Letters from the field 4: Dangers and Kidnapping

Dear Future Self,

Mexico is all over the American news right now, with two high profile assassinations and a 21-dead drug gang shootout all taking place this week. More disturbing than these reports, which really only focus on a small group of people in a small area, are the comments posted below them by readers. If I can believe the posts under CNN articles, it would appear that many Americans are taking the current Mexican violence to indicate that all Mexicans are violent and barbaric and that the US is better off coming up with a way to cut off all ties with our southern neighbor (not to mention expel all legal and illegal immigrants). To this mindset (who aren't reading this anyway, but whatever), I offer the following experience from field work:

The team had been driving 4WD "roads" in the rural hills beyond Lake Catemaco. The area there is sparsely populated, and ours was probably the first car to drive down that particular track in years. Needless to say, there are no road maps and no road signs -- why bother with road names when there are so few to bother naming? At one point, we spotted a small hut set back from the path and decided it would be worth asking directions. After a short conversation in which our team leader introduced us as a team of geologists from the university, the lady of the place loaned us two children to guide us. The boys, Fernando and Diego, were 10 and 8 years old, respectively and were best friends. Their families effectively live together following the death of Fernando's father 2 years ago, leaving him to be the man of the house. Wedging all 7 of us into the Jeep Wrangler, we set off in search of the path we were looking for.

The boys led us up hills with the enthusiasm and energy of kids who have not yet learned to look at the topography to gauge the easiest slope to climb. They taught us about the edible berries growing on the slopes. The berries, apparently called tejote, are shiny and black-ish blue, and taste a bit like overripe blueberries. Even more entertaining, the berries have an incredibly strong pigment that quickly stains one's mouth anywhere from deep purple to black depending on the number of berries eaten. Fernando and Diego told us about life on the ranch and how they milked the cows and helped to make cheese. Neither attended school, since their ranch is so remote that it would require a 2-3 hour hike each way to get to the nearest school; also, their help was needed to keep the ranch running. They were excited to be trusted with the important job of carrying rock samples (and we were relieved!), and they were absolutely euphoric when handed the rock hammer and entrusted with breaking up big rocks.

Diego and Fernando, our trusty guides.

About 6 hours after we took them, we returned them to their homes and thanked their mothers. Both Fernando and Diego happily joined us the next day as well, cracking jokes about the cow chips dissolving in the persistent rain. To thank them and their families, our team gave each family a bag of nonperishable foodstuffs that would otherwise require a long journey to the nearest store, as well as bags of candies and t-shirts for the boys ('cause no 10 year old boy is going to be excited about receiving dried beans). The families invited us in and served us coffee while we watched the end of the Mexico-France World Cup game.

Can you imagine a similar situation playing out in the US? Less than a year ago, it made news when concerned adults called authorities when they saw an 8-10 (?) year old boy walking the few blocks to his sports practice alone. Can you imagine parents giving their child (not to mention the neighbor kid) to complete strangers and watching them drive away?

Another example, this one not from the field exactly: Due to the impossibility of actually finding our street, we must ask taxis to pick us up on a street corner a couple blocks from our house. Normally this is not a problem, however, it is fairly eerie when we have to stand out there at 4 am to get a ride to the airport. We had to do that again last week when the Awesome Assistant took off to return to the US. Both times that I have been out there waiting for a taxi at that hour, someone from the area points out that hanging out on dark street corners isn't the safest move in a city, asks to make sure that we are OK, and offers to stay near us until the taxi comes. The first time, we were watched over by a taxi driver who we had already assured that we had previously called someone from another cab company to meet us. More recently, it was a car full of young men (about 20 years old, perhaps?), one of whom had clearly been studying his English and saw this as an amazing opportunity to practice the language and do a good deed at the same time. Both times, our guardians waited until our taxi arrived and could convince both us and them that he was our prearranged driver (passwords and such). Both times, our guardians were pretty much the only people that we saw out there.

Mexico is very sensitive to the real and perceived violence within its borders. While there are truly bad places to be (anyone remember Cabrini Green in Chicago?), for the most part Mexico is a country full of some of the most generous and hard-working people you will meet.

Hell, I basically kidnapped a cabbie last night while picking up a friend from the airport. Four hours, a traffic jam, two terminals (nowhere near each other), a delayed plane, and getting lost down a restricted hallway of the airport later, he was finally able to drop us off at my corner in front of the ice cream shop. He was gracious and entertaining the entire time, and it was great practice for my Spanish to spend those hours discussing geology, geography (he is working on his MS), sports, travel, etc. Thank you, Miguel. I'm glad I had enough money still on me at that point to give you the generous tip you deserved.

In short, three cheers for Mexico!

Cheers,

Shazta-of-the-present

Letters from the field 3: Yeah.

Dear Future Shazta,

I know that you haven't forgotten this field trip I just got back from. You really ever won't, short of a massive head injury. If that happens though, see if you can selectively forget the following things that I was unable to write about until now ('cause I kinda needed to calm down first):

1) This was the trip where you got a shock as to just how out of the loop you are with your team. After noticing some unusual bookkeeping practices, you started asking some pointed questions and found out that the grant was out of field money. No one had mentioned this to you before. Which means that for Year 1 of a field project, you have 2 weeks worth of field data to work with. Awesome. Especially since you didn't design your field work with this knowledge in mind. Associated with this, try to forget the extra beers and desserts purchased with the grant money, despite the lack of funding. Remember that you are not in the US, and there are different cultural norms at play here.

2) You also may have gotten into a standoff with one of your team members on a random Mexican hillside with competing GPS units, arguing over which way to go to find a pond you were searching for. For what it's worth, you were right (not difficult, since she insisted that you were standing IN the pond already, despite all evidence to the contrary). At any rate, you never did find the f-ing pond because, after the "debate," it was universally agreed upon to be too far away to hike to it while carrying an inflatable boat.

3) Ok, so to be honest, you may just want to completely block out all memories of that one colleague. She manages to get under your skin in ways that defy logic and leave you a frothing mess of resentment in the back seat of the truck (though you finally got to sit in the front seat a couple of times this trip. That's because she wasn't along on those days, having taken the other truck.). Just forget about her frequent use of "Chhh-chh-chhh" to get your attention the same way other people get the attention of their dogs (when they are misbehaving). Also forget about how hilarious she thought it was that a local boy said he couldn't understand your Spanish, and how she kept repeating the story over and over to everyone, despite the fact that you had been speaking English to your non-Spanish-speaking assistant and there is really no wonder that the little boy couldn't understand your "accent." Etc.

Oh well. Not every trip will be perfect. And you have heard from independent sources that your one colleague is fairly universally difficult to work with. Just take a deep breath and appreciate that her contract supposedly ends in one month. That, and learn how to do geochemistry really slowly so that it will fill up your time for a while.

Cheers,

Shazta

The Field

Evidence A for why my job is better than yours: I got paid to ride a horse through the rainforest, up a volcano.

Now, it might seem like I'm gloating or rubbing your noses in it. To be fair, I admit that I am. At the same time, however, I'll let you in on this little secret: while Evidence A is pretty darn awesome, I'm only gloating about it because the rest of the week in the field sucked. Really, truly, sucked.

To start off with, it's important to note that I have problems with motion sickness. I turn green and achy, and my best course of action is typically to just fall asleep. It turns out that it isn't easy to sleep in the back seat of a manual transmission pickup truck being driven Mexican-style on Mexican roads. Mexican drivers are very different from the American drivers that I'm used to, and really, they have to be. The roads here can be a wild collection of pits and speed bumps, and that's when they're paved. Survival driving in Mexico reminds me of what you might get from a 13 year old boy, hopped up on Mountain Dew, played Grand Theft Auto at 3 am (but without GTA's extra violence. Duh.). I bruised my right elbow from being bounced off of the door so many times during high-speed swerving maneuvers and bumps. The wildness of the ride was emphasized by the contrasting soundtrack: Barry Manilow and Manilow-wannabes, with a few forays into "It's not easy being green" by Kermit The Frog and "She-boom" by some bubblegum pop group from the past that left me wondering just how long the fall would be if we drive off of the next cliff. I had thought that my years of driving for Field Camp had fairly well inoculated me to hours spent listening to questionable music mixes; I was wrong.

Barry Manilow. He writes the songs. Would you road trip with this man?

I had 2 academic goals for the week in the field, and 2 non-academic goals. On the academic side, I wanted to look for some specific features on top of the main volcano and get some samples from a set of cones on the other side of the volcanic field. Non-academically, I wanted to swim in the hotel pool and ride a horse up a volcano. Of these 4 goals, you already know which one happened.

Academic goal 2 was undone by heavy fog that prevented us from even finding the sample sites. Non-academic goal 1 was undone by cold weather and a nasty bout of food poisoning that left me confined to the hotel for a day and prevented us from going down to Veracruz. The other two goals are related to one another and deserve a slightly longer telling.

I was ecstatic when I learned that we would be going up the main volcano on horseback, firstly because horses are just plain cool and secondly because I didn't really want to walk all that way. Previously, the team has rented horses from Don Tomás, a rancher up in the hills. Don Tomás didn't think he'd be able to help us this time, so he suggested we make arrangements with Don Guido. Don Guido has the ranch neighboring Don Tomás', but was down in the town below. Somewhere. As such, we spent a evening driving the back streets of the town (in the dark, of course!) asking people on the street if they knew how to find Don Guido.

Us: Excuse me, do you know where we can find Don Guido?

Man: Huh?

Woman: (just walking up to Man) Ah, Don Guido! He lives up in the mountains. Drive up this street until it curves right. Then look for the Corona sign. Or is it a Coke sign? I don't remember. Anyway, ask around for Señora Margarita. She'll know how to find Don Guido.

Us: Um... thanks!

With those detailed directions, we set off along unpaved back roads in the pitch black you get in an area where electricity is enough of a luxury that no one would dream of putting up streetlights. Miraculously, we not only found the correct curve in the road, but Don Guido happened to be there. He agreed to guide us up the mountain on horseback three days later, on Friday.

When Friday arrived, however, Don Guido had to back out of the plan due to an arthritis flare-up in his knees. Don Tomás, feeling bad for us, agreed to lead us up the volcano after all. He quickly rigged together enough equipment to saddle up four horses, and we started the ascent.

Me on Baya, just before we started the ascent. JM, my boss, is on the horse on the right. I only got to sit up this straight when we were stopped, thanks to the short reins.

As excited as I was to be riding a horse, I was also a bit nervous. I'm not a real rider, so I figured that I would have a very sore bum afterwards. I was also a little apprehensive about my horse, Baya, since I'd been warned that she had a habit of biting the tails of the other horses and pissing them off. Fortunately, Baya was very docile, particularly compared to the freckled horse given to Araceli (the other postdoc); that horse tried to rip down a small tree when Don Tomás saddled her. Within minutes of starting the ride, it was apparent that I would have an unexpected challenge in the saddle: my jury-rigged equipment included reins that were far too small. In order to let Baya walk, I had to lean forward across the pommel of the saddle and hold the reins with only 2 fingers. Since I was also wearing a backpack, this was doubly uncomfortable. All was going well, though, until Baya tried to walk between 2 very close trees and brushed against a branch on the right side. Slightly spooked, she danced sideways and bashed my knee into the left tree. The whole group got to pause while I cursed in a few languages and Baya shot me looks over her shoulder that easily translated as, "That's what you get for being a lousy rider. I have no desire to go up this mountain. I could have been back at home enjoying some nice grass." Shortly after that, JM's horse got skittish about stepping over a fallen log, backed up into Araceli's horse, panicked, and started kicking. Based on the muddy print left on her horse, Araceli came within a couple of inches of having been kicked in her own leg.

The forest around us was beautiful and eerie. It was the sort of place to make one believe in fairies and wood sprites, with curls of mist snaking between enormous trees and vines and Spanish moss dangling from branches. It was also strangely quiet, with little sound other than that of the horses steps as they climbed.

Finally, we reached as high as the horses would go. Don Tomás tethered them and then began leading us by foot up the trail. I am not a fast hiker, nor have I ever been, but I managed to leave my fellow academics in the dust. Don Tomás and I would forge ahead, then wait while the others caught up. This success for me became a little less impressive when I thought about it a little more: Araceli has a small child and JM is over 60. Plus, it turns out that JM was happily collecting orchids. And our guide, who I was so happy to be keeping up with as he used his machete to hack a path through the jungle, is well into his 70's and awaiting knee surgery. (But I am still cool!!!) Don Tomás kept reassuring us that we were very close, only 20 minutes, from the top. A couple of hours later when we stopped for lunch, the jungle was still tick around us and streams running down past us were a pretty good indication that the summit was still a ways away.

I finished my lunch (a tin of shredded turkey and vegetables, with a large roll) and looked around. The fog was closing in again, and the next part of the "path" looked nearly impassable. Despairing, I asked JM how on earth a particular naturalist had managed to climb the mountain in the 1700's during an eruption.

JM looked back at me a little confused and said, " Well, he went up the mule path on the other side of the volcano. It's a wide, smooth path that used to be trafficked a lot before they built the roads out here."

Incredulous, I gasped, " Then what are we doing over here???"

Looking even more confused, he answered, "I've already been up the other side before. I wanted to see what it looked like from this side."

That was as high as we got up the volcano. Despite Don Tomás' urgings that we were only another 20 minutes from the top, we decided that we had to start back down if we were going to reach the ranch again by nightfall. On the hike back to the horses, we discovered that the misting rain combined with our previous passage to reduce the trail to a steep mudslick. Where we had scrambled up slopes on the way up, we now were left clinging to vines and wild sugar cane to control our slide downhill. For comparison, imagine the scene from Avatar, where the characters use the huge leaves to bounce their way down from the treetops... now cover everything with mud and slime, and make it far less graceful. By the time we reached the horses, our legs were quivering from the effort of trying to control the slide down the muddy slopes.

We climbed back up on the horses and rode back ploddingly to the ranch. For the final hour, all I could think about was how badly I ached from being on the horse. My back and shoulders ached from leaning forward for the reins, and my armpits were clearly bruised from trying to lean through my backpack straps. My butt was sore. More than anything, though, my knees felt like they were on fire. They hurt so badly that I was unable to tap Baya with my heels to convince her to keep moving when she decided to gaze at flowers. I'm normally a bit knock-kneed, but I swear I was bow-legged by the time I got off of Baya back at the ranch.

The next morning, we started the drive back to Mexico City. For the next 8 hours or so, I had time to reflect on the week in the field while my aching body was bounced off of the door, Barry Manilow crooned, and I turned green. I had gotten food poisoning and was black from bruises, but I didn't have a single data point to show for the entire week in the field. When we finally arrived back at my apartment, all I wanted to do was collapse into Keating's arms and take a week-long nap.

Keating, my wonderful husband, had been busy while I was away. He happily told me how he'd worked things out with our friend Monica to visit the butterfly sanctuary the next day. I had known about the plans when I left, so I was glad to know that everything had been finalized. Except that we would be getting up at 5 am. And we would be going horseback riding.

To be continued....