Surviving the Sierra

The mountains outside Buenaventura, Chihuahua, Mexico to Santa Ana Bavìcora, Chihuahua, Mexico

We are up before the sun eating oranges outside the barbed wire fence. The sun rises down canyon, giving everything a tangerine glow. We start riding. I never even try to move any faster than 10km/hr, as the next hour clearly visible as it sinuously traverses the mountainside climbing deep into the Sierra Madre. We pass a small pasture illuminated in the morning light, a grey coyote stands alert as we pass. Traffic is light and polite. Every car gives us a wide berth, a wave and often a well intentioned honk that makes me tense  every time. We take one break midway, eating fruit flavored with sweat dripping down my face. We march upwards and meander back and forth as we reach the summit adorned with shrines dedicated to the Virgin de Guadalupe, each one filled with half burnt candles and dead flowers. My gnawing hunger makes itself known and we start our descent into Ignacio Zaragoza.

I lean my bike into the turns, yipping and howling as junipers and piñons fly past. It never lasts long though, the gradient falls off and we find ourselves using our pedals once again to traverse an open valley full of waving brown grass populated by corpulent cattle. We navigate the dirt streets of Zaragoza in search of food with no luck. We are directed further down the road, where we gorge ourselves on chips, salsa, guacamole, burritos and huevos Mexicanos. The restaurant is strange, full of patrons, yet nobody speaks. I try to break the silence to no avail. This is our first taste of the different constitution of the denizens of the sierra.

As we leave town we climb continuously and are frequently taunted by short descents. Overeating was a bad choice; I stare enviously at open patches of grass on the roadside and imagine myself laying there contented. The valley stretches out in front of us, divided by painstakingly built stone fences. I pull over to stop and stretch. Brin and I talk briefly as we watch two donkeys that overheard our conversation from a distance come tear assing down the hillside right up to the fence that separates us. Brin draws them close with a climb of grass held out as an olive branch. As I run my hand down their muzzles, dust fills the air.

We frequently stop to ask for directions and about the terrain. We peruse chiles, discuss them and buy large quantities. We stock up on supplies before arriving at the pass between this valley and Santa Ana Bavìcora. The descent is incredible, a road crew yips and hollers as we pass,  straight out of a narcocorrido. As the wind howls in my ears, the pines give way to rock, scrub and cactus once more. As we relax in the sumptuous plaza of Santa Ana Bavìcora, centered around a fountain surrounded by roses, a toothless man stares at our map uncomprehending before sending us on a shorter route towards Matachic that doesn’t exist according to our map.

We head out of town in search of a campsite, apple orchards line the roadside. We find one that lacks a fence and wait for traffic to pass before we disappear into the rows. A man in a pickup nearly slows to a stop as he rolls past staring. Strange. We roll our bikes across the supple dirt and eat apples off the trees left behind from the harvest. We unpack and get prepared for the night as a man whistling and eating an apple passes through our row, only long enough for us to make eye contact. He heads onward, but it unnerves us slightly. Trucks wander through the fields and machinery scours the earth late into the night. Traffic roars past. Light pierces the trees and shines on my face, leaves fall around me. A dog bays in the distance. All of this rattles me for a moment, but you either accept your limited locus of control or spend your life worrying about things that are outside of it. I accept that I am at the mercy of the world and roll onto my side to go to sleep.

Santa Ana Bavìcora, Chihuahua, Mexico to Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico

I awake to a sleeping back covered in frost. Light from the sun dapples the ground around me. As we slowly begin our morning, I look down the row of trees to see a man standing 100 meters away watching us. He disappears before returning several minutes later. I can see him talking on his cell phone. He disappears again and we start quickly rolling our bikes out of the orchard. We are still in the relative security of the trees as a cop car comes flying around the corner in a plume of dust heading in the direction of the farm house. We quickly hop onto our bikes and pedal hard down the road.

We set off in the chilly air towards Matachic.  The kilometers come easy until a small town appears on the right side of the road where we decide to stop for breakfast before we climb. Buena Vista has rutted rocky streets dotted with adobe houses and unintimidating dogs as obstacles. A man in a stained Frank Zappa shirt scratches his belly as he gives us directions to the local store. The massive store has shelves lined with goods spaced several feet apart, a meagre selection. We buy small candy bars as a consolation for the shopkeep.

As we are trying to find our way out of town, I ask wiry man in a cowboy hat picking up trash in his yard about the way out of town. He comes over smiling, speaking a mile a minute in Spanish.

‘Where are you from?’
‘Colorado. Have you been to the States?’ We agreed on a joint answer to simplify our lives.
‘I worked in Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona.. All over the West. Maybe half of the townspeople here have been to the States to work. We work hard and cause very few problems. I had my papers when I was there and worked in construction for many years.’
‘Are you going to go back?’
‘No, I have earned enough money and learned enough skills that I don’t need to go back there. I like living here more.’
‘Can you find work here?’
‘If you know what you are doing, there is construction work here. The problem with immigration is that the immigrants aren’t brought into the system and families are split apart. Many of the hard working Mexicans are deported while the lazy criminals who don’t even have jobs go unnoticed.’
’What do you think should be done to fix the problem?’
‘I don’t know. Obama has four more years to fix it.’
‘Did Obama win the election?’
‘Yeah, he won, by quite a bit. He has a tough job fixing all of the problems that Bush created, worrying about all of the money he spent.’

This is how we find out that Obama won the presidency.

‘Romney is a pendejo’ I feel like freely expressing my opinion.
‘No, no. He isn’t a bad person. He is just a part of a group that has bad policies.’

I am taken aback by this intelligent understanding view.

‘What do you think about Peña Nieto winning the election?’

This question always evokes interesting answers, as most people believe the election was rigged in typical Mexican fashion. The PRI is the establishment party of Mexico that held sway over the government for over 60 consecutive years until the conservative Northern party, PAN, inexplicably took the reins in 2000. PAN held the presidency for 12 years until January 2013.

‘PRI is full of crooks. We need a change, we need to move away from that style of politics. Politicians are like babies diapers, you need to change them frequently. But in many cases Mexicans don’t value the right things and they get the politicians that they deserve.’’

We introduce ourselves and learn that his name is Beto. He shows us pictures of his family on his cell phone.

‘We are going to find some breakfast, it was really nice talking to you Beto’ I say in Spanish.
‘You are going to find ham and eggs!’ Beto shouts in English as we ride away.

Our day is off to an interesting yet slow start as we climb back into the piñons and junipers. As we descent into Matachic we crouch close to our bikes and pedal hard to set new high speed records on the steep rolling descents. We ride up to a cop car parked in the middle of the intersection of two highways to ask where we can find some food. The windows are cracked, both seats are reclined and the passengers are sleeping.

‘Haha. They are sleeping!’ Brin exclaims as he rides up.
‘No…no…no’ We hear come from the car as the seats rachet up.

I ride over and they button up their shirts and put on their hats before rolling down the window to talk with us. We get directions and are told to tell anyone in town that we are friends of Mario if they give us trouble. Matachic is a strange place, random drunks staggering in the streets shout broken English as we ride past and one gropes our arms as we walk into a restaurant. Every town here seems to have its own vibe, the one here is unpleasant.

After Matachic we enter a section of rolling hills that never seem to end and sap our energy. The wind picks up, further demoralizing us. We keep pushing though. As we pedal into Guerrero I smell chicken roasting over flames and start riding towards it. I lose the scent and double back until I see it, El Pollo Rey. We lean our bikes against the wall and treat ourselves to a beer and an entire chicken.

A man enters with his alligator skin boots clomping and says nothing in response to our greetings, only flipping up his shirt so that we can see the pistol in his waistband. A black cowboy hat and thick mustache complete the look. He glares at Brin the entire time we sit there, I have my back to him. We decide to hasten our departure.

Outside town we find ourselves passing our gear over a barbed wire fence once more to a spot nestled in the pines with a beautiful view of the sun setting over the sierra. The pink lingering in the sky until darkness overtakes us. The riding here is spectacular, open, minimal traffic, good people and a constantly varying landscape.

Guerrero, Chihuahua, Mexico to Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico

The big push. We each eat a can of tuna, a banana that tastes like drywall and several chocolate cookies. I know the taste of drywall from a strange childhood that I have expounded upon previously. The morning is chilly and already a steady breeze buffets our advance. We ride across a large plain filled with apple trees and alfalfa fields before arriving at Entronque San Pedro, a place where I spent many hours sticking my thumb out the year before.

Creel is in our sights: relaxation, food and beer. The plains quickly give way to the sierra, we drop into canyons and climb out, over and over. We reach a river canyon that softens our ascent, but it funnels wind that leaves us absolutely gasping for air. We alternate drafting every couple of minutes as leading into the stiff wind is exhausting. I pedal as hard as I can to reach the top of several climbs, the pine trees on either side swaying from top to bottom. We stop and collapse into the dirt on the side of the road, laying in silence before eating some peanuts and cookies.

I grit my teeth and curse under my breath as I give everything that I have until we reach the bottom of a steep 400m climb. The wind strangely dies and we leisurely climb to the summit where a steep downhill awaits us. I am reveling in the descent, lost in a joy that nothing else I have ever done has come close to providing when a truck coming the opposite direction lays on its horn. A piece of lumber comes flying off of the truck as my eyes are watering at 60km/hr. I instinctively swerve and narrowly miss the piece of wood, but I pull over to the side of the road to breath deeply for a few seconds. Too close.

‘Everything alright?’ Brin shouts as he rolls past.
‘Yep!’

We pass through San Juanito, a rough logging and drug trafficking town. The streets are lined with liquor stores, indolent women of ill repute and corrupt police. A strange mix of Norteños and indigenous people becomes apparent for the first time in our trip. We ask around town about the ride to Creel and receive answers that vary wildly in typical Mexican fashion.

‘O Si. Tan fàcil, muy fàcil. Ustedes han hecho el parte mas difícil.’
‘Hay dos subidas grandes, mas grande que la subida para llegar acà.’
‘Solamente hay una subida grandote!’

We eat some burritos that a guy is selling out of the back of his van and pay someone else  as the guy who sold them to us took off running as we were eating for no clear reason. A bus runs us off the road, we yell unheard obscenities. Logging trucks slowly pass and choke us with black smoke. One logging truck comes down a climb we are slowly ascending, making itself first heard by a horrific squealing, swerving recklessly between both lanes at over double the speed limit. We bail to the side of the road again. Another truck randomly decides to pass another coming uphill as we are full of momentum going downhill, Brin bails into the gravel and I am forced into a steep concrete ditch on the side of the road. The riding is anything but mundane, complete focus is necessary. Virgin de Guadalupes line the roadside in little shrines. Drivers urge us on. At the summit a woman crosses herself in her car, Brin thinks that she is blowing him a kiss.

We hit Creel at full speed from a downhill, coming into town like madmen. I fly over speedbumps, blow past grandmas, a fat kid runs out into the street and reaches his arm out to touch me as I pass, but I am too fast. We gulp down beer as quickly as the waitress can bring it. The early darkness and chill put us to sleep 643km from Columbus, New Mexico.

All paths lead nowhere, but some make for a joyous journey and others for a miserable one.

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