Cali drove, and his mother Isabel rode shotgun, stiff-backed and silent - maybe because her son’s CD of thumping, electronic Latin dance music was vibrating the compact car around her.

“This music doesn’t bother your mother?” I asked Mireya, who sat with me in back.

“No, my mom doesn’t mind at all.”

“It would drive mine up the wall,” I said. I didn’t mention that it was doing that to me. It was nice of Cali to drive, and I thought it would seem ungrateful to complain. I tried to tune out the music.

The Chihuahua desert was as stark as I’ve described it in the novel I’m writing.

Studying the scenery didn’t help. The Chihuahua desert was as stark as I’ve described it in the novel I’m writing: creosote, sand, mesquite, sand, yucca, and sand… miles of prickly drab, topped by cirrostratus-whipped sky. The distant hills struggled to look mountainous, as if the desert wanted to rise to more than it was: a place not to get caught on foot without water.

I’m sending my fictional Lopez family across this forbidding terrain as they flee the Mexican Revolution. The repetitive landscape might tempt anyone to revolution, even if it would change nothing. Death might seem change enough.

I had feared meeting robbers on the highway.

I had feared meeting robbers on the highway. But they would die of boredom waiting for an American like me to come along with payoff-money in her backpack. Even Mexicans were scarce on that lonely road.

We stopped at a short lineup of faded businesses – the only notable crossroads between Juarez and Ascensión – to eat at an unremarkable café. During the previous day’s long drive to her daughter Teresa’s house, Isabel had sighed, “I’m bored.” So now, as we unfolded from the car, I asked her, “Are you bored?”

“Yes.” She laughed.

Inside, we ordered burritos. Mine tasted too salty.

“How is it?” Cali asked.

“Pretty good,” I lied.

He looked skeptical. “It’s a little too salty,” he said.

The frankness of Cali and his mother made me wonder whether all these years that I’ve thought of my Mexican grandmother as a complainer, I might have been misinterpreting a culture gap. Dare I suggest that the desert might breed a culture of complaint?

After lunch, we drove to the nearby military checkpoint, where half a dozen young men in khakis manned a small shack. Such checkpoints have been around since long before Mexico’s drug war. I wondered if there were soldiers posted at this very spot during the Revolution, which had officially started the next day 101 years ago. A soldado asked Cali to open the trunk, but didn’t look inside our bags. Maybe a baby-faced driver, rocky-faced grandmother, and two petite middle-aged women signaled little threat. I imagined a dangerous but lucrative life as an angel-faced arms smuggler.

We passed fields of twiggy bushes dotted with sloppy tufts of cotton.

A couple of hours later, we passed fields of twiggy bushes dotted with sloppy tufts of cotton. A truck passed, cotton bolls pressed against its wood slats, trying to escape. We’d reached Ascensión, the farming town I’ve adopted for a scene in my novel where one character gets beaten and nearly shot. The real Ascensión grabbed my attention in 2010, when hundreds of village vigilantes attacked and killed two teens suspected in a rash of kidnappings. But when we arrived, the town looked too drowsy to kill anyone.

The real Ascensión looked too drowsy to kill anyone.

In the plaza, whitewashed trees rose from just enough trampled grass to keep the dirt from flying away. Men leaned over shoeshine kits and candied apples. Aging cowboys tended to Saturday’s hard work of sitting silent or muttering. A barber in an apron leaned against his shop, waiting for customers or nothing. The silence traveled out to the fields and across the desert, where there was no one to hear it.

The labyrinth of adobe ruins gave the nearby city its name: Casas Grandes, or “Big Houses.”

Another hour of driving took us through the city of Casas Grandes, and onward to the labyrinth of adobe ruins for which the city was named: Casas Grandes means “Great Houses.” Its Indian name is Paquimé, a settlement that thrived from about the tenth century to the fourteenth century. It was one of several large communities built by Anasazi-type people, the “Ancient Ones” usually associated with the American Southwest.

Paquimé may once have formed part of a symbolic circuit. I’ve been to Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, and Chaco Culture, the major Anasazi ruins of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico: North, West, and East. Paquimé lies to the South. On maps, the four ruins form a cross, perhaps marking the four directions so important to ancient farmers. I felt as if I were completing the last leg of a quest.

Paquimé’s ruins looked melted instead of toppled.

The main difference at this fourth site was that the buildings were made with poured adobe, while those at the other sites were made of stacked rock. So Paquimé’s ruins looked melted instead of toppled. It’s apartment complexes undulated in waves of pale, rose-tinted clay flowing against the warm blue afternoon. They rose higher in the center than at the edges. This earth goddess was returning home: head high, shoulders defeated, hands crawling back into her mother.

“They probably were tiny.” Mireya didn’t laugh - maybe because she’s four-foot-eleven.

Some of the rooms had eroded down to just three feet high. “I picture teeny tiny people living here,” I joked.

“They probably were tiny.” Mireya didn’t laugh – maybe because she’s four-foot-eleven.

In the burial chamber, dividers delineated even smaller compartments where bodies were bundled into fetal positions for their return to the earth.

In the burial chamber, bodies were bundled into fetal positions for their return to the earth.

The Paquimé people might have descended from nomadic tribes who originally traveled across the Bering Sea Land Bridge from Asia during the last ice age. Yet they weren’t nomads themselves, but farmers who lived off the same land for generations. Their ghost town was quieter than Ascensión. Still, I imagined a bustling community: children playing, women hauling water, men working the fields, elders and priests arguing about politics and religion, athletes playing ancient soccer on the rectangular field — a symbolic game of life versus death.

We couldn’t see the river, just its strip of cottonwoods and other trees turning gold-green with the slow turning of desert seasons.

The ruins stood near the Rio Casas Grandes, the river my fictional family follows on their journey. As they prepare to cross the water, they see soldiers at Paquimé. We couldn’t see the river, just its strip of cottonwoods and other trees turning gold-green with the slow turning of desert seasons.

Isabel sat on the Mound of Heroes, where revolutionary forces buried their dead after the Battle of Casas Grandes in 1911.

The Revolution left its mark at Paquimé, on a pile of earth called the Mound of the Heroes. That’s where revolutionary forces buried their dead after the Battle of Casas Grandes in 1911. Isabel sat on the steps to rest, even though it wasn’t allowed. When I saw her coppery Indian face atop the mound, I felt that maybe she was a descendant and had a right to be there.

The dead were still there, lying beneath her, their complaints silenced long ago.

I woke to the safe sounds of a gas burner igniting, a pan shifting, an egg sizzling. It was only then that a rooster started crowing somewhere in Colonia del Carmen. Perhaps he sets his clock by Isabel. I lingered in bed, until I heard Isabel and her daughter Mireya muttering in Spanish and figured it must be time to come out of hiding. I had no clear idea of the hour. My cell phone is my usual watch and I hadn’t brought it, unwilling to pay roaming charges in Mexico, or risk having it stolen on the desperate streets of Juárez.

Every day Isabel washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Noeh’s hairdressing shop.

When I emerged it was 7:30, and Isabel was hanging laundry in the chilly morning shadows of the courtyard. Every day she washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Noeh’s hairdressing shop. She then made us a delicious herbal tea from canela (cinnamon) and flor de azahar (orange blossom).

“Good for calming the nerves,” she said, “para la tranquilidad.”

“I need that,” I teased. “I have an energetic personality.”

She smiled and offered her sincere hope that her tea would help.

(more…)

As Mireya and Cali had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After Cali drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into Isabel’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked gate to pull into the courtyard. The gate had been there before Mexico’s drug war. Juárez has long known big-city, border-town dangers.

The inside looked bigger than the outside suggested. In the new addition, an old-fashioned wood stove warmed and cheered the room.

The house wasn’t small, though it might seem poor by American standards: a graying, peeling sprawl of cinderblock, brick, and adobe. “It’s too bad they can’t fix up the outside, isn’t it?” Mireya said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

(more…)

This Thursday, I’m traveling to a place that should have yellow caution tape around it. According to the news, according to family and friends, according to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez. When I told my grandfather I was going to Mexico to do research for my historical novel, he shouted a bit, then insisted, “OK, next subject.” But hey, sometimes Grampa shouts when he and Dad are deciding where to grab breakfast on Sunday, so I didn’t take it personally.

According to the U.S. State Department, if I’m looking for danger: non-essential travel to Chihuahua, Mexico is the way to go, especially Ciudad Juárez.

I’ll only be in Juárez for a day and a half of my five-day round-trip from El Paso to Casas Grandes. Don’t tell my husband, but I’m more scared about the twelve hours I’ll be on a Mexican highway. I plan to hide a couple hundred bucks in my shoe, in case I need to pay off highway robbers. Remember when our parents used to say, “That’s highway robbery!” and we thought it was just an expression?

(more…)

I believe one way to turn travel into a more fulfilling adventure is to embark on a mission. I met Coloradan Lynette Collins at a book event, where she read an inspiring email she’d written about her recent mission to Honduras. She and her dentist husband had joined the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club of North Carolina for a medical/dental mission. Lynette kindly agreed to let me share her email here. The written content is unaltered, with the exception of a few words of clarification:

One way to turn travel into a more fulfilling adventure is to embark on a mission. A medical/dental mission to Honduras is just one of many possibilities.

LYNETTE’S EMAIL

Hi everyone!

I wanted to let you know that we returned early this morning and we are well… no malaria yet like George Clooney contracted in Sudan! Bozo. He should have taken pills and received his shots like we did!

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This story ends at the Seattle talk show New Day Northwest, where I appeared right after musician Lukas Nelson, son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right. I’d never heard him before and I was impressed:

Lukas Nelson is the son of Willie Nelson, and a unique talent in his own right.

How did I get here?

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I’m not doing this right. Every time I travel, that thought occurs to me at some point. I woke up yesterday morning at 7:30, and was ready to go by 9:00, which made me feel so grownup and responsible. Then I remembered I hadn’t yet checked the driving directions from Cheyenne, at the southern end of Wyoming, to Lovell, at the northern end. I regretted my lack of a GPS or smart phone — though I don’t know how I would have swung that, when I had neither enough cash nor credit for this trip until a couple of days before it started. Ah, panic: sometimes I rationalize that this is what adventure is made of.

It was a gorgeous second day of spring, but wow, I’d forgotten how windy Wyoming is!

I copied the directions off Google Maps, then decided to call the Fort Causeway Hostel for specifics, because I might arrive there at dusk. I thought I had the phone number, but I didn’t. So I checked the website, but the number wasn’t listed. Odd. I thought I made my reservation by phone – how did I do that? I gave up, and hoped to arrive before dusk. So, I left at 9:30. No problem. Google said the drive would take about six hours, 45 minutes. I had budgeted eight, including a lunch break, gas breaks, and a few stops for photos. Plenty of time.

(more…)

My decision to leave and travel around the world with a 13-year-old was not impulsive but directed. At the time, I hardly realized the impact on everyone who was involved with this journey. The gift of telling the story from my current perspective is interesting in that so much more of it is understood.

I truly expected this painting to fall apart by now, but it’s fine.

The date was September 10, 1997, and I will never forget the morning my husband dropped our youngest daughter and myself off at the bus stop on our way to JFK airport and the world. I had never traveled by myself or been out of the country more than stepping over the Canadian border one time. But when you know you have to do something, courage finds a place in your heart. We left with too much stuff and started a process of getting rid of things in Chile that lasted all the way to Thailand. I was traveling with a portable wooden easel and 20 pounds of oil paints. I didn’t realize when I left how hard it would be to find mineral spirits when I didn’t understand the language. It was a constant challenge in each country that we went to, but we were eventually able to find it every time.

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I’ve taken two trips to China to do research for a historical novel. Tortillas from the Canton Café will be loosely based on the family history of my Chinese-Mexican grandmother. Here are more of my journal notes on Hong Kong, as I continue “Tracing China’s Past”:

April 13, 2008
Hong Kong, China

We visited a place that retained some of the traditional beauty of old Hong Kong: Hoi Pa Village and Tak Wah Park.

Yesterday my translator ZhuZhu and I took the Metro to Tsuen Wan, one of Kowloon’s outlying housing estate districts. Don’t let the term “housing estate” fool you; in Tsuen Wan, as elsewhere in Kowloon, most people live in tiny apartments in dismal, repetitive high-rises. However, we visited a place that retained a vestige of the traditional beauty of old Hong Kong: Hoi Pa Village and Tak Wah Park.

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