It was there in the mariachi bar that I was introduced to real nachos, not the Doritos with Cheez Whiz, but the good stuff with handmade tortilla chips, refried beans, melted cheese, and some very hot jalapeno pepper slices. These the hotel staff would serve on gigantic platters. While I wasn’t much of a beer drinker, I found the local beer to go very well with those nachos.
It was rare that I knew what the mariachis were singing about, but it was beautiful, relaxing music. Sometimes we’d go out by the pool under the palms and listen to the music wafting through the open windows of the mariachi bar and just talk and talk all night until it was time to head back to the States.
Getting back into the United States was at first always interesting. It was unusual for me not to be pulled over on the U.S. side of the bridge by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. I don’t know what profile it was that the customs agents were working off of, but I know we, or I, matched it.
Often the agents would search only the car, but occasionally they would take dogs through the vehicle. That worried me because I imagined the possibility someone had planted drugs in the hubcaps or somewhere else under the car, planning to follow us and pick up their stash when we stopped. It never happened but seemed a reasonable possibility at the time.
Often during a thorough search, customs agents directed us to stand behind large Plexiglas or maybe bullet-resistant screens. Then we learned how not to get stopped.
U.S. agents always seemed to ask the same questions, revolving around how long we had been in Mexico and what we’d been doing. When an agent asked, “How long have you been in Mexico?” the incorrect answers included “Not long” and “Just doing some shopping.” Those answers got us pulled over every time.
The bakeries in Mexico seemed to always serve only warm goods. The fresh tortillas were incredible, as were the many different types of rolls. They were worth a special trip. I rarely missed an opportunity to try a new bakery or revisit an old one. I once went over the bridge for some pastries at a magnificent bakery there in Juarez. I picked up the pastries, turned around, and went back to El Paso.
When customs agents asked how long I had been in Mexico, I said, “About twenty minutes.” That triggered a full inspection by agents and dogs and found me standing behind the bulletproof barrier.
Getting tired of being pulled over, I tried experimenting with different answers until I found the one that always worked. The correct answer to the question of how long had I been in Mexico was “I don’t know. We’ve been partying over at the Camino Real,” with an emphasis on partying and acting just slightly inebriated. That answer worked every time, effectively ending the stops and searches.
Even after my weekly forays into Mexico ended, I continued to use that partying story technique, and it worked every time. The older I got, the less I needed to use it until finally I had only to act my age to get over the border. These days I mostly get bored looks from U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
When we weren’t in Juarez, Ana Maria and I would be exploring the night spots and restaurants in El Paso, of which there were many excellent ones. El Paso by the Rio Grande is indeed a good city, and well worth a song or two.
Sadly, my fabulous weekends in El Paso and Juarez came to an end when Ana Maria moved on to greener pastures.
Seeing her had been a wonderful break from the all-male world of the underground that I was living in. For my part I appreciated our time together and what seemed to me to be exotic adventures.
I was bothered by that breakup for quite some time—a little too long, as it so happened.
Fuzzmobile
Al Friedt was yet another recent Grants High School graduate. He had grown up in Grants, and I think there were others in his family working in the mines.
Al was full of enthusiasm of a kind I hadn’t seen underground. His aura was quite apart from the more basic motives of most miners. The good miners I knew went about their work driven by the need to earn a living first, then they got involved in competing with other miners to move up on the contract board, and then they became motivated by pride in their work. Al’s enthusiasm was different.
Al was a high-energy guy, a highly enthusiastic, happy young man who had no idea where he was going but was going to get there in a hurry. Maybe it was a consequence of youthful enthusiasm, but I think there was more to it than that. He epitomized Cal’s dual axioms of work like a mule and do something even if it’s wrong.
In lieu of any better idea, Al headed for the mines after graduation. Not being sure he wanted to work underground, he had started on the surface driving a front-end loader. Loaders had very large buckets and huge rubber tires and were used to load ore trucks, move sand to the sand-fill hopper, and clean up around the ore hoist under the headframe.
A lot of guys I worked with didn’t have any good stories of their time at Section 35 or didn’t know how to tell them, but Al already had some front-end loader misadventures to talk about.
Ideally front-end loader drivers would not drive up the sand pile but rather take sand gradually from the bottom. Doing it that way was easy, smart, safe, efficient, but evidently not much fun.
For some reason Al had decided one day to take his loader up the side of a huge sand pile. Apparently he was trying to be the pioneer of off-road front-end loader driving and wanted to test the limits of the machine. There was no other work-related explanation for trying that. But a big pile of sand was not the most stable terrain on which to drive a loader.
Loaders had large enclosed cabs with doors on either side that opened outward. Should a loader start to tip for any reason, it was easy for the operator to escape if need be by jumping out the door opposite of the direction the machine was tipping, thus avoiding being crushed.
As Al made his way up the sand pile, his loader started to slide sideways. Seeing that the whole machine was going to flip, Al jumped. He jumped out the wrong door, however, in the direction the machine was going to roll. Had the loader rolled over onto him, he would have been crushed, but he was somehow able to scramble away just in time, and it missed him. Both he and the loader continued rolling down the side of the mountain of sand.
It came to be a legendary story among the surface crew, but at the time of Al’s assignment to me I had heard nothing of it.
After that episode, Shotgun or Mel decided a better place for Al might be underground, and Al agreed, so he was transferred to me. Bill was the one who told me Al would be my new helper. Since I knew Al hadn’t been working underground, I asked around and heard some rumors about a loader incident. I heard it was bad but didn’t get many details other than Al was pretty stupid.
That worried me, because if he made a big mistake underground, we might not escape. Not having a choice regarding my new helper, I told Al it was great having him, but there was something I needed to know first.
“Tell me about the incident with the loader,” I said.
I was expecting a lot of excuses, denials, and misdirected blame, but what I got was a very funny story and the truth. I quickly learned that Al was far from stupid.
Satisfied and impressed, I came clean about the light in the stope. If it was going to be a problem, I needed to know right then.
“We have kind of an odd light that keeps showing up in the stope that you need to know about,” I explained. “Nothing happens and there’s nobody there, but it keeps showing up, so if you have a problem with that, let Bill know now. If not let’s go.”
Al’s response: “Oh yeah? What kind of light? I gotta see this. Let’s go.”
He seemed amused by my explanation of the mysterious light. I could tell he wasn’t buying the story, but I had the feeling if and when he saw the light it wouldn’t matter, so I felt much better about getting to work that day.