Date:         Fri, 6 Apr 2007 20:28:52 -0600
Reply-To:     Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@GWTC.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@GWTC.NET>
Subject:      Friday bus story
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

In early March, 1974 my friends Rob, Kim & Sharon and I rebuilt the 1300

in my 66 westy camper the week before heading to Mexico for a two month
quest to find the perfect beach.  I'd sucked a valve moving my stuff
from Stockton, CA to Santa Rosa, pulling the grade after Petaluma before
Cotati on Hwy 101.

This trip had lots and lots of stories that when Rob and I get together
entertain his 16 year old.  Of course we leave out the sub-theme of also
being on a search for pot while down there, and the efforts we went to
to get high without anyone knowing it.

We were all 22 years old and relatively new college grads.  We got the
engine together and turned it over.  Rattle, RATTLE, RATTLE, RATTLE.

Kurt & Ziggy, or German mechanic/advisors diagnosed wrong sized rod
bearings.  We didn't get it out of the driveway and had to strip it all
the way down to cracking the case.  Uninstalled and stripped in three
hours.  New rod bearings, and a day later we're ready to turn it over
again.  This time it purred like a kitten.

We found our perfect beach.  It was about 30 miles from the nearest
paved road at Tecoman, at the mouth of the river that forms the border
between Colima and Michoacan, I think it is.  The name of the town was
Boca de Apiza.  It took us two weeks of wandering, starting with surfing
at Mantachen Bay, countless dirt roads from the highway to the coast and
back.  When we left Tecoman, we were going on directions given us by a
storeowner who'd taken a liking to us and invited us to his house for
mid-day dinner.  We'd written them down, but we were well into the
second case of beer and spent a goodly amount of time puzzling out what
we'd written.

The roads down there were like flat ski slopes, huge bumps across the
road channeling water between them.  Some of them were so big I had to
drive at a 45 degree angle for fear of bottoming out.  I learned this by
watching the rattle-trap cars on the road.  Needless to say, when we
drove it later, it took over two hours to drive the 30 or so miles.

While surfing I stepped on a sting ray and was zapped with its tail
right in the heel.  It was incredibly painful, and to my horror, the
pain grew and grew, moving slowly up my leg.  I got out of the ocean and
sat down on the beach and just monitored the pain as it moved up my
leg.  My friend came in asking what I was doing, and I told him.  I'd
made my peace and was ready to die.  I figured the poison would move up
my leg, and eventually hit my heart and POOF!!!  It was a good life.

Kim made me limp up to the restaurant of the people who built us a two
room palapa for the month we were there.  Kim told Maria I'd been stung
by "uno rayo" and she laughed and said she had what would fix me up.
She moved her barrel shaped body over to the five gallon water jug
filled with "alcohol" and poured out 12 ounces into a glass.  No ice, no
water, just really low grade tequila, or the fermented remains of some
other cactus.  It worked.  The pain located itself on the inside of my
thigh and went no higher.  I, on the other hand, had a couple of these
large glasses of alcohol and felt no pain.

But none of this is the story I sat down here to tell.

During the first week of the month we spent in Boca de Apiza we lived on
the beach, down from the little village of a couple hundred people,
either fisherman families and well off for the area, or plantation
workers, who weren't so well off.  The coconut plantation was miles and
miles in extent, and came down to the end of the beach.  A great place
for scorpion and tarantula hunting.  During this week thousands of
people moved to the beach as part of celebrating Easter.  The first day
we're there and it's just the village, us and the great white beach and
pounding ocean waves.  Slowly people began arriving, until there were
literally thousands.

We'd staked claim to a roof held up by sturdy poles that had survived
the hurricane of a couple years before t hat had devastated the
village.  It was the only shade on the beach.  It was the oddest feeling
to live under it because there were always at least 20 children and
sometimes adults sitting/squatting and just watching us.  It was like we
were in a zoo.  I think half the reason the adult men were there was
Sharon's white blond hair and skimpy pink bikini.  They went away only
at dusk, thankfully.

On one of these days three young men in very nice city clothes walked up
and sat down in our space.  They had two bottles of rum.  They insisted
we drink with them, so we sat down to a day of drinking.  One of the men
was a school teacher and the other two were foremen from the coconut
plantation.  We ran out of rum after a couple hours - seven people
drinking seriously - and started in on beer bought at the restaurant
from the family that eventually built us our two room palapa next door
to them.

We moved to the restaurant for dinner and continued to drink.  As the
night wore on we moved from relatively expensive beer to relatively
inexpensive alcohol.  All of us were blasted by the time the teacher
said that he and his buddies needed to get home.  It turns out they'd
missed the bus back to their village - busses had stopped running it was
true.  They expected me to take them home.  I was in no shape to drive,
but hey, I couldn't go more than 15 mph, and who cared if I was heading
out into a maze of dirt roads with no signs.

Rob came with me and the five of us got in the bus.  I drove, but don't
remember anything other than getting to a village and saying goodbye to
the three of them.  The goodbye was said with each of us chugging a
jelly jar of alcohol.  Now I was really wasted.  I started to drive and
realized I couldn't do it.  Luckily Rob wasn't as self-destructive as I
and was able to drive.  It was the oddest thing.  As we left the village
there were a couple hitchhiking.  This was 11PM in the middle of
nowhere, and here are hitchhikers!!!

Rob stopped and they got in, very thankful and glad.  The man was a
young English lord on a five year "tour" of the world.  He was painfully
shy and oh so attentive to the woman he was travelling with.  She was
from Japan, but her father was a big-time diplomat and she spoke both
English and Spanish as well as Japanese, and probably a couple other
languages.  She lived in an "other world."  They'd hooked up a couple
months before and would split at some point it felt like.  Casual
travellers in the hinterlands of Mexico.

We got back to Boca de Apiza after asking directions of people out
walking the dark dirt roads.  I didn't.  I was too far gone.  When we
arrived we poured out of the bus, or all of us but the woman.  She just
sat there.  I was way gone and stumbled over to her asking what she was
doing.  She said that a voice had told her that this bus was going to
take her to Central America.  "What?"  I ejaculated?  I didn't think I'd
heard her.  She said that my bus was going to take her to Central
America.  She said this with a simplicity that was sandpaper on my
drunkenness.  The way she looked at me, expecting me to accede to her
wish, drove me up a wall.

Normally I'm a peaceable guy.  I told her in no uncertain terms that
this bus was not going to Central America.  She just smiled.  By this
time her boyfriend and my friends had come over to the bus and she told
her boyfriend to get in, that we were leaving.  I stood there just
flabbergasted.  I told her again that we weren't going anywhere, and
would she please get out of the bus.  She sweetly motioned her boyfriend
to get in.  He shrugged his shoulders and did so.  She whispered in his
ear and he got out and got his backpack.

I got in front of him and said no way was he getting in the bus.  He was
so helpless, me, a big, drunk American standing between him and his
paramour, who in part, was obviously living in a world that wasn't
shared by anyone else.  My friend Rob intervened and told me he'd take
care of this.  I was verbally abusive and disbelieving this was
happening.  Apparently the woman was convinced the bus wasn't leaving
for central america because she finally got out.  But I didn't know
this.  I ended up out on the beach retching my guts out.  I'd drank so
much that day that I would pass out, wake up, retch, pass out, wake up,
and retch again.  At one point I found my head in Robert's lap.  I was
thankful.  I didn't puke on him!

The next morning I woke to the hangover to end all hangovers, and was
greeted by Maria, the restauranter's wife, with a jelly jar of alcohol.
She just smiled.  I slowly remembered what had happened last night and
anxiously walked over to the bus.  It was just parked.  I opened it up,
expecting to find t he crazy woman and her synchophant, but it was
empty.  Apparently they'd left after being refused the bus, heading out
down dirt roads into their own probably odd and event-filled futures.

The family built us our palapa and we ate two meals a day at their
restaurant.  Chorizo and eggs in the morning with all different kinds of
freshly squeezed fruit juices, 50 cents, and dinner, usually fish caught
that day, with rice and beans, 6 pesos or 75 cents.  We surfed and took
our little two man rubber raft up the river through the reeds into
alligator land - eerie to hear one slither from the bank and enter the
water, but not see it.  AFter a month we were skinny and tan and our
hair had bleached blond from sun and sea.  The pictures we have of our
adopted family and their home show four youngsters out in the world and
loving it.

We'd spent two weeks looking for the perfect beach/experience and found
it.  Looking at a map of Mexico now there is a paved highway that goes
down the coast from Tecoman to Acapulco.  In 1974 we were oddities to
the denizens of Boca de Apiza.  They hadn't seen all that many anglos.
We had a pack stolen by Indios who escaped by boat.  There were dirt
roads to their village two hours down the coast, but we were warned not
to pursue - that they carried guns, and there was no law down there.

Jeff Olson
Martin, SD, where it's been snowing all day...