Borders I Have Crossed

BORDERS I HAVE CROSSED

     Guards boarded the red-eye bus, weapons drawn. I focused on the male passenger snoring at my shoulder and the brush of his moustache on my neck. His pet-like purr and hairy kneading comforted and distracted me from the armed shadow making its way down the aisle—a face-distorted by the wiry bristle hiding an upper lip under the shiny black leather visor. La policia.

The night wind whipped up, December in Sinaloa. The bus’s thin-shelled, tinny siding pinged against the axle and tread-bare tires. The inter-regional bus’s moans transported me to a return ride home in our 1939 Dodge, an ‘inter-age” journey.

A loose wire attaching the almost dangling running boards beat out a constant measure on the side of the door. Rear vent windows rattled against the faded gray flannel interior. Rain splashed on the stilled windshield washers. The car was dead. It was 1955, and my father had drunk too much at a family wedding. We had stalled in a dangerous part of Brooklyn.

“Pee in the Cracker Jacks box,” my mother urged my sister and me.

“But it’s waxy,” I whined, pushing out the pee which moments before had threatened to inundate the seat.

“Ew,” my sister shrieked, “There’s no room for my pee.”

“Shush, your father’s got to think.”

My sister and I huddled in the backseat, trying to make ourselves small and muffle the sounds of my parents’ shrill comments anytime a person’s shadow came close to the car.

“Oh my God, Barney! Someone’s coming. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll think of something. Get the jack under your seat,” my father slurred in my mother’s direction.

The car continued to rattle, loose fenders flapping and accenting my mother’s scream.

I opened my eyes to see a visor at my father’s window. I slid onto the floor as my father rolled down the sixteen year old window. Its screech remained in my ears, almost covering my father’s garbled “What’s the problem officer?”

My memory of the moonlight on the officer’s brass badge jerked me back to the Mexican cop moving down the aisle. I had no reason to fear, did I?

I tried to think of why I was here and where I was going—the Copper Canyon. What was in my suitcase? Where was my passport? Was this a real cop? I couldn’t see his badge.

He kept his gun exposed and readied and bared his teeth as he prodded people to make way for him. Still absorbed in thoughts about the likelihood of my being detained, I startled when he nudged my leg with his gun.

I froze as he squeezed into the space next to me. He thrust his arm along my cheek to dislodge my unknown sleeping companion.

The seat stayed fixed in my gaze, empty. My former travel companion stood outside the wind-buffeted bus, pistol whipped by the cop. The soughing of the wind stopped, replaced by the thud of his slumping body hitting the ground.

I tried to refocus as the bus rumbled off. What had this man done? Was he a Sinaloan thug? Did he have drugs? His clothes had smacked of the U.S.: rock-band t-shirt, new Levis, Nikes. Was he returning from the U.S., a citizen, a permanent resident?

I shuddered to think of border crossings. And while I could travel freely with my U.S. passport, I knew the anxiety of crossing over.

At that time I believed in the literal meaning of those words: to go over a line, to “cross” over a border, the edge of one country or region. As I continued my trek to the Copper Canyon and Batopilas, the village hidden in its most profound depths, I would soon learn about spiritual and psychic transports.

The escape artist in me found allies in the bus’s steamy heat, mixed with garlic and jalapeno enriched sweat. The outdoor still life scenes, when occasionally lit by the yellowish glare of a security light, unfolded lazily. Unremarkable. I drowsed into the night, soon falling into a deeper sleep, perhaps joining forces with the snoring chorus surrounding me.

As we neared Los Mochis, my eyes flickered open and closed. A mere smidge of a spark, white and gold, penetrated my lids, too sparse to startle me. The dull thud of tires jumping a curb, along with the shrill scraping of the bus along a corrugated aluminum Fanta sign, failed to wake me as passengers shuffled off at a backcountry stop.

And yet these latest in a series of percussive sounds seemingly orchestrated to rouse me plunged me even deeper into reverie, another flashback.

I was sleeping, pitched up against the thin-skinned metal frame of the drafty isinglass window—on my way by bus in 1975 to Arusha and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. The earlier twelve-hour flight from New York to Nairobi ensured I would sleep soundly for two nights.

I dreamt in black, ebony, blue black, high yellow black, night black, African night black. In my mind I heard words like mgali and uhuru. The essence of Kenyan savannah sands evaporated into Tanzanian mountain clays. The motherland held me fast asleep in her arms.

Flashes, orange against the cold black night, streaked not from above, but directly in my eyes. Gold swaths slithered along the length of the bus, a double file, along my bus and the side of the phantom bus, a strobe-like blur coming from the opposite direction.

Clangs and screeching rang out as the busses tore from rivet to rivet along each other’s flanks. Jolted awake by the accident, we passengers ran from the bus, enveloped by fumes of gas and burn.

We watched the fire from the side of the road, fire destroying all trace of the bus and scaring off all animal predators.

“Mwingine,” shouted the driver.

They promised another bus would come.

“Salama,” he assured, his long, bony face nodding apologetically.

I understood we were safe and had to admit to myself I did feel oddly protected in this group of twenty people, standing and slouching on the road in the pitch African night. Oddly, because of the phantom bus. Oddly, because soon fifteen of the twenty would disappear, just as they said the culprit bus had never existed.

We five reboarded a new bus, hours later. We didn’t speak of the others, neither in English nor in Swahili. Many of us would climb Kilimanjaro and reach for the aerie kingdom of this volcanic peak, whose name means Mountain of Greatness or Mountain of Shining.

Reawakened by my African dream, I turned in my seat in time to feel my Mexican bus depart from its backcountry station. Firecrackers announced our leaving as they had our arrival. Concretely they had set off my African flashback. There was no accounting for my African “shining”—a Stanley Kubrick-like psychic viewing of the past and present.

I longed for dawn and for the end of my bus ride to Los Mochis and to the train for the Copper Canyon. Neither came soon enough.

The modern train was easy enough to locate in the final moments of darkness. It stood alone, and its sleek, silver body reflected what little light existed in this isolated depot.

I could sleep a few more hours during this six-hour journey and wake up in time to cross the longest and most thrilling and bone-chilling train trestles. These crossings were benign and beautiful, awe-inspiring in a natural way.

The train platform in the town of Creel welcomed us and provided a vehicle to cross the Copper Canyon and descend by road to Batopilas. The descent was truly a journey to other worlds, that of the Tarahumara Indians and to the hacienda-like, nineteenth century village of Batopilas. While the dirt road had some gaps in its bed, and at times only three tires met the road, the rickety station wagon transported me safely through this land considered sacred by the Tarahumara, and lucrative by the cartel.

Jogging alongside the slow-moving, aging vehicle, the Tarahumara, known for their running skills, often watched the car lumber over boulders as we passed roadside shrines. What did they see? What were they watching? I would have that sense again and again. Who was watching?

A brief pit-stop deposited me on a lonely gravel spot with no one in sight. It was level. I would pee without wetting my feet—which I did until I was distracted by a shell-like shrine. A statue had just about enough room to squeeze in, and yet, its head—Guadalupe?—had disappeared. It was when I spotted a small, rotted pumpkin head painted in ghastly, blackish colors and carved in a toothy sneer, that I peed on my shoes. I caught a laugh mid-way, unsure of the benign nature of this seeming prank.

The driver dropped me off at the hacienda-type hotel. My journey had ended. I could collapse and ponder what the heck it was I sought here. Something urged me to check my “valuables”. All here–as was the driver back at my door, conferring with the hotel owner and checking my plans. Where would I walk? Why did I want to hike to the next village? What did I want with the Tarahumara?

I claimed my Spanish wasn’t good enough to give details and closed the flimsy, green, three-quarter door to my cement-floored room.

My room was cold, cold like a cellar, cold like a funeral parlor—and spartan. Cinderblock walls surrounded a bed without headboards, covered with a thin-striped cotton spread. A pipe jutted from the cement wall in the bathroom to deliver a drip of water and pass for a shower. Bygone gloom permeated this box of a room in contrast to the cheerful fountain and the quaint, blue and white stucco tower in the courtyard. What was it a lookout for?

The only relief from the oppressive, dank sadness of this room was a shallow wall niche by the side of the bed. A small, tinted glass night light perched within, possibly replacing a statue of a former patron saint or Madonna.

I attempted to sleep. Instead, I reviewed the events of my journey and returned over and over to the reason I had come. What was it again? The Taramuhara, Indian culture in general, shamanism? Or the mundane, touristy need to get away from urban distractions, the ugliness of recent politics, and a pervasive sense of malaise? What about the people’s loss of control? Were we all without power?

The questions, annoyingly pertinent in themselves, cluttered the already stifling room. I fell asleep.

My body vibrated in constant motion, moving from one spot on the lumpy bed to the next hollow just as I had travelled in the previous twenty-four hours from one Mexican region to another and between states of mind and stages of my life.

A new presence entered the room. I was viscerally aware of it. My eyes sought the night light in the niche. Blackness. And yet, another blackness, an ebony smear detached itself from the wall, and as it slithered amorphous, an elongated form took shape. This cat-like shadow drifted away from the wall, draped itself over and beyond my bed, and dissipated through the window grill.

I rose, fully awake. Ice had replaced my blood. Swaddled in blankets, I made my way to the door, and steeling myself against the impending doom, I threw open the makeshift barrier between myself and ?. Nothing. A lantern lit the empty courtyard. A gentle breeze lifted a dried leaf along the saltillo tiles.

Sleep. Could I sleep? The glass nightlight still occupied the niche, still worked. Nothing was disturbed. Just me. I swallowed a gulp from the bottle of cognac on the nightstand. I would sleep.

I awoke in a funnel. The hollow rut in the bed seemed to pull me down into the neck of the funnel. The room’s walls rose up, transforming themselves into a canyon of loosened, crumbly sand and stone. They towered above me and gathered together at the top, pressing me deeper and deeper into the funnel. I was truly at the very bottom of a canyon or a mine whose walls were burying and pulverizing me.

Air rushed in as I tore myself from my covers to throw open the door and windows. I switched on every light and flashlight and dressed, ready to run. Where? I didn’t know. I just knew I had to leave this village where the mine had failed at the end of the previous century, where men had been murdered, where marijuana made men greedy. All this I would learn only later.

Dawn would come soon. I sat back up in bed in an attempt to tease out some truth. No, I didn’t need to be here. This place could teach me nothing. Or, yes, I had already learned I needed to escape my surroundings once again. I no longer cared if I had dreamt the events of the night or if malevolence permeated this particular house.

I thought I had fled this feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia resulting from my government’s pursuit and deportation of everything and anything “other” or different from white and W.A.S.P.. Had this dread managed to find me here? I didn’t care.

There was no logical explanation for my behavior. I knew I had to escape, and yet, I found myself walking further into the canyon, as if in my sleep, four miles downriver to a chapel.

Sun on the interior, bleached white stucco walls and the beams of a bell tower wide open to the sky lit up the small church. It illuminated rustic statues of saints, Day of the Dead skulls and figures, and shamanistic masks. Feathers and stones and smudge lay strewn about. There was safety here.

I awoke some time later, aware that I had curled up on the tile floor. Aware, too, that I was filled with a certain tranquility. This village, Satevo, was a Tarahumara shrine.

The Tarahumara had not fled, but chose to concentrate their power here, at the base, from the ground up. Their physical world does not limit them, despite their compact frame and short legs. They pass beyond the physical. They fly like the wind.

This Tarahumara spirit transported me across borders and limits. I would return to the U.S. I understood now the important question was no longer “Who is watching?” but rather “Who is visible?” Would I stand and be visible? Could we stand and be visible and give free passage to all? Was there safety for all?

I felt secure knowing my trip back would be direct and free from spiritual turmoil. Neither visors, nor badges, nor break-downs would detain me.

 

Guards boarded the red-eye bus, weapons drawn. I focused on the male passenger snoring at my shoulder and the brush of his moustache on my neck. His pet-like purr and hairy kneading comforted and distracted me from the armed shadow making its way down the aisle—a face-distorted by the wiry bristle hiding an upper lip under the shiny black leather visor. La policia.

The night wind whipped up, December in Sinaloa. The bus’s thin-shelled, tinny siding pinged against the axle and tread-bare tires. The inter-regional bus’s moans transported me to a return ride home in our 1939 Dodge, an ‘inter-age” journey.

A loose wire attaching the almost dangling running boards beat out a constant measure on the side of the door. Rear vent windows rattled against the faded gray flannel interior. Rain splashed on the stilled windshield washers. The car was dead. It was 1955, and my father had drunk too much at a family wedding. We had stalled in a dangerous part of Brooklyn.

“Pee in the Cracker Jacks box,” my mother urged my sister and me.

“But it’s waxy,” I whined, pushing out the pee which moments before had threatened to inundate the seat.

“Ew,” my sister shrieked, “There’s no room for my pee.”

“Shush, your father’s got to think.”

My sister and I huddled in the backseat, trying to make ourselves small and muffle the sounds of my parents’ shrill comments anytime a person’s shadow came close to the car.

“Oh my God, Barney! Someone’s coming. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll think of something. Get the jack under your seat,” my father slurred in my mother’s direction.

The car continued to rattle, loose fenders flapping and accenting my mother’s scream.

I opened my eyes to see a visor at my father’s window. I slid onto the floor as my father rolled down the sixteen year old window. Its screech remained in my ears, almost covering my father’s garbled “What’s the problem officer?”

My memory of the moonlight on the officer’s brass badge jerked me back to the Mexican cop moving down the aisle. I had no reason to fear, did I?

I tried to think of why I was here and where I was going—the Copper Canyon. What was in my suitcase? Where was my passport? Was this a real cop? I couldn’t see his badge.

He kept his gun exposed and readied and bared his teeth as he prodded people to make way for him. Still absorbed in thoughts about the likelihood of my being detained, I startled when he nudged my leg with his gun.

I froze as he squeezed into the space next to me. He thrust his arm along my cheek to dislodge my unknown sleeping companion.

The seat stayed fixed in my gaze, empty. My former travel companion stood outside the wind-buffeted bus, pistol whipped by the cop. The soughing of the wind stopped, replaced by the thud of his slumping body hitting the ground.

I tried to refocus as the bus rumbled off. What had this man done? Was he a Sinaloan thug? Did he have drugs? His clothes had smacked of the U.S.: rock-band t-shirt, new Levis, Nikes. Was he returning from the U.S., a citizen, a permanent resident?

I shuddered to think of border crossings. And while I could travel freely with my U.S. passport, I knew the anxiety of crossing over.

At that time I believed in the literal meaning of those words: to go over a line, to “cross” over a border, the edge of one country or region. As I continued my trek to the Copper Canyon and Batopilas, the village hidden in its most profound depths, I would soon learn about spiritual and psychic transports.

The escape artist in me found allies in the bus’s steamy heat, mixed with garlic and jalapeno enriched sweat. The outdoor still life scenes, when occasionally lit by the yellowish glare of a security light, unfolded lazily. Unremarkable. I drowsed into the night, soon falling into a deeper sleep, perhaps joining forces with the snoring chorus surrounding me.

As we neared Los Mochis, my eyes flickered open and closed. A mere smidge of a spark, white and gold, penetrated my lids, too sparse to startle me. The dull thud of tires jumping a curb, along with the shrill scraping of the bus along a corrugated aluminum Fanta sign, failed to wake me as passengers shuffled off at a backcountry stop.

And yet these latest in a series of percussive sounds seemingly orchestrated to rouse me plunged me even deeper into reverie, another flashback.

I was sleeping, pitched up against the thin-skinned metal frame of the drafty isinglass window—on my way by bus in 1975 to Arusha and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. The earlier twelve-hour flight from New York to Nairobi ensured I would sleep soundly for two nights.

I dreamt in black, ebony, blue black, high yellow black, night black, African night black. In my mind I heard words like mgali and uhuru. The essence of Kenyan savannah sands evaporated into Tanzanian mountain clays. The motherland held me fast asleep in her arms.

Flashes, orange against the cold black night, streaked not from above, but directly in my eyes. Gold swaths slithered along the length of the bus, a double file, along my bus and the side of the phantom bus, a strobe-like blur coming from the opposite direction.

Clangs and screeching rang out as the busses tore from rivet to rivet along each other’s flanks. Jolted awake by the accident, we passengers ran from the bus, enveloped by fumes of gas and burn.

We watched the fire from the side of the road, fire destroying all trace of the bus and scaring off all animal predators.

“Mwingine,” shouted the driver.

They promised another bus would come.

“Salama,” he assured, his long, bony face nodding apologetically.

I understood we were safe and had to admit to myself I did feel oddly protected in this group of twenty people, standing and slouching on the road in the pitch African night. Oddly, because of the phantom bus. Oddly, because soon fifteen of the twenty would disappear, just as they said the culprit bus had never existed.

We five reboarded a new bus, hours later. We didn’t speak of the others, neither in English nor in Swahili. Many of us would climb Kilimanjaro and reach for the aerie kingdom of this volcanic peak, whose name means Mountain of Greatness or Mountain of Shining.

Reawakened by my African dream, I turned in my seat in time to feel my Mexican bus depart from its backcountry station. Firecrackers announced our leaving as they had our arrival. Concretely they had set off my African flashback. There was no accounting for my African “shining”—a Stanley Kubrick-like psychic viewing of the past and present.

I longed for dawn and for the end of my bus ride to Los Mochis and to the train for the Copper Canyon. Neither came soon enough.

The modern train was easy enough to locate in the final moments of darkness. It stood alone, and its sleek, silver body reflected what little light existed in this isolated depot.

I could sleep a few more hours during this six-hour journey and wake up in time to cross the longest and most thrilling and bone-chilling train trestles. These crossings were benign and beautiful, awe-inspiring in a natural way.

The train platform in the town of Creel welcomed us and provided a vehicle to cross the Copper Canyon and descend by road to Batopilas. The descent was truly a journey to other worlds, that of the Tarahumara Indians and to the hacienda-like, nineteenth century village of Batopilas. While the dirt road had some gaps in its bed, and at times only three tires met the road, the rickety station wagon transported me safely through this land considered sacred by the Tarahumara, and lucrative by the cartel.

Jogging alongside the slow-moving, aging vehicle, the Tarahumara, known for their running skills, often watched the car lumber over boulders as we passed roadside shrines. What did they see? What were they watching? I would have that sense again and again. Who was watching?

A brief pit-stop deposited me on a lonely gravel spot with no one in sight. It was level. I would pee without wetting my feet—which I did until I was distracted by a shell-like shrine. A statue had just about enough room to squeeze in, and yet, its head—Guadalupe?—had disappeared. It was when I spotted a small, rotted pumpkin head painted in ghastly, blackish colors and carved in a toothy sneer, that I peed on my shoes. I caught a laugh mid-way, unsure of the benign nature of this seeming prank.

The driver dropped me off at the hacienda-type hotel. My journey had ended. I could collapse and ponder what the heck it was I sought here. Something urged me to check my “valuables”. All here–as was the driver back at my door, conferring with the hotel owner and checking my plans. Where would I walk? Why did I want to hike to the next village? What did I want with the Tarahumara?

I claimed my Spanish wasn’t good enough to give details and closed the flimsy, green, three-quarter door to my cement-floored room.

My room was cold, cold like a cellar, cold like a funeral parlor—and spartan. Cinderblock walls surrounded a bed without headboards, covered with a thin-striped cotton spread. A pipe jutted from the cement wall in the bathroom to deliver a drip of water and pass for a shower. Bygone gloom permeated this box of a room in contrast to the cheerful fountain and the quaint, blue and white stucco tower in the courtyard. What was it a lookout for?

The only relief from the oppressive, dank sadness of this room was a shallow wall niche by the side of the bed. A small, tinted glass night light perched within, possibly replacing a statue of a former patron saint or Madonna.

I attempted to sleep. Instead, I reviewed the events of my journey and returned over and over to the reason I had come. What was it again? The Taramuhara, Indian culture in general, shamanism? Or the mundane, touristy need to get away from urban distractions, the ugliness of recent politics, and a pervasive sense of malaise? What about the people’s loss of control? Were we all without power?

The questions, annoyingly pertinent in themselves, cluttered the already stifling room. I fell asleep.

My body vibrated in constant motion, moving from one spot on the lumpy bed to the next hollow just as I had travelled in the previous twenty-four hours from one Mexican region to another and between states of mind and stages of my life.

A new presence entered the room. I was viscerally aware of it. My eyes sought the night light in the niche. Blackness. And yet, another blackness, an ebony smear detached itself from the wall, and as it slithered amorphous, an elongated form took shape. This cat-like shadow drifted away from the wall, draped itself over and beyond my bed, and dissipated through the window grill.

I rose, fully awake. Ice had replaced my blood. Swaddled in blankets, I made my way to the door, and steeling myself against the impending doom, I threw open the makeshift barrier between myself and ?. Nothing. A lantern lit the empty courtyard. A gentle breeze lifted a dried leaf along the saltillo tiles.

Sleep. Could I sleep? The glass nightlight still occupied the niche, still worked. Nothing was disturbed. Just me. I swallowed a gulp from the bottle of cognac on the nightstand. I would sleep.

I awoke in a funnel. The hollow rut in the bed seemed to pull me down into the neck of the funnel. The room’s walls rose up, transforming themselves into a canyon of loosened, crumbly sand and stone. They towered above me and gathered together at the top, pressing me deeper and deeper into the funnel. I was truly at the very bottom of a canyon or a mine whose walls were burying and pulverizing me.

Air rushed in as I tore myself from my covers to throw open the door and windows. I switched on every light and flashlight and dressed, ready to run. Where? I didn’t know. I just knew I had to leave this village where the mine had failed at the end of the previous century, where men had been murdered, where marijuana made men greedy. All this I would learn only later.

Dawn would come soon. I sat back up in bed in an attempt to tease out some truth. No, I didn’t need to be here. This place could teach me nothing. Or, yes, I had already learned I needed to escape my surroundings once again. I no longer cared if I had dreamt the events of the night or if malevolence permeated this particular house.

I thought I had fled this feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia resulting from my government’s pursuit and deportation of everything and anything “other” or different from white and W.A.S.P.. Had this dread managed to find me here? I didn’t care.

There was no logical explanation for my behavior. I knew I had to escape, and yet, I found myself walking further into the canyon, as if in my sleep, four miles downriver to a chapel.

Sun on the interior, bleached white stucco walls and the beams of a bell tower wide open to the sky lit up the small church. It illuminated rustic statues of saints, Day of the Dead skulls and figures, and shamanistic masks. Feathers and stones and smudge lay strewn about. There was safety here.

I awoke some time later, aware that I had curled up on the tile floor. Aware, too, that I was filled with a certain tranquility. This village, Satevo, was a Tarahumara shrine.

The Tarahumara had not fled, but chose to concentrate their power here, at the base, from the ground up. Their physical world does not limit them, despite their compact frame and short legs. They pass beyond the physical. They fly like the wind.

This Tarahumara spirit transported me across borders and limits. I would return to the U.S. I understood now the important question was no longer “Who is watching?” but rather “Who is visible?” Would I stand and be visible? Could we stand and be visible and give free passage to all? Was there safety for all?

I felt secure knowing my trip back would be direct and free from spiritual turmoil. Neither visors, nor badges, nor break-downs would detain me.

 

Guards boarded the red-eye bus, weapons drawn. I focused on the male passenger snoring at my shoulder and the brush of his moustache on my neck. His pet-like purr and hairy kneading comforted and distracted me from the armed shadow making its way down the aisle—a face-distorted by the wiry bristle hiding an upper lip under the shiny black leather visor. La policia.

The night wind whipped up, December in Sinaloa. The bus’s thin-shelled, tinny siding pinged against the axle and tread-bare tires. The inter-regional bus’s moans transported me to a return ride home in our 1939 Dodge, an ‘inter-age” journey.

A loose wire attaching the almost dangling running boards beat out a constant measure on the side of the door. Rear vent windows rattled against the faded gray flannel interior. Rain splashed on the stilled windshield washers. The car was dead. It was 1955, and my father had drunk too much at a family wedding. We had stalled in a dangerous part of Brooklyn.

“Pee in the Cracker Jacks box,” my mother urged my sister and me.

“But it’s waxy,” I whined, pushing out the pee which moments before had threatened to inundate the seat.

“Ew,” my sister shrieked, “There’s no room for my pee.”

“Shush, your father’s got to think.”

My sister and I huddled in the backseat, trying to make ourselves small and muffle the sounds of my parents’ shrill comments anytime a person’s shadow came close to the car.

“Oh my God, Barney! Someone’s coming. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll think of something. Get the jack under your seat,” my father slurred in my mother’s direction.

The car continued to rattle, loose fenders flapping and accenting my mother’s scream.

I opened my eyes to see a visor at my father’s window. I slid onto the floor as my father rolled down the sixteen year old window. Its screech remained in my ears, almost covering my father’s garbled “What’s the problem officer?”

My memory of the moonlight on the officer’s brass badge jerked me back to the Mexican cop moving down the aisle. I had no reason to fear, did I?

I tried to think of why I was here and where I was going—the Copper Canyon. What was in my suitcase? Where was my passport? Was this a real cop? I couldn’t see his badge.

He kept his gun exposed and readied and bared his teeth as he prodded people to make way for him. Still absorbed in thoughts about the likelihood of my being detained, I startled when he nudged my leg with his gun.

I froze as he squeezed into the space next to me. He thrust his arm along my cheek to dislodge my unknown sleeping companion.

The seat stayed fixed in my gaze, empty. My former travel companion stood outside the wind-buffeted bus, pistol whipped by the cop. The soughing of the wind stopped, replaced by the thud of his slumping body hitting the ground.

I tried to refocus as the bus rumbled off. What had this man done? Was he a Sinaloan thug? Did he have drugs? His clothes had smacked of the U.S.: rock-band t-shirt, new Levis, Nikes. Was he returning from the U.S., a citizen, a permanent resident?

I shuddered to think of border crossings. And while I could travel freely with my U.S. passport, I knew the anxiety of crossing over.

At that time I believed in the literal meaning of those words: to go over a line, to “cross” over a border, the edge of one country or region. As I continued my trek to the Copper Canyon and Batopilas, the village hidden in its most profound depths, I would soon learn about spiritual and psychic transports.

The escape artist in me found allies in the bus’s steamy heat, mixed with garlic and jalapeno enriched sweat. The outdoor still life scenes, when occasionally lit by the yellowish glare of a security light, unfolded lazily. Unremarkable. I drowsed into the night, soon falling into a deeper sleep, perhaps joining forces with the snoring chorus surrounding me.

As we neared Los Mochis, my eyes flickered open and closed. A mere smidge of a spark, white and gold, penetrated my lids, too sparse to startle me. The dull thud of tires jumping a curb, along with the shrill scraping of the bus along a corrugated aluminum Fanta sign, failed to wake me as passengers shuffled off at a backcountry stop.

And yet these latest in a series of percussive sounds seemingly orchestrated to rouse me plunged me even deeper into reverie, another flashback.

I was sleeping, pitched up against the thin-skinned metal frame of the drafty isinglass window—on my way by bus in 1975 to Arusha and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. The earlier twelve-hour flight from New York to Nairobi ensured I would sleep soundly for two nights.

I dreamt in black, ebony, blue black, high yellow black, night black, African night black. In my mind I heard words like mgali and uhuru. The essence of Kenyan savannah sands evaporated into Tanzanian mountain clays. The motherland held me fast asleep in her arms.

Flashes, orange against the cold black night, streaked not from above, but directly in my eyes. Gold swaths slithered along the length of the bus, a double file, along my bus and the side of the phantom bus, a strobe-like blur coming from the opposite direction.

Clangs and screeching rang out as the busses tore from rivet to rivet along each other’s flanks. Jolted awake by the accident, we passengers ran from the bus, enveloped by fumes of gas and burn.

We watched the fire from the side of the road, fire destroying all trace of the bus and scaring off all animal predators.

“Mwingine,” shouted the driver.

They promised another bus would come.

“Salama,” he assured, his long, bony face nodding apologetically.

I understood we were safe and had to admit to myself I did feel oddly protected in this group of twenty people, standing and slouching on the road in the pitch African night. Oddly, because of the phantom bus. Oddly, because soon fifteen of the twenty would disappear, just as they said the culprit bus had never existed.

We five reboarded a new bus, hours later. We didn’t speak of the others, neither in English nor in Swahili. Many of us would climb Kilimanjaro and reach for the aerie kingdom of this volcanic peak, whose name means Mountain of Greatness or Mountain of Shining.

Reawakened by my African dream, I turned in my seat in time to feel my Mexican bus depart from its backcountry station. Firecrackers announced our leaving as they had our arrival. Concretely they had set off my African flashback. There was no accounting for my African “shining”—a Stanley Kubrick-like psychic viewing of the past and present.

I longed for dawn and for the end of my bus ride to Los Mochis and to the train for the Copper Canyon. Neither came soon enough.

The modern train was easy enough to locate in the final moments of darkness. It stood alone, and its sleek, silver body reflected what little light existed in this isolated depot.

I could sleep a few more hours during this six-hour journey and wake up in time to cross the longest and most thrilling and bone-chilling train trestles. These crossings were benign and beautiful, awe-inspiring in a natural way.

The train platform in the town of Creel welcomed us and provided a vehicle to cross the Copper Canyon and descend by road to Batopilas. The descent was truly a journey to other worlds, that of the Tarahumara Indians and to the hacienda-like, nineteenth century village of Batopilas. While the dirt road had some gaps in its bed, and at times only three tires met the road, the rickety station wagon transported me safely through this land considered sacred by the Tarahumara, and lucrative by the cartel.

Jogging alongside the slow-moving, aging vehicle, the Tarahumara, known for their running skills, often watched the car lumber over boulders as we passed roadside shrines. What did they see? What were they watching? I would have that sense again and again. Who was watching?

A brief pit-stop deposited me on a lonely gravel spot with no one in sight. It was level. I would pee without wetting my feet—which I did until I was distracted by a shell-like shrine. A statue had just about enough room to squeeze in, and yet, its head—Guadalupe?—had disappeared. It was when I spotted a small, rotted pumpkin head painted in ghastly, blackish colors and carved in a toothy sneer, that I peed on my shoes. I caught a laugh mid-way, unsure of the benign nature of this seeming prank.

The driver dropped me off at the hacienda-type hotel. My journey had ended. I could collapse and ponder what the heck it was I sought here. Something urged me to check my “valuables”. All here–as was the driver back at my door, conferring with the hotel owner and checking my plans. Where would I walk? Why did I want to hike to the next village? What did I want with the Tarahumara?

I claimed my Spanish wasn’t good enough to give details and closed the flimsy, green, three-quarter door to my cement-floored room.

My room was cold, cold like a cellar, cold like a funeral parlor—and spartan. Cinderblock walls surrounded a bed without headboards, covered with a thin-striped cotton spread. A pipe jutted from the cement wall in the bathroom to deliver a drip of water and pass for a shower. Bygone gloom permeated this box of a room in contrast to the cheerful fountain and the quaint, blue and white stucco tower in the courtyard. What was it a lookout for?

The only relief from the oppressive, dank sadness of this room was a shallow wall niche by the side of the bed. A small, tinted glass night light perched within, possibly replacing a statue of a former patron saint or Madonna.

I attempted to sleep. Instead, I reviewed the events of my journey and returned over and over to the reason I had come. What was it again? The Taramuhara, Indian culture in general, shamanism? Or the mundane, touristy need to get away from urban distractions, the ugliness of recent politics, and a pervasive sense of malaise? What about the people’s loss of control? Were we all without power?

The questions, annoyingly pertinent in themselves, cluttered the already stifling room. I fell asleep.

My body vibrated in constant motion, moving from one spot on the lumpy bed to the next hollow just as I had travelled in the previous twenty-four hours from one Mexican region to another and between states of mind and stages of my life.

A new presence entered the room. I was viscerally aware of it. My eyes sought the night light in the niche. Blackness. And yet, another blackness, an ebony smear detached itself from the wall, and as it slithered amorphous, an elongated form took shape. This cat-like shadow drifted away from the wall, draped itself over and beyond my bed, and dissipated through the window grill.

I rose, fully awake. Ice had replaced my blood. Swaddled in blankets, I made my way to the door, and steeling myself against the impending doom, I threw open the makeshift barrier between myself and ?. Nothing. A lantern lit the empty courtyard. A gentle breeze lifted a dried leaf along the saltillo tiles.

Sleep. Could I sleep? The glass nightlight still occupied the niche, still worked. Nothing was disturbed. Just me. I swallowed a gulp from the bottle of cognac on the nightstand. I would sleep.

I awoke in a funnel. The hollow rut in the bed seemed to pull me down into the neck of the funnel. The room’s walls rose up, transforming themselves into a canyon of loosened, crumbly sand and stone. They towered above me and gathered together at the top, pressing me deeper and deeper into the funnel. I was truly at the very bottom of a canyon or a mine whose walls were burying and pulverizing me.

Air rushed in as I tore myself from my covers to throw open the door and windows. I switched on every light and flashlight and dressed, ready to run. Where? I didn’t know. I just knew I had to leave this village where the mine had failed at the end of the previous century, where men had been murdered, where marijuana made men greedy. All this I would learn only later.

Dawn would come soon. I sat back up in bed in an attempt to tease out some truth. No, I didn’t need to be here. This place could teach me nothing. Or, yes, I had already learned I needed to escape my surroundings once again. I no longer cared if I had dreamt the events of the night or if malevolence permeated this particular house.

I thought I had fled this feeling of claustrophobia and paranoia resulting from my government’s pursuit and deportation of everything and anything “other” or different from white and W.A.S.P.. Had this dread managed to find me here? I didn’t care.

There was no logical explanation for my behavior. I knew I had to escape, and yet, I found myself walking further into the canyon, as if in my sleep, four miles downriver to a chapel.

Sun on the interior, bleached white stucco walls and the beams of a bell tower wide open to the sky lit up the small church. It illuminated rustic statues of saints, Day of the Dead skulls and figures, and shamanistic masks. Feathers and stones and smudge lay strewn about. There was safety here.

I awoke some time later, aware that I had curled up on the tile floor. Aware, too, that I was filled with a certain tranquility. This village, Satevo, was a Tarahumara shrine.

The Tarahumara had not fled, but chose to concentrate their power here, at the base, from the ground up. Their physical world does not limit them, despite their compact frame and short legs. They pass beyond the physical. They fly like the wind.

This Tarahumara spirit transported me across borders and limits. I would return to the U.S. I understood now the important question was no longer “Who is watching?” but rather “Who is visible?” Would I stand and be visible? Could we stand and be visible and give free passage to all? Was there safety for all?

I felt secure knowing my trip back would be direct and free from spiritual turmoil. Neither visors, nor badges, nor break-downs would detain me.

By | 2017-04-13T18:49:14+00:00 April 13th, 2017|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Borders I Have Crossed

About the Author:

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dolores Maggiore soon began a search for some place “homier” – some place without the elevated “A” train, without the rattle of the wooden blinds blocking the view through the bedroom window. Dolores roamed through the Maine woods and found a temporary home she would continue to visit in the summer and in her dreams well into adulthood. Her vagabond spirit also brought her to other faraway places to study and then teach French and Italian and to search for her grandparents’ home in Sicily. While Dolores grew up on tales of Robinson Crusoe, her wanderlust also included landscapes of the mind: she worked as a psychotherapist with children of all ages, adults included. In addition to writing young adult novels, Dolores blogs about life in rain (Oregon), as well as in drought (California). She has had poetry published in anthologies as an undergraduate student and reference materials on lesbians and therapy and lesbians and child custody after graduate school. She is a member of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Willamette Writers, and The Golden Crown Literary Society. Dolores, her wife, Xander, the lynx-point cat, and Murphy, the 14 year-old rescue poodle make their home seasonally in NW Oregon and Borrego Springs, CA, hiking, birding, and enjoying nature. (Xander birds from his perch inside the house!)