Cuajimoloyas is the starting point, easiest to access via rickety old bus from the city center.  The bus is bursting with luggage; packages, bags and buckets tied down atop it, shoved into the racks inside, huddled between the knees of its passengers, quivering in the aisles.  August and Natalie headed to two seats in the back, and Jorge and I grabbed the only remaining ones in the first row, right behind the driver.  From there I got views through the cracked windshield and out the side view mirror, where I could see taxis darting in and out of view like minnows and pick-up trucks careening towards us and flying by.  The radio gave the morning news, assassinations and parades.

As we chugged through the valley we picked up more and more passengers until the center aisle was as clogged as an old chimney.  Jorge, ever the gentlemen, offered up his seat to an indigenous woman, a tiny woman with skin the color and texture of a hazelnut.  Her white hair was held back in thin coarse braids and she wore a scarf, a heavy black one with white points that made it look like a sky with constellations, wrapped around her head.  She set her bag between her legs and smiled broadly at me, offering her hand, which she placed very lightly in mine.  It felt as weightless as a piece of driftwood.  “Buenos dias,” she said.

“”Buenos dias, señora,” I replied.  She nodded and promptly fell asleep.

We lasted that way for an hour and a half on the lurching uphill curves that brought us higher and higher into the mountains, and then the four of us – Jorge, August, Natalie and I – gently elbowed and sidled our way off the heaving bus and out into the crisp, charged air of Cuajimoloyas.

Our five days in the Sierra began there, where we slyly slipped away from the tourist office before they could forge a guide upon us and were soon absorbed into the forest, bordered on either sides of the path by agaves longer and taller than me, and wide enough for a baby to sleep on comfortably.  The trees in the Sierra Norte’s forests are curious, shooting upward and arching back as if heaved from below by some secret underground slingshot; bald of leaves and branches until the very top, where a tuft of foliage appears almost as an afterthought.  They make for poetic, abstract pictures, the sparten branches and pine needles on their lonely tops silhouetted against the Sierra’s feathered, chilly skies.

We veered off at the indication of the comically costumed Zapotec Indian on the yellow trailmarkers for the Pueblos Mancomunados.  He was wearing heavy earrings and a flap over his privates and it looked as if he was walking like an Egyptian.  The Zapotec guide, affectionately known as “little dude” from that point on, would have a knack for appearing and disappearing at less than optimal points.  He was always there when you had a fat three-foot-wide path in front of you with no options other than to follow it straight ahead, reaffirming that you were indeed going the right direction, but when you came to the tricky intersections, with trails and roads spindling off like an octopuses tentacles, he hid in a far corner of the woods, giggling.  We did fine with our “they’ll all come out at the same place” philosophy until the last day.

Little dude led us along the edges of pastures where jowly cows stared at us, nonplussed.  The forest floor had a soft, dampened echo, the kind that reminds you you’re walking on Earth, which has a depth and a personality of its own buffeted and drowned out by concrete and asphalt.  Views gave out onto the mosaic of greens of the forest, the mountains, the grassy valleys.  Then we curved around suddenly and dropped down to a trout farm, one of many in the Sierra.  Trout farming has become a successful enterprise encouraged by government funding, and each village has its cluster of trucha joints offering fish smothered in mushrooms or chiles or salsa picante.

The man in charge of this tarajea de truchas assured us that the trail from that point on was indeed the road.

“Seguro?” we asked.

“Seguro,” he nodded assuredly with an indulgent smile.

So we unknowingly passed on the last two kilometers of trail, which did hug the side of the road but offered some illusion of wilderness, and walked the road. It was empty save for the occasional taxi collectivo and logging truck.  We talked, as all backpackers do about two hours into the hike, of food.  Camp meals of instant beans and tortillas, pizza and beer in Montana, instant fettucini alfredo, chilaquiles.

Then we were in Llano Grande, a town of approximately 200 inhabitants that lay on a broad, grassy plain.  The town, like all the other towns we’d pass, was empty, drained of its young, active populus by migration.

We strutted through town towards the tourist office, taking in the emptiness, the hollow, haunted melody of wind blowing through the forest trees, the smell of woodsmoke drifting from hushedd wooden houses.  The ecotourism infrastructure seemed brand new and eager to receive tourists and, at the same time, abandoned.  Not a single cabaña was occupied, and it took quite some time before the man in charge of the tourist office arrived.  Not many travelers do this route without guides, so the people manning the offices assume no one’s coming if they don’t get a call from the guide agency.

When he arrived, solo, desultory, skeptical-looking, he pointed us towards the campsites a short walk out of town.  We moseyed down, plopped our bags unceremoniously on a cushy patch of pine needles, and made heaping Gouda sandwiches.

Siestas followed.  August and Natalie passed out like babies, fast asleep on the forest floor without a care in the world.  Jorge and I fidgeted and rustled in our tent, tired but unable to sleep, figuring this new place out.  We watched clouds pass through the transparent roof of the tent, their quiet movement mesmerizing us.  We listened to the wind, watched the tree tops sway.  We went for a walk, spooked and intrigued by the sound of our footsteps on the paths winding through the forest.

Llano Grande had a handful of houses; some laid-back, shiny-coated dogs who seemed totally at ease in their pastoral lives; a few comedores and, like all pueblos in the Sierra, a basketball court.  This one had a Benito Juarez bust sitting casually off to the side, a half-Benito dressed in a suit looking benignly out over the game.

We played H-O-R-S-E, our laughter echoing across the empty plain.  Men strutted by in a big group, back from some work project, and guffawed at our lame gringo-y shots that missed the hoop entirely and sailed into the grass beyond.  Evening descended in sharp, tender oranges and blues.

We ate in a small restaurant with a few tables and a small store attached.  Pork rib with chile pasilla sauce, and Coronas.  Layers of grainy chile spice and the slightly bitter pique of pasilla, and meat.

“Is this camping?” asked August.  “I mean, really.”

The outside light poured in iridescent blinding streams over the flowered tablecloths and then dropped down under the table and began to quickly disappear; by the time we left, tipsy and full, it was dark.  We strode back to our tents, did a quick round of tooth-brushing by headlamp, and passed out.

The next morning we began a 20k day traversing long, flat, grassy plains and  valleys, forests and streams.  That day we settled into the rhythm of backpacking, a rhythm that forgets constant Facebook updates and things-to-do and pays attention to the sound of wind, to the slow passing of clouds in a sky innocent and dreamy like a faded blue-and-white cotton t-shirt, to the feel of motion timed to the rhythm of steady-progressing feet.  The mind works differently in these situations.  It races and hops along for a while and then eventually, a child ignored long enough, it gives up on becoming the center of attention and quietly begins paying attention instead.  It gives center stage to the body and its stimuli; smells, aches, views, the thrill of cold water after a long hot stretch of trail.

The trail widened into a dirt road that took us uphill.  And uphill, and uphill.  A logging truck passed and we almost caved, knowing there were five more kilometers and it was most likely all going to be this endless slog up the road.  But August and Natalie prevailed and we continued, stopping for Gouda sandwiches and Oreos in a tiny den of foliage off to the roadside.

Then, renewed but frail, our city-slackened bodies crying and burning, we shuffled on.  I love backpacking for many things, but the pace is what ultimately gets me.  The pace, so burdened and slow, becomes liberating.  It frees you from the constant fleeting desire to be doing something and thinking something, lets all the shoulds off their leashes like a thousand expendable balloons, and connects body to earth, mind to body.

Plus, the taste of dinner after a 20k day is orgasmic.

We hit the top of the ridge and seemed to be floating along it after such a long climb.  The Sierra filled up the landscape on either side of us, a living topo map of corrugated terrain.  There were dark-green forested mountains ruffling out as far as we could see.

We lasted in this limbo for a brief silent spell, walking between ranges, walking between villages, walking between the pressing needs of our busy lives on either side of our trip.

Then we descended, down and down, stopping to refill our water bottles from a pipe we prayed was agua potable, leaning slightly back to keep from keeling over like rolly-pollies and somersaulting downhill with exhaustion, catching glimpses of villages on distant mountainsides, their lights and buildings like clusters of gold earrings caught in the green.  I caught sight of little dude, resting calmly on the trunk of a tree and pointing straight down into the forest.

“Little DUDE,” I said, “after all this time.”  That day he’d had a pattern of ushering us frantically and suddenly off the road and straight up 100 meters in to the forest, meandering us around for a minute or two, and then plunging us straight back down to the road.  This happened twice before we realized that little dude – and the villagers who had strategically positioned him – had a sadistic sense of humor.  We stuck to the road from then on out.

This time, though, with glimpses of the pueblos’ terraced fields far below, we grudgingly trusted him and began the final descent.

Twenty minutes later we were straggling out through fields of alfalfa and ragged corn patches, walking an ancient stone path that stood a little above small stone homes with tin roofs. Steam rose from pots on small fires, suggesting the presence of people, but we saw no one.

Another empty pueblo.  The Sierra sees plenty of immigration to the U.S., and if you pay attention to the details – the half-built foundation of a house, the two women hurrying along the street with their children – a ghostly, sad feeling begins to creep up on you.  It is a haunted feeling, the remembrances of people and their shapes and characters that once filled the streets and rooms here and have gone, leaving their memories.  The brisk air in these mountain streets takes on the melancholy resignation hanging around a widow.  The presence of the migrants remains, but their flesh and life are gone, on a street corner somewhere in Los Angeles.

I looked at the laundry swung gently on lines traipsed across patios and suddenly remembered a scene at the Oaxaca airport.  I was waiting for friends and a small, short Mexican woman was hovering beside me, a little one or two year old girl in her arms.  People began trickling through customs and out into the open waiting area.  We both did that head-bobbing search for our loved ones, eager and nervous.  Finally, a man came through the security doors trailing two massive duffel bags and beaming.  He slid up to the woman beside me, dropped his bags, and embraced her with an enormous grin.  She was smiling somewhere between the butterflies of the first date and the tearfulness of reunited lovers.

“Say hi to your daddy,” she said to the little girl, “it’s your daddy!”

“Hi baby,” said the man, “I missed you.”  The little girl stared at him wide-eyed and he caressed her hair, then pulled the woman into him again.  “Hola mi amor, hola mi amor,” he said over and over and she grinned into him, his cheek, his chest.

I thought then about the conference on migration in the Mixteca I’d read about, and the one quote that had stayed with me– “staying home is also a fundamental human right, and we should have the right to stay home.”  I thought of that watching this man embrace his wife and child, and thought about how an economic system that forces him to labor for illegal wages in Los Angeles, wiring money home every few weeks for this woman who waits, who comes to the airport filled with relief and joy and longing, is fundamentally wrong.

They left together, with him dragging the duffel bags and looking down at her, her rounded cheeks and her black skirt, her small cheap black shoes.

Back in this pueblo, Lachatao, the emptiness of the streets was exaggerated by the soft presence of life.  Birds perched on electric wires.  Flowers rose like lilting lollipops from plastic buckets and the cut-off bottoms of old water jugs.  Brightly painted murals warning against alcoholism and dengue fever decorated the walls.  We begin a steep plunge down into the pueblo’s center and spotted the church.

It was a soaring regal relic of colonialism, all the pomp seriousness of the Spaniards standing proudly in the center of this Zapotec valley.  A proper Spanish catholic church, straight out of the 15^th century, snug between the homes and the cooking fires, the cows and donkeys and sheep and turkeys.  As we took weighted, careful step after weighted, careful step down perilous cobblestone streets into the heart of the valley the views grew more and more spectacular – the imperial Spanish church puffing its chest into the village, the walls of rippling green Sierra undulating out into the distance, the hint of river far below.

Lach-a-tao.  We said it like cats with papery tongues.

The man in charge of the tourism office came to meet us.  He had us sign some paperwork – names, nationalities, gender – on a register which, in quintessential Mexican form, was present randomly in different villages and which we needed to fill out with different information (sometimes one person, sometimes four, sometimes age, sometimes sex) each time.  It seems as if the general management style in Oaxaca and, I would extrapolate, in the rest of the country is to issue a wide and valiant order (all tourists will register!  Yes!) and then to disappear for a nice long lunch and let the municipalities work it out however they please, clinking glasses as it dwindles into obscurity.

“Where’s the camping area?” we asked, looking tentatively around town.

“Alla,” said the tourism man with a slightly wounded tone that said, “but it’s so obvious, can’t you see?”

He was pointing at the church lawn.

The church, bizarrely enough, had a grassy lawn akin to that you’d find in a suburban soccer game.  It was expansive, wrapping neatly around all sides of the church, and it was dutifully tended by sprinklers.  Sprinklers.  I can’t imagine anything more distinctly American and less expected in Lachatao except for, perhaps, a burger joint with bacon and bleu cheese and creamy microbrews.  We stood above the lawn – the church seemed to have sunk into the midst of the pueblo with the weight of its own importance, sitting a good five feet below the municipal buildings, the rounded tops of the walls of its stone courtyard even with the cobblestone streets.  The whole pueblo could essentially keep an eye on us throughout the night, the gringos in their absurd, sacred cage, walking around in their tubed hiking socks and headlamps.  Ten pesos a ticket.

We camped on the church lawn.  Who can turn down such an offer?  And the man put it out there with such obvious nonchalance, as if clearly this is what all sweaty backpacked visitors looking to save 100 pesos did, and we shrugged, dragged our packs down to the grassy lawn (which we soon discovered was covered in tiny insidious burrs) and pitched tents.

The evening light deepened and deepened as if someone was really jacking up the saturation controls on the Photoshop, and we took our first showers in three days.  Hot water, shiny new bathrooms, and mirrors.  When we emerged from the Lachatao bathrooms, we might as well have been going to a Viennese ball.  We were springing along, shaking our hair in the beams of light, glorious.

A small comedor sat to one side of the church, but you’d have never known it were a restaurant if the tourism guy hadn’t pointed it out.  We stepped tentatively into the kitchen: a cool, dark space like so many interiors in these pueblos, with screened windows giving out onto a yellow-green hill and a small cemetery of crooked wooden crosses.  A woman stepped out of the darkness of the next room: an abuelita.

“Buenos tardes!” she said, with the voice of crackling wood that these old women have.

“Buenos tardes!” we chorused back, and asked what she had on hand for dinner.

Caldito de pollo con verduras, espinas con verde, tasajo…

“Can we put beers in your fridge?” we asked hopefully.

“Of course!”

We were sold.  We settled into that long wooden table under a single hanging bulb and ate and drank, Coronas with lime, chicken soup with chayotes and carrots and fat small potatoes, pork spine cooked in a green mole made of herbs and seedy tomatillos and roasted poblanos, humble eggs and beans as August had meekly demanded, craving a humble camping meal.  We played cards and the sun gave way into diffuse watercolors.  The wind drifted up through the screens and smelled like summer in Ohio, hints of dusty metal and warmth and night falling.

Night settled protectively over Lachatao and we left the restaurant, emerging with the dazedness of a few beers and a long day of walking.  There was a basketball game going on, two teams of men ducking and lunging and sprinting across the field to the cheers of little kids and the occasional disinterested, half-bemused stares of women.  Three women were making tlayudas, memelas and molotes at a small stand with a comal set up in front of the church.  There you had your triangle of Mexican pueblo life – the basketball court, the memela lady, the church.  Our tents sat off to one side like a surreal thought bubble.

At 5:30 a.m. we woke to a cacophony of sounds that could’ve been a recording entitled “Mexican Pueblo Life.”  Men sharpening their machetes.  A long, insistent van horn.  The pueblo loudspeaker grumbling out incomprehensible announcements.  Laughter.  Donkeys braying.  Turkeys gobbling in frantic melodies that rose and fell.  Dogs barking.  Dogs echoing back.  Sheep baaing.  Feet shuffling.  More laughter with an occasional guffaw.

It was a tequio – a village project in which, under the political system of the Pueblos Mancomunados (or the “united villages”) all citizens are required to participate.  The Pueblos Mancomunados operate under a social-political setup called usos and costumbres in which people are given different roles and responsibilities each year and must fulfill them or be kicked out of the community; denied land and a share in the profits of ecotourism and other village income.  One year, a person might be the town mayor; the next, its policeman; the following, its treasurer.  This is true only for men, of course; women raise the babies and do the housework and run small restaurants, lacking, for the most part, a political voice.  Men are also required to participate in all tequios; clearing roads, picking up garbage, building a school or another municipal building.

Usos and costumbres is an interesting system that has come under debate in the last few years.  It will be telling to see what happens to it as Mexico continues to grow economically and migration takes its toll on village life. The single most obvious benefit to a foreigner is that profits from ecotourism are distributed evenly throughout the community and unlike so many other places where tourism has become a village’s main livelihood, people do not seem (for the most part) resentful of tourists or eager to exploit them.  Prices are fixed and everyone shares the responsibility of guiding, feeding and caring for the gringos.  The positive impact of ecotourism on the communities is tangible.

So after the tequio had rustled up the entirety of the village’s human and animal populations, we reluctantly emerged from our tents bleary-eyed and half-conscious.

Sometime later, following a groggy start, we slipped into the forest. We were now in the backpacking zone in which the point is to walk and everything else is superfluous.  The trail dipped down suddenly to a river where we had a 10 a.m. shot of mezcal, the official Earliest Sip Of Mezcal Ever for all of us.  The uphill after that was warm and woozy, and then we emerged into a ghost forest out of The Never Ending Story.

Spanish moss hung from the branches of pines in long gray-white beards like those of lanky 16^th century travelers.  There was so much of it that it created the sensation of having entered a different forest, a different vibe, a different time, one of those forests where enchanted things happen if you pay enough attention – a tree winks, a beard rustles, a leaf grins.  We were merely passing visitors.  The air grew cooler and sunlight peeked through the woven canopy of silvery moss.  We hiked downhill and downhill, the rocky green hills seeming to rise around us, their tops already dipped in sunlight.

We followed the river for hours along old Zapotec walking paths, their worn stones surfacing occasionally under the moss and the dead leaves.  Each time the rounded back of a stone emerged, I thought of a Zapotec runner in huaraches racing along this route, one limber leap after another, barely caressing the stone paths, a basket of salt and fish balanced upon his head, sprinting from the sea to the mountains.  Then I thought how absurd our pilgrimage was in comparison, loaded down with backpacks full of expensive gear whose purpose was none other than to give us the modern thrill of self-sufficiency, to let us play for a while at endurance and survival.  Jorge was mocking of this, even though after a few days of the rhythm and silence and absorption of walking he came to understand why gringos subjected themselves to it and even boasted of it among themselves.

We saw cactus flowers.  First red ones that looked like beautiful wounds opening up out of the cactus.  These cactuses were skinny, medusa-like locks spilling over huge rocks.  They were rock cactus-dreads, decorated with the bright red bows of their flowers.

Someone was lucky enough to glance down at just the right moment and catch a biznaga, a squat, stout cactus with a delicate pink flower in its center.  We stood in awe of this not only because of its rarity and surprising beauty, but because there’s a restaurant in Oaxaca called “La Biznaga” and the actual thing itself had always lingered in the back of our minds when we were there, elusive and half-real.

Lunch was by the river, gouda sandwiches and Oreos, sprawled in a Mexican forest with the gentle tumble of water to our backs and sun puncturing the trees at intervals.  The light was warm and soft and it smelled like Earth, pine, water, leaves.

We finally emerged from the forest onto a dirt road where, at the indication of a farmer trailing two fat oxen on a plow, we veered sharply up to the right.  I watched the oxen, spectacular creatures who always, unfailingly, remind me of The Oregon Trail (“Sarah has dysentery.  Buy 4 boxes of antibiotics”) bob away in the field as we climbed.  And climbed.  And climbed.  Nearly 1,000 meters later, all of us coated in films of sweat and grit and panting, we came out on the top of the ridge and saw Little Dude, conspicuously absent for an agonizing hour of uncertain uphill, congratulating us on the effort.

Mountains spilled out everywhere.  Green ridges and ruffles.  The sky was a kid’s drawing of puffy clouds and blue.  La Tuvi sat a few hundred meters away, a picturesque village set on the side of a peak.

“Are those the cabañas?” asked August, in a way that said, “if those are the cabañas we are staying in a cabaña, dammit.”

They were the same style as other cabañas; aromatic, thick oak logs from the Sierra, but with balconies and hammocks practically hanging over the valley and the mountains.  It was done for.  We were staying there.

There was no one in the tourist office so we pitched our bags and ourselves on the surreal grassy lawn, a patch of American suburbia in the Sierra, and watched pueblo life.  A man chopped wood.  Old women in brightly colored checked aprons and ancient sandals walked sturdily by, casting glances at us and offering enthusiastic nods when we said hello.  These old women are forces to be reckoned with.  Their hair is a perfect and unbroken shade of eggshell white and it is formed into twin braids, joined together at the ends.  Their bodies are wrinkled and worn maps of lives of labor, but still strong and springy.  They may seem frail at first appearance, but they do far more than we – with our packs and our challenging days and our fetishes of fettucini – could pull off or would want to.

We heard the rustling noises of a parade.  Just as dogs are finely tuned to hear the sounds of birds in the woods or light taps at the door, I have been programmed to pick up on a parade in the making miles away.  In this case I heard a consistent tap-tap of feet and subtle murmuring.

It was a Semana Santa procession, a ragtag group of villagers of all sizes and ages, some with thrift store T-shirts from the U.S, some with jeans, some with aprons and housedresses, carrying a bible and a large cross covered with flowers.  Chills went down my spine.  Sometimes in Mexico I can feel what life must have been like two hundred, three hundred years ago, feel the same firm beliefs and worldviews pushing forward from where they have been tamed or hidden by modernity.  Can see history like an x-ray.  An old man’s eyes were half-closed in the procession as he murmured passionately in song and rapture. This Spanish religion so completely appropriated by people whose gods come from rain and ghost forests, grasped with such conviction that it has now become them, or they have become it, their fervor transplanted into it.  The procession tumbled absorbedly downhill.

A few minutes later the woman in charge of the tourism office came and we we left our platform as town observers to reserve cabañas.  Another, larger procession went by while we were inside, this time led by several donkeys, the chanting louder, more troubled, more devout.

The woman led us to the cabaña, a wide log cabin with one huge cama matrimonial and several bunk beds, which Jorge and I took since August and Natalie were supposedly (despite our constant, stinking presence) on their honeymoon.  We showered one by one in the dark, tiled, steaming refuge of the bathroom, the sensation of cleanliness practically religious.  The Semana Santa march culminated at la iglesia; our march through the forest culminated in the perfume of steam and soap.

The late afternoon was spent cradled in hammocks, looking out over the deep V of the valley straddled by peaks, watching the sky darken to the troubled blue of stormy oceans and fill up with clouds, progressively putting on layers of clothing until finally, when we raced through the initial plops of a downpour to the comedor across the street from the cabanas, we were in several fleeces each and woolen hats and in my case, long underwear.

Someone dashed up for Coronas from the nearby Miscelanea, where a local girl, a little pudgy, a little awkward in adolescence, was flirting with the boy stocking the Coke fridge.  She didn’t charge the normal 5 peso deposito per chela and shoed us out of there.  We tucked the beers in the señora’s freezer while she started in on tasajo and memelas and soup and beans and the deliciousness that makes me weak and grateful and brings back the initial wishy-washiness of the first time traveler in another country. We played cards, got a little drunk, made fun of the word “bucolic,” ate in rapture, watched the rain pummel the pueblo and listened to its heavy, pebbly sound on the tin roof.

That night, we made a fire.  The cabaña filled up with smoke due to a clogged chimney and we opened the window to the cold and the rain, tufts of cold air making their way in just often enough to make us congratulate ourselves on opting out of camping.  Cards, and beers, and a fire in a cabin in the mountains in Mexico.  We slept contented.

The next morning the señora made steaming plates of enfrijoladas with a sharp wild mint called poleo, or more colloquially, yierba de conejo (rabbit’s herb).  The herb took some getting used to, coming off at first like toothpaste and then later, once my tongue adjusted, like a fresh, vibrant answer to the thick bean paste.  I could tell it would be one of those tastes I’d forever associate with this place and this moment, breakfast in LaTuvi months before leaving for grad school, before my friends would get serious about having a baby.

Leaving town we passed turkeys who stuck out their impressive pecs at us, fluffing their feathers and gobbling like mad, strutting like real machos defending their territory.  They ran circles around a gawky skinny female, who seemed simultaneously bored, exasperated and clueless as to how to respond.  The gobbling was constant, the warbling traipsing all over the musical scale.  I’ve always thought gobbling should be used as a sort of wah-wah-wah laugh track for when someone says something idiotic – hit the gobbles!   WabbawabbawabbawabbaWAbawabaWA…

We got lost no less than three times that day.  The first was after two hours of enthusiastic conversation dotted with inevitable, foreshadowing remarks like “wow this is such an easy day” and “man, we’ll be there by 1” which in retrospect make you want to grab and shake yourself by the throat.  The road dwindled…dwindled…turned into a shaky zigzag through thick pine forest, crossed several streams, and then merrily disappeared into a field dotted with cow patties.

“I don’t think…”

Fifteen minutes later we were grumbling back through the pine forest.  Back at the now much-despised fork we’d taken in the wrong direction – thanks, little dude, for your convenient absence once more – a farmer told us to keep going left and up, left and up.

The second time we somehow ended up at the edge of an old Zapotec woman’s farm. There were turkeys, goats, dogs, cows.

“Buenos tardes!” shouted Jorge, our local representative.  The woman laughed when we said where we were going and then, seeing the lost, begging, pathetic looks on our faces, proceeded to guide us back to the right path.  To anyone who casually glimpsed at a photo of her, at her checked apron and her long skinny braids, at her tiny feet in ancient black shoes, she might have seemed fragile.  But looking closer, they would have felt humbled.  She grabbed goats by their horns and turkeys by their feet, killed chickens, farmed, hiked, sold, negotiated, survived; and we arrived with our REI backpacks and our water filters, eating Nature Valley granola bars and heading in the exact opposite direction of where we were supposed to go.  We scrambled behind her, baby gringo chicks.

“How long does it take you to get to La Nevería?” we asked her.

“Me?” she said, looking us up and down like the curious cases we were, “an hour, y cargando cosas.”  So this woman did it in an hour, carrying bags on her head, assuredly, and perhaps towing livestock.  She saw us off at the critical junction and waved, and we felt for her unparalleled love.  It took us an hour and forty-five minutes to reach La Nevería.

La Nevería was the “sleepy village” so often referred to in travel lit, a veritable “hamlet.”  Our relief at having finally arrived was soon tempered by the realization, that brutal knuckle sandwich of a joke at the end of a day of backpacking, that the cabañas were on the other side of the Neverías narrow valley, and we’d have to go down and up again to get there.  Down we went, where a tiny puppy could barely contain its excitement at finally getting to do its job as the town welcoming committee.  It trembled so much I thought it might levitate.  It came running up and circled our legs.  It killed us with cuteness.  And then, when we passed its driveway, it calmly sat down again and waited for the next crew to come rolling in.

La Nevería was something out of a storybook.  Watercress grew in its streams, protected by gently swooping nets.  Calla lilies blossomed on hillsides and the small houses were shouldered by flowers.  The valley was the green one of fables.  Animals grazed, grandmas sat on wooden chairs.  We rose up the other side of the valley and reached the tourist office in a daze.

The two men in charge of La Nevería’s tourist office didn’t seem to know what to do with the four sweaty, dusty, hulking foreign types in front of them, and followed us everywhere with a mix of concern, anticipation, and curiosity.  What would we do next?  Would we take off our sandals and apply some strange salve to blisters again?  Would we crack each others’ backs?  Reach into the depths of our enormous packs for some strange instrument?

We were sold on the cabañas and there was no going back.  The shower was a religious rite.  Backpacks were shed, socks were left in steaming heaps on the hard wood floors, and bodies were lathered and rinsed, lathered and rinsed in remarkably clean, luxurious tile bathrooms.  La Neverías tourist wranglers sat on the logs outside, waiting for something to happen, or pondering our sudden appearance and existence.

Esther was the cook.  She hunched over a long, wide, luscious counter, her elbows akimbo.  The kitchen was her reign, and you knew it right off the bat.  Her voice was sweet, high-pitched, and matter of fact.

“Que van a querer de cenar?” she asked, and in our languor and stupification we just sort of stared at her elbows, her bright, brown, round cheeks.

Finally –

“What do you have?” I asked.

She had watercress and egg pancakes, and broad beans in a creamy salsa. We ordered four plates.

Sounds of sizzling and chopping filled La Nevería’s restaurant as we took Coronas from the fridge and squeezed lime into them.  Esther served us a heaping plate of the pancakes, watercress fresh from the town’s streams held together with egg, which we devoured with salsa and tortillas in a matter of minutes.  A woman from Canada joined us.  Our bowls of beans came and we ate as the light descended in long, orange rays.  The comedor was a wide arc, surprisingly well designed and well lit, with windows on either sides, sturdy wooden tables and chairs, and that enormous kitchen with its queen, Esther.

Night fell as we talked and suddenly August gasped about the moon, which was nearly full, and whose light etched out the trees on the neighboring ridge into dinosaurs or straggly dancers, exaggerating the fairy tale mood.

There was another fire and we gathered around it drinking mezcal and chatting, this time without fear of smoke in an unclogged chimney.  We roasted marshmallows and drank mezcal.  And then, at the paltry hour of 8 p.m., it was time for bed.  The night was quiet and deep and cold.  Jorge and I crawled under the woolen blankets and slept.

The next morning I went for a walk by myself through La Nevería, taking in the stillness of the morning, the soft light the color of fluffy yellow ducklings.  The watercress waved gently in the water and the church sat empty; it was a small brick building hung with blue and yellow flags, with a makeshift altar at its front bearing gifts and crosses and portraits of the virgin.  No one was up yet; the village held the peaceful softness of dawn.

I enjoyed that until I thought that the reason for the quiet was the loss of the town’s young people to work in the Oaxacan valley and beyond; Esther worked in the Tlacolula market and came up to La Nevería when tourists came.  “Hopefully,” she said, “this project will keep growing and then I can come back and live here.”

We took the easy way out, with five days of beautiful hiking behind us and thousands of emails and two eager dogs waiting for us, and instead of hiking the last hour to Benito Juaréz and waiting for the bus we called for a taxi to take us down from La Nevería to Oaxaca.

The taxi rumbled downhill, first under the cover of pines and oaks and cool high altitude air, and then past rocky hillsides and paler shades of yellow, darker shades of orange, past huge flat-leaved nopales and dry ravines until finally we took off our hats and rolled the windows down and smelled the warm air of the valley.