Off the Grid Read online

  At least I’d thought he fit the profile until that morning. As we departed, he walked down the stairs of my house carrying two king-sized pillows covered with 300 thread-count cotton cases.

  “Do we have room for these?” he asked.

  “You gotta be shittin’ me,” I said. “Where the hell do you think we’re going?”

  I leaned up from the Dodge’s back seat to look at Steve Malloy, a friend of ours with a trucking business who’d agreed to lug us and the Tesla to the border.

  Steve flashed his blue eyes at me as he tuned the truck’s radio. “I’d love to go with you.”

  Boy, I bet you would, I thought, knowing his marriage was on the rocks. I said, “You’ve got your kids and your business.” I turned to Steve’s driver, Rick. “You two have got a ten-hour drive back to Monroe. Maybe you can give Steve some marital advice to pass the time.”

  “Not me,” Rick said, laughing. “I’m on my fifth wife.”

  The traffic slowed a tad. I looked out at the maze of people rushing to be somewhere, rats in a race. Strangely, I felt sorry for them. In the car beside us, a middle-aged man talked on the phone. He wore a nice suit and looked the part of a successful professional. How uninspiring. Above, a flock of seagulls darted gracefully toward the Gulf, above all the mayhem. I felt like the seagulls, gliding effortlessly along, pushed by the free air without a care in the world. I mean, what was there to worry about?

  Drug Lords and Federales

  To my amazement, we finished all the paperwork at the border in less than an hour. That is, we finished after I ponied up 550 bucks with the promise from the Mexican Government that I’d get $400 of it back upon safe return. Had the IRS possibly infiltrated Mexico? I stuck the car permit on the front windshield and pulled out of the secure customs compound.

  Our only hitch at the crossing had been the Federal Police’s inspection of the car’s trunk. The bundles of electrical wire perplexed the soldier. Was I up to some mischief? I quickly explained that the car was electric. “No petro,” I said. “Loco gringos.”

  The soldier never modified his tough face, but shut the trunk and motioned us on. We didn’t need any more major problems this morning. Only twenty minutes earlier we had avoided a small mishap. Tesla’s Model S does not come equipped with a spare, jack, or lug wrench. With some effort, I had bought a spare, specially made in Indiana and shipped to me in Louisiana, and got my hands on a jack and matching lug wrench. All had been loaded in the car, or so I thought, but as we approached the border, the jack was nowhere to be found.

  Pondering whether we should turn around and go back to the Walmart in McAllen, like a magician performing a trick, Steve found a small scissor jack in the bed of his truck. This was incredibly fortuitous. With the Tesla’s limited clearance, this was the only type of jack that would work. What a mess if we had a flat on some desolate road only to discover we had no jack.

  Ten minutes later we were on the busy streets of Reynosa. The industrial border city of half a million was once a hot spot for vice and partying, a place where American college boys went for the anything-goes atmosphere or to lose their virginity. Sadly, it’s now one of the most dangerous cities in the world, an epicenter of the Mexican drug war, known for endless running gun battles, dismemberments, and bodies hanging from overpasses. Fortunately, tourists are not typically on the target list.

  I weaved around numerous potholes on the lookout for drug lords. I wasn’t sure what a drug lord looked like, but almost anything seemed plausible. The four-lane road resembled any American street through a run-down neighborhood, but the cars were older, more worn out, and the drivers crisscrossed the pavement without regard for traffic-control measures.

  I’m quite familiar with Mexico, having lived here for a year about a decade ago when working in the oil industry. The northern border region is one of the few areas of the country where I truly feel uncomfortable, so I’d hoped we’d be able to shoot over to our first destination, Saltillo, non-stop. We could quickly cover the two hundred miles in a few hours and put the worst of the border area behind us.

  Constantly checking the road signs, mirrors, and GPS, I sliced in and out of the hectic traffic. Where would a wrong turn here lead? The sights were minimal, mostly pedestrians and businesses.

  • • •

  Only a month earlier, on a Saturday afternoon, journalist Michael Deibert made a turn down a side street here and found himself eye to eye with the unthinkable—a cartel roadblock manned by machine gun-toting enforcers inspecting every car. Fortunately for Michael, the gunmen were apparently looking for someone other than him.

  About two months after we passed through here, the city erupted with firefights and roadblocks. Over a two-month period, sixty-four ambush killings, or ejecuciones, took place on these streets. Let’s get the hell out of here as fast as possible, before we run into a drug lord who wants to reduce his fossil fuel emissions!

  • • •

  Five more minutes and we found ourselves outside of town. We passed something completely useless to us, a nice, American-style PEMEX Station. In another fifteen minutes, we found ourselves on HWY 40 without a hitch.

  I let out a big sigh. We were finally on our way, not simply physically, but also mentally. Even the night before, I had lingering doubts. Would we actually go through with this? Would Dean or I have second thoughts at the moment of truth?

  One of the biggest impediments to the trip had been actually finding someone to go with me. Plenty of people said, “Hell, yeah.” But of the dozens, only Dean climbed in the truck the day before. Some probably had second thoughts after thinking it over, but most suffered from the fear that if they missed a crucial meeting, deadline, or special social event, fire, brimstone, and eternal damnation would arrive on their doorsteps.

  Dean synced up his electronic tablet and put on some Jimmy Buffet, “Wonder Why We Ever Go Home,” and I set the cruise control on 50 mph, a speed that should give us about 325 miles of range under optimum conditions.

  The scenery seemed to be turning a little more tropical, the land a little more hilly. Or was it? Was my mind hoping for and expecting a change? The terrain rushing by induced trepidation. I was no stranger to traveling. Through work, recreation, or my hiking and climbing when younger, I’d been to over thirty countries, much of it far from tourist circuits, off the beaten track. But I had never undertaken anything like this. Few had.

  For this trip, we had no corporate or government sponsorship or aid. We had no logistical support, or anyone to scout the way. We had only our wits. This wasn’t some adventure or reality TV show manufactured by Hollywood, where hidden off-camera lay the safety of a support crew and corporate resources. We had somewhere to go, to prove that something could be done, to satisfy our own wants, egos, and needs, and we had finite assets. Every fiber of our bodies and souls would try to make it happen, if it could be done.

  Before the trip, I had reached out to several people for help. One was Mike Nelson, a McAllen native and writer of travel books catering to people driving south of the border. Mike travels frequently to Mexico, and is constantly updating his webpage with current information. The other source was Sanborn’s, an all-service travel company with offices scattered along the Mexican/American border, that provides an array of services to travelers heading south. That was it.

  Twenty minutes outside of town my cell phone rang. It was Steve.

  I answered, “What’s up?”

  “You make it?”

  “Yeah, we’re out of town and on the road.”

  “Just checking. The Texas cops stopped us after we dropped you off. They saw us headed to the border with the car, and then on the way back without the car. They wanted to know what’s up. We told them the story. They told us you wouldn’t make it two hours until somebody steals that fancy car.”

  “We’ll take it under advisement,” I said. “They’ve gotta catch us first. Gotta go.”

  I relayed the comforting news to Dean and looked at my door
mirror. Prior to our departure, we had spray-painted two of the Tesla’s fenders with temporary paint, one red and one gray, trying to mimic bondo in hopes this might cheapen the value of the car in the eyes of any potential robbers.

  As I inspected our artwork, I slowed for a military checkpoint at the state line between Tamaulipas and Nuevo León. The policía checked our papers and asked a few questions. As they did, one of the officers rubbed on the paint and it easily transferred itself to his hands. He looked to his partner. My shaky Spanish and an interpolation of their faces told me they wondered what we were hiding.

  “Arte,” I said, spitting out the Spanish translation of “art,” the only Spanish word I could conjure up. Is there a word for “fake bondo?”

  A few anxious seconds passed. The two policemen scrutinized the car suspiciously, but a honking horn turned their attention to a car behind us. “Okay,” one of them finally said and handed me my paperwork.

  Steve’s call and the serious nature of the checkpoint reminded me we were not on an Americanized vacation, a week sunning in Cancún or fishing in Costa Rica. It saddled me with a strange sensation of both rapture and foreboding.

  I pulled forward twenty or thirty feet to let Dean drive. I’d take over the navigation. Less than an hour later I realized what a mistake this had been. As the day passed, Dean developed the annoying habit of playing with his tablet, and worse, video recording the trip from behind the steering wheel. In Mexico, strict, even rigid defensive driving while manning the steering wheel is best for long life expectancy. The driver and director had become one. I’d be up early enough every morning to claim the driver’s seat, at least until the new surroundings had worn off for Dean.

  Now on the open road, the landscape unfolded through my six-dollar, truck-stop sunshades, an isolated stretch of rolling sage. Snow-capped mountains loomed ahead, but along the modern freeway, the land lay almost devoid of human presence.

  • • •

  Few, if any, border crossings in the world constitute such an abrupt transformation as the Rio Grande. Paris is a drastic change from Baghdad, but if you drive the roughly two thousand miles along the route, the changes in culture and people are gradual.

  Crossing from Texas to Mexico is stark—first world to poverty, order to disorder, lawful to a place where the military and Federal Police wear masks to hide their identity.

  We passed an isolated PEMEX station, where Dean wanted to stop and get a Coke and some peanuts. I protested, at least long enough to forestall this as we passed the crossover.

  Though traveling through much of Mexico is generally safe, this stretch of land and HWY 40 in particular are somewhat notorious. The two hundred-square-mile wedge of earth bound by Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa is often called the triangle of death. And HWY 40 is the site of the 2012 Cadereyta Jiménez massacre, in which the drug cartels decapitated and mutilated forty-nine people and left them on the side of the road. Hopefully, the nonstop ride would put us out of this area by noon. This was hardly the place to stop and loiter in an expensive, new car.

  Sure enough, we passed a heavily armed patrol of Federal Police, two modern, heavy-duty Ford trucks painted a slick black and white. The soldiers, clad in body armor, stood in the backs of the trucks, their machine guns handy, eyeing every car with unsmiling, alert eyes. Only an hour across the border, the reminders of the ugly side of this land lay everywhere.

  The rest of the morning passed eventless other than my constant checking of the Tesla’s range meter. For most of the morning, it suggested that we would only get the EPA-rated range of 265 miles per full charge. This was considerably lower than I’d expected, because in Louisiana I’d averaged well over 300 miles a charge at this speed.

  Was it the load? We’d packed light in hopes of increasing our range and nimbleness, a bag each with four changes of clothes, two sleeping bags, laptop computers, a phone, shaving kit, portable commode, and a tent. Additionally, we had a bag with electrical and mechanical tools and extension cords, a cardboard box with a few maps and three guidebooks, and of course, a half-dozen rolls of Charmin toilet paper and box of maximum-strength Imodium. Total cargo: six hundred to seven hundred pounds. We’d forage for everything else.

  By noon, we skirted around the north side of Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest and wealthiest city, the evidence of the more than three million residents visible in the thick cloud of smog hovering over the city and seen easily from a distance. Rising above the pollution, jagged, green mountains encased the metropolis.

  Leaving Monterrey, we climbed up a high, barren mountain pass to Saltillo. Steep, gray rock rubble slopes tumbled down steeply to the road, only occasionally broken by scant yucca. I had read Sam Chamberlain’s account of his time in Saltillo and Monterrey during the Mexican-American War. Filled with amusing stories of American soldiers wandering the colonial streets and flooding the area’s cantinas and fiestas, he also told the harrowing story of his own trip through this pass. Called the Pass of Death by the cavalrymen, the narrow passage was a favorite haunt of highwaymen and vultures, both leaving the pass pockmarked with cadavers and bleached-whited bones. After the war, Sam moved on to scalp hunting, his story the inspiration for Cormac McCarthy’s modern classic, Blood Meridian.

  My fears grew—not of bandits but of the range meter, now showing that we would get only 80 percent of the rated miles. Would we even make it to Saltillo? The destination and range now almost matched.

  As we crested the pass, the projected range increased 15 to 20 percent. We’d make it to Saltillo, but with less safety factor than I’d hoped.

  Around 1:30 p.m., we rolled under the large Bienvenidos a Saltillo sign spanning the road. We looked for a hotel capable of housing us with Western comforts and, more importantly, a handy 240-volt socket where we could charge the car.

  I’d gotten a tip: the Hotel Emperial and Trailer Park. We punched it into the GPS and, to my amazement, it popped up on the little screen—straight ahead, a half mile on the right. Thank God for modern technology. What in the hell did Columbus do?

  Pulling in, I saw window air conditioners protruding from the rooms that were likely powered by 240-volt outlets. Unfortunately, none of the hotel’s clerks spoke English, but with my Spanglish, I got the hotel clerk to show me one of the rooms. I quickly checked the AC socket, a standard NEMA 6-20. I had an adapter for the plug.

  “Bueno,” I said. “Cuenta questa?”

  “770 pesos,” the clerk said.

  “Internet?”

  The young man nodded.

  About fifty-five dollars. In New York or DC I have paid five times as much, no internet included, but with a rat thrown in free. “I’ll take it,” I said.

  With the aid of a 200-foot, 50-amp extension cord, I rigged up a connection that worked. The Tesla was charging at 18 amps. It would be fully charged by nine the next morning. I sat down and analyzed the day’s trip. We’d gone 196 miles with 41 miles left in the batteries. Not bad considering our heavy load and the fact we’d climbed from sea level to Saltillo, elevation 5,200 feet.

  Not having eaten all day and still in two-day-old clothes, I left Dean with the car and walked down the town’s main street to a small convenience store.

  Saltillo, the oldest town in northeast Mexico, founded in 1577, sits on an arid plain at the north end of the Chihuahua Desert on the other side of a mountain pass from its much larger neighbor, Monterrey. Though the city has over 700,000 residents, like most Mexican towns, it’s much smaller, geographically, than American cities of equal population, probably equating in size and services to an American town with 150,000 people. Despite its nice plaza and colonial buildings, most of the town had square, stucco buildings, mostly white, tan, or pink. The architecture, the towering mountains surrounding the city, and the clean, dry air produced the ambiance of a frontier settlement. In the last two hundred years, the old Spanish city had been conquered by the American Army and Pancho Villa.

  We were finally on our way. We were here.
We had crossed the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, and into Coahuila. Under a stunning blue sky, I felt the isolation of a foreign land, but also an unleashed surge of autonomy and the draw of the open road. Satisfaction oozed over my soul. One day complete. No small accomplishment, but every day would doubtfully be this easy.

  I stepped into the store, picked up four bottles of water, two sandwiches, and some snacks. With relief still filling me, I put the goods on the counter. “Buenos tardes,” I said to the short, sun-beaten, elderly man behind the counter as I looked up at a poster on the wall, a bronze beauty in a skimpy bikini touting a brand of Mexican beer. Pulling some money from my wallet, I nodded to the poster. “Dónde este ella?”

  “Estados Unidos,” the man said casually as he bagged the goods.

  “Too bad,” I said, picking up the bags, “I’m going the other way.”

  Don’t Come

  The next morning I had a chilly shower as the hotel had no heater. The sexy Mexican weather gal said it was ten degrees Celsius. I’m an engineer, but have no clue what that is. Somewhere in the forties, I guessed. With our batteries fully charged, we were on the road by nine-fifteen, me behind the wheel. Dean could film all he wanted today.

  • • •

  The previous evening had not been completely without drama. Walking Saltillo’s main street late in the day, Dean had stumbled onto a raid by the Federales, locked and loaded, on some establishment right around the corner from the hotel.

  While I looked over some maps for the next day’s trip, scanned my emails, and tried to get some writing done, Dean spent a few hours googling Saltillo only to determine it was a hotbed of the drug trade and the Mexican government’s current war on the cartels. Just in the last year, bodies had been found, hacked and deposited along the city’s streets.