MEXICO: Dangerous, or Magical?
Published May 27, 2022 · 14:22 · 139,906 views
About This Video
There is a particular kind of travel that rewires you: not tourism, not escape, but the slow overland immersion that dissolves the assumptions you didn't know you were carrying. In the winter of 2014, Van drove a Ford F-350 from the Bronx to Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, for his 40th birthday, and what begins as a road trip becomes something closer to a thesis on why Americans misunderstand Mexico. The fear story collapses on contact with the actual country: its generosity, its intact culture, its refusal to optimize beauty out of daily life.
The deeper thread here is the philosophy Van borrows and never returns: "nothing works and everything works out." It sounds like a bumper sticker until you watch it operate as a genuine epistemology: a way of moving through a country where broken infrastructure coexists with extraordinary human warmth. Mexico is where The Spirited Man was conceived, not as a YouTube channel but as an orientation toward living. The footage sat for years before this edit, which says something about the weight of the material. Some things need to age before you can cut them with any clarity.
Transcript
I think it's the outsider's fear of Mexico that makes visiting Mexico such a heightened
experience. And I think my heightened state when I am visiting Mexico tunes me in
to the magic of Mexico, even though I don't believe in magic.
From the time I was about 21 I made it a very high priority to visit as many foreign countries
as I could though I was almost never in a position to afford to visit them. I've visited Europe
many fold more times than I visited Mexico. I've been to Mexico maybe five or six times but I feel much more at home in Mexico.
In the winter of 2014–2015, I drove an F-350 Ford pickup truck with a dirt bike on a rack on the
back from the Bronx down to Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca. I was in a very heightened state
of I don't want to say despair but I was in a sort of a weird transition. I
drove down for my 40th birthday present to myself. And it was a trip where the stars
aligned and I got a gig that enabled me to pay all of my bills for four months and finance
this trip and my intention was to learn how to surf by surfing basically every day full-time.
And that overland trip, having Mexico unfold very slowly and gradually all of
the different regions of Mexico and covering so much of the country, wed me to the nation.
And because of all of the news and the sensationalism about the cartels,
Hollywood exploits that angle of Mexico almost exclusively. There is almost no
Mexican cinema that's American made or foreign made that I know of wherein the drug cartels
are not part of the story. In my experience when you talk to people they sort of offload a little
bit of their fear onto you. I had a friend whose father worked in the state department his entire
career and this friend was like well they're gonna shoot you they're gonna take your truck they're
gonna just hijack you and kidnap you and... I mean I don't know the exact numbers but if you really
think about it when was the last time you heard of a American person going down to Mexico and being
killed or what have you. It's always huge news. I mean there are isolated stories and we can all
think of a few but it would be huge news and you just don't hear about it. Every week in America you
hear about a school being shot up or a mall being shot up. I used that logic to not frighten myself
out of just saying the hell with it and driving down there. When you get down there
one of the things you realize is there are tens of thousands of people like you who are also down
there, doing what you are doing. There are people from England there are people from Australia
there are people from New Zealand there are people from Europe.And the more time you spend down there
the more integrated with these people you become and all of that fear stuff just kind of melts away.
It's just kind of in the back of your head and you have to be careful. My
landlord told me don't ride my motorcycle at night because the cartels don't know that I'm a gringo.
That's what she said. I didn't travel at night. I didn't drive at night. After it got dark
that was the end of the day. I didn't have anything flashy. I had a big dent in my truck that
was unfixed when I went down. I had a very old motorcycle. So there was this consciousness
of the fact that you're in a country that's essentially in a civil war and is essentially a narco state. But the, I don't have the right word, I
keep saying the word magic and I hate that word but the the magnificence of this place
would just lift that concern from your consciousness and you could just enjoy the beauty.
And for me it was so much driving. I took like two weeks or something to drive down Mexico. I purposely went slowly. I purposely went through back roads and so
forth. And there's a saying in Mexico that in the United States everything works and nothing works
out but in Mexico nothing works and everything works out. And that is exactly the experience I had.
I was two years sober at the time and part of you know alcoholics anonymous is letting go,
is sort of putting yourself in God's hands and having faith that it's going to work out and to me
Mexico is a training ground for that faith, where you see the results very quickly – all kinds of
stuff goes wrong you know on a big trip like that. I broke the rack on the roof of my truck
and just found a welder in town and he just like covered the truck in wet blankets
and put on his mask and just welded it you know took a couple hours, charged me whatever like
50 bucks, maybe less than that. You know I got a flat on my bike, on my motorcycle, and there's these
tire repair places all up and down the highways. I pulled in, the guy, it was the rear wheel, took the
rear wheel off, disconnected the brakes, undid the chain, took the tire off the rim, took the tube
out of the tire, patched the tube, put it all back together put it back on the chain, reconnected the brakes and I think he charged me something like three or six dollars. It was something like
that. And in America if you get a flat I think the labor is just automatically ninety dollars.
And it's a place where the culture is very much intact. It's not just you know bulldozed and Petcos and strip malls.
Even in the water the local mexican surfers friendly, unlike any place I've ever been, friendly.
In fact one of the guys on one of my first days warned me of an American tourist and said that
guy's a thief be careful of that guy. I didn't experience this but I heard of this place that
had like volcanic hot springs and sometimes the tide would be high enough and the waves
would wash in fish into these tidal pools and when the water went back out the fish could not escape
and they would boil in these hot spring pools and you could just reach, you wouldn't reach your hand in,
but you could you know take a fork or whatever and pull the fish out and eat it right off of the bone.
And there's this region that I went to but I didn't have enough time, where you hire a guide and
rent a couple donkeys and you go up into these mountains where all of the monarch butterflies in
the world migrate. And if you wear floral patterns on your clothes they cover you like fur. I didn't
get to go there but I dream of it. The magic I experienced was very visceral and I kind of,
it was almost constant. I had spent the day with my friend Chloe and her cousins
and we had spent the day in what was sort of like a bird sanctuary. It was this beach where there was no people and then there was maybe like a river or a tide pool or something
that made very shallow water and there was just every kind of beautiful birds. Blue herons, white herons, beautiful little birds, big birds and that night Chloe's mother
had arranged for us to go swimming in this bioluminescent water and what it was is these
bioluminescent creatures are basically like the size of pencil shavings from a pencil sharpener
like tiny little creatures and when you move through the water that's what stimulates the
light. So when you go like this it's like a blue light. So you can take a bucket of the water and
dump it over your head and your whole head will turn blue. It's such an all-encompassing experience
and we jumped up and it's in the mangroves and we had just seen crocodiles in this same water you
know earlier that day and I remember just being in there and being so exhilarated with it and
I swam in first and Chloe and the cousins were like is it safe and I was like it's worth it if
you die, it's worth it if you die. And Chloe's mom was trying to get her attention for some reason
and Chloe just yelled back I have to be here right now mom, I have to be here. Minutes later it's pitch
black out we're in this little skiff this little boat and we're driving through this little canal
back to the dock and we go through this little river you know river as wide as this room 10
feet wide and on the right side is beautiful white tent, illuminated from underneath with
maybe 500 chairs perfectly lined up and tables. And it's a pitch black night, pitch black, and
it's the little canal and the tent here on a little island and then here is a road,
okay. And the road is illuminated by pickup trucks that are parked on the side of the road.
And the road is, there's maybe this much water or maybe this much water in the ruts
of the road, and that's why they're not driving their pickups down and the men were carrying
the women through the water in their beautiful dresses and they were back lit by these headlights
and they were all going to this wedding that's what the tent was for and it was just something
we drove... I'll never forget it and it was just something we went by really quick and you look up
and you see these lights and you see the silhouettes carrying through the water and then over here this empty tent. And that was the same night as the as the bioluminescence.
While I was down there I was trying to do nothing but surf. And while I was down there
at some point I got the idea for this channel, for The Spirited Man, for the whole concept of it.
And as we get further and further away from that experience, from that Mexican experience, my heart
just longs more and more for it and it's almost at the point now where I think this whole thing
like I was subconsciously doing this whole thing so that I could afford
time and money to spend more and more time in Mexico. And it's sort of far out of my mind now.
It's kind of becoming a distant memory now because it was seven years ago. That magic, I keep
saying that word magi, because it's the best way to describe the phenomena of Mexico, I kind of feel
like I've lost my sense for it or my ability to recognize it maybe or to experience it.
And now I'm planning the next one and I'm planning to bring my family and
the perception is that it's just as dangerous and just as scary but I have this feeling that
everything will be okay and that everything will work out and we'll see. We'll see what happens.
This week on the Patreon, zine one has been retired. Zine two is available to the next 378 new patrons who sign up. Here's the link.
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Ford F-350 uses — pickup truck used for Mexico trip
People Referenced
Chloe