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Published: July 12th 2008
I left Paul on the side of the road and went to the nearby town, called Caleta de Campos. There was a huge deserted beach lined by palm trees, cultivated fields looking to yield Papaya and coconut most obviously. I got to the town, which consisted mainly of one cobbled street with shops and a few restaurants on it. The street ended in cliff that overlooked the sea.
I asked a few people about mechanics, and was sent to the house of a strangely lucid looking young man in grease covered clothes. He told me to wait and that we would then go and get Paul and the KTM. I stopod in the intersection of two dirt roads and waited. After a few minutes the KTM arrived in the back of a blue pickup truck. As it turned out, the next two paser bys had asked him if he needed a ride, and the second truck ignored his explanation about me having gone to get help and lifted the bike into the truck without hesitation.
The men in the truck introduced themselves as Juan, a mechanic and Jesus, a welder and handiman but they rarely used these names. Their real names(nicknames) were El Diablo and Barrancas(The devil and "canyons" or "creeks") The origin of Barrancas' name is a mystery, but El Diablo's name was not. One of the stories I heard from townspeople was that if he saw someone on the towns main street badly parked that he would ram their car. He also had an incredible alcohol and cocaine habit. A few weeks after we had been staying there, the doctor told him he would die if he didn't stop drinking, so he stuck to cocaine and crystal lite.
He took us and the bike to his shop and then bought some fourty ounce bottle of corona, which tastes much better in Mexico. We ate some green mangos from the tree at the outdoor shop which was littered with garbage, husks of cars, and engine blocks. We got drunk and I may have sampled some of the cocaine, which was, of course, of very high quality and very cheap.
We pitched our tent in the field that was the shop that night and slept there. The next day a hose was running with water we could drink and bathe in. The hoses in Caleta run on odd schedules- six hours at a time and certain days of the week, which is why everyone has cement cisterns at their houses that they put the hose into to fill.
We hung out at the shop and examined the KTM. THe regulator was shot but when we ran it from a car battery there was a sound in the engine that caused all of the mechanics to say it needed a rebuild. The beer was still flowing and we decided it would be a good place to stay for a while.
The major factor in our decision to stay was a man name Max. He arrived in a truck with Juan and asked grinning through yellowed teeth "You want smoke-a weed? Heh eh eh eh!" I declined because I generally avoid marijuana due to a lot of negative effects it has on me, but Paul went with him. He came back a little later, and told me that Max had a house we could stay in. Our understanding of the story at first was that the original residents had been killed in a gang war between the various factions of organized crime in the town.
We went to look at the house. There were some papaya trees and coconut palms, a dysfunctional truck, and a few brick shacks that were littered with syringes, vials of antibiotics, and childrens schoolbooks, as well as pornography and some x-rays of a broken knee. There was also a terrified, neurotic, and emaciated cat that only emerged to steal our scraps, but eventually I befriended it, only to turn against it as it became increasingly bold in stealing my food. It's hard to watch a creature you've tried to nurture back into mental health steal away from the table with a bag of eggs, smashing them all on the ground as it runs.
We set up our tent on a filthy mattress in one of the brick huts and I picked up a moth eatten and dusty picture of the virgin of guadelupe that appeared to have a bullet hole through it on the wall. Max had also gifted a fist sized ball of marijuana to us which I put in a small bucket on the floor next to the bed, completing the bedroom set.
Across the dirt street from our house was Max's shop and house, a tarp suspended by a couple of sticks with clutch disks and engine blocks and other bits of scrap metal littered around. Max smokes a lot- and has mastered the art of speaking with a lit joint in the corner of his mouth. He smokes Boots brand cigarettes(because they come with free lighters) and only listens to American oldies. Mungo Jerrie's "In the Summertime" will always have special meaning for me.
The story of my stay in Caleta can't be understood without understanding the marijuana culture there and the evolution of my relationship with marijuana. I always refused when Max offered me marijuana because I had had bad experiences smoking in the US. Marijuana experiences often turned into intensely negative journeys into my own loathing for myself and the world. I had decided to avoid it entirely, but as we continued to wait for the KTM to be fixed(I don't know how it ended up taking two months, but I think the marijuana had something to do with it) the bucket of distinctly Mexican smelling marijuana began to burn an imprint into my consciousness.
One night I finally relented and tore a piece of newspaper and rolled a joint, roughly the thickness of my thumb and about seven inches long. I smoked it. Then I rolled another and smoked it. I listened to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." I thought to myself "Hey, this isn't so bad..." I felt as if I was riding space mountain at Disneyland, except I was having a lot of fun. I was speeding through a tunnel of bright colors in the night, bleary eyed. You could say my mind was blown. The next day I said to Paul "Man, I got really stoned last night and listened to Dark Side of the Moon. That song is amaaazing.." He looked a little surprised and asked me if I could imagine how many time that exact phrase had been uttered since the release of the song.
Soon I was smoking more and more. I developed a deep love for Bjork. The negativity was still faintly in the background, but breathing the sea air and absorbing the warm sun and friendliness of Michoacan made me feel as if I was ice skating on a tropical cloud. As I smoked more and more I gradually gave up drinking for the most part.
A typical day in Michoacan- wake up to find Tahuache(Squirrel) or as I call him Mexican Cletus asking me for rolling papers or weed. Then sit down in the street to smoke some joints. Some of the other crew, most connected with the mafia might come by. By afternoon I might have smoked three joints. Other smokers include Casimira(trans. "Almost look") who earned his name by having one eye, or Pedro, who works with marijuana in the US. He gets tourist visas to Canada, flies, and then walks through the woods to Washington where he works with a number of grows. Max is always smoking. The gang is called the "chicos malos" or "bad boys". I was made a member.
Then I might walk to town, soaking in the heart healing beauty of Mexican music. My favorite is Ranchero style music. I might go to the internet cafe and play Half Life on the LAN with Mexican schoolboys, who came to know me as, El Gringo. I got so good at half life that I could beat almost all of them, with the exception of Miguelito. Miguelito is a truly bad spirited boy. He has an incredible talent for killing people in video games and takes a perverse enjoyment in it. His main trick is playing a certain level, getting the most powerful weapon in the game, and then shooting at the ground so the recoil launches him into the air. Then, while flying, he shoots through walls and easily kills everyone. He looks completely manic as he plays, and I think he gets the money he pays for his gaming habit with by stealing. He has few friends and is good at sneering hatefully. I was told several stories about the depths of his criminality, like the time he stole the town garbage truck and drove it to school. He is about twelve.
I took some trips into the hills behind the town. Once I went with Max and Paul iguana hunting. We searched for a long time. On a cliff we saw some. Max put a few pellets into one but didn't get a head shot, so it got away. We walked for a long time, winding through the hills, sometimes scrambling up steep slopes. There were cows and sometimes barbed wire fences. Finally Max spotted one in a tree. They have a dark skin color. He crept to one side of the tree and I to the other. He was carrying a decrepit shotgun from the era of Pancho Villa. It was actually dated 1896, so a firearm more than a century old. He shot it and the bullet went into its eye. It didn't fall, instead it just clung to the branch, upside down. I aimed with my pellet gun and fired at his head. It his and he fell from the tree, and to my surprise, he ran. I swung my rifle over my head and brought the butt down hard on its body. He still ran, but Max caught him by the tail and we dragged him up to the road and smashed his skull with a rock. Then we walked back and made a nice soup. The meat was tender and had good flavor.
I went out several times by myself, looking for pray, trying to shoot birds. I managed to stalk some and surprise them, but I was never able to shoot both quickly and accurately enough to kill anything. I enjoyed roaming the hills with my senses alert, listening for any sign of game. I learned that the trick to hunting is observing your prey and understanding its habits.
We also fished quite a bit. I caught some edible fish, and some strange eels, as well as small river fish. I threw one fish back at the river because it was too small, and Max scolded me. He told me that you should dry the little ones out in the sun and eat them with eggs or rice, along with the bones. "Mucho calcio!"
I was waiting on a financial aid check that was taking a long time to process and was very low on money. Luckily we were staying for free, but when Paul went to Morelia to drop the KTM of at a dealer and rebuild the engine, Max told me he was going to las Sierras to fix some cars and because one of his cousins had died. He offered to take me and pay me ten dollars a day to be his assistant. I accepted.
Max drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee which he modified himself to run on propane, which is much cheaper than gasoline. We left, listening to classics like "The Night Chicago Died" on his stereo, and sped off to go to a mountain village called La Palmita, stoned and smoking lots of Boots. I felt a little sick so I smoked slowly. After about two hours of slowly negotiating the very bumpy dirt road winding through the mountains, there was a clicking crunching noise and Max immediately stomped down on the brakes. He looked at me, grinned, and said "Uh-oh!"
His transmission had failed. It was the third transmission to fail so far on his car. We backed the car down the hill, and waited for a ride. Eventually a pickup truck full of mustached rancheros wearing cowboy hats, boots, jeans, and clean pressed button up long sleeve ranchero shirts came and we got in with them. We drove for about another hours. The pickup truck was full enough to force me to use the art of holding oneself on the edge of the sidewall by tensing and relaxing at the same time. At a certain point the truck stopped and one of the men took a plastic shopping bag out of the space between the plastic bed liner and metal and passed out several semi automatic handguns to the men in the truck. They were fairly new, especially compared to Max's Pancho Villa gun, and had detailed gold engravings of eagles and other things. I asked how much the guns cost and the answers were above two thousand dollars, for guns I knew would cost about a quarter that in the US. Running guns to Mexico looks to be very profitable, and will probably only become more so, since I heard the US governments announcement of "Plan Mexico" earlier today.
We finally arrived at a dusty creekbed near a small schoolhouse in miserable condition. Around the creekbed were sitting thirty men and a few women. I sat down also. I had been told a little about Martin Shultz, a German who had moved to this remote area in the year 1945 and set up a gunsmithing shop from scratch. They told me how Martin spoke 5 languages- German, Japanese, Italian, English, and Spanish. He had died just a few years before and left two sons who had come to the funeral.
Later that night I got to participate in the vigil next to the dead man. There was a lot of tuneless chanting about the most holy virgin. Beautiful girls took turns kneeling in front of the altar and reciting rosaries. After the vigil we ate, I believe chicken soup and beans with the eternal fresh corn tortillas. I also had an egg. The family of the deceased were very kind and hospitable to us. We slept at the house of a cousin of Max on the floor. There were no beds left because of the high number of visitors in town. I slept well.
In the morning we started working, on a blue Toyota pick up. It needed the water pump replaced, but it turned out to have a variety of other problems that we fixed. A man also came and took us along a small path to where a mountain of freshly harvested marijuana lay drying. He was very proud of his crop and wanted us to try it. He offered me several branches as a gift, but didn't smoke himself. Marijuana smokers are not totally excluded from society, but they are not fully included either.
Over the next four days we went to many peoples houses and fixed a variety of mechanical issues using ingenuity that amazed me to fix issues using pieces from other cars and bits of scrap metal. Max is an incredible limited resources mechanic. My fondest memories are listening to old Ranchera music that turned out to be Colombian. Max had just told me about the importance of being able to do things in all mind states when I complained about having difficulty working while high. He said that I had to learn how to be able to do things while stoned, so I smoked yet another joint. The ranchera music of Yolanda del Rio filled the air and I was struck by the beauty and strength in the womans voice. So full of emotion, sad, proud, independent. I eventually found and bought some of this music and it's one of my favorites. The beautiful young, very good natured girls at the ranch we were working at brought us cold horchata as we worked. I really enjoyed being in this place. Max wanted me to stay and become a marijuana farmer in order to learn how to survive.
After spending these days totally immersed in rural Mexican culture I was a little disappointed to return to the relative bustle of tiny Caleta and to begin speaking English again with Paul. I found that my ability in Spanish benefited greatly from not speaking English, and being around an anglophone friend caused me to speak much more english. I wanted to return to the immersion that I have grown to love from traveling alone. I didn't say anything because I knew Paul would be going back to Morelia soon to pick up his motorcycle and we were planning to meet up again somewhere in Oaxaca, with myself taking the coastal route, and Paul taking the inland route.
We resumed our aimless bumming around and waited for our time to leave. Eventually Paul left and I waited a little longer for my financial aid check to come. After Paul left was when I was officially inducted into "Los Chicos Malos," and began smoking more and more. It was difficult, but I knew I had to leave, if only to stop the marijuana consumption which I knew was dulling my mind and my productivity.
I learned a lot about life in Caleta and will always value what the people there taught me and the friendships that I formed with them. Mexican culture is a strange and diverse creature, and I came out understanding and appreciating it much more.
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tom
non-member comment
whats new?
Wow so whats the latest? The last date is July 11 and its now the 28th of July. Is everything ok? Tent set up on an old mattress in an abandonded house in Michoacan. Free marijuana and inexpensive but high quality cocaine? Malandros everywhere. Waiting for a broken motorcycle to be repaired. Fourteen year old friendly girls! It sounds like youve stumbled onto a real nice place to live. I was kind of hopeing you would check out the Carribean Coast of Nicaragua and Honduras on your motorcycle and give a report on that.