexicans in Mexico City didn't yet know that Yucatan, the territory where eastern Mexico borders Guatemala, was part of their country, was not just some wild territory "out there".

The rain in Mexico makes no apologies. In Mexico City it rains every single day (during the summer at least) between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. If you go out after 3, you take a raincoat. That's usually the only rain of the day, though, and it makes for a very pleasant schedule - the heat of the day, then the rain, then a wonderful cool and clear evening, which brings everyone out.

But this Villahermosa rain came suddenly - earlier the sky had been clear. The place was dry and dusty, though it bordered on the jungle. The rain started when we were inside bargaining for some beautiful woven cloth. It was July 6th, and looking out from the fabric shop into the narrow street, we could see a shy crowd gathering around a middle-aged farmer who was dancing slowly with his arms upraised. He was smiling widely and singing to himself and to the group of Indian men, women, and children who also had come out into the street to feel the rain.

They knew, these people. They knew the nature of the land, though they were pushed to unknow it. Mexico is a land of great richness and variety, and it is also the land of the Crystal Man, who changes fate with a flip of his hand, and this we discovered many times. It is a place where, like sudden rain, fortunes can change from moment to moment, as with such a sudden rain that promises good crops. Worlds can be lost and gained in a day. Elemental forces are still at work.

Only telling the stories of our flips of fate can make this clear . . .

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I am writing this because many Americans idea of Mexico is still the cultural and geographical wasteland one encounters on a short trip over the US-Mexico border for a weekend in Tia Juana or Juarez or another dusty border town. The difference is bigger than the difference between some small mining town in the western U. S. in say 1800, and the city of Boston at that time. No, bigger than that - the real comparison should perhaps be to the settled pueblos of the Hopi and Zuni in what is now New Mexico and Arizona.

I was traveling with a boyfriend. Warren, on a trip of discovery. It was not my first trip to Mexico - I had visited Mexico City with my parents years before. But it was the first time either of us had really met Mexico "face to face" and it turned out to be quite an education.

We started out with an old friend, Ramon, a veteran traveler to Mexico. He'd been there many times, bringing huaraches (sandals), hamocas (hammocks), and other items back to sell to friends. It turned out to be a lucky break to go with him, because besides speaking Spanish well, he was familiar with Mexican ways. For example, the first day in Guadalajara he won the respect of a vendor in the mercado (town market) by buying an entire watermelon, then asking to have only the choice inner core cut out to eat.

We needed Ramon's knowledge right away. Crossing the border into Mexico has always been an experience - it's by no means smooth. For example, when my mother took my sister and me on an earlier visit to our relatives, with plans for our father to meet us later for the two weeks of his vacation, the border guards held us back on suspicion that she was "running away" with her kids.

This border crossing was no exception. We were two young men and a single woman in a new Renault auto. We were 'clean-cut', hippie long hair and moustaches having been shed by the males for the passport photos. But still. "How much money have you got?" I was asked. I flipped through my travelers checks to show the official, as I've had to do since then when arriving in London. Ramon nudged me. I didn't understand, and stood there expectant, and after a moment's eye to eye pause, the official stamped my papers. "That was a close one," Ramon said anxiously when we were back in our car, "couldn't you tell he wanted some money? He could have found some excuse to keep us there much longer." In Mexico, we learned, bribes ("la mordida", the bite) are to officials what tips are to waitresses - considered to be a due part of their pay.

Mexico doesn't really start for many miles south of the Rio Grande. On both sides of the river is a vast no man's land of desert. On the U. S. side it extends through the southwest, including - but for the grace of Colorado River dams and aqueduct - San Diego and Los Angeles. On the Mexico side, the desert with its saguaros and yuccas and clapboard buildings, extends past the small resort town of Mazatlan, all the way to Tepic, where you finally enter the high mountains and then suddenly come down into the verdant Valley of Mexico.

Mexico City has abundant signs of the nation's cultural wealth. The Zocalo (main square) is built over the site of Tenochtitlan's main pyramid, of which more and more is being uncovered. There is Zochimilco floating gardens, remains of the once-great man-filled swamp where crops were grown to feet the city. There is Chapultepec Park and nearby Tula and Teotihuacan.

For a crash review of Mexico's greatness, go to the National Museum of Anthropology. Gathered together is two full days minimum of the varied prehistory and history. The originals of the famous artifacts you've seen in books are on the bottom floor. There's the enormous Aztec Calendar Stone, the reconstruction of the tomb found in the main pyramid at Palenque, sections of the geometric designs of the walls of Mitla, Olmec sculptures, a map of Tenochtitlan itself, which Cortes, its ravager, called "the most beautiful city in the world", and much much more.

Upstairs, mannequins representing the tribes of Oaxaca, Tehuantepec, Lake Patzcuaro, etc - Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Huastecans, and more - each dressed in respective colorful hand-woven fabrics with the distinctive headwear and hairstyles of their area, within a characteristic house, and with local tools, basketry, ceremonial objects, etc. It was a surprise to me that the states of Mexico are so strikingly separate. One has to remember that this is a land where, until very recently, the farthest the average person traveled in his whole life was to the market town a day's walk from home, so each local region developed independently. The Spanish colonial culture is only a thin veneer on top of these differences. We met people who could speak only a halting Spanish, for whom Tarascan or Mazateco or Yalalag or Chamulan was their native tongue, and Spanish only a language to be used to go to market.

And now there is a new layer above the colonial, that of widespread poverty and junk-food stands. In the house in Mexico City where we rented a room for a week, the mother and her daughters slept upstairs in a room filled with icons and religious decorations; the father slept downstairs on the couch on the rare nights he was home; and the son would arrive home in the evenings with male friends and hole up in the room next to us, from which would burst rock music and the pungent odors of marijuana.

We left Ramon in Mexico City and took off on our own. At each town, we found a place to "park" - meaning paying someone to "watch" it. Everyone thought this was a necessity. Also we would ask around for an inexpensive hotel. Young boys were especially helpful and knowledgeable. Later, I checked a copy of Mexico on $5 a Day, and found many of these listed. But also we were able to find new pages that had not turned into over-booked tourist haunts because of their listing in that and other "cheap travel" books.

I would NOT take such a trip now. I would NOT drive a car through Mexico anymore. The poverty has gotten even worse, as more people leave the countryside and squat on the edges of the big cities, and the roads are full of actual bandidos, often dressed in police or military outfits, who stop your car with a real or fake gun, and find some excuse to detain you until you give them a bribe - or worse.

Anyhow, we managed to arrive in Villahermosa, the wild west town on the border between central Mexico and Yucatan. Many cheap hotels sat next to swank new luxury places. Gambling and slot machines were strongly in evidence, and rich business tycoons and tattered wilderness wanderers mingled in the streets. Some of the scruffiest men in all Mexico prowled the dirt pavements, and some of the ritziest sat in the cafes drinking their morning coffee with pan dulce (Mexican breakfast sweet breads), each genre of humanity eyeing the other warily.

In 1971, the oil's influence was not yet widespread. From Villahermosa, we drove east, crossed the new bridge over the wide Grijalva River with its tankers and merchant ships, and drove on to Palenque, the queen of ancient Mayan city-sites. Palenque lies hidden in a dense forest/jungle, nearly unchanged from its ancient state. The jungle has been gradually chopped back to reveal the pyramids and other ornately-decorated stone building which it formerly obscured, but it still insistently owns the site. The heat in Palenque was so oppressive that we could barely keep walking from one building to another, and local Indian vendors selling soft drinks were doing a brisk business. Guides with flashlights offered to lead visitors into the main pyramid tomb, though it is now empty.

That night we slept at Campeche, a humid jungle village, where the hotels rooms had hammocas (hammocks) instead of beds. (Sailors originally got the idea for hammocks from Yucatan, which is the origin of the name.) It was too hot for beds. Insects abounded, as well as incredibly huge tropical flowers.

We were moving along the Caribbean shore now, and picking up radio stations from the Caribbean islands. Yucatan is only 600 miles from Miami. We made Merida our central base in Yucatan, as Progresso seemed just a sandy beach town. Merida was quiet, with many statuesque full-blooded Mayans with faces just like the ancient sculptures, and a good Levanese restaurant. We visited Uxmal and Chichen Itza and the cenote at Valladolid. We did not visit the islands of Isla Mujeres or Cozumel, already heavily touristed. The only access was by air.

We almost didn't get to Tulum, also said to be only accessible by air, but luckily we paid no attention to what we were told. Tulum is far into the wilderness territory of Quintana Roo, which was not a state. Quintana Roo was still quite unpopulated and unsurveyed, and many new pre-Columbian sites were still being discovered in that area. The map said there was no road to Tulum, as did the guide books and the tourist agencies.

But there was a road. We started on it gingerly, asking people we met if it went through, it if was drivable, if it was safe. Oh yes, the locals assured us. We arrived at Tulum, on Yucatan's eastern coast, in a few hours. Then we understood the deception: Tulum had a new landing strip and airport, accompanying a new hotel village.

The ancient site of Tulum was far from the hotels, which left it refreshingly deserted, except for a lone elderly caretaker. It is a gem. Set on the very edge of the Caribbean, it is a tumble of ruins, the doors and interiors strangely tiny, as if dwarfs had lived there. We found a gorgeous conch shell there, had a lovely day, and if we'd known what was to come, would have stayed a week, enoying the simple pleasures of running on the beach and sitting among the ruins.

Unfortunately, discovering the road to Tulum made us cocky. When we drove back through Villahermosa and headed south, the road on the map that cut through the mountains was marked with a broken line. But the other possible road, all the way around the mountains, was much longer. We tried the shortcut.

Some eight hours later, after negotiating large washed-out patches and bumping along over boulders at 20 miles an hour, we reached the other side of the mountains, ninety miles away. We got numerous smiles and waves from the children and families we occasionally passed (a sure sign of a little-used byway), but we were limping. The plug for the transmission fluid tank under the car had scraped a boulder and we were losing transmission fluid steadily.

Luckily we were driving a Renault. We had worried about using a Renault, made in France, for our travels, but it turned out to be a boon. France has strong ties with Mexico (dating from the time when the French emperor Napoleon III set up Maximilian as ruler?) and the French are frequent tourists, mostly arriving by boat or plane in Yucatan, though rare in western Mexico where most American tourists go.

Luckily the one car repair shop that the medium-sized town of Tuxtla Gutierrez had was a Renault shop. The mechanic did not have the part, but he searched around and found something that could be made to fit, managed to pry out the old plug and get the new one to stay securely.

This was our first introduction to Mexican craftsmanship and ingenuity. We discovered Mexican craftsmen and mechanics to be excellent. Those we dealt with learned their handiwork thoroughly and are painstaking and endlessly patient. Later, during our stay in Manzanillo, we watched a carpenter fit a door. He measured the distance for the hinges on the frame and on the door, then figured the placement of the lock and latch and door handle. With carefully-placed blows on a chisel, he shaped the gap for the bolt, never hesitating for an instant. When the door went in, it fit perfectly.

Similarly, on another trip (to Baja), I watched a mechanic patiently turn and readjust the front axle on a beached auto, working it tirelessly for nearly an hour until the piece clicked into place. New parts being relatively expensive, Mexicans have perfected the use of chewing gum, rubber bands, wire coat hangers, and patience.

We were able to drive on to San Cristobal, an enchanting place high in the mountains, where you need a thick blanket on your bed and where Indians coming in from the surrounding countryside could be seen hesitating about how to react to a traffic light. You climb through layers of clouds to reach the town, past herds of sheep crossing the roads and family after family waving and smiling. Traditional costumes were common.

Tehuantepic, where we stopped next, near Mexico's southern coast, is mostly renowned in the tourist guides for women who traditionally control all the business. There as well, and in Oaxaca, ancient styles of clothing were still being worn, and weaving of cloth was a common trade.

We were enjoying ourselves, and headed gaily south from Oaxaca toward Puerto Angel, a little fishing village right on the coast, where we'd heard we could rent an inexpensive beach house. The road just south of town was well-surfaced. Some miles in, we reached a mountain pass, with only sparse houses. We stopped to have a refresco (fruit drink) at a roadside stand, apparently run by a woman with her small children. We had picked up a rider - a young man who said he was from Panama and was hitching to the U.S. - and we were happy that he spoke enough English to help us negotiate with the shoplady.

An hour after this short break, we had driven only about another twenty miles. The road had become increasingly rutted and pitted, when I suddenly realized that I no longer had my handbag. I pieced together that, on changing drivers at the stand, I had rested it on the trunk of the auto, and forgotten to retrieve it. There was nothing to do but retrace our way over that sad road. Back at the stand, the woman told our hitchhiker that she had indeed seen the handbag fall off the back of our car, but that a bus driver had picked it up and continued on towards Puerto Angel.

A double nightmare! If the purse was in Puerto Angel, we had to get there, had to cover the rest of those slow miles whether we wanted to or not. We pushed on south. The road was as bad as we'd feared and nightfall found us still not there (95 miles or so from Oaxaca to Puerto Angel), with the car running more and more poorly. Finally we took a look at the engine. It turned out, luckily, that in the tropical heat, the spark plugs had already accumulated a layer of rust so thick that they were not making contact. (Later, in Manzanillo, I found that two embroidery needles also rusted up completely after only two weeks of use.) Luckily, we were able to scrape the rust from the spark plugs and the car got going again.

We reached Puerto Angel in the evening and did indeed rent an entire cement-floored house for 35 pesos a night - at that time under $1.50. We had (luckily) started to have uncomfortable feelings about our young hitchhiker, especially when he followed us to the rented house and asked to stay there too. We decided to leave all our belongings of value locked in the car while we took a look around. When we returned, he and the battered sleeping bag we had loaned him were both gone. I had been enjoying having him along - he gave us the news that Jim Morrison had just died - but relieved that we had intuitively prevented him from perhaps making off with something more valuable. We certainly had enough of a horror story to deal with already!

The next day was Sunday, and we made our way to the gorgeous beach, and discovered his friends, a company of other local waifs also camping there. They did not know where he was just then. I have since heard stories about this area of Mexico south of Oaxaca - of cameras disappearing, of bandidos on the mountain road, of youngsters who prey on the unwary. It had been a hippie route for some years at that time, but such a backroad that help from authorities is hard to find.

I was getting quite desperate about losing my handbag, which had my passport, traveler's checks, some cash, and my contact lens solution (luckily not my lenses, which at that time I needed for driving). A bus-driver heading north who we had stopped on the way south knew about the handbag, and told us another driver did indeed have it. (Evidently there had been some scruffling until one driver laid claim to it.) But no one in Puerto Angel knew where to find the driver or what had become of the handbag.

We had landed in this little village which had sounded like a paradise, but where pigs ran in the streets and our request for "agua purificada" (purified water) was met with a finger pointing to the nearby cistern. Warren started feeling sick, and I was envisioning having to call my family in the U. S. to get some proof of my identity. Also, half our remaining funds (traveler's checks) were gone. We weren't able to enjoy the beautiful beach very much.

So the next morning we packed up and started back, hoping maybe we would run into the right bus driver on the way. The mountain village with the shop was immersed in heavy rain and there was no one home at the mayor's little purse to ask about my handbag. We wound up in Oaxaca that night totally without hope of retrieving it. The only consolation was the discovery that it was easy to buy contact lens solution anywhere in Mexico, Mexico having pioneered the soft contact lens.

We decided that we would have to cut our trip short, go to the U. S. Consulate in Mexico City, and wade our way through the red tape that losing one's identity entails.

But next morning, the Crystal Man took control of our lives. As I was hefting baggage into the car, I heard a voice say, "You Hudy - Hudy Goldsmaan?" Two men were standing by the car anxiously awaiting my answer. Warren and I stopped and stared. They went on explaining that they had recognized me from the picture on the papers in my handbag, which indeed was over at the bus depot. And where was the bus depot? we asked, gasping. Oh, just across town; they would take us there. But first, right now, they were very hungry and were on their way to the mercado (market) to get some breakfast. They would be back soon. And they vanished. We stared after them in total shock. They had appeared out of nowhere, made their announcement, and then just disappeared. And how did they find us? Oaxaca has lots of hotels . . . and lots of tourists.

Some twenty minutes later, after we sat listening to our hearts beating nervously, they reappeared, signaled us blithely to follow them, and led us across town. Their discovery of us on that little street just as we were about to drive off must again have been pure chance.

Oh how elated we were when one of the drivers in the empty lot that served as the bus depot came forward and actually handed me my handbag. The cash (maybe $10) was gone, but the rest was there. I just had to give the driver a reward; he accepted it with some embarrassment, for the money that wasn't there, I would guess.

That was our first encounter with the hand of fate. We seemed in control again. We could go wherever we wanted to go.

Perhaps out of shock we went to Mexico City anyway. We had gotten a dent in the side of the car at the start of the trip, and we discovered we could get it fixed for a very low sum.

It was the end of July. Two of the three months of our summer vacations from school were gone. We had hoped to find somewhere to live for awhile. Maps of the southwestern coast showed many villages there. To save money, we cancelled our expensive Mexican car insurance for three weeks, starting from a week later.

There are many wonderful beaches in Mexico. Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta are renowned for this, but we decided to avoid them, to avoid the tourists. (Later, Mexicans I talked to in the U. S. - the California restaurant business thrives on bountiful Mexican labor willing to work cheaply - expressed surprise when I said this. "But Acapulco is so beautiful!" they said wistfully.)

We went looking, driving along the coast. We discovered a gorgeous one. Los Angeles de Tenacatita was a tiny hamlet just north of Acapulco and Manzanillo and Barra de Navidad. The asphalt road ended a mile north of it, as far as the road towards Puerto Vallarta had been built that year. Turning back, we entered the hamlet of dirt paths between thatched houses. There was one cement building, which turned out to be the general store, the billard parlor, and also the one-room hotel, as well as the home of the only family there who had ever been out of the country. The father was a middle-aged man who had worked in California for a few years, and three of the four children had been born there. He saved enough money to come home and start a family business. We rented a room.

Down the road, outside one of the houses, and woman and her two adult daughters worked over a cook stove, dishing out frijoles and rice and chicken stew to a large number of single men. One of them had a new American car he was showing off. The men seemed rather surly, and I got the feeling there might have been a long history of different attempts to marry the daughters off to one of them.

The meal was substantial. It was the first time we were served posole, a pork and hominy stew topped with avocado, onions, cabbage, and the juice of limones, the little green lemons that are used as garnish on all soups and stew. Posole, we discovered after this, is a mainstay throughout the whole of Mexico and the southwestern U. S. The Navajo make the same dish with lamb. The woman who served us explained to us how treating the corn with lye (which is later thoroughly washed away) makes it more nutritious (later I learned it releases an otherwise missing amino acid, making posole plus refried beans a source of complete protein).

The town was small and quiet, but unfortunately we barely got any sleep that night because of a steady swarm of mosquitos, drawn there by the standing water in nearby coconut plantations. We had to leave the screenless windows open because of the heat, and draped ourselves in the uncomfortably hot mosquito netting.

The next day almost made up for a bad night though. Just to the north of town, we found the perfect beach. The weather was beautiful, the water was wonderfully warm, the land sloped very gently so that you could walk out into the water quite a ways and pick your favorite depth, and the waves were regular and just big enough.

A fisherman offered to take us fishing in his boat next time he went out and asked if we would like a coconut. Before we could protest, he had scrambled up a palm tree to pick one, drained the milk out, and, tapping it several times with his knife, it fell open easily.

There were beach huts for rent from the mother of the cooking family. We decided not to try them, as they were even closer to the mosquito-ridden groves. But we took up her offer of a meal. Right there in the hut, she lit the wood stove, fried some small fish, shaped tortillas with her hands, cooked them on the stove top, and brought this absolutely delicious offering to us steaming hot to eat on a table-clothed card table between the hut and the water's edge. It was a perfect day.

Another night with the mosquitos though, made us decide to look elsewhere for a place to stay, planning to return to the wonderful beach at Los Angeles de Tenacatita for day visits.

Manzanillo, a small fishing and harbor town, was just a bit to the south. Fishermen set off on clear days, rats as big as cats swam in the water with the children, and vacationers moored sail boats and motor launches in the harbor and came on shore for a day. On the edge of town, the Las Hadas resort cottages were under construction, one of the few places to rent. We asked around until we found a room in a cement apartment house across the road from the water and paid 400 pesos (about $16) for a month's double occupancy. At one end of the room were a stove, a little refrigerator, kitchen table, and cupboards. In the middle, a bathroom with toilet, sink, and a cold shower, built out from the wall. Two beds and door out to a sun porch were next to the windows on the ocean side.

The weather could be thick and tropical, but also clear, calm and sunny. We went to the bank, took walks, bought food from the mercado, and discovered a little store just outside town run by an Englishman, with canned goods, American cereals, other imported goods, and Spanish books. I bought a copy of the original Don Juan story in Spanish, which later was a blessing that kept me busy poring through my Spanish dictionary looking up words.

We arrived on Thursday. On Sunday it started to rain. On Tuesday night, the persistent fatigue which Warren had been experiencing for several weeks suddenly became excessive. He started having muscle spasms, shivering while his forehead burned with fever. A doctor was called and came by, and he advised that Warren be brought to the town's hospital. The spasms got worse, and on the way to the hospital, while we were stopped waiting for a train to go by, he momentarily lost control of his hand and facial muscles, which started to twitch and tighten.

The hospital had one room with two beds in it. The doctor and his assistants helped me support Warren up the stairs. Hospitals in Mexico expect that families coming in from the countryside have nowhere to stay, so it is common for the husband or wife of the sick person to sleep on the floor or in the next room and help care for the patient (bedpans, meals, etc.) The hospital staff was surprised that I was going back to the house for meals and to sleep.

Next morning lab tests showed that Warren had at least three strains of typhoid. The doctor started him on medication, intravenous feeding of nutrients, and massive doses of vitamin B. He needed several nights in the hospital before I was able to take him home to rest in his own bed, with continued medication and vitamin B.

We had both tried to get all the proper vaccination shots before we left. Unfortunately we were not made aware that typhoid vaccine should be taken in two doses four or more weeks apart, or as three shots a week apart. I had had the complete series five years earlier, on my previous trip. We only managed to get one, assuming we could get the rest later, in Mexico.



It turned out the only place in Mexico where typhoid vaccine was available was a clinic held once a week in Mexico City, only for persons LEAVING. I got a second shot there, but Warren had not been feeling well. When we reached Merida, a few days later, we asked at the Department of Public Health where we might find another such clinic, and after some raised eyebrows, were ushered upstairs to meet the public health director. He spoke some English, was well-informed, and politely explained that the typhoid vaccine was not used anywhere in Mexico. It was only effective against a few of the many strains of typhoid bacteria, any one of which by itself could cause the disease. Also it is only good for three years. And there was abundant evidence that exposure on a continuous basis to family members who had the disease immunized others, so that it was fairly rare.

We'd been treating all our water with halazone tablets, and drinking only bottled soft drinks and buying bottles of aqua purificada (although who knows how valid that name was). There is no way to know how Warren was infected, whether gradually from a slow buildup of sources, or from some particular meal or drink.

We were very lucky that Manzanillo was small. Several days after Warren was taken to the hospital, I went to the bank, and the teller had seen me and the hospital attendants carrying him up. She had no problem with me having Warren sign the checks from his bed, and my bringing them to the bank instead of him. This was another blessing, as my own travelers checks were running low already, and we needed both of our funds to pay the doctor.

The B vitamins had to be injected twice a day, something I would have been quite uncomfortable trying to do. It turned out Mexicans are quite accustomed to giving medication by injection. A woman in the next apartment was more than happy to help. The mother of three or four children, she was married to an engineer stationed in Manzanillo to work on a project connected with the port. She had learned to give injections by practicing on an orange. She was happy to come by morning and evening to help out, but she started giggling nervously when I started out the door to the market one morning. It turns out she was very uneasy about being left alone with my "husband". Seems in Mexico to leave a female alone with a man compromises her dignity (woman are felt to be at men's mercy - therefore, the duenna / chaperon). It is unheard of to leave your husband alone with another female.

Warren was supposed to have complete bed rest, but he seemed on the road to recovery. We learned that the muscle spasms could be controlled and prevented by making sure his blood sugar level did not drop too low. I made a big bottle of jamaica, a delicious Mexican drink flavored by hibiscus flowers, with lots of sugar, and stored it in the refrigerator.

I began to realize the average Mexican has much more awareness of available medicines than are those of us who leave our medical care to our doctors. People were quite familiar with various medicines - "Oh that's for the stomach," they would say. They knew ampicillin from streptomycin, knew about the new use of mega-doses of vitamins, knew where to buy what.

Latin Americans' knowledge of home remedies is also to be respected. The best treatment for "tourista" (dysentery from new micro-organisms from drinking water, also called "Montezuma's Revenge") was taught to me by a charitable Guatemalan bus-driver. It is to drink either the sourest possible mixture of lemon juice and water, or at least a lemon-lime soft drink like Fresca, or a lemonade. The sourness, he thought, "shocked" the stomach. Anyway, it immediately takes away nausea and soothes stomach spasms. {Other cures and preventatives I have learned: Drink lots of beer. Don't eat fish inland, or away from the seaside. Drink commercially-bottled soft drinks, because even "agua purificada" may be bottled in unpurified bottles.)

We had escaped another disaster, but with Warren consigned to his bed, we were not going to get the chance to take day trips. I had to learn a lot more Spanish very fast in order to deal with the doctor. Now I knew enough to get a feel for Mexican life. Water boys with trucks of bottled water parked outside every day or so, calling out musically the name of their particular brand of bottled water, and you leaned over the balcony to tell them to bring up a bottle. Little boys knocked on the door and asked to take out the garbage for a few centavos.

I went to the mercado every few days to buy food and break up the day. I learned about Mexican cooking. The cooking Americans have come to think of as Mexican, such dishes as tacos, enchiladas, burritos, chili rellenos - are actually of Tex-Mex or California-Mexican origin, and are rarely eaten in Mexico. Mexican can't afford the meat that goes into a typical Taco Bell taco. They also don't have the cheese. There was only one kind of cheese, a runny white cheese of which I have never seen the equivalent in the U.S. Lettuce is shunned, and only grown for export. Unless heavily treated with insecticides, it is a great host for the beasties which cause amoebic dysentery.

What Mexicans do eat is lots of stews and soups - chicken soup, posole, albondigas (meatball), menudo (tripe soup said to be a cure for Sunday morning hang-overs). A part of every meal are frijoles, rice, and tortillas, which form the basis of the diet and complement each other to create complete proteins. Some of the best eating was a whole huatchinango (red snapper) I bought right off the boat from a fisherman who had just caught it.

Going to the mercado also taught me about the pace of a Mexican day. When I went early in the morning I blended in. Later in the morning I could follow the same route and get cat calls and cluckings and whistles. Later on, towards or during siesta, this intensified, and evening brought me stares from everyone. Evidently early in the morning is the proper time for Mexican women to be about their business. Later in the day, being alone in the streets is considered an invitation. Think of this next time you see a Mexican woman asleep at her fruit stand in the heat of the afternoon. She is not lazy. She has probably been up and hard at work since madrugar - the first crack of dawn.

One exception is right before meals, when all the women came out on the streets to go down the block to the nearest tortilleria (tortilla factory). If you've ever had a just-made hot and steamy tortilla you'll know why (the closet you'll probably get to the delicious texture of hand-made cooked on the grill that we managed to have that day at the beach - a real, hot, fresh tortillas nearly melts in your mouth). The tortillas come down out of the conveyer belt of the big machines and each woman brings a towel or cloth from home in which to enfold them and hurries home. (In the restaurants, they bring them wrapped so they'll stay just right throughout the meal.)

So the days passed. I read my Don Juan book and started some embroidery. My skin turned brown, my feet dusty, and I almost began to feel like a native. My proudest moment was when a Mexican family driving by stopped me to ask directions.

And then there were the sunsets. We waited for them the whole day. They filled the entire sky with turquoise or crimsons or purple or salmon, changing from moment to moment and completely different each evening. After them, even the most colorful Northern sundown looks hohum.

The last weekend in August it started to rain. We noticed the fishermen brought their boats in. People talked of a storm coming. Monday morning there was a break in the rain, and people advised me to hurry down to the mercado for whatever we needed before the rains returned. That night the rains were full force.

We had noticed the window latches and shutters, but hadn't used them. The screens kept out mosquitos. It seemed strange to need shutters in the balmy climate. But that night we found out their purpose. The shutters were absolutely necessary to keep sheets of driving rain from pouring in through the windows. The latches, as tick as a Swiss chalet's, were absolutely necessary to keep the shutters closed.

The wind was so strong that I couldn't imagine trying to walk against it. I woke from a nightmare that there was a huge monster man reaching his hand in through the window to grab me and pull me out into the wind. It seemed the Crystal Man was tossing and turning us in his dice cup again.

The next morning, there was a half-inch of water on our floor, but our neighbors were dumping it out by the pail load. Their apartment faced directly into the wind, with windows on two sides. Slowly we realized that we had actually been through a hurricane. It was the eye of the storm which had passed over us calmly on Monday morning.

We were thankful that the Crystal Man had treated us kindly, but he was not done with us. Our month of rent ran out, and the doctor said Warren could travel. September 2nd was our last night. We put new spark plugs in the car, settled finances with the doctor, and took a photo of the woman down the hall with her children as a thank-you.

We were ready to leave next morning. We were impatient to finally leave the 15 x 20 foot room that had shielded us from the storm but also kept us prisoner for a month.



Having no radio, and still speaking only pidgin Spanish, we did not know which road to take. There are two roads from Manzanilla to Guadalajara, and without knowledge of weather conditions, we did not know which would be best to avoid running into the receding storm. We chose the western one; probably it looked shorter. As we drove along, we passed devastation on both sides - trees upturned, fields blown down. The square board radio tower and other buildings we had passed earlier were lying on their sides. All the thatched native huts were still standing firmly in place, however.

Around noon we were forced to stop by a long line of cars lined up on one side of the two-lane road. We learned the road ahead was washed out (a 5-10 foot gap) and people were driving their cars down the side of the raised highway and up the other, which looked very risky.

People were saying repairmen were coming, so we waited. It got extremely hot, and we were dripping with sweat, and Warren began to feel weak again. But still everyone told us to wait. Finally we remembered the salt tablets we'd been carrying with us since the start of the trip. Thankfully, moments after taking them we noticeably perked up and felt better able to cope.

We'd been waiting perhaps an hour by then. It was getting tight to reach Guadalajara that night. It was very discouraging to turn around, and go all the way back through the place we had been so glad to escape from, but we did, and it turned out the other, inland, road was clear sailing, absolutely untouched by the hurricane.

The rain followed us that night, the Crystal Man still shaking his fist at us menacingly, and the next night, in Mazatlan, we huddled in another hotel room while a stupendous thunder and lightning storm went on overhead. Lightning was flashing so often (every few seconds) that you could read a book without any electric lights on in the room.

Next day we hightailed it for the border, not wanting to dare the Crystal Man to any father fist shaking. But on the way across the desert, we got yet another experience of the fragility of fate. We were in the middle of nowhere on a two-lane road, not having seen another car or town for quite awhile, moving fairly fast. Suddenly ahead, we saw two cars parked, one on each side of the road. As we neared, too close to stop in time, and too close to go off the road without hitting one of the cars, a man stepped out onto the road. We surely would have hit him; there would have been no other choice. I found myself letting out a tremendous scream which I had never before know I was capable of. Perhaps they heard the scream, or perhaps they saw us coming, but some people waiting by the other car motioned to the man and with seconds to spare he took a step back, instead of farther forward.

We had had enough of daring the Crystal Man. We drove across the border as fast as we could - back to bank accounts and health insurance, weather reports and road maps, credit cards and auto repair shops and overflowing grocery stores. Back to a daily security we hadn't not been aware of, nor grateful enough for.