Stranded In Mexico:

The rocking of the bus, as it pulled off the road and onto a gravel shoulder that doubled as the desert oasis' parking lot, shook me awake. The brakes hiss as we come to a full stop and the driver turns on the interior lights. I'm barely wiping off the drool that has dripped down the left shoulder of my Chicago White Sox jacket when the bus driver begins to speak over the P.A. to informs us that we will be making a quick pit stop to use the restroom or buy a snack from the rundown shack that was our present roadside oasis. I didn't know how strict a Mexican Greyhound bus drivers' definition of "quick" can be. It's pretty darn fast.

It must have been around 11:00 pm and we were somewhere in the middle of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, which is mostly desert. I stepped off the bus and took in my surroundings. There was no denying that I was no longer where I am used to being. The dark desert landscape, that was visible when I looked in any direction other than the oasis, was the vastest thing I had ever seen in my life. It stretched out in every direction with only a far off mountain range sparsely dotted with lights breaking the dark distant skyline. It kind of reminded me of when we would go and see my cousin Gene at Notre Dame, from my hometown of Chicago. On the way there, there were those endless Indiana corn and wheat covered fields, almost alike but only in scale, but alive, unlike this place.

I'm going from the northern city of Monterrey in Mexico, where I visited my uncle, to the state of Michoacán, my fathers' birthplace. It was supposed to be a simple 585 mile trip to southern Mexico. Since it was a night trip I thought I would sleep most of the way there. We may have been a quarter of the way there when I was shaken awake. Up until that point, I had never left the cozy confines of my midwestern birth-place and if I had ever left Illinois at all, it was to go camping in Indiana or Wisconsin. I am Mexican-American, very American, and in Chicago, I fit in perfectly in every situation but I quickly realized that in Mexico I couldn't blend to save my life. It was my first trip to Mexico and I had never felt so alien as I did then. Also, my Spanish was horrendous and I never did get the hang of how to use the money. I gave the man about 300.00 American dollars and he gave me back the same amount in Mexican pesos, except the denominations of the bills were so large that I couldn't wrap my head around having 6 million pesos in my pocket. Sure, a bottle of Coke costs 1,500 pesos, but I was literally a millionaire and could no longer be bothered with price tags.

The oasis, or what was supposed to pass for an oasis, was nothing more than a small, one-room, general store with an outhouse. The driver went to go relieve himself I suppose and I went toward the store. There were five little kids sitting on a bench outside the place. They were very dirty and none of them had shoes on. As I walked up they rushed toward me and crowded around me. They were asking for "pan", bread in Spanish but they were not panhandling, they were begging.

Being a total city boy, my first mistrustful thought was that they really wanted money and that they might go and buy drugs or alcohol with said monies. I surely wasn't going to let that happen. So I kept walking toward the store with these kids crowding in around me and pulling on me as if I was a Hollywood movie star refusing to sign autographs. Through the stores' door window I could see that the store sold these big bags that contained about 5 large round loaves of bread and many other delicious-looking snacks and candy, all there on display for any weary travelers who may be trekking across the lonely desert roads. I in an excited tone said, "you guys want bread"? And they cheered, "si!" Well if it's bread they want, I'll buy them some bread. But of course, being a teenaged millionaire, I wasn't going to buy just one dinky old loaf.

I told them to wait for me outside. I opened the door to the little store and as I walked in was amazed to see that every square inch of space had not been spared in trying to crap in as much product into a tiny room as possible. The bag of bread that I had eyed from outside was hanging from a nail on the wall in a long plastic bag, probably intended for individual sale. I got a bag of my favorite Mexican potato chips and a drink, for the rest of the trip. The shop owner was a thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man. "Can I buy that whole bag of bread, sir?" I asked. Pointing behind him from behind the register at three were three more bags full of round loaves of sweet bread. He said, "Sure, you can buy as much bread as you want." I looked out at the kids waiting for me to come back and said to the man "I'll take the three full bags hanging behind the register, please." In retrospect that was a comically large amount of bread.

I paid for my goods and the man brought down the bags of bread. I couldn't carry everything so I went to the door and asked if one of the kids could come and help me carry it out. I thanked the man and we made our way outside. In front, there was an old wooden bench, that the kids were gathered around. As I looked out to my right, I gasped, and before I could even register it, one of the boys yelled, "Hey! The bus left without you!" I ran to the side of the road and I could see the buses' tail-lights way down the road. There were only four other passengers and none of them got off. Maybe the driver didn't see me get off and after relieving himself boarded the bus, and closed the door. Maybe he asked, "Is everybody in?" and maybe a half-asleep, "Yeah!" from some passenger impatient to get to their destination. So he probably just strapped in and drove off into the night, without me. I quickly ran back to the store and told the store owner that the bus had left without me.

Instead of acknowledging my panicking demeanor, he smiled, and chuckling he said, "Really?" His response immediately defused the seriousness of the situation. In my broken Spanish and with a reciprocating smiling chuckle I said, "Yeah. Am I screwed?" He laughed and said, "Kind of." He proceeded to inform me that I would have to wait for the next charter bus to arrive and explain to the driver that I was stranded. If I was lucky I could take that bus to the nearest city and make arrangements to get to my destination. I asked him when the next bus would be here. He said it could be anywhere from four to six hours but that if I got cold waiting outside on the bench, I could come inside for a while and warm-up. He was open 24 hours.

As I walked out somberly, and very annoyed at the prospect of having to wait on the side of this desert road for six hours, I saw the boys still waiting for me, holding the bags of bread. They were waiting for me to confirm the gift. I instructed them how they would divide it amongst themselves. "Well, I guess it's just me and you guys for a while.", I said. They looked at each other and told me that they had to be getting home soon. I looked around at the vast emptiness all around and I asked them where they lived and they pointed to behind the store/oasis. I looked in that direction but couldn't see anything. Nothing but a dark desert landscape receding into the darkness. "Where, out there?" I asked. One of them said yes, and said that his pueblo was located way in the distance, along a far off mountain range that was almost invisible in the darkness. "Is it far?" I asked. They just kinda shrugged. The taller, thin one, asked me where I was from. I told him I was from Chicago, in the United States. They had never heard of it. They were really sweet kids, subdued and humble.

Maybe if it wasn't so late they would have stuck around and talked to me for a while, but it was late. "You guys better get going, I guess. It's getting late." I said. They thanked me profusely and as they walked off, one of them asked me what my name was. "My name is Joe" I said. He said, "Orale, El Joe!" They all started yelling it together repeating it in a funny tone. "El Joe!" as they walked into the darkness. "El Joe!". Smiling, I settled in for a long wait. The bus arrived three hours later.