to the sea from albuquerque

By natural inclination, I have generally eschewed the cold and find its presence disruptive. The winters here seem to have grown increasingly dry and mild though, and I have lately been ensconced at home as winter sorta blooms, (its tiny crystalline and icy white flowers most visible at dawn, it seems) in Burque. In the past, when that chill became, by my accounting, florid, I traveled south.

I favored areas on the shores of the Sea of Cortés, and spent a few late Decembers there.

Those excursions happened at a point in history where travel to Mexico was common. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, such journeys were only mildly adventurous to many Burqeños; going south was habitual among a clearly visible and growing subculture of city residents. Albuquerque seemed like the perfect beginning point for sojourns into Mexico, especially its western coast.

It was an eight to ten hour drive to the sea. Reports here generally indicate that those temporary retreats from the shelter of snowy mountains and wind-swept mesas were favorable

Of course there were exceptions.

The high school I attended, a place whose name also alluded to the glory de la conquista, sponsored a yearly biology trip to that oceanic gulf which lies a few hundred miles southwest of these coordinates.

The man who organized this yearly venture (which included a boat trip through the gulf; scuba and snorkeling; close interaction with indigenous life forms, aquatic and terrestrial) was an excellent biology teacher and swimming coach at the school. He carried on with his yearly expeditions years after I graduated. Tragically, during one of those trips, he contracted a parasite that remained unknown to him for years and ultimately led to his death. Serio..

Stuff like that never stopped me from going to the sea; however it did put me off meat and got me to remember to wear my flip-flops as often as possible.

Two of of those trips abroad and away from this scepter'd valley were memorable enough to be included here; one in nineteen-eighty-five, another in nineteen-eighty-nine.

So, Albuquerque rolls away toward the horizon and after a while the Sandia Mountains look far away. Big dark fish stranded on a plateau. The river follows along for more than two hundred miles. There is a lot of farm land between here and Socorro, then an expansive desert. And dairy operations, large scale irrigation and industry as you approach the border.

I noted all of that on the bus to Juarez and then took the commuter train to Chihuahua City. My father had given me a list of good hotels to stay at in Chihuahua but I lost it on the train which was crowded and dirty. It stopped dozens of times in the night-time desolation to load and unload humans, to let vendors selling cheese and tamales and paletas pass through each car. I read Mexican comic books to pass the time.

When I got into town, I tried to remember what was on my father's list, had a taxi drop me off in the area that I recalled he had mentioned repeatedly. It was certainly a wonder when my old man had last visited, sometime in 1948; not so much when I did. The hotel I picked on Avenida Ocampo was dusty and worn out but sufficed. In the morning, I bought fresh elotes from the vendor on the corner, but ignored the hotdogs wrapped in bacon.

From Chihuahua there is a train to the coast. It climbs into the mountains from a terminal near the state prison, floats for a few hours amidst the majesty of the the Sierra Madre and declines toward the sea with banana trees and palms just out of reach of the windows. The time I went, the electricity was not working in the kitchen. So, they served us some Kentucky Fried Chicken that one of the porters had bought while the train was was parked at the depot.

The trip through Copper Canyon and the opportunity to experience one of this hemisphere's engineering wonders more than made up for the cold chicken and biscuits.

The tracks ended at Los Mochis, a town in Sinaloa that is inland from Topolobampo Bay. I had a hired driver take me out there and spent the day dancing on an empty beach, almost lost my glasses in the surf and later wandered nearby to the pier and watched a group of Chinese sailors on liberty drink up at the local tavern.

Another time, I drove down to San Carlos with a friend of mine. His middle name is Israel. I haven't seen him in years. He lives in Santa Fe, now, I hear.

He had a beat up old Datsun B-210 stashed in his garage on Stanford and said it would be perfectly nondescript for the trip. I agreed. We headed towards Juarez late in the day, a few diurnal rotations before Christmas proper. By the time we crossed over it was dark. We decided to take the scenic route to Hermosillo through the mountains. On the way, we listened to an old cassette copy of Nursery Cryme.

There is a town in that direction called Cananea which is built in and around some large copper mines. A huge smokestack from the smelter is visible from miles away, churning out dark clouds day and night. Parts of the town are built into the mountain and so it is filled with tunnels. Lit up like it was for Christmas with big colourful lights everywhere, it seemed otherworldly as we passed through, with the "Fountain of Salmacis" blaring from the speakers in the back seat.

Hermosillo was humid and the good hotels were plentiful and cheap. The next day I lingered around the mercado, watching the local cattlemen bring in fresh steer heads for local consumption while Israel flirted with the local women-folk, hoping they would plaintively announce to him the names of the best roads to the sea.

It turned out there was a good road available from Hermosillo to San Carlos and then Guyamas.

San Carlos was practically deserted. This is what I wrote about that trip at the time:

The sea is upon us. It seems impossible and imposing, when placed next to its desert boundry. Old craggy fishing boats and American RVs keep passing us on the highway. Roadside palapas offer fresh oysters.

The next few days are now all mixed together. An empty hotel with a colonial Spanish theme, tribal carvings being sold by the surf, a fish market built by the state, made of heroic concrete and painted with bright political slogans.

The weather was cold and stormy the first day, but then became bright and warm. Some rich Americans invited us to stop at their campsite. They had bought expensive gin and lobster tails for a barbeque. They never mentioned what their politics or culture or life were about; they just wanted to eat and drink and laugh.

I suppose that when we were done with that, we began longing for the relative organization of ghetto Smith's and recalling the pink winter sunset mountains of home. When we had finished gazing out at the unfinished cinder block hotels that were scattered around the small bay, casting their purple shadows onto the water, early in the morning, as the cacti bloomed in white response, we turned the old Datsun northward.

As we entered New Mexico and the radio crackled to life, we heard on NPR that Ceaucescu had been executed. Much later that day, I watched the moon rise over the Manzano mountains, cursing the cold and silently wishing that a great and placid sea lapped at the edges of our desert, too.