This past weekend we went to the beach for the wedding of two of our best friends.  The five of us – Natalie, August, a friend of theirs from Vancouver, Jorge and I – drove a massive van full of dogs and alcohol on a long winding road through the mountains to the coast, playing old car games from childhood vacations much to Jorge’s dismay.  We spent a night in a fantastically slummy, mildew-reeking, toilet-seatless hotel in Pochutla where we drank Coronas with lime (something I haven’t done in ages) on a patio of broken green tiles; continued on to a glittering, jade-colored bay with a curving isolated beach, shacked up in cabañas that dotted the forested hills and spent the next four days swimming, celebrating, crying, talking, and turning siesta into a verb and an art form.

Eventually, we parted – August and Natalie needed some honeymoon time, their friends headed back home or off to brief stints in other cities, and I was in charge of bringing back the van, myself, Jorge, Natalie’s brother, his girlfriend, and two dogs in one piece.  This is the story of that journey.

***************

It started just outside of Huatulco.  We pulled into an empty gas station, the abandoned-looking kind out of black and white photographs from the 1950’s.  The sun was blasting just to the edge of the concrete slab of roof, a few guys in army-green uniforms were leaning against Pemex pumps, a cheery orange and red OXXO sat off to the side with the non-presence of transitory places.

I stopped the car and the gas pump boys stared as our group – two dogs, two gringos and one Mexican – poured out in various states of disarray.

“Fill it up, please,” I said.  He nodded, and waited until Jorge had strayed off with the dogs and Brad and Laura had gone to the OXXO for snacks to add:

“Hay un planton adelante.”

These are quite possibly the four worst words a driver in the state of Oaxaca can hear.

The subtext:

You should turn your car around immediately, find the nearest 100 peso hotel, and enjoy the first nice cold beer of many, ‘cause it’s gonna be a LONG time ‘til you’re getting out of here.

“There’s no other road.” I said.  It wasn’t a question. It was me chewing over the facts.

“Nope.”

“No shortcut.”

“Nope.”

“No way around the protesters.”

“Ha! No.”

“Ok!  Thanks.”

We regrouped in the sunny parking lot with our bags full of Cheetos and peanuts and our vanilla cappuccinos, everybody with that perky, naïve, ultra-fresh look of the first hour of a road trip.  I took a breath.

“Change of plans!” I began.

Luckily, Natalie’s brother and his girlfriend are hardened travelers accustomed to strikes.  They understood the terms “roadblock” and “protesters” and that these two things usually lead directly to “screwed.”  They rolled with it.  We strategized.

There was an alternative road towards a tiny pueblo called Santa Maria Huatulco, and from there we could catch another road climbing into the Sierra and then eventually meeting up with the main road coming from Pochutla, crossing the mountains, and descending to Oaxaca.

Never mind that I’d explicitly avoided the latter road because I was in charge of driving a 12-person passenger van with four people and two dogs, and the road is just barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other.  One jerk the wrong way and you’re sailing blissfully into the green oblivion below.  Trucks nonetheless come soaring around corners as if they were on 6-lane highways trekking towards Kansas.  It can be…harrowing.

So I’d decided to bail on this road and take the long route through the isthmus, which would’ve added 4 hours to the journey but would be smooth sailing across flat, broad highways, happily eating Japanese peanuts and listening to whatever tinny radio came our way.

Now, the isthmus route was closed, and the route up from Pochutla was probably closed by roadblocks as well (Oaxacan protesters are nothing if not thorough).

So it was now a matter not only of taking the road I hadn’t wanted to take, but of taking another, more rustic, tinier, windier, unpaved road to get to that road.

“Alright!” I said.  “Vamos!”

We started in towards Santa Maria Huatulco, a pueblo like so many other beach pueblos: brightly painted concrete boxes of stores and houses with open fronts, thin curtains used as doors waving in light breezes, banana peels and pineapple skins strewn in the streets, a discheveled, makeshift quality to the stands selling flowers and chicken and atole, as if the heat and sun eventually left everything rumpled and rendered attempts at crisp perfection useless.

A festival was set up and booths covered with blue plastic tarps littered the streets at random.  People wandered in twos and threes, squinting up occasionally at the car.  Dark brown bellies stuck out and skinny brown legs ambled along beneath them, and feet were invariably in flip-flops.  Women wore skin-tight electric-colored halter tops and men thin white undershirts.  Their skin was the shade of wet earth and smooth as if it had been polished to a soft buff.

We stopped about every ten meters to ask for directions, since these pueblos seem as if they were designed from a lopsided sketch of a tic-tac-toe board on a dinner napkin.

“Which way is Candelaria?” I’d ask.  That was the next pueblo en route.  Half the time the people would say,

“Towards Oaxaca!”

And we’d start over.

“And which way is…Oaxaca?”

Meanwhile, the honks would start up and taxis would begin nosing impatiently around us, and we’d have to make a flip executive decision about where to turn lest the pueblo rise up against us.

Eventually, we were on a road edging upwards into green mountains.  The wilder coastal foliage began to give way to more uptight, serious forest, somber and quiet shades of green replacing the riotous limes and emeralds lower down.  A banana tree appeared from time to time with its phallic purple fruit dangling embarrassingly.  Hills rolled out from under us and the oppressive steamy beach heat gave way to sweet, pine-smelling coolness.

The road, meanwhile, curved like a drunken serpent.  We went 30 kilometers an hour, max, and took in the scenery.  There was a roadside shack here serving cold Coronas, a coffee farm there with a rusted ecotourism sign.  We crossed shabby bridges slapped over rivers and ravines, which I raced across coming as close as I ever will to crossing myself and praying to the Holy Ghost.

We rose and rose until eventually vast slopes extended below us on all sides, and then sheer drops.

The road got dicier and dicier, with big rocks that crunched under the van’s wheels and set it jumping this way or that, and several hundred meter drops to places we couldn’t see from the windows.  There were times when I couldn’t see the road outside my window; only open air and the foliage far below, if I dared look long enough.

Then we came to a blind curve to the right in front of which several cars were stopped.

“What’s that?”

“Some sort of construction?”

Indeed, there were construction workers scattered about the road in raggedy clothes and orange vests, gaping at us as we inched closer.

“La guera!” they shouted, “Oye, la guera!” and they slapped their thighs at the ludicrousness of a little blonde girl maneuvering a massive van full of dogs and people on a tiny half-built mountain road in the middle of nowhere.  Of course, we came to a final halt about ten feet from them, behind the waiting cars, and their cackles filtered in through the windows.

“This is interesting…” I said slowly.

Indeed it was.

“Is there even a road there?” Brad asked.

We all peered through the front window

“I don’t know,” I said.

Suddenly dust began sliding down the mountainside above us.  It rained down like the beginnings of an avalanche, with little pebbles clanking to the ground and big swoops of dirt enveloping the side of the road.

“What the…?”

We spotted the edge of a bulldozer’s track about fifty meters above us on the mountainside.

“Holy shit!” said Brad.  “You need a license to do work like that!  That’s dangerous!”

I believe this grounded and practical observation in such a situation was meant to keep him from saying,

“Oh my f-ing s*it this is f*ing insane.”

The bulldozer groaned and worked its way down a slope we couldn’t see and could only assume was pure, untamed mountainside; clouds of grainy dust poured down, pebbles and rocks hurried into solid thunks on the road and trembled with the desire to keep going.  The bulldozer slowly turned a curve behind us and began to edge around us on the road.  Four faces and two dog faces turned and followed it as it crept pass, an impassive Mexican worker at its wheel.

It worked its way past the waiting cars and forged ahead into the unknown terrain of the blind curve.  We saw huge scoopfuls of dry Earth being picked up and shoveled down the mountainside, where they cascaded into the forest below leaving atomic clouds of dust in their wake.

“Is he making the road?” Brad asked.

“Apparently so,” I said, marveling at the way the day was developing.

“Well, look at it this way!” Brad said, “if he can fit, we can fit!  If he goes over the edge, we’ll turn around.”

“Good deal!” I said.

We watched the bulldozer inch forward, scrape big piles of land over the cliff edge, and scoot back.  Meanwhile, the other drivers got out of their cars and stretched, looked curiously at us, and leaned in boredom on their doors.

Is this normal? I wondered.  Do you just get accustomed to waiting while the bulldozer comes through the eensy-weensy mountain pass and clears off your little patch of treacherous road for you?

Two cars appeared on the other side of the curve.  The bulldozer kept at it.  Creeping forward and then back, lifting big hunks of road as if it were flour being sifted for a cake.  Eventually it nearly touched noses with the other cars, and then began backing up.  The moment was near.

Once it reached us, still trucking slowly in reverse, the cars in front of us started their engines.

“Here we go,” Brad said.  Everyone else was still silent.  The dogs panted and looked at me wide-eyed.

The other two cars started in, bumping and thumping admirably over the newly cleared road.  It was one sharp U of a curve, with nothing but steep drop to the left and piles of rocks and sharp cliffs to the right.  I mowed forward.

At the crucial moment, at the central part of the U, I made the mistake of glancing ever so subtly to my left and seeing nothing but air, air, air and trees far beneath.  To the right was a big stack of rough-cut rocks pushing against the edge of the van.  I drove onto them and the van rocked back and forth.  I gunned it.  We pulled ahead onto the latter curve of the U, then onto the flat stretch where the other cars were waiting.  Cheers erupted in the van.

“Fuck IT!” I said.  “If I can do that, I can do anything!”

We were euphoric for the next three hours, naively and blissfully thinking the worst was over.  We met up with the main road from Pochutla and cruised along, the normally petrifying mountain road now comparatively a superhighway after the route we’d taken to reach it.

We stopped for lunch in San José del Pacifico, a mountain village known for its magic mushrooms.  Any gringo roaming San Josée is assumed to be tripping out of his/her mind and therefore susceptible to buying unnecessary woolen goods.  It is not possible to spend more than an hour there without ten different women offering woven hats, baby gloves, pears.  We disappointed them with clear-eyed sobriety.

Jorge and I had one of our first dates in San José del Pacifico (this part of the “how we met” story is often left out of the family-friendly narrative) and we still go back to the same restaurant every time we go through the Sierra.  The food is probably much better with some mushrooms working their magic on you, but we still love it.  Murals of happy frogs and fat shrooms and Maria Sabina sucking on a joint color the outside patio, and photos of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata hang on the walls inside.

We ate entomatadas with chorizo and reminisced about our adventures as if they’d happened five years ago and we could sit back and chuckle nostalgically.  Maria Sabina, toking up outside, must’ve been laughing a silent stoner laugh of anticipation.  We pulled out of San José as hippies in baggy linen pants and grubby dreads wandered out of their cabins in search of food.

The descent out of the Sierra was smooth, and by the time we neared Mihuatlan we were flying.  We were barreling through the valley towards Oaxaca, debating what kind of meat we wanted with our nachos and whether we’d have Bohemias or micheladas when we hit the roadblock.

This one was massive.  Cars were backed up several hundred meters.  Red flags waved in the distance and groups of people huddled around the cars and trucks blocking the road.

“SHIT!” I said.  “Shit shit shit.”  There was no way around this; no other road, and no options but to wait or go back to Mihuatlan.

A car was backing up beside us.

“Excuse me!” I shouted to the man, “is there any way around this?  How long will it last?”

“Six or seven, maybe later?” he suggested.  It was around two at the time.  “You’ll have to go back to Mihuatlan, maybe, to stay, or just wait here.”

The prospect of a night in Mihuatlan, known for being a big transit city for drug dealers transporting weed, flashed through my head.

“Nothing else we can do?” I tried.

“Well, if someone is gravely ill, they might consider it,” he said, and shrugged.  “You could try it.”

No one should say these words to me in such times.  I had made up my mind before he even nodded and continued backing up the road.

I said goodbye and whipped around.

“Laura,” I said, “you’re pregnant.  You’re pregnant and you’re sick.  We have to get you to Oaxaca.  Just lie down.”

“Ok,” she said, “I’m pregnant and I feel terrible.  I’m just going to curl up here.”

“I’m going up there to talk to them,” I said.

Jorge just nodded.  He understands the futility of negotiations in such situations.  All he said was,

“Take the dog.”

I took the dog.  As I trudged with her past the waiting cars towards the protesters, I had my moments of doubt.  Crossing the barricades?  Should I do it?  But protest is so constant and ubiquitous in Oaxaca that it’s lost its effectiveness and is now a massive source of irritation to people.  “Another march?” Sigh.  “Another barricade?”  Sigh.

I could viscerally understand why everyone got so pissed at the protesters now, walking past the cars stalled in the sun.  And while I sympathize with some of their causes, they’ve broken up into so many factions and taken on so many random groups and monikers and ideologies that it’s hard to sort out what they’re asking for or who they really are.  The ones flying the Communist flag, as these at the roadblock were doing, tended to be the worst; the most radical in the least organized way, using the hammer and sicle as a symbol of their unchallenged right to fuck up the social order in whatever way possible.  Maybe they had some good ideas and I just didn’t try hard enough to get the message.  My main association with them, however, was a march in which a ton of moto-taxis flying Communist flags clogged traffic in the city center for hours and whistled at me as I walked past.  I had little sympathy.

In any case, cringe or criticize as you may, I rationalized it.

I reached flag-waving men.

“Guera!” shouted one, “guera con su perrote!”  He laughed, then seemed confused.

“Que haces aquí?” he asked.

I put on a distressed but firm face.

“Listen,” I said, “we’ve been driving from Huatulco for nine hours and my friends is pregnant and she really needs to get to Oaxaca.  She’s feeling really sick and we only expected to be in the car for six hours but we’ve already spent much more time than that because of all the road blocks.  Is there any way we could pass?”

“Oy,” he said, “you’re coming from the beach?”

“Mm-hhmm,” I nodded, “my friends got married and now we’re coming back.  It’s just that we left really early and my friend is pregnant and she feels sick, and we need to get back ASAP.”

By now a small crowd had gathered around the men.

“The guera wants to pass,” said the first older man, with a scruffy day’s growth of beard and wrinkly, kind eyes.  “What do you think?”

“Where’s the pregnant woman?” demanded a stout younger one.  “We want to check her.”

“She’s back there in the van,” I said, gesturing, “you can check her if you want.  No problem.  We just want to get through.”

“Give me your dog,” said one, “and we’ll call it a deal!” he was half-joking.

“Never!” I said, also half-joking, “she’s my protector.”

“What’s her name?” he asked.

“Stella,” I answered, and we had a few moments of dog bonding time.

“Listen,” this man said, “we’ll let you through here, but I’m not sure about up there.  You have to convince them too.”

I then realized that there was another block about one hundred meters away; more cars and trucks parked back to back, more people sitting below them.

“Hang on a sec,” said one man, and he jogged over towards the other side.

“Where’re you from?” asked the scruffy bearded man meanwhile.

“The United States.  Ohio.”

“La guera de Oh-hi-oh!” he said, laughing.  “La guera de Oh-hi-o.”

Then he asked,

“Only foreigners in there?” gazing towards the van.

“And my Mexican husband,” I said.  This always threw ‘em for a loop.

“Mexican husband!” he declared.  “Where’s he from?”

“Guelatao!” I related proudly.  Guelatao is the birthplace of Benito Juárez and Oaxacans have a soft spot for it.

“Gay-la-taaaao!” he said, rolling it around, enjoying it.  “Orale, guera.”

The other man returned.  “Ok!” he said, in that strangely stunted way Mexicans say it, “go, go.”

“Thank you!” I said, trying not to be too fawning, “thank you.”

I trekked it back to the van as quickly as was possible without attracting suspicion and opened the side door.

“We’re going,” I said. “Laura, you’re pregnant, and we’re driving through.  Don’t sit up.”

She nodded. I gestured Stella into the van, started it up, and pulled forward.  The other cars stared as we slid past them.

“Go, guera, go!” shouted the bearded protester as I drove forward.  He lifted the flag barrier only slightly.  I pressed on the gas.

“La guera de Oh-hi-o!” he sung as I flew beneath it, the hammer and sicle sticking briefly on the windowshield.

“Adios!” I shouted, and waved goodbye out the window.

Then we hit the angry mob.

There were five or so men sitting in the shade with their backs against a red Ford truck.  They looked drunk.  That ruddy, purple-faced drunk that comes in the late afternoon after a long day of drinking.

“Ay guera,” they said, this time lecherous instead of curious, predatory instead of probing.

“Ow ow ow ow ow!” went the cry.  They elbowed each other and whistled.  Some made rumbling movements as if to stand up.  But a leader beat them to it.

“What are you doing!?” shouted a burly, angry-looking man in a classic white cowboy hat and pointed cowboy boots.  His dress shirt was blue and primly buttoned and tucked in.  He strutted right up to the window and glared in.

“Disculpa,” I said, “but I talked to the men back there and they said I could pass.  My friend is pregnant and we’ve been driving for nine hours from Huatulco, and she really needs to get to Oaxaca.  They said we could go through.”

“What?” the man said.  It became clear this might be an obstacle.  “You’ll have to talk to the leader.  He’s over there.”  He gestured vaguely at an unsteady mass of people, none of which looked like a leader.  There were old women in aprons and young, drunk men.

“Ok,” I said, “I’ll talk to him.”  Other men began gathering around the car.

“What do you want?  Where are you going?” they demanded.  I explained my story again.

“No one passes!” said one.  “No one, huh-uh.”  He was shaking his head firmly.  Others looked at him, unsure, hovering.

“What do you want?” asked another, “your friend is pregnant?  Where is she?”  I gestured back to a Laura cuddled up in a ball on Brad’s lap.  They peered in to get a look at her.

“Ok,” said one, boldly taking an executive decision, “dejala pasar!”

Some debated this among themselves.  Others, miraculously, started moving cars, inching them around slightly to the side.  Then they stopped.  General confusion reined.  What should I do?  I looked at Jorge.

“Go,” he said urgently, “go!”  He pointed at an impossible triangular space between several parked cars.

“THERE?” I said incredulously.  “Are you kidding me?”

The man in the blue dress shirt and cowboy hat was shaking his head firmly now.

“No, no no,” he said.  The drunk boys were standing up.  The cowboy flipped his hand towards a dusty, unpaved side route leading to some pueblo or another.  I instinctually knew it would lead nowhere, but wanted to take it to escape the situation.

“No,” said Jorge, “do not take that.  Metate!  Go this way, go now, go!”  He was getting agitated.  When he gets agitated I know how to take the cue.  I edged forward through the crowd towards the cramped space between the mufflers and hoods of various cars.  A few old men in plastic chairs urged me on.

“Vamos guerita!” they said, offering encouragement, “adelante!”

I began edging the van into the space, which was an uneven triangle with a curved edge at one point.  I got about halfway in before I realized I couldn’t see a thing to either side and was about a half-inch from hitting any given vehicle.

“GO,” said Jorge.

I went.  I jerked forward a foot and then shifted into reverse and backed up a few inches.  Now two or three men were behind the van guiding it, too absorbed in the manly art of turning a massive vehicle to be concerned with the argument about whether or not I should be allowed to pass.  One small, weathered old man to my left, just out the driver’s side window, was guiding me past the front of the red Ford truck.

“Back guerita back, slowly, slowly, ok now give it, give it forward!”

I will do this, I thought.  I will show them that this little blond girl can kick some ass in a crowd of macho men.  I gave a sharp turn backwards to the right and then another, sharper one forward to the left.  But it was impossible.  The triangle wasn’t wide enough for the enormous van.  I bumped the edge of the Ford.

“STOP!” shouted the old man, and I saw visions of myself being beaten to a bloody pulp by men just waiting for the excuse to burst.

I came to a cold stop and briefly closed my eyes.  Out of nowhere a mustachioed man in a clean button-down appeared, slid around the backside of the Ford, and climbed in.  He backed it up a half inch.  I shouted

“GRACIAAAAAAAASSSSSS!!”

and tore off down the road.

“Por que te dejaran passsaaar?” I heard passengers in cars on the other side shout before I was flying away, sending rocks spitting to either side.

“YES!” I said.  “THANK GOD!”

Laura sat up tentatively with ruffled hair.

“Yes?” she said, still not sure.

“YES!” I said.

We glided through the desert on the burst of relieved joy, too overwhelmed to talk quite yet.

Then:

“There will be more in Oaxaca,” said Jorge.

He was right.

We cruised along towards Ocotlan, the last major village before Oaxaca, floating by shabby hotels and skinny, pregnant stray dogs, past trash piles and cacti, past wide vistas of dry mountains and the faint silhouettes of people walking.

Then we hit it again, this time more as a guttural anticipation and a faint distant chaos than a concrete STOP.

“There it is,” Jorge said, stretching forward to see, “another one.”

A white car was coming towards us, accumulating speed.

“Excuse me,” I shouted, “is there a planton up there?”

“Yes,” said the young, well-dressed man, “but there’s a detour ahead.  Go just down this hill and then take a left onto the tracks of a road.  Keep following that around the planton and you’ll come out on the other side.”

“Thank you so much,” I said, and he nodded and drove on.

“Ok,” I said, “here we go.”

About fifty meters on, there was the vaguest implication of a dirt track through the desert, faint tire tracks in the dust.

“Here?”  I said, and turned.

Right away it sounded as if we were inside a cement mixer.  The rocks banged and clanked against the bottom of the van and the desert made a steady series of crunches and cracks beneath us.  We barreled onwards feeling like we should be shouting YA-HOOOOO!!…

And then promptly got lost.  We came crunching to a halt in a dry riverbed behind a truck that had just stopped.  Behind us cars were trampling through that desert in that purposeful yet somewhat random way of manhunts in serial killer movies, where all the FBI agents meet up in some remote locale in their unmarked cars.  Everyone was striking out in an attempt to find a road, any road.

“It’s kind of like a desert rave,” Brad said.  “The sick pregnant woman goes to a rave.”

“It is!” I responded.  “Maybe the protesters are secretly just trying to get a badass desert party going on.”

Badass desert confusion is what ensued.  A massive sewage truck rumbled up from behind us and begin forging the dry riverbed with determination.  We watched as protesters arrived, live on the scene, and began blocking its path with sticks and cactuses.

The sewage truck guys, who were drunk and presumably not thrilled about random desert detours, decided to try and run over the sticks and cactuses as they were being put up.  This didn’t go over well.  The sewage truck guys got out and started getting belligerent with the protesters, and we knew things were not going anywhere good.  Jorge jumped out of the van to go scout out new possible directions.  He made a brief tour of hovering cars, asking opinions, and then guided us backwards out of the riverbed, past a few serious rocks that could’ve left us beached in the middle of nowhere, and back into the open desert.

“This way,” Jorge indicated, fingering a wide expanse of rocky land.

“Alright,” I said, and off we went.

There was nothing in the desert but the vaguest indication of where some four-wheel drive vehicle equipped to deal with such conditions had once come and gone.  We forged a sea of cows, the fat-jowled ambling kind who barely cast curious glances at us and parted around the van with plodding, dogged resignation.  The ancient, weathered cowhand had that Mexican seen-it-all fatalism and continued pacing along as if were entirely plausible, perhaps even probable, that a giant gold van of gringos and dogs might at any moment go pitching and heaving through his herd.

Forward we ploughed, heading in the direct opposite direction of the one we came from on Jorge’s logic that we had to circumvent a small hill in order to get to the pueblo on the other side.  I tore past cactuses to the high-pitched grating sounds of thorns scraping the edge of the van.  There were communal winces and we all tried not to think about damages.  I thumped down small ravines and roared back up, and ground over large chunks of rock as if they were soft wedges of cheese.  They popped and groaned and sometimes shot dramatically out from the sides of the car.  There was a constant roar and grind of land churning under weighted rolling wheels.

Three of the potential desert ravers were following us now.  We had a caravan, and I was at the head of it.

A solid ten minutes of churning through cacti, dust, sand and spare rocks later, we emerged on the far side of the small hill and began curving around it.  We spotted other cars and trucks weaving tentatively through the desert.  I jerked the car right up a small incline and we went heaving ahead.  Huge suspiciously narco-esque trucks passed us, driven by glossy teenagers who, I’d assume, were the ones paying the soldiers who played dice by the road while our massive van slid by unsearched.  The narco boys stared and I tried not to feel nervous.  Protesters, narcos, desert off-roading – it’s all in a day of Mexican driving.

I saw a pueblo emerging in the distance; the blue-and-white outlines of a squat village church looking like stiff sheet cake in the desert.  Around it would be a labyrinth of dusty concrete streets, real, hard streets, hopefully leading past the closest roadblock.  We shot forward.

“COWS!” shouted Jorge.

I slowed to a crawl and we inched behind a herd of bony-assed cows and scraggly goats.  Their shepherd didn’t even bother to glance backward at our van and the three cars and trucks following it – an angel could’ve descend from the heavens and offered this guy a mezcalito and he wouldn’t have pondered it for a second.  I didn’t want to honk, because when you’re barreling over somebody’s land in a huge rented van and you’re riding the asses of their cows, you just don’t honk.

The cow must have sensed our vehicle pulsing behind it and made lazy, shrugging strides towards the side of the road, all the time in the world on its side.  Eventually the other cows got the message and there was the narrowest strip to their right where I could, in theory, squeeze by.

I yanked the wheel and steered around them when Jorge screamed,

“Don’t hit the cactus!!!”

“I don’t want to hit the f-ing cow!!!  I’d rather hit the cactus than the cow!!”

Panic reigned.  Cactuses made screeching terrible noises on the right side of the van.  The cows ambled with heavy boredom.  The cowhand gave a curt wave.  We pulled ahead.

Two minutes later we were soaring along the concrete streets of the pueblo.  I stopped and asked an old man for directions and he sent me down a long road that curved and curved and veered into desert and then…led me to the main highway.

We looked incredulously at another.

“Ok then,” I said, “everybody ok?”

“Doin’ great!”  Brad and Laura beamed optimistically from the backseat.  Jorge let out a breath of air he’d been holding for the past forty-five minutes.

The dogs panted up at me.  Is it over yet?

We hit two more roadblocks from that point on, both just outside the city center, but this time there were multiple if not necessarily desirable alternatives.  I crept along Oaxaca’s tiny colonial streets in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the behemoth van and bitched out neighboring taxis like the best of Oaxacan drivers.  Eventually, finally, I found a parking space in front of – fittingly – a church.  We parked, unloaded dogs and kennels and towels and flip-flops and miscelanea amidst the fumes of angry, wound-up drivers on their third or fourth hour of dead-ends and clogged streets, Brad and Laura piled into a taxi with obvious, wet looks of relief, and Jorge and I handed the van over to the Alamo guy who kindly offered to come pick it up since half of Oaxaca’s streets were impassable.

We used a towel to wipe the thing down in a rush in the midst of full-on traffic, and then we prayed.

“No problem?” We asked, trying to play it cool.

“Nope,” said the Alamo dude, “that’s it.”

In the eternal taxi ride that followed, taking us the remaining blocks to our apartment, Stella curled up in the backseat and fell into a deep sleep.  I took in the shops and the swells of passerby moving down the torn-up streets, the colors, the stormy electric blues of the twilight sky, the elote vendors with steam rising from their big metal pots, the salsa music pulsing out of the open fronts of cantinas, the graffiti and the churches. Oaxaca.

The next day I was walking back from the grocery store when I saw a boy selling mangos con chile.  I stopped and ordered one, and watched as he carved it carefully into a flower and then salted it with sal de chile and gently squeezed salsa into its petals.  I remembered the first time I came to Mexico, on a $250 round trip ticket from Chicago to Mexico City one spring break.  I remembered taking grainy pictures with an instant camera of the boys carving mango flowers in the Bosque de Chapultepec and being awed at the exoticism of it.  I remember thinking mangos!  Mango flowers!  Mangos con chile!  In the park!  It was new and terribly exciting.  I’d never have thought that six years later, I’d be standing casually on the side of a Mexican street with bags of groceries and keys jangling in my pocket, waiting for my mango flower con chile, headed home.