Friday, May 2, 2008

My first full day in Chicago starts with gray rain and a cold shower, but I won’t let it color my mood. The Whitehall Hotel’s boiler is on the fritz, so the front desk comps our breakfast while Steph waits for hot water. We order our meal brought up, so my friend won’t have to dress, go downstairs to eat, come back up to shower, and dress again. Steph refuses to consider a cold shower. She says it would run contrary to her life’s theme: “Me, me, me!” I laugh, but also worry she might be telling the truth. I fail to notice my own smugness about my life’s theme of “low-maintenance.” I see only what I fear to see.

The spring rain kills our plans for a walking tour.

We relax over an om-nom-nom breakfast of cholesterol and fat: hot tea with cream, buttered toast, eggs over-medium, fried potatoes, and OJ. We don’t leave until 11:00 a.m., and the spring rain kills our plans for a walking tour. This Route 66 Trip is a tongue-in-cheek homage to kitschy Americana, cheap nostalgia, and the road less traveled. We make no pretensions to Kerouac hipness, instead heading for geek nirvana: the Museum of Holography.

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Thursday, May 1, 2008

Stephanie has never cut out on her husband for two weeks before. My husband told me, “It’s okay, I’m getting used to it.” I recently returned from a three-week book-research trip to China, stayed home for two weeks, then split again today to start this road trip down Route 66. I already miss Dale, but this rare chance to hang with my longest-time girlfriend promises to be like crazy, man!

Stephanie and I met thirty years ago at Downey High.

Steph and I met thirty years ago at Downey High, in the sleepy Los Angeles suburbs, and we became tight friends. Though our lives have moved in different directions, it always feels comfortable to pick up our friendship again, like throwing on my favorite old leather jacket. It’s a relationship full of embarrassing confessions, unsolicited advice, and no-respect wisecracks, between two former non-joiners who joined each other. What better duo to share a time-machine trip down America’s Blast-from-the-Past Highway, Route 66, a.k.a. The Mother Road? I’ve dubbed this journey “Steph’s and Cara’s Mother F—ing Road Trip”:

What better duo to share a time-machine trip down America’s Blast-from-the-Past Highway, Route 66, a.k.a. The Mother Road?

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“We swear you’ll thank us for this,” is what Lonely Planet said. The travel book described it, quite simply, as one of Bali’s most sacred Hindu temples, and it turned out to be, quite simply, the opposite. Pura Lempuyang sits high on a mountain overlooking the Bali Sea and the active volcano Mount Agung. The challenge is climbing 1700 slippery, stone steps to reach the “don’t miss” temple “where gods and humans meet.” Azar, my travel partner, and I were up for the challenge. If Lonely Planet “swears,” then we’re committed.

The challenge is climbing 1700 slippery, stone steps to reach the “don’t miss” temple “where gods and humans meet.”

At the base, we paid a fee and were instructed to wear a sarong throughout the journey. A guide, who wouldn’t be going with us, estimated it would take two hours to reach the temple and warned us that there would be occasional aggressive monkeys looking for food.

“How aggressive are these monkeys?” I asked.

“Oh you’ll be fine, of course. Just don’t feed them,” he replied.

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The night before Revolution Day, David, Patricia, and I took their mother to El Pistolero, “The Gunfighter,” to celebrate her seventieth birthday. I suppose there was a certain revolutionary spirit in Carmela’s tossing back a beer in a bar with her son and daughter — an act of defiance against age, and time. We then spent the night in a motel with an old-fashioned wagon in the courtyard, and I thought, “So Mexico romanticizes its history, too.” We’d planned to go out for breakfast in the morning, but nothing in Nuevo Casas Grandes was open on El Día de la Revolución.

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David drove, and his mother Carmela 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 Patricia, 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 David 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.

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Around noon, an aging sedan rolled up. A skinny, baby-eyed, girl-woman got out, stepped up to the courtyard gate, and gave me a puzzled smile through the bars. She had long, metallic-red hair, mod side-bangs, and fluffy white ankle boots.

“Sara?” I asked.

She widened her eyes, as if shocked at the very thought. “Anita.”

“Un momento.” I rushed toward the house to find someone to unlock the gate.

Anita is Sara’s daughter, a twenty-year-old student at the University of Ciudad Juárez. She had arrived to take her aunt Patricia, grandmother Carmela, and me to her mom’s house, a forty-minute drive through the gauntlet of Juárez.

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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 Carmela. I lingered in bed, until I heard Carmela and her daughter Carmela 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.

When I emerged it was 7:30, and Carmela was hanging laundry in the chilly morning shadows of the courtyard. Every day she washes dozens of towels and smocks for her son Diego’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.

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As Patricia and David had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After David drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into ’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?” Patricia said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

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