A red light in the night

On a sunny day in September 2003, I boarded a train and spent nearly an hour watching a city I didn’t know pass by. A smile I couldn’t help sat on my face the whole time. I had just arrived in London.

I hoped to do the same in Mexico. My plan, when I was booking my ticket, was to arrive in Mexico City early in the day and ride to San Miguel while it was still light. I wouldn’t have a guide, but I wouldn’t have understood what was said if I did. And you don’t need one. Watching a foreign land roll by is a mix of the banal and the surreal. You see houses, cars, signs. Like always. Yet, the images are tweaked. Bare concrete homes sit next to snazzy billboards. Men in Nike sweatshirts walk with baskets balanced on their heads. The car passing your bus could fit in the bed of your neighbor’s pickup. The signs, despite their brevity, are tellingly different in their mix of suggestion and imperative.

Yet it was not to be. I got to Mexico City so late I nearly spent the night, and thus all but the beginning of the four hour bus ride passed in darkness. I didn’t even have a chance for unsuccessful conversation: in front and behind me my fellow riders slept. Silence on the bus was broken only by a mysterious bleeping that emitted from the front of the cab, which I solved only after some serious squinting at a red light that would illuminate in time with the noise; once in focus, the light turned to characters: “85 km/ph”. Our driver was setting off the speeding alert.

But we did make one brightly lighted, slow-paced detour. I woke from a light sleep nearly an hour from our destination to find the bus on an uneven dirt road. Looking out the window, I saw modest houses and small fields stretching alongside the road. After a moment, we passed another bus on the side of the road and slowed to a stop in front of it. A minute later, people began boarding the bus. Their bus had broken down. They filled the seats. They filled the aisles. And when the bus was packed from back wall to the front step, we took off again. And, soon enough, the bus began bleeping.