Adiós, Juan Denver, "I’m Leavin' in a Red Van..."
Don't know when I'll be back (in Mexico), again. Oh, babe, I hate to go.
Dear readers, are you in a good mood? If so, savor it, because it won’t last long. Finally, I ran out of time and had to leave Mexico, but I didn’t want to go.
But this time, I really am leaving, and you are about to hear the whole sad story.
Those of you who want to know exactly how bad I felt, and who want to wallow in my misery, are my schadenfreunds.
Extra points if you get that one. Now, we have to get in our little red campervan and drive. Leaving in a jet plane is more dramatic, and makes a better song lyric.
The reason for leaving is that the Federales are after me. My six-month permiso for my van expires next week, and if I don’t skeedaddle, they can take my van.
So now I’m on the run. I suppose this makes me a desperado.
Why did leaving hurt so bad?
I really dove deep this time in Mexico, and now I’m paying the price. I immersed myself in music, dabbled in dance, fiddled with my frijoles, and simmered in Spanish. After all that, leaving sucks.
Remember the last time you moved, or packed out your house, said goodbye to friends, and then left a familiar town for some new, unfamiliar place? For an uncertain future?
As the final departure drew nearer, you began counting down the hours, the minutes, as you crammed the final items into the suitcases and boxes, but you couldn’t pack all the memories. You wanted to keep all your favorite sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes.
They were fresh in your mind, but how long would they last once you left? Days? Weeks? With time, memories begin to fade; one day, they are forgotten.
The toughest person for me to say goodbye to was Paloma, who asked me to be her dance partner. The hours practicing with her had a powerful effect on me.
I had been on the road for four years with my dog. Being so close to a beautiful woman for a change was my kryptonite. It made me feel weak in the knees, which, in case you didn’t know, is bad for dancing.
She, on the other hand, appeared to be impervious to my fat old man charm; in recent years, it had only worked on my dog, and he had food as an incentive to pretend it did.
Would she miss me, I wondered? Would anyone?
She had invited me out for dinner before I left. At dinner, I wondered if she’d be overcome with emotion in our final moments together, but like a true clam, she hid the pearl.
No, “I’m going to miss you!” Instead, she masked her feelings in a complaint about one of my most annoying mealtime habits: drinking water with my food.
“How can I take care of you,” she asked, “when you don’t listen to me?”
She believes that drinking water with my meals will be the death of me.
That comment brightened my mood. I saw a chance to find out her true feelings.
“You want to take care of me?” I asked, smiling. “That must mean you like me.”
She didn’t bite. Like a sword fighter, she parried my question with one of her own.
She shrugged and deadpanned, “‘Why would I dance with you if I didn’t like you?”
I could not think of a good comeback. Touché.
The fencing judges gave her the point.
Soon we would be back on the road, sleeping in the cramped confines of the vna.
As a nomad, I’m ashamed to admit that I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.
Anyway, I had to stay over an extra day.
On Monday night, my landlady, Maria Dolores, had a birthday party and invited our other mutual friends and me from the choir that I had joined in Patzcuaro.
It was a crazy party full of crazy people, killing pesky mosquitoes on the front porch, and imbibing mezcal. They all spoke in Spanish. Very fast. Very loud.
I speak a little Spanish, but have a limited vocabulary. My only solution would be to hand out a list of the words I know and ask people to use only those words. For some reason, people say no to that idea.
My options were to understand nothing or to pretend to understand everything.
So, when they laughed, I laughed, and when they got emotional, I got emotional. Someone finally asked me if I understood, and I said, “Not a word. Ni modo.”
They roared with laughter. “Gringo loco!” I laughed too. I enjoyed spending my final hours in town with my friends, even without understanding a word.
The agony of leaving is compounded by the fact that we have to drive; it’s slow torture. I‘d have a whole week alone with my thoughts and feelings about leaving.
We’ve got to drive 1,200 miles to the US border, through the Trans-Mexican High Volcanic Belt of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Michoacan, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and Zacatecas, and then the high desert of Chihuahua.
So far, in my road travel in Mexico, I have not encountered the criminal element of society. (It occurs to me that the criminal element never calls itself that.)
Hopefully, my luck will hold out for another week as we slowly drive north to the border.
We will leave tomorrow morning early, after handing back my keys to my landlady, Maria Dolores, aka Lolita, and driving through the big cast-iron gate of my lovely little mountaintop home, the Casa en el Bosque.
We were supposed to leave on Sunday, but I dawdled about taking my laundry to the hole-in-the-wall local lavanderia. I knew it was a bad idea to leave it until Saturday.
The lady at the lavanderia told me my clothes would not be ready until Monday evening. We lost two travel days. Maybe I procrastinated on purpose.
Tuesday morning, after saying goodbye to Lolita, we exchanged hugs. I recalled that she had been the one to introduce me to the choir and make me welcome.
Her eyes got red and moist. I could see that she was holding back tears. She was trying not to cry, but of course, she did.
An emotional lady, she cried for everything. Her Mexican emotions lived their lives on the outside, while my cursed gringo emotions always hid on the inside.
“Please don’t cry,” I said to her. I felt like crying, but did not allow myself to. What would the people in Indiana say, a grown man crying over a silly thing like that?
I told my dog to jump in the front passenger seat of the van, then I got in the driver’s seat and put it in first gear. We drove down our steep cobblestone or empedrado, Calleton Reventon, for the last time.
I hated leaving our cozy casita on the mountainside. Until we moved into it in March, we hadn’t lived inside for four years, other than short hotel stays or visits to family and friends.
We loved bathing in the warm traditional colors of the casita: the burnt orange, the dull red, the bright blue, the cheerful yellow sunlit walls of the tiny kitchen.
At night, as I lay in bed, the exposed, heavy timbers of the cathedral roof protected me.
While packing the van, I sighed as I thought about living on the road once more. Back in March, it was hard to stop driving and live indoors. I worried we’d never hit the road again.
Being indoors again presented challenges. At first, I struggled to adjust. When I tried to close the front door, I felt trapped, unable to breathe. I had to leave the door open during the day. Only after dark, when the night bugs began buzzing around, did I finally get up to close it.
I looked over at my dog. He had put his head down on the center console of the van and was looking up at me, sadly. Accusingly, perhaps.
“Mr. Bones,” I asked, ‘will you miss the big comfy bed, the cushy pillows, and fluffy blankets? You liked to bury your head and leave your scent on your spot.”
“What do you think?” he asked me, ruefully, closing his eyes. “Sorry,” I said.
At least it wasn’t rainy or muddy when we left, although I felt like it was raining on the inside. I had my own gray clouds floating around gloomily in my head.
As we drove downhill, another song popped into my head, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” By Sir Elton Juan, as he is known locally.
Only now the words are, “Goodbye cobblestone roads, where the lugs of my poor tires howl.”
The rough, round cobblestone roads have been murder for my tires and suspension. The tailpipe, loosened by months of driving on cobblestones, bangs loudly on the undercarriage.
I turned to Mr. Bones and said, “It’s time for us to ‘Hit the Road, Jack’.”
He looked at me and said, “You and your sad songs!”
He doesn’t understand that, for me, the sad songs say what I often cannot.
Then we turned right on Apatzingen Road, stopping for gas before heading out of town. I asked the gas station guy to check my tires. I felt like asking him to check my mood, too.
He pumped up the tires, but there was no way to pump me up. I felt like I had a flat. I had not heard from Paloma since her daughter and granddaughter had arrived for a visit.
How can I compete with that? I left her feeling stifled by a sad silence.
When I left, as the good-bye song says, I guess I became “Just Somebody that They Used to Know.” The other expats in town will quickly forget me, I figured, like all the other short-term visitors who came and went.
The choir will continue to sing, with one less male voice. My dance partner will soon want to resume dancing. Soon, she’ll find another man to dance with.
It was silly to think I was more than a dance partner to her, but I had hoped that one day, I might be. That day never came; maybe it never will.
I turned on my favorite station, Radio Romantica, but heard a sad song in Spanish, and turned it off. Sad romantic music was the last thing I needed to hear at that point.
Just drive, I told myself. Stop thinking. Stop feeling. I wished I could turn off the damn sad feelings. Why don’t we have a switch to turn off our unpleasant feelings?
One of life’s mysteries is that when we arrive in a new place, we strive to belong, but when it’s time to leave, we wish we hadn’t.
Hola Carlos. It’s amazing how you dove into the local culture and connected to the people. I am sure they will remember you and miss you. Safe travels. And enjoy being back on the road.
That choir video did my heart good. I hope you will be good to YOUR heart and let it feel what it feels. Grief moves through us when we let ourselves feel it, and freezes inside us when we try to shove it away. I'm sorry you had to leave this place and these people you have come to love.