Let’s just start this blog entry by saying that I didn’t mean to wind up at the police station.

One of my coworkers has an extra truck that he’s trying to sell, and he insisted that I take the truck while he was away for the weekend. It gave me a chance to explore on my own some of the outlying neighborhoods in Nuevo Laredo, and I decided I would go see if the desert really did turn into mountains on the way to Monterrey. On Sunday I dropped off my laundry, ate some huevos rancheros at the local diner “Mar-La”, and headed south. The “provisional” license plate tag on the car seemed a little too provisional, but my desire to get on the road overwhelmed rational thought.

At first city, then housing developments, then land with cattle being sold for housing developments, the cattle, then cactus, cactus, cactus. I stopped for directions at a gas station, and picked up a hitchhiker, acting in contradiction of all State Department advisories. He was an eighteen year old farmhand. I was wearing funny sunglasses, asking a lot of questions, and might have been the first gringo he had heard who was not dubbed into Spanish. He was probably more scared of me than I was of him.

Luckily, the “free” road went to Sabinas Hidalgo, my destination. The toll road could itself be the subject for an incendiary blog. The one way trip to Monterrey (2.5 hours south) on this privatized toll road costs 192 pesos ($19+/-). This represents three days wages for a factory worker in Nuevo Laredo – a clear case of socioeconomic apartheid.

Road trip!

The mountains started to rise out of the desert, beautiful in an extreme way. I was happy to be driving through a place that was not city and not totally flat. I’m a big fan of mountains. Soon we crested over the mountain ridge and caught a view of little Sabinas Hidalgo. I dropped off my passenger, who had come to check out the Sunday fair. It was a nice town. I drank a fruit shake. A man half jokingly asked me to give him a ride to Nuevo Laredo so that he could cross the border. I visited a nature park with “family water attractions” and took a hike. I mildly surprised a bull that then made a lot of bull sounds at me. I meditated in the woods as some hawks flew overhead. In other words, I did very little but enjoyed it.

Exiting Sabinas Hidalgo, I followed my typical scientific travel MO, which consists of seeing a sign, deciding whether the name of the town sounds interesting and turning the steering wheel. On the sign that day was Villaldama, which sounded vaguely Lebanese but for the fact that Arabic doesn’t have a letter V. (Bil Al-Dama?) A winding road led to a small historic (read: deteriorating?) town heavy on adobe buildings and light on people. I saw a sign for delicious tamales, and resolved to loop around the one-way main road and experience tamales in the countryside. Sometime during my return lap, the proprietor had cruelly removed the tamales sign and the restaurant had retreated back into the anonymous line of whitewashed facades.

So I went to a bakery instead and bought some pecan pastries, and pulled the car over and curbed my appetite. (whoops, pun apologies) Halfway through the delicious pastry of pecan and molasses, I noticed a truck pulling up behind me, then another. And still another, all three painted black and white.

A policeman approached and asked, “What are you doing?” as he eyeballed the interior of the car. I responded that I was eating a pastry. Then I quickly regrouped when I realized that he was asking me what I was doing in town. I told him I was “paseando,” kind of “touring around,” which sounds innocent enough. Then he asked me “De donde vienes?” This question could mean either “Where are you from?” or “Where are you coming from”, so in a split second I contemplated my response options:

• I just left the bakery
• I was meditating in the woods
• I was hanging out in a children’s water park
• I’m from New Jersey
• I’m coming from Nuevo Laredo

I decided on the last option, which kicked off a series of questions: whose car is it, what are you doing in Nuevo Laredo, why did you come to this town, etc. In the meantime, the other officers began circling the car, opening doors, pawing around. The first guy kept picking up things in the car and asking me how much I’ve paid for them, saying that they looked very expensive, insinuating that I must have a lot of money. I decided this was the right time to employ Tactic #1: act like poor, naïve, lost gringo student. “Oh sir, I just got lost and gosh don’t know where I am and did I mention that I’m a volunteer here?”

But the others kept asking the same questions (now there were five of them) and they were starting to talk to others on the radio. I began to wonder what percentage of the village population was on the police force. One of them got called away (chihuahua caught in a tree? Roosters crowing at an unauthorized hour?). I counted the police: four left. I counted the pastries: four left. I could take them on. It was time to implement Tactic #2: kind offer of local baked goods. Before you could say “que rico” three of them were brushing crumbs off their uniforms. Or their clothing, I should say: two of these guys looked like they were on the way to a friend’s BBQ.

The pastries loosened them up some, but did not do the trick. They told me I would need to accompany them back to the station house for something like a “routine check.” They said a similar car was just reported stolen, and I didn’t have the right paperwork on the car to prove that it was legit. (They were right, I didn’t, apparently.)

One of them got in the car with me. I began to apply Tactic #3: getting to know each other better. I told him that I love mountains. The local baked goods are really delicious, aren’t they? I asked about the ruins of an old church that I saw as I entered town. He told me that it was the ruins of an old church.

We arrived, and they asked me to pull into the enclosed back parking lot of the station house. This is when I began to have visions of handcuffs, jailhouse dinners of mealy tortillas and beans, or, if I was lucky, just a modest payoff.

I’m all for fighting stereotypes of crooked cops, but it is a challenge when an agglomeration of all of your stereotypes is shaking your hand at the station house door. The Lieutenant’s smile exposed teeth framed in gold caps, and his half buttoned shirt revealed spotty archipelagos of chest hair and barely concealed a paunch that was the result of some serious long-term investment. He wasn’t chewing tobacco, luckily; I am told this is a sure sign of corruption. I scanned the ground for evidence of recent use, but only saw his recently polished reptile skin boots.

He asked me all the same questions and I gave him similar answers – I volunteer helping the poor, don’t know much about the rules, just here to get to know your country and your quaint yet sleepy village. In the meantime, the rest of the crew had opened the hood of the truck and seemed to be inspecting the engine.

I mentally reviewed the tactics that I had used and considered what I could still do to get myself out of this situation. Offering him the last pastry seemed potentially insulting. He didn’t seem to want to get to know me. Political humor seemed like one of the few tactics I still had at my disposal.

He asked me what happened to my arm, giving me the perfect opening for my typical cheesy response: “I broke my hand when I punched out George Bush.”

He laughed!

One of the few highlights in the darkness of recent American political history is that so many around the world share a love for Bush-bashing, forming a common ground for bonding between travelers and locals on all continents. The lieutenant was no different: my dumb joke served for him as a launching point for a diatribe against Bush, the war, how Mexico shouldn’t be involved when there was already a war against the narcotraffickers here (Mexico is involved in Iraq?), and did I know that the whole damn thing was about oil anyway?

With the lieutenant showing glimmers of Noam Chomsky, the situation seemed suddenly brighter – things took on a friendlier tone. The policemen pointed out to me the pecan trees growing in the courtyard. The guys leaning over the engine had checked the water level in the radiator and scolded me for letting it run low. The lieutenant told them to fill it up with the hose, and clapped me on the back.

What they then told me amounted to this: you were driving around in a car that didn’t have the right paperwork. We could have really screwed you, either by impounding the car or by asking for a fat payoff. A lot of police out there, they said, would have held me there for a long time until I forked over some cash. So get back on the road, drive back to Nuevo Laredo and don’t come back to our sleepy village until you have the right papers.

Then they told me this about another six times in different forms, using an impressive variety of forms of the swear word chingar. In an oddly friendly way.

They directed me as I reversed out of the courtyard, waving me on my way. I stopped only once on the way back, when I saw an irresistible sign for fresh avocados. (OK, I admit it, I stopped for tacos too.) They were the same kind of avocado I had seen growing on a tree earlier in the day, and the woman told me that it was a variety that you eat whole, skin and all. She insisted on giving me some avocados for free.

I’m not sure what the moral is in this story, but it’s clear that the policemen gave me more than a free avocado. I like having my expectations contradicted, especially when it means that I don’t wind up getting into legal trouble. And I was sorry that I had expected the worst of the situation at first.

There are a million nicknames for police here, many pejorative and some making reference to their brown or tan colored uniforms. Maybe I’ll start calling them pecan pastries, so that I’ll have reason to tell a story with a good ending.

Police mug shot of avocado. You eat it with the skin on - nam nam!