Crisis situations and death

We were talking about crisis situations, and the unexpected ways we’ve acted when life has thrust something dramatic upon us. Muggings, robberies, car crashes. When thrown into the deep end, some people act, and some people freeze. We’d both had experiences where something unpredictable, powerful, spontaneous had arisen within us. If you’d asked me, for example, to predict how I might have reacted in that Spanish bus station in 2008, I never would have guessed I would do what I did. But it gives a man great confidence, to know that’s within him – that maybe he can trust it to be there when called upon – and it won’t be the curling up into fear, the paralysis, the trauma that he perhaps previously imagined, and which does seem to be the case for others, but something altogether more wonderful and surprising and useful.

Later on, I began to make my way to El Chorro, fannying around in San Jose for a couple of days en route. Then I got the bus out to Santa Anita, but decided to disembark at the airport and see if I could find the phone I inexplicably left there on Sunday. No dice. I left it all behind and tromped through the hot desert, cutting through backstreets and unknown Mexican neighbourhoods till I came back out at a highway Pemex and unsuccessfully thumbed while the cars flew by. I gave it up and started walking up the highway: what the hell; it’s good to walk.

Soon enough, I came to a little sandy bypass around a bridge that must have been damaged in the recent storm. The traffic had to slow right down and a guy let me jump in the back of his pickup. Suddenly, of course, everything is all right with the world: I’m zooming under a hot desert sun sprawled in the bed of a Mexican pickup with the wind in my hair and not a care in the world. Ah, for this, and not having to sit in the front, making idle chatter, with a roof over my head! Ah, for this, rather than pretty much anything else.

I got water in Santa Anita – I was parched – and for the second time that day a guy told me it was too dangerous to hitchhike anymore, too many bad people on the roads. I just nodded and agreed and casually mentioned the thousands of Mexican miles I’d hitched in recent years, and made my way to the road. No other way to get to Santiago anyway. Not unless I wanted to wait two hours for a bus, and still be stuck miles from my destination, in the dark. So to the tope (speedbump) I went, and stuck out my thumb.

I say all this, I guess, because there’s something about the timing here – or the lack of it – that strikes me. The way I detoured at the airport. The way it took me much longer than I’d thought – both in terms of hours that day, and in days themselves – to get to this place, back en route to El Chorro. Plus the walk and subsequent pickup. Plus the water. Not to mention suddenly being all these thousands of miles out of England, when it’s still less than a week since I was sitting in London not knowing what I was going to do next.

The timing, the timing…

I took my spot. I thumbed a little. I turned around and watched as this lolloping silver-grey dog started making a beeline across a side road towards me. It seemed sort of jolly, like it wanted to make a friend, like it figured I had a snack. I did have a snack: I had some tostadas – but I didn’t really want to give them to this dog. To be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood for a dog to come lolloping up to me. I turned back to the road and stuck out my thumb. Behind me, I heard a squeal, like car brakes, and the bump of a car going over a ubiquitous Mexican speedbump. And then I had this flash of a thought of puzzlement: because I didn’t remember there being a speedbump there, in the side road.

I turned around. A white 4x4 was going down the hill. And the dog lay twitching in the road, its tail flopping half-heartedly, back legs occasionally kicking out, and a stream of blood trickling along the tarmac from its lazy, lolling, unmoving head.

I didn’t know what to do. What was I supposed to do? I was the nearest person to it – and, not only that, but I was responsible – after all, if I hadn’t been standing there – if I hadn’t made the decisions I’d made that day, that week, this whole life – the dog wouldn’t have had anybody to gamely gambol over to, tail wagging, tongue flapping, anticipating affection and food.

And now it lay dying in the road, immobile except for spasmodic jerks, a pool of piss now forming around its back end, and that stream of blood insistent and incessant as it flowed on down the road.

A car came on my other side, and I stuck out my thumb again, and it went on by. A Mexican family of mother and three children slowly came walking down their yard to look at the dog. They were in no hurry; it evidently wasn’t theirs. The dog twitched less frequently now, and I felt grateful that at least I wouldn’t have to kill it, or go find somebody, tell them what had happened, and try to make out it wasn’t my fault.

Now here comes a Mexican fella from the direction the previously alive dog had done a minute or so before. He ambles too: he’s in no hurry. He takes one look at it and know it’s a goner. It’s stopped twitching by now, and the piss no longer flows. He picks it up, front paws in one hand, back paws in the other, and holds it out in front of him so as not to get the piss and blood on his jeans and shoes. He carries it over to the back of a blue pickup truck and tosses it in. He says nothing. He does all this so automatically, so smoothly, it’s like he must do it every day – like he’s been preparing – like he was told the whole thing in a dream, and is going through the motions.

I guess the dog wasn’t beloved family pet after all. I guess the dog was just a dog that barked at stuff, got fed, and is a dog no more.

I wonder if anyone will ask me if I saw it, what was the car that did it, did I get a registration, like they would in England – and stand around chatting, and lamenting, and tell me its name, and grieve for the hearts of the children, when they come home from school and find out their Sandy, their Rover is gone – but no one does. The family has moved on. The guy has done his deed and gone back in the house, presumably to wash his hands of the whole mess. And the dog lies dead in the pickup bed, flies no doubt gathering, while the perpetrators are probably miles down the road having instantly figured it’s just one o’ them things, no need to hang around discussing.

Then a car stops and I get in and zoom up the road talking with Manuel in my shoddy Spanish about football and the weather and how long it takes to fly from England – but all the time I’m thinking about the dog, and about my role in her downfall, and about how she wouldn’t now be dead if I hadn’t chosen to stand in the spot I did, at the exact second I did. How children might not now be mourning and crying tears. How that silver-grey hound would still be happily lolloping after snacks and strokes and snapping at flies in the sun and snuffling into her evening meal totally oblivious to how close she came to extinction.

The colour of her fur. Those back legs twitching. The trickle of blood running down the hill in the direction of the car that rolled over her.

There was nothing I could have done, and nothing I could do. But still…

A minute later, we pass a cow lying on its side on the shoulder of the road, legs sticking stiffly and stupidly out, another victim of four wheels. It’s striking because I’ve travelled this road dozens and dozens of times, and seen plenty of cows by the highway, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen dead, right hot on the heels of the now dead dog. And then I remember also, the day before, in my friend’s yard how her own dog had got hold of some bird and messed its wing up, and the poor thing was all crippled and useless, bones showing, just air where its feathers should have been. Its little bony head cawed helplessly. Apart from the wing and trauma, it was mostly okay – but I knew instantly that I was supposed to end its life, find some rock and crush its skull, and put it out of its misery – or, at least, save it from the future misery of the slow, lingering, horrible death. I also knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill the thing. I can’t even kill flies.

All this death, but don’t start to thinking this is a Mexican thing – that life is cheap out here – that dogs and cows and birds are dying all the time, and nobody really cares – because I’ve spent a good deal of time in this country – probably about two years in total by now – and for me to see even one dying thing is pretty unusual, let alone three. It seemed sort of significant. It made me think. And it took me right back to the first time I was in Mexico, and the first time I was in El Chorro, after the Lovely Boys had left, and everything started happening for me – the synchronicities, the weird introduction to some sort of spiritual/mystical reality – and how, one night, I’d sat gazing into my fire and a grasshopper had leapt in, and instantly perished in the hot flames, and how I’d been immediately struck by the unlikelihood of his demise in that way, at the hands of a young Englishman so many thousands of miles from home, who could have been in a million other places – and maybe should have been – but was right there to build that fire, in that exact spot, at that exact time, to end the life of a sentient being who was perhaps fully expecting to land on sand, as he had done every other night of his life.

Gone. Snuffed out. Never to leap again.

I dunno. These things happen all the time. And of course there’s nothing spooky in it, because it’s just the way things are, how they have to be. And yet, this grasshopper moment deeply and sincerely struck me – it was a spontaneous reaction – and it stayed with me, and came back to me now, more than eighteen years later, and I remembered it as we drove on up the road.

Manuel took me all the way to Santiago, and then I walked once more past the Palomar and the avocado farm; turned the corner at the church; turned the other corner, and on past the zoo, and then arrived at my usual hitching place, where I’ve been standing and hitching every since 1999. But, this time, it looked different. The storm had taken out most of the road. Water still flowed, a temporary shallow river, and children played in it. I walked some ways across, carrying my wheely case on my shoulder, and then when it came time to take off shoes and socks, I saw a pickup approaching. Once more, I was invited into the back, and bounced along as far as the first little pueblo. From there, it’s maybe five miles to El Chorro. It was getting dark. I figured I might as well walk. I dragged my case down the road, and when the sand became too deep, I carried it on my shoulder; held it out in front of me; balanced it on my head. The damn thing was too heavy though: it’s all I own in the world, and it’s still too much. I’m going to have to jettison some more.

After some time another pickup came and I hopped on back. A worker on his way home from construction work, by the looks of his jeans and boots, also jumped in, and we two and the little boy who was already in there bounced along to Agua Caliente, which is only a mile or so from my destination. I was going to make it. It was maybe the last truck of the night, but after all that timing, those possibilities and turns, I was going to make it.

I hopped out in twilight. I waded across a river. I dragged my suitcase in the sand. And in the almost dark, somewhere close, I heard that sound which you know even if you haven’t ever heard it is the sound of a rattlesnake.

I stopped. I let go of my case and let it fall to the sand. I shouted ahhh! I didn’t know where the sound was coming from – whether it was right by me, or moving toward me or what – but then I saw it: the snake was just off to my left, heading away from the road, and rattling as it went. It must have been right by my foot when I’d walked on through. It could have been mere inches. They’re good old snakes – they’ve never caused me any harm – but, you know, I guess you just never know, and I guess there has to come a day when one decides it’s not the time for warnings and slitherings off, and they bite.

I didn’t want to get bitten. I didn’t want to die. And I guess this, for me, is the point of the whole thing: for, no matter how frivolously I might talk about death, and accept the fact of it, and sometimes joke how no longer existing might be quite nice – the core of my being, the bit of me that is revealed in those spontaneous, unpredictable moments, doesn’t want it one bit – nor does it think it inconsequential, something unmoving, it thinks it “a hell of a thing.” That dog’s death disturbed me. Even considering ending the life of the bird proved an emotional impossibility. And I didn’t want to get bitten by that snake. If anything, I was afraid: I wondered what the hell I was doing out here, wandering down dark roads with rattlesnakes unseen in the trail. I didn’t want it anymore. I wanted to be somewhere where there weren’t snakes in the grass.