On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

by Paul Theroux

“I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.”

a road trip would lift my spirits and release me from the useless obsession of self-scrutiny and induce in me (as the English writer Henry Green put it in Pack My Bag) “that blessed state when you forever cease to give a damn.”

But no sooner had I gotten behind the wheel than a feeling came over me that was like being caressed by a cosmic wind, reminding me of what travel at its best can do: I was set free.

Another lesson: it’s a mistake to disclose that you’re passionate about going anywhere, because everyone will give you ten reasons for not going—they want you to stay home and eat meatloaf and play with a computer, which is what they’re doing.

It was obvious to me this early in my trip that the border is not a discrete knife cut, a slash mark in the landscape, except in the minds of politicians and cartographers; it is like most other national boundaries, a muddled blur, and it is obvious in many places that Mexico does not butt up to the border but spills over it and puddles willy-nilly—troche y moche, as Mexicans say—giving many border towns a jumbled cultural ambiguity.