I was driving east away from the Mexican coast with the rugged outline of sun-blistered mountains rising above the sand dunes in my rear view mirror. I was on my way to the closest ATM which happens to be inland in Los Campos, about 50 kilometers away. It’s the nearest place to get a good rate on money exchange, so about every two weeks I drive thirty miles to get money. So do most of the other gringos who live here.
It was a bright sunny Sonoran morning in January and the sleepy fishing village of Playa Tiburones was awake and busy with the day’s chores. As I pulled away from the only stop sign on the main road through town I saw a slender Mexican man standing beside the crumbling pavement with his thumb out, waiting for the Costa bus or, better yet, a friendly ride. His clothes were old and worn, and not too clean, as is usual among working men here. I slowed and stopped just past him and he ran to the van. I don’t mind the thirty mile drive and I don’t mind driving alone and trying to understand the rapid spanish on the University station located an hour away in Hermosillo. But usually the morning programs discuss education, or health issues, or other topics I can’t follow well. So I often pick up hitchhikers on the way to Campos. They need a ride and I need to practice my Spanish at a more basic level.
I leaned over to open the door and he jumped into the passenger seat.
“¿A donde va?” I asked
I asked the question in Spanish so he’d know I had some familiarity with the language, although the question itself was superfluous. Unless he worked at one of the farms or ranches down some side road, there really isn’t much of anyplace else to go on this stretch of highway except to Campos.
“Campos.” he replied with a friendly smile.
After he settled in, I pressed on the gas pedal and asked another question to keep the conversation going.
“¿Vive usted en Tiburón Viejo?”
I assumed he lived in the old Mexican settlement and not along the beachfront where the rich gringos live. He looked at me quizzically and asked, “Do you speak English?” He had a raspy, cigarette and whisky kind of voice. He had no trace of an accent, and it was clear to him that Spanish was a second language for me.
The surprise must have registered on my face. I glanced over at him and briefly studied his dark weatherbeaten face, his stubbly chin, his dirty hat before turning back to watch the road.
“Yeah. Some.” I said, stating the obvious.
“Well I couldn’t tell if maybe you were French Canadian or somethin’.” he replied.
He resembled another guy that I’d picked up a few weeks back, a scrawny Mexican farmworker who was dressed about the same. The farmworker was looking for a job in the fields of Sonora because they paid 100 pesos (about $9.00) a day, and they only paid 70 in his home state of Sinaloa. He had walked from Los Campos out to the coast to see about finding work with the fishermen, and he’d found nothing. When I picked him up he was walking back to town to ask around the large farms in the area.
He was surprised and happy that a gringo would give him a ride, and that I was interested in his story. As we rode along he showed me a picture of his wife, his six beautiful young daughters, and his mother-in-law back in Culiacán. After six girls, they had finally given up trying to have a son. He loved his family and wanted to be back in Sinaloa, but had to leave to find decent work so he could feed them all. He was grateful for the ride in a clean passenger seat and not in the back of a dirty farm truck. He asked for nothing, but when we got to Los Campos I handed him 50 pesos to get some food.
At first glance this new hitchhiker had looked almost like the same guy. He was dressed in an old plaid cloth jacket, worn dirty jeans, and a dirty hat. He was wrapped tightly against a slightly cool breeze although the temperature was moderately warm, by gringo standards.
But this hitchhiker was different. His name was Jonathan and he lived in a little rented shack somewhere in Old Tiburón. He didn’t offer to say where and I didn’t ask, although as we spoke he was very forthcoming on most other aspects of his life. Surprisingly forthcoming, in some aspects. And when he said anything in Spanish, there was no gringo accent. I was puzzled.
“What brings you down here?” I asked.
“Well actually,” he paused and laughed tentatively, “I’m on the lam for a DUI in San Diego. They were gonna give me two years, so I split for this side of the border. I always liked the people here in the village. I didn’t think I could handle being in jail for two years.”
Surprise registered again on my face. I’ve heard my share of bullshit artists in my time, yet I detected none of that as I listened to him. He sounded like he was on the level with me. I was just surprised at his openness about things most of us would rather keep to ourselves.
As we spoke, his story unfolded. He had lived his first ten years in the dirty mining town of Cananea in northern Sonora and then in an Hispanic neighborhood of San Diego. He was completely fluent in Spanish. He’d been back to Mexico many times over the years, and now he was living a minimal existence on a meager inheritance from his late parents’ estate. He had no money for a car, and barely enough for food and shelter, but he was getting by alright.
I told him my wife had once been hit by a drunk driver, so that DUI stuff didn’t sit well with me. He nodded and stared at the road ahead. It was my call. Would I stop the car and throw him out, or not? He patiently watched the road, waiting for an answer to the question not asked. After a pause, I said that at least he wasn’t driving down here, and maybe this was a good place for him to do penance instead of wasting the taxpayers’ money back in California. He wasn’t a big enough criminal for the authorities to waste time on him, I surmised, so they’d probably just leave him alone, unless they caught him on the other side of the border for some reason or other.
He stared at me for a minute, listened, and said nothing. We rode in silence for a while. I got the sense that counselors far more proficient than I had failed to reach him in the past. Since I don’t think I need to ‘save’ people when they seem to be making it by themselves, I also stopped talking, and stared at the road ahead.
In my travels I’ve noticed that Mexico is dotted with unfinished projects and failed enterprises. This part of Sonora is no exception. They show up here and there on the road to Campos. Due to his long association with the area, I thought Jonathan might be a reasonably well-informed source of answers to questions I had about a few of them.
“I’ve been wondering” I said, “what the story is with this old empty building on the left. Do you have any idea?”
“Actually no. I really have no idea. It’s been there a long time, though. Looks like it’s probably been empty for the last five years or so. I sure wish I could tell you, but I just don’t know anything about it.”
It seemed to be the first time Jonathan had ever noticed that vacant dilapidated building standing stark against the empty desert. It almost screamed to be seen, for the efforts of the builder to be not so easily forgotten. I remembered it clearly from our first visit here ten years ago and it looked old then. I tried again a few miles down the road.
“This place on the right looks like someone had some grand plans, don’t you think?”
“You know it sure does. I don’t know what they had in mind there. Maybe a restaurant or something. It’s really too bad. It looks like it could have been nice if they had finished it. But I just don’t know.”
Still no luck. I tried again a few miles later with a different subject.
“Those plants beside the road look a lot like castor bean plants. I suppose they could be left from a time when castor oil was in demand and a lot of these abandoned-looking fields were probably planted with them. What do you think?”
“Well you know that probably does make sense. I bet that’s probably true. I just don’t know what those plants are. Could be castor bean plants, I guess. I don’t know too much about plants. Actually I never noticed them before.”
Every couple of miles for the rest of the trip I’d ask a question or venture an opinion just so I could hear Jonathan say, “You know, that’s probably true. I just don’t know what the situation is with that, and so on...” I was fascinated by his apparent complete lack of interest in his surroundings. Over the years he had managed to perfect a long and circuitous way of saying, “You know, I actually don’t know anything about that, and I really don’t even care.” I have rarely encountered another individual who seemed so totally devoid of innate curiousity, who lived so completely in the moment.
Jonathan was on his way to the bank in Los Campos to see if more money had been deposited in his account. He needed to make a withdrawal at the ATM to pay some bills. The lady at the local farmacia in Tiburón could provide him with small amounts of money on his credit card, but she didn’t keep much cash around. None of the local merchants did. It was also far less expensive to withdraw cash at the bank ATM.
When we arrived, the dusty main street of Campos was abuzz with activity, as it always is. Heavy trucks carried produce from the fields, peddlers wheeled taco carts along the shoulder of the road, groups of school children wearing Catholic school uniforms and multicolored backpacks walked to or from their half-day sessions. We stood in the ATM line with workers, peddlers, and small merchants drawing out just a few pesos for the day. The contrast between rich gringos and poor Mexicanos is nowhere more apparent than in line at the only ATM in a small Mexican town.
On the first of each month there’s always a very long line of retirees drawing their monthly allowance, their Seguro Social. A good photographer or novelist could read the history of Mexico in the creased faces and gnarly hands of the people waiting for their payments in those long ATM lines in every city and town throughout the country. I once made the mistake of being in line on the first of the month and had to wait about an hour to get to the machine. The old campesino just ahead of me was a handsome man, wearing a clean, if frayed, shirt and simple straw hat. We struck up a conversation. He told me he gets 1500 pesos a month for retirement. Most Americans have a hard time living on a social security payment of 1500 dollars a month, about ten times what this man had to look forward to.
On the way back to the coast I heard more of Jonathan’s story. His dad was a successful engineer who installed ore crusher equipment at the mines in Cananea. He had four brothers who were all successful businessmen. One of them has a vacation house on the beach in Tiburón, although he doesn’t appreciate Jonathan’s infrequent visits to the house.
Jonathan was clearly the black sheep of the family. His brothers don’t approve of his friends, but to hear him tell it, that hasn’t had much of an effect on him. The money he was expecting hadn’t arrived in his account. I left him at the stop sign when we returned to Tiburón and he headed down one of the dusty side streets for home.
On another day and another trip into Campos, I see Jonathan standing by the road again waiting for a ride. He doesn’t seem to recognize me when he gets into the van, but at the sound of my voice he realizes who his ride is. He explains that he doesn’t see well without his glasses, which he managed to lose recently.
“I can’t find them anywhere. I was telling one of my buddies” he explained, “that I needed to get to Hermosillo and get a new pair of glasses. And he said, ‘No you don’t. They’re at my house.’ And then I remembered that’s where I was when I passed out from drinking last week. The problem is, I don’t know his name. And I don’t know where he lives. And without my glasses, I can’t find him. I walk up to guys who look about like him and I squint at them, and they think I’m weird until I explain the problem.”
I begin to think that maybe his brothers have a good point about not liking his friends. He rides to Charrito to see if his money has arrived yet. It still hasn’t.
A week later, on a bright Sunday morning, I ride my bicycle over to Old Tiburón to watch a baseball game between the local “Bravos” and the “Mayos” from Los Campos. The Bravos used to be the Tiburones, or sharks, but they got a good deal on some shirts that read “Bravos” so they changed their name. When the Mayos don’t show up, the Bravos use the afternoon for batting practice, and I leave to ride along a few dusty back streets and pause at interesting little homes I don’t see when I drive a car through the old village. Some of these people have done wonderful things with a little concrete and a paint brush. I realize how much respect I have for their ability to make a decent life, and keep their kids in clean clothes for school, while they live in cardboard shacks. And some shacks, crudely decorated with cheap painted designs, show the undefeatable spirit of an artist within.
Then I start the long ride back to our place on the beach. It’s a sunny day and there’s a slight headwind. The azure sea is topped with small waves that break gently on the shore. After a few miles of hard peddling I stop to study some of the houses that line the road. I rest in the shade of a well-proportioned entryway fashioned of cantera stone, trucked up from Jalisco in large pieces and carved by local backyard craftsmen; in the next block I pass a nicely planted courtyard with tall coconut palms, their long graceful fronds clattering in the light breeze; a few blocks later there’s a bold red wall that resonates in this land of strong primary colors.
Once in a while I pass someone walking along in the parking lane or waiting for the Costa bus to come by. The parking lane is safer than the crumbling sidewalk where you could easily break a leg or run into a low tree limb. I pass a dark, wiry fellow who looks vaguely familiar but continue on for half a block, until I realize it’s Jonathan. He’s standing by the road again waiting for somebody, or something, or maybe nothing, really. Driven by, I guess morbid curiousity, I can’t help but wonder what he’s waiting for. I pull up and circle back.
Turns out he finally figured out where he was when he passed out last week and lost his glasses.
“I talked to the guy and he said he’d be here in half an hour, and that was an hour ago.” he says with an exasperated laugh that has now become familiar. It sounded like the nervous laugh of the perpetual victim —victim of his own devices and many years of poor choices. Life’s a bitch when you have no money, no prospects, little respect, and there’s no good reason anyone’s going out of their way for you anymore. At least anybody who knows you well.
So I share a noncommital laugh with Jonathan, wish him luck, and make my way onward down the road back to my house. He doesn’t need my help. He has far more highly developed coping skills than I’ve ever managed to acquire. He’ll be fine. I realize that, deep down, I’m envious of his multi-cultural agility, his well-honed ability to transcend social and ethnic cultures, and survive. As I ride away I have a feeling I’ll see Jonathan again, waiting for a ride somewhere along the road to Campos.