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chapter 34
Cuauhtémoc was scratching in the sand and MacClayne was reading when I opened my eyes and glanced around. The sun was fairly high, the air hot and salty. Something vaguely troubled me, but, whatever it was, it didn't come to mind. The foamy shoreline extended off to the left of us, and, on our right, the jagged megaliths rose out of the water. Some presented tall cliff faces which stood above the onslaught of the pounding surf, while smaller ones appeared and disappeared as the waves rose and fell.
But something seemed to be missing. Then it came to me--the schooners of the previous afternoon were gone, as well as the sloop that had been anchored near them. Suddenly I recalled with a sense of uneasiness that during the night one of those ships had been about to blow up and sink. Had that been another dream? I paused to think. Such a thing didn't seem at all likely to have happened in reality, and I dismissed it as an invention of my troubled sleep. However, the images of doom and dismay were not easy to banish from my mind.
"Buenos días." It was MacClayne's voice. I glanced up and returned the greeting.
"¿Cómo amaneciste?"
"Bien," I replied. "Muy bien."
"There were a couple of schooners out there yesterday," MacClayne remarked, seeming to tune in on my thoughts.
"I guess they sailed away," I said.
"Apparently."
"Or blew up and sank," I said off-handedly.
MacClayne looked at me strangely. "Why do you say that?" he said. There seemed to be a slight quaver in his voice.
"I was just being facetious," I said. "I didn't mean anything serious."
There was a pained expression on his face that I'd rarely seen before. I wished I hadn't make that last remark, but it was already said. At the same time I wondered again if MacClayne and I might be having parallel dreams. That thought had first occurred to me several days before, but was such a thing even possible?
I kept gazing out over the bay. A tall wave dashed itself on a distant rock, washing it in white foam. My thoughts returned to the drubbing MacClayne had given me the evening before during our fish-cooking discussion, and it annoyed me almost as much now as it had then.
Why couldn't one put a fish on a stick and roast it like a marshmallow? I was sure one could, and MacClayne himself must've done it many a time during his beachcombing days in the Canary Islands.
Right now I didn't even feel like talking to him, and for the first time on our journey I almost wished he weren't with me.
"I'm going off to explore," I said, "I'll be back later."
MacClayne replied that he'd be in the vicinity.
I put on my shorts, and, together with Cuauhtémoc, headed toward the megaliths. The beach was lined with fiberglass launches which were drawn up on the sand, and along the way I stopped to talk with a fisherman who was working on his boat and gear. "How's the fishing?" I said.
"Malo," he replied. "Muy malo." He told me the recent storm had muddied the water and that the mud had driven the fish away. "Just look at the surf," he said. It was tinged red with sediment.
The megaliths were on the other side of the mouth of a river. It was a good twenty meters wide, but people were wading across very near the point where the water discharged into the surf. Apparently that was the shallowest place.
The current was swift, and so thick with sediment that I couldn't see the bottom. Very cautiously I stepped in, and the water swirled around my feet, but it only came up to my ankles. Cuauhtémoc sat on my shoulder, looking down at the opaque flow.
"You okay?" I said to the bird. He seemed curious rather than worried, and I continued on. The water never rose above my shins, and we were soon across.
We'd reached the first megalith, and I was able to examine it closely. The rock was granite, the same igneous material which formed the headland at Faro. A strange sound attracted my attention and led me to a sea cave that had tunneled its way through the megalith. Water rushed back and forth, rising and falling with each incoming wave. It made a deep, hollow chopping noise that echoed out of the cave.
I continued on, visiting the other megaliths and finding more sea caves. Along the way I paused to chip off pieces of the granite and study them with my lens while the bird pecked and scratched at things which attracted his curiosity. I wished I'd brought my rock hammer; without it I didn't feel quite like a geologist.
The granite here, together with that at Faro, seemed to be part of a much larger plutonic body which lay at the core of the coastal range. Millions of years ago this would've been a molten mass deep within the earth's crust, where it slowly cooled and hardened. Much later it was uplifted to where it stood today.
The cause of uplifts such as this had been one of the earth's mysteries until the late 1960s, when the theory of plate tectonics came into being. Before that, very few reputable scientists thought that continents drifted about. Alfred Wegener, who originated the hypothesis back in 1912, was laughed at. Then, almost 40 years after his death, as the result of further discoveries, it became the widely accepted theory. That happened while I was a geology student.
Continental drift, now called plate tectonics, was the unifying concept which tied everything together. The volcanoes around Uruapan, the Valley of Infiernillo, and the coastal range were all parts of a larger piece, called the Caribbean Plate. And about a hundred kilometers off the coast was an oceanic trench into which the Pacific Plate was subducting. The descending plate was passing beneath where I stood, and, as it went under, it forced these megaliths and the rest of the coastal range to rise. This in turn exposed them to the action of the wind and waves which would ultimately erode these rocks to sand.
As I walked and waded along, looking at rocks and sea caves, I came upon a sandbar covered with coconut palms where I found an encampment. Next to a Volkswagen van with a Canadian license plate sat three men chatting. I went up to say hello, and as I approached, I heard a familiar Scottish brogue. The one with his back to me was MacClayne.
Did I really want to see him right now? Our fish-cooking discussion still rankled me, and I was about to back away when one of the men saw me. "Hello there!" he called out.
MacClayne also turned my way, and, seeing me, he greeted me cheerfully, then introduced me to the other two.
"Have a seat," said one, motioning to a folding chair. "Sorry we can't offer you a beer."
"Yeah, we just missed the beer truck," said the other.
"You did? Sounds pretty tragic," I said with a grin. I assumed they were joking.
"It happened just an hour ago. There's a truck that comes around once a week to make deliveries to the village. We were waiting for it, but we didn't see it arrive, and before we could catch it, it was already heading back down the road towards Colima." The fellow paused, then added a bit sheepishly, "I guess we weren't paying attention."
"What do you mean we? You're the one who wasn't paying attention," his companion chided him. "I told you I was going over to the beach for a bit, and you were supposed to be watching out for the truck."
"Well, I'm sorry."
"Yeah, you're sorry. We're both out of beer." He chuckled, indicating that, having properly fixed the blame, he wasn't inclined to pursue the matter further. Turning to me he said, "So you're traveling with MacClayne?"
In the course of the conversation that followed, I learned that the two were from Vancouver, BC, and they'd been stranded for some weeks on this sandbar.
"Did you say stranded?" I asked, and they explained that they'd arrived some weeks before, crossing a dry creek bed with their Volkswagen. Their intention was to stay only a single night. But that was the night the recent storm broke, and the next morning they awoke to find that a raging torrent had turned the sandbar into an island and cut off their exit. They could easily wade across, but not drive out with their vehicle.
Somehow they'd managed to get word to their employer back in Canada and tell him about this unforeseen situation. The boss had assured them their jobs would be waiting.
"I couldn't think of a much nicer place to be marooned," I said.
"We've managed to endure it," said one, with a grin. "Until this morning at least."
"I wonder how people got beer to this village before that road was put in," said the other.
"They probably did without beer."
"You think that's possible?"
There followed a philosophical discussion on the meaninglessness of life without beer and this began a lengthy exchange of drinking stories.
My thoughts wandered and I thought again of the airplane I'd admired the evening before. The Electra. I decided that I'd heard enough drinking stories, and, excusing myself, gathered up my bird and headed towards the landing strip.
I soon came to the creek bed which separated this sandbar from the land. This seemed to be where the raging torrent had trapped them, but it was now hardly more than a trickle. Cuauhtémoc was able to wade across by himself, and I realized just how seriously "marooned" those guys really were.
The outskirts of the village began just beyond the sandbar, and, with Cuauhtémoc strutting along at my side, I strolled up an unpaved dirt street between houses of mud-wattle, until we arrived at the airstrip. The Electra was still there. A fellow was working on it; he had part of the cowling off and was doing something with one of the engines.
"Buenas tardes," I said.
He glanced up, returned my greeting, and I took the opportunity to ask, "Lockheed Electra, ¿no?"
"Sí, lo es," he affirmed proudly.
Thus began our conversation. He introduced himself as Enrique, and, as he worked, he told me about the plane. It was built in the 1930's, long before either of us was born. Enrique was perhaps thirty, with a robust look. He wore a head band to keep his shoulder-length hair in place.
"An old plane like this takes a lot of maintenance," he said, suddenly switching to English.
"You've lived in the US?" I said.
"For half a decade," he said. He'd worked in Los Angeles as an electrical engineer. Flying had been his hobby; then one day he'd come across this Electra sitting at the edge of a runway, taking up space and falling apart. The landing gear on one side had buckled, and an engine was missing, as were many other essentials.
"In this airplane I saw the life I wanted to live," he said. "I acquired it, restored it to flying condition, brought it back to México with me, and, here I am."
He now ran this one-man, one-plane airline which served the remote towns and villages of the coastal range.
Cuauhtémoc, who'd been perched nearby listening to our conversation, chose that moment to flap his wings and crow.
Enrique glanced at the bird and grinned. "Your pet? You don't seem like a guy who'd use him as a fighting cock."
I told him the bird's story, and then about our journey to Apatzingán. Normally I didn't tell people about our fabled and forbidden city, and certainly nothing about our search for the Holy Grail--that would've struck most people as downright loony. But Enrique seemed sophisticated enough that he might enjoy hearing about our fantasies.
"Your search for El Dorado, Cíbola and other legendary places," he smiled.
"That's the way we see it," I said.
He put the cowling back, and I held it in place while he bolted it down. Having completed that, he went on to check the fuel lines, the navigation lights and then the control surfaces of the wings and tail. While I watched and lent a hand as needed, Enrique told me how and where he'd found replacement parts when he restored the airplane. Since it'd been out of production for decades, he'd had to scrounge those pieces from all over the US, Canada and México. Some he'd had to make himself. Each piece had its own story.
"Like a thousand quests for the Holy Grail," I said.
Enrique paused and thought for some moments. "Yes, I'd say that's what it was. I guess we each have our own special vision of the Grail, and the quest to find it. For me, it's been this Electra and the parts I needed to make it fly."
It was late afternoon, though it certainly didn't seem like that much time had gone by, when Enrique stepped back, looked at the Electra, and said, "Airworthy for another flight."
He packed up his tools and I helped carry them to a shed near the edge of the runway. While we were doing this, we heard the sound of a vehicle. I looked over to see MacClayne alighting from a Volkswagen van, which then took off down the road, raising a small cloud of dust as it went.
"Hello there," he said, walking up to where Enrique and I were.
"Hello," I responded. "Those people aren't stranded any more?"
"They're making a beer run," he said. "On their return I'm sure their condition of strandedness will resume."
I introduced him, and Enrique said, "Olaf was telling me about you and your journey to Apatzingán. I'd like to hear more about it. Have you eaten yet? Perhaps the two of you would like to have dinner with me."
We accepted, and after finishing with putting the tools away, we set off towards Enrique's place
"Do you people like fish?" he asked as we walked. "Fishing's been poor since the storm hit, but there's a guy down this street who's pretty lucky. Let's stop by and see if he has any."
It turned out the lucky fisherman had been lucky on this day as well. After acquiring a bucket of fish from him, we continued on to Enrique's which wasn't far away.
He lived in a house of brick and concrete with a corrugated metal roof. It was rather plain from the outside, but, inside, the walls were whitewashed and covered with photos of antique aircraft, both civilian and military. The photos portrayed B-17s, Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Zeros, as well as aircraft from the '20s and '30s. There were a Ford tri-motor, a GB racer, a Vega and a good many others that I didn't recognize.
It was like a photo museum from the pioneering age of flight, but there were other images as well. On a wall that seemed to be specially reserved were posters of the Beetles and other rock bands. Among them was one of Che Guevarra. There were reproductions of Van Gogh and Renoir as well as a traditional Japanese landscape.
Prominently displayed above all, was a Vietnam era anti-war poster featuring a line from a Bob Dylan song: "How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?"
"Soda okay?" said Enrique. "Don't have any beer, doesn't go with my flying."
The sodas he brought out were warm.
I could guess that back in the US he'd probably lived in a fashionable apartment with a swimming pool. Here he didn't even have a refrigerator, but he didn't seem the least regretful about what he'd given up.
MacClayne was admiring the aircraft photos when he paused to study a Heinkel 111. "I think this one might have been built in Spain," he said.
"Yes, it was," Enrique affirmed. "It's a German bomber, but only a few are still in flying condition, and most of those were built in Spain. I see you know your aircraft."
I was also impressed as well as surprised. Till now MacClayne had never shown any interest in historic airplanes. Then I recalled that he'd manned an anti-aircraft gun during the Second World War.
Enrique had set to work, starting a fire in a barbecue pit in the courtyard. Then the three of us worked together to clean the fish. When the fish was ready and the fire burned down to glowing coals, Enrique handed us each a stick and said, "How about if we sit here around the fire and do this like a good old American style weenie roast? In this case, a fish roast."
"That would be splendid," said MacClayne enthusiastically. I said nothing to MacClayne about cooking fish on sticks, but I couldn't help feeling a smug satisfaction.
There was also rice, chile sauce, limes, and, for desert, papayas. As we ate, MacClayne lavished eloquent praise on the meal and the style in which it was done. One of the best fish dinners he'd ever enjoyed, he assured our host.
Enrique's English was nearly as good as our own. He and MacClayne hit it off well. However cranky and obnoxious MacClayne might be towards me at times, it was always the good Dr. Jekyll side of him that came out on occasions like this.
Night had fallen and we were still sitting in the courtyard by the dying coals of the fire, sipping coffee and exchanging memories of places we'd been and things we'd done. Eventually Enrique got up to adjust a lantern. It was a gas lamp that burned brightly, giving off as much light as a good-sized electric bulb. The sound of breakers could be heard faintly from the not-too-distant shore.
"Tomorrow I'll be making a hop to Apatzingán," Enrique said. "I'll have extra space, and you're welcome to come along."
I looked at MacClayne, and MacClayne looked at me. I wished for a ride in the Electra almost as much as I wanted to finish our journey in the proper way.
"You don't have to decide now," Enrique said. "I'll be taking off at about eight in the morning."
He invited us to spend the night at his place, but we returned to our campsite on the beach. Somehow, we felt the need to sit out there under the stars as we resolved this moral dilemma that now confronted us.
We gathered driftwood, built our fire, and discussed the subject at length, carefully weighing every possible consideration.
A commercial flight in a modern airliner would have been blatant cheating, even more unthinkable than riding in a first-class good-road bus. MacClayne and I were firmly agreed upon that. But Enrique's twin-engined Electra was more like a holy relic from the heroic age of flight. We'd be descending into the Grail city from the sky, and that, we decided, would be almost mystical.
"Maybe this is the way Apatzi would prefer it," said MacClayne. "It doesn't always have to be hardship, bad roads and scorpions."
* * *
A couple of men were loading cargo into the plane when we arrived at the runway in the morning. There was no wind and hardly a cloud in the sky, perfect flying weather.
I wondered if Enrique would provide us with parachutes. He didn't, and I thought it best not to ask for one. It could suggest that I lacked confidence in his flying, or, worse yet, in his beloved Electra.
He started the engines by grabbing the propeller with his hands, giving a yank and stepping back. It looked dangerous, but he'd no doubt done it many times. The engines came to life, and we climbed in. MacClayne sat in a passenger seat and I in the cockpit beside the pilot, with Cuauhtémoc on my lap. We fastened our seat belts, but for the bird there was none. I held him in my arms, and he seemed safe enough; this was a closed cockpit.
We taxied to the end of the runway, turned around and gunned the engines. The entire craft shook so violently that even my teeth vibrated, but we sat there, frozen to our spot on the runway. Suddenly we were moving. The bushes at the end of the runway were rushing at us, faster and faster, then passed under us and were gone, revealing a white-capped ocean below. We climbed for a few minutes and then banked steeply, almost standing on one wing. Below us the megaliths and skerries were grouped in a rough semi-circle to form the breakwater of the anchorage--they looked so different from up here. Then they were behind us, and the green hills of the coastal range swung into view. Soon we were zooming up through a valley and passing between the peaks which rose on the right and left of us. The altimeter read 1,500 meters, then 2,000. I saw pine forests both above and below us.
Slightly beneath us a hawk was soaring. Cuauhtémoc watched it riding the air currents, and, as we shot past it, let out a cluck that I could sense rather than hear over the roar of the engines. No doubt my bird was getting a good deal of satisfaction out of this.
The flight plan was to land first in the mountain village of Aguililla for a delivery, then continue on to Apatzingán. As we approached Aguililla, I saw the parched desert valley beyond it in the distance. Beyond everything stood snow-capped Mount Tancítaro, dominating the Meseta Volcánica. Off to the left were the Needle Peaks, also snow-capped. The Valley of Infiernillo fit Akutagawa's description of the murky Buddhist hell, but in this case in the full blaze of day.
We were still above the coastal range as we descended towards the runway of Aguililla. Soon we touched down on the runway and were skidding to a halt. We were now halfway to Apatzingán, and we'd covered this distance in only half an hour, but having come so far, we felt the need to get out and stretch our legs while the plane was being unloaded.
Nearby was a small outdoor restaurant where we went for a cup of coffee. MacClayne was hoping it'd be locally grown on the slopes of these mountains. I enjoyed the look on his face when the proprietress set the ubiquitous jar of instant on the table, then we both laughed about it.
Cuauhtémoc hopped up onto the edge of the table. There weren't any backrests on the benches for him to perch on.
While we sat there, sipping instant coffee and waiting for the Electra to resume its flight, MacClayne took out his notebook and began scribbling furiously. I assumed it was a poem and, when he looked up with an air of completion, I asked if I could read it.
Dropped from space.
Wafted on silent wings
to where deep voices
mourn, at a burial ground
of lost birds.
Oh, we were young then,
and blazed through the sky
before time and distance
squandered our footpath to the sun.
I was still looking at the poem when Enrique came to tell us the bad news: A change in flight plan. The cargo he was to pick up here for delivery in Apatzingán wasn't ready. So he'd be returning directly to Maruata.
"Can we continue on to Apatzingán by bus?" asked MacClayne.
It turned out we could. A bus would be leaving in an hour, and we'd be in Apatzingán by mid afternoon. It was only about eighty-five kilometers away. But would it be proper?
Again, we were faced with a moral dilemma. We had of course determined that it was permissible, even commendable, to enter a fabled and forbidden city from the air in a vintage aircraft. That would more than justify leaving a huge stretch of the coastal road untraversed. However, if we didn't complete this journey in the Electra, wouldn't we be taking a shortcut?
"Enrique," I said. "Do you have space on your return flight to Maruata?"
"No problem," said Enrique. "You're welcome to come back with me."
"So you want to go back to the coast?" MacClayne said to me.
"Yes."
"To trek through the jungle."
For some moments I hesitated, turning it over in my mind. I suspected that MacClayne was by now tired of this lengthy journey, tired of the jungle and above all tired of the uncertain roads. He'd probably be glad to take the bus from here and just get to Apatzingán. Nevertheless, I said, "Yes, that's what I feel is the right thing to do."
MacClayne gazed out over the airstrip, towards the Electra.
"That airplane has been like our white bird," he said at last. "the one in the Old Country folk tale who takes the traveler safely over the rugged mountains, leading him by a golden thread. And I have a feeling that if we go back to the jungle now, we shall have used up our entire allotment of golden thread for this journey."
"That could be true," I said. "But breaking the golden thread may be part of our quest."
I said that for myself, and not with any hopes of convincing MacClayne. But he replied, "Then let us break the golden thread."
Enrique had taken us here for free, as his guests, but I felt we should make a contribution to the gas. And MacClayne, in spite of his usual frugality, readily agreed with me on that, but Enrique declined our offer. We got back in the plane, and it was still forenoon when we landed in Maruata.
continued in Chapter 35
But something seemed to be missing. Then it came to me--the schooners of the previous afternoon were gone, as well as the sloop that had been anchored near them. Suddenly I recalled with a sense of uneasiness that during the night one of those ships had been about to blow up and sink. Had that been another dream? I paused to think. Such a thing didn't seem at all likely to have happened in reality, and I dismissed it as an invention of my troubled sleep. However, the images of doom and dismay were not easy to banish from my mind.
"Buenos días." It was MacClayne's voice. I glanced up and returned the greeting.
"¿Cómo amaneciste?"
"Bien," I replied. "Muy bien."
"There were a couple of schooners out there yesterday," MacClayne remarked, seeming to tune in on my thoughts.
"I guess they sailed away," I said.
"Apparently."
"Or blew up and sank," I said off-handedly.
MacClayne looked at me strangely. "Why do you say that?" he said. There seemed to be a slight quaver in his voice.
"I was just being facetious," I said. "I didn't mean anything serious."
There was a pained expression on his face that I'd rarely seen before. I wished I hadn't make that last remark, but it was already said. At the same time I wondered again if MacClayne and I might be having parallel dreams. That thought had first occurred to me several days before, but was such a thing even possible?
I kept gazing out over the bay. A tall wave dashed itself on a distant rock, washing it in white foam. My thoughts returned to the drubbing MacClayne had given me the evening before during our fish-cooking discussion, and it annoyed me almost as much now as it had then.
Why couldn't one put a fish on a stick and roast it like a marshmallow? I was sure one could, and MacClayne himself must've done it many a time during his beachcombing days in the Canary Islands.
Right now I didn't even feel like talking to him, and for the first time on our journey I almost wished he weren't with me.
"I'm going off to explore," I said, "I'll be back later."
MacClayne replied that he'd be in the vicinity.
I put on my shorts, and, together with Cuauhtémoc, headed toward the megaliths. The beach was lined with fiberglass launches which were drawn up on the sand, and along the way I stopped to talk with a fisherman who was working on his boat and gear. "How's the fishing?" I said.
"Malo," he replied. "Muy malo." He told me the recent storm had muddied the water and that the mud had driven the fish away. "Just look at the surf," he said. It was tinged red with sediment.
The megaliths were on the other side of the mouth of a river. It was a good twenty meters wide, but people were wading across very near the point where the water discharged into the surf. Apparently that was the shallowest place.
The current was swift, and so thick with sediment that I couldn't see the bottom. Very cautiously I stepped in, and the water swirled around my feet, but it only came up to my ankles. Cuauhtémoc sat on my shoulder, looking down at the opaque flow.
"You okay?" I said to the bird. He seemed curious rather than worried, and I continued on. The water never rose above my shins, and we were soon across.
We'd reached the first megalith, and I was able to examine it closely. The rock was granite, the same igneous material which formed the headland at Faro. A strange sound attracted my attention and led me to a sea cave that had tunneled its way through the megalith. Water rushed back and forth, rising and falling with each incoming wave. It made a deep, hollow chopping noise that echoed out of the cave.
I continued on, visiting the other megaliths and finding more sea caves. Along the way I paused to chip off pieces of the granite and study them with my lens while the bird pecked and scratched at things which attracted his curiosity. I wished I'd brought my rock hammer; without it I didn't feel quite like a geologist.
The granite here, together with that at Faro, seemed to be part of a much larger plutonic body which lay at the core of the coastal range. Millions of years ago this would've been a molten mass deep within the earth's crust, where it slowly cooled and hardened. Much later it was uplifted to where it stood today.
The cause of uplifts such as this had been one of the earth's mysteries until the late 1960s, when the theory of plate tectonics came into being. Before that, very few reputable scientists thought that continents drifted about. Alfred Wegener, who originated the hypothesis back in 1912, was laughed at. Then, almost 40 years after his death, as the result of further discoveries, it became the widely accepted theory. That happened while I was a geology student.
Continental drift, now called plate tectonics, was the unifying concept which tied everything together. The volcanoes around Uruapan, the Valley of Infiernillo, and the coastal range were all parts of a larger piece, called the Caribbean Plate. And about a hundred kilometers off the coast was an oceanic trench into which the Pacific Plate was subducting. The descending plate was passing beneath where I stood, and, as it went under, it forced these megaliths and the rest of the coastal range to rise. This in turn exposed them to the action of the wind and waves which would ultimately erode these rocks to sand.
As I walked and waded along, looking at rocks and sea caves, I came upon a sandbar covered with coconut palms where I found an encampment. Next to a Volkswagen van with a Canadian license plate sat three men chatting. I went up to say hello, and as I approached, I heard a familiar Scottish brogue. The one with his back to me was MacClayne.
Did I really want to see him right now? Our fish-cooking discussion still rankled me, and I was about to back away when one of the men saw me. "Hello there!" he called out.
MacClayne also turned my way, and, seeing me, he greeted me cheerfully, then introduced me to the other two.
"Have a seat," said one, motioning to a folding chair. "Sorry we can't offer you a beer."
"Yeah, we just missed the beer truck," said the other.
"You did? Sounds pretty tragic," I said with a grin. I assumed they were joking.
"It happened just an hour ago. There's a truck that comes around once a week to make deliveries to the village. We were waiting for it, but we didn't see it arrive, and before we could catch it, it was already heading back down the road towards Colima." The fellow paused, then added a bit sheepishly, "I guess we weren't paying attention."
"What do you mean we? You're the one who wasn't paying attention," his companion chided him. "I told you I was going over to the beach for a bit, and you were supposed to be watching out for the truck."
"Well, I'm sorry."
"Yeah, you're sorry. We're both out of beer." He chuckled, indicating that, having properly fixed the blame, he wasn't inclined to pursue the matter further. Turning to me he said, "So you're traveling with MacClayne?"
In the course of the conversation that followed, I learned that the two were from Vancouver, BC, and they'd been stranded for some weeks on this sandbar.
"Did you say stranded?" I asked, and they explained that they'd arrived some weeks before, crossing a dry creek bed with their Volkswagen. Their intention was to stay only a single night. But that was the night the recent storm broke, and the next morning they awoke to find that a raging torrent had turned the sandbar into an island and cut off their exit. They could easily wade across, but not drive out with their vehicle.
Somehow they'd managed to get word to their employer back in Canada and tell him about this unforeseen situation. The boss had assured them their jobs would be waiting.
"I couldn't think of a much nicer place to be marooned," I said.
"We've managed to endure it," said one, with a grin. "Until this morning at least."
"I wonder how people got beer to this village before that road was put in," said the other.
"They probably did without beer."
"You think that's possible?"
There followed a philosophical discussion on the meaninglessness of life without beer and this began a lengthy exchange of drinking stories.
My thoughts wandered and I thought again of the airplane I'd admired the evening before. The Electra. I decided that I'd heard enough drinking stories, and, excusing myself, gathered up my bird and headed towards the landing strip.
I soon came to the creek bed which separated this sandbar from the land. This seemed to be where the raging torrent had trapped them, but it was now hardly more than a trickle. Cuauhtémoc was able to wade across by himself, and I realized just how seriously "marooned" those guys really were.
The outskirts of the village began just beyond the sandbar, and, with Cuauhtémoc strutting along at my side, I strolled up an unpaved dirt street between houses of mud-wattle, until we arrived at the airstrip. The Electra was still there. A fellow was working on it; he had part of the cowling off and was doing something with one of the engines.
"Buenas tardes," I said.
He glanced up, returned my greeting, and I took the opportunity to ask, "Lockheed Electra, ¿no?"
"Sí, lo es," he affirmed proudly.
Thus began our conversation. He introduced himself as Enrique, and, as he worked, he told me about the plane. It was built in the 1930's, long before either of us was born. Enrique was perhaps thirty, with a robust look. He wore a head band to keep his shoulder-length hair in place.
"An old plane like this takes a lot of maintenance," he said, suddenly switching to English.
"You've lived in the US?" I said.
"For half a decade," he said. He'd worked in Los Angeles as an electrical engineer. Flying had been his hobby; then one day he'd come across this Electra sitting at the edge of a runway, taking up space and falling apart. The landing gear on one side had buckled, and an engine was missing, as were many other essentials.
"In this airplane I saw the life I wanted to live," he said. "I acquired it, restored it to flying condition, brought it back to México with me, and, here I am."
He now ran this one-man, one-plane airline which served the remote towns and villages of the coastal range.
Cuauhtémoc, who'd been perched nearby listening to our conversation, chose that moment to flap his wings and crow.
Enrique glanced at the bird and grinned. "Your pet? You don't seem like a guy who'd use him as a fighting cock."
I told him the bird's story, and then about our journey to Apatzingán. Normally I didn't tell people about our fabled and forbidden city, and certainly nothing about our search for the Holy Grail--that would've struck most people as downright loony. But Enrique seemed sophisticated enough that he might enjoy hearing about our fantasies.
"Your search for El Dorado, Cíbola and other legendary places," he smiled.
"That's the way we see it," I said.
He put the cowling back, and I held it in place while he bolted it down. Having completed that, he went on to check the fuel lines, the navigation lights and then the control surfaces of the wings and tail. While I watched and lent a hand as needed, Enrique told me how and where he'd found replacement parts when he restored the airplane. Since it'd been out of production for decades, he'd had to scrounge those pieces from all over the US, Canada and México. Some he'd had to make himself. Each piece had its own story.
"Like a thousand quests for the Holy Grail," I said.
Enrique paused and thought for some moments. "Yes, I'd say that's what it was. I guess we each have our own special vision of the Grail, and the quest to find it. For me, it's been this Electra and the parts I needed to make it fly."
It was late afternoon, though it certainly didn't seem like that much time had gone by, when Enrique stepped back, looked at the Electra, and said, "Airworthy for another flight."
He packed up his tools and I helped carry them to a shed near the edge of the runway. While we were doing this, we heard the sound of a vehicle. I looked over to see MacClayne alighting from a Volkswagen van, which then took off down the road, raising a small cloud of dust as it went.
"Hello there," he said, walking up to where Enrique and I were.
"Hello," I responded. "Those people aren't stranded any more?"
"They're making a beer run," he said. "On their return I'm sure their condition of strandedness will resume."
I introduced him, and Enrique said, "Olaf was telling me about you and your journey to Apatzingán. I'd like to hear more about it. Have you eaten yet? Perhaps the two of you would like to have dinner with me."
We accepted, and after finishing with putting the tools away, we set off towards Enrique's place
"Do you people like fish?" he asked as we walked. "Fishing's been poor since the storm hit, but there's a guy down this street who's pretty lucky. Let's stop by and see if he has any."
It turned out the lucky fisherman had been lucky on this day as well. After acquiring a bucket of fish from him, we continued on to Enrique's which wasn't far away.
He lived in a house of brick and concrete with a corrugated metal roof. It was rather plain from the outside, but, inside, the walls were whitewashed and covered with photos of antique aircraft, both civilian and military. The photos portrayed B-17s, Spitfires, Messerschmitts and Zeros, as well as aircraft from the '20s and '30s. There were a Ford tri-motor, a GB racer, a Vega and a good many others that I didn't recognize.
It was like a photo museum from the pioneering age of flight, but there were other images as well. On a wall that seemed to be specially reserved were posters of the Beetles and other rock bands. Among them was one of Che Guevarra. There were reproductions of Van Gogh and Renoir as well as a traditional Japanese landscape.
Prominently displayed above all, was a Vietnam era anti-war poster featuring a line from a Bob Dylan song: "How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?"
"Soda okay?" said Enrique. "Don't have any beer, doesn't go with my flying."
The sodas he brought out were warm.
I could guess that back in the US he'd probably lived in a fashionable apartment with a swimming pool. Here he didn't even have a refrigerator, but he didn't seem the least regretful about what he'd given up.
MacClayne was admiring the aircraft photos when he paused to study a Heinkel 111. "I think this one might have been built in Spain," he said.
"Yes, it was," Enrique affirmed. "It's a German bomber, but only a few are still in flying condition, and most of those were built in Spain. I see you know your aircraft."
I was also impressed as well as surprised. Till now MacClayne had never shown any interest in historic airplanes. Then I recalled that he'd manned an anti-aircraft gun during the Second World War.
Enrique had set to work, starting a fire in a barbecue pit in the courtyard. Then the three of us worked together to clean the fish. When the fish was ready and the fire burned down to glowing coals, Enrique handed us each a stick and said, "How about if we sit here around the fire and do this like a good old American style weenie roast? In this case, a fish roast."
"That would be splendid," said MacClayne enthusiastically. I said nothing to MacClayne about cooking fish on sticks, but I couldn't help feeling a smug satisfaction.
There was also rice, chile sauce, limes, and, for desert, papayas. As we ate, MacClayne lavished eloquent praise on the meal and the style in which it was done. One of the best fish dinners he'd ever enjoyed, he assured our host.
Enrique's English was nearly as good as our own. He and MacClayne hit it off well. However cranky and obnoxious MacClayne might be towards me at times, it was always the good Dr. Jekyll side of him that came out on occasions like this.
Night had fallen and we were still sitting in the courtyard by the dying coals of the fire, sipping coffee and exchanging memories of places we'd been and things we'd done. Eventually Enrique got up to adjust a lantern. It was a gas lamp that burned brightly, giving off as much light as a good-sized electric bulb. The sound of breakers could be heard faintly from the not-too-distant shore.
"Tomorrow I'll be making a hop to Apatzingán," Enrique said. "I'll have extra space, and you're welcome to come along."
I looked at MacClayne, and MacClayne looked at me. I wished for a ride in the Electra almost as much as I wanted to finish our journey in the proper way.
"You don't have to decide now," Enrique said. "I'll be taking off at about eight in the morning."
He invited us to spend the night at his place, but we returned to our campsite on the beach. Somehow, we felt the need to sit out there under the stars as we resolved this moral dilemma that now confronted us.
We gathered driftwood, built our fire, and discussed the subject at length, carefully weighing every possible consideration.
A commercial flight in a modern airliner would have been blatant cheating, even more unthinkable than riding in a first-class good-road bus. MacClayne and I were firmly agreed upon that. But Enrique's twin-engined Electra was more like a holy relic from the heroic age of flight. We'd be descending into the Grail city from the sky, and that, we decided, would be almost mystical.
"Maybe this is the way Apatzi would prefer it," said MacClayne. "It doesn't always have to be hardship, bad roads and scorpions."
* * *
A couple of men were loading cargo into the plane when we arrived at the runway in the morning. There was no wind and hardly a cloud in the sky, perfect flying weather.
I wondered if Enrique would provide us with parachutes. He didn't, and I thought it best not to ask for one. It could suggest that I lacked confidence in his flying, or, worse yet, in his beloved Electra.
He started the engines by grabbing the propeller with his hands, giving a yank and stepping back. It looked dangerous, but he'd no doubt done it many times. The engines came to life, and we climbed in. MacClayne sat in a passenger seat and I in the cockpit beside the pilot, with Cuauhtémoc on my lap. We fastened our seat belts, but for the bird there was none. I held him in my arms, and he seemed safe enough; this was a closed cockpit.
We taxied to the end of the runway, turned around and gunned the engines. The entire craft shook so violently that even my teeth vibrated, but we sat there, frozen to our spot on the runway. Suddenly we were moving. The bushes at the end of the runway were rushing at us, faster and faster, then passed under us and were gone, revealing a white-capped ocean below. We climbed for a few minutes and then banked steeply, almost standing on one wing. Below us the megaliths and skerries were grouped in a rough semi-circle to form the breakwater of the anchorage--they looked so different from up here. Then they were behind us, and the green hills of the coastal range swung into view. Soon we were zooming up through a valley and passing between the peaks which rose on the right and left of us. The altimeter read 1,500 meters, then 2,000. I saw pine forests both above and below us.
Slightly beneath us a hawk was soaring. Cuauhtémoc watched it riding the air currents, and, as we shot past it, let out a cluck that I could sense rather than hear over the roar of the engines. No doubt my bird was getting a good deal of satisfaction out of this.
The flight plan was to land first in the mountain village of Aguililla for a delivery, then continue on to Apatzingán. As we approached Aguililla, I saw the parched desert valley beyond it in the distance. Beyond everything stood snow-capped Mount Tancítaro, dominating the Meseta Volcánica. Off to the left were the Needle Peaks, also snow-capped. The Valley of Infiernillo fit Akutagawa's description of the murky Buddhist hell, but in this case in the full blaze of day.
We were still above the coastal range as we descended towards the runway of Aguililla. Soon we touched down on the runway and were skidding to a halt. We were now halfway to Apatzingán, and we'd covered this distance in only half an hour, but having come so far, we felt the need to get out and stretch our legs while the plane was being unloaded.
Nearby was a small outdoor restaurant where we went for a cup of coffee. MacClayne was hoping it'd be locally grown on the slopes of these mountains. I enjoyed the look on his face when the proprietress set the ubiquitous jar of instant on the table, then we both laughed about it.
Cuauhtémoc hopped up onto the edge of the table. There weren't any backrests on the benches for him to perch on.
While we sat there, sipping instant coffee and waiting for the Electra to resume its flight, MacClayne took out his notebook and began scribbling furiously. I assumed it was a poem and, when he looked up with an air of completion, I asked if I could read it.
Dropped from space.
Wafted on silent wings
to where deep voices
mourn, at a burial ground
of lost birds.
Oh, we were young then,
and blazed through the sky
before time and distance
squandered our footpath to the sun.
I was still looking at the poem when Enrique came to tell us the bad news: A change in flight plan. The cargo he was to pick up here for delivery in Apatzingán wasn't ready. So he'd be returning directly to Maruata.
"Can we continue on to Apatzingán by bus?" asked MacClayne.
It turned out we could. A bus would be leaving in an hour, and we'd be in Apatzingán by mid afternoon. It was only about eighty-five kilometers away. But would it be proper?
Again, we were faced with a moral dilemma. We had of course determined that it was permissible, even commendable, to enter a fabled and forbidden city from the air in a vintage aircraft. That would more than justify leaving a huge stretch of the coastal road untraversed. However, if we didn't complete this journey in the Electra, wouldn't we be taking a shortcut?
"Enrique," I said. "Do you have space on your return flight to Maruata?"
"No problem," said Enrique. "You're welcome to come back with me."
"So you want to go back to the coast?" MacClayne said to me.
"Yes."
"To trek through the jungle."
For some moments I hesitated, turning it over in my mind. I suspected that MacClayne was by now tired of this lengthy journey, tired of the jungle and above all tired of the uncertain roads. He'd probably be glad to take the bus from here and just get to Apatzingán. Nevertheless, I said, "Yes, that's what I feel is the right thing to do."
MacClayne gazed out over the airstrip, towards the Electra.
"That airplane has been like our white bird," he said at last. "the one in the Old Country folk tale who takes the traveler safely over the rugged mountains, leading him by a golden thread. And I have a feeling that if we go back to the jungle now, we shall have used up our entire allotment of golden thread for this journey."
"That could be true," I said. "But breaking the golden thread may be part of our quest."
I said that for myself, and not with any hopes of convincing MacClayne. But he replied, "Then let us break the golden thread."
Enrique had taken us here for free, as his guests, but I felt we should make a contribution to the gas. And MacClayne, in spite of his usual frugality, readily agreed with me on that, but Enrique declined our offer. We got back in the plane, and it was still forenoon when we landed in Maruata.
continued in Chapter 35
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