Zipolite and Turning Northwards

I haven’t fallen off the ends of the Earth; I’ve just been sitting on the edge for a while.

Zipolite is known as a beach where one can do nothing, and while I haven’t been doing exactly that, I’ve been enjoying the outward permissiveness of immobility to full effect.  For the last five days I’ve simply sat still, lulled in the hypnotic breath and thunder that goes on softly and constantly in the background, printing my brief footprints back and forth in the firm golden sand between sweeps of the warm erasing waves, a familiar at the shaded patio tables with the rainbow-striped cloths where my round glass seems to hold a creamed distillation of the ocean’s colors before their sunlit bars of broken sapphire and foam.  After two nights at the Hostal Teresa I moved my Miata fifty feet down the single road to a private room at the Posada Mexico hotel, a tidy room just big enough for a mosquito-netted bed, a little sink, a swinging rattan door to a tiny bathroom, and a miniature little writing table under the ceiling fan.  I’ve spent most of my days right there.

I’ve been working on another rewrite of my novel, and working also on the big decision of where to go from here.  And I’ve decided to turn around and begin a slow return Northwards to the States.

It’s a little humiliating to renege on the great goal of the trip (and the name of this blog, which in its silent way made a strong appeal to continue), but in various ways recently I’ve been confronting the fact that I’ve bitten off more than I could chew.  Looking at what would have been my next destination Southward, San Cristobel de los Casas in Chiapas, I was unwontedly dismayed to find it an eight-hour drive away, with a blank map of unknown small rural Mexican towns between wherein I would have to find lodging.  Scaling that reluctance outward into South America I realized I’d be into post-Jovian distances between bright points, the important matter being that I’d lost a certain thrill in the notion of the passage itself. 

In short, while I would still love to pull my Miata up at the end of all roads in Tierra del Fuego—and will regret not knowing that last, great press of the brake pedal—when I asked myself how I would most like to spend the last three and a half months of my midlife vacation, other possibilities arose.

On the basis, as I said in an earlier post, of reasons both practical and shameful. 

The practical side is uninteresting, and consists of things like the daunting cost of shipping my car around the Darien Gap (perhaps $2,000), and the prospect of losing my Miata at the end (if I even could, Argentina having strange prohibitions about importing foreign cars). 

The emotional side, though, is where I feel a little exculpation is in order.  Basically, I’m homesick.  (Yes, I realize my home country is currently threatening to launch a nuclear war for, apparently, fun, which makes it perhaps not the best time to come back, but I can’t help it, I miss the USA anyway.)  Now, it’s particularly shameful to call oneself homesick while sitting at a beachside restaurant on a glorious day in the cool and humid breeze off the ocean while nibbling at a delicious plate of cold salami and cheeses alongside my laptop.   And Mexico has many glorious places that have been joyful and important to explore.  My feeling gets back to the enjoyment of the places between.  Mexico, it turns out, isn’t the best place to have a road trip—in a way that I think projects to other Central American countries. I imagined that I’d be driving a lot back roads (it’s a Miata, after all), which is precisely what I CAN’T do here, both because of the road conditions and because, quite honestly, I don’t feel safe there. 

The other day, driving through the outskirts of Oaxaca City, someone on an overpass threw a full beer bottle to explode on the hood of my car.  Now, while 99% of the people in Mexico I’ve met have been friendly, kind, and generous, I couldn’t help feeling like that greeting was an announcement of a 1% that also projects forward into areas that are even less stable in their remote regions.  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t play a role.

Like I say, shameful. 

So my plans right now are to work my way back up Mexico on the Eastern side, through San Luis Potosi and Monterrey, and enter the USA on the Atlantic side.  I have my eye on a writer’s workshop in Virginia in September, which would give me a lovely excuse to wend through the back roads of the Mid-Atlantic States: Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia.  And then, probably, continue up the East Coast to visit family.