by Charles Miller

My Mexican road trip adventure, told here last year, is certainly not the only memorable travel experience I have ever blundered into during more than four decades of traveling the highways back and forth between Texas and San Miguel. Another example is the time my old VW van left me stranded on the roadside in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert. From out of nowhere a young boy appeared asking if I needed a mechanic. I said "okay, and even better if he has an accelerator cable." I had been contemplating what I might be able to rig up using dental floss and coat hanger wire but decided to wait in case the niño was somehow going to provide a roadside rescue. Lo and behold a short while later the boy was back, seemingly out of nowhere again, along with a man carrying a toolbox and a rusty old accelerator cable. That cable was still in use when I sold that van years later.

As Mexican road trips go, one in particular stands out in my memory memory because that summer an extremely rare June hurricane formed in the Gulf of Mexico and aimed itself at Yucatan then toward the Texas Rio Grande valley. I was in San Miguel de Allende at the time the Category 2 Hurricane Alex made landfall with 105 MPH winds on the sparsely-inhabited gulf coast of Tamaulipas on the night of June 30, 2010. Blithely I thought it should be okay to travel through that area the very next morning.

The drive north from SMA through the state of San Luis Potosi was uneventful until I crested the mountains south of Ciudad Victoria and started to see all the roadside billboards had been mangled or blown away. North of the city the police were turning back all traffic from their roadblock, saying that the highway north to Texas was flooded and impassible. At the point where the road was blocked there were dozens of travelers milling about, exchanging information, and trying to decide what to do next.

There were also some people there who for all I know might have been from the Ciudad Victoria Chamber of Commerce; offering that everyone should spend a few days in local hotels with no electricity and that had quadrupled their rates just in time for those stranded by the hurricane. I was not the only one to whom that did not appeal and in part because it was not my first experience with the Victoria CoC. Years earlier a friend and I had spent one night in a nice-enough hotel there where we were unimpressed after looking over the restaurant menu and sampling stale peanuts in the bar. At the front desk there was one of those fluffed-up promotional brochures from the CoC describing the city's attractions in flowery detail. I read this over while my friend waited with a grumbling stomach. Then I told her, "The good news is that the brochure recommended the best restaurant in Ciudad Victoria, but the bad news is we're sitting in it now." But I digress.

Back to Hurricane Alex. While on the road I had seen several high-voltage electrical transmission towers blown over, so I was not surprised to hear the news that the electricity was out across several states. What that meant to one young Mexican couple was that they were stranded because Pemex had no way to pump gas into their car's empty tank. Unlike La Escondita, this station had no funnel or little 10-liter buckets they could use to dip gas out of a tank out back. The couple was desperate to check on the welfare of their elderly parents who lived up in the mountains to the east of the city. They asked if I was going that way and could they leave their car to hitch a ride with me. By this time my old Volkswagen van was long gone, replaced by an American make with plenty of room for more passengers, so I did not immediately say no.

Changing my route to driving east in the direction from which the storm had come did not seem wise, but Hurricane Alex was long gone and replaced by clear blue skies. That was definitely not the direction I wanted to go, but the young man assured me he knew all the back roads and they would be passable both to where he needed to go and from there I could go north to the Texas border which is where I was headed. At the time I did not even know there were any mountains named the Sierra de Tamaulipas east of Victoria, so I was willing to try a new, though circuitous route.

The road east was not badly flooded though there were several places where the desert on each side was. There were frequent stops to exchange information with others on the roadside. It made me recall reading accounts of traveling on horseback centuries ago when everyone would always stop to converse with anyone met along the trail. In one place my guide walked ahead wading through knee-deep water to make sure the roadway was still intact and safe to ford. We stopped to take on two more travelers who had also run out of gas. I was lucky to be driving the big American van with its 36 gallon tank still half full. The stranded travelers we picked up, another young couple, were on the same mission to check on their relatives who lived back home, up in the mountains.

Climbing up a one-lane road into the hills after leaving the main road we drove a short distance up to an isolated cluster of houses that we found completely intact. The surrounding terrain had sheltered everyone there from the hurricane winds. The so-called mountains were more like hills; not too heavily forested, an ecotone between the desert to the west and the mangrove swamps on the gulf coast to the east. It was not yet noon but my thoughts of pushing on to make it across the Rio Grande before sundown were about to be changed.

The elderly parents we had come to check on were just fine, and were among those busily preparing for a big barbecue. In fact there were picnic tables setup in preparation for serving dozens of people. Obviously, with no electricity there was no refrigeration, so; under those circumstances the best one could hope for is to have enough hungry friends to help empty your refrigerators before everything went to waste. It did not appear that there could be more than a dozen people who lived in the enclave, but as the aroma coming off the grills drifted downwind into the forest more and more people started to arrive on horseback, bicycle (mountain bike of course), or on foot. The banquet to kill a vegan included venison, duck, pork, cabrito, sausages, but no chicken. Those were still alive and scratching about among the tables.

Halfway through the meal I asked the couple seated to my left about their family that lived so isolated up in the "mountains." Their confused response was "But you said you had some Mexican family, we thought these people were your relatives." An easy mistake to make considering the warm embracing welcome I had received. I turned to the new friends seated on my other side and got the same response. We all had a good laugh, and then many more laughs punctuated with shots of tequila. Over the next few hours the conversations flowed while nobody was obsessed with the smart phones, the ones with no Wi-Fi signal. It is heartwarming to be a part of experiencing complete strangers being brought together by adverse circumstances. Later the second young couple I picked up had a tearful family reunion after the message that had been sent by horseback over to the next valley brought their parents.

With an over-full belly, a bit addled with tequila and mezcal, in the fading light I decided I had already been foolhardy enough for one day and that it would be really stupid to strike out alone into unfamiliar territory. That territory was blanketed in the darkest of utter darkness you could imagine. It was really dark before a full moon rose late that night. With no electricity and absent the light pollution from millions of streetlights the Milky Way was ablaze with constellations I had not seen in years. With a pair of kerosene lanterns serving as footlights someone serenaded the dwindling group with his guitar. I was prepared to sleep in the van or out under the stars but was offered a bed inside by the newly-acquired friends who warned that lions, tigers, bears, or some other critters made it better not to be outside. I never saw any undomesticated animals more aggressive than the chickens, but I think the "other critters" to which they referred could have been the mosquitoes. I took them up on the offer to sleep inside.

By the next morning the travelers who had arrived with me found their way to their destinations over in the next valley. Soon I also was on my way, traveling solo again. The mountain people likely did not have email addresses to share and so to my regret we did not stay in contact. A few miles down the road I found the coastal municipality of Soto la Marina had been hit dead on with the full force of the eye of the hurricane but was remarkably unscathed. Mexican construction favoring sturdy concrete walls and roofs meant that most of the people there still had roofs over their heads even if they had no electricity. I do not mean to downplay the seriousness of the hurricane's aftermath because there was loss of life and considerable damage from flooding throughout northern Mexico and south Texas.

I ended up making a safe passage through the storm-damaged areas albeit at a slower pace than normal. What was normally a ten-hour drive this time took most of two days. Several places the highway was down to one lane routed around downed trees or debris. Since I had a tow chain, I stopped once to pull a car out of the mud and back onto the pavement. The van's radio was eerily silent not being able to pick up many stations; and forget about cell phones. I picked up two more out-of-gas travelers and ended up giving away my gas can with apologies for not filling it. For a couple of days a spirit of community completely overcame any worry associated with picking up hitch-hikers and helping out strangers in the middle of what is today known to be a very dangerous part of the country.

Several years later I drove that road one more time even though it is a detour of several extra hours. That second passage was uneventful and fades in my memory along with so many other driving trips from Texas to San Miguel and back, but my experience with Hurricane Alex will always be a fond memory.

**************

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

Discover Lokkal:
Watch the two-minute video below.
Then, just below that, scroll down SMA's Community Wall.
Mission

Visit SMA's Social Network

Contact / Contactar