From last weeks blog: But on this particular afternoon, I had a Neil Armstrong moment. As I stepped southward across a faded and crackled white line on the asphalt with pieces of gum stuck to it and brought my Converse High Top-clad foot down on the other side, I took one very small step for mankind, but one giant leap for Eric. With that single step I had arrived in a nation unknown, chock full of sites so odd that my eyes became like saucers and my heart raced. I knew in an instant that I had found a place that spoke to the quiet, insistent, yearnings in my heart. 

The sign over head, a bit askew and tinged with rust read, “Bienvenidos a Tijuana”.  Welcome to Tijuana. 

What hit me like a clear and uplifting breeze the moment I crossed the border was a symphonic cacophony of beautifully choreographed chaos. My head and my eyes swung from left to right and it was as if the air changed the moment we crossed the border. 

There was a line of well-worn yellow taxis wafting car cologne, the drivers standing outside their cars bantering and laughing with each other or calling out to us, “taxi, taxi mister?!”. Key chains hanging out of permanent press pants. Old buses rumbled by with boys leaning out from the front doors calling out in high-pitched voices.  An old man with a push cart was selling corn on the cob to a small ball of people, a woman was peddling helium balloons, there were people going in all directions, a motorcycle rumbling, the air smelled like popcorn and urban dust. And the soundtrack to it all, some tinny old song with a guitar and a crooners voice, was provided by a radio wired to the side of the old man’s push cart. 

 I could feel the thickness of the salty, light infused air and the vibrating city right through the pores of my skin. But there was something more in the air, something that seemed to fit me better than anything I’d known before, something that felt in tune with the frequency deep in the core of my being. 

This is very hard to explain. We are talking about Tijuana, after all. Maybe it was just that I felt excited because I was walking into a carnival rich with novel sights and sounds. There was plenty of that to be sure. But it went deeper than that. There was something subtle and solid and basic that I still can’t put my finger on, but that I can feel in my memory to this day. Though I’d yet to meet a single person,  I could feel a kind of human presence which I immediately sensed to be more at ease, spontaneous and warm than any I’d known. Interwoven with the chaos and cacophony there was something that felt incredibly sane and aligned with some ancient human song of well-being.

Within me, especially then, there was a compass in my heart that pointed the way. I might call it  a primal instinct, or a deep awareness of what made sense to me and what didn’t.  One of the big things that didn’t make any sense to me was the story I was being presented by the world I was born into about the good American life. The career, the money, the things to buy, the mowed lawns, the tidy neighborhoods and polite smiles, the new car and on and on. It felt to me that all of these things were as hollow as a sheetrock wall. Yet some version or another of this was about all that my culture seemed to have to offer me. I knew it would not fit my heart and I was hungry to find what would. But I didn’t know what that would look like.  

How do salmon born in a small mountain creek find their way back to that same creek after years in the vast ocean? Their hearts, I suspect, never forget the way. Something within me sensed that a whisper of my home creek was in the air here. 

I didn’t think any of these thoughts that day, I just gaped and felt awash in a kind of wonder. I was five steps into Mexico and it was changing my life. 

“Come on,” Scott said, snapping me out of my trance, “we’re gonna take this one”, and he ushered me into the back seat of one of those perfumed cabs. 

Once inside, I ran my fingers over the burgundy velvet seats and while gazing at a holy image in a plastic golden frame on the dashboard, I learned that Scott had a superpower. He spoke Spanish. I’d never witnessed someone I knew have a conversation in another language, much less be understood. My mouth went agape, not for the first time that afternoon. 

Scott was 14 years older than me and was my Mom’s live-in boy-friend. Over the previous three years he’d somehow filled the roles of mentor, open-minded uncle and older brother for me all at once. We got along exceptionally well.  Scott loved beaches, he loved shoe-string travel and he loved Mexico. So  when I had a week off of school and my Mom was away at a conference in Colorado, Scott figured we could either stay home all week and do chores or go on a good adventure. Which is how we found ourselves ten car-hours and one nation away from home in a yellow Tijuana taxi bound for the bus station with visions of beaches in our heads.

Scott got us the front two seats on the night bus to La Paz. With 22 hours of roadway to traverse, it would be a day bus as well. From there we’d catch another bus that would take us three hours further south, to Cabo San Lucas on the very tip of the Baja peninsula. Southbound. We settled in and our journey began to unfold. 

The plot line of our trip was to go to the beach in Mexico. And that’s just what we did.  Our hotel in Cabo San Lucas had the elegant name of Hotel Casa Blanca. Very Bogart. Our room had white walls and a bare light bulb, and, as Scott pointed out, its very own bathroom, making it as luxurious as we needed. In 1982 the fishing village that Cabo San Lucas had once been was gone, but the big resort town that it would become was still a sapling. I didn’t understand any of this at the time, but I recall that the outstanding smell of that town, in addition to salt air, orange rinds and fish entrails, was of wet cement. It was being built before our very eyes.  We swam every day, Scott taught me to body surf, we ate lots of Mexican food and I got a sunburn. It was my first ever Mexican beach vacation and I believe I did a good job of it.

But though the swimming and beach life was quite enjoyable, I hardly remember any of it. In the long journey of life the beach time is not what mattered to me. Rather, it was the simple, enormous experience of walking into Mexico that, like a shift in the wind, shifted the course of my life. There were five other events on that journey that have stuck with me as well. There was the fast VW; the sunrise tortilla race; Stallone and Pele on a sheet in the street of Cabo; the very slow meal and the fast bus; and the old man in a hat. Each of them were simple events that would never make the headlines of even a local Baja newspaper. But in the life of a 13* year old boy, they were telling little moments, perhaps even ballad-worthy in the hands of the right kind of bard. 

Next week I’ll do my very best to compose the ballad of these five events. See you then! 

*In the previous blog I stated that I was 14. I’ve since done the math and realized that in April of 1982 it would be another five months before I reached that stately age.