Nathan and the friends we’ve met on our journey have wanted to know how I spend all that time alone in the backseat with only the thoughts bouncing around inside my helmet. In truth, I mostly love our connection to the environment as we ride and I only get bored when we’re riding toll roads. Without the shelter and security and enclosure of a four-wheeled vehicle, we are especially vulnerable, but I find that within that vulnerability, we have a unique opportunity to exercise mindfulness. We are mindful of the fact that we have no control over the choices that other motorists make, and that the only mileage we have to accomplish is what we can achieve by sundown. I mean it—the timetables of the setting sun and those of a small town on Sunday are the only ones we have to mind.

Still, while I have always considered myself a fairly flexible person, even I become attached to an itinerary every now and again, even without having anything at stake. I’ve found it interesting to question where those attachments might come from. Nearly always, we have nowhere to be and have in our pockets the option of moving on whenever we’d like. (The Enlightened among us may remind me that this has always been and will always be true—one’s plans can always change at any time. But given our near-two months in Mexico, it seems especially true.)

We’ve sailed past signs hailing cattle crossings, horse crossings, coyote crossings, and wild boar crossings and, as such, we are now intimately acquainted with the cycles of death, decomposition, and renewal. An amazingly intact, fully dehydrated dragonfly has been stuck in headlight grate for weeks, and our panniers and jackets are speckled with streaks of cadmium yellow butterfly remains. (Fortunately, Nathan in first position catches the bulk of insect casualties.) Whether a dog or coyote or deer has been hit while crossing the road or has met it’s end by some natural cause and lies hidden among thick, scrubby vegetation or behind a bank of sand, there simply isn't any mistaking the fact of a dead animal in a hot weather country. It’s a fact that we were mostly shielded from living in a city like San Francisco—barring, of course, the occasional unfortunate mouse which may expire within your walls. Even without wind, the scent of decomposition carries far beyond the decomposing creature, in all directions, and slithers inside your helmet via the millimeters of wiggle room around your neck.  We’ve seen so many different animals left in various stages of decay and are constantly reminded of how other organisms—the vultures, the flies, the ants, the beetles, and the worms—participate in the cycle.

We find the calling cards of the approaching seasons, weather patterns, and changing terrain in an ever-expanding array of sensory experience. The scent of water is an impressively evocative one for me. It signaled the transformation of the arid terrain of the San Felipe desert in Baja California to slightly more temperate zones like those of Loreto and San Javier in Baja California Sur; the change from a temperate zone like Mazatlán, in the state of Sinaloa, to the lush and tropical towns of San Blas, San Francisco, and Sayulíta in the state of Nayarít; and then the return to the temperate, urban climes of cities of Mexico’s central altiplano like Guadalajara, Jalisco, Morelia, Michoacan, and San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. From the road, the scent of water brings a roundness to the air; the dark, blue-green notes of moss and algae whisper of low, snaking streams or lakes nearby. The scent of water tells us of the damp world of frogs and salamanders and alligators, unseen but not distant and gives material life to one of our many visions of Mexico that had been largely imaginary until now, with its mangroves and its guava and yaka fruit hanging heavily from the trees. It gives us a glimpse into the birth of Mexican civilizations and the dynamism of its culture; of the sustenance and the opportunities for empire that freshwater sources held for both the natives and for the conquerors of this land. 

Likewise, take the desert highways of Baja California, where stretches between towns were the longest and loneliest; where our eyes perceived the vast horizon as tessellations of the same patch of cactus, sand, and scrub, again and again. Here, if our eyes struggled to find nuance, the scents of human habitation carried on the wind helped us build a much fuller awareness of where we were. To our continual surprise, each Middle of Nowhere we encountered was peopled, if only by the few—and wherever there are people, I realized, there follow the aromas of fire and trash. In many of the towns we have visited, infrastructure like trash collection doesn’t exist. As such, household refuse is burnt along the perimeters of one’s land, and even when we couldn’t see a thin grey trail of smoke disappearing into white desert sky, the cloying sweetness of charred corn husks and kitchen scraps and the acrid tang of plastic and aluminum-lined wrappers shriveling and shrinking into nothing found its olfactory foothold among the simmer of asphalt and our exhaust. I wonder, Why would anyone live here? and How awesome would it be to live out here? and Could I survive out here even if I wanted to?

I engage in quite a bit of speculation. I take copious mental notes to research the origins and meanings of indigenous place names, but often forget to do so in post-ride exhaustion. Though the Spanish named many places after the Christian tradition, I have been surprised to note that as many places have retained their indigenous monikers. As we rode through Mazatlán, (Place of the Deer) Sinaloa and Tecolotlán, (Place of the Owl) Jalisco and noticed the absence of said deer and owls, I was initially struck by how greatly the ecology of these places must have changed since the naming and the now. But then it occurred to me that, perhaps, some places bearing the names of animals had never been home to a special abundance of those particular creatures, but rather, were named for some feature of the landscape that resembled an animal or, maybe, for a place’s association with a deity said to take the form of said creature…as I said, I speculate widely and often. And I enjoy being transported through such mental wormholes. But inevitably, my eye is caught by a passing pick-up loaded with jicama or kale, and then I balk at the thought that it’s been almost two months since I’ve even seen any kale, and then I long to follow that kale to it’s destination, and then I fall to pondering the miraculous inflammation-fighting properties of parsley, for which I happen to know the word in Spanish. It’s “Perejil.” Naturally. 

Despite the wealth of entertainments available to me, I do try to keep my eyes on the road. When the potholes are plentiful, or when we find our fellow motorists taking more creative license than usual, or when a cow is running for it’s life, away from us, and looks as if it will dash across the road, I remember and and apply myself to mindfulness. And then I focus on encircling our rig in a bubble of protective energy, imaging ourselves vibrating along inside a little bubble of courage, quick-thinking, and resilience.