RAISED WITH WOLVES

Bus Trip ‘Oh Ten: Episode 50- No Shortcuts

July 30th cont…

(It is with great trepidation that I sit down to write this, almost exactly a year since we began this crazy trip, this is the final entry from my journal, in almost illegible script due to the bouncing, shaking bus.)

We drove along that great expansive border fence that ensures American “freedom”, as if a fence can grant freedom, built by the same architects that construct wars, paid for by you, the “free” citizen. At some point that looming fence disappears, and there is only the Rio Grande, which has been a border for longer than America has been a country. We took a left, down a dusty, rocky road that looked like it probably led to those underground cock fighting rings Ben was talking about, and entered New Mexico.

As we passed a border patrol car, partially obscured by the gathering dust, Pual asked, “Are you guys sure we’re going the right way?”

“Well Pual, there’s never any way to be sure about anything, really. But this looks right, according to Tyler’s map,” I replied curtly.

Ben pointed out the window from his spot on the couch, “There’ s the sign for it, take a left up ahead.”

The road, which supposedly led to Mount Cristo Rey, was more of a dirt trail than anything, and it led up a steep hill into what looked to be a rock quarry, not a parking lot. Hoping this wasn’t a trap for drug cartels to kidnap unsuspecting blonde tourists, I pushed the pedal down as hard as I could, like I was squashing a beetle, and we bounded the hill, kicking up rocks behind us.

The trail led past yet another border patrol car, and weaved up and and down a few more gravel hills. Everyone was holding onto something as the bus bounced along, looking out the windows nervously, worried that we wouldn’t make it, or worse, we weren’t even heading in the right direction, but the heat was brutal, I was tired, and I just didn’t care. If this is where the bus met its fate, let it be, I’d pack my bags and hitch hike home, leaving it there to be swallowed up by the dust.

Finally, after a doubtful drive, we came up on the parking area, which was desolate except for one rusty work truck. Two Mexicans were putting tools and a ladder into an old shed. I parked the bus, leaped out into the rocky parking area and went to ask them if we could hike up, going over in my head how I would ask them in Spanish if need be.

Both men were wearing matching red caps that read “Mt. Cristo Rey, 69 anos”, and as I walked up to them, one of them took off his cap and wiped his sweaty forehead with a raggedy kerchief.

“Hey guys, is it okay if we go up?” I said, pointing at the lumbering statue of Christ on top of the hill, his arms outstretched as if waiting for an embrace.

“Sure, man, but remember, it’s at your own risk. We aren’t liable if anything happens to you and your buddies,” one of them replied from behind a patchy beard.

“There have been banditos in the area, and reports of assults. People go up there looking to pray, and sometimes they come back down in just their underwear. The banditos wait in the rocks and jump out and rob them,” The other one added.

“And there are a lot of rattlers this time of year, so no shortcuts, okay?”

“Yes sir,  no short cuts. Got it.” I said, and started to walk back to the bus.

“I mean it, man!” he called after me.

Back at the bus, Ben was drinking his second Beer:30 and Tyler was filling up his canteen. A border patrol officer pulled up beside the bus and asked us if we were planning on going up the mountain.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, taking off his dark sunglasses and revealing surprisingly kind eyes, “Just realize that right on the other side of that mountain is Mexico. There isn’t a fence, no river, nothing, that’s Mexico down there. Just be careful. No one is going to attack four rough looking guys like you, anyhow.

I grabbed a cold, yellow powerade out of the ice chest and the four of us started heading up the mountain trail. We were met by the two mexican men, who were sitting on fold out chairs drinking Bud Light.

“Hey man!” one of them called after us, “If you have a little pistoletta, I’d maybe carry it up with you” he made made the universal symbol for gun with his fingers and held it up in the air, laughing as we walked beneath the sad yellow arch that read “Welcome/Bienvenidos”.

Maybe I should have been more worried, but honestly, I was okay with the whole situation, banditos, rattlers and all. I was ready for a little adventure to finish up our trip. But god was it hot. It was almost too bright to even open my eyes. God damn that unremitting desert sun, hanging right there over our shoulders ad we hiked up the dusty trail.

I thought that maybe if I did have a pistol, I might just stand in the oppressive sun, beads of sweat forming on my cheeks, and go right on ahead and shoot one of those banditos in existentialist cold blood. A man’s brain could get cooked out here, and the universe wouldn’t even bat an eye at any of it.

The trail up the mountain had so many lazy switch backs it made a third of a mile hike into a two and a half mile hike. There was a yearly pilgrimage up to the feet of Jesus on the last Sunday of October, when thirty thousand people showed up to hike this trail–grandmas, priests, children–and it had to be easy enough so the hordes of the pious could make the hike.

That’s great on a cool October day, but two pm on a July afternoon, with my sweat burning my poison ivy rashes, this dusty two and a half mile trail seemed unnecessary, but we weren’t supposed to take shortcuts, so we dealt with it as opposed to dealing with rattlesnakes.

So here we were, peering over one side of the mountain into Mexico, the other side into Texas, our feet treading New Mexican dirt, and this was the last bit of hiking, last bit of anything really, that we’d be doing on this three month excursion out west. That night we would be driving east across interstate ten, that lonely stretch of Texas highway, six hundred miles back to Austin.

But now, we were doing the last activity that we would be doing together as bus-partners, as the final four swashbuckling, ratty road pirates of that sluggish yellow ship. We hiked in silence up the Mexican mountain in hundred degree sweltering heat, talking only to curse the torturous sun and the dry desert air. We watched for rattlers at our feet, expecting to find them slithering in the dust at every turn, looking over our shoulders for sneaking banditos, all to get a vision of a twenty nine foot tall concrete Jesus, arms outstretched to blank desolation, hands facing down, blessing everything and everyone all at once.

When we finally ascended the top of the mountain, the sun had sucked the energy right out of us. No wonder we didn’t run into any banditos, we were the only people stupid enough to take that wretched trail this time of the year; it just wasn’t worth it to anyone else. Pual and I were shirtless and out of water, lying down on the hot concrete in the shade of Christ. Tyler had his shirt unbuttoned, revealing his hairy chest, his hat pulled down over his brow. Ben was taking shots of Damn Hot schnapps straight from the bottle, irreverent as ever.

So we sat in the shade of Jesus, who towered above us with a stoic gaze to the east. Two and a half months of travel had culminated here, seeking solace from the oppressive sun, high above El Paso at His feet. Our pilgrimage had finally come to an end. We saw the great American West in all of its beauty and splendor. We made new friends, caught up with old ones, and lost some along the way. We learned about ourselves, about each other, and about life itself. We witnessed great American monument postcard fodder with our own eyes, felt it with our own hands, touched it with our own feet. We were two and a half months older, but we were thousands of miles older–in that time we saw what most people take their entire lifetimes to see.

I put my wet shirt back on and, with Ben’s help, climbed up onto the platform on which Jesus stood, hugging his gargantuan feet, resting my sweaty face on his rock solid gown. I sighed in his shade, watching Pual, Ben and Tyler lounging beneath us, Pual drinking from a water bottle he’d found on the ground, Ben sipping from his brown liquor bottle, and Tyler reading the candles laid at the altar.

We were all the same. From east to west, hippies, punks, street kids, hipsters, Chads, Christians, Hindus, Mexicans, “Americans”, young and poor, rich and old, we are all the same, we are all from the same places and ultimately we’re all just seeking salvation. We all want salvation, every one of us, whether we’re able to admit it or not. And as I held onto the concrete leg of Jesus, staring up at his cold visage, I couldn’t help but think it’s out there. There is hope for all of us, after all. Even if it is so damn hot out here.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Ben left his bottle of schnapps at the altar with the liturgic candles, I said a small prayer –God bless us, keep us, and save us, amen– and we began our meandering ascent back down the mountain, towards the bus, which looked like a matchbox car or a mirage below us, the mantra “MAY I NEVER BE COMPLETE. MAY I NEVER BE CONTENT. MAY I NEVER BE PERFECT” glaring up at us.

Ben and I decided, despite the Mexicans’ warnings, to take some shortcuts on the way back. As a matter of fact, we walked down the entire mountain in about fifteen or twenty minutes, making leaps and bounds down shaky boulders and slippery rocks. Ben, drunk as always, was yipping and hollering the whole way down as we hopped from rock to rock like rotten nomadic mountain goats.

When we reached the bottom, half running half skipping down, the two old Mexicans were sitting in the shade, drinking cold Bud Lights.

“I’m pissed at you guys”, one of them said, sipping his beer slowly.

The other Mexican stood up dramatically. “I told you not to take any shortcuts!” he said wildly, “I saw you two climb up the ridge at Lady of Guadalupe!”.

It was true, we had indeed climbed up from the little relic, it was a five foot climb over a ridge in lieu of a long curve around the peak on the trail, leading to some superfluous stairs.

“We’re sorry. It was the only shortcut we took,” I lied.

“And I saw one of you climb up on the statue. Well, he did, anyway!” he said, pointing at his friend, who was still sitting down drinking his beer.  ”He has eagle eyes!”

“Oh, that was me,” I admitted, “I just wanted to get closer to Jesus,” I said glancing at my dusty shoes.

“You pinche chile con shit! You desecrated a holy site!” the loud one said, taking off his hat.

“Hey, I’m a religious man!” I said with a grin. “I didn’t desecrate anything!”

“It’s true,” Ben agreed with a nod.

“Okay, fine, you guys want a beer?”

So Ben and I hung out in the shade with the two friends, Arturo, who was sixty one, and Felix, who was about to turn seventy. Art, the louder one, handed us both two cold beers, which we promptly opened.

“I’m just as old as he is,” Felix said proudly, pointing up at the statue.

They told Ben and me that they came out here every Friday and Saturday to do maintenance. They even had to replace the right arm of the cross last year.

“You should have been here then” Felix said to me warmly, as if he were reminiscing, “Up there on the scaffolding, you could have kissed his face.”

They had grown up out here, in the shadow of the mountain. They knew every inch of this place. There was a spot beneath a tree on the east side that you could dig a few feet and get cold water to drink. “Our fathers took us out here since we were children, and we are still coming here, every weekend.” Art said from his chair.

Tyler and Pual finally caught up, winded and red, after a good forty five minutes; they hadn’t taken the shortcuts. It’s a good thing too, because Art never let it go that Ben and I had, saying “You pinche chile con shit!” every time he thought about it.

It was so refreshing, at the end of an exhausting road, to meet two best friends, so content with their static existence.

“This is life,” Art said. “If we didn’t have wives we’d probably be out here all the time.”

“Yeah, just put a trailer right over there and live out the rest of our lives here,” Felix chimed in, taking a long sip of beer.

The two old men, old but not weary, looked up at Jesus fondly as they spoke. “We really love this place. It’s like home to us,” Art said reverently.

Art looked down at my dirty legs, reading the tattoos above my ankles. “Stay Gold, huh?” he asked, “Is that why you have that long wildman beard? Trying to stay gold?”

They asked us about the bus, and about our trip, and the four of us gave the truncated version, each picking up where the other one left off.  It was a routine we’d mastered in the past few months.

“So you guys just worked during the year, saved up the money, and then went out and saw the world?” Felix interrupted.

“Yeah, yeah that’s the basic idea.” Ben said with a sip.

“I think maybe you guys have it figured out, you crazy motherfuckers.” Art said laughing.

We all laughed together, the six of us, all thinking the same thing about the opposite party. These guys, Felix and Arturo, they were the ones who had it all figured out. Here were two old Mexican Catholics, spending their entire lives devoted to taking care of this holy statue, and thus taking care of themselves in the process. And praise Jesus, praise Mary, praise all the saints in heaven, here were two genuine Zen masters, real holy men, right in front of us, beer in hands. They didn’t need to seek out existence, to seek out experience, to live frenetic and fantastic lives, they had all they needed right here beneath the indifferent sun.

There was a solemn sadness in their voice when they spoke of the past, but there wasn’t a hint of desperation, only acceptance and contentedness. These men were living here in peace, on the most violent border in America, in the shadow of Cristo del Rey.

“Next summer, swing by and get me” Art said with a vivid smile. “I’ll pitch in for the gas money and everything. I want to see the Grand Canyon.”

After we’d all had a few more beers, Felix and Art deemed the work day to be over, and we had to get back on the road. We all shook hands as we left, and Art pulled me in close, whispering in my ear, “Russell, I hope you found what you were looking for out here in the desert. You’re welcome here anytime, primo.”

I smiled and thanked him, wanting to hug this wise man like I’d hugged the concrete Jesus because it was evident that they were one in the same spirit.

“But next time, no short cuts! Ok? Pinche chile…”

So we drove back down the dusty road, out to the highway, leaving our new friends behind, maybe to never see them again. It’s just a sad fact those on the trail learn to accept, but all those streams wind up in the same ocean, anyhow.

We pointed the bus due east, on that long familiar stretch of interstate ten, dusty trade winds at our backside. It was all downhill from here. Back to sea level, back to my girlfriend, back to air condition and beds and television and our friends and our mothers and home, which had become such a lose concept in my mind. I would navigate the dingy yellow monster three hundred and fifty miles that night, from El Paso to Ozona, while everyone else slept, to park between semi-trucks at a rumbling three-am truck stop on the side of the highway. The next morning I would push on to Austin, driving the whole way in one straight shot, back sweating in my leather seat, just trying to get back to sanity and showers.

Pual sat at the graffitied blue table, staring patiently out the window, contemplating the life that lay before him. His foray into freedom, into independent recklessness, was coming to an end, with every mile of highway the bus covered, he got closer to the firefighter academy, and his looming career as a “professional”. He ran his fingers across raised words, written in acrylic paint, as the box fan on the table whirred pointlessly, circulating hot desert air. The blank expression on his face, as seen through my rear view mirror, seemed to agree with me, that it hadn’t been enough. Like the virgin who enters a young girl for the first time, or the cannibal who swallows his first chunk of flesh, is the voyager’s appetite ever quenched? Now that he has laid eyes on purple mountain majesty, will Pual’s eyes ever be content?

Ben drank from his cup, presumably full of liquor, I’ve stopped asking him what he is drinking at any given moment and taken to assuming. He sat on the couch in his ragged flannel shirt admiring some of the old VHS tapes he’d acquired on the trip–Legend of the Queerwolf, Faces of Death, something with Vincent Price on the cover– he put the tapes into a bag one by one. He pursed his lips together, his mustache protruding up like a caterpillar stretching before going into its cocoon. I’d never bothered to ask Ben why he wanted to go on the trip. It didn’t seem like an applicable question. I’d invited him with a beer in my hand at one of our house parties in Houston. I’d only met him a few times before, and that night he had been peeing in solo cups and leaving them around the house, hoping some sad hipster would mistake them for beer. “Yeah, man. That sounds like a great idea. When do we leave?” he’d said to be, carefully placing one of his piss cups on a stair rail. It just seemed like the most natural, obvious thing for him to do, there didn’t need to be a rhyme or reason behind it. The bus shook beneath him, around him, as he took inventory of his souvenirs, as I was taking inventory of my mental souvenirs.

Tyler strummed his guitar, sitting on the dirty couch which was caked in desert dust, riverbank mud, and beach sand. He was tweaking a Willie Nelsonesque dirge about Salt Lake City, the first lines going, “I keep prayin’ lord that the Mormons are right.” He sang it softly, to himself, and I wondered if he’d found the meaning of life, as he’d set out to do. It was apparent from his song that the Mormon temple hadn’t provided the answers. I found myself surprised and impressed with him when he had originally told me that was his goal of the trip, to find the meaning of life. Tyler, the self-professed atheist, who had long ago turned his back on his minister father’s religion, was still looking for meaning in existence, not giving any consideration to the apathetic existentialism that plagues most of our generation. There were dark semicircles under his eyes, like inverted crescent moons, the common badge the four of us exhausted travelers were flaunting. Despite Tyler’s supposed shortcomings, it seemed he was closer to finding the answer than I was.

My mind raced with the bus tires– it was over, our summer fling with the West, with the road, was winding to its end.I clinched my fingers around the vibrating steering wheel and fixed my eyes on the approaching horizon and we barreled across the West Texas highway, the tires humming, the bus creaking, my head reeling– the road always the same, ever changing, and always the same.

Printed above a swinging toy skeleton, there at the front of the bus, in Ben’s erratic handwriting was, “So much space, so little time.”  I sighed and knew it was true. Our three months on the road would never be enough, there was so much more left to be seen. Like back in grade-school, the few precious hours of twilight between three thirty and bedtime, there was no way to fit everything in those fleeting summer months. There never would be, but such is life.

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