by Randy Denmon
We were charging, though minimally. I didn’t really feel like staying in underwhelming Matehuala another night. We’d go to San Luis Potosí the next morning and try to find a better source of current. At least we’d be out of the desert and into the more densely populated areas.
I looked at the late-day sun and sighed as I started to realize how difficult this might be. Had the first day been the exception? It would likely take all of our creative juices and ad-libbing to keep the sleek, high-tech machine moving south every day.
Inspecting the hotel, I eerily noticed we were one of only three or four guests, and the only foreigners. The night before, I had done some internet research on the Las Palmas Inn, finding a trove of pictures with dozens of American RVs lined up at the once-popular stop. Obviously, those days were gone. As I had witnessed on the road earlier in the day, almost nobody, Mexican or American, traversed this route anymore. Vacationers pouring south to enjoy Mexico’s treasures and treats were other victims of the drug war. I plucked an orange off a tree on the hotel’s lawn, peeled it, and began to eat. Now this was foraging.
Out of the Desert and Into the Tropics
I was up early the next morning. My alarm clock: Matehuala’s roosters. I took a shower and plucked two disgusting gray hairs from my bangs. So far, the digestive tract had been fine, but the previous evening I had eaten my first prepared food on the trip, some fried cheese sticks from the hotel restaurant. I felt fine, but I was no rookie to Mexico, and my stomach was likely more delicate than Dean’s. When south of the border, I never stop wondering before I put anything in my mouth: Will this give me the runs?
Since the hotel had Wi-Fi, I briefly passed over my email. The world had not stopped rotating without me. Somehow, my email account had been tagged in the computer universe, and my daily list of spam included a rather risqué email from Playboy, complete with full-body portraits of hot, unclad women. Of course, I delete this trash every day, but as with all spam, it’s appropriate protocol to open it first and briefly scan the contents before deleting, just to make sure it is indeed spam, and not something important I need to address. Attention to detail is a key to success in any occupation.
Dean walked into my room, dressed and ready for a 7:00 a.m. departure. He looked no worse for the wear, back on his feet from the mild bout of stomach tumbling.
I stepped out and inspected the car, shaking my head. “I thought you were going to scrub that fake paint off the car last night? What’d you do, take a nap instead?”
“Me? … You told me you’d do the washing. After you screwed up the charging yesterday, I guess you decided to muddle up the washing too. I sure hope you weren’t up all night finding another country paradise like this for us to enjoy tomorrow night.”
“Whatever. We ain’t got time to worry with it now. Let’s get on the road.”
In no time, we happily said goodbye to Matehuala, hopefully never to return. If they have rednecks in Mexico, this would likely be an ideal gathering spot.
Under overcast skies and with Dean behind the wheel, we yearned for straight, flat tarmac. The hasty charging the previous evening didn’t go as well as I’d thought, but we had 169 miles of range to go the 133 miles to San Luis Potosí.
In Mexico, when you leave town, and I mean almost exactly at the city line, the cell phone service ends abruptly. Not what you want when headed out across a barren desert hosting a war between the Federales and drug cartels with little spare juice in the tank.
The landscape was again scrubby, a few little towns polluted with trash, the people seemingly living hand to mouth, a testament to people’s struggle for survival at the most fundamental level. But on the open road, North America’s second largest desert appeared to be one of the few places on the continent barely impacted by humans, the scrub, yucca, and Joshua trees stretching beyond the horizon. Just south of Matehuala, we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. We were now officially in the tropics.
We plowed along bravely, surveying the emptiness, the only sight a bad wreck in the middle of the road that probably had no survivors, a ’60s Volkswagen Beetle, upside down and mangled. This area of the desert, known as the Bolsón de Mapimí, has long been a no-man’s-land and haven for bandits. The huge, barren basin, spanning several hundred miles in all directions, is bounded by mountains and without rivers. Unwanted by the Spanish because of its lack of minerals or arid land, it was once the haunt of Comanches fleeing the Texas Rangers.
• • •
This isolated stretch of road is the site where, in 2011, US Homeland Security agent Jaime Zapata was killed by one of the cartels as he drove south to Mexico City in a suburban. His partner, Víctor Ávila, shot twice in the leg, lived to tell the chilling story.
Out of nowhere, two SUVs raced up behind the Americans, one storming past them. The two SUVs, filled with a dozen machine gun-armed men, fired away and rammed the Americans off the road. Eighty-three spent casings were found at the scene. In the mayhem, the agents tried to explain that they were American agents.
One of the assailants yelled, “Me vale madre.” Translation: “I don’t give a fuck.”
Ávila likely survived because the American suburban was armored. The gun hands, later caught, confessed that they did not know who was in the car. They simply wanted the tricked-out suburban. We didn’t have any armor. No wonder I’d become a pack-a-day smoker in just a few days.
• • •
We only suffered through one Federale stop where they waved us through without correspondence—the policía only worried about the long northbound line. But twenty miles later, a federal policeman pulled us over, lights flashing. Mexican cops swooping in on you, especially on a vacant road and from out of nowhere, is an unsettling experience. A few antsy seconds passed as the officer walked to the car.
With an empty stare, neither hostile nor friendly, the gentleman asked about the paint on the flashy car.
“Tourista,” Dean said from behind the wheel, playing dumb. “Norte Americano, we go to Veracruz.”
The officer turned to me, then the painted fender again. A few seconds passed and he handed Dean his passport and driver’s permit. “Bueno.”
Dean smiled at me. “I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, but playing dumb seems to work better than that combination of broken Spanish mixed with your country-ass accent. That only confuses them.”
Late in the morning, as we drove through a light drizzle, the GPS and range meter told us we’d make it into San Luis Potosí with fifty miles to spare. Out of nowhere, the city popped up out of the desert. Here, isolation transitions into a dense urban landscape quickly. As soon as we reached the city line, my cell phone rang. There’s no escape, I thought, and didn’t answer as I looked for street signs. The night before, I’d done some internet research. Most of the city’s western hotels were in the southeast quarter of town.
In no time, we found ourselves tangled in some road construction, north- and southbound lanes creeping along over a single dirt road. Ironically, we got stuck behind a two-wheeled cart pulled by a donkey for almost a mile. What a contrast—the Tesla waiting on the donkey.
Though Dean had refrained from video recording all day as he drove the open, almost vacant road, now as we bumped over construction joints, weaved around dumptrucks, backhoes, and oncoming traffic, he decided it was time to videorecord the donkey!
“Give me that camera,” I scoffed, “If you have to film that old mule, let me do it.”
Dean moved the camera to his left hand and out of reach. “No, you’ll screw it up like the paint washing.”
As if he needed some more distractions, Dean spoke to the camera, “Randy hates it when I drive and film.”
I pulled out a piece of Nicorette gum, trying to extract it from its little tin container. The wrapper is a disaster, designed like a Pentecostal preacher might fashion a chastity belt for his daughter. If any of the gum rubs against the metal or cellophane package, everything gets mushed together and you can’t get the metal out of
the gum. After twiddling with the gum over the bumpy road for a few minutes, I threw the entire contraption out the window and grabbed a cigarette. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts.
Somehow, we made it through the construction without a mishap and in a few minutes were cruising the Avenida Benito Juárez that housed a couple dozen hotels ranging from upper-end establishments, like the Holiday Inn, to bottom-end shanties not fit for convicts. The area had a Walmart, Pizza Hut, and three nice strip clubs (none of the latter for us—the State Department mentioned they were hangouts for drug lords and carjackers). Mexico and the States do have a few things in common.
Despite three passes, and me going in and looking at four different hotels, we found no place to charge the car in more than an hour of determined searching. Frustration setting in, we pulled into the Hotel Maria Dolores. Tired of beating around the bush, I asked if they would show me all the rooms. Walking the hotel with one of the clerks, I found a room with a window AC unit and an exterior socket, 240 volts. “Perfecto,” I said.
I purchased the night without even checking the rate. Pulling around to the room, I plugged in the Tesla’s charging adapter and got a green light. I set the charge rate to 18 amps and calculated that the car would be fully charged by nine the next morning.
Whoa, I thought, apprehension setting in. This was getting tough. We were in a town of almost a million people, and it had taken hours to find adequate power. Charging was certainly going to require some unabashed improvisation.
I looked at the flashing green lights on the Tesla’s adapter again. Getting the car plugged in and charging at an adequate rate five hundred miles south of the border probably feels something akin to a drug addict getting another hit.
The Riddle of Mexico
Having the afternoon available, Dean and I found time for our first recreation of the trip. Including the twelve-hour trip to McAllen, our four days had been taxing. To my disappointment, the days had been long and exhausting as we crossed four Mexican states. The slow driving, the cumbersome time spent finding a charge, planning for the next day, taking care of emails and calls, and trying to write left little time for sleeping, much less sightseeing. The trip had been all-consuming, but with it a splendid break from our world up north and a sense that we were engaged in something meaningful.
After we spent an hour washing the paint off the car, I changed my pants for the first time since we started. We then took a cab to the center of San Luis Potosí. Perched on a high, dry plateau, it is a lovely four hundred-year-old colonial gem founded to exploit the nearby silver and gold mines. For an hour, Dean and I wandered the tight, cobblestone streets packed with Friday evening pedestrians without seeing a single American.
As the sun waned, I drank my first beer of the trip from the second story of a café overlooking the beautiful Plaza de Armas and wonderful, towering cathedral. We snacked on some cheese fries, or at least what had arrived at the table after I ordered French fries covered in cheese—more like potato chips with cheese in a bowl. Must be a Southern thing.
As I sipped my beer, below in the plaza several thousand of the city’s residents mingled, happily, looking as if they had not a care in the world, as they’d probably done here for hundreds of years.
The scene reminded me of my fondness for this mesmerizing country. One of the joys of the trip would be seeing much of Latin America up close and personal, off the beaten track and away from tourist spots filled with foreigners that give little hint of the people or places hidden away from the five-star hotels. We were on a voyage that can’t be booked by a travel agent, something sought by so many but rarely undertaken.
While Mexico shares a continent and border of almost two thousand miles with the United States, few pairs of bordering countries in the world differ more. Our southern neighbor’s land, people, climate, customs, and history are more similar to nations on the other side of the planet than anything most Americans experience every day. It’s a land as exotic as anywhere in the world.
What’s happened in the last decade with the drug cartels and the significantly increased violence can make Mexico’s admirers cry. I keep abreast of the drug war, and am something of an amateur expert. I lived in Mexico in the late 1990s, not as a tourist, but as a contractor for PEMEX, the state-owned oil company. I worked closely with the people and many aspects of the government, I know how the place works.
It still amazes me how quickly the security situation here has devolved. Anything you know about the country that’s eight or nine years old can be disregarded. Ten or fifteen years ago, I felt much safer in Mexico than the United States. In all but the most impoverished areas, I felt comfortable wandering the streets alone at all hours of the night.
How this peaceful land of joyous fiestas and sun-splashed plazas morphed into armed militias, torture chambers, and chopped-off heads is a complicated story. It’s even more intriguing when you consider it happened in a stable, democratic country on the doorstep of the world’s only superpower, and in a nation that, at least on a world scale, is rich.
It’s a lesson in what happens when petty kickbacks, extortion, and trading crimes for bribes (paying your taxes as it’s known locally) is woven into the government’s fabric. When a rotten system like that is suddenly injected with billions of illegal dollars, things can spin out of control quickly. The cartels’ deeds make the crimes of the American mafia, even in its heyday, seem like schoolboy fisticuffs, and the American public is still relatively naïve about this.
When seventy innocent people are executed in San Fernando, only eighty-five miles south of Brownsville, it only makes the back pages of the largest US newspapers.
Before the drug lords consummated the mass murder in San Fernando, they raped the women, then passed out weapons and forced the condemned men to fight each to the death in a sadistic death-sport similar to gladiator matches in ancient Rome.
British journalist Ioan Grillo who has lived in Mexico for more than ten years has written what I consider the best account of the last hideous decade, El Narco. It’s a page-turner. Ioan’s research determined the current fee in Mexico to have someone gunned down is a paltry eighty-five dollars!
Most of Mexico seems to be a contradiction. How can parts of the country be so idyllic and charming while just down the road, often in broad daylight, government forces and heavily armed gangs battle in a daily life-and-death struggle?
I’m often spellbound by this country. Like a rose, it shows off its beauty surrounded by thorns. Eighty years ago, Graham Greene wrote:
Mexico disappoints—a town seems fine in the evening, and then in daylight the corruptions seep through, the road peters out, the muleteer doesn’t show up, the great man on acquaintance becomes strangely muted, and when you get to the gigantic ruins you are too tired to see them.
In many ways, this rings true today. In the last few decades, a true middle class has emerged, and much of the nation’s extreme poverty has been vanquished. But Mexico still falls far short of its promise. Few places have more natural resources or physical beauty. The country is the tenth-largest producer of oil in the world, just one example of its wealth, but it lacks almost any social safety net. Class mobility remains difficult. Unlike most of the western world, this is a country where wealth secludes itself far from the road.
Though great strides have been made, it is still very difficult for western business practices and companies to flourish here. Centuries of foreign exploitation have resulted in a Mexican constitution that puts much stricter restraints on citizenship and property ownership than most democratic countries. Paranoia from foreigners’ past misbehavior still resonates in the Mexican psyche.
Still, I could sit here for hours and watch the streets teeming with chaos and the constant pushing and shoving in a world where few norms restrict human endeavors. Almost anything goes, almost anything can be bought or bartered, and you are generally on your own to fail or succeed.
This country is a riddle. Eye-tearing injustices
sit alongside abundant, smiling eyes and warm greetings that surpass anything in the American South. The cities contain architectural treasures and ancient ruins that rival those of Greece, although you often have to travel down dirt roads festooned with garbage to see them. But unlike America, where everything is beginning to look and act alike, Mexico is a land of perpetual discovery. I truly haven’t decided if I envy or pity the inhabitants.
Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican president for thirty years at the end of the nineteenth century, summed up the country and its relationship with its neighbor to the north: Poor Mexico—so far from God and so close to the United States.
In front of the church, a Mexican rock band was setting up a giant stage in the plaza. I wish we could have stayed until the wee hours, drinking too much tequila and wallowing in the nightlife, but we needed to get back to the hotel.
The charging situation at the Hotel Maria Dolores hadn’t been as good as I’d initially thought, raising my anxiety level. After the first hour of charging at 18 amps, we’d blown the hotel room’s 240-volt breaker. I’d found the breaker and reset it, lowering the charging rate to 16 amps. All looked good before our brief respite on the town, but I wanted to get back to the hotel and check on the car. Maybe we’d get a full charge tonight, and get back on the road so we could get to experience more of Mexico’s better side on our glorious trip into a world few westerners experience.
Ancient Mexico
That Friday night the Hotel Maria Dolores hosted a party that included hundreds of Mexican toddlers. As I ate breakfast the next morning, the fifty or so cute, curious faces of the kids playing in the café restored my faith in Mexico and its future.
Our tank full of kilowatts, we left by nine o’clock. Today’s trip would be our first real taste of the feared mountains as we planned to skirt around the northeast side of Mexico City to the domain of the Toltecs and their ancient ruins. How would these hills affect the Tesla? We’d surely spend the day anxiously watching the range meter and our rearview mirrors for SUVs racing ahead, but it was Saturday. I wouldn’t have to spend the evening returning calls and emails!