Bringing out the e-book of my short story collection, Hard Travel, sent me back to the journals I kept while writing it. We were living in Mexico at the time, my husband posted there as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail. These days, being a foreign correspondent sounds romantic and a little bygone. It was pretty romantic, travelling all over Latin America and getting into danger now long past. The danger part usually involved Paul, not me. He was kidnapped by a couple of Contra guerillas in Nicaragua, and had guns pressed to his back by Chilean soldiers confiscating his notebook, aware they might shoot. Et cetera.

When we travelled together, he was often on vacation while I was usually researching short stories. Fictional stories. When I got back to Mexico City I sometimes wrote a story set in the place we’d just visited. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the places in Hard Travel were all places I’d visited, while the plots and main characters are fictional. Places inspire me more than characters or stories. I feel a ping. Not surprisingly, people have asked me what that means, so I thought I’d post both the opening of a story and the journal entry from the trip that inspired it. Maybe that will help explain it.

The story is called Mary Ellen Among the Tarahumara, the Tarahumara being Indigenous people living in northern Mexico around the Copper Canyon. It’s about a Canadian doctor who goes to the canyon on an organized tour. She’s taken her young son and is trying to decide what to do about her deteriorating marriage. On the tour, she meets a cancer survivor travelling with her grown son, and the story begins.

***

A U-shaped platform curving a couple of feet from the tracks. A concrete shelter shaped like an umbrella. Concrete benches under it carved with initials, Tarahumara women sitting around them weaving baskets of pine needles and palm, wearing gathered skirts, kerchiefs, underblouses and overblouses made from mixed remaindered fabric with patterns of racing cars, crewcut boys doing the jive, ballerinas en pointe—some women were barefoot—and rockets taking off on cushions of steam. When a train pulled in, the women would sell their baskets to tourists who ran outside for the fifteen-minute stop, then go back to weaving and drinking their Coke. 

This was a waystation, Divisadero, Mexico, on the Continental Divide. There was a hotel, a few taco stands, and a canyon that fell into other canyons, all so deep there were pumas on the valley floors, mangoes, bananas and tropical birds, even when it snowed on the peaks in winter. It was summer now, and the sun burned in the thin air. The children scratched, flies crawled into the Coke. It was a scabby, unswept place. Yet because it was a waystation, Mary Ellen found that its very insignificance felt significant, weighted with the feeling that the place was really no place, a suspension, a held breath. Something like her marriage.

“Oh, look, I nearly forgot what I brought for the children.”

Mary Ellen turned when the woman spoke and saw her fumbling in a bag marked Patient’s Effects. It was Bernice McInery, who had broadcast her name in the hotel dining room. If Mary Ellen’s husband Dieter had been there, he would have been very rude and very funny about poor Bernice. She was a strangely-shaped, ill-looking woman from the same tour who had lost weight from the top down. Her head looked tiny while her hips were still immense.

“Cranes,” she said, taking something silver out of her bag. “Japanese cranes. You make them out of folded paper.” Bernice caught Mary Ellen’s eye.

“You know,” she said. “Origami. They’re symbols of peace. We made them last year for our church Christmas project. Sending out, what do you call them, vibrations. Well, I always like to bring something along for the children when I travel, and they say not to bring candy. So this seemed like a good idea.”

***

I wrote the journal entry at the end of our trip to the Copper Canyon. Like the main character, I went there with our three-year-old son, but also with my husband Paul, and we weren’t on a guided tour. Instead, we were taking a train trip through the canyon, stopping at various hotels en route, and ending up at the airport in the northern Mexican town of Los Mochis.

Here’s what I wrote when we got there:

21 August

We’re in Los Mochis waiting to take the airplane home tonight. It’s a swamp outside, even the local newspapers writing about the heat when it must always be hot here in August. At any rate, it’s a good day to sit down and write about this latest holiday, which I haven’t had time to do until now. 

We arrived in Chihuahua last Saturday, early enough in the morning to see the mountains looking pink and green. The sunflowers were blooming on the road into town. A beautiful setting, a modern town, and while I’m sure it’s a good place to live in, it’s not much of a place for tourists. At least, we didn’t find that. (This is disjointed because Paul’s on the phone to the Globe and I’m half listening.)

Anyway, on the next day, Sunday, we got up very early and waited for a while at the Chihuahua train station, then took the train through Mennonite country, where we saw little beyond apples, groves and groves of apples, some under the black nylon netting they use on the cocoa plants in Grenada, although here they’re apparently raised against hail. Beautiful fertile country giving onto mountains, the mountains leading us toward the Copper Canyon.

We arrived that afternoon in Divisadero, where there is a hotel in which we did not have a reservation. (We never did for anything. There’s been a certain amount of last-minute anxiety on this trip.) It’s a beautiful place, right on the meeting of canyons that go down and down the way the Himalayas do, although unlike the Himalayas, they do not go up and up. The hotel is right at the top of the canyons and at the edge of one as well, so the view is wonderful, all the slate and green mountains. At sunset that first night mist rose out of the valleys and over the lips of the canyons, boiling like steam. 

This is where the Tarahumara people live. They used to live in caves at the top of the cliffs in summer and go down to the bottom of the valleys in winter, where it’s warm enough that banana trees grow. Now they mostly live in houses and the men work in lumber camps, although some of the people who built the hotel still live in caves around it. We saw one cave with some kids outside it as we walked around the mountain—a recess in the granite with a roof blackened by fire and a log fence at its edge. There was a red plastic bucket behind the log fence, presumably containing water, although the people were among the poorest and dirtiest I have ever met with. The women sell baskets and carvings on the hill that leads from the train tracks to the hotel and the children even have sores on their faces. One woman came to sell me something, and as she walked toward me her baby vomited all over her, and as she took my money she simultaneously put him to her breast. Her face was so sad. Meeting her eyes broke my heart. 

So did the fact the children all seem sick, and they’re barefoot. When we waited at the station again a few days later, though, we noticed how ingenious they were at entertaining themselves. They rolled rocks up in tinfoil and threw them around. They took sharp pieces of palm leaves their mothers had cut from the baskets they were making and drew on the concrete benches. All the while they ate junk, unfortunately, Coke and cookies from the nearby food stands, although at least they had something. Meanwhile the women were colourfully dressed in kerchiefs and overblouses and underblouses and gathered skirts, all in bright cotton patterns thirty or forty years old. Racing cars. Hockey players. Girls in circle skirts jiving with their boyfriends. All so dusty. Such criminally abandoned people. But this is meant as description not protest, the needs surely clear enough.

We were at the hotel for two nights, and on the one full day we went out for two walks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon—up in the mountains and down in the Tarahumara caves. Then there was the (long) wait in the train station and we met Mary Alice, an American woman I don’t think I’m up to describing right now, an older woman. Let’s just say she’s big, and her way of coping with her cancer is to talk about it loudly. She gave out paper cranes folded through origami techniques to the Tarahumara children—Paul is sure she started a cargo cult—while saying her church made them at Christmas. She said she spent hours herself in front of the television making them, despite what the chemotherapy did to her fingers. If you make a thousand, it will give you long life, she said. 

At first we were unsure who made up her party, since there was her husband but also two younger men with identical little pot bellies underneath identical polo shirts. The younger men seemed to be together yet they also stayed close beside Mary Alice and her husband Vance. Later, we learned that one was their son and the other someone from Baltimore with whom the son had “struck up a friendship.” They drank endless amounts of beer and coffee, on which Mary Alice blamed the son’s later wimpishly-borne case of gastroenteritis. 

I can say that because we saw them again. The train eventually came and we all went to Cerocahui, getting there via Bahuichivo Station and a 50-minute bus trip, by then at night, to the Hotel Misíon Cerochaui. The town is an old Jesuit station and tiny farming community. It’s lovely, although I still wonder why this particular Mexican hotel chain chose to build there. The people seem fairly prosperous. The houses have wood floors and metal roofs, there are plants outside most and the cows and chickens—which roam the streets—seem healthy and fat. About four times a prosperous as a similar town in Nicaragua, Paul says. 

And there is a good government health clinic which we saw because we took Mary Alice’s pitifully complaining son and his (mild) gastroenteritis there. The doctor was a very pretty young woman with a pretty child who was just beginning to walk. Mary Alice and Vance came with us. All the while they talked to their son, told him about his health, that he wasn’t going to vomit. All the while, the son leaned on his father while his truly-ill mother stumbled cheerfully up the street. We escaped as soon as the son got his pills, leaving them back at the lovely hotel.

Our plan was to rent horses, and there were legions of muchachos outside the hotel each saying that his own was gentle enough for Gabriel. But we were unsure, and someone at the hotel told us to call Don Lorenzo, who turned out to be a kind old sandalled man, I think Tarahumara, who took us to his flowered house and sat chairs for us in the small dirt yard while he saddled the horses. His wife came out once in a tidy clean white housewife’s apron and men’s glasses, and hung a parrot sitting on an old coat hanger from a nail on the roof. 

The horses were indeed mancito, gentle—old nags, really—which is all we’re up to riding, and we rode for an hour into the hills to a path leading to a waterfall. A young boy rode with Gabriel, holding the reins, and Don Lorenzo insisted on trotting along behind us. He must have been in his 50s or 60s and seemed to get very out of puff, and even disappeared once, I think to vomit, so I was increasingly worried. In fact, by the end I was afraid he would have a heart attack, although I really think less melodramatically he was finding out he couldn’t do this anymore, which might have been almost as devastating.

After about an hour, we arrived at a path to a waterfall and left the horses there. Then Don Lorenzo trotted us through the forest, which made me think of home, since the trees were more of less those of the Canadian Shield and the terrain like Lynn Valley in North Vancouver—except of course for the wild begonias and poinsettias growing underneath the pines. At the end was a pleasant waterfall, into which Gabriel and I happily threw pieces of wood and stone, then we had an hour’s ride back. 

After we arrived at the hotel, Mary Alice appeared again and said that since we’d been so nice to her son, she wanted to give us a copy of her book, which turned out to be a self-published edition of her journal about finding out she had cancer. Soon afterward we got on the bus with her and her family and what I think was a combined family from Colorado, a second marriage with His and Her kids—since it later transpired that the wife had worked for the Peace Corps in Nicaragua at the end of the Somoza dictatorship but the husband had not, so I think she and some of the kids must have been there with her previous husband. 

Paul was comparing the town of Cerocahui to one in Nicaragua and I saw some of the people listening. Mary Alice said, “Our church has declared itself a sanctuary church for people from Latin America. (Son, now, if you’re going to be sick you tell the driver to stop.) I don’t know what would happen if anyone actually took us up on it. (You said you wanted to come to Mexico, son, to see the wildflowers. Well, look. There are some wildflowers.)”

Eventually we got back to Bahuichivo station where we waited and waited for hours. The hotel had a boxcar set up as its own waiting room with a sofa on which the balding son lay. The toilet in the corner stank and it was an unpleasant place to be, but what I have not mentioned is the shine Gabriel took to Mary Alice, who had been a nursery school teacher. So we stayed there a while, Gabriel playing with his toy trains on the floor or singing the Bell Song with Mary Alice. The son had some sort of container of juice from which he ostentatiously sipped. 

“My boys were 20 months apart,” Mary Alice said. “So they always played together wonderfully.”

I told her about Gabriel having the book, The Little Engine That Could; how it mentions parlour cars with big plate glass windows, and how we got on the train in Divisadero and I’d told him we were in a parlour car with plate glass windows. 

“I can see the glass,” he’d told me. “But where are the plates?”

“The age of literalness,” Mary Alice said. “If my boys don’t provide me with grandchildren soon, I’m going to be too old to stoop and bend with them.”

Eventually the train came, although we only had a couple of hours of light to see what is supposed to be the most spectacular part of the trip, the journey from Bahuichivo to Las Mochis. But for a while we saw gorges, and an orange sky at sunset, and a double rainbow over a particularly spectacular canyon. 

“You see,” Mary Alice said. “If we hadn’t been delayed, we never would have seen the rainbow.”

And now we’re in Los Mochis, Paul planning to write a (protest) column about the Tarahumara people at the train station and me a story, someday, called more or less, Mary Alice Among the Tarahumara.

***

Years later, you can download Hard Travel here.