nytimes.com
Personal Journeys
By MARK SUNDEEN
They told us to not go to Mexico. Too dangerous: drugs, machine guns and black-masked kidnappers. But it was January, the dead of Montana winter, and we unbolted the back seat of the station wagon and transformed it into a camper, a mattress in back, curtains over the windows, surfboards on the roof.
Over the next five days we climbed the Rockies in a blizzard, were married on a frozen lake in Oregon, then chased the sunshine south and crossed the border at Tijuana. Our honeymoon was open-ended: We had to be home sometime in May. The officials pasted a decal on the windshield that allowed us to drive as deep into the country as we wanted.
The first night we slept on a bluff south of Ensenada over the Pacific with the doors locked. In a few days we were brave enough to bump down a long dirt road and boondock at the laguna with the hatch flung open, campfire glowing and whales huffing through the night. On the Transpeninsular Highway we were stopped daily at military checkpoints, where boys too young to shave cradled big rifles and peered into the glovebox.
My wife (it was the first time I had called Cedar that) didn’t speak much Spanish, and it occurred to me with a twinge of importance that one of my new jobs as a husband was to be her protector. But when they asked where we were going and how long we planned to stay, I responded with just enough Mexican slang to arouse suspicion and provoke more inspections. So after that my wife merely smiled and said, “No hablo espanol,” and they waved us on through.
Despite the warnings back home, we found Baja California colonized by Americans: snowbirds in shimmering R.V.s, old-time fishermen on dune-buggies, surfers in sleek pickups. And they said: Baja is safe, but don’t go to the mainland. It’s dangerous over there.
But after a month we crossed the Gulf of California anyway, taking an all-night ferry to Mazatlán, sleeping on benches because the berths were overbooked. And when we camped three weeks at a Nayarit beach, we found English spoken in the taco shops, tofu grilled at the farmers’ market and American dollars in the cash machines.
But don’t go south of Puerto Vallarta, we were warned. And don’t go to Michoacán, maybe the deadliest state of them all. The warnings were coupled with tales of tragedy. An American’s sailboat had washed ashore on the Michoacán coast, its owner never found, foul play suspected. A Canadian man had been shot and killed near Barra de Navidad. Even in our bucolic town of condo palapas, an American child was murdered by the babysitter’s strung-out boyfriend.
This time we listened. “Fine,” Cedar said. “Let’s go to the mountains.” So, we packed the car to head inland toward Zacatecas. But then I discovered a State Department memo, which warned that because of the murders and abductions along the Jalisco/Zacatecas border, the safety of motorists could not be guaranteed. I couldn’t bring myself to start the car. “Fine,” Cedar said. “Let’s just keep going down the coast.”
We drove two days south of Puerto Vallarta without seeing an American license plate. Beachfront camp parks were vacant. For Sale signs creaked in the breeze. We followed dirt two-tracks to white-sand bays, we killed the motor and stood there, no sounds but crashing waves and calling gulls. “It’s kind of spooky,” Cedar said. We laughed and high-tailed it back to the pavement. We followed a road to a beach only to find it blocked by a gate where sentries stood cross-armed in black jeans and mirrored sunglasses and bulletproof vests.
“I don’t think we should ask them where to snorkel,” Cedar said.
Heart pounding, I flipped a U-turn, and again we laughed like we had cheated death.
And then one afternoon, as the sun crept toward the ocean horizon and I worried that we might not find a place to stay (driving at night is considered near suicidal, even by Mexicans), we crossed into Michoacán. This is a state where a female mayor was assassinated, where the cartel men threw hand grenades into the plaza on Independence Day and killed eight bystanders, where severed heads were rolled onto the dance floor of a nightclub.
At dusk we rolled down a cobblestone hill into a village, and found the slice of Mexico we had dreamed of: a smattering of palapas, a clear river flowing between palms and velvety waves peeling off the sunset. Before we had even left the car, an Argentine fellow called from his hut. “I’m baking pizzas!” he announced. “Shall I reserve for you the last one?”
We rented a cabana above a tool shed, with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. We were the only Americans, but a crew of Australians, Canadians, Spaniards and Guadalajarans had found their way here, breaking up the surfing with hammock naps, eating tamales wrapped in banana leaves delivered by a village woman.
One day when the wind chopped the swell, we drove with a Canadian couple to the next beach, a crescent bay where green waves surged up the steep white sand. A lighthouse bellowed from the rocky point. Although hundreds of chairs and tables stood beneath the awnings of seafood shacks, it appeared that we had the place to ourselves. We stripped to swimsuits and popped open some cans of Modelo and waded into the sea. I asked Joel and Maddie why Canadians weren’t as frightened as Americans by violence in Mexico.
“I guess in Canada we don’t really get any news about Mexico,” he said.
Just then, a lancha (a small fiberglass fishing boat) crossed the bay and skidded up the beach. From inside a restaurant, some Mexicans filed toward the boat, hauling folding chairs, an umbrella, ice chests, coconuts and a machete.
“Where are you going?” I asked one of the men, in Spanish.
“To the island,” he said, pointing to a rock out in the bay. “Do you want to come?”
I turned to Cedar and Joel and Maddie. “They’re inviting us to that island. You want to go?”
I was surprised by the lack of debate. My companions leapt off the sand, and with nothing but board shorts and bikinis, not even shirts on our backs, we helped drag the lancha into the water, hopped aboard, and set out to sea.
Oh, a boat ride! The vessel slid over swells and splashed in the troughs, sea foam fizzing like champagne in our faces. Sunlight skittered across the whitecaps. Pelicans circled overhead and dived alongside, scooping sardines and dancing away. We rounded a horn and brought the lancha ashore on a cobble beach. The island was no more than an acre or two of tide pools and pelican roosts. We cheerfully unloaded the chairs and coolers and stacked them in the shade of a crag.
Our host was a well-dressed lawyer from Guadalajara named Pepe. With him were three women whose relationship to him was difficult to ascertain, all of them dark-haired and heavyset and dressed in jeans and blouses. A young, quiet, muscular man in a tank top took to splitting coconuts with the machete. An inflatable kayak arrived, captained by a man named Jorge and his young son who was celebrating his 12th birthday. Jorge wore a Speedo, mesh half-shirt, doo-rag, sunglasses and a tight black mustache. He appeared slightly drunk.
And then the fisherman backed the boat down the beach, fired the motor and left us there.
A wave of fear hit like nausea. Since I spoke the most Spanish, and I was the one who had gotten us into this situation, it was best to conceal my fear. If Cedar was afraid, she wasn’t letting on. She and Maddie were already wading into the tide pools. If my hosts turned out to be captors, my fear would do no good. And if they turned out to be friends, well then, my fear would be an insult.
The first order of business was for Pepe and Jorge to strip to bikini-shorts and snap photographs — dozens, perhaps hundreds — with their arms around our wives, who were both nearly naked. Configurations were various, but the most popular was of one man in the middle, a woman on either side. Eventually our wives were released to dip in a pleasant rocky pool that our hosts called the Jacuzzi. The Mexican women joined them, fully clothed.
Which freed up Jorge and Pepe to move on to their second task: drinking from a plastic jug of Scotch. The preferred cocktail was to mix the whiskey in a plastic cup with ice and coconut juice.
“Have a drink!” they commanded.
“No, thanks,” Joel said.
“I’ll just have some water,” I said.
Jorge and Pepe discharged a string of Mexican epithets.
“Did you catch that?” I asked Joel.
He nodded grimly.
And so we drank. For what seemed like hours, the bottle was passed, the coconuts were drained, cigarettes were lit and cigars were shared. Pepe told me that he had been to this island at least 30 times, that he brought his friends and family twice a year, and that they always chartered a boat to the island. He said it was the most precious place in Mexico. Jorge told us that he was born in California, an American citizen, but since he didn’t have a birth certificate, he didn’t think he could ever return. He worked with computers, he said. The other night, in Guadalajara, he and his wife and son were at a red light when someone tapped their window with a pistol. They exited the car, and the man drove off in it. Yes, it’s a dangerous country, he told me. You have to be careful.
“What about this beach?” I asked, pointing toward the mainland. “Is it safe here?”
“In the daytime, yes,” he said. “But not at night.”
I looked at the sky. The sun was setting. Our boat was nowhere in sight. The whiskey had eased my anxiety, and by the time Cedar and Maddie returned from the pools, our “abductors” and I were slapping one another on the backs, shouting and proposing toasts.
“To our friends!”
“To Mexico!”
“Viva Mexico!”
“You guys are wasted,” my wife said. “And sunburned.”
Now we hauled the umbrella to the Jacuzzi and all soaked together, drinks in hand, the rising tide lapping at our elbows. The man with the machete, the only sober man on the island, built a bonfire in an alcove. Jorge pulled whole fish from the ice, squirted chile sauce from a plastic tub into the gut cavity, and set them on the flame. There were no plates, or forks or knives. The men pinched the fish tails and lifted them from the fire, peeled back the bones and flung them into the sea. We passed around the fillets, squeezing limes onto the meat. We drank cold beer. A metal grate was laid over the fire and dozens of shrimp spread over the flame. “I love these people,” my wife said.
The sun dropped and a warm shadow spread across the beach, and we — all 11 of us — huddled around the fire and ate barehanded, lime and chile dripping down our wrists. Sun-beaten and salt-washed we shook hands and hugged and spoke earnestly of the brotherhood of all men, peace between nations.
A breeze began to blow and the fisherman arrived in his boat. The tide was rising, lapping at our bonfire, and we left it to be extinguished and carried to sea. We helped one another onto the lancha and gave it a shove. A few hours more and this whole beach would be underwater.
