On the Road to Mexico, Part 4

We assist a child in defrauding the government

By the second day, everyone but the driver dozed.  Beyond the closed windows of our air-conditioned car Mexico unrolled, with her heat and dust and sun and churches and shacks and cactus and fields and cattle and flashes of preternaturally purple and scarlet flowers growing out of hard, dusty ground flickering dream-like between snatches of sleep. 

    At one point, on a hypnotizingly straight highway, I fell asleep while driving and went off the road, but it was one of those places where you could run off the road for quite a distance and not hit anything important.

Late in the evening of the second day we stopped at Tepic, south of Mazatlan.  As we sat in the restaurant a little Mexican boy, maybe ten years old, watched us and tried to get our attention.  When we left he came to our car and asked for our toll road receipts.  In Mexico, toll roads appear to me indistinguishable from any other sort of road, except for the presence of toll booths, where is collected some arbitrary amount bearing no discernible relation to the length or quality of the road.  It would appear, in fact, that these are just ordinary highways on which the government has erected toll stations.  And unlike traffic offenses, tolls are not negotiable.

    I gave the boy a handful of our toll receipts, thinking to myself how the poor lad must be collecting receipts in lieu of stamps or baseball cards or some more expensive boyish hobby.

    He sells them, explained Roger, to other motorists.  A driver need only pay a particular toll once a day and then may go back and forth as many times as he wishes, merely by showing a toll receipt for the day.  So, my little muchacho was defrauding the government.  Admirable initiative for a lad so young.

Then south again, Mexico seeping through the cracks of our car.  Cattle on the road, bats flitting through the beam of our headlights.  At one point frogs hopping across the road, at another, small snakes slither.  A red glow in the night sky from a burning cane field.  Mexican music on the radio to keep the driver company while his companions sleep.

It was sometime past midnight when we entered Puerto Vallarta, the car bouncing on the cobbles.  Colonial buildings and shop fronts of the restored town, artificially constricted by the bright overhead street lights, looking like a scene from a dream.  Then across an arched bridge and south again, the road through a tunnel of trees with scarcely-seen shapes fluttering out of the darkness.  We start counting the kilometer markers.  No elation: just tiredness.

At 5:30 on our third morning, forty-nine hours after leaving home, we arrive.  Even El Patrón, for all his enthusiasm for his new house, just wanted to go to bed.  I shake out the bedclothes, for El Patrón has told us that on his last visit the staff, who are soon to be let go, had put a scorpion in his bed to discourage him from buying the house.  There was a spider, large and brown but unaggressive, and I chased him off the bed.  I was dirty and my feet were swollen, but I could worry about that later.  I slept all through that day and following night and through the morning of the day that came after.  I would sleep for thirty hours.  We were in no hurry and there would be time enough to deal with Mexico.

On the Road to Mexico, Part 1

Ever since I was a little boy and first looked at a road map, I have been fascinated by the notion that you could get into your car and pull out of your driveway and, by turning at the right places and driving far enough, you could get to Mexico.  And then you could just keep going.
    For a long time I never got around to doing that.  Then one day I did.

Part 1.  A quite manageable plan.

My friend had bought a house in Mexico.  Not some modest vacation bungalow  --  for he was not a modest person  --  but a luxurious compound perched on a cliff overlooking an unspoilt and unpopulated stretch of sandy Pacific beach.  A great house with servants’ quarters and guest houses.  Three pools and a tennis court and a landing strip  --  though as a result of some misunderstanding with the authorities there was at the moment a line of palm trees planted down the center of the runway. 

He insisted that we watch over and over the realtor’s video of the property as he each time pointed out more amazing features of his new home.  As befitted the owner of such an estate, my friend had shed his former persona and now wished to be referred to simply as “El Patrón”.

When word came up from the South that the papers had been signed and seals affixed he would of course waste no time in assuming his new estate and insisted that we should immediately depart for Mexico.  As there were three of us, we could drive straight through.  Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested it would be about a 48-hour drive from San Francisco to his new property south of Puerto Vallarta.  Divided three ways, that would be two eight-hour stretches apiece.  Quite manageable.

Besides El Patrón and myself there would be Roger, a nice young Mexican fellow whom El Patrón had recently met and who, in a moment of rashness, had lent El Patrón $50,000 of his family’s money.  I was unclear what the purpose of this had been and thus far all that had come of it was that El Patrón, in one of those bursts of enthusiasm so typical of him, had purchased with some exorbitant amount of Roger’s money an elderly Renault amphibious automobile, whose leaks, he was sure, would be easy to fix.  The Amphi-Car was probably the first of a number of small incidents that had caused Roger to fear that his business with El Patrón was not going to go as he had expected and so he had arranged to be constantly at El Patrón’s elbow and would of course be going with us to Mexico.


We left early in the morning, hours before sunrise: Three Caballeros in a Jeep Cherokee.  We took turns driving, though it soon became clear that El Patrón  --  despite his claims to the contrary  --  did not see well in the darkness, and duties were divided accordingly.  He also mentioned to us in passing that the police were “holding his driver’s license for him,” but soon we would be in Mexico where such Anglo legalisms will be no problem.  It was my impression that “Anglo legalisms” were no small part of his reason for wanting to spend more time in Mexico in the first place.


(to be continued . . . )