San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: The End of an Era

I’d officially finished my MFA degree, having successfully defended my thesis that spring. In July, I moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to continue the program via its postgraduate workshops, if for really no other reason than to sort of take a victory lap, to spend just one more summer with these folks who I’d grown so fond of these last few years, one last chance to meander foreign streets and drink late into the night and sometimes even into the early dawn in claustrophobic bars and pubs, or sit on a town square wall and eat messy street food, to talk books and writing and love and life one more summer. Not quite ready to let it go. Not ready to delegate it to my back pocket where I kept all my past experiences.

No, I was telling myself. Not yet. This adventure was still present tense. Still in the here and now.

This time, though, would be without the pressure of coursework and grades, without the pressure of pages needing to be written, chapters needing to be read. This one would be just for fun.

By this, my fourth summer in the program, my fourth consecutive year traveling far afield, I’d perhaps gotten a little cocky, less cautious and measured. The apprehension of that first summer traveling to Montpellier, France, by myself and having never been abroad before, had long evaporated. The previous summer had been my second consecutive in Madrid, Spain, so I’d felt at home from the very first day. By then, year three, I knew the city as my own and I’d made lifelong friends that I was happy to see again. We ventured by train one weekend to the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, where a few of us joined the fray in the streets and, ridiculously, ran with the bulls.

So, by San Miguel, I felt like a seasoned veteran traveler. Which is how, on the very first night, I tripped over my overconfidence and got myself good and lost trying to find my hostel on the way home from having drinks, and toasting our last hurrah, with a core group of fellow MFAers. Leaving my hostel, I’d thought the walk to the center of town, perhaps a mile, had been pretty much a straight shot, maybe one, perhaps two, simple bear-rights and bear-lefts along the way. But when I left the bar, and the group, hours later, feeling a little tipsy but still a seasoned, grizzled writer-adventurer-world traveler, I had all the confidence in the world that, even if I didn’t know exactly where that hostel was, I could feel my way to it, guided by experience and some sort of Hemingway-esque bravado.

That didn’t last too long. I learned pretty quickly that I was in fact lost. I wandered until surrendering to the realization that at that point all I was doing was tangling the rope worse and worse, and the best thing to do was to retreat to the center of town again, thereby untangling the knot, and start all over again.

But the second attempt bore the same result. I’d end up wandering some twisting side street, surrounding windows all dark, businesses closed and locals asleep in their apartments. The moon vanished behind a sheath of cloud cover, and I stumbled over uneven cobblestones that I couldn’t see beneath me. I wandered some more, backtracked, wandered a different direction, then, growing frustrated, retreated to the center again. At least I could easily locate the distant cathedral spires in the town center and fumble my way back there.

By the time I made my third attempt, the sky had broken apart and a soaking rain hammered San Miguel’s ancient streets. All I could do to protect myself was hunch my shoulders against the weather, stuff my fists a little deeper into my pockets, stiffen myself against the cold summer rain. Soon I was drenched, clothes heavy with water and sticking to my skin. I’d caught a chill. I had to resign myself to the fact that the weather, and this city, were having their way with me. My drunken Hemingway swagger of an hour ago had longed abandoned me.

On this, my third failed attempt, the fact that I wasn’t going to find this place, not on my own, struck me. I was not going to be able to simply roam until I bumped into it. In fact, at that point, I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered what its façade had even looked like. In other words, I wasn’t going to recognize it even if I saw it. And, more importantly, I had no idea the name of it or what street it was on.

Back in the town center, readying myself for a fourth attempt, nearly two hours now into this fruitless quest, rain punching at me in aggressive and wet slaps, I surrendered to the idea that the best I would be able to do, at this hour, might be to simply stay awake all night long, wait for the dawn and the hope of a new day, and see how it all looked in daylight.

In my wanderings, though, I found a police station. I was desperate, and went inside to ask for help. There were two big roadblocks still facing me, however. The first was that no one here really spoke English. I think I conveyed that I was lost – they could probably figure that out just by how wet I was –but then we ran into the second roadblock: even if we could get past the language barrier, how could I tell them what I was looking for when I didn’t even know myself?

A female police officer told me to follow her, or gestured for me too, more accurately, and then we were out in the street again, walking a couple blocks in one direction until, oddly, we ducked inside a restaurant. She led me to a hostess, who, it turned out, spoke English. I told her my story and she conveyed it to the cop. The cop asked something back, and the hostess translated it for me: you do not know where your hostel is? I shrugged and gestured vaguely to the south. Or maybe it was east. I don’t know. I gestured vaguely.

The cop thanked the hostess and so I did too – “Gracias,” – and then I followed the cop back down the street, which had grown much quieter in these last couple hours, and then back inside the police station. She pulled a map out from under the counter and splayed it open, then tapped her finger on the town center and then the police station, right over here. Then she looked at me questioningly, waiting for me to point at where I was trying to go. I put my finger on the map, traced a road south, then stopped, unsure. I looked at her and shrugged. “I don’t have a clue,” I said.

She smiled apologetically and said something to me, but at that point the realization that she was not going to be able to help me – of course she wasn’t – had become clear. I nodded and gave her a thumbs up and told her “Gracias” a few more times, backing out into the street, retreating to my original plan: to wait it out until morning.

But then I had an idea. I should have thought of it two hours earlier, but better late than never. When I’d booked the hostel, it had been one of many listed on the University of New Orleans study abroad website. In my endless wanderings, I’d twice passed a late-night Internet café, so I double-timed it back over there, praying it was still open.

It was. I bought myself twenty minutes, got to the website, found the list, and recognized the name of the hostel. Thank fucking Christ. I borrowed a scrap of paper and a pencil from the guy working the front desk, then wrote down the hostel’s name and address. Then I hustled back to the center of town, clutching that scrap of paper in my wet, cold fist, and flagged down a taxi cab. “Hola,” I said to him, winded and tired and very, very wet. I handed him the piece of paper, tapping my finger on the address. “Gracias,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Muchas gracias.”

***

Julian and I moved a day later from our hostel room, which we’d been sharing with two friends, Eric and Sydney, to our own house a few blocks away, complete with rooftop terrace, gardens, and even a daily housekeeper who did the dishes and washed our laundry. After my introductory night being lost, San Miguel took a sharp turn into paradise. I went to workshops during the day ad did some writing, trying to finish the novel that had originally been intended as my MFA thesis before I’d run out of time and switched to a collection of short stories.

In the evenings we’d listen to lectures and student readings, then head for dinner and the bars, often drinking long into the night. The summer felt both celebratory and melancholy, the end of this wild chapter of personal growth, for me sort of a long-delayed coming of age. One day we left the city for the countryside, visiting a working ranch where we mounted horses for riding in the mountains and plains of rural Mexico. We crossed rivers that soaked our legs, and I gritted my teeth in expectation as my horse navigated a treacherously narrow cliff-side path, often the team of horses needing to be coaxed along by the ranchers. Whenever this happened, my trust always fell to the horses, not the ranchers. A part of me wanted to interject: “If my horse doesn’t want to cross this gap (or descend this steep ledge, or round this precarious corner at this deathly height) then maybe we shouldn’t do it.

At the end of the day the ranchers asked if any of us wanted to line our horses up to race. Some of us volunteered, and I, at the end of this four year adventure of a lifetime, couldn’t refuse, not after all these summers spent saying yes.

At the pinnacle of the race, my horse topping out at its full sprint, I lost my hold of the saddle and was thrown into the soil and grass, landing with a dull thud on my back. Miraculously, I wasn’t really injured. In fact, I hadn’t been hurt at all. My pride, maybe.

***

I walked the desolate and dark streets of San Miguel later that night, or maybe the following night, the cathedral up-lit like a beacon, the damp cobblestone streets reflecting moonlight, the smell of old rain clinging to the air. I’d survived my fall from the horse and had recovered after getting lost during that first-night monsoon. The year before, I’d traveled to Pamplona, Spain and followed Julian into the gauntlet to run with the bulls, echoing Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I’d just read for a course called “Expat American Literature”. I’d skinny-dipped in the Mediterranean and danced in sweaty, dangerously overcrowded Madrid nightclubs late, late into the night, coming out to the street tired and spend to find the early dawn greeting us, making me squint in its beautiful orange glow. And a million other foolish, exhilarating, life-affirming things. I’d successfully defended my thesis and had earned a second master’s degree, had made lifelong friends, completed my novel, lived in new countries. I wasn’t the same person coming out of this experience as I’d been going in, not by a longshot.

In a couple months I’d turn forty, and my younger brother would move to San Diego, the start of his own new adventure, and an adventure for me, too, a new coast and horizon for me to explore. To get reacquainted with. And that coming fall, I’d meet my future wife, too.

But I didn’t know any of that yet, not that night wandering the ancient midnight streets of San Miguel. That night, I just walked, stretching my sore back, full of gratitude. For everything that had happened, and, of course, for everything yet to come.