(Excerpt from a blog entry written February 27, 2015, as I was raising money to ride my motorcycle to South America.)
What Holds Us Together, series 3, no. 8. Graphite, pastel and cotton floss on paper. 2020
Torrential rains came at me sideways when I descended the mountain out of the town of Papantla, northeast into the state of Veracruz. The road turned straight and flat as I approached the coast.. but the water came down faster, covering the tarmac with shallow lakes, and hiding any potholes or unmarked speed bumps in my path. Gradually I was making my way toward a mass of twisted clouds boiling 50 miles off the Veracruz coast, a tropical depression that wasn't dissipating or doing much of anything except drowning people in sheets coming out of the sky in constant streams.
When the water crept into the crotch of my plastic rain suit and the back of my throat started itching, I knew what I was in for. I suppose I could have gone a different way, but I wanted to see some friends.
The rain kept coming down as I putted my way through Veracruz, accidentally blowing through stop signs, so tired I could barely see straight. My half-soaked copy of Sjoerd Bakker's hotel list for bikers led me to an address I couldn't find - or more accurately the address in question was a burned-out husk of a place that might have at one point been a hotel but clearly was no longer. The guy across the street mopping the floors in his not-yet-open nightclub pointed me to another option down the road a few blocks. "Come back later and I'll buy you a beer," he said with a crooked smile in really crooked English. I took that as a good sign.
Hotel Casa Blanca was 3 blocks from the waterfront, cost 200 pesos a night and was manned by a friendly inn keeper, whose eyes widened when he saw my disproportionally large, very black and very soaked motorbike parked in the courtyard in front of his establishment. "Es estacionamiento segur para un moto un poco grande cerca de aqui?," I blurted out in my pathetic Spanish. He smiled, broke out a massive key ring, as it turned out the closed restaurant next door was also his. Five minutes later, my bike was locked away in a safe, dry retreat, surrounded by hand-carved high-backed chairs and checked cloth-covered tables.
I crawled upstairs to my little room, peeled off the sticky, dank layer of plastic in which I'd been enshrouded for the previous ... 10 hours...?... and passed out on yet another set of threadbare, flower printed sheets.
The next day I rose from bed in fits and starts, in and out of that swimming haze that comes from a 100 degree fever. It honestly felt great to be forced to do nothing by my own body. What happens so often on the road is that you forget to take care of yourself. Forget to eat. Ride too furiously in order to land somewhere you hope is safe by nightfall, while taking "shortcuts" that only place you in more danger. So the best thing that can happen, then, is that your body forces you to stop... and the dreams are amazing...
The waters were subsiding when a day later I had the strength to roam around Veracruz, and I was privileged to do this in the company of two fantastic other English speakers, Alix Aylen and Bobby Gadda. Alix and Bobby had spent the previous 8 months riding their bicycles down the west coast of the North American continent - Alix from Vancouver, BC, Canada, Bobby from San Francisco. They had in fact met in SF, fallen for each other and got married, choosing to ride down to Mexico together. They had camped under bridges, alongside homeless guys, and in the wild all over Mexico. They carried musical instruments, playing (U.S.) southern blues-inspired tunes in town squares along their route, which scored them decent extra cash from younger locals sick to death of mariachi music. All of this on BICYCLES. I was then and forever will be in awe.
We parted ways and I roamed around in the post-rain early summer humidity, intent on checking out a real Mexican beach. I'd never seen one before. What I found was a bit more like Galveston, TX but with fewer rules and more folks camped on trash-littered stretches of it, semi-permanently. There were jetties and a seawall with muscle cars parked next to it in a line, hoods open, showing off paint jobs and stereo systems. A couple of city-commissioned sculptures, and one extremely pleasant police officer, who despite his job requirement of checking my bag for weapons, allowed me to walk out onto a wooden pier with a smile.
Three days had passed before I felt up to leaving. I'd enjoyed hanging out with Alix and Bobby, watching them play music and see the faces of people light up from Bobby's banjo and Alix's lovely voice. I loved the way the colonial buildings bore their history in cracks, mildew stains and faded pastel colors, the way the heat shimmered off their broken cornices in waves. The coffee was amazing. And as usual, the people I met were gracious and kind, pleasantly surprised every time I attempted to speak Spanish, as bad as it was.
I decided to leave an embroidery in an old boarded up window space across the street from an amazing antijitos joint where you could get an entire meal of appetizers for $30MX (the equivalent of less than 2 bucks). The woman who both cooked and served me my meal was suspicious of me at first, but as soon as I smiled and told her how fantastic her food was, she lightened, wished me well and invited me to come back. I sincerely hope that she's the one who found it.