Senora, We Have To Go Back For Your Husband

Every second of today was the absolute best except for the 15 minutes when I thought Chris might be dead. Those minutes sucked, but in a way they really heightened my awareness and enjoyment of the rest of the minutes of the day.

We arrived at Sol & Luna at 10 a.m. because that is when the Sol & Luna representative indicated we should arrive. Doors locked. Street deserted. We waited. And waited. And discussed whether or not the Sol & Luna representative had said we were to meet him at his office or someplace else. They have another office in the neighborhood, so Chris decided to check to see if that office was open. It wasn't, but in the meantime a nice young man came and opened the office I was still waiting at and explained to me in the most apologetic terms (lo siento, lo siento) that he had been sleeping. He invited me to the office to wait for both Chris to return and the man who would be our guide to arrive. Chris came back first. And we waited. And then the guy who was to be our guide--Ray--arrived and explained to me in the most apologetic terms (lo siento, lo siento) that it was the tequila that had done him in. He said we only had to wait a short while longer for the van to arrive. It didn't, so we piled into a compact, drove two blocks and then were instructed to switch cars to a van parked ahead of us. It was starting to feel like a kidnapping, but the kidnappers seemed like they were really dragging from the night before so I was confident we could get away if the plot reached its crisis.

There was a phone call on the way out of town and would it be alright with us if we just picked up one of Ray's friends because she was on her way to the airport and the horses were on the way and she was ready now and, and, and sure. Her name was Theresa, a nurse midwife who splits her life between Chicago and SMA; she travels back and forth every two weeks. We only knew her for about 10 minutes but in that time she spilled coffee all over Ray, had some shifty financial dealings involving an envelope full of pesos that she asked him to give to some other guy and made it clear that she wasn't a fan of either Oak Park Hospital or West Sub.

I should probably mention that I am afraid to get on a horse. I'm not afraid to ride a horse. That part seems easy and fine. I'm afraid to get on and off the horse. I've done it before, but not for a long time and my legs are so short and Chris has a coworker who was kicked in the face by a horse and lost all of her teeth and it was her horse that kicked her so I don't know how a horse that is a total stranger to me is going to feel about having to cart me around on it and what if I kick it by accident when I'm trying to get my leg over the saddle and then there is this weird and final reason for me to be nervous: I have stress dreams about this. It isn't enough for me to sometimes have the dream where my teeth fall out or the one where my contacts break in my eyes, I also have dreams about needing to get on a horse and not being able to do so.

It turns out, it is easy to get on a horse--even if your legs are short--if you attempt to do so from on top of a truck. And once I was up there, I loved it, as I suspected I would. My horse's name was Pancho, and we got along just fine.

I should also probably mention that there was no tutorial. No instructions. No tips.

Ray took the lead and Chris and I followed. A man named Luis, who provided the horses, owns a huge amount of land in the outskirts of the city and his family farms along the river. It is a peaceful and beautiful place for horseback riding. There are fields full of cacti in bloom and brush flowers and trees. Some of the nopales growing by the side of the trail were 15 feet tall. Ray said those were 500 years old; they grow very slowly and then are pruned by all the people who eat them.

I learned that mesquite trees are mean and that while Ray says to avoid them he doesn't necessarily show you what they are or how to avoid them and the horses don't mind them and they tear the shit out of your skin. I have what the detectives on Law & Order would accurately identify as defensive wounds up and down my left arm which bore the brunt of it, and also on my scalp and neck.

The first part of the trail was through this wilderness and the second was through a remote area where indigenous people live in very small houses with very aggressive dogs. The horses apparently ignore everything. These people mostly farm. Past that, there were corn fields, and Chris's horse stopped moving to chomp ears of off their stalk. He did eventually regroup. The trail is also used as an ATV course and I was glad he caught up before the horses and ATVs had to negotiate a crossroads. Ray spent most of the ride on his cell phone, so when we turned from the cornfields to the river, he didn't notice Chris's horse stopped. Chris made a joke about the horse eating which I thought Ray heard and I mentioned Chris was falling behind but Ray was on the phone.

The trail up until this point was out in the bright sunshine. When we turned toward the river, it was shady. There were eucalyptus trees and it was harder to see where you had come from or where you were going. The river itself was beautiful and full of water birds and occasionally fishermen. I asked Ray if the horses followed the trail or they followed him and he said that it was all Luis's land and they were all his horses and that they knew the trail well. I asked him because I hadn't seen Chris in what seemed like a long time. But then I heard whistling and I was sure he was relatively close. Ray took another phone call and the whistling stopped. It turns out, Ray whistles, too. I didn't think Chris was dead.

Ray asked me where my husband was and I said I hadn't seen him for a while. He asked how long it had been. It could have been four minutes or it could have been an hour, and I wouldn't know; time isn't really my thing. I said I had last seen Chris in the cornfield. He told me to continue on the trail on my own and that he would go back and find Chris. I appreciated his concern for Chris's welfare but then grew concerned for my own because Ray was gone, and I still hadn't had any instructions about how to start or stop a horse or which forks to take in the trail. I figured the horse knew the way and I guess he did, except there was a fallen tree he went under because he fit under it but I didn't exactly so add a scrape down my spine to the list of war wounds. I still didn't think Chris was dead.

Pancho decided to go off trail into some weeds, tall grasses and bushes for a bit of a snack himself, at which point I became a snack of sorts because of the mosquitoes that thrive in weeds, tall grasses and bushes. I eventually figured out start and stop and turn and reverse on my own and got Pancho out of the brush and back onto the trail. I still didn't think Chris was dead.

I thought Chris was dead when Ray came galloping across a field shouting to me, "Senora, we have to turn around. We have to go back for your husband." He said he had followed the trail back and had followed all of the turns of the trail we hadn't taken and asked everyone he saw along the way and no one had seen Chris. He wanted to call Chris but I explained we didn't have a cell phone here. He said he didn't know where Chris was, asked me if I thought Chris would cross the river (um, no) and said that we had to go back and find him together. He asked if I was ready to go faster and without waiting for an answer galloped off and Pancho followed. Luckily, Pancho had enough of that quickly and so again I was alone on the trail, but at least I was heading in the same direction as Ray and hopefully heading towards my long lost husband.

Chris wasn't dead. This isn't how I would tell you if he was. He and his horse were exactly where I had seen them last a half hour before and still doing what what they were when I saw them last: eating corn. Ray got a big kick out of that; Chris not so much. He pleaded with it, yelled at it, pulled the reins, hit it with a rope, gave it the finger, kicked it, sweet talked it and the damn horse just wouldn't budge. Our tour was supposed to be three hours door to door but it was closer to four and a half. In the end, we revisited the river trail because Chris had not yet seen it and Ray took some more phone calls, one of which was to arrange for his children to meet us at the end of the river trail. When we veered off, there was his girlfriend and his two kids ready to ride along with us. Ray dismounted and his children who are two and three took his place on his horse and he walked along beside. That slowed them down a bit and so Chris and I took the lead and then sometime after that Ray passed us driving a car. He did lean out the window and ask "Esta bien?" We eventually caught up to his parked car at the end of the trail and his kids and girlfriend (now all three of them were on the horse, the kids in the saddle and her behind it and P.S. the two-year old had fallen asleep between his brother and mama) caught up to us and we all had a quick beer that was the best beer ever and then Ray's girlfriend took us back to town. It was all a little weird, but I really liked the horseback riding part.

While I don't think Sol & Luna is a bonded and fully insured travel agency, we didn't get enough of him; Ray's taking us to the hot springs tomorrow. We're supposed to meet him at Sol Y Luna at 10 a.m. We'll see.