The Desert

From walks around the place.

Benson,Arizona

Bruce and I met through sailing. He worked as an engineer in Northern California at the time I lived in Santa Cruz but boats on the east coast drew us together. We are the proverbial chalk and cheese but share an iconoclastic view of the foibles of humanity and the world we are born into. He is my electro-mechanical sounding board when disaster strikes, especially in the imagination in the pre-dawn hours. He puts up with my intensity and deflates my pomposity as needed. He isn’t a saint but he is as close as might be necessary in my secular life.

He and his wife live in a rather comfortable trailer park in Benson enjoying those amenities that sometimes we miss as we sweep sand out of intimate creases of our swimsuits and look with a jaundiced eye on a sprayer of cold water. We are online as we moochdock in his drive and last night Layne remarked we never had a signal this strong in Mexico outside our nights in the Hilton in Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiapas.  That was a peculiar interlude with room service and strong Wi-Fi our reward for being blocked by a citizen protest in Mexico’s poorest state!

Speaking of which I had a Mexican moment my first day sunk into the land of lotus eaters found oddly enough in this Sonoran desert.

The showers have two units, one a narrow average monastic cell fit for purpose but not like the handicapped stall, an expansive regal two part room with space for a camper to spread his belongings and shower in a manner to which he is long since not accustomed. I prepared for my encounter with hot water and none was forthcoming. Dammit! Mexico strikes again, I swore in disbelief as I stared helplessly at the dry shower head. Luckily it is low season and there are few campers hanging around to brave one hundred degree days in the desert.

I left my stuff in t(e handicapped stall and removed myself a towel and soaps to the upright coffin next door. It was full of lovely water such that I could then repair, sparkling clean to my boudoir next door and emerge like a fresh new butterfly to face the world, dressed…in yesterday’s shirt.  Ah yes supply issues strike again.

I have mentioned previously my shortage of shirts torn variously over the weeks by a dog on the beach, a barbed wire fence and an awkwardly placed thorn bush that ambushed me somehow. My intact pink shirt (which started the journey a manly maroon color washed out by the Mayan sun) has accumulated several less than attractive marks and stains impervious to sturdy Mexican laundry ladies, which marks are unfortunately suggestive of either incontinence or butchery by the wearer.

The back of the port of entry at Naco, the exit to Arizona.

That we might more easily sail through the Immigration inspection at Naco, I wore my sole surviving respectable shirt, a sober shade of dark blue free of too many wrinkles but also stains scratches tears of poorly executed repairs. That shirt has had to do duty as we wait for the mysterious supply chain monster to disgorge some replacements from the bowels of container ships or Malay sweat shops while a quick search through the racks of several box stores in Sierra Vista yielded nothing but oddly shaped and decorated shirts apparently designed for broad chested hunchbacks with stick arms and pirouette narrow waists.  I looked around and saw no such body types in evidence and concluded I was late to the party and summer shirts are gone. Or local ballet dancers had cornered the market.

I think Rusty is enjoying being back. He lives an ordered life on a leash proudly striding up the lanes between parked RVs with his tail high flapping gently from side to side, his signal that all is well in his canine brain. When we spot other dog walkers he goes on alert for a second, no doubt remembering the sudden riot of Mexican street dog ambushes, but he slacks off when he spots them all leashed up and prancing along in proper suburban style.

Layne likes to say I want Rusty to have more freedom than he wants himself. He spends the day lounging as he used to on Cudjoe Key wandering between the gravel drive and the shaded overhangs popping indoors from time to time to cool off with the adults in the air conditioning. He knows change is on the way, as it always has been since we gave him a home and I suspect he won’t mind some wild camping at altitude away from the burning desert heat. We have some chores to do, booster Covid shots, and I want to get an alignment to check the tire work done in Hermosillo as poor alignment will kill our expensive Michelin Agilis 3 tires…and we are planning our next moochdock in northern Arizona next week.

After that we will boondock in the mountains in cooler air (I hope!) away from the forest fires north of Flagstaff.  I read about that and was struck by an irony. Our wild camping in Mexico sometimes requires some clean up as public toilets are not widely available and the concept of removing you4 trash or burying your crap is not widely practiced…and I read the fire wrecking access to land north of Flagstaff was started by a camper burning his toilet paper! He left it smouldering in these dry forests and surprise, surprise! it set off a conflagration. Apparently he is not a dedicated outdoorsman but an unemployed wanderer looking for work from Louisiana so I doubt he will be in much of. A position to repair his well intentioned mistake. Oh well I trust they will overreact and ban camping or some other draconian response to stupidity. We travel around with a trash can of toilet paper and dump it in a dumpster from time to time keeping the toilet unclogged and easy to drain. If you were wondering. Meanwhile we pretend to be desert rats.

Crossing The Line

We started the day at a truck stop in Santa Ana in Sonora and ended the day moochdocking with friends in Benson Arizona. It was a long day by any measurement.

One reason I hate flying is because the journey of a few hours completely transforms the nature of your experience. You wake up on one continent and go to sleep in a different time zone or continent or culture. The change is abrupt. I spent many summers as a child waking up in London eating bacon speaking English and petting Bobby our family dog. By six o’clock that night I was in a hot Mediterranean climate speaking Italian over a plate of pasta while explaining to my friends that quarantine laws prevented me from flying with my dog and they would never meet Bobby. I grew to hate airports and the sudden transformations they wrought in my life.  I still do. 

And there we were flying through a hole in the time/space continuum in our modest Promaster van, GANNET2, named for Webb Chiles’ boat and behaving like the Starship Enterprise. On Wednesday we boldly went from Mexico through a quiet village backwater and catapulted ourselves into the chaos and traffic of a surprisingly busy Arizona summer. It felt busy to us but the snowbirds are long gone from here as they are from San Carlos!

We drove back to Arizona the way we came, and the road though the same identical  road felt like a new trail across the mountains. We reminisced as we drove, thinking back to that cold rainy December 30th when we left Bisbee full of trepidation and hope. People nag so much about Mexico’s dangers you have to stop yourself wondering if they could be right, that your own memories of pleasures past might be leading you into a dead end.

Of course the part six months driving around Mexico, indeed the entire eight months since retirement October 25th have been far more joyous and fun and rewarding than we could have hoped. And this journey isn’t over, not by a long chalk. 

This wasn’t a vacation or a break, this was van life created by two old farts and their dog, two experienced travelers who want to see more of the world from their van.  We aren’t living in a van to make money on YouTube or to impress strangers…it’s not a “lifestyle choice” dictated by poverty or a desire to Abe money though it is helpful that way! 

Our 21 foot Promaster is our only home and the best possible tool for us to see the bits of the world our good health and the van’s strength will help us to see. As we drove away from the government office in Cananea where we had handed in our Temporary Import Permit Layne paused the book on tape and said she has no desire to live anywhere but GANNET2, the van we named after Webb Chiles’s tiny circumnavigator, a Moore 24 sailboat. He suggested it and we agreed with alacrity though it seems hard to imagine we shall drive as far as he has sailed the original GANNET. 

We approached the border with some sadness, the chapter that had rewarded us with splendid memories was closing as it had to. In the distance we could see the southernmost mountains of Arizona beckoning. 

We were driving to a new set of experiences, new roads, new challenges and new campsites. We are retired and with no plans to go to work. 

As we closed in on Naco Sonora, the dusty little town on the border we could see across the valley five miles away the straight brown line of the border wall and behind it the little town of Bisbee in the hills. 

When we arrived in Naco in December there was snow on the mountains and we wanted to camp on the beach and we had miles to drive so we barely noticed Naco as we figured out the driving and the roads and the locations of the government offices for our paperwork. On our way out it was different. 

We found a coffee shop on Google maps so we paused and Layne ordered us cappuccinos while I walked Rusty one last time in Mexico. 

Sierra Vista appears to have donated some trash cans to Naco whether it is aware or not. I doubt the county seat of Cochise County minds. 

It was lovely to pause in the shade and watch the world pass by. Down the street a quarter mile we could see the wall and the Mexican flag above the port of entry. It was time. 

I made one last deviation and took a dude Street looking for a tortilla shop that was unfortunately closed.

The side street dead ended by a dentist’s shop advertising for US clients outside, next to some street murals: 

We passed a couple of US pedestrians crossing the border but as usual it’s the Mexicans who wave and the Americans everywhere in Mexico, even on the border who studiously ignored us right to the end! 

“To USA” pointed the arrow. We waved to three soldiers standing next to the line and stopped to hand our passports to an Immigration official sitting under a canopy at the line. He waved us into the first inspection station. We were in the US! 

We had a five minute interview with a cheerful young man and we explained we’d dumped all fruits vegetables and meat and had nothing to declare. He noted our particulars and told us to bypass the secondary inspection bay. We turned left and that was that. 

The street led us round the back of the border post past the old port of entry now preserved for posterity. 

And then as suddenly as an airplane flight you are in Arizona and Mexico is a million miles away, as unattainable as a distant star. 

We thought we had left the land of topes behind but Arizona welcomed us with a couple of speed bumps of their own just to remind us of another reason why we were happy to be home. We had a tank full of Pemex gas at $3:28 a gallon but that will only last for 350 miles…

Bruce and Celia joined us for a hearty American lunch filled with laughter. 

And we look forward to a summer of driving and seeing old friends before we find ourselves back here for another drive through Mexico and then on south to Panama and all the complexity of getting GANNET2 and ourselves to Colombia. We aren’t finished with Mexico just yet.