Above the Rocks and Beneath the Stars

                                                   

Above the Rocks and Beneath the Stars

The people and landscape of Mexico's Copper Canyon region, through the eyes of a dreamer

                                                                   

By Erickson Lowell

I was driving down the highway at a normal cruising speed, let’s say 55.  For some reason, I decided to go in the opposite direction.  I cut the steering wheel sharply to the left while braking hard and, with tires squealing, did a 180.  This violation of the laws of physics and the principles of common sense was followed by another:  The car was now flying backward down the highway at full speed—in its former direction.  I applied the brakes hard, but they seemed to have little or no effect.  I struggled to keep the car on the road while looking over my shoulder.  It was weaving from one lane to the other, and I knew this situation couldn’t last.  Sure enough, another car came from the opposite direction.  I had to try to avoid a collision.  The next thing, I was fighting to keep the car under control as it flew through the ditch.  The car and I were still moving at highway speed in spite of my strenuous efforts to apply the brakes.



I awoke in a tiny cave, a shallow notch in a rock wall, in Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara, certain that I had been on this wild ride before.  I had slept fitfully on a narrow, uneven, sloping perch, worrying about the sanitary and safety implications of some small animal droppings on a shelf just above me.  These are good conditions for dreaming.

If this was indeed a recurring vision, a one-act drama with a hidden message, that restless night was to mark its last occurrence.  It was made unnecessary by what was to follow.  Or so I like to think.

I was in the Copper Canyon region, Las Barrancas Del Cobre, famed for its network of canyons that in places are deeper than Arizona’s Grand Canyon.  It is a remote area of north-central Mexico, accessible in most places only by primitive roads or on foot, a wild and beautiful land to which I awoke the next morning, and through which I followed my son Dylan, our guide Reyes Ramirez, and a horse over the trails and dirt roads leading to our destination, the bottom of Copper Canyon, on the Urique River, near Tejaban.

Our journey was Dylan’s idea, proposed months earlier over the telephone.  An adventurous, athletic twenty-eight year-old, he wanted to visit the Copper Canyon region before it succumbed to twenty-first century commercialization.  He clinched his proposal when he said, “You don’t have to do this with me, Dad, but I’d really like you to.”  What’s a father to say?

Dylan’s request presented many challenges.  Keeping up with my hardy son wouldn’t be easy in steep terrain and thin mountain air.  Also, my knowledge of Spanish is at the “Me-Tarzan-you-Jane” level, so communication would pose obstacles to a gringo like me.  Above all, I looked to this adventure as a test of my mental awareness and common sense.  You see, I tend to be a thinker and a daydreamer.  I resolved that on this trip I would think less and experience more.
         


Our journey began on June 9 in Albuquerque, where we boarded a bus and traversed the deserts of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, arriving that evening in the city of Chihuahua.  The next morning we rode the Chihuahua al Pacifico Railway up into the mountains to the town of Creel, the primary staging point for excursions in the area.  Two days later, after exploring some of the countryside on our own, we rode a van into the little village of Cusárare.

Here, we were introduced to our guide, Reyes, a wiry man with deeply wrinkled brown skin and graying black hair and mustache.  When he smiled, which was often, he revealed that he was missing all his teeth except for those in front on the bottom, a result of exposure to mercury in the days when he worked for the mines.  In his white straw Stetson and cowboy-style shirt, he looked like a typical mestizo farmer. 

But Reyes was more prosperous than most of the people of Cusárare.  His property, a handful of acres devoted to a cornfield and an apple orchard, sat on the edge of the village, alongside the stream that ran through the community.  The front of his white adobe house presented a pretty picture, with blue window frames and door frames and an unpainted picket fence in the foreground. 

But Reyes showed us that a gas explosion had destroyed the entire back section.  A recently constructed one-room log cabin nearby served as sleeping quarters for the family, while the one habitable room in the house functioned as a kitchen and dining area.  A 1960’s vintage Ford pickup truck, its front end on blocks, sat in front.  It didn’t run, but it appeared to be the closest thing to a motorized vehicle in the village. 
         
Before leaving, we sat in the kitchen.  It seemed as if we had stepped back in time one hundred years.  There was no electricity, and thus no lights or refrigerator, and no running water, only a pitcher and bowl.  Heat for cooking was provided by a small crude woodstove in the corner.
         
Reyes’ wife and their son, a young man who left off working the field with a horse-drawn plow, assisted in preparations for the trek.  We left with our gear tied to an old saddle on the back of a small smoky-white stallion, headed southward towards Tejaban.  Reyes led the horse while Dylan and I followed immediately behind.  After just a few yards, we found ourselves climbing a steep ridge overlooking Reyes’ home. 


         
The stallion seemed to handle his bulky load pretty well at first, but before long he began to balk.  We learned to step back quickly at these times, because the sudden stops were often accompanied by a flow of green manure, which threatened to land on our shoes, or a release of foul gas.  Reyes gave up on leading the horse and instead walked behind, offering encouragement by means of vigorous whacks with his walking stick
         
As we trod behind or alongside him, Reyes drew Dylan into a flood of conversation, a challenge to Dylan’s functional but not fluent Spanish.  I understood fragments, and could often extract the gist from what was being said.  Occasionally, I contributed laboriously produced phrases and sentences of my own.  Reyes and I were in our mid-fifties, and we joked about being old men,“viejos.”
         
Progress was slow due to the frequent interruptions and the leisurely pace set by the stallion.  This allowed us to fully appreciate the scenic environment through which we walked, especially a section that I call “the valley of the boulders,” a forest glen strewn with rocks, some of them as large as a house.  After about an hour, it began to rain, fitfully at first and then steadily.  By the time we reached our campsite three hours later, we were soaked to the skin from top to bottom.
         
Nevertheless, our spirits were high as we changed clothes and dried out in front of a campfire at the mouth of a small cave.  A bullfrog, heartened by the rain, croaked in the distance with a loud, hoarse quack that persisted all night.  I left the cave, which I deemed too small for three people, to Dylan and Reyes, and slept in the still smaller notch further down the ridge, where I dreamed of my struggle to control the runaway car.
         
The next morning, as we resumed our slow walk behind the stallion, I decided that the dream was a cautionary tale about capricious decisions, a parable about the proper application and limitations of control.  It was directed to a man who pursued goals, and who was always looking to something better--or at least something new--a middle-aged man who had not yet learned to sufficiently cherish the things that he had.
         
We met a boy on a bicycle coming from the opposite direction on a wooded dirt road.  He was followed by a gray burro trotting with an empty wooden pack frame on his back.  Behind the burro came a man in sandals, younger than Reyes but dressed in an identical plaid cowboy shirt and straw hat.  He smiled, revealing a missing upper tooth, as the two men greeted each other warmly and hugged.  It turned out that the man was Reyes’ cousin.  They agreed to switch animals and proceeded to unload the gear from the horse and place it on the back of the burro.  The cousin then rode off on the horse, after the boy on the bicycle. 
         
The burro was an improvement on the horse, less balky and better at negotiating the steep uneven ground.  Reyes marched immediately behind it, almost in lock-step, urging it on in a hoarse loud whisper or with a lip-smacking “tsk-tsk” sound.  When it stopped, he whacked or poked it with his walking stick.  When he wanted to communicate a still greater sense of urgency, he jabbed the burro sharply in the rectum.  Rather than making the animal jump, this merely produced a grudging compliance.  When the burro made one of his frequent diversions to the edge of the trail in order to sample some tasty plant, Reyes ran over to his side and drove the reluctant animal back with a vigorous whack or two.
         
Although Reyes set the course, the burro had a lot to say about how fast we went, and when and where we took those brief unsanctioned breaks.  Reyes accepted this give and take with equanimity, never truly angry at the animal.  “Poco a poco (little by little),” he announced repeatedly.  It was as if he were commenting on my dream about the boundaries of control. 
         
Meanwhile, as we progressed over the trails that twisted up and down the ridges, the terrain and plant life were changing.  When we had left Reyes’ home in the valley surrounding Cusárare, the vegetation had tended toward scrub pine and bushes.  But as we ascended to higher elevations, the land came to be dominated by forests of tall but thinly interspersed pine, oak, and juniper trees.  The madroño, a strikingly attractive deciduous bush, was also common.  It displayed a bright red bark that tended to peel off to reveal white wood underneath, like a sycamore.
         
Much of the time, we picked our way up and down over gravel, loose shale, or uneven rock, or we followed inches-wide paths and switchbacks skirting steep slopes.  Occasionally we jumped from boulder to boulder.  At the highest levels, the ground often consisted of solid expanses of dark gray pocked volcanic rock, looking like the surface of a dry sponge. 
         
Reyes’ walking stick skimmed over this often treacherous terrain like a third leg.  He locked his eyes on the ground directly in front of him, at the heels of the burro.  Although he sometimes commented on the beautiful scenery, he rarely looked about him unless we stopped.  Even on the few occasions when we traversed level ground, he moved with short, heavy, plopping steps as if he were still walking up or downhill.  This I surmised to be the gait of a man who had spent his life treading over these mountain pathways, a man who understood the importance of maintaining a solid footing in life, a man who was not likely to act impulsively.
         
I strove for the same attention to task.  To do otherwise would invite a nasty fall, with no way out for help except on foot or on the back of a burro.  Loose shale required the most care, especially going down steep inclines where we had to take short slow steps to avoid a hard fall on our butts.  On the other hand, the porous volcanic rock provided excellent traction.  Feeling like a fly on a wall, I trusted it on the steepest slopes.
         
I found myself thinking about those rocks, seemingly so solid, and yet made of atoms that are for the most part just empty space.  I was fascinated by the thought that I was walking on an illusion, a force field rather like the ones in old Star Trek episodes.  From there it was only a short step to reveries about so-called reality. 



So much for my resolution to stay in the here and now.  I don’t suppose that such fancies occur to most of the people of the Copper Canyon region, people who are of necessity of a practical bent of mind and who don’t find it difficult to live in the moment, people like Ramona.  She was the wife of Reyes’ cousin, the one who met us on the trail and traded his burro for Reyes’ horse.  They lived at the edge of Tejeban, a dusty village near the beginning of the descent into the canyon. 

The story continues in "Above the Rocks, Beneath the Stars 2" and "Above the Rocks, Beneath the Stars 3."