Teacher on Two Wheels

Saturday 12/1/07

Above:  Birthday party in a small village outside of San Fernando, Mexico.  Check out the cool pinata!

Almost everyone I met in Texas warned me about Mexico. Even though many of the people I talked to in Texas had never been beyond the Mexican border towns or spent more than a day at a time in the country, everyone seemed to have a story (heard through the grapevine, of course) about someone being mugged, drugged, or kidnapped on Mexican soil. I tried to take all of these stories with a grain of salt, but after a while, I began to wonder if Mexico really was a horrible, dangerous, dirty place after all.

When I pedaled up to the pedestrian bridge that led from Brownsville, Texas over the Rio Grande to Matamoros, Mexico, I wasn’t just nervous. I was scared. I wasn’t ready for Mexico. My short ride through the states didn’t seem long enough. I had a sudden urge to turn around.

“Senor, next. Come on.” A woman called out from the toll both. She buzzed open a large metal door and motioned for me to push my bike through. I had no more time to stand around worrying about Mexico. The short line of people behind me wouldn’t allow it. I paid my $0.60 and crossed the bridge.

Within five minutes of riding through downtown Matamoros, I realized the Mexico I feared was most likely the one that existed solely in my mind. The Mexico before me was filled with people on their lunch breaks, vendors selling drinks and balloons, children chasing each other around the school yard. There were banks, auto body shops, restaurants, schools, pharmacies. Sure, it looked a bit different from the U.S., but it still housed a pulsing humanity, one that was absent from the cautionary anecdotes Texans shared with me. People live here.

Like in the U.S., most people in Mexico wave to me when I ride by. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to see the people of a country I’d been coaxed into fearing wave and smile at me as I passed. Unlike the waves in the U.S., most of the waves in Mexico are accompanied by a loud greeting in Spanish. Sometimes people will yell simply ‘Good morning’ or ‘Hello’, but many times people will say ‘Keep it up!’ or ‘Ride fast, friend!’

In high spirits, I left Matamoros and plowed my way into a strong headwind. I pushed and pushed and left a trail of sweat on the asphalt behind me. As trucks barreled past me and gusts of wind jostled me around, I fought to keep the bike on a narrow strip of pavement a few inches wide that substituted as the road’s shoulder. The wind didn’t let up all afternoon. At dusk I gave up and pulled the bike off the road into a tilled field. I set up camp behind a grove of trees hidden from the road. As the stars came out by the millions, I smiled. I had survived my first day in Mexico and had done so without being drugged, mugged, or kidnapped. Life was good.

For three straight days, the nastiest headwind I’ve experienced so far on the trip howled and tried its hardest to prevent me from moving forward. Based on winds I’ve had at my back before and been able to measure via the internet, I could tell it was blowing steadily at around 20-25 m.p.h. I fought to maintain seven miles per hour on flat ground (by contrast, I can easily maintain 15—18 m.p.h on flat ground if I have a tailwind). I kept thinking about the advice Dick, a cyclist in Montgomery, AL, gave me: Don’t let the winds get inside your head. Take it one hill at a time. Don’t worry about your gears, your miles—just pedal. With the cars passing too closely to safely listen to music, all I had to keep me going was Dick’s advice.

It worked. Slowly, I moved on down the road. I fought for miles and got lost in thought to help the time pass.

On my second day in Mexico while at a small grocery store in the countryside in the late afternoon, I picked up a bunch of bananas.

“You can weigh them over there,” said a man leaning up against a soda machine.

I was shocked to hear English.

“Thanks. Where’s your accent from?” I asked.

“I lived in Oregon for 28 years.” Pause. “Jose.” The man put out his hand. His shake was firm and his palm was calloused.

We talked for a bit and after five minutes or so, Jose asked if I wanted a ride 35 miles down the road. I accepted. When Jose pulled into the little village atop a mountain where his property was located, he looked across the horizon at the setting sun.

“It will be dark soon. If you want to stay the night here, you can.”

I jumped at the chance to spend a night in the village, a collection of quaint two and three room houses centered around the small grocery store that Jose’s wife managed. Jose showed me to my digs for the night, a small cabin a few dozen yards from the main house, and invited me to use anything in the house as if it were my own.

I talked with Jose and his wife throughout the night in-between visits by local villagers looking for produce, medicine, meat, or any number of other things sold in the store. They moved back to Mexico three years ago after a 28 year absence from the country. Jose took a job at a lumber mill the first year he arrived in America and stayed there for almost three decades. He and his wife saved as much money as they could, started an in-home elderly care business in Oregon that blossomed into a round-the-clock, full-house operation, and moved back down to Mexico to retire. They purchased 200 acres of rugged bush land outside of San Fernando and now tend to their 100 cows that graze on it. Jose and his wife feel as if they experienced the U.S. of immigrant fantasies, the country that rewards hard work and welcomes everyone with open arms.

Because they were so busy with their store during my stay, I didn’t have too much time to chat with them.

After the sun went down, I set up my tent on top of my cot in the cabin to keep the mosquitoes off me and settled in for a night of heavy sleep.