Nice. Different world, different time, one I wish I could have known.

On 4/6/07, Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@gwtc.net> wrote:
>
> In early March, 1974 my friends Rob, Kim & Sharon and I rebuilt the 1300
>
> in my 66 westy camper the week before heading to Mexico for a two month
> quest to find the perfect beach.  I'd sucked a valve moving my stuff
> from Stockton, CA to Santa Rosa, pulling the grade after Petaluma before
> Cotati on Hwy 101.
>
> This trip had lots and lots of stories that when Rob and I get together
> entertain his 16 year old.  Of course we leave out the sub-theme of also
> being on a search for pot while down there, and the efforts we went to
> to get high without anyone knowing it.
>
> We were all 22 years old and relatively new college grads.  We got the
> engine together and turned it over.  Rattle, RATTLE, RATTLE, RATTLE.
>
> Kurt & Ziggy, or German mechanic/advisors diagnosed wrong sized rod
> bearings.  We didn't get it out of the driveway and had to strip it all
> the way down to cracking the case.  Uninstalled and stripped in three
> hours.  New rod bearings, and a day later we're ready to turn it over
> again.  This time it purred like a kitten.
>
> We found our perfect beach.  It was about 30 miles from the nearest
> paved road at Tecoman, at the mouth of the river that forms the border
> between Colima and Michoacan, I think it is.  The name of the town was
> Boca de Apiza.  It took us two weeks of wandering, starting with surfing
> at Mantachen Bay, countless dirt roads from the highway to the coast and
> back.  When we left Tecoman, we were going on directions given us by a
> storeowner who'd taken a liking to us and invited us to his house for
> mid-day dinner.  We'd written them down, but we were well into the
> second case of beer and spent a goodly amount of time puzzling out what
> we'd written.
>
> The roads down there were like flat ski slopes, huge bumps across the
> road channeling water between them.  Some of them were so big I had to
> drive at a 45 degree angle for fear of bottoming out.  I learned this by
> watching the rattle-trap cars on the road.  Needless to say, when we
> drove it later, it took over two hours to drive the 30 or so miles.
>
> While surfing I stepped on a sting ray and was zapped with its tail
> right in the heel.  It was incredibly painful, and to my horror, the
> pain grew and grew, moving slowly up my leg.  I got out of the ocean and
> sat down on the beach and just monitored the pain as it moved up my
> leg.  My friend came in asking what I was doing, and I told him.  I'd
> made my peace and was ready to die.  I figured the poison would move up
> my leg, and eventually hit my heart and POOF!!!  It was a good life.
>
> Kim made me limp up to the restaurant of the people who built us a two
> room palapa for the month we were there.  Kim told Maria I'd been stung
> by "uno rayo" and she laughed and said she had what would fix me up.
> She moved her barrel shaped body over to the five gallon water jug
> filled with "alcohol" and poured out 12 ounces into a glass.  No ice, no
> water, just really low grade tequila, or the fermented remains of some
> other cactus.  It worked.  The pain located itself on the inside of my
> thigh and went no higher.  I, on the other hand, had a couple of these
> large glasses of alcohol and felt no pain.
>
> But none of this is the story I sat down here to tell.
>
> During the first week of the month we spent in Boca de Apiza we lived on
> the beach, down from the little village of a couple hundred people,
> either fisherman families and well off for the area, or plantation
> workers, who weren't so well off.  The coconut plantation was miles and
> miles in extent, and came down to the end of the beach.  A great place
> for scorpion and tarantula hunting.  During this week thousands of
> people moved to the beach as part of celebrating Easter.  The first day
> we're there and it's just the village, us and the great white beach and
> pounding ocean waves.  Slowly people began arriving, until there were
> literally thousands.
>
> We'd staked claim to a roof held up by sturdy poles that had survived
> the hurricane of a couple years before t hat had devastated the
> village.  It was the only shade on the beach.  It was the oddest feeling
> to live under it because there were always at least 20 children and
> sometimes adults sitting/squatting and just watching us.  It was like we
> were in a zoo.  I think half the reason the adult men were there was
> Sharon's white blond hair and skimpy pink bikini.  They went away only
> at dusk, thankfully.
>
> On one of these days three young men in very nice city clothes walked up
> and sat down in our space.  They had two bottles of rum.  They insisted
> we drink with them, so we sat down to a day of drinking.  One of the men
> was a school teacher and the other two were foremen from the coconut
> plantation.  We ran out of rum after a couple hours - seven people
> drinking seriously - and started in on beer bought at the restaurant
> from the family that eventually built us our two room palapa next door
> to them.
>
> We moved to the restaurant for dinner and continued to drink.  As the
> night wore on we moved from relatively expensive beer to relatively
> inexpensive alcohol.  All of us were blasted by the time the teacher
> said that he and his buddies needed to get home.  It turns out they'd
> missed the bus back to their village - busses had stopped running it was
> true.  They expected me to take them home.  I was in no shape to drive,
> but hey, I couldn't go more than 15 mph, and who cared if I was heading
> out into a maze of dirt roads with no signs.
>
> Rob came with me and the five of us got in the bus.  I drove, but don't
> remember anything other than getting to a village and saying goodbye to
> the three of them.  The goodbye was said with each of us chugging a
> jelly jar of alcohol.  Now I was really wasted.  I started to drive and
> realized I couldn't do it.  Luckily Rob wasn't as self-destructive as I
> and was able to drive.  It was the oddest thing.  As we left the village
> there were a couple hitchhiking.  This was 11PM in the middle of
> nowhere, and here are hitchhikers!!!
>
> Rob stopped and they got in, very thankful and glad.  The man was a
> young English lord on a five year "tour" of the world.  He was painfully
> shy and oh so attentive to the woman he was travelling with.  She was
> from Japan, but her father was a big-time diplomat and she spoke both
> English and Spanish as well as Japanese, and probably a couple other
> languages.  She lived in an "other world."  They'd hooked up a couple
> months before and would split at some point it felt like.  Casual
> travellers in the hinterlands of Mexico.
>
> We got back to Boca de Apiza after asking directions of people out
> walking the dark dirt roads.  I didn't.  I was too far gone.  When we
> arrived we poured out of the bus, or all of us but the woman.  She just
> sat there.  I was way gone and stumbled over to her asking what she was
> doing.  She said that a voice had told her that this bus was going to
> take her to Central America.  "What?"  I ejaculated?  I didn't think I'd
> heard her.  She said that my bus was going to take her to Central
> America.  She said this with a simplicity that was sandpaper on my
> drunkenness.  The way she looked at me, expecting me to accede to her
> wish, drove me up a wall.
>
> Normally I'm a peaceable guy.  I told her in no uncertain terms that
> this bus was not going to Central America.  She just smiled.  By this
> time her boyfriend and my friends had come over to the bus and she told
> her boyfriend to get in, that we were leaving.  I stood there just
> flabbergasted.  I told her again that we weren't going anywhere, and
> would she please get out of the bus.  She sweetly motioned her boyfriend
> to get in.  He shrugged his shoulders and did so.  She whispered in his
> ear and he got out and got his backpack.
>
> I got in front of him and said no way was he getting in the bus.  He was
> so helpless, me, a big, drunk American standing between him and his
> paramour, who in part, was obviously living in a world that wasn't
> shared by anyone else.  My friend Rob intervened and told me he'd take
> care of this.  I was verbally abusive and disbelieving this was
> happening.  Apparently the woman was convinced the bus wasn't leaving
> for central america because she finally got out.  But I didn't know
> this.  I ended up out on the beach retching my guts out.  I'd drank so
> much that day that I would pass out, wake up, retch, pass out, wake up,
> and retch again.  At one point I found my head in Robert's lap.  I was
> thankful.  I didn't puke on him!
>
> The next morning I woke to the hangover to end all hangovers, and was
> greeted by Maria, the restauranter's wife, with a jelly jar of alcohol.
> She just smiled.  I slowly remembered what had happened last night and
> anxiously walked over to the bus.  It was just parked.  I opened it up,
> expecting to find t he crazy woman and her synchophant, but it was
> empty.  Apparently they'd left after being refused the bus, heading out
> down dirt roads into their own probably odd and event-filled futures.
>
> The family built us our palapa and we ate two meals a day at their
> restaurant.  Chorizo and eggs in the morning with all different kinds of
> freshly squeezed fruit juices, 50 cents, and dinner, usually fish caught
> that day, with rice and beans, 6 pesos or 75 cents.  We surfed and took
> our little two man rubber raft up the river through the reeds into
> alligator land - eerie to hear one slither from the bank and enter the
> water, but not see it.  AFter a month we were skinny and tan and our
> hair had bleached blond from sun and sea.  The pictures we have of our
> adopted family and their home show four youngsters out in the world and
> loving it.
>
> We'd spent two weeks looking for the perfect beach/experience and found
> it.  Looking at a map of Mexico now there is a paved highway that goes
> down the coast from Tecoman to Acapulco.  In 1974 we were oddities to
> the denizens of Boca de Apiza.  They hadn't seen all that many anglos.
> We had a pack stolen by Indios who escaped by boat.  There were dirt
> roads to their village two hours down the coast, but we were warned not
> to pursue - that they carried guns, and there was no law down there.
>
> Jeff Olson
> Martin, SD, where it's been snowing all day...
>

--
mordo
1990 Carat