planetjan

When I was growing up in Omaha, the days leading up the 4th of July included a pilgrimage just outside the city limits to buy fireworks.  These were piddly-ass fireworks, by today’s standards; sparklers, snakes, pinwheels, pop-bottle rockets, and the real show stopper – the Roman candle.  My brother always managed to secure some M80s and cherry bombs.  These served to remind us that it WAS possible to blow your hand off with one of these babies.

Neighborhood families pooled their fireworks and put on a show.  My father arrived at these gatherings carrying an aluminum downspout, which did double duty as a poor man’s rocket launcher. 

As kids, we were only allowed to play with the snakes and sparklers on our own.  We wrote our names in the air, immune to the bacon-grease snap, snap, snapping on our arms.  On July 5th, the air smelled vaguely like gunpowder and the driveway had black spots where the snakes had grown, writhed, then turned to ash.

The 4th of July I’m thinking about today, though, was spent in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.  We were desperately looking for Puente Numero Dos, Bridge Number Two, the only route, save wading crossing the Rio Grande, to get back into the U.S. 

My family; husband Richard and sons, Taylor, 10, and Ian, 6, had moved to San Miguel de Allende to escape the high cost of living in New York.  We’d had a ridiculously fun time in Zihuantanejo, Mexico a year before and Mexico and the ghost of Frido Kahlo beckoned.  Never mind that we’d never actually set foot in San Miguel.  Hey, I’d done the research. 

You mean you’re moving to NEW Mexico, friends queried.  ”No, Mexico!” we replied, rather enjoying the look of shock on their faces.  We were ready for a change, and we were up for anything, short of moving to New Jersey.  We’d sell everything we owned and then spend a year writing a blockbuster script.  Yes, a sojourn in Mexico sounded exotic and the price was right.

San Miguel de Allende is a gorgeous colonial gem nestled in the mountains three hours north of Mexico City.  It’s long been a mecca for artists and has an established colony of American expats, who were drawn by San Miguel’s beauty and cheap real estate.

I flew to San Miguel two weeks before the arrival of the troops.  It was my job to secure the beachhead and lease a house.  “Remember,” my husband implored.  “Rent a house that’s already furnished and has a telephone.”

Well, can you imagine what kind of house I rented?  Three floors stacked like a stucco layer cake.  No furniture or telephone, but It had a garage and that was the deal maker.  Richard and the boys were flying to Omaha so my parents could give us their 4-cylinder Oldsmobile Firenza station wagon.  We hadn’t owned a car in 11 years so this was a big deal.  We couldn’t park our new/old car on the street! 

My family arrived.  It was then I realized it wasn’t New York that stressed me out.  It was my family.  Not a good sign.  The house I’d rented had recently been remodeled and all of the construction had stirred up the scorpions.  Every time we took a shower, a scorpion climbed out of the drain.  Standing in the shower awaiting their arrival made the shower scene in “Psycho” seem G-rated.  Scorpions lurked everywhere.  I took to sleeping with the flashlight on and aimed at the ceiling.   Just in case.  

Four days after we’d moved in, the toilet on the second floor stopped working.  With a dog leash tied to a bucket, we scooped water from the cistern beneath the patio then hauled it up two flights of stairs.  This was required three or four times a day while awaiting the eminent arrival of the “handyman.”  I was starting to feel like I lived in rural Africa.  My life now revolved around obtaining water for the upstairs toilet.  The blockbuster screenplay was not getting written.

I’d first been shown the house during siesta, the only time of day it turned out that the aerobic studio across the street was not open.  We were awakened at 6 a.m. each morning by a pulsating disco beat and a woman yelling, “Uno, dos, tres!”  They knocked off for siesta and then continued until 10 p.m.  

The burro next door began braying at the crack of dawn.  This was followed by ten minutes of silence before the braying resumed.  We joked that it was a Mexican snooze alarm.  We laid awake at night and listened to the coyote tethered on the roof of a nearby house howl.  Less than three weeks into our sojourn, we’d lapsed into severe culture shock.  For the first time I uttered the “L word” – Leave.

There was one small problem.  I’d signed a two-year lease with our landlady, Pat, a widow from Michigan who’d retired to Mexico.  She’d married a local attorney, a certain Sr. Caballero.  Pat bore more than a passing resemblance to Marjorie Main’s “Ma Kettle” character.  We told Pat we needed to talk about our situation.  I‘d paid first and last month’s rent plus a security/cleaning deposit, so I thought just maybe, she’d let us off the hook.

Just in case Pat wanted to play hardball, I was the designated weeper. The trouble was, once I started crying, “I want to go home,”  it was no longer an act.  I really wanted to go home.   But Pat was unfazed.  ”You know what you need?” she said matter of factly  “You need to go to the corn roast over at the Presbyterian church and meet some nice folks.”  She added that if we did try and break the lease, her husband, Sr. Caballero, would have our car impounded so we COULDN’T leave. 

Panicking, I ran to the U.S. Consulate to talk to Colonel Maher, an ex-CIA op, whom I’d met once before.  It was siesta and the consulate was officially closed, but the shuttered windows to his office were open.  I could see him sitting in the dark, feet up on his desk, and smoking a cigar.  He looked like he was plotting to overthrow a mid-sized country.  

I called to him and he came over to the window.  I breathlessly explained our predicament.  He listened attentively, chomping on the cigar before giving me his best legal advice.  ”I know Sr. Caballero,” he said.  “He’s well connected.  So my advice to you is to disappear.“  The shutters snapped shut.

Now when I’d leased the house, we’d also inherited a maid, Lara, from the previous tenants.  Lara was incredibly kind and was paid so little, I would have felt guilty not to keep her on.  We’d never had a maid before and I felt so awkward about having someone clean up after me that I helped her clean.  Lara told me the previous tenants, two American women, had left suddenly in the middle of the night after only two months.  A pattern was beginning to emerge.

With Lara’s help, we frantically began packing.   Pat lived up the street and had a clear view of the house, so there was an air of urgency.  All of the furniture I’d bought at the mercado would go to Lara, and all of the housewares as well.  To my mind, it was not much, but I came to realize that for Lara, it was the world.  Her husband had cancer and she was supporting an unknown number of children.

One of Lara’s relatives arrived with a truck to cart off the furniture.  Lara’s husband sat in the back of the truck, too weak to help.  I wrote out a letter and in my broken Spanish bequeathed all of our personal items to Lara as regalos, or gifts.  Lara cried tears of joy.  Her children would sleep in beds for the first time that night.  We kept one small side table with a hand-carved top, which we tied to the top of the car.

When Richard and the boys had arrived three weeks earlier, the car was packed to the gills.  Now I had to squeeze in, along with my luggage and a set of Mexican pottery that I couldn’t bear to leave behind.  The car was essentially a low-rider heaving under the added weight.  Richard took the hills out of town slowly.  With every bump, we could hear the bottom of the car scrape against the cobblestoned street.   We headed north.  From time to time we looked in the rear view mirror,  half expecting to see Sr. Caballero chasing us with a posse.

Richard was retracing the route he’d driven to get to San Miguel, but for me this was uncharted terrain.  I was trying to take in the surreal landscape that is northern Mexico.  In the middle of nowhere, a person would be standing by the side of the road.  Dried rattlesnake skins, draped over wooden poles, were the only roadside attraction.  We drove by “houses” that had organ cactus for walls and a sheet of corrugated tin for a roof.

The first night we stopped at motel that I’m certain had never seen better days.  When the person at the front desk asked us for our address, we mumbled something about being in transition.  “Hippies!” he ascertained. This was the early 90s.  My son set him straight.  ”We’re homeless!” he announced.

The plan was to cross the border into Laredo, Texas.  On the south side of the Rio Grande, lies the sprawling bastard child city that is Nuevo Laredo. It’s the equivilent to living on the wrong side of the tracks.  Nuevo Laredo has been plagued by the kind of violence that accompanies drug trafficking.  Wearing a badge is tantamount to wearing a target.

It was summer and the temperature hadn’t fallen below 100 for days.  Even after the sun set, there was no relief from the heat.  Nuevo Laredo finally came into view.  In the distance, we could see the lights of Laredo, Texas – the promised land.   All we had to do now was find Puente Numero Dos, and we’d be home free.  It was then that steam from the radiator began billowing out from the hood.  We cursed the universe.  Then cursed it some more.  We pulled over and waited for the temperature gauge to go down, then drove another mile.  Stop and repeat the ritual.  It was slow going. 

The boys’ survival instincts had obviously kicked in because they’d stopped talking altogether.  They knew the next thing to blow was going to be mom or dad.  Then we saw the sign; Puente Numero Dos.

A huge American flag waved on the Texas side of the bridge.  That’s my flag!  I’d never felt such a surge of patriotism.  I felt like the character Sally Field played in “Not Without My Daughter,” where she’s recovered her kidnapped child and is racing toward the American flag because then she’ll be safe.

Only forty feet from the border, plumes of steam engulfed the car and we shut off the engine.  I steered and Richard pushed.  Slowly, we inched toward American soil.  A U.S. Customs agent came over to greet us.  Never had English sounded so melodic.  We stood there sweating and shell shocked.  As the border agent checked our papers, we heard what sounded like a series of explosions.  ”What’s going on?”  we asked.  The border agent looked at us, incredulously.  ”It’s the 4th of July!“ he said.  We looked up to see the sky filled with fireworks.  We didn’t care that they were red, white, and green.

We got the last room at La Quinta, only a stone’s throw from the bridge on the American side.  Taylor walked into the room and promptly threw up.  ”I’m hungry,” he announced.  ”Can we go somewhere and eat?”  Richard took the boys to the Denny’s next door where they gorged on chicken-fried steak. Me? I laid on the bed in the air-conditioned room and turned on the TV. The sound of Ted Koppel’s voice was the sweetest lullaby I’d ever heard.