The Last Easy Day
Copper Canyon, Mexico
Day Five
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Trying our hands at tortilla making |
The last difficult day. Skip warned that it would be a strenuous six hours. Divisadero is no more than a whistle-stop which allows tourists to debark from the train and look down into the immense depths of the Urique Canyon but to us it represented cold beer, hot lunch, and our waiting transportation back to the Sierra Lodge. To get there we had to ascend more than 3600 feet in elevation. There were no springs, so we carried what water we needed. I gladly relinquished my pack to one of the Tarahumara, who loaded it with oranges to take back to Creel. I carried only my three liters of water.
It was a very difficult climb, but the footing was more secure that we had experienced, and Calistro paced himself with me to offer encouragement. He carried a pack that must have weighed 80 pounds. Whenever he led me across a particularly steep and dangerous place, he would point down and very seriously warn, “chew-weeky!” I decided that it was Tarahumara for, “Fall here and you die!” I taught him to say “dead”, and he deadpanned a mangled version of the word at every approaching precipice. In the past five days, we had learned to smile together, and had reached across great differences to find common ground.
The sounds of the canyons will remain forever among my most vivid memories: the rhythmic pat-pat of Paula’s daily tortilla sculpting, the reverberating sounds of a dog’s bark as it mimics itself endlessly down the walls of the chasm, the shared laughter around the crackle of a campfire. And above all, the immense, timeless, unfathomable silence of the canyons themselves.
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Our group |
No one emerges from a crossing unchanged. And we stumbled out of the wilderness much different from the way we stumbled into it. Physically, we looked a ragged riot of scratches, bruises, blisters, and beards. Emotionally, we were stronger, more sure of our abilities, and most importantly, we carried a sense of dignity and serenity that was the gift from the mountains and its citizens, the Tarahumara.
The crossing is certainly not a trip for everyone. But it is the only way to see these lands hidden from the twenty-first century. The unexpected bonus is the opportunity to have our lives touched by the people who live here by choice, securely hidden in a fortress of formidable mountains.
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Relaxing back at the Lodge |
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Skip McWilliams |
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Celebration |
Read all six parts of The Last Easy Day
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
