By Chris LaRoche

It’s late November in Montana. Days before Halloween, my long-distance girlfriend dumped me in broken but adequate English over a crackling phone line from Germany. For a month I moped about like a sad puppy, crying in my coffee and failing exams in morpho-phonology. Finally, I decided it was time to get over it, and the best way to do so would be by launching into brazen adventures in exotic lands. More importantly, these adventures would instill my now ex with vehement jealousy, jealousy that would be sweetened by the fact that she’d never, ever know as we would never speak to each other ever again.

I am sitting outside a café with my mousy, platonic friend Sarah. It was her shoulder I had soaked with tears, her couch I had repeatedly passed out on, her cuter, younger sister with whom I desperately flirted. We are looking over the polluted skies of Missoula. Christmas was coming and after that a month-long break from school. January was going to be miserable. Sarah expresses a fantasy involving a tropical beach.

“Let’s go to Baja,” I say.

She takes one long breath, looks across the deadened campus, and agrees. Plans are made on the spot: we would ask my friend Nate to join us, along with Roman the German exchange student. We don’t know him very well, but he is an amiable, handsome guy and more importantly has just bought a 1974 Volkswagen camper van. Sarah also has a mild crush on him. To this day, I’ve never admitted to Roman that we asked him along merely because he had a VW, not because he’s a nice guy. He is a nice guy, a friend still, but I didn’t know that at the time and really didn’t care about him, just his van.

As the only one who’s been to Mexico before, my main task became to assure the parents of my friends that we’d be safe. Before my first trip, I was warned repeatedly from “friends” and strangers alike about the gamut of Mexican stereotypes: watch my back, stay away from the cops, and carry a knife because “if they see a gringo, they won’t hesitate to jump you!” My experiences were the complete opposite and filled with friendly, honest people. It was painfully obvious that I was treated in Mexico far differently than the way Mexicans are treated in the US. No one spit on me or cursed me for my origins. This, combined with the obvious racism of my countrymen, filled me with shame. “Don’t listen to your parents,” I tell Sarah and Nate, “we won’t have any problems.”

We leave at three in the afternoon on the day after Christmas in Roman’s 1974 Volkswagen camper van. It’s the type of van that you’d expect four college kids would drive to Mexico, complete with a rust-eaten hole in the floor in the back and a jerry-rigged ignition system involving a button, a switch and a symbolic key. It has its quirks, but Roman has had it for nearly a month without any serious problems.

Our departure occurs with a haunting omen: as we pull out of town, Roman inserts the faceplate for the stereo and enters the security code. The stereo replies blankly. “Scheisse!” he curses, “I entered the wrong code!” He tries again, and again no response. “It lets you try three times, if you get it wrong, it shuts off for three days,” he says as he makes his third mistake. We are to make the entire first leg of the journey in silence.

From there, it’s downhill: I timed the departure to cross Donner Pass, seventeen hours away on the California-Nevada border, during daylight, forgetting that the Monida Pass on the Montana-Idaho border is higher, steeper, colder, and more ice-covered, especially at midnight, when we reach it. The pass is void of traffic, as are all Montana roads, especially at midnight, especially during a blizzard snowstorm on a steep and curvy mountain pass road in the dead of winter on the day after Christmas. In the middle of the pass, I discover the key rolling around on the floor. I grope for it with one hand while navigating the pass –six thousand feet, snow-packed roads, five degrees above freezing, fierce wind– with the other, find the key and put it back in place. We clear the pass and empty into the potato fields of Idaho where the highway floods with traffic crawling through white-out conditions. I try to pass an RV, and in the middle of doing so the wheel locks. I panic while the bus slowly drifts over to the side of the road towards the ditch, but drifting very slowly. I stop it on the shoulder, take the key out of the ignition, flip it over, and put it back in snuggly with a click.

“What happened?” Sarah asks from the back.

“Oh, um, nothing. Just the key was in the ignition backwards, that’s all. And the wheel locked, and pulled us over into the shoulder.”

Before dawn, we find ourselves in southern Idaho skating across black ice –Sarah flatly illustrating the condition with wild swings of the steering wheel, which had no effect on the bus. A few hours later in northern Nevada, the bus suffers a bout of violent coughing and struggles to stay alive. I plead with Roman, “Don’t let it die! Don’t let it die!” Tears swell in his eyes as the van farts its last gasp, crawls to the side of the road and dies. In the middle of the most isolated stretch of road in the continental US at three o’clock in the morning in the dead of winter, a platoon of Marines on route to Vegas saves us from certain death with a bottle of carburetor fluid.

The domestic leg of the journey concludes with New Year’s Eve in San Francisco, when I whisper in Sarah’s ear an off-hand comment regarding her crush on Roman. She stomps her feet, holds her breath, and storms off. Soon, after the lost rings and abandoned children, after we buy a new stereo and return to winter to be housemates for a semester, we will never speak to each other again.

We rise at dawn on one of those orange and gold Southern California beaches featured in muscle mags and bikini calendars, speed across the border and arrive an hour later in Ensenada. We are ordering fish tacos when two young boys offer to wash our windows.

“How much?” asks Nate. Like the boys, he is devoid of shoes and wears a rag of a t-shirt.

“One dolla,” replies the taller boy.

“One dollar for the two of you?” says Nate.

The two boys’ eyes widened at the prospect of jilting the tourist out of a whole dollar. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” They punctuate each yelp with a bounce.

“No, that’s not fair!” Counters Nate. “How ’bout I give you a dollar each?”

The two boys twitch with excitement: this tourist is far more gullible than any they have ever encountered. The rest of us note the karma Nate is accruing.

Exiting Ensenada, the road worsens considerably, turning into a shoulder-less half lane riddled with potholes. At the fifty-kilometer mark, we pass our first military checkpoint manned by our fatigue-clad Mexican peers wielding oversized rifles.

“Do you have any guns?” asks one.

“No,” we politely answer.

“Do you have any drugs?” he asks again.

“No.” I reply. Nate and Sarah and I have never even ever smoked pot. Roman, the upstanding yet hip, brainiac working on his Master’s Degree, is the epitome of the responsible German. The soldier glances curiously into the van, noting Sarah sitting rigidly in the back, and winks.

On the map, San Quentin is a town, the last of the three beads on a highway after Tijuana and Ensenada. According to the travel book, there are beachside campsites in San Quentin. It’s an easy day’s drive and our destination for the day. In reality, San Quentin is a lose collection of hamlets lining the single road of Mexico’s last frontier. Like a Wild West town, there are no cross-streets, stoplights, or intersections, just a road lined with buildings; a very bad, narrow road line with very disparaging looking concrete buildings.

We enter the conglomeration just as the sun starts to set, casting a nasty glare on our poorly cleaned windshield and accentuating all the pockmarks, imperfections, and especially the unprofessionalism of our preteen window washers. I start to swear and my blood pressure quickly rises. “Where’s the campsite?” I ask.

“Just at the end of town, we’re almost there,” Sarah replies.

But the town doesn’t end, just continues –a schitzophrenic gauntlet of badly lit potholes, sheer darkness, and people dodging traffic. Finally, I pull over to ask for directions and surprisingly find another gringo who looks just like us.

“Where’s the campsite?” We ask him eagerly.

“About a mile further, at the end of town,” he replies.

The words ring like a tipping point in our adventures that signal the worst is over and soon we’d be sitting on a beach, waves crashing at our feet, feasting on barbequed iguana and obliviously swallowing Tequila-drunken worms.

Minutes down the road, the town ends. There, just as prophesized, looms a large sign in English:

CAMPING RV STORE ESPRESSO –> ONE MILE

We turn onto a gravel path cutting through utter darkness and visualize toasting hand-made tortillas on an open fire.

Less than one hundred feet down this road stands a man dressed in dirty white. At his feet is a collection of large white sacks. They look like they are filled with potatoes. The man has picked one up and is dragging it to a similar sized collection the other side of the road, doing so with an exaggerated limp. The good-natured Montanan in me –where one regularly sees motorists stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, sometimes even wielding large guns– slows down to a stop.

In the back, someone whispers, “Don’t stop!”

I don’t know why I stop, as I was planning to tell him, “Sorry, we can’t help you” and was trying to figure out how to say it in Spanish: “Lo siento… no… um, podomos ayudar tu.”

The man comes to the window.

“Lo siento,” I said, “No… um, podomos ayudar…”

“Stop the car,” he commands in a low whisper. We are collectively surprised.

“Huh?” We ask in unison.

“Stop the car,” he repeats, this time as a demand. “Now.”

It is then his friend appears from the other side of the road, wielding a gun and pointing it at us, collectively.

“Shit.” Someone utters.

“Get out of the car,” says the first man, the Talker.

There is a groan as Sarah and Nate open the side door and step out into the dirt. Roman gets out the passenger door and joins them next to the Talker. I exit the driver’s side, and walk towards the back of the van, the opposite corner to where the bandits and their hostages are standing. In this lonely space, under a moonless sky, rumbled by a low farting of the idling vehicle, I realize that if I were a true Montanan, I would’ve been able to confirm my suspicion –even at a quick glance at a difficult angle in bad lighting– that the gun the man wields shoots merely BBs. I also realize that I’m well out of sight of the bandits, far away on the other side of the high Volkswagen van. To my right run endless fields into pitch-black skies. It is then I conclude these are not professional armed banditos, or even practiced ones, as even I, a naïve college kid, know that when you are jacking a car, you don’t let the victims out of your site. If I were a true Montana, I would’ve had a handgun hidden in the back bumper, and I would be a good shot.

The van sits, farting plumes of poorly combusted fuel, and I remember that if I had turned the damn thing off, its complicated ignition system would’ve thwarted their getaway.

I turn around from the back of the van to find Sarah, Nate and Roman frozen, their hands limply raised in the air. A few feet away stands the Talker, his brow wrinkled, his left hand obviously hidden in his coat pocket. Behind him on the edge of the road, as far away from the action as possible, stands the Pointer pointing his BB gun. At the end of the barrel he’s fastened a shoestring, the other end tied to the stock.

All heads turn to me.

“Gib us your wallets”, demands the Talker. It is the only evidence of an accent. The Pointer shakes the gun, for emphasis or lack of control isn’t clear. He holds the gun at arm’s length away from his body, as if he is dancing with his homely mother-in-law, and alternately wields it towards Nate and Sarah, Roman, and myself. His eyes are wild and expanded and if you look closely, you can see his knees slightly knocking. I have the impression that he is far more afraid than any of us.

The Talker looks at Sarah and rustles the hidden hand in his jacket. He wants us to wonder what he is hiding there, and hope we fear he has another weapon. I suspect he is bluffing, or at most exaggerating the lethality of a sharpened butter knife.

“Gib us your rings,” he barks at Sarah. She pouts as she took the thin sliver rings off her hands and drops them into his.

The Talker looks us over –four dirty college kids in shorts and t-shirts driving a twenty-year-old Volkwagen van. His disappointment is obvious; we are a poor catch. With nothing else to plunder from us, they turn to the van.

“You find your car at the end of the road. In one hour,” the Talker commands. “Don’t tell nobody!”

He walks around to the driver side; the Pointer waves his rifle in a manner that tells us to back off and stumbles into the passenger door. After fumbling with the clutch, the wheels begin to slowly turn and the van crawls into the distance. We stand helpless as we watch the taillights slowly dim away to utter darkness, straining our ears to catch the very last fart until we were sure we can’t hear it any more, which isn’t very long. We speculate that the van is driven literally just out of sight, but none of us want to go and confirm this. We look at each other in amazement. Sarah’s jaw has been dropped since losing her rings. Nate points out that he isn’t even wearing shoes.

It’s a short walk back to the highway. Traffic is sparse. As we stand there, still stunned from the idiocy of stopping on a dark road to help a stranger, the ineptitude of the banditos, and the probability that the car is just two hundred yards away, an old beaten Toyota two-door chugs out from the dark road. The windows are tinted, save the rear passenger one, which is sealed with a white plastic bag. Without slowing from its crawl, it turns onto the highway and disappears.

We stop the next car that passes, a beaten-up black and blue Camarro with tinted windows. I don’t know how we get them to stop and judging from the bewildered look on the faces of the two young men inside, they don’t know why they stopped either. We try forming “take us to the police station” as a polite request, but before they answer we’ve crammed ourselves into the backseat.

“Policia??” asks the driver.

“Si,” I reply, “policia.”

The look he gives his companion indicates that they’ve never in their lives willingly gone to the police station.

Being a one-road town, the police station is a few miles from where we’d been carjacked. Our driver drops us off at the front and hastily disappears. The doors are shuttered, the lights off, all that is missing is a large “CERRADO” sign.

“Shit,” says Roman. “It’s closed.”

A path on the side of the building leads to the back. We follow it and find two officers chatting in the warm Baja air. Being the one who speaks Spanish, and the one who stopped for the bandits to jack us, I approach them.

“Um, habla ingles?” I ask.

“No, no hablo ingles,” replies one officer in slow Spanish, as if speaking to a kindergarten class. He turns to the other. “Y tu? Hablas ingles?”

“Yo? No…” Says the second, shaking his head.

“Porque?” Asks the first, turning back to me, wondering why.

I start to summarize the situation: “Estamos robado (hands in the air) por dos banditos (sombero motion around the head) con una arma (the universal finger gun symbol).”

“Wait, what happened?” Interjects the first officer in fluent English.

What happens next is more dizzying than the events in the darkened fields with the bumbling thieves. The English-speaking sergeant rushes inside, rapidly translating details of the incident. Instantly, what appeared to be a deserted police station erupts with energy: The receptionist behind the counter broadcasts the announcement across the intercom and radio frequencies. Police bolt down from a stairwell and spring up from the cellar. They burst out of closets, sprout from the ground and crash through windows, dozens of them, maybe even hundreds. They open drawers, cupboards, and hidden storage panels, pull out their armory and don bullet-proof vests. A nondescript cabinet above the receptionist is unlocked and opened, revealing a stash of a M-16s. The rifles are pulled one by one from the cabinets and handed to an awaiting officer, who loads it with a clip and cocks it ready. Extra ammunition is loaded individually into bandoliers and flung over shoulders in a tribute to Poncho Villa and Benito Juarez, though Nate disputes this detail to this day. Orders are yelled. Uniforms move frantically. An armored personal carrier with “Federales” ominously stenciled along the side pulls up. It’s a small town on a Friday night; there is a distinct feeling that they are extremely excited to hear that a group of gringos had been held up at gunpoint. We had made their night.

The whirlwind activity makes us uneasy: though we were distressed for being robbed in the middle of the desert, we find the display of weaponry and eagerness to use it a bit extensive and fear for the lives of our assailants. From our arrival at the back gates to the departure of the armored assault vehicles spanned little more than three minutes. In that time we are transformed from piteous victims of petty crime to energized advocates for criminal justice reform, one that prohibits summary punishments.

As quickly as the eruption began, it ends. Every available officer has left on the manhunt, leaving the four of us alone in the station with the immobile dispatch clerk behind the counter. Exasperated, we collect our breath and sit down on a bench. There across from us at ground level are three tiny children equally dazed and silent. Two boys and a girl, none older than five, are all decked out in elaborate yet tiny embroidered formal wear: the girl in white sequined dress, the two boys in gray and brown suits, with equally tiny shorts, knee-high stockings and dress shoes. They are completely covered in drying mud. They look like the guests to a wedding gone wrong. The trauma of being held-up by bandits on a deserted road in the middle of Mexico that had been replaced by the shock of the trigger-happy police battalion has now been replaced by the sight of three tiny forgotten children staring up from dried mud with huge eyes, like those of tiny birds who are coming to realize that mama bird will never to return with food and aren’t sure what to do next.

We plop ourselves down on the bench across from them and watch in a saddened awe. They mind their business and preoccupy themselves as tiny children abandoned at the police station do, oblivious us. Overhead, the police radio cackles.

In minutes, the armored caravan radios in a report. Our van is found, intact, unsinged, unexploded. They call for a tow truck. Within a half hour, our beloved hippy van is hauled back to the station like a wounded soldier.

“Not yet!” warns the police captain as we reach out to embrace her, “We need to dust for fingerprints. We’re going to take it to the district headquarters up the street.”

The station isn’t far away, and the police chief there is humble, walks with a limp and has a wandering eye. He’s sympathetic to our story and speaks careful English. His demeanor suggests that he feels more akin to us sophisticated foreigners than his backwards countrymen of frontier Baja.

“It’s too late to dust for fingerprints now,” he explains. “Your car is safe here. Go across the street, stay in the hotel, come back in the morning. We’ll dust and then you can leave.” We point out to the chief that we’d like to get some clothes from the bus. He understands and tells us to enter through the back hatch, not the front doors that hold the fingerprints. We open the hatch and I designate myself as the retriever. The scene is simple, it’s obvious the crime was quick and our criminals sloppy. The stereo -which never worked- was rudely ripped from its socket, but otherwise the van is untouched. Between the front seats lay my moneybelt, complete with passport, credit cards, and traveler’s checks. Roman’s backpack sat in the back, a collection of cameras and lenses poking from the top. Nothing else was taken from the van. I grab my money belt, plus a pair of underwear and toothbrush from my bag. Sarah takes her backpack. Nate recovers his wallet hidden between cushions in the back and his shoes. Roman takes a small backpack. We leave the rest in the locked compound of the district police headquarters in San Quentin, Baja California Norte.

The manner in which we trudge across the street and into the hotel and with which we sleep and awake resembles the mannerisms of zombies. But not cool, happy zombies fresh from the dead and ready to eat some brains, but poor, shocked and depressed zombies who’ve just been held up at gunpoint on a deserted road in Mexico.

We don’t sleep well and wake up feeling much like we did when we went to sleep. We trudge back to the station and are reminded that in Mexico, there’s no such thing as “hurry”.

We wait.

We wait hours. We wait hours outside a police station in a wild west outpost town in the middle of the desert. We pace. The inside of the station is decorated with guns. A photo on the wall features every member of the force at a scenic vista, each menacingly wielding a large M-16. After several hours the English-speaking police chief approaches us with a look of reserved relief.

“It’s ready. You can go,” he announces.

We’re overjoyed. We race to the compound to our awaiting beloved van, blue powder of fingerprint dust dusting its nose. We open the doors and jump inside, but freeze mid-flight. Something halts us like an invisible wall. We look around.

“The speakers in the back are gone,” declares Sarah.

“Hey, what happened to my camera?” asks Roman.

Nate summarizes: “We were robbed again.”

Our bags had been ruffled through, the contents strewn on the floor; the speakers in the back were missing, as were the extra cartons of oil and a pair of Levis. We reverse our jump out of the van and turn to the chief.

“Um,” I say, not really sure how to accuse him that we were robbed again while park at his trusted police station, “We were robbed again last night.”

The police chief takes a deep sigh and looks at the ground. He murmurs, “One moment,” and walks back inside.

A moment later he returns with the Big Boss, a blond Viking of a Mexican with gold-rimmed glassed and a walrus mustache. We tell the Big Boss that we were robbed. He turns to the Chief, who translates. The Big Boss takes a deep breath of air and looks off into the distance. He probably swore under his breath, but inaudibly so. He turns and storms back to the office. The Chief looks at us. “One moment,” he says, and follows the Big Boss. We stand and wait. There’s some commotion. Finally, the Chief calls us into his office. “We know what happened,” he whispers, “but we need time. Can you come back tomorrow?”

We leave town, pass the doomed road of the fateful event, a half-mile further to another dirt path highlighted with a bright sign announcing:

CAMPING RV STORE ESPRESSO –> ONE MILE

We park our van on the beach, at far end of a train of American and Canadian RVs. Roman produces a small pack of marijuana. “I hid this in the van,” he reveals. “I thought I should smoke this now incase anything else happens.” He promptly befriends two teenage Canadian girls to share his joint. The next day, Roman and I return to the police station, where the Chief announces that the night watchman and his brother had stolen our stuff, and produces the missing speakers, camera and lenses. Nate and Sarah spend the day frolicking on the beach, swimming with dolphins. That evening, we rummage through the van to take a complete inventory of our losses. Roman lost two hundred dollars. I lost forty dollars in traveler’s checks and a camera. Sarah lost twenty dollars and antique rings from her dying grandmother, as well as her address book and contact lenses. Shoeless Nate, the gullible tourist, didn’t lose anything. In the glove compartment I find a can of grizzly-strength pepper-spray, which my uncle gave me to ward off assailants, buried and neglected under soiled fish taco wrappers.

The next day we proceed to the rest of Baja: never-ending salt flats, seas full of mating gray whales, forests of cacti, tarantulas and jackrabbits. We skinny-dip in a phosphorous algae bloom at midnight, resuscitate leatherbacks at sea turtles rescue facility, and tramp through an abandoned town devastated by dust storms. Our last night is celebrated with a bottle of tequila, and I witness a brilliant orange sun rising over desert mountain peaks reflected in mirrored waters that gently lap my forearms as I double over and dry heave into the Sea of Cortez.

“My,” I muster between painful gut knots, “what a beautiful sunrise”.

The return home is uneventful, save an explosion of white smoke from an electrical fire in the steering column ten miles from the border.

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Chris LaRoche’s experience as a professional writer started over six years ago as a freelance journalist for the Seattle weekly newspaper, Real Change. He is a contributing editor for the Not For Tourists Guide to Seattle and was recently published in Cautionary Tale and the December issue of Noö Journal. He lives in Seattle and call himself a public school teacher.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Bad Trip, Great Stories, Second Annual Solas Awards Winners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.