by Brian Blickenstaff
As I eagerly looked back and forth, out the left, then right hand windows, I noticed a little girl, perched on her mother's lap, staring at me. Her mother was seated on a bench opposite mine; our legs were awkwardly scrunched off to either side so that it was possible for us both to sit.
"Hola," I said to the girl. She shrank bashfully, but without looking away, into the hair of her dark skinned, Indian mother. Many, perhaps the majority of Mexicans, have both a physical and cultural resemblance to their native ancestors. This is only the case with a minority of Americans. The North American Indians were violently routed and destroyed, rather than violently assimilated, as their Mexican neighbors had been.
I repeated my greeting to the girl's smiling mother, who was coaxing her daughter out of her hair. I heard the girl say something about "verde," and "ojos" and realized my green eyes could, at times, be a bit of a spectacle.
"De donde eres?" asked her mother.
Suddenly unable to remember how to say the United States, in Spanish, I told her that I was from "America."
"Me too," she said. Some of the other passengers in the cambi laughed. My face reddened.
"California," I quickly replied, still unable to remember the three elusive words. My embarrassment seemed to be directly correlated to my inability to remember Spanish vocabulary.
"Eres de los Estados Unidos," she informed me in a motherly tone. Oh yeah. That's how you say it.
At this point, the bus made an abrupt stop; the girl and her mother grabbed their things and we exchanged goodbyes. They squeezed out of the bus, paid the driver, and disappeared around a white washed retaining wall with broken bottles on top. I silently returned to my window-watching.
A short time later, after numerous stops, Sylvan and I were the last passengers on the bus. We drove around several more switchbacks before coming to the end of the paved road. The statue was still several hundred vertical feet above.
Our driver shut off the engine and in the new, relatively profound silence, lit another cigarette. I looked nervously at Sylvan, who, calm as always, climbed out of the cambi. "Come on," he said impatiently. I checked my fear and hopped out.
As the bus had made its final switchbacks, the surrounding buildings had quickly deteriorated in quality. Instead of the whitewashed, small yet reasonable homes we had seen farther down the mountainside, rebar was now visible sticking out of many of the walls; along with rusted sheet-metal rooftops. I remembered the warnings: Don't go above the market. You could get mugged!
"What now?" I asked.
"We walk," Sylvan told me. He asked the driver about the statue. The driver gestured to a path that wound to the right, out of the city and eventually, into the forest.
What am I doing up here?
I, once again, considered the facts - the broad daylight, my fluent companion. I kicked at some rocks as we walked toward the trail head; it was more of a dirt road than a pedestrian path. A small, water-forged ditch ran down the center of the road and occasionally wound off to one side or the other. I shot a fleeting look at Jesus and looped my thumbs through the shoulder straps of my backpack.