Twenty Miles per Cookie: 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures

by Nancy Sathre-Vogel

  Twenty-five miles later we pulled into the city and cycled to the very heart of it to find a hotel. I wearily went in to ask for a room while John and the boys waited outside. When I came out I found him deep in conversation with a woman while a man snapped photo after photo. We had apparently ridden right past the local newspaper and they chased us to the hotel. We were exhausted, filthy, hungry, thirsty, and wanting to collapse, but we stood around talking with the reporter while the photographer took a bunch of photos.

  It was one of those days that I didn’t want to remember. One of those days when I wished I could close my eyes, click my heels three times, and say, “There was no day like today… There was no day like today… There was no day like today…”

  * * *

  Dear Grandma,

  When we were riding today Mom’s tire went flat. Me and Daryl made up a game called box kicking. You get some boxes and try to hit the other person as much as possible. It’s very fun. Then we switched to bottles. That made it more fun. Then we had to leave.

  A while later the same tire went flat again so we stopped to fix it. We found more bottles on the ground and played again. This is how you play: You get some bottles and put them in a pile. Then you kick the pile to scatter them. You also have borders. If a bottle gets kicked out of the border you can go get it but you can’t kick it at the other person, but the other person can fire at you. You can use your hands to block the attack.

  OK, back to Mom’s tire. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad were fixing the tire. They tried a lot of times to fix it. And after a long, long, long time, they finally got it fixed. That was a pain in the rear. Now the tire is holding good.

  Love, Davy

  * * *

  The four of us pedaled northward into the Sonora River Valley toward the USA. As we drew nearer to our home country, excitement mounted. It wouldn’t be long before we were back in our own country and we were all counting the days. As much as we loved Mexico, there was something about the US that was “home”, even if we weren’t at our house. The four of us agreed to pedal hard – we had four hundred miles to the border and we vowed to cross it in a week’s time.

  Mexico, however, had other plans. As we cycled into the Sonora River Valley, we were entranced time and time again by quaint, picturesque villages and old, historic churches in the area. We stopped to snap a few photos but pushed on, determined to make the mileage. Villages in the valley came every ten miles, each one more attractive than the one before.

  Our third day in the valley, we pulled into Banamichi, intending to eat a quick lunch and continue on our way.

  We made our way to the central plaza, leaned our bikes against a gazebo in the middle of the park, plopped ourselves onto a park bench, and began cramming sandwiches down our throats. Davy and Daryl, with their boundless energy, were soon up and running around with local kids while John and I took advantage of a few moments of peace and quiet.

  A man approached and started telling us about the history of the region. Although interesting, what really got our attention was what he said next.

  “Did you know there’s a hot spring a few miles out of town?”

  John and I looked at each other. A good long soak in a hot spring sounded pretty darn nice right about then!

  “Another thing you might be interested in… There’s a fiesta tonight over at the arena. They’ll have a rodeo and music and carne asada. It should be pretty fun.”

  A soak in a hot spring sounded delightful. But a soak in a hot spring followed by a fiesta sounded absolutely heavenly. We decided to stay.

  “We’ll need a spot to pitch our tent. Know any place around here?” I asked him.

  “Sure!” he responded. “I’ll find a place. Let me get my car – you follow me.” We followed him down a hill and along a dirt road until he stopped at a ranch house. “This’ll be a good place for you,” he pronounced as he climbed out of his car. “It has a canal so you can have some water.”

  He headed up to the house to ask permission for us. A woman and her mother-in-law came out, looking totally bewildered. I’m sure they had never had a bedraggled family on bicycles come ask to pitch a tent in their yard before, but they happily agreed to let us stay and we quickly set our tent up in their yard.

  We soon discovered the hot spring wasn’t hot at all so we bagged that activity and headed directly to the fiesta. We could see the dust clouds hovering over the arena from a mile away, and could smell the carne asada a short while later. As we walked through the gates of the arena, smiling ranchers handed us bottles of Coke and Corona beer, along with plates of carne asada and beans. We drank. We ate. We talked with local ranchers. And all the while a joke of a rodeo went on.

  John and I sat surrounded by drunk ranchers wondering if we had stumbled into a rodeo or a party. It mostly resembled a big party, but it also had all the elements of a rodeo: calf and horse roping, parading of horses, horse dancing and bronco busting. A ten-piece band played festive Mexican music while the crowd consumed ungodly amounts of Corona beer.

  The four of us roared with laughter when it took a couple of cowboys a good twenty minutes to catch and rope a calf, and had tears streaming down our faces by the time one participant actually roped his partner rather than the horse he was attempting to lasso. The bronco busting was a complete bust when they put a cowboy atop a poor horse that wouldn’t buck. We were in stitches.

  Eventually the party broke up and we headed back to the garlic ranch where we had pitched our tent. Davy had been complaining about his hand since we left the plaza all those hours ago. Apparently he had slipped on an orange while playing with the local kids, and had watched the whole rodeo with an ice bag carefully balanced on his hand. As we were leaving the arena I suggested swapping out his mostly melted ice for fresh ice.

  Within a minute, as I got a new ice pack ready, he started complaining. The new ice, since it wasn’t melted, didn’t surround his hand like the old ice water had and the numbness began to wear off. He started whimpering. Then he started crying. When he started begging me to cut off his hand I figured it was time to take him to a doctor, but it was late Sunday afternoon.

  We arrived at the clinic to find it all locked up, but a knock at the door brought a doctor out.

  “I think it’s broken,” the doctor told us, “But it needs an x-ray to be sure. Unfortunately, we don’t have an x-ray machine here. You’ll have to go to Ures to the hospital.”

  Davy looked up at me with panic in his tear-filled eyes. “Do we have to ride all the way back to Ures?”

  “No sweetie,” I replied. “Not on bikes. We’ll take a bus or hitch a ride. I wouldn’t make you ride seventy five miles with a hand like this.”

  Davy breathed a big sigh of relief, and the doctor started wrapping his arm in plaster. A few minutes later Davy left the clinic with an enormous splint extending from his armpit down to his fingertips.

  “Remember – this is just to immobilize the arm until you can get to the hospital,” warned the doctor. “It’ll make it feel better, but you still need to get it checked out.”

  Somehow we needed to get to Ures. The doctor had said he would send an ambulance, but I figured that was a bit excessive. We headed out to the main road to hitch a ride. The first car we stopped just happened to be the rancher we were staying with.

  “It’s not even worth going now,” he told me. “The hospital is basically empty on Sunday evening. All they will have you do is hang out and wait until tomorrow. Just go back home and we’ll get you to the hospital tomorrow – we have to go there tomorrow anyway.”

  “You’re going to the hospital tomorrow?” I asked. “Why?”

  “My wife’s father fell this morning and hurt his wrist too. We’ll take him to Ures in the morning.”

  We turned around and headed back to our tent for the night. We had no idea what we would do with a kid in a cast, but we figured we would face that decision the next day.

  The following morning, we got a totally unexpected reception at
the hospital. Our photos had appeared in the paper a couple of times, and we were instantly recognized as local celebrities. Doctors and nurses scurried around trying to take care of us, and it wasn’t long before we had the diagnosis – it wasn’t broken, but very badly sprained. The doctor showed me the x-ray and I could very plainly see where the bone had bent, but not quite broken.

  “I’ll put a cast on it to make it more comfortable,” the doctor told me. “It won’t help it heal at all, but it’ll at least make it so it doesn’t hurt so much. And I’ll try to cut it up above the knuckle so he can still ride his bike.”

  Davy and I had our doubts about riding with a cast, but we didn’t have a whole lot of options at that moment. Davy held his arm up while the doctor began wrapping it with plaster.

  “How should I record this?” a nurse asked. She was sitting at a rickety old desk in the corner of the room. “The referral came from the clinic in Banamichi, but he isn’t from Banamichi.”

  Right about then the director of the hospital walked into the room to see us. “Don’t bother with recording this one. Human rights – that’s what we’ll call it!” They didn’t charge us a dime.

  Davy severely sprained his wrist and wore the cast for two weeks. Fortunately he didn't have to steer the bike.

  The following day was a challenge. The road passed through one of those sections where there wasn’t a flat piece of road anywhere. We climbed. We descended. We climbed again. Steep climbs, followed by equally steep descents.

  Before long, Davy started complaining of stomach cramps. He tried to help on the bike, but could only pull with one hand as the other lay protected in a sling. He kept doubling over in pain. John did his best to carry the two boys, but in the end, they ended up walking most of the climbs.

  We made it thirty miles before deciding it was time to stop. By then it was after five, and we were pretty desperate for a place to put the tent. A major mountain pass was coming up and we figured it would be so steep we wouldn’t find a place big and flat enough for the tent. We passed a dirt road, with a policeman right at the entrance. “Would it be possible,” I asked, “for us to ride back that road a ways to find a place to set up our tent?”

  “I have a little ranch right here,” a grizzled old man who happened to be talking with the policeman said. “There is a nice flat spot in front of my casita. You can camp there.”

  We followed him up the hill and around the corner to his casita. And what a casita it was! At one point the three-sided structure had been built with mud bricks, but rain had washed them away until they were all heaped together in a jumbled up mess. The roof was patched together with all kinds of whatever he could find and held in place by old tires. Inside was barely space for a bed, with a few clothes hanging from the rafters above.

  “I have a few cows,” Ernesto told me as we sat around his tiny cookfire. He had built a wooden frame over the fire with a wire dangling down. He attached an old tin can filled with water from the river to the wire. Soon he would have hot coffee. “I sell them in town, but here in Arizpe they don’t pay much. They only want the little ones for some reason, and the men from town take all the calves, put them in trailers, and haul them to the border. They get a lot of money for them there.

  “I can’t afford a trailer, so I have no choice but to sell them here in town. It would be nice if all of us small ranchers could get together and hire a trailer, but we can’t all agree. We are stuck. We have no choice but to sell here.”

  “Do you have any kids?” I asked.

  “No,” Ernesto replied as he added another log to his fire. “I once met a woman that I really liked. She stayed with me for over five months, and I had hoped to marry her. She was three months pregnant with my child when her husband of thirteen years returned from the US and took her away. I didn’t even know she was married. After that, I’ve stayed away from women.”

  We climbed into our tent and slept in comfort, while Ernesto fell asleep in his ramshackle hut.

  Ernesto lived a simple life on his one-man ranch.

  Yap! Yap! Yap! We were awakened the following morning by the barking of a multitude of dogs. I climbed out of the tent and saw Ernesto scurrying down to the river with a big pole. A few minutes later the dogs quieted down, and our host came walking up, proudly dangling a raccoon in front of him.

  “Now what are you going to do with it?” I asked him.

  “I’ll cook it up – the dogs love eating raccoon,” he replied.

  “Will you eat it too?” I asked.

  “Sure! Raccoon is very tasty with chile!”

  Fortunately, we were gone by the time it was cooked.

  * * *

  Dear Mom,

  Brutal. That’s a good word to describe this wind. Last night we piled on every garment of clothing we could muster up from the depths of our panniers, mummified ourselves in our down cocoons, and spent the night listening to the tent rockin’ and rollin’ in the wind.

  And yet, even being exhausted from fighting the wind, shaking from the cold, and uncomfortably crammed into my sleeping bag, there is no place I would rather be. Sure, I love those nice warm spring days with the wind at my back and easy terrain. But it is days like today that make me enjoy the nice ones so much.

  Our journey is like a big pot of chicken soup – it just wouldn’t be the same if you picked it all apart. Somehow each ingredient enhances the whole, making the whole pot a yummy concoction. That’s how I feel about our journey – the good days and the bad days all meld together to make the whole. If I could somehow get rid of tough days, the journey just wouldn’t be the same. .

  Love, Nancy

  * * *

  I wrote that letter to my mom as I sat in our tent, wrapped up in my warm sleeping bag, refreshed from my night’s sleep, and somewhat protected from the wind whipping around us. John and the kids were still sound asleep. I was dreading pedaling against the freezing cold howling gale all day.

  The previous day we had fought a hellacious headwind all day, ended up out in the middle of nowhere with not much for dinner, and collapsed in the bitter cold for the night. And today didn’t look any better. And yet, we were so close to the border we were determined. There was simply no way we were going to wait out the storm – come hell or high water, we would be in the USA that night.

  * * *

  Dear Grandma,

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! It’s cold! Yesterday we woke up with cold air outside our hotel room. We stayed there late because of the cold. At 11:00 we left. It was a miserable day.

  We had a terrible day. We fought a very bad headwind. We made it to the intersection to Naco. There we found a part-worked-on house and we camped in it. It was a very, very cold night.

  We only had one and a half tortillas filled with beans for dinner. The beans were cold because our stove wouldn’t work in this cold wind. Then we climbed into the tent and me and Dad played Rummy before we went to sleep.

  This morning I played two games of chess with Dad. One game we had a draw, the other game I won. We haven’t gotten out of the tent yet, but I bet our water bottles are frozen again. I know I’m going to be tired tonight. We don’t have any food except a few granola bars! We’re going to be hungry till Agua Prieta.

  Love, Davy

  * * *

  Battling an ice-cold headwind is a challenge. Notice Davy's face is wrapped in an Ace bandage.

  If possible, the wind was even worse than it had been the day before. Daryl pulled his fleece neck gaiter up over his mouth and nose, we wrapped Davy’s face with an Ace bandage and set out into the howling gale. Davy still had his cast on his arm (it would come off in a couple of days), so he couldn’t pedal with full force. We fought for each and every meter we made.

  It was a tough twenty four miles into Douglas, and then we had to turn back west ten miles to get to the college where a friend of a friend had invited us to stay.

  But we made it back to the USA! We were “home” again.

  SWAT Teams and the Unb
eatable Foe

  We expected the desert to come alive at night with animals, but in southern New Mexico it came alive in a different way. Nighttime was when hundreds of smugglers came out of the mountains separating the United States with Mexico.

  We, of course, were clueless. We realized we were cycling right along the border, but didn’t even think of smugglers coming across. All we noticed were the enormous numbers of border patrol vehicles. As evening approached, private vehicles diminished greatly and then vanished altogether while border patrol vehicles became more abundant. The road was deserted – no people, no houses, no trees, no nothing – except an ample amount of border patrol agents and a cycling family.

  We pedaled along keeping our eyes peeled for a camp spot, but all we found was mile after mile of fence. Every once in a while we passed a gate, but they were all securely locked. Panic began to set in. We were cycling right along the border with Mexico, the area teemed with border patrol agents, and we were desperate for a place to camp. It looked like we might be stuck for the first time since we left home.

  We finally managed to find an unlocked gate on the south side of the road, hurriedly opened it, passed through, and headed back away from the road. We were half a mile off the road when a truck turned off the road and came toward us. We looked around to find a place to hide, but there was nothing. We stood still and waited for him to catch up to us.

  “What are you folks doing?” asked the border guard as he rolled up beside us.

  “We’re biking through the area, and need a place to pitch our tent. We figured we would come back here. Is that okay?” I asked.