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The Grit and the Glory of the Train Ride Through Copper Canyon Mexico.

This piece was written in 1999, during my Creative Nonfiction class of my senior year of college. For more background on this piece, read my Letter From the Editor.

                The sun was having its way with us. We’d been stuck under its harshest hour, waiting for the second-class train. There is no exaggeration when someone says that the train is always late in Mexico, but I never realized just how late the norm actually was. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t 3:00 in the afternoon and 90 degrees, and if we weren’t stuck sitting around the reflective metal tracks. When the train does finally arrive, it comes so quickly that we had to be ready for it, and since it was already late, and would be arriving any time, we had to wait right there. We had attempted to stand with our packs on, ready to jump quickly on the train when it arrived, but now our packs lay piled up and we were sprawled out on the ground leaning against them. We had very little energy to move at all because to do so in such heat would make us all thirstier, and we each had only our two small water bottles to last us until we made it to Creel. With a train already over an hour late and then a ride of another five hours or so, who know when that might be.

                The environment was surreal as I lay looking up at my surroundings. Behind me, travelers mingled and murmured to each other, kicking the dirt around in their impatience. In front of me, more dirt stretched out in an ever-expanding, desert-like vastness. The jagged walls of the Copper Canyon could still be seen at a distance, but it was hard to believe that we had been at the bottom of the canyon only hours before. It was as if some invisible hand had pulled us up out of the lush hole we were in, which is three times as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon, and dropped us blindly in the open lands of dirt and rock. Down there we had been cooled with the offerings of icy river water and the shade of the canyon walls. But that magic was behind us and we were now forced to sit in limbo, held against our will in the sun’s tight grip.

                Just as I was about to give in and devour the contents of one of my water bottles, I was jolted when the backpack I was leaning against was yanked from beneath me and all the hundreds of travels around me jumped to their feet in unison. “Oh shit, it’s time,” I said to myself, frantically throwing my own heavy pack onto my shoulders.

                I looked to my left to see the train winding its way toward us like a silver snake in the sun. The closer it got the more it appeared to be gaining speed as if it were chasing its prey. The sun’s rays bounced off its sides in bursts of light that burned the eyes.

                “Remember” I could hear Brett, our guide, yelling over the harsh grinding of the train’s wheels against the metal tracks. “Just get on the trains as fast as you can and push your way through and try to find a seat. You have to be aggressive because these people do this all the time, and they’ll push you right out of the way if you let them.”

                Hoards of anxious locals were already getting between me and the others in my group and I suddenly felt like I was lost in the crowd. Then the train came to a stop. This silver monster stood powerfully high, blocking the sun. Like a snake dislocating its jaw, the train was able to swallow all the hundreds of us in a matter of seconds.

                The vast expanse of the open skies disappeared behind me as I found myself trapped within the linear confines of the train’s belly. I felt like I was stuck within a clogged metal pipe. Suddenly the train began to move and I realized that the heat from the sun outside was far preferable to the heat of these bodies plastered together; dripped from the skin and walls, it hung from the ceiling like some tangible quality.

                I was stuck on the vestibule at first, trying not to lose my balance, and I suddenly became very much aware of the burden of accessories. My slippery body was sliding out of my sturdy backpack. My oversized straw hat, which I loved so dearly when I was on the beach by the river, was now scraping the temples of immobile heads. Our group probably took up twice as much space with all of our crap as anyone else on the train, and this made us easy targets for the frustrated locals who knocked clumsy tourists aside as they pushed through the congestion of sweaty bodies, determined to find that little unclaimed corner of space where they could more comfortably stand. The floor was sticky with a little girl’s vomit that had been walked in and spread around. As a small person, I found myself being moved along with the wave of pushers-through, and soon I was stuck up against the bathroom door where I was hit with terrible smells that seeped out whenever any little kids were able to push me aside and open the bathroom door.

                I was amazed that some people were still trying to push through the mass of bodies; small people like me and the elderly travelers suffered because of it. I could see a wrinkled man, who was shorter and probably as skinny as I was, standing behind a seat amongst a luggage pile. He had on dirty blue jeans and a sweatshirt and he was holding his mesh handbag. It was the same kind as I had bought for five pesos to carry my souvenirs in, but from the tattered edges and the stretching of the material where the handles connected, I inferred that he had been using his as his life-long carrying bag. I wondered what was in it. He looked like he was about to crumble away in the madness of the crowd but he just stood in silence holding his bag, his little body jerking around with every corner and bend.

                One of the better train experiences happened a few days before the really difficult one. We were on our way into the canyon, giddy with anticipation. We’d heard the horror stories of the train--it was always very late; it was unpredictable; sometimes it was too crowded to even move; dangerous criminals might be on the train with knives; the train guards walked around with machine guns. While some of these stories are sometimes true, none of them were our experience that day. We had boarded the train before sunrise and were happy to see that there was enough space to sprawl out in our seats for an extra hour of sleep.

                The mad racing and weaving of the taxi drivers that took us to the train station in Chihuahua had given us our first taste of the urban Mexico lifestyle. When our train had left the station, it was still dark outside. But when we awoke, we were surrounded by the orange light of the golden terrain outside. We were still far from the mouth of the canyon, but it was already evident why it was named “Copper” Canyon.

There were steep rock hills and we found it hilarious to see cows standing there with nothing to graze and nothing to stop them from tumbling down. There were tall, jagged formations that led us into tunnels. Then on the other side were huge, round rocks, like boulders. There were even small villages built into the rocks. I guess the life in that area just learned to adapt to the roughness around it; there was so much strange beauty in the rocky land that I could see how it would be worthwhile.

                Suddenly our sweaters that had kept us warm in the early morning were too hot and wanted to expose our skin to the fresh air blowing in through the windows. Minimal safety regulations on the train meant passengers could hang out of the windows (protective glass was lacking) and snap pictures. When the train stopped, short, round women hobbled on with hot tamales and tortillas wrapped in colorful handkerchiefs, and our stomachs grumbled. Lunch became a fiesta when two young men in cowboy hats and boots got on the trains strumming old guitars and singing harmonious melodies. 

                The most fascinating travelers to board the train were the Tarahumara Indians; they are the second largest population of indigenous people in America, and yet we had to come to Copper Canyon to see them. Mainly we saw the women with small children and babies. They were so distinct because of their clothing and facial features. All wore brightly-colored layers (sharp blues, reds, pinks, and yellows) of similar design, and due to the amount of time they spend sitting on the rocky ground in the canyon or on the trains weaving and selling baskets, dust and dirt clung to their skirts and shawls and gave them a rag-doll quality, further emphasized by their small stature and shy mannerisms.

                These women would stand in the back of the cars behind the seats with two or three tiny children next to their legs and a papoose on their backs. They would stand silently, peering out of their oversized owl eyes. Their power to survive (and their culture to prevail) as they had for decades, being forced into the high terrain of the canyon territory, shown through in their ability to float like spirits in and out of the public eye without interacting. Their strength was evident in the mother’s feet, brown and mud-cracked, barely supported by the flap of a sandal; with children at her side and a baby on her back she would walk for miles a day, collecting material for handcrafts. Brett told us that the Tarahumara are the fastest runners in the world. I wondered what other features they possessed. As I watched them standing patiently on the train, I desired to jump off at their stop and follow them into the canyon. I wanted to see them with their families at night in the safety of the canyon caves.

                No one around us appeared to be dangerous or criminal. We were surrounded with people just like us, diverse and various under their brown skin. The warm steam from the hot lunches carried the smells of delicious handmade food, and the sounds of live music floated down the aisles as the two young men took turns playing for each car. That moment, being in the center of a blending of sensations, was the best experience of the train ride.

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                When the five long hours of standing in the smelly aisles finally ended, and everyone in our group found the stability of a nice restaurant with papas and cerveza, it seemed that no one could stop talking about the day on the train. Even amidst the complaints, the little stories about the tequila bottle busting open inside the backpack, or when one guy actually slapped another local in the face for poking at his girlfriend when trying to squeeze through the aisle, everyone became giddy. When we warmed our stomachs with Mexican-style hamburgesas (that actually have a slice of ham on top of the beef) and shots of tequila, we laughed hysterically, screaming even, like Frat boys, and the stories seeped out and demanded their own respect apart from the storytellers’ intentions.