Photo of The Day: After September 11, 2001, Hospitality in Mexico
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- by Mark Stephens on Sun Sep 11, 2011 - Add comment
In a hut in Mexico just 4 months after the attack on September 11, we were treated to an unusual, but beautiful, display of humanity in the form of a home cooked meal.
I used to share an apartment near a small ridge of desert granite called South Mountain at the edge of Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona with my friend Tiamo when we were in our mid-twenties. He got the bigger bedroom, but I got the covered parking space. For a bed, I had a mattress that sat on the floor. When my clothes were clean they went in a pile in the closet. Then I stored my precious climbing gear in two clear 50-quart totes in the corner of my bedroom. I kept a lamp and an alarm clock radio on top of the totes. Ten years ago today the radio alarm clock went off, like it did every day, to the same FM morning radio show.
One of the planes had already struck the first World Trade Center tower, but the news of if it was so absurd that even the radio show hosts were laughing. "Some moron crashed his plane into one of the buildings at the World Trade Center" one said. "How could you be flying a plane and not see the building?" The other probed.
I snoozed but listened. At first, the event just sounded like a freak accident, even to the radio show hosts who remarked that it merely looked like a single engine plane had crashed. It wasn't yet fathomable that the crashed aircraft had been a commercial jet hijacked by madmen and that our country was indeed under attack in a way we'd never experienced before. Until the news spread that another plane hit the other building and nearly all of New York City watched that one slam into it because their eyes were already locked onto the first tower suffering a crisis.
Tiamo was making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up, asked him if he knew anything about the plane crash. He said no. I turned on the television. We watched together, tried to make some sense of all that black smoke trailing over New York City and into that perfect blue sky. And then, after some time, we heard the newscaster say that there were rumors that this may not be a strange accident at all, but could be the work of suicidal hijackers and that more airplanes could be on collision courses elsewhere - but, they repeated over and over, it was just a rumor that hadn't been verified.
Four months later, and during a fine sunset, I was driving a terrible washboard road into a fishing village on the Sea of Cortés in Mexico that had no electricity service. It's so far off the grid that the nearest paved road is 50 miles away. I camped on the beach with my brother, his girlfriend Briana, and my girlfriend Brooke. We barely rolled into the village before the sun went down and we expected to find a restaurant or a villager who'd sell us some fish to cook. Neither was the case; this, another unfathomable event. I talked to a local who was burning weeds in his front yard; he said the fishing season had been a rough one and that we'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to part with what little they had, even for money. All we had with us to eat were a bag of peanuts, a box of white rice, a package of tortillas, a couple of bell peppers and a red onion.
We cooked what we had, fleeced of that prime ingredient we'd set our hearts on and promised our stomachs hours, hungry hours, before. The wind on the beach that night worked itself into a mild rage that our pot of rice never cooked all the way and added a dose of sand grains to the crunchy rice. So what wasn't edible was nearly unbearable. Sand crept through the rain fly and zippers on our tents all night long, too. It may as well.
In the morning, we each wandered along the beach looking for sand dollars and shaking the sand out of our ears and hair. We knew the trip was going to be cut short because we needed food eventually. This wasn't panning out the way we'd intended: intense relaxation, grilling some fresh-from-the-sea shrimp, maybe a boat ride and a swim in the waters. So we didn't talk about it. Soon a local man stopped by our camp. At the time I was much more fluent in Spanish than I am today, so he and I struck up a conversation. When he asked where we were from, I answered with my best Spanish inflected,"Areezonah."
"Ah! Areezona!" He grinned and laughed and raised his fist in the air and then shouted, "Go Diamondbacks!"
Not only was he a baseball fan, he was also the caretaker of the beach we'd camped on and said it cost $5.00. He told me to come up to his house and pay there on our way out of town, when ever that might be. In his fine Spanglish, "Dos o tres o cuatro días, no problem."
Not willing to give up our adventure too soon, I asked if there was a restaurant or market here to buy food.
No, he said, only families of fishermen. But he had an idea. He suggested in his gentle way that we come to his house and his wife will make us a fish taco breakfast. He didn't wait for an answer. "¿Que tipo de tortillas prefieren, de harina or maíz?" Did we prefer corn or flour tortillas? You know how hospitality works: the receiver says don't go to any trouble for me, and the giver says nonsense it's no trouble at all we're honored you're here.
So we went. The man's wife cooked fish tacos, with all the fresh chopped tomatoes and onions and cilantro and limes and hand-made tortillas we could handle until I finally told her we were beyond stuffed, and therefore our hearts happy. She didn't say anything, but I could tell she resisted this idea that she stop cooking for us. She wanted to cook, and it seemed she'd do it as long as we were sitting in her home, on her recycled milk crate chairs in her floorless hut.
The man suddenly brought up the September attack that happened just a few months before. He showed us how they used a car battery to power a small portable television set, and that that's how they watch the news all the way out here, on the Sea of Cortés, in a village with no electricity and little influence from the developed world. The woman, who mostly faced the stove with her back to us the whole morning, finally turned around to face us. She stopped and said in Spanish, "That was a very, very sad day."
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