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 by Jane Bow

The Angel’s Share: A Cretan Grape Harvest

As winter Covid cases surge, why not escape with me to a grape harvest in sunny Crete, home to Zeus, Aphrodite and the angels who share in every barrel of fermenting wine?

Earth, sky, rocks and sea fill my creative reserves when I am in Crete. Often, when the moon is laying its silvery path across a silent Lybian Sea at 4:30 am the Muses whip me. Now, holed up in white, disease-heavy Canada, I am working on The Angel’s Share, my new heist novel about sex and love, grapes and wine, and a $2 million bottle of cognac. Did the angels send me Anna Maria Kambourakis, a wonderful sommelier, owner of Chania Wine Tours, and writer of unravelingwine.com? She and her husband Vasilis Kokologiannakis came into my life last year when I was researching The Angel’s Share. Now Anna Maria has sent me this description and pictures of her family’s wine harvest in October. Reading it will lift your spirits, I promise!

On October 1st we harvested our Romeiko vineyards here in Crete, 75 years after Vasili’s grandfather planted the vines in 1945. The vineyards were the Kokologiannakis family’s main source for wine until 1973 

when Vasili’s father left for the United States. With no one left behind to care for the vineyards, the vines grew out of control. When Vasili arrived in Crete in 2013, the vines were unmanageable and were desperate for care. Vasili revitalized the vineyards by pruning and creating support systems for vines that had fallen over. 

This growing season was quite difficult. Hornets were eating all the grapes! Vasili set up traps around the vineyard in hopes of saving the crop. There were thousands and thousands of hornets in the traps every time he replaced them. We operate Chania Wine Tours but this year, thanks to the pandemic, the tourism season came to a standstill. The silver lining to this was that Vasili had the time to properly care for his vineyards. 

Harvesting in Crete is a family affair. Close friends and relatives are invited to participate. We borrowed baskets from our neighbor, Antonis, and borrowed the crusher/destemmer from our son’s godfather, Nikos. Wine equipment is expensive and everyone borrows what they need from other people in the village.

Everyone grabbed their shears and headed up the hill behind the family home to the small vineyard of Romeiko. The grapes were perfect! Very few bunches had been eaten by the hornets. Because of the care Vasili gave the vineyard by pruning and stabilizing the vines correctly, the grapes were easily accessible and easy to harvest. 

Romeiko is the most widely planted grape of western Crete. It is a red grape though many of the bunches never turn purple. Farmers need to be careful that the grapes don’t get too ripe because Romeiko can get quite high in alcohol. Our grapes were harvested at 14% potential alcohol. Harvesting the small vineyard took less than an hour with all the great helpers we had. We brought in over one ton of grapes!!! That’s enough to make 2 barrels of wine.

The truck was filled with all the baskets of grapes and brought down to the garage for crushing and destemming. Our friend, Bobby, emptied the baskets into the machine. Crushing the grapes releases the sweet juice from the inside of the grape to begin fermentation in the plastic bin below. The destemmer is supposed to remove the stems but the machine we borrowed is quite old and did a pretty bad job of it. That’s okay with Romeiko because the stems add a bit of tannin to the wine for much needed structure and ageing ability. 

Back at the house, Vasili’s mom and I were busy cooking up a feast for everyone who came to help. (Masks are not necessary outdoors here because Crete’s Covid numbers are very low.) We served lamb with rice, salads, stuffed zucchini flowers, tzatziki, green beans, and handcut french fries for the kids. Vasili’s father was grilling pork chops and chicken wings on the barbeque all night. Of course, pitchers and pitchers of last years’ wine was served to our wonderful guests. Drinking and eating lasted throughout the night. 

Vasili heads up to the village every other day to check on the status of this year’s wine. It is bubbling along and will complete the fermentation process in the next couple of days. Vasili is thrilled with the results so far. 2020 is one of the best vintages yet for us!

After the first 5 days the wine was pressed away from the skins and put into barrels to continue fermentation. The wine will stay in the barrels until spring when it will be transferred to another barrel to separate it from the sediment that will fall to the bottom. It’ll stay in that new barrel until we drink it all! The skins are not wasted. They’ll be used in the next few weeks to make raki. Raki is the famous Cretan moonshine. The moonshine party is another great feast! 

Thank you, Anna Maria!

By the way, Anna Maria and Vasili are adventurers worthy of their own blog story. Read more about them here. 

in Novels / Travel / Uncategorized 0 comments
 by Jane Bow

Good Morning Canada, Who Are You?

A Trip West

 

When three invitations to present my new novel, Cally’s Way, arrived from Edmonton, my husband and I packed the trunk of our second-hand Volvo with books and hit the road.

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Canada today is very different from the country I knew growing up as the daughter of diplomats. Then, we were respected across the world as a thriving democracy and an international peacekeeper.

Last month our prime minister did not attend the U.N.’s summit meeting on climate change. Today’s Canada muzzles its scientists, harasses PEN Canada, which champions freedom of speech, does not even try to meet carbon reduction targets. Toronto, our biggest city, is run by a confessed drug addict.

What happened? How did that Canada become this Canada? Maybe driving across the country would yield some answers.

 

Days 1 & 2 – Behind the Pines

Fall is touching central Ontario’s sugar maples with red, orange, yellow, gold. Further north, pines that inspired Canada’s Group of Seven painters find purchase among the Canadian Shield’s granite crags and cliffs.

Chi-chi bakeries populate Muskoka Lakes towns where some of the country’s wealthiest families own summer homes, but drive north for a couple of hours and the scene changes.

Motels, gas stations, small businesses along the highway have been abandoned. Those that remain are suffering, their grocery shelves as bare as some I have seen in the third world. But, noticing my walking sticks, a store owner stops mopping the floor to help me.

No gas today. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Trees, trees and more trees line the highway. Cold, wind-whipped rain makes clear how powerful are the forces of Nature up here. Slide off the road or hit a moose and without help you will surely perish.

Billboards and signs offer clues to what goes on behind the trees:

Fishing and hunting lodges will fly in their clientele
When I was a junior reporter in Thunder Bay, I spent a weekend at one of these wilderness lodges, helping in the kitchen, exploring the river, playing penny card games late into the night. Forty-two years later the smell of frying bacon still takes me back into that wild peace.

You are now entering a First Nations reserve
A few years ago, while working in a Moose Factory school, I visited a Cree fishing camp on the mighty Moose River just south of James Bay. Hidden by brush, the camp was invisible until our canoes landed. We feasted on grilled, freshly caught fish, learned how to make a duck blind and mud decoys, then sat, silently waiting for the sound of wings. Knowing that each of us was one tiny breathing participant in the great dance of Nature. What a gift!

Violence against women must stop
Testimony during a murder trial I covered for the Chronicle-Journal in 1972 took me into a wilderness hunting camp near Long Lac. The accused was a slight, shy eighteen-year old boy. Waking in the night, hearing one of the older women crying for help in another tent, he found her struggling under a large, very drunk man — his uncle. He yelled, tried to wrestle the attacker. Could not pull him off. Finally, in desperation, he picked up the closest object, an axe, and buried in his uncle’s head. A court full of white men sent the boy to prison for life. Where, I wonder, is he now?

Impossibly blue Lake Superior, stretching as far as the horizon, is framed by red granite cliffs polished by the rain.

Barrick Mine
Just for a moment, the wall of trees breaks. A building and  pond are dwarfed by a pile of gravel as high as a hill.

Further west, more trees — deciduous, cedar, pine — all vying for every square inch of earth remind me of other parts of the world, where people of different races and faiths are battling each other for control of land they call home. When the rain lets up, blackened skeletal trunks appear where recent forest fires destroyed everything. Under them, light new-green growth has already begun.

Highways up here are new and beautiful. Cities we are passing through — Sault Ste. Marie, Thunder Bay, Dryden, Kenora — all have fast food joints and big box stores.  Is this where the money up here has gone?

 

Day 3 – Flatlands

Manitoba’s highway signs, in French as well as English, remind us that Francophone Canada does not live only in Quebec.

Fields here are huge, seas of yellow sunflowers. Rolled up hay bales advance like extra-terrestrial creatures from a humanless horizon. Platoons of silver silos wait for the grain and seed trucks throwing up dust along the side roads.

Welcome to big agro, farms owned by companies. You don’t need to be a farmer to feel the enormity of the change this has brought. Wooden homesteads nestled into little groves of planted trees lie empty now.

Above it all the prairie sky is the most magnificent living canvas I have ever seen.

Everything here is big. Trains so long you never see the last car carry cylindrical black tanker cars, and goods containers piled one on top of the other. A man I meet later in Edmonton, whose company is involved with the oil industry, tells me some of the chemicals being transported are lethal. I thank God the land is flat, the rail lines straight.

(Two weeks later, while writing this, I read that a train, derailed and on fire near a rural Saskatchewan village, is belching toxic smoke. Heaven help the people and flora and fawna there. Heaven help us all.)

Prairie villages and towns each have their own character. How did Mozart get its name? Langeburg’s central park is decorated with a painted Volkswagen. A hand-painted sign at the entrance to Churchbridge, Saskatchewan boasts of the two NHL hockey players it has produced.

Langenburg’s park
We can’t find an affordable place to stay in Saskatoon so we keep driving, arriving late at North Battleford’s lovely Gold Eagle Lodge. Next door, in the casino, people are shoving money into one-armed bandits, sitting around dimly-lit poker tables. It’s 10 pm and the restaurant is nearly empty, but the Gold Eagle’s “pig’s wings” are among the finest restaurant ribs I have eaten.

 

Day 4 & The last Crossing

Winding through low, tawny hills, the North Saskatchewan River valley has been an awesome passageway as long as humans have travelled between the Rocky Mountains and Saskatchewan. As we follow it, heading for Alberta, gigantic farming and construction machines and filthy oil tanker trucks rule the road. We are glad when Edmonton’s skyline appears.

The North Saskatchewan River cuts right through Edmonton. We walk along its banks. Readers welcome me and Cally’s Way. By the end of the festivities I am number two on the Journal’s fiction bestseller list, and it is time to head home.

Alberta’s southeastern cattle ranges come alive, thanks to Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels, particularly The Last Crossing. Then, at Wild Horse, we find a lone guard defending Canada’s border.

Highways are under construction all across Canada and the United States. City exit ramps are clogged with cars, pick-up and transport trucks. At the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Detroit trucks are lined up for more than a kilometer, engines idling.

Driving the last stretch, through acres and acres of new windmills in south-western Ontario, I try to make sense of what we have seen:

  • People we met everywhere on our trip were kind, generous-hearted, very different from each other. I feel grateful to live among them.
  • More and more stuff, some of it dangerous, is moving across our awesome landscape of lakes and forest, prairies and mountains. This is not healthy. Neither are our politics.
  • But how, I wonder, can Canadians struggling through windswept, six-month winters in isolated places, and working dawn to dusk in the growing season, find the strength or the time to relate to the lives of other Canadians thousands of kilometres away? How can an Albertan from Vermilion know what concerns someone trying to make a living in Windsor Ontario?

Canada became a country because the British needed to defend against incursions from the south. We forced the aboriginal peoples onto reserves, forged a federation of provinces and territories, built railways, and have been making it up as we go along ever since.

Today the Canada we cherish — clean air and water, freedom of speech and open debate, consumer choices — needs our protection. So please, wherever you live, get out and vote, but for people and parties that stand for a free, environmentally responsible Canada.

Peterborough City Council plans to build a bridge here.

Thanks for taking time to read this,
Jane

in Jane's Journal / Travel 0 comments
 by Jane Bow

Travelling in Crete – The Food!

One morning, while I was writing Cally’s Way on my mountainside terrace, an old woman wearing a kerchief stopped by on her way to the steep vacant lot next door, where herbs and artichokes grow in profusion. Pulling a sprig of fennel out of a cloth pouch attached to her apron, she smiled.
“Very good with potatoes.” 

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I watched her spend the next half hour climbing, bending, squatting, reaching and twisting as she filled her bag with fresh greenery before walking back up the mountainside to prepare dinner. She is well into her eighties, a typical Cretan grandma.

Artichokes merit their own trip to the vacant lot. Cretans put them in casseroles but I can’t wait that long. Boil, then strip and dip is my method. The impossibly lush heart of this tough and prickly mountain plant needs only lemon juice or salted and peppered olive oil.

An artichoke from next door

At the bottom of the mountain fishermen bring their daily catches to the Plakias fish shop. You can eat fresh sea bream, sardines and other lovely fish, or squid, sometimes cuttlefish.  Or, why not buy a newspaper cornet of shrimps? Poached for a couple of minutes, they still hold the flavour of the sea. 

Local lettuce, tomatoes, onions, or a bag of horta (a mixture of greens) and a bottle of local Cretan olive oil are available anywhere. Add a $6-bottle of wine from Sitia, on Crete’s north coast, and Presto, you have one of the tastiest, healthiest, most economical dinners in the world!

Cuttlefish stew – Yum!

Then there is the meat. Lambs gambol about on the mountainsides, and a few days before Easter shotgun blasts make clear the connection between raising and eating animals. Roasting lamb on an outdoor spit is a Greek tradition that goes back thousands of years.

Why is lamb on a spit so good, I asked my friend Nikos, who ran Nikos Souvlaki in Plakias for many years.

“Because, where was this lamb three weeks ago? Out on the mountainside eating oregano, thyme, rosemary!”  (Those who have read my new novel, Cally’s Way, will recognise this interchange.)

One of the best places to find this meal is at Le Vieux Moulin Taverna in the inland town of Agyroupoli. 

If you want a gastronomic treat and have a few extra Euros, drive up to Milia, high in the western White Mountains. A 16th Century village, Milia was built as a summer pasturing place and then abandoned until World War II, when it  served as a hiding place for its families during the Germans’ brutal occupation of Crete. After the war it was abandoned again until two of its owner families rebuilt the village as a totally organic, locally sustainable mountain resort. A two-minute video here will give you a tour.

Milia in spring, from a hiking trail

Milia features in my novel Cally’s Way. How could it not, when the book intertwines the story of Cally, a young woman trying to find a way to make a life in a world that promises very little security, with that of her grandmother Callisto, a runner in the Cretan Resistance, who lived in a high mountain village? A story summary and reviews are here. Read a sample chapter here (click on cover.)

And happy eating, wherever you are!
Why not share your experiences by commenting below?
Thanks for visiting,
Jane

in Novels / Travel / Uncategorized 0 comments
 by Jane Bow

Travelling in Crete – The World War II Story

Crete’s World War II story interests readers of Cally’s Way because it is told from the point of view of women. 

Buy HERE or HERE  

On May 20, 1941, when hundreds of German paratroopers floated down out of Crete’s blue morning sky in the Second World War’s first airborne invasion, most of the island’s men were away fighting with the Greek army on the mainland. Only a few thousand Allied troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and the local people were there to defend Crete. Grandfathers fought with ancient swords left over from the Turkish wars, grandmothers with pitchforks. Women hoisted rifles, manned machine guns. 

Knives and dishes used in WWII. Plates have swastika on bottom.

Twelve days later the swastika was flying in Crete but, situated in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Europe, north of Africa, just west of the Middle East, this island has been invaded again and again for more than two thousand years. Even its monks were militant resistance fighters. 

Callisto in Cally’s Way is fictitious, but the hair raising submarine rescues at Limni Beach, just below Preveli Monastery, really happened. And so did so much else in the book. Teenaged boys and girls became messengers, nurses, hiding and helping Allied soldiers who were trapped on the island. When they were caught, whole villages suffered gruesome reprisals.

Limni Beach from cliff top.

Unsung Cretan WWII heroes must include the girl who carried food past German patrols to two Australians hiding in the Koutaliotis Gorge, and the girl who rowed a British soldier fifty miles out to Gavdos, an uninhabited island off the coast. Machine gun fire, strafing the boat from the air, opened the soldier’s side. The girl made him lie in the sea water flooding into the boat, to stop the bleeding and keep the wound clean.

Seventy three years later, travelling in Crete, you’ll find old ladies dressed in black out on the mountainsides, filling pouches attached to their aprons with horta, edible greens. They were there; they remember.

You’ll also find busloads of German tourists hiking, swimming, frequenting the tavernas, bringing badly needed Euros into the Cretan economy. How do the Cretans feel about this?

The elderly curator of Sougia’s war museum, who fought as a teenager, smiled when I asked him:

“Those Germans are not these Germans.”  

Pragmatic #forgiveness: what an example for so many parts of the world right now!

Tell me what you think. Comment below, or on FB at Jane Bow’s Novels, or on Twitter @JaneBow2
Thanks for visiting me here,
Jane

in Novels / Travel / Uncategorized 0 comments
 by Jane Bow

Travelling in Crete: a novelist’s thoughts (1)

One of the reasons it takes 12 years to write a novel (Cally’s Way) is that you fall in love with the place where it is set, in my case Crete. If you travel there this summer, go off the beaten track. And prepare to come back changed.

Crete’s south coast, a land of myth and history

The first time I went to Crete, in 2001, I knew nothing, except that:
a) it is the southern–most Greek island and therefore, hopefully, was warm in March, and
b) it was home to the peaceful pre-Greek Minoan culture that worshipped the Great Goddess and produced world renown statues of her, alabaster pottery and gold jewellery.  

My teenaged daughter and I rented a mountainside apartment overlooking the sea in Myrthios, away from tourist resorts along the main, north coast highway. In the mornings I holed up in the kitchen, meditating then making notes on what I was reading, thinking, seeing, feeling, with no idea why. 

My daughter sat on the balcony working on her correspondence courses or reading The Cretan Runner, a page-turner of a war memoir by George Psychoundakis, who was a shepherd until World War II, when hundreds of German paratroopers floated down out of the sky. During their brutal occupation of the island, the Cretans mounted a powerful, imaginative Resistance, working with British commandos hiding in the mountains.  

In the afternoons we drove our tiny Fiat up hair-raising, unguard-railed mountain roads, looking for the villages Psychoundakis described, imagining the stories he told of unnamed, unknown heroes, some of them boys and girls.

Sometimes we explored ruined Minoan palaces. King Minos (who owned the mythical Minotaur) built his famous palace at Knossos, but it‘s always clogged with tourist buses. I much prefer Phaistos, near the south coast, where the first linear writing was discovered on the Phaistos disk. It is so easy to imagine the famous bull jumping spectacles there, in a stone courtyard still clearly preserved 4,000 years later.

The ancient stone block archive at Phaistos

If the day was hot, we explored beaches along the south coast, swimming in the Libyan Sea beside the 14th Century Venetian fort at Frangocostello, or at Skinaria, a beach tucked away behind the headlands that nudists (now prohibited) favoured, or at fabulous, palm studded Preveli, once known as Limni Beach, where two daring submarine rescues of Allied troops took place. (See Cally’s Way.)

Preveli beach from the headland above.

I spoke no Greek but for some reason, smelling the sea air and the herbs on the mountainsides, watching the clouds over Plakias Bay, listening to the staccato rise and fall of the language in the villages, nodding hello to black-clad women of my age with whom I had nothing in common, I felt utterly, viscerally at home. 

Why? Was it because my formative years were spent in Spain, at the other end of the Mediterranean? 
Too thin a reason, by itself.

Was it because the Greek myths, many of which were born on this island, and the Greek language lie at the root of our Western civilization? Psychology, archeology, logic, democracy — so many of our fundamental social concepts are defined by Greek words. 
No. If this was the reason, why doesn’t every English speaking Western tourist feel at home here?

An ancient olive tree lives on the mountainside

Was it something less nameable then? Something to do with genetic predisposition or re-incarnation? 
Hard to conjure that, but when I was a child in Spain my father used to take me to look at the paintings in Madrid’s Prado. My favourite artist, at age nine, was El Greco. Not until I went to Crete did I find out that El Greco was Cretan. 

Life itself is a miracle, so who knows what the full answer is. What I do know is that:
a) the great power of love features in all my novels,
b) I love this island, its people, its rock, its air, its sea, and
c) love and creativity are two faces of the same force. 

Flowers in a Cretan ditch

One morning, that first year in Crete, the World War II part of Cally’s Way dropped into my head fully formed. I have been returning to the island to write every year since then. 

And now, published this spring, the book’s characters have come to life in the very place where they were born! Tourists from all over Europe can find Cally’s Way at Carol’s Workshop in Myrthios. Happy me!

Cally’s Way now on sale at Carol’s Workshop.

What makes a place feel like home? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below, or on Facebook at Jane Bow’s Novels, or on Twitter @JaneBow2.

Thanks for visiting me here,
Jane

in Novels / Travel / Uncategorized 2 comments
 by Jane Bow

Mexico papers – Conclusion

Note: This is the last of a 4-part series. Scroll down to read parts 1-3.

Our little blue Datsun climbed through the mountains of central Mexico to San Miguel de Allende, and I continued to record the odyssey:

“A national monument, this beautiful little town is a perfect mesh of old and new. The people who have lived here for centuries are among the best artisans in the world, says renown Canadian artist Leonard Brooks.”

Leonard and his wife Reva, an acclaimed photographer, had built a house and studio full of wondrous collages, stone carvings, paintings. Everything was art, every plant in the garden, every stone around the pond carefully chosen, their fence a living sculpture made of cactuses.

“Gave the Brooks’ our corn cob pipes by way of thanks.”

Two days later we arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, the capital of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, looking for a Canadian potter who had married a Lacandon Indian and gone to live with his isolated tribe in the rainforest near the Guatemalan border. The widow of Danish anthropologist Frans Blom, who discovered the Lacandon tribe in 1951, provided guided access to the tribe, but she wanted nothing to do with two would-be Canadian journalists.

Undaunted, we set off down a long dirt road to Ocosingo, the last town at the edge of the jungle, where we had been told a man had a plane. That night a parade of blue, red, emerald green insects crossed our hotel room floor, drawn by the overhead lightbulb. Watching, terrified to get out of bed, we noted that they did not climb. Next morning they were gone.

The pilot’s little Cessna sat at on a grass runway at the edge of town. We were in luck. He was taking a load of palm leaves somewhere and was willing to drop us off near the Lacandon village of Na’Ha. We would only have a couple of hours there as clouds were closing in. I watched him use a wooden ruler, the kind I used in grade school, to check the level in his plane’s fuel tank but was too excited to be afraid.

The Lacandon Indians lived in the traditions their people, the Mayans, had espoused for thousands of years. Gorge, who heard the plane and came running to the landing strip cut out of the jungle, wore only a canvas shift. His shoulder-length hair was bushy and black and he had the most extraordinary feet. Larger than a basketball player’s they gripped the mud, bounced off sharp stones, sprang up the path. Behind him, in our hiking boots, we struggled to keep up.

Na’Ha was a collection of thatched huts, but the Canadian potter was not home. Having gone to Canada for a visit, she had been barred by the Mexican government from returning.

Chan K’in, her husband and the kind, charismatic son of the chief, spoke Spanish however, and we spent our precious hours learning about this gentle tribe that eschewed modern civilization, preferring to use farming techniques that go back thousands of years to eke out a natural living in the rainforest. Kneeling with him, we watched one of the women pound out tortillas and then cook them over the fire for us. The only sign of the potter was an Inuit calendar hanging beside the pots on the wall of her and Chan K’in’s hut — a strange and beautiful cultural connection.

The rains held off long enough for us to fly back to Ocosingo but then the skies opened. Torrential rain pounded the roof of our little blue Datsun, and turned the road back to civilization to mud. Then the windshield wipers stopped working.

Picture jungle on both sides, no sign of human habitation anywhere, driving blind behind a curtain of water. Hiking boots have shoe laces however. We tied one to each wiper, then brought the other end of our laces in through our side windows. Yelling “Pull!” every few seconds, operating the wipers on manual, we made it to the highway.

It was time to go home. By the time we reached northern Mexico, we had one traveller’s cheque left. If we cashed it in Mexico we would lose money twice on the exchanges. But if we didn’t, where would we sleep? Not at a Mexican police station!

The answer appeared on the edge of the town we were in: a small hospital. Surely murderers and rapists would not hang out in its parking lot? The front door was locked but there were lights on inside. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Again. The door opened a crack. Inside was a tiny man, the night watchman. Clearly very frightened, waving a revolver, he asked what I wanted.

I told him we were two Canadian girls who needed his protection. Could we sleep in his parking lot? His chest expanded. Growing taller, he waggled the gun at the ceiling.

“Don’t worry,” he smiled, “I will keep you safe.” And he did.

The Lacandon story and several others were bought by Chatelaine. The Leonard Brooks story sold to The Toronto Star and Montreal Gazette.

Forty years later, I have published articles, plays, stories, books, and sitting here writing this, perhaps it is time Les and I thanked him and all the other beautiful souls we had the good fortune to know and record in The Mexico Papers.

If you would like to visit me in my study, go to http://studiosnapshotsblog.com/
where Judy Douglas hosts a fascinating blog about artists’ work spaces.
Let me know your thoughts, and thanks for reading,
Jane

in Travel / Uncategorized 1 comments
 by Jane Bow

The Mexico papers – Part 3

“DO NOT DRIVE AT NIGHT IN MEXICO.” Over and over the travel guide warned that it was not safe. If hitting stray cows, pigs, horses wandering unlit highways didn’t kill us, an accident would embroil us in bribery. Bandits planted carcasses on the road too. But we had to be in Mexico City, 750 miles away, by tomorrow. My Mexico Papers, typed on a salmon pink portable typewriter in the back of our Datson hatchback home record what happened next:

“We find a nice big truck that can do 50 mph and follow it. So far, in daylight, we have seen trucks passing on curves, three abreast on mountain roads, cars pushed onto the shoulders. There are more trucks than cars. And abandoned restaurants, gas stations, little tumble down huts and adobe shacks. Lights go on in them as it gets dark.”

The truck drivers we were following kept signaling us to pass them, so when they pulled off at a roadside restaurant, we did too, to introduce ourselves. Two men in their early twenties, they said they would be delighted to run interference for us and, deep into the night our Datsun rode safely behind their tractor-trailer bulk. Until, in the middle of nowhere, the truck pulled over. 

One of the drivers came back to explain that a car ahead of them had hit a cow. A family needed a ride to the nearest town. They would all fit into the truck’s sleeper space behind the seats, if one of the drivers came with us. Les and I conferred. Was this the scam we had just been reading about, a one-way ticket to rape and death?

In the end, in moments of crisis you have to trust your intuition. I moved into the passenger seat and, in the safe darkness inside our little car, the driver told us about himself and his country. Mexico in 1972 was ruled by a repressive regime. He and his partner were university student who has been expelled for being at a meeting to commemorate the death of their friend at the 1968 Olympics.

“He tells us to beware of Mexican bandidos and terrorists. And be more careful with truck drivers, he says, because many are drugados, especially those driving gas trucks. Stay away from the police. Driving through the night, my mind brings to life the stories he is telling.

“After the truck drops off the family and they buy us dinner, we pull into a truck stop at 1 am. They park us in the shelter of their truck. Our friend sleeps in a hammock under his truck. The other driver sleeps inside the cab. They tell us to yell if we are disturbed… A few hours later we are off again, 250 miles left to the capital. We leave our friends with much honking and waving. We don’t even know their names.”

Forty years later I wonder where are our saviors are now.  May their lives now be full of richness.

Later in the morning “a man crosses the divided highway on a burro. So far we have dodged burros, cows, pigs, horses, chickens and dogs on this road.” 

By dinner time, after a Mexico City traffic ticket delivered on the back of an envelope and paid on the spot in cash, we were luxuriating in marble bathrooms and white fleecy towels at my parents’ hotel. The Mexico Papers were not shared.

Please feel free to comment below or through my Contact page, and join me next month for the trip south into Mexico’s rainforest to meet the Stone Age Lacandon Indians.
Thanks for visiting,
Jane

in Travel / Uncategorized 0 comments
 by Jane Bow

The Mexico Papers – Part 2

Two people living in a ’72 Datsun hatchback, sleeping in police station parking lots, required creative attention to personal space. The front passenger seat, tipped as far back as it would go, was Les’ domain. Pushing the back of the driver’s seat forward against the steering wheel, and then collapsing both back seats gave me a head-in-the-trunk bed.

Crawling into it through the hatchback, I lowered the trunk with a piece of string and tied it, open about two inches, to the clasp. Now I could keep a secret eye on our perimeter, and breathe. If a dangerous perpetrator escaped custody, all I had to do was pull the string to lock us in.

Driving through Texas, I was scared:

“Texans are proud of their lone star state,” but, “saw a man in jeans and a check shirt wearing a holster and gun and bullets and a Stetson, no uniform… A lady in the drugstore told us they’ll rip open your car doors and yank you out at a red light in the city… Stove is broken, cooked hot dogs over a garbage fire on a rest stop barbecue grill. Have a lot of garbage by now.”

Does this explain why we went home for the night with Louise after meeting her, Leroy and Paul in a Waxahachie diner?

“Leroy has been married four times. Paul’s wife is gone. He is old, and he’s a great dancer. Louise, 55, is a widow, a really amazing woman whom all the town kids call Mom. She now ‘goes with‘ Leroy, but she and Paul are real ‘show outs‘ at the club where they go dancing… Slept in a real bed. Louise made us Texan biscuits with cream gravy, eggs, bacon, pork chops and coffee for breakfast.”

No intuition was needed to sense these people’s kind generosity. They were also rednecks, “their prejudice open and deep, like hunger…”

We had to reach Mexico City in time to meet my parents — their Canadian embassy contacts would have freelance story ideas — but we had no idea how far south of the border it was. Finding a map finally, 100 miles north of Laredo, we discovered that we still had 850 miles to drive.

“We have to make Laredo tonight… Decide to find a motel on the border side of town. Suddenly there is a bridge. We pay the toll and cross, see the sign ‘Rio Grande’ halfway across. Two policemen are chatting in the middle of the bridge. Then the signs are all in Spanish. People are yelling and blocking the street, cops at every stop light. We are in Mexico with no insurance, no tourist cards! There was no border. We panic, pay another toll and cross back into the U.S. A border guard asks us how long we have been out of the country.”

A long night with Mexican truck drivers, a plane ride into the southern jungle: join me for The Mexico Papers – Part 3 on March 14.
Thanks for visiting,
Jane

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 by Jane Bow

The Mexico Papers – Part 1

“Am lying in the back of the Datsun (blue ’72 hatchback,) the smallest mobile home on the road, which now looks like a tenement, towels strung over the windows. Typing on my pillow, (on a salmon pink portable typewriter) braced on elbows, undercarriage dangerously close to Les’ stomach.”  

Cameras can nail an image but word pictures let the reader into the smell-sound-feel of a place. These snapshots of the United States have been buried at the back of my closet for 40 years. Two 23-year old women, we were our way to Mexico, to make our fortunes as a journalist and a photographer.

“Met Fred from New York State, who gave us homemade apple pie and fuel for our Coleman stove… Trying to figure out what is going on in the Arab-Israeli war. A man heard us asking where to buy an Indiana newspaper and gave us his.” Then:

“It was dusk. A half-ton pickup played leapfrog with us on the highway. We turned off to visit nature, found ourselves driving down a lonely road in the bush. Suddenly there was the half-ton behind us. Scared shitless. Turned into a small side road, truck turned in too. ‘Could this really be the end?’ A small cluster of houses appeared. Turned into a driveway. Truck drove on by. Was it a coincidence, was he going home for dinner, or was he following us? We will never know.”


“Everyone says the Ozarks is hillbilly country, that you’ll never get out alive, but the friendliness is overwhelming. Bought corn cob pipes, heard Spiro Agnew resigned.“

We were staying off the “completely sterile” interstate highways,“trying to get a feel” for this country. “Most of our knowledge of the U.S. comes through tv, movies and songs, but where does truth end and exaggeration begin?”

In a Tuckerman diner, an Arkansas state trooper invited us to sleep in his station’s parking lot. Gratitude, joy, relief! Could there be a safer place to spend the night?

The next night, in Beebe, Arkansas, another scary man followed us, but:

“As long as we stay on the road we are all right. It’s late and we’re tired, but I can drive forever if I have to.” By the time we reached Jacksonville, it was 10:30 pm:

“We find the cop shop downtown, where there is a display of dope pipes in a glass case that also contains tools used by abortionists, and heroin needles, heavy drugs and other artifacts. Find a cop heavily laden with gun, whistle, and other goods. He was scared of us!” He did, however, let us sleep in his parking lot.

Revisiting these word pictures I feel 23 again. Thrilled and appalled. Would I do it again, knowing what I do now? In a heartbeat.

Thanks for visiting. Next time, (February 21) food, Texas, and a borderless border in The Mexico Papers – Part 2. You can make sure not to miss it by clicking the email button below. 
Jane

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