Salvador, our amateur guide and Semipro Mariachi singer, is throatily butchering something about a bra-full of bad news named Maria when the song suddenly dies in his mouth. His eyes are fixed on a big, red Dodge pickup with smoked-black glass that just burst through the dust ahead on this dirt gully of a road.
"Narcotraficantes," he mutters.
Drug runners. Salvador edges our truck as close as he can to the crumbly edge of the cliff on our right and stops, granting the red pickup every bit of road he can spare. No trouble here is the message he's trying to send. Just minding our own, non–drug-related business. Just don't stop. . . . Because what would we say if they cut us off and came piling out, demanding we speak slowly and clearly into the barrels of their assault rifles, while we explained just what the hell we're doing out here in the badlands of Mexican marijuana country?
We're not federales, we'd have to stammer, or under-cover DEA. We're not searching for drugs, but for a people who are guarding something far more valuable: the secret of longevity and perpetual health and happiness. The phantom Tarahumara Indians are said to have found a way to party all their lives and never pay the consequences, living on a diet of carbs and beer but still being able to hop up and run more than 100 miles at a time, even in their 60s. . . .
I'm still rehearsing this speech when I notice that the truck has rumbled past, its crew invisible behind sealed black windows. Salvador watches in the rearview till the Dodge is again swallowed by dust, then slaps the steering wheel. "¡Bueno!" he shouts. "¡Andale pues, a más aventuras!" Excellent! On to more adventures!
Gradually, parts of me that have clenched tight enough to crack walnuts start to loosen, but I suspect it won't be for long. We set out yesterday from Chihuahua, driving all night across the desert and deep into the Sierra Madre, heading toward the upper rim of the Barrancas del Cobre -- Mexico's Copper Canyons, a maze of twisting gorges that run wider than the Grand Canyon. There are no roads where we're headed, or even mapped trails, which is just the way the Tarahumara like it.
Either you know where you're going, in other words, or you aren't getting there. And a few hours after our encounter with the deathmobile, that seems to sum up our situation. We went off-road long ago and are now crunching over a bed of pine needles, winding deeper and deeper into a darkening forest with no sign that any human has passed this way before. Salvador, however, is still belting out tunes, making turns based on trees he thinks look familiar.
We're screwed, I'm thinking.
And then, just as the sun sets, we run out of planet. We emerge from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead -- a crack in the earth so vast that the far side could be in a different time zone. And in a way, it is -- because standing nearby are three Stone Age men in togas, motionless as the mountains, as if they've been there forever.
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