La Temporada de Lluvia

A dramatic start to the rainy season.

At this point I imagine just about everyone has seen a video of someone inexplicably driving their car into water that is far, far too deep.

“What could this person possibly be thinking?” you likely asked yourself. “Are they a complete moron?” Those are certainly the kinds of thoughts I’ve had when confronted by this type of lunacy, thoughts which make the below video (from YouTube) even more fun to watch.

Yesterday, though, I had my own brush with exactly this type of situation, but as the driver. And while I did not drive into deep water, stranding our car somewhere murky and inconvenient, I now much more clearly understand what it’s like to look into filthy, surging water and think, “how high off the ground is my car? How deep is that water? Could I make it?”

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After months of scorching heat, rampant wildfires, smoke-obscured horizons, and crushing drought Oaxaca is now, finally, in the embrace of la temporada de lluvia: the rainy season. Of course, it hasn’t been a simple transition. While we deeply welcome the release of the tight, arid grip which has choked us for so many months, so far it hasn’t been rain, so much as deluge.

Yesterday found me in San Antonino Castillo Velasco, a Oaxacan village about an hour and a half from our home in San Agustín Etla. I was there with our friend Ehren to visit the famed sculpture workshop Taller Manos Que Ven (“Workshop of the Hands That See”), so named because the taller’s maestro, José Garcia, has been blinded by cataracts yet still continues to produce beautiful art alongside his exceptionally talented family. I’ll be writing about that visit separately, so stay tuned.

San Antonino lies south of the city on a highway lined with towns known for their traditional handicrafts. For example, San Martín Tilcajete sells alebrijes (colorful and fantastical carved figures upon which the creatures from the Pixar movie Coco are based); Santa María Coyotepec has barro negro, black clay pottery; and San Antonino has the Garcia family and a family producing “flores inmortales,” flowers which perpetually keep their colors after being dried and incorporated into handicrafts.

Driving home, even in rush hour, should have taken only about an hour and a half. The highway is well-maintained and flat, only starting to see major traffic once it reaches Animas Trujano, the town just south of the airport where our carpenter Edher lives. Really it only gets bad when you reach Abastos, Oaxaca’s massive warehouse neighborhood of ill-repute.

Abastos is a fascinating and increasingly vile place, a hive of both legitimate business and drugs and human trafficking. The market is sprawling, made up of a collection of large, permanent metal warehouses and a symbiotic network of stands and stalls made from plywood, aluminum siding, or simple tarps strung together with nylon rope. Abastos lacks the charm of many of Oaxaca’s other markets, being populated by both everyday people going about their lives and doing their jobs and a fair number of homeless people visibly in the grip of addiction. While many people go to Abastos to buy wholesale flowers, vegetables, construction supplies, to eat famed street food, to get holiday decorations, and much more besides, it’s also where you can buy stolen electronics, easily find drugs, and find the companionship of women who are being pimped. Abastos isn’t quite a dangerous as tour guides and people often make it out to be, but the market’s bad reputation is deserved and even locals advise that you not wear a watch, jewelry, openly flash cash, or do anything at all that might make you a target for a mugging or pickpocketing. The market is also bordered by a large, illegal garbage dump through which people scavenge for scrap metal, sleep, and (sometimes, as I saw yesterday) publicly defecate.

There are effectively three routes to get to the airport, and the most efficient requires you to drive on a road which hooks through the worst part of Abastos, by the dump. It’s the route Google Maps automatically defaults to and it’s grim, a looping, dysfunctional, shattered stretch of concrete studded with vicious little speed bumps. There’s one particular stretch which dips underneath an overpass and due to neglect whatever drainage is embedded in the concrete is completely stuffed up with silt and garbage.

It started to rain on the drive back from San Antonino, and I soon found myself weaving through that part of Abastos. Traffic was bad and visibility was worse, and as the road approached where it dips beneath the overpass I was suddenly confronted by a volume of water so deep, disgusting, and churning that I was momentarily stunned. Not even having dozens of cars and trucks behind me was enough to shatter my state of suspended animation.

While the truck immediately in front of me braved the water, I wasn’t the only person stuck. To my left were a coach bus and several other large, industrial vehicles, all of whom had realized that to drive into the water was to expose their vehicle to almost certain damage. After the shock wore off I pulled in front of the coach bus only to find the driver had gotten out of his vehicle to survey what was happening.

“Señor,” I said to him through my passenger-side window. “No es posible a manejar a través del agua, sí?”

He laughed and said “nooooooo,” confirming that driving into the water was a terrible plan. And with that I was stuck. There was no way forward and the road behind me was only two lanes with a tall, concrete barrier, making it impossible to cross into the lanes moving in the opposite direction. Behind me the road was filled with a collection of delivery trucks, tractor trailers, buses, sedans, and more.

It was at that moment that I understood how people end up stranded in flooded roads and parking lots. Having traffic behind you, people waiting for you to make a decision, creates an incredible, unspoken pressure. Conversely, the idea of simply waiting for some unknown amount of time itself feels unreasonable. It’s a situation that compels some sort of action, and I definitely thought about driving into the water.

I wasn’t prepared to wreck our car, though, which was clearly what could happen. And in the absence of space to turn around the only thing left to do was sit alongside the bus and other trucks. At least, I thought, I have some company.

Suddenly, something improbable happened. The driver of the bus began walking up and down the road, politely speaking to individual drivers. His words were inaudible but the message was clear; you cannot go forward, you’re going to have to turn around. And miraculously, that’s what started to happen. Many dozens of car lengths behind us cars and trucks started to reverse with shocking order, compassion, and patience.

Even more incredibly, as the vehicles reversed, people made room for them. Nobody cut the line, and there were no accidents. With space to move, even the huge delivery vehicles were able to turn, and suddenly I found that I, too, was able to proceed back in the direction I had just come, driving into oncoming traffic with dozens of other people, necessity giving us the right of way.

I made eye contact with a man driving a compact sedan, his family inside. I pointed in the direction I’d come and shook my finger, no. He flashed me a thumbs up and I sent him one back, and as he began to make a U-turn so did all the drivers behind him. The message was now traveling up and down the road, everyone realizing the road was impassable.

I eventually made it home, my 1.5 hour drive closer to 3.5. But it was remarkably easy, all things considered. I didn’t see a single car accident and there were shockingly few fire trucks or ambulances racing through the city to save people from traffic-related calamities. The amount of detritus on the roads was astonishing, the highway itself covered with huge drifts of sand and gravel, and the highway’s shoulder was littered with huge chunks of rock and piles of trash. The heavy rain had washed the hills, bringing down dirt, sand, stones, and garbage.

Now, safely at home, I’m struck by how civil it all was, and how different this experience would have been in the United States. It’s hard to picture a large group of Americans driving through the rain being generous (or coordinated) enough to essentially flip around two lanes of heavily crowded traffic without any kind of accident or altercation. If this were Texas it’d probably end with someone pulling a gun. But here in Oaxaca, even though the rainy season is off to an exceptionally wet and rocky start, I have hope it will be a good one.

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