Mexican poet Alberto Blanco wrote a singular poem called, “The Broken-down Bus,” which is set in the winter of 1965. The narrator is riding a bus from Mexico to Los Angeles—his first journey across the border into the United States. But on the second day of the journey, at midnight, the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. All the people—first the teenagers, then the children and grown-ups—get off the bus. They are exhausted from the long journey, anxious to escape the wailing of a baby, impatient with the delay, and angry with the bus driver—blaming him for the mechanical breakdown.

Once the passengers are out under the night sky, their collective mood begins to change. The mother nurses the now quiet baby “under the soft stars,” “bajo las suaves estrellas.” A blind woman starts playing an accordion. The open air outside the bus is cool and smells sweet. Someone sings the first Beatles song the narrator has ever heard. The passengers light a small fire and gather around it. 

The passengers’ anger with the bus driver also begins to ease, “bit by bit,” and disappears completely when another bus arrives and the two drivers agree the mechanical problem is serious. “But—like so many other things—when all was said and done it could be fixed.” The second bus is too full for anyone to transfer to it. Even though they would be stranded awhile, the passengers watch calmly as the lights of the departing bus fade into the dark. They listen to the “purr of the motor” diminishing until they hear only the crickets in the night that surrounds them: “We still went on listening / for a long while / to the purr of the motor / thinning out among the crickets . . . | Todavia estuvimos escuchando / durante un largo rato / el ronroneo del motor / que se fue adelgazando entre los grillos . . .“

Then, suddenly, “as if responding to one voice,” all the passengers get up from the fire and go to do what they can to help the driver fix the bus. They understand, “even with a spark of happiness,” that to continue the journey they need to share the burden of the broken-down bus, not just to wait and blame. 

In the last lines of the poem, the narrator reveals why this day, this particular moment, may be so clear in his memory: “All this was what I felt / the day I found out I was going to be a father | Todo esto fue lo que sentí / el dia que supe que iba a ser padre.“

In a handful of words, the narrator transforms how we experience and remember the poem. We don’t know how he learned about being a father that day, whether he read a letter on the bus, or his girlfriend was traveling with him and whispered the news in his ear. His realization he would soon be a father is inseparable from his memory of the night he was stranded in the desert—where he felt a mix of apprehension and joy and resolve that surprised him. Like the understanding that the bus would be repaired and the passengers would continue their journey, whatever worries he had about being a father can also work out, even if it takes some time. 

Reading this poem brings back a similar moment for me:

It was the summer of 1984 when I drove into Mexico with six college friends in a wood-paneled station wagon we had purchased together for a thousand dollars. We drove across the Nevada desert, spent a restless night at a friend’s apartment in San Pedro, California, then entered Mexico through Tijuana in late afternoon the next day. At the border, the Mexican border police searched our car twice. Once as we crossed the border itself and again only minutes later when a different group of police spotted us. Clearly, a station wagon packed with young gringos was too much of a red flag to resist. What did we expect? For both searches they had us completely empty the station wagon and went through all our gear. We emptied our backpacks, rolled out and opened our sleeping bags. Everything was spread out on the sidewalk—shoes, t-shirts, pants, sunglasses, flashlights, roadmaps, cassette tapes, swimsuits, toilet paper, canteens, bags of potato chips, wallets, underwear—everything. Of course the police were just doing their jobs, but they couldn’t help relishing our embarrassment a bit. Perhaps we had it coming.   

After a second sleepless night in Ensenada with shouting in the streets and a drunken trumpeter playing revile at dawn, we started down the Baja peninsula towards La Paz. We had imagined ourselves driving within yards of a bright blue ocean where we would frequently stop for a cooling splash in the waves. Instead, the seven of us were packed close in the car, roasting in the July heat, and shouting to be heard above the blaring stereo and the wind through the open windows. But being young, we were going to have a fine time—no matter what—as we drove through the hot day with only brief stops for gas and cane sugar Coca-Colas. Not once taking a dip in the sea. 

We drove down Highway One, mostly along the coast before crossing inland through San Ignacio and Punta Prieta and finally to the eastern coast at Santa Rosalia, where we stopped for a meal and watched young couples stroll through the town square. The girls were beautiful, their boyfriends glared. As the evening settled on Santa Rosalia, we lingered in this exotic oasis under the palm trees swaying in the wind, reluctant to get back in the cramped car. It was full dark before we headed farther south to the outskirts of a beach town, near Playa Santispac. We needed a place to sleep and thought we could camp on a deserted beach—foolishly driving our heavy station wagon out onto the dunes until the car was buried up to the chassis, only the tops of the spinning tires showing above the sand. Even though we were close enough to hear the ocean’s waves and smell the salt air, we were so preoccupied with our predicament we never crossed the hundred yards of dunes to see it.

There was nothing to be done but camp for the night. We put down tarps on the sand and rolled out our sleeping bags. We hoped in the morning we would find a way to get the car out. I remember staring up at the night sky, again unable to sleep, rethinking the previous day’s trouble at the border and nursing a habitual anxiety at being far from home with no idea of what would happen next—when I saw headlights and then a spotlight darting back and forth in the misty sky above us. Soon we could all hear a vehicle approaching on the other side of the dunes between our stranded car and the ocean. Everyone must have been awake, but pretended to sleep. As the chief worrier of the group, I silently prayed that whoever it was would please please somehow pass by without seeing us. 

But alas, a military jeep, likely patrolling the beach, crested the dunes and bore down on our camp. Three armed soldiers in green fatigues jumped out of the jeep, shouting in Spanish and pointing their guns at us. We stood blinking into the lights. I can’t remember if they demanded we put our hands up or if we were just shielding our eyes from the glare. Either way, we were at their mercy.

After a few tense seconds, one of my friends, who had lived for a time in Columbia, started to speak in Spanish. In a voice loud enough to hear but without a hint of complaint, he explained—I learned later— that we were a bunch of stupid American gringos—complete idiots—who have managed to get our car stuck on the beach and we are so happy—oh, so happy—you have found us.

This must have been exactly the right thing to say because the effect was miraculous. The guns came down, the spotlight turned from our faces to the stranded station wagon, and the soldiers, now laughing instead of shouting, walked out from behind the lights, ready to help us. One of them already had a shovel in his hand instead of his rifle. We handed out Coca-Colas and five-dollar bills and soon we were all digging the car out—one soldier with a shovel and the rest of us clawing at the sand with our hands until the buried tires were exposed. There as a lot of laughing and heaving—the soldiers even sang as they worked—and soon, we had the car out of the sand and back on the road. We cheered. It was a celebration of shared relief. No talk from the soldiers about a fine or other consequences. Perhaps the soldiers were also relieved that we were just a carload of idiots instead of potential criminals. What the soldiers did insist, however, in no uncertain terms, was that we load up and start driving—and keep driving, for our own safety—until we reached La Paz, 345 miles to the south.

And so we did. Driving all through the night and into the morning, taking turns at the wheel, alternating between attempts at sleeping, driving the car, or sitting in the front passenger seat to make sure the driver didn’t fall asleep. For the third night in a row, I wouldn’t sleep a wink. The car brakes were grinding and squealing as we navigated the winding, narrow roads. I had sand in my shoes, pockets, and ears. In spite of all this, what came over me unexpectedly, like a balm of peace, was a near certainty I could live with whatever came my way. Not only in Mexico, but back home at graduate school, where I had two new freshman classes to teach, a half-baked Master’s thesis to pitch to a frustrated faculty advisor, a much pined-for girlfriend I feared—no, knew—I would soon lose, and a whole lifetime of unknowns ahead. My moment of euphoria was fleeting. Probably brought on more by sleep deprivation and relief at being back on the road than by newfound insight. But I felt it, in that moment, filling me to the brim, and I have never forgotten it.