Burning Through VI - Casting Back while Moving Forward

Burning Through

I’m traveling blind now, heading south into the full length of the Baja. The first hour of this trip, to Ensenada, the first kilometers south of Tijuana peaks my interest. I begin to see and smell Mexico outside of the bus terminal and I like it. Arriving in Ensenada, I begin a series of firsts. First shower in over 3 days of bus travel, first sit down meal, first horizontal sleep…

I need rest and I begin a time of collection, collecting my thoughts, assessing possibilities, resting and gaining strength.

My mind peels back through my journey to here, specifically my Greyhound melting pot rollick through America. There was Portland on the first snowy night of winter, the first of many Greyhound delays. I am one of many Los Angeles bound travelers in a weary line snaking through the station. There is not much to do in the line up but talk to the guy in front of me. Hence, through Hans, I am introduced to Republican America.

Hans is: Swiss Texan, Spanish speaking, Special Military Forces, Canadian criminal code studying, Republican bible thumping American. He tells me has just come from Vancouver where he wore his black US law enforcement officer gear “to scare all the pinko Canadians.” “Why do you allow your immigrants to stay separate in their little communities?” I make an unimpressive attempt to explain the rationale for multiculturalism, that encouraging and celebrating cultural diversity promotes social cohesion, but he dismisses this as typical Canadian liberalism.

It’s okay, we agree to disagree. There is a nano second of silence before he once again waves his Republican stripes. “I love George Bush, he has been the savior of America. In fact I worship Him.”

I … I … I don’t quite know how to respond. I know he is provoking me, inciting reaction. This is when 12 years of yoga and reflection comes in handy. I stumble, “ You … you must be upset with the election of Obama.“ Dismissive, he moves us to the next topic. I am both repulsed and attracted to him, using the opportunity to test my resolve, to remain present and engaged with somebody whose world view is so opposite to mine. His mixture of strong opinions and open mind intrigues me.

The bus trip will present many of these kinds of opportunities. Ear plugs and traveling pillow will not shelter me from the social hurricane that whips around me. America is on the move for the holidays. She stops at all night gas stations, stalked with 7-11 hoagies, jumbo soft drinks, and complete with grease puking taco bell franchise. Greyhound America is fat with fast food. Over the course of two days my bus mates change but stay the same. I recognize several who stood in line with me on the frozen dark tarmac off Main Street at the Vancouver terminal.

You share a bus trip with people for 12 hours or more and you begin to imagine a brotherhood. Yet, this brotherhood has separate agendas. We all just want to get to our destination. Sooner rather than later.

Now here I am in Ensenada. All of that seems like a dream now. My sights are set on what lay south of here, down the long stretch of desert to the south. I’ve gathered a few destinations from a conversation in a coffee shop and make plans to leave the next day. Time is running out. Christmas is in 2 days and I want to be somewhere warm and sunny before Feliz Navidad. Where will I go?

Burning Through V - The Abandonment of Sonora

Burning Through

It’s 12:35 pm Tijuana time. I’ve been standing in this line for 8 hours now. For the last 3 hours I’ve been crushed up against the counter pleading my destination – Hermosillo, Hermosillo, Hermosillo – the capital of Sonora. Why I wonder am I so intent on this destination? It looked great on the map I bought from Wanderlust -The Travelers store on west 4rth, a few blocks down from my warm, cushy apartment in safe, predictable, latte infused Kitsalino.

The blips of hope about Sonora have diminished in the past hour as I have begun to truly understand the motives of the Stone Face and his green jacketed accomplices.

To my left is the Aquila ticket counter. The wall board lists Baja destinations, increasing in price the further down the list I scan – the further you travel south. The prices are in pesos - $110 is the cheapest ticket – to Ensenada. I recall that name when I was studying my map back in Vancouver, but I know little else than I may be able to afford the ticket.

There’s no bank around to cash a travelers cheque and the bank machine in the terminal is out of funds. All I have left is $10 USD. Is 10 bucks more or less than 110 pesos? If I go over there and ask, I loose my position in the crush against the greyhound counter. I need a ticket out of here and at least 3 pesos to pay to get into the bus terminal bathroom. Let’s just say the pressure for a decision is building in many ways.

For the past 2 hours the Aquila lady has been shouting out Baja destinations trying to attract customers. I dismissed her at first because my intention was to go to Sonora, on the opposite side of the Sea of Cortez from the Baja, but in the last 20 minutes the prospect of being on the road to anywhere has started to grow in my mind as a reasonable idea.

In a flash, so fast I can’t remember the actual decision, I am standing in front of Ms. Aquila and in another flash I have a ticket to Ensenada, and 63 pesos change, enough for an orange crush and a trip to the bathroom.

In an instant my whole trip has turned south. Yet the prospect of being on the road moving south to warmer climes lifts a burden of bus station confusion from my mind and I leave the ticket counter feeling elated. I gather my kit and bust out of the international section, buy a pop and slip my 3 pesos in the bathroom turnstile. I have fond memories of one particular Tijuana bathroom stall. It was a liberating moment knowing I would soon be on the road – feeling a little lighter. Where I am going and where I am going from there is unknown. But … alas, I am going.

Waking Up

There is that wonderful moment when our consciousness flirts between the world of dreams and being awake, when you can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy, when just for that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened. Then you are ‘awake’, and your mind starts to mull over the images and dream impressions - scanning ahead to the tactile facts of being awake. Waking up – what is this?

This morning: I am falling from 10 story bridge before I emerge and find myself perspiration soaked peering at the yellow light of my alarm clock - 5:30. Dam … I know there will be no more sleep this night despite the damp gloom of an October morning. The rain pelting against my window makes me want to curl up for more, but I toss and turn myself out of the covers.


There are the mechanics of waking up. Mine starts with scrubbing the fuzz off my teeth followed by a splash of cold water to my stubbled face. The water snaps me into a new place of awake, one that moves me into imagining the day ahead - usually job related and sometimes involving a conversation I am going to have with my boss where I make myself sound really intelligent and ‘right.’. But I am not truly awake as I move to the kitchen and flick the switch on my single cup coffee machine. It gurglers and sputters away, the aroma of Sumatra Dark Roast filling the space.

This is certainly one kind of waking up - waking up from physical sleep. Sleep involves dreaming and therefore waking up is awakening from the dream world. Dreams are metaphors from daily life and life can be thought of as metaphor for something greater. Something greater … hmm … so this is where God enters the picture. She’s always hanging around.

Some may think of God as an ‘idea’ conveniently constructed to be a mental refuge from the slings and arrows of the tangible struggles of conscious life. Whether God is an idea or a force is for everyone to reconcile. To my mind, God is no more an idea than Me. In fact, the idea of Me is the thing that stands in the way of truly waking up.

My encounters with any world beyond the physical are all too infrequent and often vicarious. At a recent personal growth workshop the group of well meaning middle aged ladies I was sharing my personal struggles with were imploring me to -“Go to the Light James,” as if it was some place just around the corner, past the Seven Eleven.

I believe in this place they are pointing to, yet belief isn’t enough. Really waking up means direct experience but the mind is so tricky. Even getting hit on the head can fool the best of us.
In the Hollywood movie, Leap of Faith, Steve Martin plays a struggling evangelical who pleads God for “some kind sign” that He exists. After getting hit square on the head with a bolt of lightening, Martin picks himself up off the ground charred and smoking from the lightening strike and pleads one more time – “Just some kind of sign!”

Sometimes waking up means waking up to the facts. But facts get lost over time because memory is very unreliable. Until the advent of written language there was no way to retain personal or cultural memory except through the stories or symbols that would get passed on from generation to generation. However, a story is not evidence, it is a recounting of an event filtered through the mind of the story teller. Facts exist in the present. For example, you can be sure that you are sitting here right now, listening to me or reading this. Everything before this and after this is recounting or speculation.

Carl Sagan in his seminal work Dragons of Eden hypothesized there is a collective mammalian memory that goes back to the first primitive shrews. The implication here is that deep within each of us is the memory of our most distant ancestors, from shrews to the first monkey like humans.

This is like waking up to the recognition that I am connected to something primordial. That’s a big thought. But the connection to the primordial may exist through language. I can hear my old linguistics professor pontificating, “Language is our greatest invention!,” followed by, “Spoken language, in brief, is a series of agreed upon sounds and gestures that add up to communication.” Imagine an elder Homo Erectus sitting quietly in the African forest – his mind fills with Light and he utters a guttural hmmgh. Two million years of human evolution later, we have created a word out of that first sound or grunt - God. Is this what Carl Sagan meant?

Waking up - the Zen call it Satori; Buddhists Nirvana; Hindu Kundalini; Christians Christ Consciousness, ... all of these are names to describe something that can only be understood by direct experience. Language has not evolved to the point that can describe these experiences. And when somebody does try to describe one of these awakening moments the result is most of us create mental impressions of what these experiences are. Those mental impressions then become the obstacle to the experience. Further, when some kind of feeling or experience of true awakening happens we often doubt it because it doesn’t match the image or impression we have formed of how it is supposed to look or feel.

This is the trap and promise of waking up. We may never accept when or if we are truly awake, yet we keep opening our eyes wider. Beyond all of the big ideas, perhaps the only thing we can really rely on is what is happening now. I tell myself that as I regale in my first haze dispelling caffeinated breath of the day. Phew!

Burning Through IV - Stone Face, Toothy and Chicano

Burning Through


Some time around 9:00 am I am awoken by commotion. I have fallen asleep sitting on my pack, head in hands. I stand up and look to the bus counter.

There is a young confident bus ticket man issuing transfer tickets, he has a ticket writing female assistant. I watch his eyes. Do they reveal anything? I can’t recall such stone face confidence before. The twitch below his eye indicates there is emotional life inside, but other than that, he could be playing poker, and likely is with us. He is half Ricky Martin cute and half Al Pacino tough. Mid 30’s, early 40’s at best.

There is a crush of people at the counter and remarkably he is immune to the pressure. Desperate travelers like myself, everybody dependant on him to grant us a ticket. A desperate crush and he stands stone faced. Later on I will recognize the agenda. He serves the bus company and only wants to fill seats with pre purchased tickets to the furthest destinations - Guadalajara and Mexico City.

I am now at the counter, edging forward after two young women and their family, my early morning translators, get their tickets to Guadalajara. They are the second group to get their tickets.
I stand now, totally at the mercy of Stone Face; ocationally I receive a gesture that which indicates my Greyhound adventure will continue. These subtle nods are enough to keep me standing at the counter for hours. Too many hours.

I look around and see some of my LA bus terminal companions, several Mexicans I have had wordless communication with. Behind me, the beautiful grandfather, his tan olive skin and perfect teeth. I appreciated his conciliatory smiles when we were in LA, agreeing about bus terminal madness. Now we are in Tijuana, in line together again.

There are 2 young men. One Chicano, with shaved head, ball cap visor turned to the side, earrings on both sides with a black shadowed face. He and his road friend are trying to get to Mazatlan. They are going on a Christmas beach holiday.

Every time Stone Face swings through the door, Chicano desperately repeats ‘Mazatlan, Mazatlan.’ The door represents liberation, behind it is the escape zone. It’s where those who are granted tickets slip away from the crowds and crying babies. Beyond the door, each of us has a personal heaven, our ticket destination.

Chicano’s friend, a large guy, shaven head and a big toothy smile is leaning up against another bus ticket counter. He is keen on the young attendent. Perfect black hair, and dark suit, with tight black stockings, heavily massacred eyes cover the face of a 20 year old at most. Toothy is spending his idle time entertaining her. This makes his eyes happy. There is some kind of deal he and Chicano have worked out. Chicano is waiting in the line with me pleading his case, while Toothy spends his time exerting his Latino testosterone.

Chicano pulls a trick, his pleading tips a favor from Stone Face. He is now on his way to Mazatlan and Toothy has to drop the attendant and stand in line for himself. His toothy smile drops. This is not the scenario he worked out in his mind. Now he is a poor pleading campesino, like the rest of us. We wait. My resolve is weakening.

Burning Through III - TJ Dreaming

Burning Through

Surely with my Greyhound ticket I must be one of the privileged. This thought is dashed soon after, when wading through the sleep deprived crowds, I realize I am but one of the minions. A potential bum in the seat for one of the 15 Mexican bus companies operating out of Tijuana Central, all whom are over booked with passengers, short of busses, short on drivers, short on civility.

I am the first from our greyhound into the station. The shock comes when all of the signs are in Spanish. Dugh – I’m in Mexico bright boy, what did you expect? I have achieved my goal, to make it to Mexico from Vancouver by bus. Now what?

With that thought comes the faint memory and realization that the bus I was on did not stop at the Mexican border. For a moment I am slightly confused. Is Tijuana actually in Mexico?? Yes, yes, I am in Mexico. But I really don't remember passing through customs. This cannot be good. So the anxiety arising from not understanding what I am supposed to do with the Greyhound ticket I have builds with the thought that I am now in Mexico - Without a Tourist Permit.

I scan the scene. The “international area” is jammed to over flowing. Little blue couches are filled with travelers sleeping or glazed eyed starring off into space. I make my way through luggage and legs towards the bus company counters. I see a Greyhound logo and head over there. Approaching the desk I recall some traveling Spanish I learned 16 years before and attempt to ask the blank face on the other side where I need to go to get my connecting bus. She motions to the counter beside us, where there are now 15 people from the bus I was on, all of whom are now ahead of me. Damn - and nobody is behind the counter. Esperar. Wait. I am now one of the waiting crowd.

There is a counter and behind the counter a computer and a door. We all stand there waiting - watching the door. Some of the people I was on the bus with speak English. I feel we are brethren. We stood in line in LA waiting for 4 hours and now we are standing in line again. It’s us against Greyhound. Surely my English speaking Mexican brothers and sisters will advocate for me – Dream on. We are all in this Mexican bus terminal nightmare together. “What do we do,” I ask. We stand here and wait for somebody to come one of the young girls says to me. We stand, we sit on our luggage, we watch the door.

Burning Through II – Thus Begins the TJ Waiting Game

Burning Through

Where do you go when you've been dumped by Greyhound in the Tijuana bus terminal at 4:00 am. Nowhere. That’s the stuffy truth to it. Fact is that there is no Greyhound in Mexico, only an affiliate bus company who are supposed to take Greyhound tickets and through some rudimentary refund process, place your butt in the seat of one of their buses. But it doesn’t quite work that way. In fact, after waiting for 8 hours, I still don’t know how it works.

Spanish. If you don’t speak Spanish it’s like being handicapped 100 strokes in a game against Tiger Woods. I don’t speak Spanish. I didn’t realize my handicap till a little too late in the game. My Canadian sense of fairness tells me my ticket should have some bearing on the outcome. And truth be known I am banking on a little foreigner sympathy. Naivety doesn’t put my bum in a seat.

So much of the wait is about filling in my pointillist picture of assumptions based on gestures and facial expression. Paul Ekman’s study of faces in Emotions Revealed helps me when people are displaying the classic universal gestures – anger, fear, sadness, being thwarted; but 4:00 am in a Tijuana bus station is not a place or time to decipher the nuances of Latino facial gestures. Lesson - What I think I know probably isn’t happening. What is happening is a mystery.

Crowds: It’s 3 days before Christmas. Mexicans are on the move. They are heading home to see families for the holiday. The bus station is jammed. My bus empties out into the international area of the bus station. Through the glass I see a long tall hallway with hundreds of travelers standing, sitting, and sleeping on luggage. It leaves me feeling stranded and helpless from the beginging. If this is where people are at when I arrive, is that going to be me in 5 or 6 hours, sleeping on the concrete floor winging for a bus?

Burning Through - By Bus to Baja and Back

Something deep inside needed to move. It had been needing to move, to go south for a long time. The prospect of a two week break from the office job sparked a thought to get on a bus headed south. Yes, really. To the Baja by bus. Everybody said, don't do it. But the burning inside was too strong to listen.

Greyhound. Sharing the journey with the great American melting pot. Melting to the unending interruptions and announcements, delayed departures and missed connections.

When something inside burns for long enough sometimes you have to act on it. Burning Through is the accounting of this journey.

Musings on Loneliness, Lawn Mowers and Homing Pigeons

It’s Halloween night and I’m scared. Loneliness lurks like an old familiar ghost, in fact I smell it like it’s just around the corner. I have an Orwellian thought. I’ll put my head in a rats cage like Orwell’s Winston and take a walk down Hastings Street. This scares the shiny Gortex off my back. I’m close, just off Granville Street. I take an about face, away from the Japanese girl dressed up in her Mariachi outfit, away from the masks and costumes. Tonight everybody is trying to be somebody else. Tonight you can become your fantasy, the person you could never be. Its a celebration of the unreal. That’s Koko under the handlebar mustache, her empty guitar case strapped to her back. Tonight she is Javier De la Alhambra, riding off on the Tehuantepec Railway. Imagine her round trip during the night, playing for cowboys and peasants in clunky railcars. She makes a few pesos to feed herself, she finds a cigarette butt under a seat, the smoke in her lungs brings calm. She’s not lonely tonight though, she’s with her Japanese mariachi friends. Behind me now are the night-clubs and testosterone fueled bravado of Halloween in the downtown core. Ahead it gets truly scary. Ahead east of Cambie, Hastings dives towards the lost and forgotten where fantasy is a different movie. To some it may be a found pack of cigarettes or a Mickey of vodka, or enough coin to buy a few pitchers of beer in the Grande Union pub or better yet, a night-room at the Austin hotel.

I pass victory square. Its a victory for me to cross Cambie street. Keep heading east I tell myself. If you keep moving you are safe. Keep moving. If you stop they will latch on to you. I cross the street. A Long Hair yells – Weed!? I keep walking. No I don’t want weed. It’s raining and everything is dripping. Buses splash by, rain splatters off the overhang of the Grande Union hostel. The City has put up lamp posts to brighten the area up. What the light reveals is dark. I can’t see their eyes but I know there are tears in those stubbled and scared faces, smoking as they wait, leaning forlorn against the side of the building waiting for the doors to open. A man with his head in his hands blurts to the guy beside him, Another bloody hour and a half! It’s a wet wait for a lonely room in a stinky hotel.

It’s Halloween. The deeper I dive into Hastings street, the more my legs feel like jelly. A crowd ahead at the Golden Crown Pub. I peer inside as I slowly walk past. The place is packed, there are no Halloween costumes here, it’s enough just to have the clothes on your back. People are outside smoking, there are two young guys who know each other. Howze it going … howze yur Mom? Oh I’dun know, same old. Same old same old eh? People care. Caring is a currency where currency is lacking. I keep walking. It is Halloween and I’m afraid of what people will do when their minds are overwhelmed by substances. I keep moving and I pass a native guy stumbling side to side. He wobbles close to me on the wide sidewalk. I smell the boozy desperation and lurch out of the way. The streets are full of people. Little crises erupt here and there. I hear people caring for each other. There is a nylon tent on the sidewalk, an women are gathered around it. A scraggly haired woman explains the vigil she is on for her missing friend. The tent has 7 candles sitting on a chair. One for each month Sally has been gone. I sleep out here waiting.


Lonely lawn mower
There are men with shopping carts on the sidewalk under a temporary safety roof built for a construction site. They are selling what ever they can, what ever they have from their daytime gatherings in alleyways. They are selling but there are no customers. One is emerging out of a glue sniffing haze. Body shaking his hand reaches out to the wall for balance as he wobbles and stumbles, pulling himself up to lean on his shopping cart home and retail store. Then I pass it. A lawn mower. It sits angled towards a paint peeled storefront with its black metal grates. The light is dim and I smell puke and piss. I haven’t seen a blade of grass all night. There’s only one way a lawn mower can get here. I can see him now. Pushing the stolen machine through the streets. He stops between two street vendors. They sit alone with their cardboard on the sidewalk displaying trinkets, random clothing and fake jewelry. He parks his big ticket item. He is full of hope, a sale might mean a beer swilling good time. I wonder what the going price is for a stolen lawn mower in October where there is no grass? It’s hard to think straight down here. Loneliness and it’s substance abuse sidekick twist rational thinking out of the mind like tears out of a damp handkerchief. There’s no grass and there is no reason for anybody to buy it. Now it sits in the dark light angled into the wall. The salesman probably faces his own wall. Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow in the day light. There it sits. Dark lit lonely lawn mower.


Homing Pigeons
The Homing Pigeon has been bred so it can find it’s way home over long distances. At Pigeon Park it’s a different flock of birds. The benches and brick provide a temporary perch for the lost, here they find safety with the flock. Loneliness is the biggest disease down here. I’m acutely aware of it I don’t want to catch it. Keep moving I say. But Charlie John with his big brown sad eyes stops me. Gotta few minutes to talk to me? He is distracted and disoriented. I smell the beer on his breath. An argument over empty bootles erupts on the bench behind Charlie. I live down here and I love it, he says. Why would he love it I wonder? I’m looking for something. I won’t know what till I find it. All the pigeons tonight have flown here for their own reasons. Few, I suspect, stay here for their own reasons. All of them are driven by the constant demand of substances. But the real affliction is loneliness. Loneliness is the vortex that pulls this collection of pain and loss together.

Loneliness stinks I say to myself. I’m going home.