To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  We woke up early to say goodbye. They were leaving just a day early from their scheduled trip, but the debates and planning of escape routes consumed so many hours the day before, it felt like we had all been stranded and trapped in the tiny town for weeks.

  Later in the morning, Susan gave us stand-up paddle boards, and her thirteen-year-old daughter took us out on the river. As we slid them into the warm water, she warned us against paddling across the river’s wide mouth, because that’s where the crocodiles liked to hang out. We said okay and laughed. Teenagers with guns. Now crocs. But as the three of us paddled upstream, we weren’t thinking of war. Tall palm trees and thick jungle leaned out over the water, and I watched the muddy banks for logs that could be crocodiles. Paddling was easy in the lazy current. In the distance, we saw cliffs covered in vines and flowers. Birds spooked and flew from the trees. Weston paddled alongside me, and Susan’s daughter slid ahead of us as if not paddling at all.

  We got to talking about explorers and Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg and movies from the eighties. Weston said, “Can I tell you something that will make you hate me?”

  I said, “Of course. I already hate you.”

  “There are two things I don’t like, and every time I say these things, people hate me afterwards.”

  “This is a safe place. On this river, we can speak truth without judgment,” I said.

  “Okay, well, here we go: I don’t like Star Wars, and I think I hate the Beatles.” He paddled forward and didn’t look at me. He grinned at this scandal.

  “WHAT?” I shouted. “You have got to be kidding me. Star Wars? How can you be a stable human being without loving Star Wars!? Do you hate sunsets, too? What about food? Do you hate food?” I shouted.

  “See, I told you,” he said, laughing. “This river is not a safe place. I’ve made a huge mistake.”

  For an exercise in empathy, I tried to argue his point of view. “Okay, okay, I mean, the Beatles, I don’t love some of their songs,” I said. “And I must admit I get annoyed when music snobs demand I like something because it was groundbreaking. But the Beatles sound changed so many times, there has to be SOME song of theirs you like. Like ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Come on! You have to love that song!”

  “I’m not sure I know it,” Weston said.

  “Okay, thank God, there’s hope,” I said.

  It’s remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals. Stranded in Nexpa, I saw the locals laughing over beers. Making jokes about the military, about the cartels, about resorting to powdered milk the last time this happened. Human beings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it.

  As we paddled up the river we came to the big bridge on the coastal highway. It loomed over us, tall and cracked. We heard a loud engine and looked up as a Humvee boomed down from the bridge. We paused for a minute to make eye contact and acknowledge the wildness of what was happening around us. Weston broke our silence. “Do you think me hating Star Wars is worse than being the leader of a cartel?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Beyond the bridge, we came upon a huddle of crocs floating in the middle of the river. In a tight-chested instant, we turned around and paddled furiously, laughing and feeling exposed on the boards. Once downriver, we dragged the boards up onto the grass to watch Susan’s daughter shimmy like a spider up a tree to knock down some coconuts with her machete. The giant rusted knife looked half as long as she was tall. Back on the ground, she slashed off the tops of the coconuts, revealing the milky meat inside, tender and delicious.

  The next day, Humvees buzzed across the bridge and kicked up dust, and black helicopters patrolled the beaches. I lay in the hammock. I did push-ups. I sliced more coconuts. I found a stack of old National Geographics in Susan’s hostel. One of them from 1986 had a story about Leo Tolstoy, about his hometown in Russia, about the man behind the legend. I grabbed it and walked out to the river. I sat against a palm tree facing upriver, where I could see the bridge and the Humvees and the mountains. Behind me I could hear the waves of the ocean.

  I read that when Tolstoy was young he wrote in his journal, “I am twenty-four years old and I have still done nothing…I am sure it’s not for nothing that I have been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past eight years. But what am I destined for? Only time will tell.” I was thirty years old reading this, sitting by a river in Mexico, wondering what I had done with my life. I knew it wasn’t for nothing that I’d been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past twenty years. I had dipped so deeply and completely into my faith, into my love of God, or who I made God to be, and what the people around me said He must think about everything. I knew it was not for nothing, but what, I didn’t know. I just knew it was somewhere in me, and I needed travel to shake it out. I needed to see different things to remind me what I was, in contrast to what I already knew. To see clearly what I had become.

  Days passed trapped on that riverbank, beside that beach, with nowhere to possibly go, all tangled up in my head. We lounged and played in paradise and spent many hours at the bar. To Weston’s delight Stewart would always walk out and hand us free joints. Stewart had news on the cartel war, too. He explained that the Knights Templar were losing their fight with the military and getting pushed into the jungle. But the rule of law wouldn’t follow in their wake. Stewart’s uncle was high up in another cartel (I think it was called La Familia) based in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital city—one that had more members and sway with the government. Once this fight was done, they would move into the region and pick up where their predecessors left off.

  Ten days in, we woke to the new normal of coffee and toast and waiting for any news of the fighting. Susan was not in the hostel when we got up. As we were making the coffee, she ran in, excited. “It’s over! The military pushed the mafia out last night and they retreated. The roadblocks came down this morning!”

  The weight of the air suddenly lifted. The beach town was no longer a prison. We were, it seemed, free. Nothing around me had changed. The river flowed just as it had minutes ago. The waves were still pumping. The coconuts grew in silence just the same. But the whole world looked different. Our internment camp had morphed back into a beach town.

  * * *

  —

  WE SPENT A final day with Susan in Nexpa. It was a vacation again, but with our new freedom, we felt the time we’d lost. We should’ve been in Morelia by now. Susan had whetted our appetites for the colonial beauty of the city, the cobblestone streets, the cathedrals. But she wasn’t confident that the cartel nonsense was over, so she insisted on driving us south to Lázaro Cárdenas. That way we’d be through the epicenter of the fighting and on the highway that led up the mountains to Morelia. We gratefully accepted. She dropped us by the highway and we hugged and she waved as we cycled away.

  We made it one day up the mountain, slept terribly in a bug-infested grove of trees, and early the next day, Weston’s wheel broke. After trying for three hours to get a truck to rescue us, we asked a passerby with a phone to let us make a call. I had written down Susan’s number (thank God) and we called her. She seemed relieved to hear from us, as if she hoped we’d call, to check in or to need her again. “I don’t like driving the truck up in the mountains, because the mafia loves to steal trucks,” she said, “but this is Ricardo’s truck…I hope it gets stolen. He deserves to have his truck fucking stolen. Here I come!”

  To get out of the sun, we waited under a bridge until she pulled up honking and waving and laughing. We were sweaty and so happy to see her. She reiterated her fear of driving, so Weston drove. We
threw our bikes in the back and traveled from sea level to over six thousand feet, from hills covered in jungle and palm trees to farmland, to pine trees, to cooler air. The humidity quickly dropped as we drove higher. As I sat in the truck and watched the land whiz by, I felt how my trip was changing. I was having fun, and I wasn’t. This wasn’t a weekend camping trip; there would be no quick return. My bed wasn’t waiting for me. Not long ago, I was thinking how brave I was to go on this trip and do this difficult thing. I reveled in people’s astonishment. Now their astonishment made sense. They knew something I hadn’t. What was I doing here?

  But I held this feeling of dread in one hand. The other hand was holding love. Love for Mexico. For the land and the ocean. For the freedom of seeing new things and not knowing what was next. Have you ever felt two things at once? Two opposite things?

  Farms became little villages became the outskirts of Morelia. Fields gave way to a tightly packed Spanish Colonial grid, with cobblestone streets and walls and the spires of cathedrals reaching high above the grid. Morelia looked more like the photos I’d seen of Spain than what I knew of Mexico.

  Susan was going to stay with a friend in town, so she dropped us at our hostel. Later, we met up at the cathedral to find dinner. As we walked up, a full symphony was playing in the square and there was a fireworks show at the entrance to the cathedral, set to shoot off as the orchestra crescendoed. It was all part of a music festival taking place in town.

  Morelia felt every bit as cosmopolitan and savvy as an artists’ town in Germany or Park City, Utah. We couldn’t believe the contrast here to the feeling of lawlessness on the coast. The streets of Morelia were stone, the buildings European. I stood, frozen in front of the two giant cathedral bell towers as the orchestra played. Women in big Victorian dresses, fully in costume, waltzed around in front of the violinists. Thousands of people milled about and were mostly quiet to respect the musicians.

  Weston and I felt safe again.

  For the next two days, we explored Morelia by eating at cafés and walking the streets. Thanks to the music festival, parades of musicians from all over the world shocked us at every turn. Bagpipes from Scotland. Jazz. Tubas and cellos. Walking in clumps, playing their music over flower petals strewn in the streets.

  Morelia had a well-stocked bike shop, and an oily mechanic to fix Weston’s bike. We bought lots of new tubes. I had my bike checked out and cleaned and lubed. When both were shiny and ready to roll, we mapped our route to Mexico City. The next day, we rode out of Morelia. The town ended abruptly, from thick Spanish stone to rolling hills and farms. Then, as quick as a page turn, we were winding up into the green mountains. It was gaspworthy beautiful. The air was crisp, the sky sunny and blue, the world inviting. The trees were tall and the cows by the side of the road were fat and pleasant. We rode for several days. We started seeing monarch butterflies. Lots of them. On weeds by the road and in the air. We camped in abandoned barns and thick forests. We took a shower in a waterfall.

  The Baja desert had worn me down. Mainland Mexico was showing me something new. This was the Altiplano, the giant spine of Mexico, floating more than 5,000 feet above sea level, cooling the air, reducing humidity, and making the world as pleasant as paradise. A natural kindness.

  Three days into the ride, the sky changed. It was full of specks. Birds too high to make out? Millions. Pepper raining across the sky. “What is that?” Weston asked.

  “I don’t know.” I stared into the sky as we stood by the side of the road, squinting up.

  “Jed, look!” Weston said, pointing to a bush. It had several monarch butterflies on it. “Dude, they’re butterflies!”

  The great monarch butterfly migration was under way just as we approached the town of Zitácuaro. A local told us that we were near the forest where they arrive every fall, by the millions and millions.

  We ditched our bikes at a cheap motel and took a bus to the forest. The mountains here were covered in evergreen trees. The air was chilly and garnished in mist. We booked a horseback ride into the forest. Our guide took us over a ridge and down into a gully where we saw that the trees looked strange, as if they were dipped in chocolate and dripping. “Can you tell us about why they’re here?” Weston asked.

  “Sure,” he said with a proud smile. I remember his English being excellent. He’d done this tour many times before. “Monarch butterflies born in the fall are different than all the other monarchs. They are a super generation. They can live up to eight months as they travel from Canada all the way down to our forest. Then, after waiting out winter here, they’ll head up to warmer places like Louisiana and breed. Their children will live for only six weeks. It can take five generations of their children, who live so much shorter lives, to get back to Canada. Then those born at the beginning of fall, they become the super ones again. Then those ones begin the great journey. They can fly from Michigan all the way here, to Zitácuaro.”

  As we got closer, we saw that every single inch of each tree was covered in butterflies. “Look up,” our guide said, and in the holes of blue sky between the trees, we saw a blizzard of butterflies. “This is early, and more butterflies will come. But now too many butterflies don’t come back. Five years ago, we had ten times more.”

  The monarch, too? I thought of the bees, and what it must mean, we humans ruining everything. We don’t have any way to process how everything we do touches everything else.

  “It is probably climate change,” the guide said. “Or technology. The cell phones. Something that people are doing is confusing them or causing them to die. It is very sad. We do not care for the beautiful things of this world.” His voice was heavy and pensive as he worried out loud about the future of this forest and his region’s claim to fame.

  We returned to our bikes thrilled at the majesty of the butterflies and thrown by the confusing science of their decline. When we got back to our motel, a parade was noisily clanging down Zitácuaro’s main street. So many parades.

  Cycling through the mountains of central Mexico, we would camp and find tiny hotels for less than ten dollars a night. On one rainy night in the woods we used our tarps and hammock string to make a simple A-frame ground tent. It got very cold up in the mountains at night, so we hoped we could make a tent to stay dry and warm, side by side. We were at close to 9,000 feet. It rained and we got wet, but not soaked. As I was falling asleep on my back, something fell onto my closed eye. I reached up and felt a squirming fuzzy creature. I flicked it off and found my phone for some light. My eye was already on fire, as were my fingers. Weston heard me scream “DAMMIT!” and sat up.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Something stung the shit out of my eye!” The flashlight revealed a fuzzy brown caterpillar crawling on my sleeping bag. Apparently, its fuzz was a swarm of stinging needles, and it had fallen right onto my eyelid.

  I fell asleep with my hand pressing on my eye, wondering if I’d been poisoned and doomed to blindness. I woke up the next day soggy and okay, but determined to sleep in hotels for a few days.

  We passed Christmas tree farms and white-tarp greenhouses of poinsettias. We saw vendors selling stick sculptures, with Santa Clauses and reindeer shaped from bundled sticks and vines. It was mid-November, and the Christmas decorations made me feel happy. If they’ve got the Christmas decorations out, that means it’s coming, and I’ll go home for the holidays and get a bit of a break.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS LATER, the road dropped out of the mountains and into Toluca, a big town west of Mexico City. We found a family to stay with on Warm Showers and met a group of three brothers. They took us to dinner and practiced their impeccable English. They loved pop-punk music and Quentin Tarantino movies. They said they were perfecting their English through watching television and movies. They said that this would get them good jobs in the hotel industry. They said we shouldn’t bike from their house into Mexico C
ity because it is too crowded and only freeways. We said warm goodbyes and cycled to the edge of town. From there, we hitchhiked in the bed of a truck into Mexico City.

  I began to sense the scale of Mexico City, more sprawling and populous by far than New York City. But what did it look like? I couldn’t picture a skyline. Or even a building. I conjured up the grimy streets from Man on Fire, the Denzel Washington movie with child kidnapping and car chases racing through the city. It is strange to know a place’s name so well, to know something about it, and to have almost no image of it in your mind.

  The Mexican Altiplano had changed my tune about this country. The baking misery of Baja was a memory. This was a paradise. As an American, my assumptions about Mexico were formed in ignorance. I assumed the country was a dry, dusty desert populated by cacti and big hats and U-shaped horses and sun-baked clay homes. And then maybe Cancún—jungles, white sand, and embarrassing tourist traps. It never crossed my mind that the center of the country could possibly look different or have its own benefits. I didn’t think about it. I just filled in the blanks with drug cartels and heads in bags. And yes, I had been stranded by a cartel, sure, but somehow I couldn’t agree with my mom.

  Take, for example, the chain of towns called Pueblos Mágicos, onetime colonial settlements that run through the mountains of central Mexico and elsewhere. Each town is Spanish by design, built to remind the colonists of their homeland and paid for by the king’s gold (much of it heisted from the Aztecs and Mayas). At the center of each town is a massive cathedral and square. These beautiful relics, still very much alive and bustling with life, are far older than anything in the United States. They feel so completely European that their proximity to the United States comes as a shock. You look up at one of those buildings, and some subconscious association between European architecture and distance causes your mind to assume jet lag and time-zone adjustments. But all of these towns are in the same time zones as the United States. When I walked the streets of Morelia, I thought of how absurd it was that no one I know had ever been there.