The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  “We miss the gringos, man,” he says wistfully when he drops us off. “They all left, like the Mayas did.”

  Pink flamingos swim in the fountain outside the Agua Caliente Racetrack on the night of the dog races. See, Tijuana indulges America’s upscale fantasies too. It is our Larry Flynt and our Robin Leach. Eighty years ago the Agua Caliente’s casino was a great gringo mecca—“a dazzling, dream-like city,” in the words of a pilgrim from Vogue. Its owners came to Old Mexico and built . . . Europe.

  The casino was constructed in 1928, pre-Vegas. The chandeliers were imported from Italy. The columns were made of marble. Designer shops had a UN roll call of fashion. (You could take $100 worth of stuff back across the border legally. You smuggled the rest.) In his book Satan’s Playground, Paul J. Vanderwood notes that the owners boasted that the Agua Caliente was built in the shadow of an ancient Spanish fort. This was horseshit, but there was a certain glamour in the image of a Spanish don leaning on the craps table. The casino’s motto was “Agua Caliente, where all nations meet and speak the tongue of happiness.”

  A San Diego pensioner could feel like a rich man at Agua Caliente. Charlie Chaplin hung out there. Howard Hughes was photographed at the racetrack. Will Rogers played cards at the grandly named Monte Carlo across town, and Tijuana’s top-ranked bordello was called the Moulin Rouge.

  Lured by a fat purse, Seabiscuit outran an overmatched field at Agua Caliente’s horse track. So did studs like Phar Lap and Round Table. By 1929, Tijuana’s promoters—imagine Mark Cuban with fewer legal controls—were staging an annual $100,000 handicap, dwarfing the purse at the Kentucky Derby.

  The grand old Agua Caliente was closed by Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas in 1935 and later turned into a school. The new Agua Caliente, owned by Mexican oligarch Jorge Hank Rhon, is your basic, utilitarian casino. The drug war cleared the place of Americans: Naim Lajud Libien, director of the dog track, tells us that 5 percent of the clientele are from the north. I’d heard of one absurdly upscale touch, however. I’d heard Hank kept a private zoo on the premises.

  Naim smiles. “Mammals, birds, what do you want?”

  He boasts that Hank’s menagerie rivals Noah’s. “We have tigers. Lions. An ostrich. A giraffe.”

  “. . . kangaroos, macaws . . .”

  “. . . peacocks, panthers . . .”

  “. . . jaguars . . .”

  “. . . camels, buffaloes . . .”

  “. . . bears—black, grizzly . . .”

  “. . . focas. How do you say that? Seals . . .”

  “Come with me,” Naim says. He leads us behind the first turn of the dog track, not 100 feet from where greyhounds will run. We see lions and white tigers—five, six, maybe seven of them—prowling listlessly in a chain-link cage. My notes end here. Naim hurries us away—this is just a “preview.” You’ve got to be a high roller with a reservation to see camels, buffaloes, kangaroos, macaws . . .

  Tijuana, you might have heard, is frightening. Americans cross the border for this too. They don’t want to be robbed or murdered, but they get a kick out of walking mean streets where such a thing happened to someone else. If you’re scoring at home, Tijuana is our Larry Flynt and our Robin Leach and it’s also our Freddy Krueger.

  The Tijuana Racetrack opened in 1916, five years after the city was captured by rebels in the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, the Revolution led to a loud scream of panic in the United States, what historian Ricardo Romo called the “Brown Scare.” For decades after, tales of murderers and pickpockets rippled through the Revo—some real, some the product of the hyper gringo imagination. You cross the border into Mexico and your sense of security melts away.

  “There’s a kind of mysteriousness about Mexico,” says the historian Paul Vanderwood. “But even more than that, a kind of unpredictability. You never know quite where you’re at, quite what’s going to happen, you don’t quite speak the language . . .

  “Entrepreneurs didn’t really want to clean up Tijuana,” he adds. “They may announce once in a while, ‘We’re going to do this and that.’ But they want to leave that ‘what’s going to happen next?’ kind of atmosphere.”

  The drug war sent Tijuana’s danger from a semiromantic, Touch of Evil variety to a full-on, Faces of Death freak-out. The bodies piled up in 2008, when two lieutenants in the Tijuana Cartel vied for control of the city. They were El Teo (Teodoro García Simental) and the Engineer (Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano). The Freddy-versus-Jason battle was a typical narco debate—the mutilated body as message. (A typical note, left atop eight headless, tongueless corpses: “Here you go Engineer.”) This created a grimly ironic situation at Camp Pendleton: U.S. Marines, who were deploying to the most dangerous cities in Iraq, were discouraged by their commander from going to Tijuana.

  The murder rate plummeted after El Teo’s capture in 2010, and Tijuana is now a relatively safe city. But as with the revolution, a forensic residue remains. “I don’t feel comfortable going sometimes,” Freddy Sandoval tells me. “I’ll just go and stay in my house.” For this fear we can thank the American cable news networks, which have taken a complicated, regionalized problem and used it to make all of Mexico look like a bloody slaughterhouse. One night Eric and I see a lonely hot dog salesman on the Revo. We can’t help but think the man’s fortunes have been crippled, in an absurd way, by both El Teo and Bill O’Reilly.

  But bloodstains are part of the reason Eric and I are here. We silently congratulate ourselves: we’ve made it to Tijuana. Narco Tijuana. Pull up a stool and hear a horror story. My friend, thank goodness you were not here two years ago, because a horrible thing happened at this very place. Have a drink and I’ll tell you . . .

  We return to the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame and gaze up at the bell tower. As befits the city of the “Dr. House” pharmacy, it turns out to be a copy. A bell tower like this one guarded the old Agua Caliente Casino. The city thought it might be nice to rekindle the memories (glamour! vice!) and then turn the building over to sports.

  Inside the Hall, we meet a man. He’s sixtyish, tall, and strongly built, with dyed black hair. “I’m in charge,” he says.

  This is Felipe Domínguez Cobo, the acting president of Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame. There are two cool things about Felipe. One is that he’s also in the Hall. We see pictures of him in tight basketball shorts. Point or shooting guard? I ask. “Shooting,” Felipe says, looking slightly wounded that I have to ask. The second cool thing is his nickname: El Caballo—The Horse. Felipe graciously pretends he doesn’t remember why his teammates started calling him El Caballo. “It was so long ago . . .”

  We’re high rollers here (actually, the only ones here), so El Caballo is going to take us to the secret parts of the Hall of Fame. He lifts a metal chain and we ascend a flight of stairs. Here, on the second floor, he points to an architectural model. “This is the future,” he says—a ground-level Hall straight out of Cooperstown. The reason, Felipe says, is that the old men and women enshrined in the tower can hardly make the climb.

  Next Felipe takes us up another flight of stairs. This is the really important room. The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame. The stuff below is just memorabilia gathered after an announcement in the newspaper. (That would explain Equipo Vikingos—they answered the ad.) This room contains the finest sportsmen and sportswomen Tijuana has ever produced.

  Look, it’s Macario Rayle Preciado, the lefty slugger who, his Hall bio notes, is one of the most disciplined players in Baja California baseball. And isn’t that grand old Jesús “Chucho” Peralta, the “father of bullfighting in Tijuana”? Miguel Ángel López, the professional wrestler known as Rey Misterio Sr., is here. His nephew Rey Jr. will be his tag-team partner someday—but you’ve got to be retired for five years to be considered for the Hall.

  Eric and I find the jai alai legend Dr. Juan Valdés Martínez, who stopped his career to pursue a life of the mind just as Robert Smith left the Vikings. The bodybuilder Beatriz de Regíl González, who in her bio is compared to a beautifu
l flower in Tijuana’s garden. There are expansive men like Benjamín Rendón Castrejón, a boxing judge, who says, “The sport of boxing is, to me, the philosophy of my life.” There are haunted men like Carlos Pérez Acosta, a golfer, who says, “My life has been tragic, I lost my wife and my son.”

  The only thing more touching than the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame’s membership is its waiting list. Each candidate is asked to send a sports résumé to El Caballo and the executive committee. The local martial artist Roberto Proo Mendoza sent in a whole book crammed with photos, news clips, and certificates of achievement from the World Hapkido Federation. He tacked on sixty-four addenda. The Hall had no choice but to admit Master Roberto in 2008.

  Now El Caballo takes us up a final flight of stairs. This is the fourth floor of the Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame, the top level of the bell tower. Only we see no bell here, just an old stereo system. The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame plays a recording that sounds across Zona Centro.

  To recap: Eighty years ago, Old Tijuana had a bell tower. It was built to convince Americans they were experiencing European luxury. Now we’re standing in a copy of that tower—a Xerox of a dream of Europe. This tower is used to celebrate sports history. Sports attracted vice-hungry Americans to Tijuana, until they stopped coming because of violence. However, that violence may now be at a point where, like the vision of Europe, it’s mostly a creation of the American mind. Finally, this bell tower plays a fake bell.

  The Tijuana Sports Hall of Fame may be the most perfect encapsulation of Tijuana ever built.

  After three days in Tijuana, Eric and I hail a cab on the Revo. We pop the trunk and see a well-worn wooden baseball bat lying inside.

  You play ball? I ask the cabbie.

  “That’s for the bad guys!” he says.

  We’re not sure if he’s kidding, but the three of us laugh together as we drive to the border.

  My friends, why are you leaving? No girls? Just a bunch of athletes? Sure, it’s okay. To each his own. You have seen a part of Tijuana. You have seen an even larger part, perhaps, of your gringo souls. Whatever else, my friends, you must promise me one thing. Okay? Promise me you’ll come back.

  KIMBERLY MEYER

  Holy City of the Wichitas

  FROM Ecotone

  AN OMPHALOS IS an ancient religious stone, hollow and often beehive-shaped, its surface intricately carved. The most famous one was discovered at the Temple of the Oracle, at Delphi, but similar objects have been found in Rome, Iraq, Egypt. According to the Greeks, Zeus sent two eagles across the earth to meet at the center of the world, and there the Greeks erected a stone, perhaps the world’s first omphalos, which they believed allowed them direct communication with the gods. The word means “navel.”

  In the Middle Ages, Jerusalem was considered an omphalos. To signify this designation, medieval cartographers frequently placed the Holy Land at the center of their maps of the world, where all the continents and rivers and seas met. These mappae mundi, while often adorned with precise geographic details, were attempts to represent an idea of God’s orderly creation more than they were depictions of the world as it actually existed. At the center of their picture of the idealized world—and the center of spiritual existence—was the place of the birth and death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

  The United States also has a navel. It’s called Oklahoma, located, one might be tempted to say, at the buckle of the Bible Belt. But what I didn’t know, until I lived in Oklahoma the first two years of my married life, is that America has a holy city as well. Ours is the Holy City of the Wichitas, a rusty red granite replica of ancient Jerusalem. It rises from the scrub-covered foothills of the Wichita Mountains, which are named, according to Native tradition, for the tribe whose ancestors were born from the rugged rocks.

  In the Wichita story of the first creation, Kinnekasus, “Man Never Known on Earth,” created all things. In the beginning, land hovered upon the water, and darkness was everywhere. Kinnekasus made a man and a woman, and afterward they dreamed of things, and when they woke, they had those things of which they had dreamed. The woman was given an ear of corn, and in her heart she knew that it was to be her food. But they were still in darkness. Then the man dreamed he should travel east and so he did, and in the east he found another man and together they made a bow and an arrow, which they used to shoot and wound a deer. A voice told them that they had done well, and now the darkness could move on, and time began. Later, the man and the woman themselves became the light. Woman, the moon. Man, the morning star. The man they had met in the east became Kinnihequidikidahis, “Star That Is Always Moving,” and set off to follow the wounded deer and all the others of the herd, a chase that would last until the end of days.

  When we married, my husband, Terry, was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. We were stationed at Fort Sill, near the base of these same mountains in southwestern Oklahoma, just north of the Red River and Texas. From time to time his unit would practice artillery warfare out in the desolate hills. They’d be gone for a week, no showers, eating prepackaged MREs, sleeping in their cramped Humvees when they could. Terry would come back with red dust rubbed deep into the lines of his palms, into the creases of his neck.

  One restless February, years after we had left Oklahoma and the army for Houston and civilian life, Terry and I returned to Fort Sill for the weekend with our daughters. We didn’t have enough money to go anywhere more exotic or enough vacation time to travel anywhere farther away. So we packed up our station wagon and drove north out of the Piney Woods of east Texas across the flat bottoms of the Red River under gray skies, in bitter winter. Cows in the fields bore the brunt of the cold wind, unbroken by any tree. Barbed wire fences anchored by cedar posts stretched off into the endless distance. Telephone poles like barren crucifixes lined our way.

  We stayed in Medicine Park in a small cobblestone cabin overlooking Medicine Creek, believed by the Wichitas as well as the other Plains Indians who came later—Kiowa, Comanche, Apache—to have healing powers. Not far from our cabin, Medicine Bluff loomed over the stream. This sheer precipice of rock is cleft from top to bottom by a jagged tear. In his 1875 account, The Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians, Thomas C. Battey, a schoolteacher stationed at the Wichita Agency in present-day Anadarko, Oklahoma, recorded “the old Indian legend of Medicine Bluffs.” Many years before, a group of Comanche traveling by horseback had arrived at the edge of the precipice and been forced to halt, unsure of how to proceed. But their medicine man, “uttering some words of Indian magic,” rode his horse over the cliff and was borne across the creek to the opposite bank. He turned back toward his companions, but they were too frightened to follow, and too arrogant to go around. “To relieve them from their unpleasant position,” Battey’s chronicle notes, the medicine man “crossed the creek, and rode directly up to the perpendicular wall of rock, which rent at his approach, dividing the bluff into two parts by forming a chasm through the cliff several feet in width, through and up which he rode, rejoining his companions at the top, who then followed him down through the pass thus made, now known as Medicine-man’s Pass.”

  According to Edward Charles Ellenbrook—lifelong resident of nearby Lawton, Oklahoma, adventurer, hiker, amateur historian, and author of Outdoor and Trail Guide to the Wichita Mountains of Southwest Oklahoma—native medicine men of various Plains tribes once climbed that escarpment for vigils. War parties came to the bluffs to fast and meditate before raids. Sometimes the sick or afflicted were carried to the top and laid within a circle of stones to be healed. How the sacred becomes the profane: we used to picnic here.

  Our cabin had a sleeping loft and at night the girls giggled and whispered up there after we turned off the lamps. I lay with Terry on the foldout couch downstairs and thought of the Wichitas’ story of the first man and woman, dreaming things into being which they would need. The moonlight illuminated the painting on the wall above our bed—a landscape in gaudy oils with buffalo on the horizon and, against a setting sun,
a quotation from Genesis: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

  Jerusalem has long been two cities, one literal and one metaphorical. It was the City of David, conquered by that poet-king, who brought the Ark of the Covenant there, and whose son Solomon built a temple for it. When that temple was destroyed by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II, around 586 B.C., and the Israelites were exiled, Jerusalem became a symbol of all that had been lost. It was the homeland to which the Jews longed one day to return. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy,” laments Psalm 137, dating from the time of Babylonian captivity.

  When the Jews finally did return to Jerusalem, seventy years later, they rebuilt their temple on the same site where it had formerly stood. The site of this temple, now known as the Temple Mount, encompasses some of the most contested real estate in the world today: the Western Wall, sole architectural remnant of the Second Jewish Temple; the Dome of the Rock, from which, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad ascended to heaven, accompanied by the angel Gabriel; and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—the tomb in the middle of the city in the middle of the world. That omphalos: the center of the center of the center.

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre had only recently been erected under the orders of Emperor Constantine when, in A.D. 333, an anonymous pilgrim made his way from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and wrote the earliest extant record of a Holy City pilgrimage. Like the sites he traveled so far to see, this brief Itinerarium itself became a precious relic worth preserving, a record of the beginnings of the great age of faith. Copied out by monks, three manuscripts remain, one each from the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Much later the manuscript was translated into English by Aubrey Stewart, Esq., for the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society in Victorian England. In his Itinerarium, the unknown author merely notes the towns and cities he passes through, and the distances in leagues between them, on his overland route across what was then the vast Roman Empire. Even in Jerusalem he does little more than list the sacred sites he visited: the house of the high priest Caiaphas with its scourging column “against which Christ was beaten with rods”; the Mount of Olives, where Jesus taught the disciples and where he prayed; a vault in which Lazarus, raised by the Lord, was supposed to have been laid. Over the centuries more sites and their associated relics would emerge, miraculously, it seems. By the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrims to Judea could visit countless places associated with Jesus’s birth and life and death and Resurrection: the field where the shepherds kept watch over their flocks; the manger, encased in white marble; the house of Simon the leper and of Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha; the muddy waters of the Jordan; the place near Mount Zion where Jesus broke bread during the Last Supper; the Rock of Calvary; the Stone of Unction; the empty Tomb. Pilgrims appear to have required “some visible and tangible evidence of our Lord’s Passion to confirm their faith,” writes Stewart, without irony. “For such persons the necessary aids to faith were provided in gradually increasing numbers.”