I. Hacienda.
II. Sun down, spider up.
III. Rooster sounds.
IV. Landing pad.
V. Sun then serenade.
VI. Compliments.
I. Hacienda.
Safely now we are tucked away at camp. It’s warm. The border crossing was a little different; more involved. They wanted us all to get out of the vehicles and walk through the customs checkpoint. We never had done that before, not in my time.
They wanted the Entrada portion of our FMME forms. Then we had to perform a perfunctory act. We could leave almost all of our luggage behind in the vans but we each had to bring one bag with us through the checkpoint to send through an X-Ray. Good bag, bad bag. I’ll take the good bag through. In this case my fanny pack, which went through the scanner and down the conveyor belt, airport-style. When my bag came through I stood there for a moment. I was waiting for someone to tell me I was OK, or my bag was. But they weren’t going to do that. They would only have said something if there were a problem. Get your bag and go, mochila adios.
Otherwise the cross was uneventful. We took the toll road. Cuota. Follow the signs for Tecate. 151 pesos. What is the exchange rate? We discussed it in the van, which filled up, by the way. In addition to Peter, there’s Doug, Tim, and Wade. Tim and Wade are father and son.
Doug was the most talkative. He seemed to know some things. Older guy. Said he went on an AMOR trip thirty years ago. I guessed that the exchange rate was catorce or quince but it’s higher. Diecisiete pesos a uno dólar. So 151 pesos comes out to nine bucks. The church gave each driver a twenty. A bit more than double what we needed. La cambia comes back in pesos, which I like. The tollbooth operator handed back a 100-peso note, a 50-peso note, and some coins I haven’t looked at.
“Buenos días,” I said to her a split second after she greeted me with a, “Buenas tardes.” It was after two in the afternoon so “Buenas tardes,” or “good afternoon” was the right call.
It’s warm and breezy at camp. Cheryl hooked me up with a tent and the same cot from last year. I really like this cot. It belongs to a guy named Gary who was on this trip the first year I went. He had been multiple times before that. He was fun. I’m grateful for the cot. I can position it so I can sit up to and read and write. Then lower it flat when I want to sleep.
Dinner tonight is the taco bar. I’ll probably go nacho-style, easy on the chips. Pancakes in the morning, along with sausage and chilaquiles, which are repurposed tortillas along with some cheese and salsa. I’ll eat a bunch of pancakes and butter.
I went over to the shower house and took a bucket-bath. The shower house is open air, roofless; one for the guys, one for the gals. There isn’t any running water. You can fill up a bucket or a solar shower bag with water from a large water tower held aloft. In prior years I brought a solar shower; they’re nice if you want to hook the bag above your head, to get some water pressure. But in an effort to travel light, I nixed the solar shower last year and again on this trip. So I just use a bucket and a washcloth.
When all you have to wash yourself is a bucket of water and you’re rinsing the washcloth out in the same water that you’re using to clean yourself, it becomes quickly apparent just how much dirt you’ve been carrying around on your body. My bucket water got dirtier than I would have guessed; and this isn’t even a work day. All we did was cross the border and set up camp.
Dinner in 34 minutes. When it was just me and him in the van, Peter asked me about what I do. My answer to this question gets clunkier and clunkier. Aloofly I threw out one past endeavor after another but I did eventually mention poetry. Which became a coincidence because Peter says he has about seventy uncollected poems from over the years. He said he’s been wondering what to do with them. We arrived at 940 Dennery right then so we put a hold on the conversation. To be continued.
I’m sitting in the tent now, drying off, listening to the sounds of the tent flaps, the unzipped tent windows swinging and scraping gently in the breeze. It reminds be a bit of the surf in Ocean Beach. Relaxing. I could go to sleep right now.
II. Sun down, spider up
When the sun goes behind the mountain, figure out which strangers know you best. Oh look, there’s the border. Was that the border? Yes. It didn’t look one. No, not all of them do.
The heat finally breaks when the sun’s lowest edge tips below the top of the mountain. Then the rest of it disappears bit by bit, leaving only night behind. I enjoy the nights here, sleeping outside in July, doing without A/C. Experiencing the gravity of the sun’s disappearance. The stark impact of the Earth’s curvature. It cools down drastically but a night breeze is still welcome.
At night here, the soundscape begins to piece itself together. Gas plant sounds. Loading and unloading, metal on metal, pressurized air escaping, valves and flanges. There’s state petroleum infrastructure immediately to the west and also just to the south of the campground. I don’t mind it.
The road south of camp remains somewhat active, even through the night. As I lie down to sleep, I search out for any sound from the road. When there isn’t any, I hear the crickets chirping. Then, music from somewhere, perhaps from a radio in the night watchman’s little shack, or from his car stereo.
“Does anyone know where Tom Stodgel is?”
It’s not quite bed time. A few folks are still milling about. I step out of the tent to look at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Scorpius, a sprawling and beautiful constellation in the south. Then, in my headlamp light, I see on the surface of the Earth the largest and most readily identifiable black widow spider I have ever seen. Clinging to or working along a string of silk, the spider is arresting, gorgeous, dark as blackest ink with taut, precise limbs and the infamous orange-red hourglass figure visible on its belly.
I’m enthralled but also a little creeped out. The spider is pretty close to my tent. I almost killed it but I couldn’t, not tonight. I’ve been seeing black widows a little more often, lately. I saw one at the farmhouse I visit in rural Missouri. Black widows belong to the orb weaver family of spiders. They all possess wicked venom but the black widow is the only one with jaws strong enough to sink that venom into human skin. I see the big, yellow-black orb weavers a lot in Missouri, usually in late summer, September. They also look fearsome and their webs are works of art, but unlike their black widow cousins, they’re harmless.
I watched as the widow crawled into a hole in the ground, just a few feet from my tent. There are plenty of insects around here it can hunt at night. Lots of ants. It probably disliked the light I was flashing upon it. I don’t want to interfere with that spider but if I see it anywhere near my tent zipper I will act swiftly, decisively, and with reason. If I were to get bit, I’d be on a one-way ticket back across the border, and I have come too far to be going back just yet.
I’ve got the moon in view as I peer through the mesh of a lowered tent flap. It’s a fine tent, a pop-up with a built-in fly. I can leave the tent flaps down all through the night but they have to be zipped up when we are away during the day. Otherwise, the crazy afternoon winds will blow a surprising amount of silt and dust into the tent.
I’m fading; ready for sleep. I must not have been asleep for longer than two hours at any point last night. Whenever I began to fit myself into the shape of sleep, I would be startled by some street sound or commotion from the room next door. I don’t think I’ll have that problem tonight. Tomorrow, we mix concrete and put the walls together.
III. Rooster sounds
Hoarse rooster crow. Rooster with a sore throat or laryngitis. Not loud enough to wake a person up but with just enough volume to them know it is indeed morning into which they’ve returned.
I went to the bathroom and dumped my pee bottle, down into the vault. The bathrooms here are johnny-on-the-spot stalls with the bottoms cut out, a latrine ditch scoured out below. To rinse my bite guard I go over to our wash station, which has potable water in a big Gatorade thermos. We also have hand washing basins, two tubs one next to the other, one for “wash” and one for “rinse.” It works pretty well. I bring along some bar soap from home, in addition to the little bar or two from the hotel room. Liquid soap has become more popular but I still like bar soap. Don’t even get me started on hand sanitizer. I’ve stopped using it altogether.
Back at the tent, I change out of the shorts I slept in and into a pair of work pants, crisp and clean for the last time on the trip. It is a touch cool this morning. Hazy. Just starting to get light at 5:27. My phone face lights up with a morning greeting from my wife. Everything is OK in St. Louis.
I slept pretty well. Got up only once to pee and that was using the bottle. It wasn’t the best possible choice for a tent bottle; I shoulda just packed one of the ones I use in the car. But not having to get out of the tent and walk to the baño might’ve meant I went back to sleep sooner, slept better than if I had to find my sandals, adorn the headlamp, unzip the tent, walk out into the night. At one point I woke briefly only to ask myself where the heck I was. Oh yeah, in a tent on the eastern outskirts of Tijuana, Mexico.
If there are mornings (or evenings) much cooler than this I’ll wish I’d brought that old gray hoody of mine. That hoody over a t-shirt would be fine right now. It’ll warm up quickly, though. Now, multiple roosters are sounding off as the morning unfolds. Some of the roosters are closers than others. They are doing rounds of call and answer.
“What’s the deal, though?” is how one of them sounds. ”Get your hands off!” is another. ”Sour diesel!” from a third. ”Hansel Gretel!” is the fourth. Others are too far away to articulate. I’m gonna go check on whether hot coffee has landed at the beverage station.
“Have some pancakes!” howls another rooster as I make my way to the mess tent.
The mosquitoes are bad this year. I am noticing that they have gotten into my tent this morning. Ten of them. Maybe they were in there all night. I don’t remember them being bad here, not at all. I’m used to leaving the tent door unzipped and open as I go about my business here at camp. Now I’ve got a pack of mosquitoes and a massive black widow to consider.
“What’s the answer?” asks one of the roosters. I don’t even know what the question is.
Coffee was on at 5:45. Eugenio and his wife run a small business here called Baja Cooks. The church hires them to cook breakfast and dinner for us here at camp. They’ve been prompt and consistent in everything they do; it’s an invaluable service. In the early days, according to Mike Mayer, a twenty-five-time veteran of this trip, members would have to make all their own meals. And they’d bring all that food down from the Bay Area. No thanks. After a full day at the work site, I would not be in any mood to start whipping up dinner.
I’m going to go make my brown-bag lunch, visit the baño, and then sit down to eat some pancakes. Nice sunrise. Red light on clouds in the east.
IV. Landing pad
We got the pad done today. We call it “the pad” but it’s really the house’s concrete foundation, a rectangle of cement, water, sand, and gravel measuring eleven by twenty-two feet. And we constructed all of the wall sections, seven of them in all.
The family for whom we are building the house is really friendly. And happy. They are Ivan (age 26) and Enalit (24) and their two children, Keila (7) and Matias (3) . Ivan has a factory job in Tijuana making $85/week, so he wasn’t around until later in the day but when he got there we were pretty close to being finished with the pad. He and his wife were standing at the foot of it taking photos. They moved to Tijuana from Chiapas (southern Mexico) in 2022.
And their neighbors are awesome. There’s a strong community feel already palpable at this site. That hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t true the first year, and it wasn’t true last year. This year, there are smiles all around and there are extra hands on deck pitching in to help us with the work.
Happily, I told el vecino de la familia para quien estamos contruir la casa que mi cuñado es de la Ciudad de Mexico. Or, I told the neighbor named Gustavo that my brother-in-law is from Mexico City. Gustavo is also from Mexico City. He spoke fine English. He was incredibly friendly. The people at the site were so nice and warm and happy that it almost felt like an act, a ruse, too good to be true.
I told Gustavo, “Necesito practicar mi español.” He was happy to talk. In turn, he wanted to practice his English. He voluntarily offered his bathroom for us to use. It’s right next to the work site. It’s a stall with an actual toilet inside. There’s no running water; it’s a vault toilet, but still. It’s better than sitting on a bucket, or just hovering over a hole. It also has a stack running up and out of it, to help with odor control. It makes a difference.
Gustavo’s wife is a teacher in town. She arrived later in the day. They have a baby boy named David, an adorable little kid. Cheryl was holding him at one point and seemed to be on cloud nine.
Then later an older man, he could have been a grandfather or an uncle, was walking down a narrow path from his casa leading into an open area between those higher-up street-facing buildings and the empty lot where we were building the house. We were using this open area to build the wall sections. It was nice and level; it could have been a driveway, or a small parking lot. On the last day, we had lunch in this spot. We had also set some of our larger tools there. Ladders, wheelbarrows, the big lost-and-found chest of tools AMOR offers. Our stuff was blocking the end of his pathway down to this landing, a path he must often use. I was walking that way. I thought he might be put out.
“Lo siento,” I said.
Then in English, as if he were born in America, and maybe he was, he says, “It’s awesome work that you’re doing here.”
I was prepared neither for his response nor for the perfect English he said it in. Two and a half years ago, he said, Ivan and Enalit went to see a prophet who told them she (the prophet) saw a group of Americans helping Ivan and Enalit build a home of their own on property of their own.
“God is amazing,” he told me, with a grin. I told him how happy it made me to hear him share the prophecy.
By the time we had the pad poured and troweled smooth, there were several friends, neighbors, and family gathered around the site. They were smiling and taking photos. It’s the first time in four years I can remember such excitement over the mere construction of the foundation. Still, it did make for a good photo with mountains in the distance and a healthy crop of sunflowers growing in the drainage ditch leading south away from the property. It would make for a pretty good view out the back window. Better than any of the views from any of the windows of my house.
V. Sun then serenade
We are back at camp after the first work day and crikey is it hot. We still have two hours to go until dinner. How about doing this trip in early January?
5:54. Almost dinner. Snuck up on me. Spaghetti tonight. It’s been a great meal in past years. There’s something about that bread and butter.
I have showered, walking around afterward to dry off, with my towel over my head to fight the sun. We are sitting ducks out here on this hard-scrabble playa. I swear the sun gets stronger every year. I can only sit in the tent for a little while before it gets too warm and I have to get up to keep from sweating again. As I sit in the tent, I listen to camp sounds, the ambient conversation, what the kids are saying.
“What do you think about blueberry salad?”
“OK, let me into the tent, I need to crash!”
“You’re saying sand is broken-down rocks?”
“Yeah.”
“Then what is dirt made of?”
“Broken-down organic matter.”
/\\.
The mountain is now just barely tall enough to block the sun, to give us relief.
“El vive en mi corazon…” sings a security guard doing a troubadour act at his post.
“Quiero cantar de mi amor…”
His guitar playing is sharp and clean. He sounds great. Fits the scene so well. The dusty Mexican countryside, with the last of the light leaving the sky. Acoustic guitar and Spanish ballads wafting in the night.
I basked in the guard’s singing as I walked back from the baño. Frank was doing the same.
“We’re going to be serenaded tonight,” he said.
“I could listen to this all night,” I said.
VI. Compliments
The security guard has a dog with him. Not a bad gig. The boys in the tent next to me have thankfully stopped playing the game they made up. The game involves loudly punching a ball or maybe it’s a balloon. They’re having fun, I don’t want to hold it against them. I used to love making up games. Playing with my brother, or neighborhood friends. You can play a game of not letting the balloon hit the ground. My brother cracked his head open that way but otherwise ad hoc games are a great way to pass the time.
With the ball game over, I can focus once again on the sound of acoustic guitar in the night. Layers of sound. The guitar, his singing, traffic along one of the gas roads. North Star Gas.
Now the guards are changing shifts. Uh oh. Darn. The guitarist has gone away. Tim went and talked to him while he was still playing. ”Me gusta,” Tim told him. Tim’s a guitarist in the church band. I’m glad someone went and paid our troubadour a compliment.
Which reminds me. I want to give a shout out to our crew. I worked hard today and so did our crew. There were many members of our team who worked all day long, never seeming to take a break. I enter the work day with prejudged notions about who is going to kick ass and who might sit back. My first guesses are so often wrong and useless.
We had several crew members absolutely attack the foundation work. They were constantly tamping and screeding. It’s hard work, crouched down in the dirt holding opposite ends of a twelve-foot two-by-four across the burgeoning pad, sliding the two-by-four back and forth (screeding). Picking up the end of the two-by-four and letting it thud down against the wet concrete (tamping).
I was working mostly on mixing the concrete in the troughs. And sifting sand, which doesn’t sound terribly productive until you realize that you are out of pure sand. When the materials are delivered to the site, the sand is often mixed with the gravel. You can make much better, consistent concrete if you separate the sand out from the gravel. It’s a matter of making the recipe exact. If the gravel is mixed in with the sand, you tend to end up with too much gravel and not enough sand in the concrete. We didn’t sift enough last year. It’s essential.
Today, the sifting operation was running all-day. We use sifting frames, rectangular wooden frames with screen fastened inside the frame. Take a shovel of the sand-and-gravel, dump it onto the screen, and shake it. The sand falls through the screen, into a wheelbarrow beneath. Sift until the wheelbarrow is full of clean sand. Toss the gravel to the side, make a pile of pure gravel.
We poured the second half of the concrete pad a lot faster than the first half. I guess we got into a rhythm. We brought pump sprayers along on the trip this year. Filled with water, they make it easy to mist the poured concrete, to keep it wet and workable; to keep it from drying out too quickly in the hot Tijuana sun.
That widow is on this tent! On the mesh of a turned-down window flap! I flicked it off. Jeepers. Was it drawn to the red light of my headlamp? I had a pretty good view of the hourglass mark on that spider’s belly. I had been running black widow spider bite scenarios through my mind but then I told myself to stop, stop worrying, stop projecting.
Then the widow I wouldn’t stomp on yesterday was crawling along the outside of my tent, looking for a way in. That’s enough for tonight. In the light of my headlamp I watch dust motes, particulate matter, smoke. They fire brick kilns near here at night. The smoke hangs like a haze, ready to greet you in the early light of morning….
This was part two of my 2023 Tijuana Trip blog. You can read part one here. This will end up being a four- or five-part series. Thanks for reading…
The Writing of John B. Randall 