No country for old men

This is how it happens. This is how one gets in trouble. You decide that rather than take the direct route, the easy road, you’ll wander off track a bit, let yourself roam, look for that dusty little store near the church in Guadalupe where you found the retablos years ago, not knowing what the name of the shop is or if it’s even still there, and then you get a little lost, because there are no signs out here, just ridiculously narrow tracks meandering one way and then another, and you can’t find the shop, can’t even find the church, and suddenly it is getting late, late enough that you’re a little shocked when you realize it will soon be dark and you don’t even know where you are so you get that little panicked feeling, that tightness in the chest that comes from realizing you are an idiot, even more so because you’ve forgotten to pay any attention to how much gas you have, and it isn’t much.

But wait! Wait, wait, wait! Isn’t there a hotel you’ve stayed in around here, a little place with a restaurant that serves good chile rellenos and a security guard at night who looks after the parking lot? And then your luck comes back because the road starts to look vaguely familiar, the fields and the tall cypress trees, and then there it is, the hotel up ahead on the left, just as the last of the deep orange light drains from the sky.

The food in the restaurant isn’t as good as you’d remembered or maybe the cook has changed, and it seems a little more forlorn than the last time you were here, the room a little mustier, the carpet more frayed. Plus you’d forgotten that the train tracks (evidently there are trains in this part of Mexico) are just across the street from the hotel and just as you’ve gotten to sleep, there’s an earthquake. At least, that’s what it feels like when the freight train rumbles by shortly after midnight. You just get back to sleep when the rain and wind start, not heavy, but steady, the rain peppering the windows and the courtyard palm trees slapping around in the inky night. You can’t go back to sleep as the storm intensifies and so around four a.m. you give up, take a shower, decide to hit the road, hoping to get to Mazatlan while it was still early in the day.

It is so dark out. No lights anywhere. And because of the rain, which has intensified, hard to even see the road in front of you. The further west you go, the heavier the rain and wind become. You slow to forty and then thirty and even that seems too fast when you hit low spots where the water has collected and the car starts to swivel and shake, as if it were dancing.

And then you start hitting the potholes. Potholes, potholes, POTHOLES! Not little potholes but potholes the size of bathtubs and just as deep. There are long stretches of them, one after another, and you grip the wheel tightly as you try to straddle them, sometimes making it, sometimes not, always a vicious, jarring smack when a wheel slips into the black hole, and sometimes, a quarter mile or so later, there’d be a Mexican car on the side of the road, its driver standing in the rain looking at a shredded tire. And sometimes there would be a truck, its emergency lights weakly warning you away from it, stalled in the slow lane, an axle broken and its tires splayed like a ballerina in a toes-out position. And the winds are now so high that all kinds of crap is sailing sideways through the sky at you—ripped branches, pieces of woods, parts of billboards. They smack into the side of the car as you grimace and think, Shit, what the hell was that.

And that’s when you notice that the Check Engine light is on. So now you’re driving in the dark, in a pelting rain storm, with high winds, and the red engine light staring at you from the middle of the dashboard like the angry eye of a cyclops, warning of impending doom. And, of course, this just happens to be the nastiest stretch of road on the trip, where you can go 100-150 miles without seeing a single PEMEX station or anything else for that matter. But you’re pretty sure you’ve got enough fuel to make it to Mazatlan, maybe, and so decide to just keep going—what are your choices?—and hope the car doesn’t die on you out here in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe the sun is up at this point but you’d never know it because it’s still as dark as night. And the closer you get to the coast, the worse things get. The rain is now falling literally sideways, hitting the driver’s side window so hard (like paint balls) that it starts to leak inside the car. You’re only going twenty-five now but there is almost no visibility and sometimes the fields and pastures on both sides of the highway are so deep in water that they have flooded the road and you have to slow the car to a crawl as you come up to what looks like a lagoon but should be the highway and hope that it’s not too deep to cross and that there is actually a road beneath all that water.

And now the landscape is getting so bizarre that you feel like you’re in the middle of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Four or five Brahmann bulls, with sad humps riding over their shoulders, stand helpless in a flooded field, stuck in mud that goes all the way up to their shoulders, their heads, less than a foot above water, lifted up to the flooding sky to keep from drowning.

There are highway signs, twenty feet wide, that have blown over and are covering the road. Peasant houses are completely blown over, flattened into the mud. At one point the road completely disappears beneath the stream of water flowing everywhere so you follow close behind a beat-up farm car creeping along at less than twenty mph. Something catches your eye and you look up, through the blurry windshield, and see a flock of black geese swirling counter-clockwise, like something out of the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz, and one of the geese, twirling and twirling in the wind, slams into the windshield of the farm car ahead of you, completely blowing out all the glass. You stop and run through the rain and the wind to the Mexican car, which looks like it has been in a head-on collision. The dead goose is splayed all over a woman in the passenger seat. She can’t move and she can’t stop screaming and there is glass in her hair, face—everywhere. You help the woman out of the car and try to brush away the glass, cutting your fingers, and there is blood all over the woman’s face and you can’t tell if it is from the goose or from her because she won’t stop crying and won’t take her hands away from her face.

And then there are other people there, you don’t even know where they’ve come from, they seemed to have just appeared out of the sky like the black geese, and the woman is helped into a pickup truck and the man climbs into another vehicle and suddenly everyone is gone, the destroyed farm car half on, half off the highway, the windshield wiper weakly waving back and forth like a hand where the windshield used to be and the blood from either the goose or the woman washing over the dirty seat and out the open door of the car.

Just before Mazatlan, you watch as a thirty- or forty- foot tree is uprooted and falls towards the highway just in front of you. It’s thick canopy snaps the first string of power lines but the second string stops the tree from hitting you, though it pushes the power pole to a ninety degree angle. In your rear-view mirror, you watch as the downed lines dance like strings of Chinese firecrackers on the ground, sparks flying everywhere as the cars behind you skid and swerve to avoid them. But you don’t stop, don’t even slow. You keep going. What else can you do?