Caballo Blanco

Scroll down to next post for part 1, or click here....I pronounced my diagnosis to Shula.
"Babe, I'm having a heart attack."
She nodded and smiled.
"You know this is my second one today, and third one this week."
Half nod, half smile.
"You know I'm only 27."

I woke the next morning still breathing but now coughing. I went to go find Keith, the owner of Entres Amigos, the name of our lodgings in Urique, and what I gather is the only reliable outfit for the caucasian tourist visiting the area—and quite an outfit it is. 30 years ago Keith came to Urique "on an adventure," and bought the land when the town was half the size; a block of houses with a church. Here, he would build an eden. A knowledgeable organic gardner and builder, Keith has constructed what amounts to a small campus on the very edge of the town. On a small slope, with wonderful views of the surrounding mountains and rock formations, grapefruit, orange, mango, lemon, papaya, and guava trees shade a library, dormitory, a couple private rooms, and two kitchens (one with a hand made ping pong table). Tall cartoon-like cacti protrude from the rest of the flora, among which are rows of planted green onions, green beans, swiss chard, zucchini, coffee beans, radishes, various herbs, and more.





I spotted Keith in the garden watering his plants and approached him timidly clutching my chest.
"How'd you sleep?" He asked.
"Well to be honest I had a rough night..." I told him my symptoms, and my new diagnosis, possible pneumonia, and waited for his reply. Being that I was in a town with one internet connection, Keith's (the Mexican military at one point knocked on Keith's gate asking to use his internet), one phone in the town center, and a nine hour train and three hour bus from the nearest sizable city, I am not sure what I was expecting Keith's response to be, but it certainly wasn't:

"Well, you could go to the free clinic there in town. They're pretty good. Matter-of-fact now's probably a good time to go." I didn't need any more convincing and took my translator with me.
This would be the second time I visited a health clinic in a foreign country. The first time was a few years ago, also with Shula, in a small mountain town in Japan called Takayama. I had some kind of awful case of conjunctivitis and could barely see out of one eye. From the time I set foot in the clinic until the moment I walked out the door with a diagnosis, remedy, and the confidence that I was on the road to recovery, about 15 minutes had elapsed. And aside from 1,000 yen for the eye drops (about $10 USD) the visit was free. Tough to beat, but the Urique clinic came in clutch, shedding a full five minutes off Takayama's treatment time, and 150 pesos off the cost (about $10 USD). Not only was the care free, but so was the Amoxicillin, though in Spanish of course they had to add an 'a' and called it Amoxicillina; I understood that one, and took it for my temperatura. Yeah, socialized medicine, what a horror.

Armed with antibiotics, an organic garden, a kitchen, and a bed, I was pretty sure there was nothing to worry about. When I started to turn around Shula remarked how long my recovery time would have been had I been home and hospitalized, compared to the two days it took me to get better in Urique. The last respiratory infection I had was almost three years ago. I was in the hospital for a week and it took me an additional three weeks before I made a full recovery. After a handful of days of doing little else but reading, eating, whining to Shula, and napping, I was hiking up mountains, and being sick became just a minor footnote on my visit to this major canyon-land; a canyon deeper and more vast than the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

A few weeks before we came here I read Christopher McDougall's New York Times Best Seller, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, an immersion journalistic work about ultra-marathon runners. At the beginning of the book, McDougall is an injury-prone mess, barely able to go five miles without ending up in a doctor's office where he is warned repeatedly to stop running. 'The human body is not meant for running,' he is told, even getting second opinions on the wording. But after hanging out and training with some of the biggest names in ultra-marathon running—runners who compete in 50 to 100-mile races, or do it for fun—and a handful of the Tarahumara Mexican Indians, an indigenous people who have been running up mountains on rubber sandals evading extinction for generations, McDougall becomes a true distance runner, discovering that he was indeed, born to run. In fact, we were all born to run, he alleges, and backs this hypothesis up with reporting that suggests running is what allowed humans to survive and evolve into the world-dominating species that we have become.

Captivated by the book's protagonist, Micah True, AKA Caballo Blanco (the White Horse), I read the book without putting it down and found myself promptly doing the same thing I did after reading Krakaur's Into the Wild, blabbering to anyone with an ear about what an inspiring read it is. However, the two non-fiction books have one major difference: Into the Wild is a Shakespearean tragedy in which protagonist Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, falls fatally in love with the wild; whereas Born to Run ends with a descriptive scene of Caballo Blanco alive and well, departing his shack at the bottom of the Copper Canyons for one of his daily marathon runs through the desert mountains—a living and breathing myth. And one I would find sitting right next to me.

He was ten feet tall and could shoot fireballs from his ass. Actually, I was happy to find that he looked like me, plus twenty years; tall, thin, bald, slightly dark complexion, slight hunch in the shoulders, and insanely handsome. I never payed much attention to the names of cities and villages when reading Born to Run, but when I brought up the book with Keith he told me he met the writer and that the major annual 50-mile race that now occurs in the canyons with international participants as well as Tarahumara Indians every March, begins and ends in Urique.

"Matter-of-fact, Micah will be staying here in a couple days." I almost leapt from my chair.

The morning before his arrival I woke Shula up with the sound of opening and closing of zippers and exasperated noises.

"What's going on?" Her words were raspy.

"Have you seen my los lapices? One of them is missing."

"Huh?"

"My lapice, it's missing." Later, when Shula had fully awakened, she asked me,

"What is it you were saying about your pencils?"

"What pencils? I can't find one of my sandals."
Keith told us where we could buy a replacement.

"Ventura is the best leather-maker in town. Go into town and ask for Ventura and tell him you want a pair of guarachis."

This was one of many wild goose chases Shula and I went on in Urique. In each case we walked to the middle of town and asked someone for the item we were looking for. Eventually a name would be shouted and a house pointed to, and inevitably that person would point to someone else. Ventura made my sandals, Elena sold us the Tezweeno, the Tarahumara's corn alcohol (Shula quickly became a Tezwine-o), Lupe hooked us up with the Pinole, the Tarahumara's energy food, and Roseanna was the town baker with the freshest tortillas. Ventura did a fitting with me and we picked up the sandals that afternoon. They had rubber souls cut from a tire with a leather pad on top, and three wholes punctured through both surfaces. Binding it all together were leather straps that had a specific tying procedure. They are like tefillin for the feet.

When Shula and I returned to our quarters at Entres Amigo with sandals in hand Caballo Blanco and Keith were seated at Keith's kitchen table having a beer together. I showed my new guarachis, the sandals that the Tarahumara wear to run up mountains, to the experts to evaluate them. Keith took them from my hands and began a close examination of the straps and the rubber.

"Yeah, Ventura is really the best. These are a great cut. The rubber is nice and thin, very light, and the tire treads are deep."

He handed them off to Caballo.

"Well, the rubber could be a bit thinner. And the leather straps are too thick," Caballo countered.

"No, that's the perfect width," Keith objected.

"It's very important that as soon as you start to feel pain in between your toes, take them off. You're feet will need to get used to them," Caballo cautioned.

"Yeah, you blister there, that could set you back a few days."

"Not days, weeks. Really, as soon as you feel any sign of pain on the side of your big toe, yank them off. Also you'll want to buy more leather, the straps wear out," Caballo said.

"Yeah, it's not uncommon with those to get a llanta ponchada," Keith added.

"A what?" I asked, getting a word in.

"A flat tire."

Over his couple days there Caballo and I had talked briefly about the book. I caught Caballo on his way out to guide a Swiss couple on an overnight hike from Urique to Batopilas, where Caballo lives. Before he left I had some words for him.

"For what it's worth, I found your story, at least your story according to McDougall, to be really inspiring. It was a great read for me." Caballo's concern was that the book would ultimately do nothing to help the Tarahumara, the very people he is hoping to help protect. The 2011 race is quickly approaching. The event has been growing in numbers especially since the book's publication—in 2010 there were 250 international competitors and about the same in Tarahumara runners. Various companies have contacted Caballo looking for a way to profit from the race but nobody has put forth any money to help put the race together. Last year, Keith told me, Caballo didn't sleep the entire week leading up to the marathon, but come race-time still ran the 50 mile loop through Urique and up the mountainsides. Caballo left Entre Amigos, heading down the gravel path along the river, his little beige mutt trailing behind him.

Another interesting facet of Urique was how hard this little town parties. Not only was New Years Eve quite a scene to behold, but the whole week leading up to it, there were parties until 3 a.m. Every male in town plays guitar and believes they can sing, and does so until the early morning. Walking through town we met one very notable and very large Mexican guy who stopped his conversation when he saw us gringos walking by.

"Hey, you guys speak English?"

"Yeah. We didn't know anyone else here did. Where did you learn your English?"

"Ten years in American prison," he said, his chest bulging into the air..

I smiled thinking he was being sarcastic, but when I realized he was dead serious, I thought sarcasm was the only way to lighten the mood.

"Well, at least something good came of it, you learned English." Thank god he laughed.

In one week Urique healed me of more than just pneumonia. After an 8 day stay, I felt rejuvenated and ready to move west. But first-things-first, when you're at the bottom of a canyon, you must go up, placing your life in the hands of yet another driver. In this case we were to be taking what must be one of the hardest and most dangerous bus routes in the world. I hoped he had his morning coffee and tried not to look back, but the scene was too beautiful to resist.