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"On the Road to the Cofradia"
© 2003 T. Adams
By the end of June, the villages around the Lake were cool and green and deserted, the time of year everyone waited for. Influenced by tourism, we knew that visitors would begin returning in November and stay until taxes were due again in April.
I planned two trips, one west to the pacific coast and the other north to a lake in the state of Nayarit. As I packed for my trip north I shuttled back and forth to my car between email sessions on my computer. A book of mine was selling well on the Internet and correspondence was heavier than usual. By mid-morning my emails were answered and my car packed and ready to go. I stood back from the big sedan I'd bought from an American friend and wished for the Bronco II I'd originally brought to Mexico. It was my idea of a perfect vehicle. It rode high, made tight turns and was narrow enough to navigate cramped village lanes and overgrown trails. Its dramatic demise became legend after friends saw photos of it burning to the tires at the Guadalajara airport. Its ruin taught me an important lesson: negotiation is an essential art in Mexico.
A less than robust combi overtook us on the ramp to the airport that morning as my friend Tony and I were approaching Miguel Hidalgo International. The driver of the van and his passenger, both farm workers, passed waving their caps and yelling greetings. Remarking on the extreme affability of the working man in Mexico, my friend and I smiled and waved back. When a whoosh sounded from under the passenger seat and a black streak of smoke streamed in the window, we were suddenly educated about our popularity on the roadway. FIRE! I pulled the car into a turning lane and we bolted-myself, the unfortunate Tony, and my dog, Atticus. A businessman in the car behind us ran up, pulling the pin on a portable extinguisher, and sprayed the flames shooting out from under the wheels. Just as we yanked the luggage the battery exploded beneath the hood. As the battery blew, fire trucks began arriving. Ten minutes later damage control aircraft trucks arrived and covered the Bronco in a blanket of hissing foam.
The businessman drove Tony to his gate and I stood disbelieving, hysterical with laughter as I watched myself in one of strangest movies I could have imagined. I thought, more than once, that this doesn't really happen to people, does it? Hours later when I made my formal report to the Federales de Caminos, the Highway Patrol, I suddenly remembered that my premium check had cleared just four days earlier. In the same breath I worried to my friend who drove me that my tourist policy might not pay off and I wondered what good would come out of a bizarre event like this. We'd both lived long enough to know that good things can come out of disasters as long as you didn't go looking for the panic button.
A week later my doorbell rang and a woman stood outside. She held in her hand an envelope of photographs she'd taken of my burning Bronco. The story of how she'd arrived at the airport from Texas and stood waiting, camera around her neck, for her son to collect her wasn't unusual but when she described how she'd tracked me down from Guadalajara I knew this was an extraordinary event.
Read the complete article . . .
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