by Noe Alvarez
What am I doing with my life?
30
Santo Coyote
Guadalajara, México. Roughly 4,500 miles from Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, where I started.
Chula Pepper lifts her head from the side of the street, where she’s been vomiting. Passersby look almost judgingly at her. They seem to know even before she does that she is pregnant.
We runners go inside the five-star Santo Coyote Restaurant—an adobe structure like that of the Flintstones’, carrying a mixed atmosphere of New Mexican mysticism, Sioux and Navajo culture. The place is almost cartoonish, housing collectors’ items like peace pipes, statues, animal fur, and high-end tequila. Totem poles and palm trees adorned with dream catchers stand in a lush garden. Wicker lanterns hang like glowing beehives over our dinner tables. Chiseled into the walls are Egyptian and Hindu figures, tribal chieftains, and framed images of Catholic saints. A playland of commercialized culture.
Pacquiao, a mentor to Chula Pepper, sits privately with her to discuss next steps.
From Santo Coyote, we run sixty miles through streets vibrant with cafés, art galleries, and scented with orchid, ceiba, and tabachín del monte flowers that are bursting over walls like cotton candy forgotten there by children. It is the expat town of Ajijic in Lake Chapala in the state of Jalisco. Here we are received by local artists. We set down our feathered staffs after closing Circle. Some of us take a walk to the pier that overlooks the great Lake Chapala, a lake slowly choked off by the growth of lotus and green foliage. On its banks are swarms of herons. An occasional water snake slithers into the tangle of vegetation. Cheeto, Andrec, Zyanya Lonewolf, and I stroll through the outdoor markets, inspect merchandise, appreciate some art, and buy water and snacks.
We engage in an effort to see with new eyes—with our feet—in a movement that is something like friction and capturing our feelings of isolation, displacement, even exile.
When we return to the café where we will sleep, Chula Pepper announces to the group her departure from the run. She is leaving to let her body prepare for motherhood. She wants to raise her baby alone, because, she says, “I do not want my kid to have a false sense of a father figure.”
What an enchanting place, Lake Chapala, to conclude the run, I think to myself.
31
Hardware Store
My father is always occupied in work, and when he pauses he teaches me his work of landscaping, home repair, and basic construction. Between the orchards, we often visited the hardware store together after hauling some trash or other from worksites to the dump in nearby Terrace Heights.
The thing that always hit me most about the store was the smell. Mulch and plywood. A smell to contrast that of the orchards. I followed him through the aisles, learning his trade at an early age, observing him sift his fingers over things like boxes of nails and fasteners, feeling, reading, and inspecting his way around. It was as if he was envisioning in his mind the things he would repair or construct without much understanding of the English language. The door, window frame, a fence, or rooftop he would install or repair.
He would point and say things like, “Find me a two and a half,” and I would jump at the opportunity to help him, copying the same motions as his, painting my fingers over nail boxes, inspecting and absorbing the magic not only of the place, but of my father’s tracks. I knew even then, deep in my heart, that when my father passes, I can become reacquainted with him in places such as these hardware stores.
He inspects the lumber boards, evaluates their cut, reads their grain to determine integrity. “Place them in the cart,” he tells me.
I do so proudly, laying the wood, no matter that splinters lodge in my fingers.
In another area, there are doors on display on hinges. Before leaving the store, I quickly turn them like pages, pretend to walk through them into a different world.
32
Weaving Words
August 30. Morelia, Michoacán.
My knees immobilize me inside the bustling baroque city of Morelia, Michoacán, roughly 310 miles north of my father’s hometown of La Cruz de Campos. Street vendors, cobblestone streets, grand architecture, folkloric festivals, verdant plazas, tropical gardens, and water fountains abound in all directions here in Morelia. Here, the run takes a rest among the locals in one of the central gardens where large plumes of copal smoke smudge the air. A group of spinning danzantes clears a path like whirls of air and magnetize a crowd. I sit this one out on a bench, in pain, too stubborn to call it quits. Families and children gather around, corn on the cob, chips, and candy in their hands.
It is on this day that I am taken to the Morelia hospital. Large liquid pockets have formed around my knees, and they are choking off circulation to my knees. If I don’t quit, I could suffer permanent damage to my knees, the doctor tells me.
“Why are you running?” the doctor asks me.
“Corro por mi familia.” For my family, I tell him.
He looks at me. I’m prescribed painkillers and sent on my way.
While the runners go away to tackle steep hillsides in Pátzcuaro, I am comfortably housed and fed in the city, treated in a candlelit room in a place of worship where alternative-medical practitioners drain my swollen knees with needles. I learn that some of them hold high positions of influence in the city, that they are lawyers, businessmen, artists.
One of these men is Helvio, a political refugee, writer, and philosopher from Uruguay. He invites me to rest in his home—partly converted into a bookstore. He spends his days among corridors of bookshelves, taking breaks to smoke his pipe on a chair on the sidewalk.
Helvio and I speak about the ache of exile, feelings of isolation, and what it might mean to stand up for what one believes.
“Writing can be a medium for spiritual awareness, social justice,” he says. “Change can be activated in a society by way of story.”
He tells me that because of his refusal to keep quiet, his stories, activism, he was ousted from the only home he ever knew: Uruguay.
“If you create words and repeat them enough, they can elicit change.” He knocks his pipe against his foot and reloads it with tobacco. “Our words,” he says, “must be hurled with precision.”
For me, the language of PDJ has been in our feet. Like language, running creates us and holds us accountable to the world around us—committing our own bodies to every inch of earth across our North American journey.
Every time a person opens their mouth, that person re-creates himself. Running invites us to reimagine our future—where running is used to reestablish unity with others. This is why running stories are timeless. We are what we imagine, according to the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday. And if we imagine a better future, and speak it with words and the soles of our feet, we just might see it come to fruition.
33
The Flying Men of Teotihuacán
The PDJ run also traces the origin story of the Aztecs—an ancient people who left their mythical homeland of Aztlán (located somewhere in northwest Mexico) after the revelation of a prophecy, in pursuit of a new place to settle. They embarked on a two-hundred-year journey, wandering and establishing communities along the way, into Lake Chapala in Jalisco, Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, and many others, until finally anchoring themselves in the place where the prophecy was said to come to life—an eagle that perched itself on a cactus tearing its talons into a snake. It is now the emblem on the Mexican flag. Where the Aztecs founded their capital of Tenochtitlán stands on present-day Mexico City. In their many years of wandering, they adapted their name to Mexica, which gave rise to the name Mexico.
Mexico City is a monster. Six-, seven-, eight-lane traffic. A free-for-all driving atmosphere where pedestrians do not have the right of way. The traffic lights turn red and homeless children scramble out from under bridges with water bottles and dirty rags in hand. They make the rounds through traffic and encircle vehicles, our van included. Sickly children step onto the front tires and clean the windows.
I observe one boy in particular as he wipes our van’s windows with a rag. His eyes are on me. Here we are. Two Latino extremes. Me, inside, the privileged traveler. He, outside. Coins are handed over, and the children retreat when the flow of traffic resumes. This reality is hard to get used to.
When we run, hopping onto edges, skirting large vehicles, trying not to get swept into the stream of cars, I hold my staff up high, hoping to signal cars behind me of my presence. We enter underpasses at our own peril, sucking in thick plumes of diesel fumes, and dodging pedestrian traffic like soccer players. I blow black snot rockets from all the smog. It’s a miracle that some of us find our markers at all. This is the chaos that we try to navigate.
Again and again, runners are dropped off at intervals while another van tries desperately to relocate us for pickup. The task of standing out in a crowd is difficult. But we do our best. At times, we move faster than the vans held up in traffic. Unable to wait for pickup sometimes, we take on more miles, run and run until we cannot go any longer, until the vans come for us.
Later, the staffs are set onto blankets on the ancient grounds near the Templo Mayor, the epicenter of everything Mexican. Here also is Mexico’s presidential palace. Vendors bustle with activity in the Zócalo—an island of concrete. I wander off during Ceremony toward the Metropolitan Cathedral. It’s askew and sinking due to the soft soil. A soil that will one day consume us all.
I then wander into an old bookstore, peruse the Spanish books, buy a newspaper and read it in one of the portales on a gritty corner overlooking the Zócalo. I buy a black coffee. It feels good to be seated among normal people, to feel part of society again, despite the glances.
Crow investigates a commotion happening between Tlaloc and a woman who surprise-visited him in Mexico City. She’s yelling at him, striking and slapping him, then chasing him through the streets while he ducks for cover. Later, Tlaloc approaches Crow while she orders tacos from a street vendor to tell her that he loves only her.
“But wasn’t that your girlfriend?” she asks, having heard from the other runners.
“No. Not anymore,” he answers her. “I just broke up with her.”
At a ceremonial gathering at the ruins of Teotihuacán, northeast of Mexico City, a group of Indigenous men, voladores of the Totonac Nation, climb a hundred-foot pole where they then tie themselves to ropes and swing down in circular motion like buzzards over prey. It is an ancient ceremonial practice. Four men swinging in the sky outstretch their arms like many crucified Christs. A fifth man sits at the apex and plays a flute. I cannot imagine the feeling. When the men finally reach bottom, they extend the rope to us. One of them is an elderly man, in his seventies. I decline the invitation.
Something about the flight of these men reminds me of a day when I was a child, and my uncle, Gonzalo, my father’s brother, was visiting. I noticed a large crow perched on the low part of a tree in an orchard in Yakima. Gonzalo, seated in the car next to me, encouraged me to grab it despite my father’s warnings that the bird was sick and dying. But Gonzalo was older. He nudged me. I got out of the car, stepped up into the tree and reached for the crow. It did not resist. I spent the rest of the day playing with my new friend. I walked everywhere with the crow perched on my arm, introducing it to the orchard grounds. I combed the grass for worms and tried feeding it. But it ate very little. I picked and bit parts of apples and tried feeding it this way. No appetite. As the day progressed, I tried encouraging it to fly, but it wouldn’t. It lacked the will to fly. When the workday came to an end and the men packed into the car again, I perched the crow onto my wrist and walked with it to the car.
“Noé. Let it go,” my dad commanded.
Gonzalo agreed. “It wants to die. Let it die in the trees, where it belongs.”
I knew at the time that they were right, but didn’t want to believe that my bird was dying. Maybe it could be saved, if just given the chance. I left it on a branch and walked back to the car. It never settled right with me, this idea that things can want to die.
This evening, Trigger and Tlaloc call for a vote to eliminate a few runners, including me, from the run. Everyone is tense.
“We believe there are runners here not honoring the ways of our ancestors. They consume our food, take up space, and are unwilling to run the mileage,” Trigger begins. “They don’t honor the ways of the run.”
“It’s a hard truth to face: The run is not for everyone. We hang on longer than we should. We don’t want to go home when we should. But it’s a difficult choice for everyone. These runners stay and suck the spirit out of the run,” Tlaloc adds.
Cheeto, Andrec, myself, and others are named. We defend one another. I disclose all that Trigger has done wrong. I call him out on his flaws, his abuse of power, how he contaminates the run with gang philosophy, and is someone who cannot be trusted. In solidarity, Cheeto brings attention to Tlaloc’s own acts. Circle quickly spirals into a heated shouting match between runners, who hold nothing back.
Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, Zyanya Lonewolf announces her resignation from the run. The problems on the run have reached new heights, she says, and she does not want to bear the weight any longer. Circle adjourns, and later in the evening, Trigger and Tlaloc follow me back to the van when I’m alone. They close the van door, trapping me inside.
In the face of their threats to watch my back, I fear even more for my safety.
Later that evening, I climb up the Sun Pyramid, and sit overlooking the sunset. I reflect on what was said to me. The power of their words has cut me open, and I am forced to confront what I’ve have known all along—that I am living in an illusion and that my time on the run is soon coming to an end.
34
Descending Eagle
We run to the burial ground of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc (“Descending Eagle”), in Santa Maria de la Asunción Church overlooking the beautiful town of Ixcateopan, in Guerrero. Like many Mexican towns, the place is fashioned in the colonial style of its Spanish conquerors, laid with cobblestone roads, white adobe structures, and red-tiled roofs extending from here to the neighboring silver-mining town of Taxco.
We settle inside the church to have Ceremony around a glass ossuary of the Aztec emperor. The bones are said to have been recovered from under the church—one of the many tactics of psychological warfare employed by the Spanish conquistadores to erase any memory of Indigenous revolt was by building churches over sacred grounds.
“His people never gave up searching,” Cheeto tells me. In many ways the Mexican people still search for him. “They never believed that he had abandoned them.”
We reflect on what Pacquiao had said about how there’s a long history of oppression, a history that often feels like it has seeped into the land, and how part of the work of running is to be able to uncover that and break that up. So that “violence doesn’t get incorporated any further into our cultures, getting passed down like a hereditary gene,” Pacquiao said.
“We’re all responsible for taking care of one another,” Cheeto adds. “Healing through culture, healing in a way that is grounded in identity.”
“That’s the ceremony of running,” Andrec concludes.
35
Oaxaca
The harsh elements appear to relent roughly 5,600 miles from Prince George, B.C., Canada, in the state of Oaxaca where our run breezes along the coastline. The air is sweet and it whips our sweat from us. Our stay is fairly short in this state, and we take resting points along the Pacific Ocean. One such stop is under straw ramada.
It’s customary to gather for Circle after a run, before laying the staffs to rest. On this particular day the gathering of people is large. We’re into our third hour of Circle. Many of us runners are shifting our weight, shaking the pain throbbing in our knees, and salivating over the abundance of food getting cold on a nearby table that the community has set with beans, rice, tortillas, and tamales. It is brutal to watch the food get cold.
Like a house
hold of siblings, we eye the food we’ll get to first. I eye the tamales, imagining the flavors of my mom’s home cooking.
“Look at those frijolitos.” Cheeto leans toward me, as desperate to savor the food as I am. “Are those chicharrones?”
Despite the fairly consistent rhythm of eating twice a day, before and after the run, we still often fight hunger, what feels like kicks to the stomach and head. It causes us lightheadedness, grumpiness. Fatigue. Division. We become ravenous animals with short fuses. But this, some say, is the warrior way, and to people like Trigger, some of us are not suffering enough. “The ceremony of Sun Dance is in pain,” he often says.
We dash to the table after Closing Ceremony, pack our plates, and indulge in food until we get stomachaches. In moments like these, the tongue becomes hyperaware of taste, savoring everything as if for the first time. The fatty oils are especially fatty, it seems, after a long run. The salts especially salty.
After filling our bellies, some of us rest on hammocks under the ramada, others plop straight onto the sand itself. This part of the coast seems unperturbed by tourists or even locals. Silence under an ocean wind. The best kind. The water is shallow, low tide, and for several hundred feet, Cheeto, Andrec, Chenoa, Refugio, and I walk into the horizon toward a red sun. We dip ourselves into the temperate waters, nourishing ourselves with the minerals. A single raft is moored on the sand, wedged between water and soil. It rocks over the nudging water like a baby’s crib.
I dip my fingers into this holy water and think about my father when he too squatted as a boy over the edge of the Pacific Ocean, coming from La Cruz de Campos, Michoacán, to cast iguanas into the water and hunt for crabs. When he tracked the edge for turtle eggs while his stomach burned with hunger. A lot has happened since that time. My father has come a long way, and now it is my duty to go farther. And the kids after me, even farther. I step into these waters as if to cast my own body into its whole memory of life and death. As if to let the water know whose son I am. To ask it to release us of any ill will, for any past wrongs our family may have inflicted onto the cosmos, and to let us grow. Here, I ask the water for forgiveness. To wash me of the pain passed down from father to father to son to brother.