On Mexico time

Highway 200 cuts a jagged path along the Pacific Coast from the Guatemalan border to just north of the state of Nayarit where it merges with another highway and heads for the mountains. In Oaxaca, the highway is a long stretch of nerve-stripping road, damaged and at times barely passable due to the weak pavement's inability to hold its own against the harsh rainy seasons. Between Puerto Escondido and Huatulco, the road intersects with Highway 175, running north to Pochutla and across the mountains to the city of Oaxaca, and south to the backpackers' haven of Puerto Angel. For roughly two hundred miles along 200, Highway 175 basks in its importance of being the only road north.

Many times I've followed 200, taken a right on 175 towards the beach, or a left on 175 to the mountains, or gone straight to the bays of Huatulco. Many times. An intersection of unspoiled remoteness, without so much as a stoplight to mark it, it's part of an important vein through an otherwise dreamy coastal region baked by the sun but having the perseverence to somehow hold onto the green.

I once spent an entire day at the intersection, waiting for hours over a taxi dispute in which about 50 taxi drivers simply parked their taxis in the road to make their point - they wanted to have the base rate raised from just about nothing to next to nothing. Nobody got far that day, though a group of bus passengers did collectively walk across the intersection to exchange busses, and the two busses - one on each side of the line - turned around with a new destination in mind, churning and belching black smoke into the distance while the rest of us sat atop our cars or in the back of our trucks, listening to music, fanning ourselves from the heat, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Turning the truck around was not an option by the time we realized it was an all-day gig. Hundreds of cars were parked in all directions.

The friend we were going to pick up from the airport in Huatulco that day caught a cab to the strike zone, paid her fare, walked west a while and found us parked in the truck beneath the shade of a palm tree, watching the scene around us, listening to Collective Soul and drinking the cold Dos XX we had packed in the cooler. As they say, Bienvenidos a Mexico.

This morning I heard Collective Soul's Shine on the radio and in an instant I was right back in that day. I swear I could hear the palm fronds lifting in the breeze above my head, feel the heat rising from the street, the sun bearing down on my back, a drop of sweat falling from my brow. I could hear the truck's tailgate dropping, and the cooler creaking open.

It's funny how we deal with a plan thrown off course. Funny how something out of your control that could have made your blood boil, instead turns out to be a day that left you with no choice but to sit back and say it is what it is. And one day years later you find that while you're stuck in traffic on your way to work on an altogether different road, a song will come on the radio, and before you know it, you're catapulted back into a day you hadn't previously classified as perfect, but you do now. Oh yeah, that day is looking real good from here.

But still, no matter what you thought then, you know enough now to be happy you had it in the first place. That? That's good stuff.