On a cliff in a thatched roof bungalow 700 feet above a turquoise river in primeval Mexico, Gilbert Freeman serenaded the night with Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, and some Sinatra-sounding guy with clarinets and a string section. The music bounced off the soft roar of the Rio Gallinas emptying into the Rio Santa Maria, the awe-inspiring Cascada de Tamul. Dim moonlight turned the falls into unmoving white columns.
You shook me all night long/we’re captives on a carousel of time/so you think you can tell heaven from hell
Freeman used battery power for his odd lyrical juxtapositions. No electricity in our mountain hut. And we had to make do with only one chef, just two nubile Mayan princesses to light our candles and serve our food and rum and wine, and a mere two guides to keep the three of us un-drowned and heading downstream as we tubed through the river rapids. We were roughing it.
Attentive readers will recall that Freeman, Dan Strimple, and I had felt nervous at our first roadblock in Mexico. Drug runners from the Zeta gang had shot and killed a DEA agent in the area only two days before. Was this an extralegal traffic stop? No: Vicente Mojica—our driver and primary river guide—murmured something soothing to the heavily armed man in black sunglasses. “Vas.” “Gracias.” And off we went.
We were two golf pros and a golf writer, ostensibly on a golf trip but about to experience something deeper than another set of fairways and greens. We’d hooked up with a company called Huasteca Secreta, whose eight properties are dotted around this wild region in northeast Mexico. The Huastecs were an indigenous people with their own food, music , culture. That they were naked most of the time speaks volumes about the climate and their attitude. The Aztecs conquered them in 1450, which didn’t seem bother the Huastecs much, but the Spanish conquered the conquerors 50 or so years later, and blushed. They decreed Roman Catholicism, and clothes.
Juan Ignacio Torres Landa thought like an Aztec general when he formed Husateca Secreta: occupy the high ground, and control the rivers. Thus we middle-aged golfers, who rarely do anything more strenuous than brunch when on vacation, found ourselves driving on hilariously bumpy roads through mazes of sugar cane fields, being stared at by machete-wielding cane cutters and their wives and ninos, to reach mysteriously blue rivers whose sheers sides blocked out half the sky. Tubing was exhausting, ultimately, because you have to hold your body like a luger, with head and butt up, to avoid unpleasant collisions with rocks. And you have to swim hard against strong currents when you fall off your big rubber doughnut.
The reward at the end was a pleasantly blank mind. Although Strimple jonesed like a crack addict for internet and cell phone signals, and Freeman had a nasty bruise on his ass (he told but didn’t show), they were distracted from these mundane worries. We floated music out from our cliff top residence into the vastness. The night breeze gently ruffled the thatch on the roof. The moon rose pink and orange over the mountains. We imagined the jaguars and javelinas in the jungle below, and naked natives, and dinosaurs.
