Today, December 12th, marks one of the most important religious and cultural holidays in all of Mexico. The Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe commemorates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to indigenous peasants in 1531, 12 years after Hernán de Cortés bravely rode into the Aztec capital of Tenochtlán, ultimately changing the course of history in the Americas forever. Vatican News has a great article on the event here. Another, longer version can be found on Wikipedia here.
On December 12, 1977, I was in Mexico, the beginning of many adventures to this colorful and historic land. And three years ago, I wrote a blog post about an unforgettable night I experienced while traveling in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Like the reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, or the recitation of David Sedaris’s “Santaland Diaries” over the Christmas holidays, I will never forget the scene that unfolded before my eyes 46 years ago today. Below is a complete repost (with some updates). Please read it and celebrate the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
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December 12th is one of the most important religious holidays in all of Mexico. On that day, people travel from rural villages to their parish churches (sometimes hours on very bad roads), visit family, and take part in colorful celebrations (here is an article about the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Mexicans). I first experienced this holiday in 1977, during the fourth great adventure of my life, traveling by bus and hitchhiking for three months through Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. I will never forget what I saw and experienced that night in rural tropical Mexico. It is a memory that comes back every year on December 12th, 43 years ago.
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| 16th century statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe |
I was about four weeks into my adventure. I had just finished my second season as a backcountry ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. My life had changed a lot in those two years, but my desire to get out and travel and escape unpredictable conditions had not. I had previously completed three six-week hitchhiking adventures in the United States and Canada in the summers of 1973 and 1974, and in the winter of 1976. After a planned seasonal break at the Grand Canyon, my girlfriend Cindy Kane and I drove to Austin, Texas, where we met up with her old boyfriend, Peter Sprouse. Peter was a professional caver who had been in eastern Mexico with fellow cavers to map Cueva de Infiernillo, which was then thought to be the second longest cave in the Western Hemisphere. The paper describing the cave system can be accessed here. How could we have known back then that the cave system was formed in Cretaceous limestone?
After this amazing 10-day backcountry camping adventure, we headed south and hiked seven miles to reach another cave, Sotano de las Golondrinas, where thousands of collared sand swifts dive headfirst into a bell-shaped cavern more than 1,200 feet deep at sunset. We visited Mexico City and then took a bus to Oaxaca City, where we boarded a second-class coach for the trip to the beachside resort of Puerto Angel, where we slept in hammocks under a palapa. This is where Guadalupe’s story begins.
The Road to Oaxaca
Puerto Angel is Gringo Trail We arrived in early December, looking south toward the Pacific Ocean with temperatures in the low 90s. Columnar cacti grew on the nearby hills, and I wondered what the weather was like that very day in the mountains of Northern Arizona. I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be lying on the beach and enjoying a great road trip, even though it was hotter than I would have liked. I paid the equivalent of a dollar a night (about 22 old Mexican pesos) to pitch a hammock at a place called Susanna’s. I asked the hostess, “Where’s the bathroom?” and she tilted her chin up toward the garden and said, “Ai” (over there). When we got outside, she muttered, “El Puerco” under her breath. I was confused, but what on earth? This is Mexico, and I get confused a lot. Sure enough, within five minutes of me relieving myself, the pig was gone without a trace, snorting among the cacti in search of more edible food. Everything I left behind was gone, including the paper. I hadn’t had bacon for a month.
After a few days at the beach, Cindy and I decided to head to Chiapas and the Palenque ruins. So we packed our hammocks in our backpacks and headed to the bus station in Patchutla late in the afternoon of December 12th. As we pulled into the bus station, what an incredible sight unfolded before our eyes. Hundreds of petite Mexicans were crowding toward the three-window ticket booth. Cindy, about 5’7″ tall with long blonde hair, really stood out in the sea of dark hair. She and I were taller than the mixed-race mestizos, more Indian than Spanish. Everyone was crowded cheek to cheek toward the caged ticket booth. There wasn’t even a sign of a line. We asked a few people next to us why there were so many people. They replied, “La fiesta. La fiesta de nuestra senora de guadalupe.” Wow! We had no idea.
It was clear to me that I needed to be as proactive as possible to get to the ticket booth. There was no other way. I was told that if I didn’t get my bus tickets that night, the bus wouldn’t come until the next morning. I was still a little nervous about traveling in a country where I didn’t know the language or the customs very well. So it was rather easy for me to use my height advantage and struggle to the ticket booth. It was like a scene from a movie, with hundreds of people trying to reach the booth and barely any movement at once. After about 45 minutes, I reached the booth and I managed to grab the last two seats on the second class bus. It was a nine-hour overnight trip on bumpy roads to Oaxaca. I was exhausted from the ticket struggle, but I didn’t realize that most of the adventure was still ahead of us. In these circumstances, I thought there was absolutely no guarantee that we would be able to get on the bus, with or without the ticket. Still, I managed to get a seat on the bus by about 8pm. (Bus travel in Mexico at that time was very primitive, not at all like it is today, where you can book spacious buses with Wi-Fi online.)
It was pitch black outside, the warm tropical air was in the air, and I was looking forward to a night in the mountains where it would be cooler. I also dreamed of sleeping on the bus to Oaxaca. As I sat in my bus seat, I started to relax. The journey started off easy as we climbed into the Sierra Madre de Sur. The roads were very bad at the time, and it would take us 9 hours to cover about 150 miles. What I didn’t expect was that the back seats were not completely bolted to the floor of the bus. When we left the station, I barely felt the gentle rocking of the seats. But it was clear that as we started to climb uphill and the roads got rockier, it would be very difficult to sleep.
A few hours later, sleep was difficult and restless as every bump in the road caused the seat to rock back and forth, so much so that every rocking slammed my head against the back window of the bus. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the back door of the bus didn’t close tightly, only partially closed with a wire. Air was letting in through about an inch of gap behind the seat all night. On the coast, this might have been a welcome relief from the stuffiness of a crowded bus and the tropical heat, but here, it just meant cool air from the mountains. To make matters worse, the opening also let in a ton of dust, which at first was unnoticeable in the dark of night, but soon became as thick as smoke inside the bus. The bumps in the road, the rocking seat, and the suffocating dust made it impossible for me to settle, let alone sleep. The bus was a Bluebird, like most buses in Latin America, so it was built for elementary school kids, so there was very little leg room to begin with.
What a night it was. I couldn’t sleep. The struggle at the ticket counter would have been memorable enough, but the bus ride only added to the adventure. When the bus finally arrived at the 2nd class bus station in downtown Oaxaca at sunrise, I was in a pretty bad mood. I looked at my clothes covered in white dust. I wondered what was happening to my lungs. I went up to the young conductor on the bus and showed him that the seats were not properly bolted to the floor, hoping that he would somehow make me forget about this. All he could say was shrug and “lo siento.” Sorry. Cindy wasn’t in a very good mood either, since the idea to “sleep” on the bus was mine (we stayed there for 3 months for $350 each) instead of staying in a cheap hotel to save precious money. Maybe it was my handling of the situation that caused her bad mood. She seemed willing to accept this night as just another part of her Mexican adventure.
The thought of fighting with hundreds of Mexicans at a crowded second-class bus stop, then finally getting a seat on a crowded bus (an old, beat-up school bus) with an uncomfortable bench seat and doors that wouldn’t close, and then traveling for nine hours on a dusty, freezing cold, bumpy dirt road, was just too much.
As the city woke up in the train station in Oaxaca, I walked blearily and aimlessly towards the bathroom. I entered, only to find it full of tiny men standing in front of the urinals. But I had another business there, and looked around for a toilet, but there was none. Focusing better, I could see where the toilet should be, across from the urinals. All I could see instead was a foundation that appeared to have been smashed with a sledgehammer, not repaired. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Even if I’d only just walked into this bathroom after getting drunk on some cold Modello, this would have been a shock. But after last night’s adventure, this was all part of an unfolding story. All that was sticking out of the hole where the toilet should have been was the sharp, upturned edge of the toilet’s foundation, with a pile of human waste hanging off the usually white porcelain edge. My desire for a morning boost quickly vanished. It wasn’t until I stepped out the eastern door and into the brilliant sunlight that the whole situation seemed more ridiculous. In that moment, I regained my composure and laughed at the incredible series of events that had led me to this place at this time. At this exasperating end to an unforgettable night, something inside me clicked.
Some readers may wonder why I recalled this story. I will be the first to admit that the final act of this play is not a pleasant memory. However, not a single Mexican treated me badly throughout the night, nor would anyone have thought that my attitude towards it was inappropriate. In fact, the opposite was true. Most of them looked at me with sympathy and understanding, knowing that I came from a culture that sees the small inconveniences of life as major traumas to be avoided at all costs. To them, this was just the other side of life’s coin. Over and over during that three-month journey, I learned how to look at the events that occur on the road of my adventure in different ways. It took several similar events to make sense of it. How did I react? What was placed in front of me was far more important than what the encounter looked like.
That is why every December 12th, I smile and remember the significance of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary of Mexico. As Karl Franz told us, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
