The Pan American Highway

As we traveled up Highway 57 to bring us to Texas, my eyes drank in the scenery in case I don´t travel the road again for awhile. The absence of billboards is something I appreciate as is detracts from real life, this is what we did see...

A very large bull meandering in the highway, nothing stops traffic like a 900 pound animal in front of you. Tierra Quemada, the name of a town, it means burned earth and I think I wouldn´t want to live there. Real de Catorce rising like a giant. Las Palmas in it´s 1960´s wonderfulness. "Vulcanizadoras cons pistolas a las 24 horas" and that would be tire repair dudes with pistols 24 hour service, I´m never traveling the Pan-American Carretera at night. Men driving donkey carts on the dirts roads of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. The skinniest horses I have ever seen were in the alti-planos of San Luis Potosi, the land there is high in the mountains and arid...how anything thrives there is a mystery. Coyote roadkill with giant swooping vultures on the side of the road to clean up. Vendors with casacabel skins every few kilometers, yes people (mostly women and children) make their living selling the sketletal remains of rattlesnakes they have killed. There are a hell of a lot of rattlesnakes for sale in north San Luis Potosi and the "homes" by the stands are built of scrap pallets, corrugated cardboard, threadbare blankets, a piece of tin if you are lucky...it´s third world living at the edges of a fancy highway. Pozozs de Santa Ana, and I wondered if the misery of revolution had lived here and been left broken, to whither out. Ancient adobe walls abandoned for 20th century building scraps. Land being cleared of Huizache and Mesquite trees and the trees were just set on fire, no collection of firewood, no conservation but the air smelled like they should be smoking ribs and it was a scrumptious smell.

When we arrived in Monterrey the smog hanging over the city hit us in the face and the smell burned our nostrils. Monterrey is like Gary, Indiana in the 70´s, pumping out the nastiest fumes that even your air conditioner cannot conceal. Isabel remarked "I have to get out of this city, it stinks so bad I have a headache!" She was right, Monterrey is another place I don´t know how anyone survives because of the carcinogens being released into the air. Entire mountains are cut away to harvest materials for concrete, the entire ecosystem around the city is marred from production of industry. Sebastian wondered how the mountain didn´t fall down on "all these people, look at this mom, it´s so dangerous." My eight year old sees it, my six year old smells it in the air, why can the adult reapers/rapers of the land acknowledge what is wrong with that brand of progress?

As we exited Monterrey I composed some poetry while driving:

huizaches drenched
with yellow blossoms
and the air, oh the air
moving the sweetest of smells...
of spring
beneath mountains
gouged by industrialism
and the cloud
of the 21st Century
saturating an entire
valley
choking everyone
below

I haven´t written poetry since 10th grade high school, and the teacher thought I had copied some beatnik poetry (because she said it was too good for 10th grade literature, ego boost.) Whether it´s good or bad, I don´t really care, that is Monterrey in my minds eye, a hopeful wasteland, waiting to be reclaimed. Drive the Pan-American Highway 57 for yourself and observe, the cloud of what the United States does not want in their back yard is waiting there for you to witness.

Please don´t get it in your head Mexíco is ugly or worthless. There is untold beauty of heart and miracles. The most luscious land I have ever seen is in Urupan, home of avocado export to the world. The most gracious people one could encounter, and my standards are high as I grew up in the mid-west and expect a "hello, how are you today?" with chatty banter, live in Mexíco. The Pan-American Highway really isn´t Pan America at all, it is a desolate fast stretch of highway that takes you through places you´d never go to get to where you want to be. Mexíco is where the hearts of my children lie because it is beautiful and forgiving while giving and with mysterious otherworldiness of the town we lived in and loved. But that chapter closed during 947.8 miles (including when I went the wrong way and had to go back.) That our last memories should be on that toll-road driving from the unknown to the unknown sucks.

Before I have said, my children are brave and fierce (also annoying). In traveling Highway 57 I could not have chosen better, more attentive companions. Constantly they pulled me out of my torpor from driving to look and see the wonder in the wasteland. The beauty in the breakdown.